Alexandre Millerand
Alexandre Millerand began as the socialist who broke socialism's rule against joining a bourgeois government, and ended as the only French president driven from office by a parliamentary majority. He was a Paris lawyer who defended strikers and was elected as a socialist deputy in 1885. In 1899 he accepted the ministry of commerce in a government formed to defend the republic during the Dreyfus crisis, and in doing so provoked one of the defining arguments of European socialism: whether a socialist could take office in a capitalist state without becoming its instrument. The international congresses debated the case for years, his own party expelled him, and the question outlived all of them. In office he was a genuine reformer, creating the labour inspectorate and the ten-hour day, but he drifted steadily rightwards thereafter, becoming minister of war before and during the first year of the Great War and then administrator of the recovered provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. He became prime minister in January 1920 and president in September, after his predecessor resigned following a nervous collapse. Millerand did not accept the convention that the president reigned without governing. He campaigned openly for a stronger executive, intervened in policy, and backed the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 as the way to make Germany pay the reparations it had stopped paying. The occupation succeeded in extracting coal and failed at everything else, wrecking the German currency and isolating France from its own allies. When the left coalition won the elections of May 1924 it refused to nominate any government while he remained, and having no way to appoint one he resigned in June. He sat in the Senate for another sixteen years and voted, in July 1940, against granting full powers to the marshal.
- Lived: 1859 CE – 1943 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
