Short answers, pulled from the story.
Édouard Daladier was a French Radical-Socialist politician who served as Prime Minister of France in 1933-1934, and again from 1938 to 1940. Born in Carpentras on the 18th of June 1884, he was also Minister of Defence from 1936 to 1940 and was a leading figure in the Radical-Socialist Party for most of the interwar period.
Daladier signed the Munich Agreement on the 30th of September 1938 but privately considered it a shameful treaty that had betrayed Czechoslovakia. He had in fact ordered French military mobilisation before the conference and told US Ambassador William Christian Bullitt Jr. that he would have preferred war to the humiliation of the Bad Godesberg terms. He told his aide Alexis Léger, looking at the celebrating crowd at Le Bourget on his return: "Ah! les cons! S'ils savaient..." ("Ah! The fools! If only they knew...").
As Defence Minister from 1936, Daladier nationalised the French arms industry, appointing himself chairman of the newly founded Supreme Defence Committee. He pushed through a 14-billion-franc military rearmament programme in September 1936, which the historian Joseph Maiolo described as the largest peacetime arms programme ever attempted by a French government. By September 1939, France's aircraft production had reached parity with Germany's.
Daladier was arrested by the Vichy government and tried for treason during the Riom Trial. He was imprisoned in Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees from 1940 until April 1943, then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, and later held at Itter Castle in North Tyrol, where he was freed after the Battle of Castle Itter.
The Canadian historian Robert Young argued that Daladier's reputation has been unfairly tainted by the popular image of appeasement, describing him as a "weary Sancho Panza to Chamberlain's Don Quixote". Young contended that English-speaking historians have treated French appeasers as products of national character rather than individuals making constrained choices, and that the idea of France barely fighting in 1940 is historically wrong: approximately 120,000 French servicemen were killed in action between the 10th of May and the 21st of June 1940.
Daladier was mobilised in August 1914 as a sergeant with the French Army's 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment. He fought at the Battle of Verdun in 1916 with the 209th Infantry Regiment, received a field commission as a lieutenant in April 1916 for gallantry in action, and was awarded the Legion of Honour in May 1917. He ended the war as a captain and also received the Croix de Guerre.