Édouard Herriot

Prime minister of France (1924-1925, 1926, 1932)

• Born: July 5, 1872
• Birthplace: Troyes, France
• Died: March 26, 1957
• Place of death: Lyon, France

One of the most important French statesmen of the first half of the twentieth century and leader of the Radical-Socialist Party for much of his career, Herriot served nearly four decades in the French parliament. He was the first minister of any major European government to advocate publicly some form of European federation. His domestic agenda favored the left-wing, non-Marxist program of social insurance, educational reform, reorganization of the tax structure, and reduction of the length of military service.

Early Life

Édouard Herriot (ay-dwahr eh-ryoh) was born into a humble provincial family less than two years after republican rule returned to France. Education was the key to his personal success. While both of his parents came from military backgrounds, none of his relatives was prominently connected or wealthy; consequently, the young Herriot had to rely on native intellectual ability and scholarship grants to gain educational opportunities. Tutored at an early age by a village priest, Herriot at age fifteen received a scholarship to a prestigious Paris lycée from a local official whom he happened to impress. Four years later, he won admission to the École Normale Supérieure, where he received training as a teacher. In 1905, he completed his doctorate at the Sorbonne.

Herriot’s rich educational experience instilled in him a deep commitment to rational investigation and inspired him to work throughout his political career to expand educational opportunities. It also cultivated a love of literary pursuits, which made him one of the most brilliant orators and prolific writers of his day. Before he died, Herriot published nearly fifty books and articles historical and political tracts, literary essays, works based on his own travels abroad, and memoirs. He composed his first scholarly treatise, Philon le Juif (1898), a study of the important Hebrew philosopher who was a contemporary of Jesus Christ, in the barracks at Nancy while completing his mandatory military service in 1898. In 1947, his writings would win for him election to the Académie Française.

Herriot’s early and enduring affiliation with the Radical-Socialist Party at the municipal and national levels followed naturally, in his view, from his concern for the defense of basic human rights and his faith in the power of rational thought. As he wrote in 1931, “Radicalism appears as the political application of rationalism.” It was also, Herriot believed, the best embodiment of France’s democratic tradition. Herriot’s political philosophy solidified at the time of the Dreyfus affair and the vicious anticlerical campaign that followed it. A spirited Dreyfusard and anticlerical himself, Herriot claimed to have entered public life under the patronage of Émile Combes, the Radical prime minister from 1902 to 1905 who spearheaded the controversial separation of church and state. Herriot first gained public office by winning election to the Lyons city council in 1904. The following year, he was elected mayor of Lyons (at age thirty-three, he was the youngest mayor in the country), and, as chief executive of France’s second largest city, he gained a voice in Radical politics at the national level. In 1912, he began a seven-year term as France’s youngest senator, and, in 1919, he won election to the Chamber of Deputies. In the latter year also, he was chosen president of the Radical-Socialist Party, and his career as a statesman was under way.

Life’s Work

Herriot’s life’s work focused on city hall in Lyons and the cabinet rooms and legislative chambers of Paris. In the first setting, Herriot’s disposition toward social activism may be most easily seen. As mayor, he improved hospitals and schools, expanded housing for working-class citizens, enhanced libraries and museums, constructed numerous public buildings, renovated and enlarged port facilities, and undertook municipal beautification programs. Despite the heavy responsibilities of national office for most of his career, Herriot emphasized that nothing was as important to him as Lyons and said once, “I loved Lyons as one adores a woman.”

His service in Lyons and the publication of a collection of his lectures earned for Herriot recognition by the national leadership and resulted in his first appointment to ministerial office in December, 1916, in the cabinet of Aristide Briand. He held the post of minister of public works, transports, and supplies for barely four months, however, and his decision to ration bread and limit the number of courses allowed in restaurant meals was not popular despite its importance to the war effort. Herriot did not hold governmental office again until 1924, when he was named prime minister after the ruling center-right majority was overthrown in national elections by a coalition of left-wing parties (Cartel des Gauches), in which his own Radical-Socialist Party constituted the largest group.

It was as head of the government from June, 1924, to April, 1925, that Herriot established himself as an important national leader. During this brief term, he directed the end of France’s Ruhr Valley occupation, the implementation of the Dawes Plan, and the preliminary negotiations to the Locarno Pact. In all of this, he manifested a more conciliatory approach to Germany and a significant change in tone from earlier postwar French foreign policy. In 1924, he became the first head of a French government to address the League of Nations in Geneva, an occasion he later termed “the most solemn moment” of his life. He also established full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1924, a move paralleled by Great Britain’s Labor government in the same year. In 1925, Herriot became the first minister of any major European government to advocate publicly some form of European federation. His domestic agenda favored the standard left-wing (though non-Marxist) program of social insurance, educational reform, reorganization of the tax structure, and reduction of the length of military service. The conservative senate ended his premiership when he tried to enact a tax on capital. Herriot’s colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies, however, rewarded him with the presidency of the lower house when his government was overthrown, and he held this post generally viewed as the third-highest office under the French republics on several occasions during the next quarter-century.

Herriot’s appointment as minister of public instruction in July, 1926, led to his most enduring achievements in cabinet politics. As a trained teacher of humble origins, he appreciated the importance of equal educational opportunity for all French citizens regardless of their wealth or social status. He also believed that the democratic state had an obligation to finance and universalize public education in the interest of creating an informed citizenry. Accordingly, among Herriot’s accomplishments as minister in the 1920’s were laws admitting students to primary and secondary schools without charge, equalizing instruction for girls and boys, and standardizing course content nationwide. Perhaps his greatest triumph in educational reform may be seen in the preamble to the constitution of the Fourth Republic, which he helped to frame in 1946, which guaranteed “equal access of children and adults to education, professional training and culture” and affirmed as “the duty of the State to provide free, secular, public education at all levels.”

In the 1930’s, Herriot headed one more government and sat in four others. His major accomplishment as premier in 1932 was a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, which paved the way for a full-scale antifascist alliance with Moscow four years later. During this troubled decade, Herriot held such influential positions as president of the Radical-Socialist Party, president of the Chamber of Deputies, and president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. After 1936, however, he was excluded from cabinet posts and was opposed to the official policy of appeasement of the fascist dictators.

The fateful year of 1940 found Herriot, as presiding officer of the chamber, in the middle of events surrounding national defeat and the dissolution of the Third Republic. Herriot became one of the most outspoken defenders of parliamentary rights during the authoritarian Vichy regime. He was arrested in 1942 and spent the remainder of the war in captivity, ultimately in Germany. After the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Herriot’s own liberation by Russian troops, he returned to France, resumed his mayoral duties in Lyons, and restored himself and his Radical-Socialist Party to national prominence. With so many French politicians discredited for collaborating with the Nazis, Herriot’s example of passive resistance to the wartime tyranny won vast public admiration. He emerged during the postwar years as a primary shaper of France’s new republican regime and served as president of the National Assembly from 1947 to 1953. These years also afforded Herriot the opportunity to champion another of his long-standing goals: European federation. In November, 1948, he became president of the international study commission for European unity, and, when the Council of Europe was founded as the first common political institution for Europe in 1949, Herriot delivered the inaugural address in Strasbourg.

Significance

Herriot’s life coincided with one of the most tumultuous periods of French history. Born two years into the Third Republic, itself the offspring of catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Herriot became one of the most important leaders of the last three decades of that regime. His first ministerial post came in the middle of one world war; his tenure as president of the Chamber of Deputies ended with France’s defeat at the beginning of the next. His death preceded by one year the end of the Fourth Republic, a regime he had helped to found.

While his specific political and literary achievements speak for themselves, Herriot’s ultimate contribution may lie in what he symbolized. His rise from ordinary beginnings to extraordinary prominence bore witness to republican France’s emphasis on careers open to talents. As a statesman, he confronted the problems of war and recovery on two momentous occasions. Above all, Herriot stands out for his unyielding commitment to parliamentary government, the ideals of the French revolutionary heritage, and international harmony. For his defense of these principles, he fell momentary victim to the Nazi tyranny. Once vindicated, he regained the opportunity to move his nation toward the elusive vision of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” In the aftermath of World War II, Herriot became to many “the patriarch of the Republic” and the symbol of what was best in France’s entire political tradition.

Bibliography

Dell, Simon. The Image of the Popular Front: The Masses and the Media in Interwar France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. A study of how the political left of France, of which Herriot was a part, used media to promote its politics, one of the first such movements to use emerging media technologies to get its message to the people.

De Tarr, Francis. The French Radical Party: From Herriot to Mendès-France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Contains an entire chapter on Herriot as the “symbol of Radicalism” and is especially informative on Herriot’s importance as party leader after World War II.

Herriot, Édouard. In Those Days. Translated by Adolphe de Milly. New York: Old and New World, 1952. An English translation of the first volume of Herriot’s memoirs covering to the outbreak of World War I. Offers useful insights into Herriot’s formative years as a writer and a politician.

Jessner, Sabine. Édouard Herriot, Patriarch of the Republic. New York: Haskell House, 1974. A full-length biography, based solidly on Herriot’s own writings and the wealth of scholarly literature about him in the French language.

Larmour, Peter J. The French Radical Party in the 1930’s. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964. A scholarly treatment of radicalism that provides extensive material on Herriot’s role in the Radical-Socialist Party during the turbulent decade before the outbreak of World War II.

Talbott, John E. The Politics of Educational Reform in France, 1918-1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Contains a good summary of Herriot’s achievements in the field of education.