Georges-Étienne Bonnet (; 23 July 1889 – 18 June 1973) was a French politician who served as foreign minister in 1938 and 1939 and was a leading figure in the Radical Party. He advocated for the maximum appeasement of Hitler prior to the Second World War.
Early life and career Bonnet was born in Bassillac, Dordogne, the son of a lawyer. Bonnet's father worked at the Cour de cassation and used his wealth to give his son the best education that money could buy in France. Bonnet was educated the elite Lycée Henri IV, École supérieure des hautes études and École des sciences politiques. Bonnet studied law and political science at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and University of Paris.
Bonnet began his career as an auditeur at the Conseil d'État. In 1911, he launched his political career after he married Odette Pelletan, the granddaughter of Eugène Pelletan. Bonnet's wife, often known as Madame Soutien-Georges, ran a salon and had great ambitions for her husband. One contemporary reported that Madame Bonnet was "so wildly ambitious for her husband that when a new ministry was being formed he was afraid to go home at night unless he had captured a post for himself." Many privately mocked Bonnet for the way in which his wife dominated him. Bonnet's wife's nickname was a French pun on the word for brassiere (soutien-gorge) and was both a reference to Madame Bonnet and to the size of her breasts.
In 1914, Bonnet joined the French Army. During his service during the First World War, Bonnet was a much-decorated soldier who won the Croix de guerre medal for bravery under fire. in 1918 he served as director of demobilization. Bonnet served as the editor on Alfred de Tarde's book L'âme du soldat (The Soul of a Soldier). Bonnet highlighted the passage by de Tarde in which he wrote: "The France of 1914-1917 is more sincerely democratic than it has ever been, and she is in love with command". As an upper-class man, Bonnet was in some awe of the camaraderie and fighting spirit of the mostly lower-class poilus and saw it as his duty to record their experiences. Bonnet seemed to have been jealous of the toughness of the ordinary French soldiers, who lived under conditions that he could never accept. Bonnet often recounted the story of a poilu, named Lauteau, a happily married man with two children, who was killed while displaying a reckless disregard for his own life while he was repairing a telephone wire that had been severed by German artillery. Bonnet used the story of Lauteau as an example of the Union sacrée in action, as he argued in his 1919 book Lettres à un bourgeois de 1914 that it was love of la patrie that had inspired the poilus to resist.
In 1919, Bonnet served as a secretary to the French delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and wrote a book, Lettres à un bourgeois de 1914, that called for widespread social reforms. The British historian Anthony Adamthwaite noted that Lettres à un bourgeois de 1914 was the last serious interest that Bonnet was to display in social reform.
Bonnet served in the Chamber of Deputies from 1924 to 1928 and again from 1929 to 1940. He was appointed undersecretary of state in 1925, the first in a series of high ministerial positions throughout the 1920s and the 1930s. During his time as in the Chamber, Bonnet was regarded as a leading expert in financial and economic matters. As a minister, Bonnet had a reputation for working hard, being always well prepared in parliamentary debates and excelling at political intrigue.May, Ernest Strange Victory, New York: Hill & Wang, 2000 page 160. In 1931, in response to an appeal for help from China, the League of Nations sent a group of educational experts to suggest improvements to the Chinese educational system. The experts were Carl Heinrich Becker, the former education minister of Prussia; the Christian Socialist British historian R. H. Tawney who was the only member of the group who had been to China before and who could speak some Mandarin; Marian Falski, a senior bureaucrat with the Polish Ministry of Education in charge of all primary schools in Poland; and the scientist Paul Langevin of the Collège de France. Bonnet joined the group, as he was serving as the director of the Paris-based Institution of Intellectual Co-Operation, and the League wanted someone outside of the educational system to serve as the chairman of the group.
On 30 August 1931, the group left for China and saw first-hand the furious protests that erupted all over China in response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which had started on 19 September 1931. Although most of the university and high school students in China were protesting the loss of Manchuria, the group was able to have cordial talks with Chinese educational officials about possible reforms and in 1932 released the book The Reorganisation of Education in China. In 1932, Bonnet headed the French delegation at the Lausanne Conference, where he first met Franz von Papen, who was serving as the German chancellor. During the Lausanne Conference, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, commenting on Bonnet's abilities, asked: "Why isn't he in the Cabinet?"
Economic expert In 1933, Bonnet was a prominent member of the French delegation to the London Conference and was a leading critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's actions during the conference. In 1936, Bonnet emerged as the leader of 18 Radical deputies who objected to their party's participation in the Popular Front. Bonnet was regarded as the leader of the right wing of the Radical Socialist party, which, despite its name, was neither radical nor socialist. As a result, the French Premier Léon Blum, a socialist, effectively exiled Bonnet in January 1937 by appointing him Ambassador to the United States even though Bonnet did not speak English.
Upon hearing of Bonnet's appointment, the American Ambassador to France, William Christian Bullitt, Jr., wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about Bonnet: "I don't think you'll like him. He is extremely intelligent and competent on economic and financial matters, but he's not a man of character. You may remember that he led the French delegation to the London economic conference where he led the attacks against you". Despite his short stay in the United States and his inability to speak English, Bonnet thereafter and for the rest of his life claimed to be an expert on all things American.
On 28 June 1937, Bonnet returned to France when Premier Camille Chautemps appointed him Finance Minister. Bonnet's first major act as Finance Minister was to oversee the devaluation of the franc, the second devaluation in less than nine months, with the value of the franc going from 110.8 francs per British pound to 147.20. The devaluation was forced on Bonnet since the 10 billion francs that had been set aside in September 1936 in a currency reserve fund to defend the value of the franc after that year's devaluation had been spent by mid-1937. As Finance Minister, Bonnet imposed sharp cuts in military spending. He felt that the costs of the arms race with Germany were such that it was better for France to reach an understanding that might end the arms race than continue to spend gargantuan sums on the military. Besides the economic problems associated with budgetary stability and his attempts to maintain the value of the franc against currency speculation, Bonnet was concerned with the social conflict caused by the need for increased taxation and the decreased social services to pay for arms.
In a meeting with Papen, now the German Ambassador to Austria, in November 1937, Bonnet and Chautemps expressed the hope that an understanding might be reached in which France might accept Central and Eastern Europe as Germany's exclusive sphere of influence in return for German acceptance of Western Europe as France's sphere of influence. Moreover, Bonnet became the leading spokesman within the French Cabinet for the idea that the French alliance system in Eastern Europe, the so-called cordon sanitaire, was a net liability that served only to embroil France in conflicts with Germany. Throughout his career, Bonnet was noted as an advocate of "sacred egoism": French interests should always take precedence over other nations' interests. Bonnet regarded himself as a "realist", and his thinking on foreign policy tended to be coloured in equal measure by pragmatism and insularity.
Bonnet's cuts in military spending led to a clash with War Minister Édouard Daladier, who persuaded the Cabinet to rescind the most severe cuts to the French Army budget by pointing out that in the current international climate, the Army needed more funding, not less. Since the Ministers of the Air and the Marine were not as substantial personalities as Daladier, the French Navy and French Air Force could not reverse the Finance Minister's cuts. In January 1938, after the fall of Chautemps's government, Bonnet made a serious effort to form a new government but in the end had to content himself with being appointed Minister of State.
Foreign Minister of the republic, 1938–1939 Appointment as foreign minister In April 1938, after the fall of the second Blum government, Bonnet was appointed Foreign Minister under Daladier as premier (they had reconciled their 1937 quarrel). In 1938 and 1939, there were three factions within the French government. One, the "peace lobby" led by Bonnet, felt that France could not afford an arms race with Nazi Germany and sought a détente with the Reich. As an expert in financial matters and a former finance minister, Bonnet was acutely aware of the damages inflicted by the arms race on an economy that was already weakened by the Great Depression. A second faction, led by Paul Reynaud, Jean Zay and Georges Mandel, favoured a policy of resistance to German expansionism. A third faction, led by Daladier, stood halfway between the other two and favoured appeasement of Germany to buy time to rearm. The American historian Ernest R. May wrote: "Small and dapper with a pointed long nose and a prominent Adam's apple, Georges Bonnett was privately mocked behind his back for overdoing the bidding of his young, sensual and well-to-do wife, Odette Pelletan.... But Bonnet was no lightweight.... As a minister, he worked long hours, always knew his briefs and had formidable skill at parliamentary intrigue". The secretary-general of the Quai d'Orsay, Alexis St. Léger, later wrote that of the many foreign ministers he served, Bonnet was the worst, and he described Bonnet as a man committed to appeasement.