Gaston Doumergue
Gaston Doumergue presided over the only stretch of the interwar years in which France was not in a crisis, and was recalled from retirement to handle one. He was born in the Gard into a Protestant wine-growing family, which made him the first Protestant to hold the presidency in a country whose religious quarrels were still a live political fault line. He served as a colonial magistrate in Indochina and Algeria before entering parliament as a Radical in 1893, held half the ministries in the republic, and was briefly prime minister in 1913. He was president of the Senate when the left coalition forced Millerand out in 1924, and was elected to replace him precisely because he had no intention of repeating Millerand's attempt to govern. His seven years covered the republic's best period between the wars. The franc was stabilised at a fifth of its prewar value by a national-union government, which ended four years of currency panic at the cost of wiping out the savings of the rentier class. France signed the Locarno treaties guaranteeing its frontier with Germany, admitted Germany to the League of Nations, and put its name to the pact of 1928 renouncing war as an instrument of policy - an agreement that bound almost every state on earth and prevented nothing, but which was the high-water mark of the belief that it might. In the same years his governments began the fortifications along the eastern frontier that were meant to make the next war unnecessary. He left office in 1931 to general affection and was brought back in February 1934, after riots outside the Chamber of Deputies killed fifteen people and toppled a government, to lead a national-union cabinet. He used it to propose strengthening the executive against parliament, lost his majority within nine months, and resigned for good.
- Lived: 1863 CE – 1937 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
