Briand, Aristide
Briand, Aristide (b. Nantes, 28 Mar. 1862; d. Paris, 7 Jan. 1932) Prime Minister of France 1909–11, 1913, 1915–17, 1921–2, 1925–6, 1929
Briand was born in the western city of Nantes and trained as a lawyer. He flirted with the far left, made a reputation defending the anarchist trade unionists of the CGT and entered Parliament as a revolutionary Socialist in 1902. In the Chamber of Deputies he quickly demonstrated the mastery of compromise and manœuvre which would become his trademark. As rapporteur of the bill introducing the separation of church and state, he worked hard to defuse the tensions between anticlericals and Catholics. He then moved towards the centre by refusing to accept the Socialist Party's embargo on participation in bourgeois governments. Appointed Minister of Education and Churches in 1906, he was promoted by Clemenceau to Minister of Justice and became Prime Minister on the latter's defeat in 1909. As Prime Minister, he attacked the Radical Party and outraged his erstwhile Socialist colleagues by dealing toughly with trade union militancy. His shift to the right was confirmed by his support for the presidential bid of the conservative Republican Poincaré, whose Prime Minister he became, and by his leading role in the campaign for an extension of military service to three years.
It was, paradoxically, World War I which started the process by which Briand regained the confidence of the parties of the left. He was not a very successful Prime Minister in 1915–17. Out of office, he grew alarmed at the endless slaughter and put out diplomatic feelers to the Austrians. In the short run, this proved dangerous as he came up against the implacable determination of Clemenceau, who became Prime Minister in November 1917. Briand narrowly avoided being swept away by the anti-defeatist campaign led by Clemenceau's henchmen and spent the rest of the war in uncharacteristic silence; to his chagrin he was excluded from any role in the 1919 peace negotiations. Yet he quickly recovered his earlier authority, first by leading the backstairs campaign which led to Clemenceau's failure to be elected President of the Republic and then by demonstrating to the inexperienced Chamber elected in 1919 his superior political talents. By 1921 he was back in office as Prime Minister. His clash with the assertive President Millerand, which led to his resignation in 1922, did him no harm at all when the left regained power in 1924. In the last phase of his career, he was several times Prime Minister, but devoted most of his energies to the cause of Franco-German reconciliation and the League of Nations. He was Foreign Minister for almost six years. Known as the ‘pilgrim of peace’, he established close links with Stresemann, built on the ‘pale sunlight of Locarno’ and even put forward a plan for a European federation. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 with Stresemann. He was also the moving spirit behind the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.
By 1931 he was visibly failing. He was deeply upset by his failure to be elected President of the Republic in May 1931 and in January 1932 was evicted from the foreign office by his former protégé, Laval. He died six weeks later. Nine years later the cause of Franco-German reconciliation to which he had devoted his final years collapsed in disaster and some of the strongest champions of ‘Briandism’ became prominent collaborators. His own reputation, however, survived, and is perpetuated by the memorial plaque outside the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
