Édouard Daladier
Édouard Daladier was a French Radical-Socialist politician, who was the Prime Minister of France in 1933, 1934 and again from 1938 to 1940.
Daladier was born in Carpentras and began his political career before World War I. During the war, he fought on the Western Front and was decorated for his service. After the war, he became a leading figure in the Radical Party and Prime Minister in 1933 and 1934. Daladier was Minister of Defence from 1936 to 1940 and Prime Minister again in 1938. As head of government, he expanded the French welfare state in 1939.
Along with Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Daladier signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, which gave Nazi Germany control over the Sudetenland. After Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. During the Phoney War, France's failure to aid Finland against the Soviet Union's invasion during the Winter War led to Daladier's resignation on 21 March 1940 and his replacement by Paul Reynaud. Daladier remained Minister of Defence until 19 May, when Reynaud took over the portfolio personally after the French defeat at Sedan.
After the Fall of France, Daladier was tried for treason by the Vichy government during the Riom Trial and imprisoned first in Fort du Portalet, then in Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally in Itter Castle. After the Battle of Castle Itter, Daladier resumed his political career as a member of the French Chamber of Deputies from 1946 to 1958. He died in Paris in 1970.
Early life
Daladier was born in Carpentras, Vaucluse, on 18 June 1884, the son of a village baker. He received his formal education at the lycée Duparc in Lyon, where he was first introduced to socialist politics. After his graduation, he became a school teacher and a university lecturer at Nîmes, Grenoble and Marseille and then at the Lycée Condorcet, in Paris, where he taught history. He began his political career by becoming the mayor of Carpentras, his home town, in 1912. He subsequently sought election to the Paris Chamber of Deputies but lost to a Radical-Socialist Party candidate; he later joined that party.Daladier had received military training before the war under France's conscription system. In August 1914, he was mobilised at the age of 30 with the French Army's 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment when World War I started with the rank of sergeant. In mid-1915, the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment was destroyed in heavy fighting against the Imperial German Army on the Western Front. The surviving remnant of it was assigned to other units, Daladier being transferred into the 209th Infantry Regiment. In 1916, he fought with the 209th in the Battle of Verdun and was given a field commission as a lieutenant in the midst of the battle in April 1916 having received commendations for gallantry in action. In May 1917, he received the Legion of Honour for gallantry in action and ended the war as a captain leading a company. He had also been awarded the Croix de Guerre.
After his demobilisation, he was elected to the Paris Chamber of Deputies for Orange, Vaucluse, in 1919.
Later, he would become known to many as "the bull of Vaucluse" because of his thick neck, large shoulders and determined look. However, cynics also quipped that his horns were like those of a snail.
Interwar period
After he entered the Chamber of Deputies, Daladier became a leading member of the Radical-Socialist Party and was responsible for building it into a structured modern political party. For most of the interwar period, he was the chief figure of the party's left wing, supporters of a governmental coalition with the socialist Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. A government minister in various posts during the coalition governments between 1924 and 1928, Daladier was instrumental in the Radical-Socialists' break with the SFIO in 1926, the first Cartel des gauches with the centre-right Raymond Poincaré in November 1928. In 1930, he unsuccessfully attempted to gain socialist support for a centre-left government in coalition the Radical-Socialist and similar parties. In 1933, despite similar negotiations breaking down, he formed a government of the republican left.In January 1934, he was considered the most likely candidate of the centre-left to form a government of sufficient honesty to calm public opinion after the revelations of the Stavisky Affair, a major corruption scandal. The government lasted less than a week, however, since it fell in the face of the 6 February 1934 riots. After Daladier fell, the coalition of the left initiated two years of right-wing governments.
After a year of being withdrawn from frontline politics, Daladier returned to public prominence in October 1934 and took a populist line against the banking oligarchy that he believed had taken control of French democracy: the Two Hundred Families. He was made president of the Radical-Socialist Party and brought the party into the Popular Front coalition. Daladier became Minister of National Defence in the Léon Blum government and retained the crucial portfolio for two years. Besides for serving as Defence Minister, Daladier was appointed the chairman of the newly founded Supreme Defence Committee. At the first meeting of the committee on 26 June 1936, Daladier complained that other nations had someone to direct their defence policies, citing the example of the War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg in Germany; the Defence Commissar Marshal Kliment Voroshilov in the Soviet Union; Benito Mussolini in Italy and Sir Thomas Inskip in Britain. Daladier stated from now on he would be playing that role in France. He then moved on to say that the first order of business was the nationalisation of the entire French arms industry as he accused French arms firms of failing to provide the military with the necessary weapons on time or in full, and stated that henceforward the French state would take direct control of all production. Daladier had a difficult relationship with Marshal Maxime Weygand-a man whom he greatly disliked-but Daladier was very close to Weygand's successor, Maurice Gamelin, whose views and judgements on military matters he greatly trusted and valued.
Daladier was much influenced by intelligence reports from the Deuxième Bureau that the factories of the German arms firms such as Krupp AG, Rheinmetall AG, and Borsig AG were being run at full capacity, suggesting that the Reich was preparing for war in the near-future. Daladier complained that Germany as the world's second largest economy had an automatic head-start in the arms race while France as the world's fourth largest economy was by definition behind the Reich in terms of arms production. In early July 1936, Daladier appeared by the Defence Committees of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate to warn that Germany was winning the arms race; the Wehrmacht would soon field 650,000 men; and that the Wehrmacht was buying tanks in massive numbers to win a "war of movement". Gamelin expressed much concern to Robert Jacomet, a senior civil servant at the Defence Ministry about the plans for nationalization of the arms industry, which he described as a "left-wing gimmick" instead of being a practical policy to win the arms race. Jacoment replied that Daladier was all for nationalization as he stated that "Time is short" and to create a "powerful parallel state industry" alongside the private sector arms industry would take too long. Jacoment stated: "Our interest is therefore to get our hands on the existing factories and modernise them fast". On 11 August 1936, the nationalization bill was approved by the National Assembly, and the French state took control of the arms industry.
As Defence Minister, Daladier asked the commander of the military, General Maurice Gamelin to submit a four-year plan for military modernization. When Gamelin submitted in a plan that was budgeted at 9 billion francs for the French Army, Daladier rejected it as too low and instead added in an extra 5 billion francs. During an "emotional" interview with Blum, Daladier persuaded him to accept the 14 billion franc plan as he issued a stark warning that the Reich was winning the arms race at present. On 7 September 1936, the Blum cabinet approved Daladier's 14 billion franc plan for rearmament. The American historian Joseph Maiolo wrote the rearmament program launched in 1936 was "the biggest arms program ever attempted by a French government in peacetime". As Defence Minister, Daladier favoured a hawkish line towards Italy, and in January 1937 played a crucial role in having Admiral François Darlan appointed commander of the Navy as Darlan saw Italy as France's primary opponent unlike his predecessor Admiral Georges Durand-Viel who was an admirer of Fascist Italy. The French Navy was not large enough to patrol both the Atlantic coastline and the Mediterranean Sea.
A key element in France's war plans against Germany was bringing in a massive number of soldiers from North Africa to France, and the prospect that Italy would cut the sea lanes linking Algeria to France was considered a major problem in Paris. Darlan argued that France needed control of the Mediterranean not because of the need for troops from Algeria, but because it was the only way for France to reach its allies in Eastern Europe and for reasons of trade. In the debate between Darlan vs. Maurice Gamelin who saw Italy more as a potential ally rather a potential enemy, Daladier came to favour Darlan. The Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with Benito Mussolini's openly pro-German foreign policy convinced Daladier by late 1937 that Italy was only a potential enemy and it should be assumed that France became involved in a war with Germany that Italy would inevitably enter the war on the side of the Reich. At a meeting of Comité Permeant de la Défense National in November 1937, Daladier stated: "The hypothesis of conflict with the Mediterranean as the center of preponderant action, raises different problems for our foreign and military policy...Given the two-bloc composition of the Franco-British empire, an attack in the Mediterranean, the stem between these two blocs would allow Germany and Italy to obtain the most decisive results". In addition, Daladier noted that the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez canal was equally important to the British as almost all of the shipping that linked the United Kingdom to its colonies in Asia went through the Mediterranean, and the possibility of a potential Italian naval threat was the best way of securing an alliance with Britain. Daladier pushed for war planning that called for making the defeat of Italy the first priority while France remained on the defensive against the Reich along the Maginot Line.
After the fall of the Blum government, Daladier became head of government again on 10 April 1938, orienting his government towards the centre and ending the Popular Front.