Edvard Beneš

President of Czechoslovakia (1935-1938) and president in exile (1940-1945)

• Born: May 28, 1884
• Birthplace: Kožlany, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Czech Republic)
• Died: September 3, 1948
• Place of death: Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)

Beneš helped undermine Austro-Hungarian rule in the Czech and Slovak region during World War I and became foreign minister of the new republic there in 1918. A brilliant statesman, he negotiated numerous agreements, but as president he was unable to prevent the dismemberment of his country at Munich. During World War II, he headed the Czechoslovakian government in exile and after 1945 endeavored unsuccessfully to maintain Czechoslovakia’s political freedom in the face of mounting Communist pressures.

Early Life

Edvard Beneš (EHD-vahrt BEH-nehsh) was the youngest of ten children born to a moderately successful farmer who was able to send him to secondary school at Vinohrady. As family funds were too meager to cover the cost of higher education, however, Beneš resorted to tutoring and freelance writing to make ends meet. In 1903, he entered Charles University in Prague to study philology (he did become an accomplished linguist) but switched to philosophy and came under the influence of Tomáš Masaryk, the leading advocate of Czech nationalism. At Masaryk’s urging, Beneš went to France to study at the Sorbonne and at Dijon, and he obtained a doctor of laws degree in political science and sociology from the latter. In Paris he met a Czech student, Hana Vlčkova, whom he married in 1909; she was his lifelong companion and source of constant encouragement.

In 1909, Beneš returned home, completed a Ph.D. at Charles University, and secured a teaching post in political science at the Academy of Commerce in Prague. He also turned away from Marxism, joined Masaryk’s Progressive Party, and wrote for its organ. In 1912, he joined the faculty at Charles University as a lecturer in sociology. (After the war, he regularly lectured there on sociology.) In 1913, he also became a lecturer at the Technical College in Prague. By that time, he had become a prolific writer on politics and international affairs and active in the national liberation movement. He had developed a deep hatred for militarism, of both the Austrian and the German varieties, but he was not called up for military service at the outbreak of World War I, because of a leg injury incurred in his youth when he was a star soccer player. In early 1915, he and Masaryk (who was now in exile) formed an underground organization called Maffia, which sought to promote a national uprising and to aid the Allies by supplying secret information about activities in Austria-Hungary. In September, 1915, Beneš left the country with a forged passport to avoid imminent arrest by the Austrian police and joined Masaryk in Switzerland.

His earlier sojourn in France had imbued Beneš with Western political, economic, and cultural ideas that put him at odds with those Bohemian patriots who looked to Russia for salvation. Beneš and Masaryk became the leading spokespersons for the “Westernist” school in the liberation movement. They represented a “Europeanist” or “realist” stance; that is, they believed the nation must learn how to observe, analyze, and contemplate options carefully, rather than follow the romantic notions of nineteenth century Pan-Slavism. Through their intensive efforts in the three years that followed, Beneš and Masaryk almost single-handedly achieved their goal of an independent Czechoslovak state.

Life’s Work

At their meeting in 1915, Beneš and Masaryk discussed plans for their country’s future, arranged to gather funds to carry on the work, and determined that they would persuade the Allies to support their movement. Beneš functioned essentially as Masaryk’s chief of staff. In February, 1916, Beneš became general-secretary of the Czechoslovak National Council, which was seated in Paris, where he had extensive ties. A tireless propagandist, Beneš pounded the Allies with details about how the Czech and Slovak people were working for victory through army desertions and mutinies and civilian riots, sabotage efforts, and demonstrations against the authorities in Austria-Hungary. Their movement contributed materially to the demise of the Habsburg Empire and influenced the Allies to recognize the idea of a Czechoslovak republic. Through his French contacts, Beneš negotiated the specific mention of the liberation of the Czechoslovaks from foreign domination in the entente’s note to Woodrow Wilson in January, 1917, which spelled out their war aims, and Wilson included in his Fourteen Points in January, 1918, the demand that the peoples of Austria-Hungary should have the opportunity for autonomous development. Once Masaryk had secured the formation of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia in 1917, the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris began to function as the government in exile of a state that had hitherto existed only in the minds of its leaders. In May and June, 1918, Beneš obtained French and British recognition of Czechoslovakia as an allied and belligerent nation, and he effectively countered Italian opposition to this recognition. He also was in regular contact with nationalist leaders in Prague, and, when the Habsburg regime collapsed, Beneš was able to secure the establishment of an independent state under the National Council on October 28. Three days later, the Slovaks proclaimed independence and joined with the Czech provinces.

On November 14, a hastily convened parliament approved the émigré committee as the constitutional government, with Masaryk as president and Beneš as foreign minister, and the latter was commissioned to represent the new country at the Paris Peace Conference. After signing in 1919 the Treaty of St. Germain with Austria, which finalized the authority of the Czechoslovak government, Beneš returned home in triumph to take up the duties of foreign minister. He served in this post until 1935 with only a brief interlude from September 26, 1921, to October 7, 1922, as premier.

During his tenure as foreign minister, Beneš gained renown as a European statesman who was devoted to the struggle for international peace and collective security. His major achievement was the formation of the Little Entente with Yugoslavia and Romania in 1920-1921 to check Hungarian ambitions; this Little Entente, linked with the Treaty of Alliance and Friendship with France in 1924, was the foundation of the continental balance of power and the French deterrence system against Germany. Through this tie, Beneš was able to secure French assistance for construction of the Czechoslovak border fortifications, which might have saved the country from German conquest in 1938 if the Sudeten region had not been lost through the ill-fated Munich Agreement. Beneš also concluded one of the first European treaties with Soviet Russia (1922) and treaties of friendship with Poland (1921), Austria (1921), Italy (1924), and Germany (1925). He was an active participant in the Genoa Economics Meeting (1922), the Locarno Conference (1925), disarmament conferences (1927, 1929, 1932), and the Lausanne reparations talks (1932). In 1933, he negotiated the London Convention with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Turkey, which defined aggression and thereby applied the 1928 Paris Pact to Eastern Europe, and in 1935 he concluded an alliance (Treaty of Mutual Assistance) with the Soviet Union. He played a leading role in the League of Nations, first as acting vice president in 1920 and then as a member of the council (1923-1927), president of the assembly (1935), and chairs of various committees. In 1924, Beneš and Greek foreign minister Nicholas Politis drafted the celebrated Geneva Protocol, which was designed to prevent aggressive war by requiring that international disputes be submitted to peaceful negotiation and arbitration.

When the aged Masaryk decided to retire, the parliament named his protégé as the new constitutional head of state on December 18, 1935. Beneš tried to check Nazi expansion by means of collective security, but his efforts were torpedoed by France, which allowed Germany to remilitarize the Rhineland, cowered behind the Maginot line, and refused to honor its treaty commitments. After the Austrian Anschluss, Adolf Hitler put pressure on Czechoslovakia to cede the area populated by German-speaking people (the Sudetenland), and when he began to concentrate troops on the border, Beneš ordered a general mobilization on May 21, 1938. By putting the country on a war footing, Beneš forced the führer to back down, but by late summer it appeared certain that Germany would drag Europe into a general conflict over the Sudeten issue. The British and French leaders succeeded in negotiating an agreement at Munich on September 29 that allowed Germany to annex the region. Neither the republic nor its Soviet ally was consulted about the matter, and Czechoslovakia, stripped of its border fortifications, was thrown to the wolves. In response to Hitler’s demands, Beneš resigned on October 5 and went into exile in London.

He traveled to the United States in February, 1939, to teach at the University of Chicago, but when Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia on March 15, he agreed to assume the leadership of his country’s liberation movement. He returned to London in July, established a popular government known as the Czechoslovak National Committee, and a year later converted it into the Provisional Czechoslovak National Government. In July, 1941, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union accorded recognition to Beneš’s government in exile. His wartime strategy was to pay official visits to the two men who would play the decisive roles in shaping the new order, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. He went to the United States in May, 1943, and to Moscow in December, 1943. He made it clear that Czechoslovakia would have a new and more cordial relationship with the Soviet Union after the war, and he agreed to the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Assistance, and Postwar Cooperation that paved the way for the disaster that would befall his country after the liberation. He hoped that voluntary concessions to Stalin would make for goodwill, but his surrender of Ruthenia (Subcarpathian Ukraine), Czechoslovakia’s easternmost province, gained nothing.

As the war drew to a close, the Red Army installed native communists in Slovakia. Beneš naïvely thought that he and his government would be able to oust these communists once he appeared on the scene, and he journeyed to Russia and then to Slovakia in March, 1945, where he established provisional headquarters at Košice. He agreed to a coalition government that would include communists, most notably the Czech party leader Klement Gottwald. On May 8, Beneš went to Prague (also liberated by the Soviets), where he was joyously welcomed.

Although Beneš set out to prevent the communists from monopolizing power in Czechoslovakia, his program of strengthening public morale, treating the communists evenhandedly and having them share power responsibility in proportion to their strength, yielding to their demands in social and economic but not political matters, and keeping avenues to the West open while reducing Soviet influence in the country was a failure. His position steadily eroded, and in 1948 the communists carried off a coup. On February 25, Beneš reluctantly signed the death warrant for Czechoslovak freedom by accepting the resignation of the democratic ministers and naming a new government headed by Gottwald. By that time, Beneš was sick. He had already suffered a serious stroke the year before, and he resigned the presidency on June 7 and retired to his country home at Sezimovo Ústí. His physical condition deteriorated rapidly, and he died on September 3, 1948.

Significance

Beneš was the quintessential European statesman of the interwar years. Unfortunately, the times were not ripe for a person with such a commitment to international peace through collective security. Although he was a Czechoslovak patriot, he had a broader conception of the international order. He was an eternal optimist and an ineffable proponent of democracy on the international scene, and thus he was no match for dictators such as Hitler and Stalin. Although he was a brilliant negotiator and understood the art of compromise, his critics questioned whether he really had the fortitude to stand up to tyranny.

Like that of his country, Beneš’s life was a tragic story. A confirmed democrat, he was forced to compromise with antidemocratic forces. His allies never came through when they were needed, and, in the crucial years of 1938 and 1948, he and Czechoslovakia were left alone and ignored as the flame of democracy was extinguished. Whether he was a victim of forces beyond his control or he had contributed to the situation by his own ineptness is a matter for historians to debate. Yet he left his mark as a statesman and fighter for a democratic nation and world.

Bibliography

Beneš, Edvard. The Fall and Rise of a Nation: Czechoslovakia, 1938-1941. Edited by Milan Hauner. Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 2001. In newly discovered manuscripts, Beneš described the events of the last two weeks of September, 1938, culminating in the adoption of the Munich Pact. Supplemented with wartime speeches and other documents, the book recounts Germany’s campaign to acquire the Sudetenland, the German invasion of Prague in 1939, and Beneš’s formation of a government in exile.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memoirs: From Munich to New World and New Victory. Translated by Godfrey Lias. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Originally published in Prague in 1947, the Czechoslovak edition was a best seller until its suppression after the Communist coup. It was designed to justify his statesmanship after Munich and the process of undoing the agreement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My War Memoirs. Translated by Paul Selver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. A detailed personal account of Beneš’s activities in the Czechoslovak national movement, from the beginning of the war to Masaryk’s return to preside over the new state.

Bruegel, J. W. Czechoslovakia Before Munich: The German Minority Problem and British Appeasement Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Insightful treatment of the Sudeten German question and Beneš’s efforts to deal with it. Demonstrates that he failed to grasp the significance of having such a large German minority within his state until it was too late.

Crabitès, Pierre. Beneš, Statesman of Central Europe. London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1935. Typical of the popular biographies that were published in the interwar years laudatory and based on My War Memoirs and secondary sources.

Korbel, Josef. The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, 1938-1948. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. Traces Communist activities in the land from Munich to the coup. Includes the efforts of Beneš to deal with the Communist exile regime and his losing struggle with Gottwald to retain democracy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Twentieth Century Czechoslovakia: The Meaning of Its History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. A historical survey that focuses on the key role of Beneš and criticizes his apparent unwillingness to exercise forceful leadership during the Sudeten crisis and the period before the Communist coup.

Mamatey, Victor, and Radomír Luza, eds. A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918-1948. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. A collection of seventeen detailed scholarly essays on various aspects of the republic’s history. The central focus is on Beneš and his leadership.

Taborsky, Edward. President Edvard Beneš: Between East and West, 1938-1948. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1981. An account by Beneš’s personal secretary and legal adviser between 1939 and 1945 who fled to the United States after the coup. He relates the president’s deeds during the war years and defends him against his critics.