Paul Baudouin

Paul Baudouin (1940)

Paul Louis Arthur Baudouin (born December 19, 1894 in Paris , † February 10, 1964 there ) was a French politician of the Third Republic and the Vichy regime .

Career and life

Paul Baudouin came from a wealthy Parisian banking family and studied at the École polytechnique . During the First World War , Baudouin served as an artilleryman and subsequently became a finance inspector. In 1930 he became director of the Banque de l'Indochine . Politically, Baudouin increasingly sympathized with the ideas of the nationalist Action française .

On March 30, 1940, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud appointed him to the government as Undersecretary of State. After the German attack on France and the looming military collapse, Philippe Pétain took over the government on June 16, 1940 and called for a swift end to the fighting. Baudouin became the new foreign minister and on June 17th asked the Spanish ambassador Lequerica to the German Reich about the terms of the armistice, which was concluded in Compiègne on June 22nd . With the establishment of the Vichy regime, Baudouin remained foreign minister and presumably it was from him that the first official use of the term "collaboration" for the "ongoing cooperation" between Vichy France and the German Reich ( collaboration in France ) came from. The term can be found in a memorandum from the Foreign Ministry dated July 1940. Baudouin conducted important negotiations with the German and Italian governments, but was unable to prevail over the terms of the armistice against Pierre Laval and lost his post on October 28, 1940.

By 1944, Baudouin worked again for the Banque de l'Indochine and supported the youth movement of the Vichy regime (Chantiers de la jeunesse française). In March 1947, Baudouin was sentenced to five years in prison as a representative of the collaboration government, but was released again in 1948.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Paul Baudouin in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Association X-Resistance, Ministres de Vichy issus de l'École polytechnique , Paul Baudouin ( Memento of the original of July 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , x-resistance.polytechnique.org 
2. ^ P. Baudouin: The Private Diaries of Paul Baidouin. London, 1948, taken from: Gerhard Hirschfeld, Patrick Moreau: National Socialism from the left: The Combat Community of Revolutionary National Socialists. P. 202, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1984
3. ^ Gisèle Berstein, Serge Berstein: Dictionnaire historique de la France contemporaine: 1870-1945 (= Gisèle Berstein [Hrsg.]: Dictionnaire historique de la France contemporaine . Volume 1 ). PUF, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-87027-549-8 , pp. 64 (French, limited preview in Google Book search).

predecessor	Office	successor
Paul Reynaud	Foreign Minister of France June 16 - October 28, 1940	Pierre Laval