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Charles Corbin
Charles Corbin (1881–1970) was a French diplomat who served as ambassador to Britain before and during the early part of the Second World War, from 1933 to 27 June 1940. Early life He was born in Paris, the son of Paul Corbin, an industrialist. He studied at the Collège Stanislas de Paris, a private Catholic school in which the father of Charles de Gaulle taught. He continued his education at the Faculté des Lettres at the Sorbonne. After World War I, Corbin served in the press bureau of the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d'Orsay, in Paris. He made many British friends; he spoke English fluently and had a profound sympathy for Britain and British ways. Corbin served as the French ambassador to Spain (1929–31) and to Belgium (1931-33) before being appointed French ambassador to the court of St. James. Ambassador in London Chasing "continental commitment" He was assigned to London as ambassador in 1933. Corbin arrived in London on 13 March 1933 and presented his crede ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Eden
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British Conservative Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 until his resignation in 1957. Achieving rapid promotion as a young Conservative member of Parliament, he became foreign secretary aged 38, before resigning in protest at Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy towards Mussolini's Fascist regime in Italy. He again held that position for most of the Second World War, and a third time in the early 1950s. Having been deputy to Winston Churchill for almost 15 years, Eden succeeded him as the leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister in 1955, and a month later won a general election. Eden's reputation as a skilled diplomat was overshadowed in 1956 when the United States refused to support the Anglo-French military response to the Suez Crisis, which critics across party lines regarded as a historic setback for British foreign poli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Léon Blum
André Léon Blum (; 9 April 1872 – 30 March 1950) was a French socialist politician and three-time Prime Minister. As a Jew, he was heavily influenced by the Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century. He was a disciple of French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès and after Jaurès' assassination in 1914, became his successor. Despite his relatively short tenures, his time in office was very influential: as Prime Minister in the left-wing Popular Front government in 1936–37, he provided a series of major economic and social reforms. Blum declared neutrality in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) to avoid the civil conflict spilling over into France itself. Once out of office in 1938, he denounced the appeasement of Germany. When Germany defeated France in 1940, he became a staunch opponent of Vichy France. Tried (but never judged) by the Vichy government on charges of treason, he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war, he resumed a transitional lea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Paul-Boncour
Augustin Alfred Joseph Paul-Boncour (; 4 August 1873 – 28 March 1972) was a French politician and diplomat of the Third Republic. He was a member of the Republican-Socialist Party (PRS) and served as Prime Minister of France from December 1932 to January 1933. He also served in a number of other government positions during the 1930s and as a Permanent Delegate to the League of Nations in 1936 during his tenure as Minister of State. Career Born in Saint-Aignan, Loir-et-Cher, Paul-Boncour received a law degree from the University of Paris and became active in the labor movement, organizing the legal council of the ''Bourses du Travail'' ( workers' associations). He was private secretary to Premier Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau from 1898 to 1902. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a Radical in 1909, he held his seat until 1914, briefly serving as Minister of Labour from March to June 1911. After serving in the military during World War I, he returned to the French National Assembly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain (; 18 March 18699 November 1940) was a British politician of the Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940. After working in business and local government, and after a short spell as Director of National Service in 1916 and 1917, Chamberlain followed his father Joseph Chamberlain and elder half-brother Austen Chamberlain in becoming a Member of Parliament in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Hoare, 1st Viscount Templewood
Samuel John Gurney Hoare, 1st Viscount Templewood, (24 February 1880 – 7 May 1959), more commonly known as Sir Samuel Hoare, was a senior British Conservative politician who served in various Cabinet posts in the Conservative and National governments of the 1920s and 1930s. Hoare was Secretary of State for Air during most of the 1920s. As Secretary of State for India in the early 1930s, he authored the Government of India Act 1935, which granted self-government at a provincial level to India. He was most famous for serving as Foreign Secretary in 1935, when he authored the Hoare–Laval Pact with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval. This partially recognised the Italian conquest of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) and Hoare was forced to resign by the ensuing public outcry. In 1936 he returned to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, then served as Home Secretary from 1937 to 1939 and was again briefly Secretary of State for Air in 1940. He was seen as a leading " appea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Wood, 1st Earl Of Halifax
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, (16 April 1881 – 23 December 1959), known as The Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934 and The Viscount Halifax from 1934 until 1944, was a senior British Conservative politician of the 1930s. He held several senior ministerial posts during this time, most notably those of Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931 and of Foreign Secretary between 1938 and 1940. He was one of the architects of the policy of appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1936–1938, working closely with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. However, after Kristallnacht (on 9–10 November 1938) and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 he was one of those who pushed for a new policy of attempting to deter further German aggression by promising to go to war to defend Poland. On Chamberlain's resignation early in May 1940, Halifax effectively declined the position of Prime Minister as he felt that Winston Churchill would be a more suitable war lead ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon
John Allsebrook Simon, 1st Viscount Simon, (28 February 1873 – 11 January 1954), was a British politician who held senior Cabinet posts from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War. He is one of only three people to have served as Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the others being Rab Butler and James Callaghan. He also served as Lord Chancellor, the most senior position in the British legal system. Beginning his career as a Liberal (identified initially with the left wing but later with the right wing of the party), he joined the National Government in 1931, creating the Liberal National Party in the process. At the end of his career, he was essentially a Conservative. Background and education Simon was born in a terraced house on Moss Side, Manchester, the eldest child and only son of Edwin Simon (1843–1920) and wife Fanny Allsebrook (1846–1936). His father was a Congregationalist minister, like three o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Cadogan
Sir Alexander Montagu George Cadogan (25 November 1884 – 9 July 1968) was a British diplomat and civil servant. He was Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1946. His long tenure of the Permanent Secretary's office makes him one of the central figures of British policy before and during the Second World War. His diaries are a source of great value and give a sharp sense of the man and his life. Like most senior officials at the Foreign Office, he was bitterly critical of the appeasement policies of the 1930s but admitted that until British rearmament was better advanced, there were few other options. In particular, he stressed that without an American commitment to joint defence against Japan, Britain would be torn between the eastern and western spheres. Conflict with Germany would automatically expose Britain's Asian Empire to Japanese aggression. Background and education Cadogan was brought up in a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family as the se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British People
British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.: British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the Ancient Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain and Brittany, whose surviving members are the modern Welsh people, Cornish people, and Bretons. It also refers to citizens of the former British Empire, who settled in the country prior to 1973, and hold neither UK citizenship nor nationality. Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.. The notion of Britishness and a shared Brit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart, (25 June 1881 – 14 February 1957), known as Sir Robert Vansittart between 1929 and 1941, was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government. He is best remembered for his opposition to appeasement and his strong stance against Germany during and after the Second World War. Vansittart was also a published poet, novelist and playwright. Background and education Vansittart was born at Wilton House, Farnham, Surrey, the eldest of the three sons of Robert Arnold Vansittart, of Foots Cray Place, Kent, a Captain in the 7th Dragoon Guards, by his wife Susan Alice Blane, third daughter of Gilbert James Blane,Williams, E. T., Palmer, Helen M. ''The Dictionary of National Biography 1951–1960. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
André François-Poncet
André François-Poncet (13 June 1887 – 8 January 1978) was a French politician and diplomat whose post as ambassador to Germany allowed him to witness first-hand the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and the Nazi regime's preparations for World War II. François-Poncet was the son of a counselor of the Court of Appeals in Paris. A student of German studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, his first area of study was journalism. One of François-Poncet's early written works included observations made during several journeys to the German Empire in the years prior to World War I. During the war, he served as an infantry lieutenant. Between 1917 and 1919, he was assigned to the press office of the French embassy in Bern, Switzerland and later served with the International Economic Mission in the United States and in other diplomatic roles under a series of French leaders. François-Poncet became managing director of the ''Société d'études et d'inf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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