Word: briand
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...story, like so many others of the mid-20th Century, came to its end in a courtroom. But its beginnings were more auspicious. It began, more or less, on that day in 1926 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. Putting aside the enmities of World War I, Briand and Stresemann had signed at Locarno a mutual security pact...
...support their diplomacy of good will, the two men encouraged Franco-German youth congresses, literary and scientific conventions, exchanged theater companies, formed a Franco-German Society. In Paris, Briand subsidized a newspaper edited by gifted Jean Luchaire...
Luchaire was well prepared as an advocate of French-German reconciliation. His father had served Briand at the League of Nations, his stepmother was Stresemann's secretary and biographer. Jean's wife waved the flag of rapprochement in her own way: she became Stresemann's mistress, took Jean's daughter Corinne to Germany with her. Little Corinne so charmed Stresemann's friend, Banker Kurt von Schroeder, that the rich old man took her into his home...
Criminality & Corruption. Jean Luchaire shared Abetz' feelings, helped him mightily. As "men of good will" under Briand and Stresemann, the two had failed to bind France and Germany together in peace and prosperity. In the Nazi era, they forged a lethal link between German criminality and French corruption...
...Aristide Briand called Eduard Benes the only "permanent Minister" in Europe. Others dubbed him "Europe's smartest little statesman." That was how he looked between the wars. He did not change but the world did, and long before the end came last week, Benes looked anything but permanent, anything but smart...