Edvard Beneš
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| Edvard Beneš | |
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2nd President of Czechoslovakia
4th President of Czechoslovakia President of the Provisional Government-in-Exile |
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| In office 1935 – 1938 1940 - 1945 1945 - 1948 |
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| Preceded by | T. G. Masaryk |
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| Succeeded by | Jan Syrový (acting) |
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| Born | May 28, 1884 Kožlany, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | September 3, 1948 Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia |
| Political party | Czechoslovak National Socialist Party |
Edvard Beneš (IPA:[ˈɛdvart ˈbɛnɛʃ] ) (May 28, 1884–September 3, 1948) was a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement and the second President of Czechoslovakia. He was born in Kožlany, Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire).
He was born into a peasant family in a small village of Kožlany near Rakovník, ca. 60 km west of Prague. He spent much of his youth in Vinohrady district of Prague, where he attended grammar school from 1896 to 1904. After studying at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague, he traveled to Paris and continued his studies at the Sorbonne and at the Independent School of Political and Social Studies (École Libre des Sciences Politiques). He completed his first degree in Dijon, where he received his Doctorate of Laws in 1908. Then he taught for three years at the Prague Academy of Commerce, and after his habilitation in the field of philosophy in 1912, he came to lecture sociology at Charles University.
During World War I he was one of the leading organizers of an independent Czechoslovakia abroad. He organized an Czech pro-independence anti-Austrian secret resistance movement called "Maffia". In September, 1915, he went into exile where in Paris he made intricate diplomatic efforts to gain recognition from France and United Kingdom for Czechoslovak independence movement as he was from 1916–1918 a Secretary of the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris and Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs within the Provisional Czechoslovak government.
From 1918–1935, he was first and the longest serving Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, and from 1920–1925 and 1929–1935 a member of the Parliament. He represented Czechoslovakia in talks of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1921 he was a professor and also from 1921–1922 Prime Minister. Between 1923–1927 he was a member of the League of Nations Council (serving as president of its committee from 1927–1928). He was a renowned and influential figure at international conferences, such as Genoa 1922, Locarno 1925, The Hague 1930, and Lausanne in 1932.
He was a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (till 1925 called Czechoslovak Socialist Party) and a strong Czechoslovakist - he did not consider Slovaks and Czechs to be separate ethnicities.
In 1935 he succeeded Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk to become President. He served as President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1945 to 1948, his term broken by World War II, during which he served as president-in-exile from 1940 to 1945. In October 1938, after the Munich Agreement ceded the predominantly German speaking Sudetenland to Germany, but before the German occupation of the Czech speaking remainder of Bohemia and Moravia, he resigned from office and went into exile in Putney, London. Then in 1940 he organized the Provisional Government-in-Exile in London with Jan Šrámek as Prime Minister and himself as President.
In November 1940 Beneš, his wife, their nieces and his household staff moved to The Abbey at Aston Abbotts near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. The staff of his private office, including his Secretary Edvard Táborský and his chief of staff Jaromír Smutný moved to The Old Manor House in the neighbouring village of Wingrave while his military intelligence staff headed by František Moravec was stationed in the nearby village of Addington.
In 1941 Beneš and his government planned the Operation Anthropoid, aiming at the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. This was implemented in 1942, resulting in brutal German reprisals such as the execution of thousands of Czechs and the eradication of two villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
Although oriented to the West he was also on friendly terms with Stalin. In 1943 he signed the entente between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in order to secure Czechoslovakia's political position, as well as his own.
At the end of World War II, he returned home as the President of Czechoslovakia. He resented the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia on 25 February 1948 led by Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, and resigned as President on 7 June 1948. Gottwald succeeded him as President. He died of natural causes at his villa in Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1948.
The so-called Beneš decrees, which, among other things, expropriated citizens of German and Hungarian ethnicity, paved the way for the eventual expulsion of the majority of Germans to Germany and Austria. The decrees are still in force to this day and remain controversial, with Expellees demanding their repeal. The Czech government's repeated assurances, that the decrees are no longer applied, was accepted by the European Commission and the European Parliament.
[edit] References
- Oskar Krejčí: Geopolitics of the Central European Region. The view from Prague and Bratislava Bratislava: Veda, 2005. 494 pp. (Free download, in English)
- Neil Rees "The Secret History of The Czech Connection - The Czechoslovak Government in Exile in London and Buckinghamshire" compiled by Neil Rees, England, 2005. ISBN 0-9550883-0-5
- John Wheeler-Bennett Munich : Prologue to Tragedy, New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.
- Paul E. Zinner "Czechoslovakia: The Diplomacy of Eduard Benes" pages 100–122 from The Diplomats 1919–1939 edited by Gordon A. Craig & Felix Gilbert, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America, 1953
[edit] See also
| Preceded by Jan Černý |
Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia 1921–1922 |
Succeeded by Antonín Švehla |
| Preceded by T. G. Masaryk |
President of Czechoslovakia 1935–1938 |
Succeeded by Emil Hácha |
| Preceded by Emil Hácha |
President of Czechoslovakia 1945–1948 |
Succeeded by Klement Gottwald |
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| First Republic | Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1918-1935) • Edvard Beneš (1935-1938) |
| Second Republic | Emil Hácha (1938-1939) |
| Government in exile | Edvard Beneš (1940-1945) |
| Transition to Communism | Edvard Beneš (1945-1948) |
| Communist | Klement Gottwald (1948-1953) • Antonín Zápotocký (1953-1957) • Antonín Novotný (1957-1968) • Ludvík Svoboda (1968-1975) • Gustáv Husák (1975-1989) |
| after the Velvet Revolution | Václav Havel (1989-1992) |
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| First Republic | Karel Kramář • Vlastimil Tusar • Jan Černý • Edvard Beneš • Antonín Švehla • Jan Černý • Antonín Švehla • František Udržal • Jan Malypetr • Milan Hodža • Jan Syrový |
| Second Republic | Jan Syrový • Rudolf Beran |
| Government in exile | Jan Šrámek • Zdeněk Fierlinger |
| Transition to Communism | Zdeněk Fierlinger • Klement Gottwald |
| Communist | Klement Gottwald • Antonín Zápotocký • Viliam Široký • Jozef Lenárt • Oldřich Černík • Lubomír Štrougal • Ladislav Adamec • Marián Čalfa |
| after the Velvet Revolution | Petr Pithart • Jan Stráský |
| Presidents of the League of Nations |
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| Paul Hymans (1920–21) • Herman Adriaan van Karnebeek (1921–22) • Augustin Edwards (1922–23) • Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1923–24) • Giuseppe Motta (1924–25) • Raoul Dandurand (1925–26) • Afonso Costa (1926) • Momčilo Ninčić (1926–27) • Alberto Guani (1927–28) • Herluf Zahle (1928–29) • Jose Gustavo Guerrero (1929–30) • Nicolae Titulescu (1930–32) • Paul Hymans (1932–33) • Charles Theodore Te Water (1933–34) • Richard Johannes Sandler (1934) • Francisco Castillo Najera (1934–35) • Edvard Beneš (1935–36) • Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1936–37) • Tevfik Rustu Aras (1937) • Aga Khan III (1937–38) • Éamon de Valera (1938–39) • Carl Joachim Hambro (1939–40, 1946) |
