The revolutionary wave and the world war 333

Literature and arts 1867–1942 ○ Illness

The voice of Action Française, the polemicist who pushed a scandal from the page into the street day after day

Through January 1934 his columns called out the implicated deputies one by one, and on the morning of 6 February the paper urged its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. At the front of the columns that filled the square that night were the Camelots du Roi, the action squads of Action Française

The son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, a medical student turned polemicist, who founded the daily Action Française with Maurras and set its tone. He sat as a deputy for Paris from 1919 to 1924, and his method of personal attack and denunciation left its mark on a generation of French political language. After losing a libel case brought over his claim that the police had killed his son Philippe in 1923, he fled to Belgium in 1927 and returned under an amnesty in 1930. In January 1934 he printed the names of the politicians touched by the Stavisky affair day after day, building the picture of a 'republic of thieves' that carried the paper's readers to the square on 6 February.

Military command Finland state institutions 1867–1951 ○ Natural causes

Aristocratic soldier who rose from Russian Imperial lieutenant general to Marshal of Finland, facing the Soviet Union in two wars

"Forts, cannons and foreign aid will not help unless every man himself knows that he is the guard of his country."

A Swedish-speaking Finnish aristocrat who served 30 years in the Imperial Russian Army, rising to lieutenant general through the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. In the 1918 Finnish Civil War he commanded the White Army to victory, then as regent consolidated Finland's independence, telling the London Times that 'the historic mission of Finland is to drive Bolshevism out.' As commander-in-chief in the Winter War and Continuation War, he led outnumbered Finnish forces against the Soviet Union, fighting alongside Nazi Germany but refusing to assault Leningrad. Elected president in 1944, he concluded peace with the USSR and expelled German forces in the Lapland War, leaving Finland the only Eastern European nation to escape occupation.

Military command France state institutions 1867–1965 ○ Natural causes

From Foch's brilliant staff officer to a general of defeat and accommodation

On 12 June 1940, Weygand advised the French government to capitulate.

Maxime Weygand was a French general who served as Ferdinand Foch's key staff officer in the First World War, coordinating Allied operations and reading the armistice terms to the German delegation in 1918. Between the wars he carried French military influence in Poland and the Levant, then became commander-in-chief of the French armies in May 1940 and, after the German breakthrough, judged that continued fighting in metropolitan France was no longer feasible and advised an armistice. He joined the Vichy government and later directed French North Africa, choosing limited accommodation with Germany while enforcing antisemitic measures harshly. Detained after the war on treason charges and cleared in 1948, he later defended Marshal Pétain's memory.

Government and administration Mongolia 1868–1928 ○ Died of illness in office, (13 Feb or 13 Nov)

First prime minister of the Mongolian People's Republic, diplomat of the old regime

On 23 September 1924 a constitution-drafting commission chaired by Prime Minister Tserendorj was set up, and on 26 November 1924 the first Great Hural unanimously adopted its 6-chapter, 50-article constitution declaring Mongolia's first republican order.

Born in 1868 at Kherlen Bayan Ulaan as a subject of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu's Great Shabi, he learned Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese and Russian and worked as a scribe and translator in the Manchu administration in Khüree from 1885 to 1911. After the 1911 independence he entered the Foreign Ministry, serving as deputy foreign minister in 1913-1915 and first-ranked minister in 1915-1919. He signed the 1919 renunciation document under Chinese occupation and became deputy foreign minister in the revolutionary government of 1921. Appointed prime minister in 1923, he headed the 1924 constitution-drafting commission and became the republic's first prime minister. After 1926, as Moscow tightened control, he resisted the abolition of private property and the persecution of the Buddhist Church, and he died of illness in office in 1928; sources give his death as 13 February or 13 November 1928.

Military command Germany state institutions 1868–1946 ○ Natural causes

SPD defence minister who said “someone has to be the bloodhound” and used the Freikorps to crush the left risings of 1919

He directed the suppression of the 1919 Berlin uprising with Freikorps and army forces, then authorized summary executions by military forces in a March order.

A basket-maker from Brandenburg who became an SPD journalist, he entered the Reichstag in 1906 and was known as its military expert. Sent to Kiel as the government’s representative in November 1918, he calmed the mutiny and became governor. After the Christmas crisis he joined the Council of People’s Deputies for military affairs and, saying “someone has to be the bloodhound”, organised the Freikorps that crushed the January rising and the March battles. First defence minister from February 1919, he resigned after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, later governed the province of Hanover and was arrested after the July 1944 plot.

Political and party leadership Action Française 1868–1952 ○ Died

The brain of Action Française, the royalist theorist who denied the republic itself in the name of integral nationalism

'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!', on hearing his life sentence in the court at Lyon, 27 January 1945

A poet and polemicist from Martigues in Provence, deaf from his youth, who led Action Française for half a century after the movement formed out of the Dreyfus affair. His 'integral nationalism' called for the restoration of the monarchy and the abolition of the parliamentary republic, and named Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners as the 'four confederate states' eating France from within. The movement survived the Vatican's condemnation of 1926, and in 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française. Through January 1934 his paper named 'the thieves' day after day, and on the morning of 6 February it called on its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. He welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 as a 'divine surprise', backed Vichy, and denounced resisters and Jews in print throughout the occupation. In January 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and national degradation for collusion with the enemy.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1868–1941? Missing; presumed dead

Estonian prime minister who concluded the Treaty of Tartu, publisher of Postimees

As Soviet forces occupied Estonia in June 1940, he urged President Päts to offer at least symbolic armed resistance.

Leader of Estonia's liberal national movement through the newspaper Postimees, he was prime minister in 1919 and 1920 and concluded the Treaty of Tartu. Pushed out for opposing Päts's authoritarian regime in 1934, he was arrested after the Soviet occupation of 1940 and disappeared.

Military command Japan state institutions 1868–1948 ○ Natural causes

The admiral-prime minister who steered Japan toward surrender

On August 10, 1945, Suzuki broke the deadlock by proposing that the emperor’s decision should settle the conference.

Kantaro Suzuki was a Japanese admiral and politician who became prime minister after serving as grand chamberlain and president of the Privy Council. Publicly he upheld the wartime line, while privately managing the cabinet and Supreme War Council as defeat made continuation untenable. After the atomic bombings and Soviet entry, the Big Six remained deadlocked, and Suzuki forced a procedure in which the emperor’s decision would settle the split. Japan then accepted the Potsdam Declaration, though the process did not erase responsibility for the war of aggression or the military’s resistance.

Government and administration Hungary 1868–1957 ○ Died in exile

Regent who led the counter-revolutionary National Army and ruled Hungary until 1944

Regent from 1920, Horthy led Hungary in alliance with Nazi Germany and into the invasion of the Soviet Union. After Germany occupied Hungary, 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz; Horthy was ousted after his October 1944 armistice attempt.

An Austro-Hungarian naval officer, he became commander-in-chief of the Navy in 1918. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he entered Budapest at the head of the counter-revolutionary National Army, and in March 1920 the Diet elected him regent. His national-conservative and antisemitic administration banned the Communist Party and the Arrow Cross and sought to revise the Treaty of Trianon. Allied with Nazi Germany, he joined the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; after the German occupation of March 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. In October 1944 he announced an armistice with the Soviets, was forced by the Germans to resign, and power passed to the Arrow Cross. He went into exile in Portugal after the war and died at Estoril in 1957.

Scholarship and theory 1868–1963 ○ Natural causes

"Capitalism cannot reform itself": father of the modern Negro liberation movement who joined the Communist Party at 93

"Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day." — from his 1961 application to join the Communist Party USA, submitted at age 93

American sociologist, historian, Pan-Africanist, and the single most important African American intellectual of the 20th century. A co-founder of the NAACP, he edited its magazine The Crisis for 24 years, shaping the direction of the black civil rights movement, while his books The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America transformed American sociology and historiography. He viewed capitalism as the root cause of racism and pursued a synthesis of Marxism and Pan-Africanism. In 1961, at age 93, he joined the Communist Party USA; invited by Kwame Nkrumah, he settled in Ghana to begin work on the Encyclopedia Africana, and died there in 1963.

Military command Germany state institutions 1869–1927 ○ Stroke

German Eastern Front chief of staff who placed his soldier's boot on the Brest-Litovsk negotiating table

"The General on several occasions put his soldier's boot on the table around which the discussion was taking place": Trotsky, who wrote that 'Hoffmann's boot was the only reality to take seriously'

An outstanding strategic staff officer who, as Chief of Operations of the German Eighth Army, devised the plans that destroyed the Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. As Chief of Staff of the Eastern Front from late 1917, he was the driving force behind the German position at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks: on 18 January 1918 he spread a map before the Soviet delegation and demanded the severance of Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine from Russia. After Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' declaration, Hoffmann commanded Operation Faustschlag, an unopposed advance that compelled the Bolsheviks to accept far harsher final terms. He embodied the asymmetry between revolutionary diplomacy and imperial military force, most memorably by placing his soldier's boot on the negotiating table.

Political and party leadership Conservative Party (United Kingdom) 1869–1940 ○ Natural causes

The appeasement architect whose bid to avoid war helped open the way to it

Returning from Munich in 1938, he declared the agreement to mean “peace for our time.”

Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician whose career combined domestic administrative reform with finance before he became prime minister. Seeking to avoid another European war and gain time for rearmament, he pursued appeasement, but the strategy failed to restrain Nazi Germany's expansion. His government's acceptance of the Munich settlement in 1938, and its limited response to Soviet proposals for collective security, formed part of the international conditions surrounding the 1939 crisis and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After declaring war on Germany following the invasion of Poland, he resigned in 1940 amid criticism of the Norway campaign.

Government and administration Spanish Republic 1869–1946 ○ Illness

The UGT worker-leader they called the Spanish Lenin, a prime minister broken between revolution and war

In November 1936 Largo Caballero appointed four CNT leaders to his cabinet: anarchists whose programme was the abolition of the state took ministerial office in one. One of them, the health minister Federica Montseny, was the first woman to hold a ministry in Spanish history.

A man who left school at seven, worked as a stucco plasterer and became a union leader. At the head of the UGT he was sentenced to life for the general strike of August 1917, and under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he took a seat on the Council of State to keep the organization alive, a choice argued over for the rest of his life. As labour minister of the Second Republic he pushed through the eight-hour day in the countryside, and around the Asturias rising of 1934 he moved so far left that his supporters called him the Spanish Lenin. In September 1936 he became prime minister and war minister, and in November brought four CNT leaders into the cabinet, seating anarchists in a government for the first time; but he clashed continuously with the communists and the Soviet advisers over rebuilding a regular army and over the pace of the revolution. After the May Days of 1937 he refused to outlaw the POUM, lost his ministers and fell. In exile in France he was seized by the Gestapo and held in Sachsenhausen until the liberation of 1945.

Scholarship and theory 1869–1947 ○ Natural causes

A historian who linked scholarship with social democracy

In Moscow in 1940, he signed the peace treaty that ended the Winter War.

Väinö Voionmaa was a Finnish historian, professor and Social Democratic politician who helped shape the early republic. He founded institutions for workers’ education and joined scholarship to popular political work through parliament, diplomacy and social policy. As a Social Democratic member of Finland’s delegation to the Moscow Peace Treaty negotiations in 1940, he signed the settlement that ended the Winter War, embodying the difficult compromises imposed on Finland between war and great-power politics.

Monarchs and royalty Italy state institutions 1869–1947 → Died

A monarch caught between constitutional authority and responsibility for Fascism

On 25 July 1943, he dismissed Mussolini, had him arrested, and appointed Badoglio to head a new government.

As king of Italy, he presided over the decline of liberal constitutionalism, the consolidation of the Fascist state, and two world wars. He approved Mussolini's seizure of power, colonial wars, the racial laws, and entry into the Second World War, making the monarchy a participant in Fascist rule. In July 1943 he dismissed Mussolini and appointed Pietro Badoglio, using the crown's constitutional powers to open a legal route for governmental change, but his flight from Rome after the armistice left the armed forces and state in disarray. He abdicated in 1946 after the monarchy failed to recover its legitimacy.

Political and party leadership French Communist Party (PCF) 1869–1958 ○ Natural causes

Leader who took the SFIO majority into the Comintern at Tours in 1920, founding the French Communist Party, and ran L’Humanité

At the 1920 Tours Congress, he backed SFIO affiliation with the Comintern, led the majority split, and helped found the French Communist Party. Arrested in 1923 for opposing France’s Ruhr occupation, he was cleared by the Senate sitting as a High Court.

Born in Paimpol in Brittany, he joined Guesde’s French Workers’ Party in 1891 and the unified SFIO in 1905, and from 1918 ran L’Humanité for the rest of his life. As his supporters swung towards the October Revolution after the war, he led the vote to join the Comintern at the Tours congress of 1920 and became a founder of the French Communist Party. He was jailed in 1923 for denouncing the French occupation of the Ruhr. A deputy and senator, he remained the party’s elder statesman until his death in 1958.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1870–1919 ✕ Beaten and shot

German anarchist thinker who served in Bavaria’s revolutionary government and was killed by counterrevolutionary troops in 1919.

The state is a social relationship. Create new communities, and it can be replaced by a different social relationship.

Landauer argued that the state was not merely an apparatus to overthrow but a social relationship that could be replaced by creating voluntary communities. In 1908 he founded the Socialist Bund to pursue socialism through cooperatives and communal association. He opposed the First World War and came to Munich at Kurt Eisner’s request in 1918 to support the revolution. In April 1919 he joined the Bavarian Soviet Republic as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. After government forces crushed the republic, he was arrested and killed at Stadelheim Prison on 2 May.

Social movements and organizing Comintern 1870–1932

French socialist and teachers’ union activist who led the Committee for the Third International

He organised internationalist socialists against the war and served as secretary of the Committee for the Third International during the founding of the French Communist Party.

A teacher, Loriot joined the Socialist Party in 1901 and became active in the teachers’ union. During the First World War he opposed support for the war and backed the Zimmerwald position, serving as secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations and later the Committee for the Third International. At the Tours Congress in 1920 he joined the leadership of the newly formed French Communist Party.

Political and party leadership Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) 1870–1940 ○ Died in prison

PSOE right-wing leader, Speaker of the Cortes; joined Casado's coup, refused exile, and died in Franco's prison

"The great majority, the masses, they cannot leave, and I, who have always lived with the workers, will continue with them and with them I will stay. Whatever is their fate will be mine," to the socialist daily La Voz, March 1939

A Marxist revisionist who started as a philosophy professor in Madrid and succeeded Pablo Iglesias as leader of the PSOE and UGT in 1925. As Speaker of the Constituent Cortes (1931) he held to a moderate parliamentarism, and his opposition to the armed rising of October 1934 cost him his party base. During the Civil War he stayed in Madrid seeking a negotiated peace, and in March 1939 joined Colonel Casado's coup against Negrín, serving on the National Defence Council; but Franco demanded unconditional surrender. When every other council member fled, Besteiro refused, telling the socialist daily La Voz that he had always lived with the workers and would share their fate; a Francoist court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment and he died in Carmona prison.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1871–1919 ✕ Murdered

The lone vote against the war; the revolution's first martyr

“The main enemy is at home.” — anti-war pamphlet, 1915

German socialist revolutionary. The only Reichstag deputy to vote against war credits during the First World War. Co-founded the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) with Rosa Luxemburg. Murdered by Freikorps after the January 1919 uprising.

Social movements and organizing Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1871–1919 ✕ Murdered

“Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”

On 14 January 1919, the day after the Spartacist uprising fell, Luxemburg's final article appeared in Die Rote Fahne. To the victors' cry of 'Order prevails in Berlin!' she answered: 'I was, I am, I shall be!' Arrested that night, murdered the next day.

Polish-born German revolutionary, and the Bolsheviks' sharpest comradely critic. From prison she defended the Russian Revolution while warning against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of the press. Murdered by Freikorps troops during the January 1919 Berlin rising.

Political and party leadership Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1871–1925 ○ Peritonitis

SPD leader who headed the revolutionary government of 1918, steered the councils into parliamentary democracy and became the first president

During the November Revolution of 1918, Ebert led the Council of People’s Representatives and advocated elections to a National Assembly. Elected the first president of the German Republic in 1919, he served until 1925.

Born to a tailor in Heidelberg, he worked as a saddler, became a party organiser in Bremen and in 1913 succeeded Bebel as SPD co-chairman. In the war he backed war credits and the Burgfrieden. Taking over the chancellorship on 9 November 1918, he led the Council of People’s Deputies and that night won the army’s support in a secret pact with General Groener. Elected president by the National Assembly in February 1919, he put down risings from left and right with the army, the Freikorps and emergency decrees under Article 48. He died in office in 1925 after an appendicitis operation.

Government and administration Greece state institutions 1871–1941 ○ Natural causes

The monarchist anti-communist who established the 4th of August dictatorship

“Then, it is war.”

A Greek military officer turned politician, Metaxas sought an authoritarian national order that joined monarchism to hostility toward parliament. With King George II's support, he suspended parliament in 1936 and established the 4th of August Regime, banning parties and strikes while repressing the left. He also used state intervention and a youth organization to mobilize society, and historians have debated whether his rule is best understood as fascist, authoritarian-conservative, or a regime with a strong fascist component. In 1940 he rejected Italy's ultimatum and led Greece into war, but died in 1941 before the German invasion.

Literature and arts 1871–1942 ○ Died

Pastor and writer who headed Latvia's pro-German government of 1919

"Not clever speeches or treaties but force decides a nation's fate," he declared at his 1924 treason trial.

A leading Latvian novelist and Lutheran pastor, he headed the pro-German government backed by von der Goltz after the Liepāja coup of 1919. His regime fell after Cēsis, he fled to Germany and, returning in 1924, was tried for treason and expelled.