Background
Georges Bidault was born in Moulins, France, on October 5, 1899.
Georges Bidault was born in Moulins, France, on October 5, 1899.
His family background and Jesuit education gave him a strong faith that lasted throughout his life. Bidault briefly left school to fight in World War I, but the 1918 armistice was reached soon after, and he was discharged.
He was a journalist with the Catholic leftist newspaper L'Aube before switching in 1939 to L'Europe Nouvelle. Bidault was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940 but was repatriated in 1941 because of ill health. He promptly joined the resistance and helped establish the clandestine Christian-Democrat newspaper and resistance group in the unoccupied zone named Liberie. After this group merged with Henri Frenay’s Verites to become Combat, Bidault was on the steering committee. Jean Moulin later directed him to establish a centralized agency that became known as the Bureau d’informations el de presse (BIP), which fed news and information to all clandestine publications. After the three major resistance groups in the unoccupied zone merged to become les Mouvements unis de resistance, Bidault, no longer an active resistance leader, joined former associates of Liberte and founded a Christian party that in 1944, after the liberation, became the powerful Mouvement republicain populaire (MRP). Meanwhile, Bidault allied his new party with the Conseil national de la Resistance (CNR) after it was formed by Jean Moulin. Bidault succeeded Moulin as CNR president in 1943 primarily because the communist faction favored him, although he was no fellow traveler. Bidault kept trying to smooth relations between Gaullists and resistance leaders who aspired to power in postwar France, but his efforts were largely futile. Narrowly escaping the Gestapo before figuring prominently in the Paris uprising of Aug 1944, Bidault was conspicuous in de Gaulle's Paris apotheosis. He was the only resistance leader to accept a post, that of foreign minister, in the provisional government that de Gaulle formed 10 Sep 1944. Three months later Bidault accompanied de Gaulle to Moscow (Larousse).
Although young for such high office. Bidault remained foreign minister in the cabinet formed in 1946 by Felix Gouin. He himself was premier in 1946, 1949-50, and 1958. Bidault was a strong internationalist, supporting the UN and working for cooperation with Russia. He was too pro-Communist for American taste, and France was the only western European country in which the Communists (under Thorez) posed a real threat of a parliamentary takeover. But when Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet bloc in 1948, Bidault became a staunch believer in Western defensive policies including NATO. (S&S.) In the bitter resistance to de Gaulle’s Algerian policy, Bidault supported the Secret Army Organization, and in 1962 he became president of the National Resistance Council. Charged with treason in 1963, he took refuge in Brazil. The warrant for his arrest was suspended in 1968, and he returned to France. Bidault’s books include D’Une Resistance a I’autre (1965) and Le Point (1968)