Pierre-Étienne Flandin

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1889–1958 ○ Natural causes

Premier and leader of the Democratic Republican Alliance who hailed the Munich Agreement and served as Vichy's deputy premier

Born in Paris in 1889, he became a lawyer, was elected deputy for the Yonne at twenty-five in 1914 and served as a military pilot in the First World War. He held the commerce and finance ministries in the 1920s and early 1930s. He took the chair of the Democratic Republican Alliance in 1933 and was President of the Council from November 1934 to May 1935, while the Stresa Front and the Franco-Soviet pact were negotiated. As foreign minister in 1936 he failed to answer Germany's remilitarisation of the Rhineland, and after the Munich Agreement of 1938 he sent Hitler a telegram of congratulations. In December 1940 he became Vichy's vice-president of the council and foreign minister, until Darlan displaced him two months later. After the Liberation he was acquitted of treason but convicted of national unworthiness.