Pierre Cot : apostle of collective security

Cot's activities indicate the roles he played. He was instrumental in shaping Radical-Socialist support for the foreign policies of Aristide Briand from 1928-1932. As Air Minister, in 1933 and again in 1936-1937, he helped shape French aviation policy. He was active in building the Popular Front in 1935 and 1936. He worked to find international support for Ethiopia, Spain, and Czechoslovakia when they were threatened by fascist aggression. And he tried to build a Franco-Soviet-British alliance to deter Hitler. In each case, his failure is as instructive to the historian as his success and brings into focus the influence that the continuing shift of his political thought leftward had on the reception accorded his policies of collective security.

Pierre Cot was a man with magnified consciousness of the mystique of the French Revolution and intense commitment to its myths. Throughout his career, he was the advocate of individual freedom and democracy. Deeply influenced by a paternal heritage of republican defense, yet personally devoted to his Catholic mother, Cot early in life experienced the need to seek compromise among France's conflicting political traditions. Thus it was that Cot, the skilled and indefatigible advocate--eloquent, quick witted, and energetic--was an equally skilled and determined conciliator, willing and able to negotiate details of compromise. While he was a man who was inclined to seek political solutions and to rely on public opinion and popular mandate to implement these solutions, he had no personal taste for political power and failed to measure its necessity realistically.

This study is developed from primary and secondary source materials selected from the political and memorial literature of interwar France and draws most heavily from Cot's own work and from contemporary reports of his activities. These are found in Chambéry's Radical journal, Le Démocrat Savoyard, and in Paris journals, La République and L'Oeuvre; in the reports of the Radical-Socialist's annual congresses; in the debates of the Journal Officiel; the published documents of the French Foreign Ministry; and in testimony given to the Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry in 1946.