Eleuthérios Venizélos

Greek politician

• Born: August 23, 1864
• Birthplace: Mourniés, Crete, Ottoman Empire (now in Greece)
• Died: March 18, 1936
• Place of death: Paris, France

Venizélos was an outstanding national figure of modern Greece. In and out of power, he was the country’s leading statesman in the first part of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Eleuthérios Venizélos (ehl-yehf-THEHR-yaws vehn-yih-ZEHL-ohs) was born in the small village of Mournies near Canea in Crete. His father was the merchant Kiriakos Venizélos Krivatos, whose family had emigrated from Morea (the Peloponnesus) in 1770, and was a leader of the Greek national movement on the island attempting liberation from the Ottoman Empire and union to the Kingdom of Greece. The elder Venizélos had spent many years in exile on the island of Siros as a result of his activities. Eleuthérios was the fourth of six children born to the Venizéloses, the first to survive, and according to one account he was named for a local saint whose name derived from Eileithyia, the ancient goddess of childbirth. In 1866, after the great uprising of that year on Crete, the government deported Kiriakos Venizélos to Siros once again. The family, including Eleuthérios, then only two years old, followed. After the boy had finished elementary and part of secondary school in Siros, the family was allowed to return in 1872 to Canea, where Eleuthérios continued his education and then went on to private study in Athens and also classical studies at lycées in Athens and Siros. After Eleuthérios completed these studies, the elder Venizélos wanted his son to remain on Crete in the family business. Eleuthérios, however, wanted a career in law, and a friend of the family, the Greek consul at Canea, persuaded his father to allow it.

In 1881, Venizélos entered the University of Athens, where he gained public recognition when, as leader of the Cretan students’ union, he put the island’s cause for independence before Joseph Chamberlain, a leader of the British Liberal Party, then traveling in the Near East. While Venizélos was at the university, his father died, so in addition to his studies he was obliged to care for the family business. In 1886, he received his degree and went back to Crete to practice law and continue the struggle for independence. He also worked as a journalist and within a year was elected a deputy to the island’s assembly and became the leader of the newly formed Liberal Party. Although he had planned to continue his studies in Germany in 1890, he chose instead to remain at home to marry Maria Catelouzu.

Life’s Work

Venizélos’s real goal was the independence of Crete . When a new insurrection broke out in 1897, he was at the forefront. The Great Powers intervened and appointed a mixed international naval commission to oversee the governing of the island. Venizélos greeted the arrival of the Russian, French, English, and Italian admirals on behalf of the assembly. In December, 1898, Prince George, the younger son of the Greek king, George I, came as the High Commissioner of the Powers. Venizélos was appointed to the island’s executive committee and soon became the dominant figure. Yet irreconcilable differences arose between him and Prince George.

Venizélos’s anti-Turkish activities and insistence on pushing the government of the island to complete independence led to a new insurrection in 1905 against the wishes of the Great Powers and the commissioner. Prince George abdicated the following year. Venizélos emerged as a Greek hero, but Crete still remained in Turkish hands. In October, 1908, in the wake of the Young Turks Revolution, Venizélos, without consulting Commissioner Alexandros Zaïmis, who had replaced Prince George, led the Cretans in declaring their independence with the hope of joining Greece; he also became prime minister of a provisional government.

Then an uprising by the junior officers of the Military League in Athens led to an invitation to Venizélos to become the Greek prime minister in 1910 the first of five times he held that post. Venizélos, with the support of the Military League and its backers, swept the elections of 1910. He assumed the leadership of the Greek Liberal Party and carried out major modernizing reforms in the constitution and government. Although he was very popular, he also had many bitter enemies, including the Conservative Party, members of the royal household, particularly the king’s sons, and some members of the military.

Venizélos as prime minister also modernized the Greek army with British and French assistance and came to agreements with his Christian neighbors, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro, to prepare the final exodus of Turkey from Europe. The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the first against Turkey and the second against Bulgaria, gave Greece much of Macedonia, Thrace, and Epirus as well as Crete and the Aegean Islands.

In 1913, King George was assassinated and succeeded by his son, King Constantine I, who was less accommodating to Venizélos. The outbreak of World War I exacerbated relations between Venizélos and the monarch as the former wished Greece to join the Allies, but Constantine, loyal to his brother-in-law, William II of Germany, steadfastly chose to remain neutral. Venizélos resigned his post in March, 1915, but in the summer won a strong majority in parliament and began his second administration. His pro-Allied stance, however, caused the king to ask for his resignation within a few weeks.

The next year, the Allies, trying to establish a second front in Greece, invaded Athens and forced the government to expel the missions of the Central Powers. In September, Venizélos declared a Greek republic in Crete and then moved to Salonika, where large numbers of Allied troops were stationed. Great Britain and France enthusiastically recognized him. King Constantine persuaded the Metropolitan of Athens to swear a curse of anathema on Venizélos and then left the country with Prince George. In 1917, however, the royal family under Prince Alexander, Constantine’s younger son, made its peace with Venizélos. The monarchy was restored and joined the Allied side.

After the war was over, Venizélos journeyed to Paris as the Greek representative at the peace conference and came away with great gains from Bulgaria and Turkey. Yet he had hoped to obtain Constantinople as well as more of Asia Minor for Greece. Although the Allies had promised this as a consideration, they were reluctant to hand the Turkish capital over to Athens. Venizélos returned from Paris in September, 1920. Despite his triumphs, his long absence and the continuation of wartime conditions in Greece pending the resolution of the Turkish dispute led to his loss of popularity. Furthermore, a month after his return, King Alexander died from illness contracted when bitten he was by his pet monkey. Then, in the November elections, the Conservative Party won a stunning upset. Constantine returned, and Venizélos went to Paris in self-imposed exile.

By this time the Greek army had moved into the interior of Asia Minor to enlarge its war gains. Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), however, organized the Turkish defense that delivered a stunning defeat to the Greek forces. An armed insurrection followed, and Constantine abdicated a second time. His son George IIII24IIII became king, and Venizélos once more entered the Greek service, representing the monarchy at the peace talks at Lausanne between the Allies and Turkey.

Another insurrection in 1924 forced George into exile, and Venizélos became prime minister for the fourth time. He did not wish to end the monarchy as his associates did, however, and, using illness as an excuse, he resigned in four weeks and returned to Paris. Yet in 1928 he came back for his fifth term as prime minister and was confirmed when the country gave the Liberal Party a large electoral victory. These were turbulent years for Greece, with army insurrections, periods of military dictatorship, and the struggle between the monarchists and the republicans. Prime Minister Venizélos was able to come to peace terms with his neighbors, including Turkey, but the Great Depression had grievous economic effects for Greece, and the Conservatives swept him from power in 1932. After an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1934, he went into exile a third time but continued to interfere in the chaotic politics of Greece, including another attempted coup d’état. In 1935, Ioannis Metaxas, a royalist general, reestablished the monarchy under his dictatorship. Venizélos died in March, 1936, at seventy-one from pneumonia after a short illness. He was survived by his second wife and two sons, Sophocles, who became prime minister of Greece in 1944, and Kyriakos.

Significance

Venizélos is the towering figure of contemporary Greece. More than the monarchs whom he served and battled, he stands as the symbol of the twentieth century Hellenes. He was a nationalist who fought for the Megali Idhea (great idea) of great Greece but was willing to embrace the precepts of peace, equality, and justice. He was trained in the liberal tradition of the classics and law, and his ideas and deeds were a mixture of conservatism, progressivism, and radicalism that earned for him many friends and as many enemies. Under Venizélos, Greece fulfilled much of its dream of gaining Turkish territory, almost doubling in size. Venizélos’s charisma and his political and oratorical gifts made him the ideal statesman to lead the Greek cause in the early twentieth century. His family tradition of Greek nationalism and rebellion as well as his nativity in Turkish-held Crete also aided his career. Much of Venizélos’s success had a serendipitous aspect being in the right place at the right time. He was a leader of Crete and then Greece during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. He chose the side of the winning Allies at a time when his monarch, a political rival, chose the losing Germans. He was out of power when Greece suffered its major defeat at the hands of Atatürk. However, fortune often frowned on him. He lost his popular mandate after one of his greatest triumphs at the 1919 Peace Conference at Paris; he also bore the full brunt of censure for the unsuccessful military coups d’état of 1933 and 1935. (He actually was involved only in the latter.)

Venizélos was a stormy figure whose politics and actions called forth either unqualified adulation or bitter enmity. Like the monarchs he opposed, he alternated between holding the supreme rule in his state and living in exile. His political gifts of sagacity and moderation were also in part the cause of his downfall at a time when Greece, like many countries entering into the modern world, swung from one extreme to the other, from republicanism to monarchy, and indeed at a time when extremes of both Right and Left came to dominate much of European politics. As a national leader, Venizélos could only meet with success, but, when the boundaries of the new state had been won, he was unable to compete in the domestic political wars.

Bibliography

Alastos, Doros. Venizélos: Patriot, Statesman, Revolutionary. London: Percy Lund Humphries, 1942. A hagiographic biography of Venizélos that emphasizes his life to 1924 and has an appendix covering Greece from his death to the country’s involvement in World War II. Includes maps.

Chester, Samuel Beach. Life of Venizélos. New York: George H. Doran, 1921. A sympathetic look at Venizélos’s career to World War I. Contains a map of Greece.

Dakin, Douglas. The Unification of Greece: 1770-1923. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. A history of Greece including the period of Venizélos’s early political career, putting his role in context. Very sympathetic to the Greek point of view. Contains tables, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Falls, Cyril. “The Greek Anatolian Adventure.” History Today 16 (July, 1966): 452-458. An analysis of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 with an evaluation of Venizélos as well as the Turkish leaders.

Kerofilas, Costas. Eleftherios Venizélos: His Life and Work. Translated by Beatrice Barstow. London: John Murray, 1915. A brief biography of Venizélos written as wartime propaganda.

Kitromilides, Paschalis M., ed. Eleftherios Venizélos: The Trials of Statesmanship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Essays analyzing Venizélos’s life and career, including examinations of his early life and political career in Crete, his entrance into Greek politics, and his domestic and foreign policies during his years as prime minister.