Albert Lebrun
Albert Lebrun was the last president of the Third Republic and did not believe, until it was too late to matter, that he was entitled to stop it ending. He was a mining engineer from Lorraine, top of his year at both of the schools that trained the French technical elite, and a moderate deputy from 1900. He held the colonies and the blockade ministries during the Great War, sat in the Senate, and was elected president in May 1932 after his predecessor was shot dead by a Russian emigre. He was chosen for exactly the qualities that would define his presidency: he was conciliatory, correct, personally modest, and had no ambition to be anything more than the office had become. The eight years that followed were the republic's worst. A financial swindler's suicide in 1934 exposed his protection by ministers and magistrates and brought rioters to the Chamber; the Popular Front won in 1936 and produced the first paid holidays, the forty-hour week and a wave of factory occupations settled by agreement in a single night; the Rhineland was remilitarised, Spain fought its civil war on the far side of the Pyrenees, and Czechoslovakia was given away at Munich. Lebrun presided over all of it and was re-elected in 1939 because nobody wanted the disruption of choosing anyone else. He signed the declaration of war in September and watched the front collapse in six weeks the following May. In June 1940 he favoured moving the government to North Africa and continuing, and he was talked out of it. He appointed the marshal who would ask for the armistice, then found that parliament had voted its own powers away and that his office had been abolished around him. He never resigned; he simply had nothing left to preside over, and retired to the country until the Germans arrested and deported him in 1943.
- Lived: 1871 CE – 1950 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
