Georges Bidault
Georges-Augustin Bidault (born October 5, 1899 in Moulins , Auvergne , † January 27, 1983 in Cambo-les-Bains ) was a French politician . During World War II he was an active member of the Resistance , later Christian Democratic Prime Minister and, in the early 1960s, a member of the terrorist organization de l'armée secrète (OAS), which opposed and fought against Algeria's independence.
Life
Bidault, son of an insurance director, took part in the First World War and studied at the Sorbonne . He became a history teacher. From 1925 to 1926 he worked in Valenciennes , 1926 to 1931 in Reims , and from 1931 at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris as a history teacher. In 1932 he helped found the French Catholic youth organization and from 1934 he was the editor of the Christian-democratic-anti-fascist newspaper l'Aube . He had a column in it and protested, among other things, against the Munich Agreement of 1938, anti-Semitism and fascism . Bidault was the leader of the Christian Democratic Parti démocrate populaire (PDP).
In 1939 he joined the French army and in the course of the defeat of France in June 1940 he became a German prisoner of war. After his release in July 1941, he was no longer able to work as a journalist in Paris because of his political views and in October 1941 he moved to the "unoccupied" southern zone . There he joined the Resistance group Liberté , which later merged with the Combat group of Henri Frenay . Jean Moulin recruited him to organize an underground press and, with Albert Camus, to found the underground newspaper Combat .
Bidault participated in the establishment of the resistance parliament Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) as a representative of the PDP in Paris, which is why he returned from Lyon to Paris and lived there in the underground. After the Gestapo captured Moulin, he became chairman of the CNR. In 1944 he published a Charte de la Résistance , which recommended a far-reaching reform program for the post-war period. This program called for the restoration of human rights.
politics
After the liberation of Paris in July / August 1944, he took part in the victory parade for the Resistance. Charles de Gaulle appointed him on August 25, 1944 as Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government . He became the founder of the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), a Christian Democratic center-right party.
From 1945 to 1956 and again from 1958, Bidault was a member of the National Assembly as a member of the Loire constituency . After the war he worked in the Félix Gouin Cabinet of the Provisional Government as Foreign Minister in 1946 until the Constituent National Assembly elected him President of the Provisional Government (de facto Prime Minister ) on June 19, 1946 . His cabinet consisted of socialists , communists and Bidault's own MRP, and he took over the foreign ministry again. Elections to the National Assembly were scheduled on November 29 , after which Bidault resigned. The socialist Léon Blum became his successor.
Bidault worked in various French post-war cabinets of the Fourth Republic , initially as Foreign Minister in the cabinets of Paul Ramadier and Robert Schuman . He became prime minister in 1949, but his cabinet only survived eight months. In the cabinet of Henri Queuille from 1950 to 1951 he received the position of Vice-Prime Minister and the cabinets of René Pleven and Edgar Faure he was a Minister of Defense.
In 1952 he became honorary president of the MRP. On June 1, 1953, President Vincent Auriol commissioned him to form a cabinet, but on June 10 the National Assembly denied him the mandate. In 1953, Bidault was a presidential candidate, but withdrew in the second ballot.
During the Indochina War , Bidault was one of the proponents of maintaining colonial status in Indochina. On the eve of the Indochina Conference in Geneva, John Foster Dulles took his French counterpart aside during a meeting in the Quai d'Orsay and asked him privately: What if we gave you two atomic bombs?
He hoped the conference would split the communist powers. He also tried to get US support through air strikes, but this was rejected by Congress and the Eisenhower administration. Due to the course of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu , the war was no longer tenable domestically and Bidault was replaced by Pierre Mendès France as negotiator through a change of government. After the defeat in Indochina, his party no longer wanted to support his position against the decolonization of North Africa.
In April 1958 Bidault was again prime minister, but could not form a cabinet and was involved in the establishment of the conservative Mouvement Chrétien Démocratique (MCD). He supported the presidency of de Gaulle at the height of the Algerian War in 1958. However, in 1961 Bidault became president of the "Executive Committee for the March for a French Algeria", which sharply rejected the independence of Algeria accepted by de Gaulle. Bidault founded a National Council of Resistance within the terrorist organization OAS . In June 1962 he was accused of plotting against the state as head of the OAS. So he lost his parliamentary immunity . He fled into exile in Brazil in 1963 . In 1967 he moved to Belgium and returned to France in 1968 after an amnesty .
Web links
- Literature by and about Georges Bidault in the catalog of the German National Library
- Kurzbiografie (English)
- Biography (french)
- Newspaper article about Georges Bidault in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Jad Adams: Women and the Vote. A world history. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-870684-7 , page 299.
- ↑ TV interview (Hearts and Minds, 1974, minute 4.00)
- ↑ Jacques Dalloz: Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Indochine 1945–1954 , Paris, 2006, pp. 32–34
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bidault, Georges |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bidault, Georges-Augustin (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French resistance fighter and politician (PDP, MRP, MCD), member of the National Assembly |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 5, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Moulins (Allier) |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 27, 1983 |
| Place of death | Cambo-les-Bains |