Aristide Briand

Aristide Briand was prime minister of France eleven times, shared a Nobel Peace Prize for the reconciliation with Germany, and proposed a European union in 1929. He began as a socialist journalist and lawyer arguing for the general strike, and made his reputation carrying the 1905 law separating church and state, which he administered with a moderation that surprised both sides. He broke a rail strike in 1910 by conscripting the strikers, which ended his standing on the left permanently. As foreign minister for most of the years from 1925 he worked with Gustav Stresemann to bring Germany into the League of Nations and to settle the western borders at Locarno, and the two shared the Nobel in 1926. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renounced war as an instrument of national policy and was signed by more than sixty states; it is routinely mocked for having failed to prevent anything, and it is also the legal basis on which aggressive war was prosecuted at Nuremberg. In 1929 he put a memorandum to the League proposing a federal link between the European peoples, which went nowhere and reads now as an early draft of an idea that took another twenty years and another war. He was a superb speaker in a period that valued the skill, and contemporaries described the voice rather than the arguments. His European memorandum proposed a federal bond that would not touch sovereignty, which is precisely the circle the European Communities later tried to square. He died in 1932, a year before Hitler took power, and Stresemann had died in 1929 - the two deaths are conventionally treated as the end of the Locarno period. He served as foreign minister under fourteen different governments, which in the Third Republic was a way of providing continuity that the premiership could not.

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