Background
Édouard Herriot was the son of an army officer, Édouard Herriot was born at Troyes on July 5, 1872.
Édouard Herriot was the son of an army officer, Édouard Herriot was born at Troyes on July 5, 1872.
After graduating with highest honors from the École Normale Supérieure in 1894, Édouard Herriot rapidly acquired a reputation for outstanding scholarship and teaching.
Édouard Herriot's doctoral thesis, Madame Récamier et ses amis (1904), followed by his brilliant Précis de l'histoire des lettres françaises (1905), secured that reputation.
Like many young turn-of-the-century French intellectuals, Herriot was politicized by the Dreyfus Affair.
After directing the opposition to the right-wing Bloc National, which had won a parliamentary majority in 1919, he organized a left-wing coalition of Radicals and Socialists called the Cartel des Gauches, which won the elections of May 1924.
Herriot's first ministry lasted 10 months.
As Raymond Poincaré's minister of public instruction from 1926 to 1928, he devoted his energies to the struggle for free secondary education.
Infuriated at his decision to pay the December installment of the French war debt to the United States, the Chamber overturned his government.
Though he took no active role in the Resistance, his hostility to the Vichy regime was widely known.
In 1944 he lived under house arrest in Lyons until he was deported to Germany.
Liberated in April 1945 by Soviet armies, Herriot returned to Lyons, where he had already been elected mayor.
In 1947 he was returned to his old post as president of the new National Assembly of the Fourth Republic and retained it until his retirement in January 1954.
In his later years Herriot was the recipient of numerous honors.
In 1946 he was elected to the prestigious French Academy, and following his retirement from active politics he was made honorary life president of his beloved French Chamber of Deputies.
In June 1955 the Soviet government awarded him its annual Peace Prize in recognition of his long advocacy of international cooperation.
Further Reading The first volume of Herriot's two-volume memoirs was translated as In Those Days (1948; trans.
1952).
Herriot's career is also well covered in the more specialized Peter J. Larmour, The French Radical Party in the 1930's (1964).
For general background see Denis W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1939 (1 vol. , 1947; rev. ed. , 2 vols. , 1966).
Jessner, Sabine, Edouard Herriot, patriarch of the Republic, New York, Haskell House Publishers, 1974.
As an ardent Dreyfusard, Herriot joined the Radical party, and for more than half a century he had few peers in his passionate dedication to justice and eloquent defense of liberalism and republican democracy.
There is extensive biographical coverage of Herriot in Francis De Tarr, The French Radical Party: From Herriot to Mendès-France (1961).