Background
Alexandre Ribot was born in St. Omer, February 6, 1842, the son of a banker.
Alexandre Ribot was born in St. Omer, February 6, 1842, the son of a banker.
After a brilliant academic career at the University of Paris, where he was lauréat of the faculty of law, he rapidly made his mark at the bar. He was secretary of the conference of advocates and one of the founders of the Sociéte de legislation comparée. During 1875 and 1876 he was successively director of criminal affairs and secretary-general at the ministry of justice.
Ribot was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1878, beginning a parliamentary career that spanned forty-five years. An Anglophile and admirer of British political liberalism, Ribot placed himself at the center of the French political spectrum, opposing the violent anticlericalism that dominated national politics during his first years in the Chamber. He focused his interests on government finance and foreign affairs as well. He took a firm stand against General Boulanger's efforts at parliamentary revi-sion, the burning issue of the late 1880s. Polished speaker and brilliant debater, Ribot was considered ministerial timber from his early years as a deputy.
Ribot served twice as premier in the next decade, in 1892/1893 and again in 1895, but his most significant contribution to French political life was as foreign minister, 1890-1892. He played the crucial part in forging France's military alliance with Russia. In the summer of 1892, when negotiations seemed deadlocked, Ribot moved the talks to fruition. He accepted the crucial Russian demand that France mobilize in the event of a confrontation between Russia and Austria. Ribot argued that France could not afford to stand aside in such a crisis; moreover, French security demanded an alliance with Russia at virtually any cost.
The Dreyfus affair' seemed to end Ribot's ministerial career. His middle position expecting the army to correct its judicial "error" and condemning the Left's immoderate attacks on the military offended partisans on both sides. By the first years of the twentieth century, politically isolated and in poor health, Ribot seemed to be an elder statesman in the making. He refused the ambassadorship to Russia in 1908;. he considered his presence as France's envoy to St. Petersburg would sharpen the existing Balkan crisis. He moved to the Senate in 1909, then tried unsuccessfully to get elected president of the Republic in 1912. His position as a political moderate was reinforced by his support of the three-year service law in 1913 and, the next year, by his acceptance of a direct income tax. When he tried to form a government in June 1914, however, he failed in the face of Radical and Socialist opposition.
The war gave Ribot a new lease on political life. He took the Ministry of Finance in the union sacree government of August 1914. He directed France's finances for more than two difficult years. An apostle of fiscal conservatism, he found the tug of wartime necessity led to sweeping reversals in his ideas. Ribot decided to cover expenses by borrowing rather than instituting new taxes, hoping that the war would be short. In any case, with France's richest areas in enemy hands and with the country's population fully mobilized, he doubted France could tolerate the taxation imposed in other countries.
Paying for essential imports, chiefly from the United States, became Ribot's main problem. By mid-1915 he was presiding over painful changes in France's economic position: gold had to be shipped to Britain and French holdings in the United States liquidated. Britain's reluctance to form a united economic front burdened Ribot. The problem crested in August 1916, when Britain negotiated an American loan without informing Ribot, thereby establishing terms France could match only with growing difficulty.
Ribot became France's third wartime premier on March 20, 1917, succeeding Aristide Briand. His health was poor, his working hours had to be severely limited, and he accepted the post only out of a sense of duty. He moved quickly to limit the prerogatives with which President Poincaré had tormented his predecessor, but Ribot could not be a consistently decisive leader when the entire context of the war was changing. Russia's March Revolution and the imminent entry of the United States into the conflict placed in question the long-planned offensive of General Nivelle. Ribot had personal doubts but allowed the offensive to proceed to disaster. He was wiser in the aftermath.
He allowed Commander in Chief Pétain and War Minister Painlevé the latitude to restore the army by internal reforms and by the abandonment of largescale offensives. As the Russian Revolution raised hopes on the Left for a negotiated peace, Ribot stood firmly against French Socialists' demands for passports to attend an international gathering in Stockholm. Pétain insisted that a French delegation at Stockholm would shatter the army's will to fight. Ribot followed this advice; the Left never forgave him. Ribot confronted another by product of events in Russia when French Socialists revealed France's secret territorial agreement with the tsarist government. Already on record as opposing a war of annexation, Ribot answered that all secret wartime treaties were subject to peacetime revision. The Chamber of Deputies was momentarily pacified. On the perennial Greek question, Ribot acted decisively. He had kept the portfolio of foreign minister for himself, and in June he forced out Greece's pro-German king, then rallied the Italians and Serbs to prevent the British from liquidating their role in the Balkans.
Events at home were harder to control. Ribot had secured the support of the Chamber's Radicals by retaining the long-standing minister of the interior, Louis Jean Malvy. By July Malvy was under sharp attack for defeatist sympathies and, more concretely, for failing to close down pacifist newspapers. Ribot hesitated to request Malvy's resignation until late August. Pétain won a victory in the meticulously prepared offensive at Verdun that month, but moderate and conservative support for the government drained away. At the same time, Ribot lost the backing of moderate Socialists like Albert Thomas who were drawn leftward as the Socialist rank and file responded to the Russian Revolution. Ribot fell from the office of premier on September 7, 1917, but he remained on as foreign minister for a month. He had rebuffed the peace overtures of Prince Sixte de Bourbon in April in his early days as premier, and proved equally skeptical as the Germans sought negotiations through the Belgians and Briand.
Ribot spent the remainder of the war quietly in the Senate, but he spoke out with fire in the early postwar years. The damage the Germans had inflicted on his home region in northeastern France appalled him, and he became an outspoken advocate of heavy German reparations. Ever the moderate, however, Ribot was equally emphatic in opposing French hopes for territorial gains or permanent political influence on the left bank of the Rhine, which would create a new Alsace-Lorraine and sow the seeds of another war.
Ribot died in Paris, January 13, 1923.