Vincent Auriol
Vincent Auriol was the first president of the Fourth Republic and spent seven years demonstrating why it would not last. He was a socialist from the south-west, a lawyer and journalist elected to parliament in 1914, and the party's specialist in finance for twenty years. When the Popular Front took office in 1936 he became finance minister and carried out its two most contested measures, the devaluation of the franc and the nationalisation of the Bank of France, which ended a century in which the currency had been managed by its shareholders. In July 1940 he was one of the eighty parliamentarians who voted against granting full powers to the marshal, was arrested and placed under house arrest, escaped to London in 1943 and joined the provisional authority there. He presided over the constituent assemblies that wrote the new constitution and was elected president under it in January 1947. The office he had helped design was deliberately weaker than the one before the war, and he found it inadequate almost at once. Governments lasted an average of six months. A president who served a full seven years was therefore the only continuous authority in the state, and he used the one power the text gave him, the choice of who should be asked to form a cabinet, far more actively than its authors had envisaged. His first year brought the expulsion of the communist ministers from government and the acceptance of American reconstruction aid, which fixed France on one side of a division that had not existed when he was elected. The Atlantic alliance and the coal and steel community were both founded during his term, the second of them the beginning of what the European Union later became. His governments also put down a rising in Madagascar with a brutality that killed tens of thousands and was barely reported at home. Running underneath all of it was the war in Indochina, which began before his presidency, lasted the whole of it, and was lost three months after he left. He declined to stand again in 1953, saying the office as constituted was not worth a second term, and lived long enough to vote for the republic that replaced it.
- Lived: 1884 CE – 1966 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
