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##### October 12, 1970 OBITUARY ## Daladier, Signer of Munich Pact, Dies at 86 ##### Special to The New York Times PARIS, Oct. 11--Edouard Daladier, one of the most prominent leaders of the prewar Third Republic, died here yesterday, an almost forgotten man. He was 86 years old. As Premier, Minister of Defense and Foreign Minister in the nineteen-thirties, Mr. Daladier led his country into a war that brought it one of the most crushing defeats of its history and ended the Third Republic. In the Fourth Republic, formed in 1946, he won a bitterly contested comeback, and until 1958 was regularly elected deputy from the Vaucluse Department, where he retained his popularity. Defeated in 1958, he lived in quiet obscurity in an apartment in western Paris. He leaves his second wife, the former Jeanne Boucoiran, whom he married in 1951, and two sons, Jean and Pierre, by his first wife, the former Madeline Laffort, who died in 1932. An Agile Politician By ALDEN WHITMAN In the inglorious fall of France, a process that went on for at least a decade and culminated in her crushing defeat by Germany in the spring of 1940, Edouard Daladier played a conspicuous part. Perennially Minister of War and thrice Premier (he was in office when World War II began in September, 1939), he was one of those political leaders who failed, until it was far too late, to perceive the menace of Hitlerism to France, to Europe and to the world. Irresolute, weak, intellectually unalert, Mr. Daladier pushed France a giant step along the road to her doom by joining in the Munich Pact of September, 1938, whereby his country's ally, Czechoslovakia, was virtually dismembered and Adolf Hitler's appetite for a war of genocidal conquest was sharpened. Mr. Daladier was not the architect of the pact (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was that) so much as an accomplice in it. He was not initially eager to abandon Czechoslovakia and France's traditional balance-of-power policy. Indeed, he talked to Chamberlain once about attacking Germany; but he permitted himself to be dissuaded on the ground that such a step would surely result in a general war; and ultimately he signed the pact along with Chamberlain, Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator. Justifying his action, Mr. Daladier said at Munich: "I believe we have done the reasonable thing. Should 15 million Europeans have been killed in order to oblige three million Sudeteners, who wished to be German, to remain in Czechoslovakia?" Astonished by Cheers Yet Mr. Daladier was shrewd enough to realize that yielding to Hitler's demands for German occupation of the Sudetenland was a grave diplomatic and military setback for France. Flying back to Paris, he voiced somber thoughts for France's future, and feared that he would meet a hostile reception from a public apprehensive over this latest triumph of German bellicosity. To his astonishment, he was wildly cheered. "I return," he told the airport crowd, "with the profound conviction that this accord is indispensable to the peace of Europe." However, according to William L. Shirer's "The Collapse of the Third Republic," this episode also occurred: "To Gen. [Maurice] Gamelin, waiting among the crowd of notables at the airport, he whispered: 'It wasn't brilliant, but I did everything I could.' Gamelin was thinking of the 35 Czech divisions lost, and [Paul] Reynaud needled him by asking: 'Where are you going to find 35 new divisions now?' Daladier, who was Minister of Defense as well as Premier, could not fail to think of them too. Still surprised at the tumultuous welcome along his route back to the capital, he is reported to have turned to an aide and said: "The imbeciles--if they only knew what they were acclaiming!" Political Success Story Mr. Daladier, in truth, was not a great leader but an agile politician, most of whose adult life up to 1940 had been passed in climbing the slippery pole of public advancement. Born June 18, 1884, in Carpentras, a village near Avignon in southern France, Edouard Daladier was the son of a baker. Bright in school, the young man was sent to the Lycee Duparc in Lyons, where he met Edouard Herriot, then a teacher and later a leader of the Radical Socialist party, who was to introduce his protege to politics. Won Mayoralty in 1912 On graduation, he taught history, first, at the University of Nimes, then at Grenoble, Marseilles and in 1919 at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris. Meantime, in 1912, he entered politics by winning the mayoralty of his home town; and two years later he stood for the Chamber of Deputies and was beaten by the Radical Socialist candidate. Invoking an ancient political rubric, he joined the Radical Socialists. In World War I Mr. Daladier went into the army as a sergeant and was demobilized as a captain with a Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor won in action. A war hero, Mr. Daladier had no trouble being elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a Radical Socialist from the town of Orange in the Department of Vaucluse. He was re- elected consistently for the next 20 years. With the help of Mr. Herriot, the leader of the Radical Socialists, Mr. Daladier found a place in the Cabinet in 1924. He was represented in every subsequent Cabinet in which his party participated, either as Minister of War, Colonies, Education, Public Works or National Defense, or as Vice Premier or Minister of Foreign Affairs. At last, in 1933, Mr. Daladier became Premier, forming a Cabinet that lasted nine months. In this period, he and his Foreign Minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour, attempted to establish a four-power directorate for Europe consisting of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The pact was shattered by Germany's defiant exit from the League of Nations, the beginning of a series of events that led to Munich and World War II. Mr. Daladier's second Premiership was in early 1934, and lasted only 11 days. He was obliged to resign after his vigorous efforts to quell Paris demonstrations on Feb. 6 over a financial scandal resulted in some 20 deaths. Ironically, he had been appointed Premier because of public confidence in his personal probity, a confidence that was justified by Mr. Daladier's atypical disinterest in graft. Then and later he lived quite simply, content with an unpretentious apartment heavy with books. Moved Away from Left Not notably social, he preferred small gatherings, such as the salon maintained in the late thirties by his mistress, the Marquise de Crussol, the handsome daughter of a wealthy sardine packer. It was at the Marquise's salon that he accommodated himself to French business and industrial interests after he dropped out of the leftist Popular Front of 1935- 38. In that period Mr. Daladier not only served as Minister of War, but he also made a number of platform appearances with Leon Blum, the Socialist leader, and Maurice Thorez, the Communist chieftain. In these speeches he declared his enmity to "a financial oligarchy from whom power must be wrested and given back to the people." However, when he became Premier for the third (and final) time in April, 1938, his Government moved perceptibly to the right. He moved to abolish the 40-hour factory week, broke strikes by force and sealed the Spanish border, thus effectively helping Francisco Franco to crush the Republican Government of Spain. In the year between Munich and the start of World War II, Mr. Daladier was publicly optimistic about the chances of peace while building up, as best he could, his country's armaments. When Germany opened the war with an attack on Poland, France could no longer ignore her treaty obligations to an ally, and entered the conflict. 'The Phony War' However, instead of attacking Germany from the west, France kept her soldiers in the Maginot forts, and what came to be known as "the phony war" developed on the Franco- German front as neither side moved against the other. Mr. Daladier, meanwhile, helped to create a super-Maginot myth by declaring on every occasion that "formidable" fortifications had been constructed on the Belgian frontier, with an implication that a German invasion was unlikely. Thus, when Hitler struck west in the spring of 1940, the French public was ill-prepared for the swiftness of the German advance, the dispatch with which the Maginot Line crumpled and the thrust across the Belgian border, where the defenses proved virtually nonexistent. But by the time the German blitzkrieg opened, Mr. Daladier had resigned as Premier (he stepped down March 20 after losing a vote of confidence) although he remained in the Cabinet of Paul Reynaud, his successor, until June 2. Neither in France's defeat, which occurred in the middle of June, nor later, was it suggested that Mr. Daladier was lacking in patriotism: His judgment was questioned but not his commitment to France. Denounced Petain Regime Indeed, under the pro-German Vichy regime of Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain, Mr. Daladier was arrested and tried for war guilt at Riom in 1942. He was accused of declaring war against Germany without Parliament's concurrence and with having failed to equip the army properly. At his trial he courageously denounced the Vichy regime, and was imprisoned first in France and then in Germany. He was liberated by American troops in 1945. After the war he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, in 1946, and seated by a vote of 311 to 132 in a challenge to his war record.
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