Aristide Briand

Aristide Briand (born March 28, 1862, Nantes, France—died March 7, 1932, Paris) was a statesman who served 11 times as premier of France, holding a total of 26 ministerial posts between 1906 and 1932. His efforts for international cooperation, the League of Nations, and world peace brought him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1926, which he shared with Gustav Stresemann of Germany.

As a law student, Briand became associated with left-wing causes, writing for such publications as Le Peuple, La Lanterne, and Petite République, and in 1904 he joined Jean Jaurès in founding L’Humanité. In 1894 Briand succeeded in getting the sharply divided French trade unionists to adopt the general strike as a political tactic at a workers’ congress at Nantes.

After three unsuccessful attempts (1889, 1893, and 1898) to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies, Briand became secretary-general of the Socialist Party in 1901. In 1902 he finally won election as a deputy from the Loire département and remained a member of the chamber until his death.

Briand’s first great success in government came with his work on the commission that drafted a law of separation of church and state in 1905; he succeeded in carrying this reform into law with only slight modifications. This achievement led to his appointment as minister of public education and culture in March 1906, but his acceptance of a post in a bourgeois Cabinet widened his break with Jaurès and other Socialists. Unlike Jaurès, Briand contended that the Socialists should cooperate with the Radicals in all matters of reform.

After serving another term as education minister in the first government of Georges Clemenceau (1906–09), he became premier from July 1909 to November 1910. He served two more terms, briefly, before his plan for proportional representation met defeat in the Senate in March 1913.

On the fall of the Cabinet of René Viviani in October 1915, Briand again became premier; he also took control of foreign affairs. He formed his sixth Cabinet in December 1916 but still failed to cope with the lagging war effort.

Forced to resign (March 1917) because of mounting pressures and the unsuccessful Balkan campaign, Briand spent the next three years taking little part in public affairs except for his outspoken advocacy of the League of Nations and the concept of collective security. He returned to the premiership in January 1921, but his failures in foreign policy forced his resignation on Jan. 12, 1922.

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In April 1925, under Premier Paul Painlevé, he again took the post of foreign minister—a post he held in 14 successive governments, four of which (three in 1925–26, the last in 1929) he headed himself. During that period his successes were the Pact of Locarno (1925), in which he, Gustav Stresemann of Germany, and Austen Chamberlain of Britain sought to normalize relations between Germany and its former enemies; and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (Aug. 27, 1928), in which 60 nations agreed to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy. In December 1930 Briand publicly, and boldly for the times, advocated a federal union of Europe.

Briand finally retired in January 1932, after an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of the French Republic, and died shortly thereafter.