Daladier asked to leave the War Ministry
, 56, Radical-Socialist, three times President of the Council and signatory of the Munich agreements in 1938, held the Ministry of National Defence and War at the Hotel de Brienne. When Paul Reynaud had succeeded him as President of the Council on 21 March 1940, Daladier had kept this military portfolio, which made him the political protector of the generalissimo Gamelin, a close associate.
But Reynaud and Daladier could barely tolerate each other. The President of the Council held Daladier as co-responsible for the high command's passivity, and wanted to take back the conduct of the war himself. On 18 May 1940, with Sedan broken open and the Panzers racing toward the Channel, Reynaud reshuffled his cabinet: he announced that he was taking National Defence and War himself, and offered Daladier the Foreign Ministry.
Daladier experienced the exchange as a demotion and as a manoeuvre aimed at once at him and at Gamelin. He had a few hours to reply to Reynaud: stay in the government in a diminished post, slam the door, or resist.
Should Daladier accept being moved out of the War Ministry?
Daladier applied A. He accepted the Foreign Ministry out of Republican discipline and for fear of adding a political crisis to the military one, while keeping a grudge against Reynaud. The War portfolio thus passed to Reynaud that same day, on the eve of Gamelin's replacement by Weygand. Daladier remained at the Foreign Ministry until the fall of the government on 16 June. On 21 June, he was put aboard the liner Massilia at Bordeaux, ostensibly to reach North Africa to continue the fight; Vichy had him arrested at Casablanca. Charged at the Riom trial in 1942, he stood up to the regime, then was handed over to the Germans and deported to Buchenwald, and finally to the Schloss Itter (Tyrol). Released in 1945, he won a seat as a deputy under the Fourth Republic and died in 1970. His exit from the War Ministry sealed the eclipse of the Daladier-Gamelin tandem that had directed the French army.
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