Alexandre Ribot

Alexandre Ribot

Alexandre Félix Joseph Ribot (born February 7, 1842 in Saint-Omer ( Département Pas-de-Calais ), † January 13, 1923 in Paris ) was a politician of the Third French Republic .

Life

Alexandre Ribot studied at the Sorbonne Law and could this study in 1863 successfully with a promotion to complete. As a Licencié ès lettres , he then settled as a lawyer in Paris. He was secretary of the Lawyers' Conference and one of the founders of the Société de législation comparée .

In 1870 Ribot was appointed substitute (assessor) at the Seine tribunal and in 1875 Jules Dufaure appointed him director of crime and mercy matters to the Ministry of Justice, then Secretary General and State Councilor in extraordinary service. In 1877 he left the Ministry of Justice and was again a member of the bar. On July 25, 1877, in Paris, he married the widow of his boyfriend, Armand Demongeot, who died young, the American Mary Weld Burch, with whom he had a son, Alexandre Eugène (1878-1960), who became a doctor.

Also in 1877 Ribot made himself more noticeable on the political stage through his important role, which he played in the Committee of Legal Resistance during the cabinet of Albert de Broglie . He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in Boulogne in 1878 as a representative of his native Pas-de-Calais department , where he joined the left-wing center and represented moderate republican views, but soon assumed an influential position thanks to his excellent workforce and eloquence. This was increased by his articles in the moderately left newspaper Le Parlement , in which he rejected violence against unauthorized congregations. In 1881 his mandate was renewed.

Ribot was particularly devoted to financial issues and was rapporteur for the budget in 1882. He became one of the most influential republican opponents of the Radical Party and sharply attacked Léon Gambetta's cabinet, which was only in office from November 1881 to January 1882 . Then he refused to vote in favor of the loans required by the Ferry cabinet to finance the Tongking expedition and, in 1885, with Georges Clemenceau, participated in the overthrow of this government. In the elections that year, the Republicans in Pas-de-Calais suffered a devastating defeat and Ribot did not return to the House of Representatives until 1887. After 1889 he represented Saint-Omer there. He had great fears about the movement of General Georges Boulanger .

When, after Pierre Tirard's resignation on March 13, 1890, a new cabinet was formed, led by Charles de Freycinet , Ribot took over the management of the Foreign Ministry and, under the maxim of a peaceful foreign policy, maintained close ties between France and Russia . This was expressed in 1891 when the French fleet visited Kronstadt . As a result, a formal alliance agreement was concluded between the two powers. Ribot also knew and valued British institutions well; two of his earlier works, Biographie de Lord Erskine (1866) and Étude sur l'acte du 5 avril 1873 pour l'établissement d'une cour suprême de justice en Angleterre (1874), deal with English law.

Ribot also retained the leadership of the Foreign Ministry in the cabinet of Émile Loubet (February 1892) and in the cabinet he formed himself on December 6, 1892, in which he also became Prime Minister of the French Republic. As early as January 10, 1893, he was forced to reshuffle the government because of the attacks on various members of his cabinet on the occasion of the Panama scandal. He energetically forced the dismissal of Freycinet involved in this scandal. He himself remained Prime Minister, but also became Minister of the Interior in the now “purified” cabinet, while Jules Develle took on the foreign minister's agenda. Ribot resigned with his cabinet on April 4, 1893 because the Chamber of Deputies did not want to implement the budget corrections required by the Senate . Then Charles Dupuy became the new head of government. In the new elections in August 1893, Ribot received a mandate again.

After Jean Casimir-Perier's resignation in January 1895, the new President Félix Faure Ribot again entrusted the formation of a cabinet, in which he took over the Ministry of Finance alongside the chair on January 26th. On June 10, he was able to officially announce France's definitive alliance with Russia for the first time. His cabinet was overthrown after just a few months; it resigned on October 30, 1895 because of its defeat on the question of the Chemin de fer du Sud . The real cause of his fall was the mismanagement of the expedition to Madagascar , the cost of life and money beyond expectations, and the alarming social conditions in France itself, as the strike in Carmaux showed.

After the resignation of Prime Minister Félix Jules Méline in July 1898, Ribot tried in vain to form a cabinet of "compensation". At the end of 1898 he was elected president of the important public school system, in which he advocated the introduction of a modern education system. The policy of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet towards the religious education congregations divided the republican party, and Ribot was one of the apostates. In the elections of 1902, however, his policy suffered a severe setback, although he was re-elected himself. He then vigorously opposed the actions of the cabinet of Émile Combes and condemned its alliance with Jean Jaurès . On January 13, 1905, he was one of the opposition leaders who brought about the overthrow of the cabinet.

Although Ribot had strongly criticized the anti-clerical policies of the government led by Combes, he now expressed his willingness to accept a new arrangement in place of the Concordat of 1801 and supported the government in establishing the Associations culturelles . To justify his opposition course, he published the work Quatre années d'opposition; discours politiques 1901-1905 (2 vols., Paris 1905). He was re-elected as MP for Saint-Omer in 1906. In January of the same year he succeeded the late Senator Gaston d'Audiffret-Pasquier as a member of the Académie française (chair 16); and he had been a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques since 1903 . In 1909 he became a senator .

During the First World War Ribot belonged to the governments of René Viviani and Aristide Briand as finance minister before he took over the offices of prime minister and foreign minister after the overthrow of the latter in March 1917. His term of office fell during one of the most difficult phases of the war, which was marked by the failed Nivelle offensive (April 16 to the end of May 1917) and subsequent mutinies in the French army . After the Socialists left his government in September 1917, Ribot announced his resignation, but kept the post of Foreign Minister under his successor Paul Painlevé for a month . He died on January 13, 1923 at the age of almost 81 in Paris.

Works

• Lettres à un ami, souvenirs de ma vie politique. Journal d'Alexandre Ribot et correspondances inédites, 1914-1922 . Plon, Paris 1924. Commons

literature

• Martin E. Schmidt: Alexandre Ribot. Odyssey of a Liberal in the Third Republic . Nijhoff, The Hag 1974, ISBN 90-247-1639-X .

Web links

Commons : Alexandre Ribot  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)
• Newspaper article about Alexandre Ribot in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

predecessor	Office	successor
Émile Loubet Charles Dupuy Gaston Doumergue Aristide Briand	Prime Minister of France December 6, 1892–4. April 26 , 1893 January 26, 1895–1. November 1895 June 9, 1914-13. June 1914 March 20, 1917–12. September 1917	Charles Dupuy Léon Bourgeois René Viviani Paul Painlevé
Eugène Spuller Aristide Briand	Foreign Minister of France March 17, 1890–11. January 1893 March 20, 1917-23. October 1917	Jules Develle Louis Barthou
Raymond Poincaré Joseph Noulens	Finance Minister of France January 26, 1895–1. November 1895 August 26, 1914-20. March 1917	Paul Doumer Joseph Thierry
Émile Loubet	Minister of the Interior of France January 11, 1893–4. April 1893	Charles Dupuy
Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin	Minister of Justice of France June 9, 1914–13. June 1914	Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin