Édouard Daladier

• 1. Introduction

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  Édouard Daladier landed at Le Bourget Airfield on the 30th of September 1938 to a crowd of cheering Parisians. They waved and shouted, relieved that the man returning from Munich had kept France out of another war. Daladier looked out at them, turned to his aide Alexis Léger, and said: "Ah! les cons! S'ils savaient..." Which translates, roughly, as: "Ah! The fools! If only they knew."

  He had just signed away the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler. He knew it was a shameful treaty. He knew it had betrayed Czechoslovakia, France's most loyal ally in Eastern Europe. And he knew the crowds cheering him had no idea what had just been agreed in that Munich conference room.

  Daladier is one of history's more complicated figures. Born the son of a village baker in Carpentras in 1884, he fought with distinction at Verdun, built the French Radical-Socialist Party into a modern political force, launched the largest peacetime rearmament program in French history, and stared down Mussolini's territorial demands on Christmas radio. Yet his name is attached, above almost anything else, to appeasement. The questions this documentary will try to answer are: what did Daladier actually believe, what were the constraints he was working under, and does the popular image of him hold up?

• 2. The Baker's Son at War

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  Carpentras, Vaucluse, is a market town in Provence, and it was there on the 18th of June 1884 that Daladier was born, the son of a village baker. He was educated at the lycée Duparc in Lyon, where he first encountered socialist politics. He went on to teach history, first at Nîmes, then Grenoble, then Marseille, and eventually at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris.

  His entry into politics was locally rooted. He became mayor of Carpentras, his home town, in 1912. He ran for the Chamber of Deputies and lost to a Radical-Socialist Party candidate, then did the sensible thing and joined that party.

  When war came in August 1914, Daladier was mobilised at the age of 30 as a sergeant with the French Army's 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment. In mid-1915 the regiment was destroyed in heavy fighting against the Imperial German Army on the Western Front, and the survivors, Daladier among them, were redistributed to other units. He was transferred to the 209th Infantry Regiment.

  In 1916, the 209th fought at Verdun. In April of that year, in the midst of the battle, Daladier was given a field commission as a lieutenant on account of his gallantry in action. The following May he received the Legion of Honour. He ended the war as a captain commanding a company, and had also been awarded the Croix de Guerre.

  Back in civilian life, he won election to the Chamber of Deputies for Orange, Vaucluse, in 1919. His constituents would later call him "the bull of Vaucluse" on account of his thick neck, large shoulders, and determined look. Cynics, though, noted that a bull's horns are quite different from a snail's.

• 3. Building a Party, Choosing Sides

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  From his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, Daladier set about turning the Radical-Socialist Party into a structured modern political organisation. For most of the years between the wars, he led the party's left wing, which favoured a governing coalition with the socialist Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, known as the SFIO.

  He held various ministerial posts during the coalition governments of 1924-1928. In 1926, however, he played an instrumental role in the Radical-Socialists' break with the SFIO, and in November 1928 joined the first Cartel des gauches with the centre-right Raymond Poincaré. Two years later, negotiations for a centre-left coalition broke down. In 1933, despite similar difficulties, Daladier managed to form a government of the republican left.

  In January 1934, he was considered the most suitable candidate of the centre-left to calm public opinion after the Stavisky Affair, a major corruption scandal. That government lasted less than a week. It fell in the face of the riots of the 6th of February 1934, and with Daladier gone, two years of right-wing governments followed.

  After roughly a year away from frontline politics, Daladier returned in October 1934. He took a populist line against what he called the banking oligarchy, which he accused of capturing French democracy, referring to them as the Two Hundred Families. He became president of the Radical-Socialist Party and brought the party into the Popular Front coalition alongside Léon Blum's Socialists.

  As Defence Minister in the Blum government, Daladier was also appointed chairman of the newly founded Supreme Defence Committee. At the committee's first meeting on the 26th of June 1936, he made clear who would now be directing France's defence policy: himself.

• 4. The Rearmament Drive

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  At that first Supreme Defence Committee meeting, Daladier listed the defence ministers of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Britain as a way of saying that France now had one too. He then announced that the entire French arms industry was to be nationalised, accusing French arms firms of failing to deliver weapons on time or in full.

  The nationalisation bill was approved by the National Assembly on the 11th of August 1936. Privately, General Maurice Gamelin, the commander Daladier trusted most and whose military judgement he valued greatly, described nationalisation to a senior civil servant as a "left-wing gimmick" rather than a practical policy. That civil servant, Robert Jacomet, replied that time was short and that building a new parallel state industry alongside the private sector would take too long: "Our interest is therefore to get our hands on the existing factories and modernise them fast".

  Daladier asked Gamelin to produce a four-year military modernisation plan. When Gamelin submitted a proposal budgeted at 9 billion francs for the army, Daladier rejected it as too low and pushed for 14 billion francs. During what the sources describe as an "emotional" meeting with Prime Minister Blum, Daladier warned that Germany was winning the arms race, and persuaded Blum to accept the higher figure. On the 7th of September 1936, the cabinet approved the 14-billion-franc plan. The American historian Joseph Maiolo later described it as the largest arms programme ever attempted by a French government in peacetime.

  Daladier's intelligence picture was partly driving this urgency. The Deuxième Bureau, France's military intelligence service, had identified that German arms firms including Krupp AG, Rheinmetall AG, and Borsig AG were running their factories at full capacity. In early July 1936, he appeared before the Defence Committees of both chambers to warn that the Wehrmacht would soon field 650,000 men and was buying tanks in massive numbers to fight a war of movement. France, as the world's fourth largest economy, was by his reckoning starting the arms race behind Germany, the world's second largest.

  On the question of Italy, Daladier sided with Admiral François Darlan, whom he had appointed to command the navy in January 1937. Where Gamelin saw Italy as a possible ally, Darlan saw it as France's primary opponent. Daladier came to believe that any war with Germany would draw Italy in on the German side, and he pushed for war planning that made defeating Italy the first priority while France held on the Maginot Line.

• 5. Munich and Its Contradictions

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  Neville Chamberlain tried hard to get Daladier to renounce the French-Czechoslovak alliance. At the Anglo-French summit in London on the 28th and the 29th of April 1938, Chamberlain pressed the case. Daladier refused firmly. That refusal had a structural consequence: it forced the British very much against their will into involvement with the Sudetenland crisis, because the French refusal to abandon Czechoslovakia meant that any German attack on that country would automatically become a Franco-German war, and British military experts were almost unanimous that Germany would defeat France without British intervention.

  Daladier had no illusions about Hitler's programme. At that same April meeting, he told the British that Hitler's real aim was to secure "a domination of the Continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble". He went on: "Today, it is the turn of Czechoslovakia. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of Poland and Romania. When Germany has obtained the oil and wheat it needs, she will turn on the West".

  At the same time, Daladier understood the constraints he faced. Sixty percent of French imports came by sea, making France dependent on Britain, the world's largest naval power. The Italian alignment with Germany had concentrated most of the French Navy in the Mediterranean, leaving the Atlantic coast exposed. France's need to bring soldiers from Algeria made control of the western Mediterranean the navy's primary task. Without the British what Daladier called the "continental commitment", France could not win.

  On the 25th of September 1938, at Bad Godesberg, Hitler rejected Chamberlain's proposals and demanded that the Sudetenland join Germany by the 1st of October. Upon hearing this, Daladier told his cabinet that France intended to go to war. He ordered a military mobilisation. He imposed a blackout on French cities so German bombers could not use their lights as navigation guides. He sent General Gamelin to London to begin staff talks. When Gamelin's chef de cabinet asked whether Daladier was serious, Gamelin replied: "He'll do it, he'll do it".

  Then, on the 29th of September, Chamberlain announced that Mussolini had intervened and that Hitler was willing to discuss a compromise. Daladier attended the conference held the following day and signed the agreement he described privately as a shameful treaty. He told US Ambassador William Christian Bullitt Jr. the day before the conference that he would have preferred war to the humiliation of the Bad Godesberg terms. The crowd that cheered him home at Le Bourget did not know that.

• 6. Firmness at Home, Collapse Abroad

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  In October 1938, at a rally in Marseille, Daladier announced his new domestic direction with the phrase: "J'ai choisi mon chemin: la France en avant!" which he translated as "I have chosen my path; forward with France!". What that meant in practice was the dismantling of many of the Popular Front's social reforms.

  Finance Minister Paul Reynaud issued a series of decree laws on the 1st of November 1938, bypassing the National Assembly entirely. The 40-hour work week was abolished. Taxes were raised sharply. Social spending was cut. Union power was restricted. Saturday was again declared a workday. In a radio broadcast on the 12th of November, Reynaud stated: "We are going blindfold towards an abyss". He argued the pain was necessary. As part of the effort, Reynaud increased the military budget from 29 billion francs to 93 billion francs.

  The French Communist Party called a general strike to protest the decrees. The one-day strike of the 30th of November 1938 was Daladier's first test of "firmness". He declared a national emergency, ordered the military into Paris and other major cities, suspended civil liberties, ordered police to disperse workers with tear gas, and announced that any worker who struck would be fired with no severance pay. The strike collapsed after one day.

  Daladier also rejected Mussolini's territorial demands on France outright. When stage-managed demonstrations in the Italian Chamber of Deputies produced shouts of "Tunis, Corsica, Nice, Savoy!", Daladier's Christmas radio broadcast gave what the British historian D.C. Watt described as "an extremely tough speech" rejecting every one of those claims.

  By June 1939, a public opinion poll showed that 76% of the French believed France should immediately declare war if Germany tried to seize the Free City of Danzig. By September of that year, France's aircraft production had reached parity with Germany's, and 170 American planes were arriving per month. But the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of the 23rd of August 1939 had destroyed Daladier's hopes for an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance, and when Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September, he declared war on the 3rd of September.

  During the Phoney War, in a radio address on the 29th of January 1940 titled The Nazi's Aim is Slavery, Daladier stated his government's purpose plainly: "In this world of masters and slaves, which those madmen who rule at Berlin are seeking to forge, we must also save liberty and human dignity". France's failure to aid Finland against the Soviet Union's invasion during the Winter War brought his government down on the 21st of March 1940, and Paul Reynaud replaced him as Prime Minister.

• 7. Prison, Trial, and Return

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  Daladier remained in government as Defence Minister after Reynaud replaced him as Prime Minister. His personal antipathy to Reynaud created an awkward problem: as long as Daladier held the defence portfolio, Reynaud could not dismiss General Gamelin as Supreme Commander. Gamelin was finally replaced by Maxime Weygand on the 19th of May 1940, nine days after the Germans began the Battle of France.

  After the massive German breakthrough at Sedan, Daladier and Reynaud exchanged portfolios: Reynaud took Defence, Daladier became Foreign Minister. Under the impression that the French government would continue its operations from North Africa, Daladier left for French Morocco. He was arrested there by the Vichy government.

  The Vichy authorities put him on trial for treason during the Riom Trial. He was then imprisoned in Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees from 1940 until April 1943, when he was handed to the Germans and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. In May 1943, he was transported to Itter Castle in North Tyrol, where he was held alongside other French dignitaries. He was freed after the Battle of Castle Itter.

  After the war, Daladier returned to the Chamber of Deputies in 1946 and served as a patron to Pierre Mendès-France, the Radical-Socialist Party's young reforming leader. He was elected Mayor of Avignon in 1953. He opposed the transfer of powers to Charles de Gaulle following the May 1958 crisis. In the legislative elections of that year, he failed to win re-election, and withdrew from politics after a career of almost 50 years. He died in Paris on the 10th of October 1970 at the age of 86 and was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

• 8. What the History Got Wrong

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  The Canadian historian Robert Young argued that Daladier's historical reputation has been shaped by a misleading image: a "weary Sancho Panza to Chamberlain's Don Quixote", the picture of a weak, cowardly man who signed the Munich Agreement out of personal weakness rather than any real calculation. Young noted that this image has made Daladier's reputation worse in some respects than Chamberlain's own.

  Young identified a structural bias in how English-speaking historians have written about the period. British appeasers like Chamberlain are typically treated as individuals, their choices explained by their own personalities and judgements. French appeasers like Daladier are more often explained by their being French, with an implied suggestion that cowardice is a national characteristic.

  The popular image of the French military defeat of 1940 compounds the problem. Young pointed out that the idea of an effortless German triumph over a France that barely fought is historically wrong: approximately 120,000 French servicemen were killed in action between the 10th of May and the 21st of June 1940. Connecting that image to Daladier's personal role creates a narrative of inevitable national decline that, as Young observed, is too teleological and too deterministic to be useful history.

  Young argued that an accurate account of Daladier requires engaging with his actual record: the 14-billion-franc rearmament programme, his persistent refusal to let Britain off the hook for the continental commitment, his rejection of both the Bad Godesberg terms and Mussolini's territorial demands, his effort to build an Anglo-Franco-Soviet front against Germany. Whether those efforts were sufficient is one question. Whether the popular image of the man is an accurate guide to that question is, as Young's work suggests, quite another. The Czech comedy Lost in Munich, released in 2015, centres on a 90-year-old parrot who once lived with Daladier and is still reciting his quotes about the Munich Agreement. The joke captures something true about his legacy: the words are still in circulation, but the context around them has mostly been forgotten.