Edouard Herriot ou la République en personne

Born in 1872, at about the same time of the Third Republic, Edouard Herriot died in 1957, one year before the collapse of the Fourth. For 85 years, Edouard Herriot's life could not be separated from the parliamentary history of the Republic and of its partisan incarnation, radicalism. Edouard Herriot's éducation was enlightened by the values established at the end of the 19th century, during the great battles for the Republic, and he then acquired the political culture which was to guide him during his whole career : Senator, deputy, minister, président of the Council of Ministers, almost continuously président of the Chamber of Deputies and of the National Assernbly after 1936, mayor of Lyon since 1905, Herriot exerted great influence on French political life for 35 years, and was determined to see his own convictions triumph. Until the 1930s, they were shared by a great many French people, which led him to play a major rôle. But they were less and less able to solve the post-war problems. Despite his repeated failures, Herriot remained faithful to his ideas. At the very height of honor scale, he became more and more marginal, a symbol of the past.