Édouard Marie Herriot was a French statesman, leader of the Radical Socialists and three times prime minister of France. For many years he served as President of the Chamber of Deputies. Herriot was also the author of a Life of Beethoven; a biography of Philo; descriptions of his travels in Russia and America; studies in education; and political memoirs. The Académie Française received him among its Forty Immortals on June 26, 1947.
Background
He was born in Steuben County, Indiana. He attended the local public schools and graduated from Tri-State College (now Trine University) in 1914 receiving a degree in education. He taught at local elementary schools and served as a school principal in Indiana.
Career
Édouard Marie Herriot, French statesman, leader of the Radical Socialists and three times prime minister of France. He was born in Troyes on July 5, 1872. Herriot early distinguished himself at the Collège Sainte Barbe, the Lycée Louis le Grand, and, after abandoning plans for a military career (his father was an army officer), the École Normale Supérieure, from which he graduated with the highest honors in 1894. Then followed a decade of brilliant teaching at Nantes and Lyon, during which time he completed his doctoral thesis, published as Madame de Récamier et ses amis ("Madame Récamier and Her Friends"; 1904).
Drawn into politics during the Dreyfus Affair, he became a member of the Lyon municipal council in 1904 and mayor in 1905, a position he was to hold almost without a break for more than half a century. In 1912, at the age of forty, he was elected to the Senate, becoming its youngest member. During World War I he served as minister of public works in the cabinet of Aristide Briand. The 1919 elections sent him to the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat with the middle-class, anticlerical Radical Socialists, whose leader he became and remained (save for the years 1927-1931 and 1935-1938) until his resignation from the party in October 1956. The elections of 1924, sweeping in the Cartel des Gauches (the left-wing coalition) gave Herriot the opportunity to form his first government, with a program of shorter military service, easing of relations with the German Republic, abrogation of the concordat with Rome existing in Alsace and Lorraine, and wholehearted cooperation with the League of Nations. Financial difficulties and inability to hold his diverse supporters together led to his government's fall on Apr. 16, 1925.
He was chosen president of the Chamber of Deputies that same year. After a second brief tenure as prime minister (July 19-22, 1926), he headed a government for the third and last time from June 4 to Dec. 18, 1832. Champion of the Treaty of Lausanne ending the post-1918 debate on reparations, Herriot fell on the issue of the French debt to the United States, repayment of which he continued to advocate after a visit to Washington in April 1933. As minister of state in the cabinets of Gaston Doumergue, Pierre Laval, and Pierre-Etienne Flandin (Feb. 9, 1934, to Jan. 24, 1936), Herriot represented the disarray and paralysis of the still-important Radical Socialist Party. As president of the Chamber of Deputies again from June 1936, he witnessed the Republic's ill-fated internal quarrels and troubled foreign policy that led from social struggle and appeasement to war in 1939 and defeat in 1940.
Unwilling to abandon stricken France to join the dissident Free French forces of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, Herriot gradually exhibited a mild opposition to the puppet Vichy regime of Marshal Henri Pétain. Herriot was accused of subversive activities in September 1941, and after a public incident with PétainPetain was arrested on Oct. 2, 1942. Released in August 1944 when Laval failed to persuade him to form a government, he was taken to Germany with other hostages. Herriot was freed by Soviet troops near Berlin on Apr. 22, 1945, and resumed office as mayor of Lyon. He appeared as a witness at the Pétain trial, and (in the November 1946 elections of the new Fourth Republic, whose constitution he had opposed) was returned as a deputy to the National Assembly, over which he presided from 1947 to 1953. Thereafter he was honorary president of that body, where in his last major speech (1954) he pleaded for better relations with the Soviet Union and against German rearmament. He resigned from the lifetime presidency of the resuscitated but still divided Radical Socialist Party on Oct. 14, 1956, and supported the progressive forces of Pierre Mendès-France in the struggle for party leadership. He died in Lyon on Mar. 26, 1957.
Connections
He married Ellen Dygert (1892–1977) and had four children: Kathryn, Gilbert, George, and Ellen.