Briand, Aristide 1862-1932
French Socialist statesman and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Nantes, he began his political career on the extreme left, advocating a revolutionary general strike, but soon moved to the centre as a 'republican socialist', refusing to join the United Socialist Party (SFIO, Section Fran�aise de l'Internationale Ouvri�re), which did not allow its members to participate in 'bourgeois' governments. He held ministerial office almost continuously from 1906, being a Cabinet Minister 25 times, and Prime Minister 11 times. Apart from his periods as Prime Minister (1909-11, 1913, 1915-17, 1921-22, 1925-26, 1929), his most important offices were as Minister of Public Instruction and Minister of Religion (1906-08), during which he implemented the Separation of Church and State (voted 1905), and as Foreign Minister (1925-32), when he became known as the 'apostle of peace'. With Jean Jaur�s he founded the socialist paper L'Humanit� (1904). He was a fervent advocate of the League of Nations, and of Franco-German reconciliation. He shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize with Gustav Stresemann, concluded the Kellogg-Briand Pact which proscribed war as a means of solving disputes (1928), and launched the idea of a United States of Europe (1929).

Bibliography: Valentine Thompson, Briand, Man of Peace (1930)