Edvard Beneš

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(b. Kozlany, Bohemia, 17 May 1884; d. Prague, 3 Sept. 1948) Czech; Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia 1918 – 35, President 1935 – 8 and 1941 – 8 The son of a peasant Beneš was educated at the universities of Prague, Dijon, and the Sorbonne. He obtained a doctorate in sociology and in 1909 was appointed professor at the Prague Academy of Commerce. In 1915 he escaped from Austria-Hungary to Paris, where he helped T. G. Masaryk to form the Czech National Council. He was Foreign Minister of the new Czechoslovak state from 1918 to 1935 and represented Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference from 1918 to 1920. He opposed any revision of the post-World War I settlement. In the 1920s he tried to build "Little Entente" with alliances between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in 1920 and Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1921. He developed close ties with both France and the Soviet Union. Beneš was a strong supporter of the League of Nations, of which he was six times chairman. The admission of the Soviet Union to the League in 1934 was a triumph of his diplomacy. The following year Czechoslovakia made a pact of mutual assistance with the USSR. When Masaryk retired as President in December 1935, Beneš succeeded him. In 1938 he resigned and went into exile in the United States following the Munich Agreement.

From 1941 to 1945 Beneš was head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. In 1943 he visited Stalin in an attempt to act as mediator between East and West. He returned to Prague as President in March 1945. He tried to keep the presidency above party politics and did not intervene against Communist subversion of the government after 1945. In February 1948 Klement Gottwald launched a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Beneš resigned as President on 6 June 1948, refusing to sign Gottwald's Soviet-style constitution. He died three months later.

The Czechoslovak statesman Eduard Beneš (1884-1948) was president of his country from 1935 to 1938 and from 1940 to 1948.

As foreign minister of a small state created from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and precariously situated between Germany and the Soviet Union and bordered by hostile Poland and Hungary, Eduard Beneš supported the territorial settlements of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, was a pillar of the French-East European alliance system, and was a zealous proponent of the League of Nations and of the settlement of international disputes through arbitration. The League's failure to maintain peace and France's refusal to honor its commitment to defend Czechoslovakia against German aggression led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Europe's postwar prostration rendered any challenge to the Soviet-backed coup d'etat in 1948 impossible. Thus East Europe's most noted fighter for international cooperation and collective security lived to witness the defeat of those ideals and the loss of his country's independence.

Eduard Beneš was born on May 28, 1884, in Kozlany, Bohemia, the tenth and last child of a Czech farmer. He studied at the University of Prague and at the Sorbonne and École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He received a doctorate of law at the University of Dijon in 1908 and then studied at the University of Berlin. He lectured at the Commercial Academy of Prague in 1909 and at the Czech University of Prague in 1913, by which time he had become a protégé of the Czechoslovak patriot Tomáš Masaryk.

Cabinet Posts

After the outbreak of war in 1914, Beneš helped to form a Czech resistance movement in Prague, and in 1915 he assisted Masaryk in creating anti-Austrian propaganda in Switzerland. Traveling to Paris, Beneš, with Milan Stefanik, founded a Czechoslovak foreign committee, which became the Czechoslovak National Council in January 1916, with Beneš as secretary. Under Masaryk the council was transformed into the provisional government of Czechoslovakia on Oct. 14, 1918, with Beneš as foreign minister. In this position Beneš distinguished himself as the leader of the Czechoslovak delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and he held this office in all the Cabinets until he was elected second president of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1935. In addition, he was the prime minister in 1921-1922.

To preserve the Paris Peace Conference settlements and combat the Hapsburg restoration in Hungary, Beneš helped to found the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia (1920-1921), linked with France. Leader of the Czechoslovak delegation to the League of Nations from 1920 on, Beneš sat on its Council (1923-1927) and formulated the Geneva Protocol of 1924, which made the arbitration of disputes between League members compulsory. Although he signed a pact of friendship with Italy in 1923, Beneš clearly considered the French and Little Entente alliance systems the keystones of Czechoslovak foreign policy, and when he was approached in 1937 by Austria and Hungary to present joint resistance to expansionist Germany, he refused. Nevertheless, to counterbalance the growing power of Germany, Beneš restored Czech-Soviet diplomatic relations, favored Soviet entry into the League of Nations in 1934, and concluded a qualified mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union in May 1935.

President of the Republic

Beneš succeeded Masaryk as president of Czechoslovakia on Dec. 18, 1935. German demands for the Sudetenland brought the collapse of the French - East European alliance system, for Czechoslovakia's allies deserted in the face of the German threat. The Munich Conference of Sept. 28, 1938, awarded Germany the Sudeten portions of Czechoslovakia. A week later Beneš resigned the presidency and left the country. He taught at the University of Chicago, as Masaryk had done.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Beneš organized a Czechoslovak committee in France, but after the French collapse he fled to England, where he created a Czechoslovak provisional government under his presidency on July 21, 1940. To gain Soviet support, he signed a Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact of Friendship, Mutual Assistance, and Postwar Cooperation on Dec. 12, 1943, intending to create the role of East-West mediator for Czechoslovakia in the postwar order.

On March 18, 1945, Beneš conferred at Moscow, arrived on April 3 at Košice, Slovakia, to establish a provisional government, and reached Prague on May 10, when his government began nationalizing important sectors of the economy. In the elections of May 1946 the Communists received 38 percent of the vote, emerging as the strongest political organization in Czechoslovakia. The Constituent Assembly elected Beneš president of the republic and the Communist Antonin Zápotocky president of Parliament on June 19. The Communist Klement Gottwald was selected premier on July 3.

Weakened by two strokes in 1947 and unable to withstand the pressure of the Soviet Union and the demands of the Czech Communists, Beneš appointed a government of 12 Communists, 7 Communist sympathizers, and only 2 non-Communists, thereby reducing his own role to that of figurehead chief of state. Although loyal Czechoslovak troops had been ready to oppose the Communists by force, Beneš had refused to utilize them for fear of Soviet armed intervention, thereby sealing the loss of his country's independence.

Although Beneš refused to approve a new constitution passed by Parliament on May 9, 1948, providing for a single-list electoral ballot, elections under the new system resulted in a Parliament that was two-thirds Communist. Thereupon Beneš resigned the presidency on June 7, 1948, to be succeeded by the Communist premier, Gottwald. On September 3 Beneš died at his country house in Sezimov Usti. Among his publications are My War Memoirs (trans. 1928), Democracy Today and Tomorrow (1939), and the unfinished Memoirs: From Munich to New War and New Victory (trans. 1954).

Further Reading

Informative works on Beneš in English are Pierre Crabitès, Beneš, Statesman of Central Europe (1935); Godfrey Lias, Benešof Czechoslovakia (1940); and Compton Mackenzie, Dr. Beneš (1946). Background studies that discuss Beneš include Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After (1939); Josef Korbel, The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, 1938-1948 (1959); and Paul E. Zinner, Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1948 (1963), which is very useful for an assessment of Beneš's career. A chapter on Beneš's diplomacy is in Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, eds., The Diplomats: 1919-1939 (1953).

Additional Sources

Beneš, Edvard, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš: from Munich to new war and new victory, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Taborsky, Edward, President Edvard Beneš: between East and West, 1938-1948, Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1981.

Edvard Beneš
President of Czechoslovakia
In office 18 December 1935 – 5 October 1938
Preceded by	Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
Succeeded by	Emil Hácha
President of Czechoslovakia in exile
In office 1940 – 2 April 1945
President of Czechoslovakia
In office 28 October 1945 – 7 June 1948
Preceded by	Emil Hácha
Succeeded by	Klement Gottwald
Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia
In office 26 September 1921 – 7 October 1922
Preceded by	Jan Černý
Succeeded by	Antonín Švehla
Born	28 May 1884(1884-05-28) Kožlany, Austria–Hungary
Died	3 September 1948 (aged 64) Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia
Political party	Czech National Social Party
Spouse(s)	Hana Benešová

Edvard Beneš with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

Edvard Beneš with wife 1921, autochrome portrait by Josef Jindřich Šechtl

Edvard Beneš with his wife 1934

Statue of Edvard Beneš in front of headquarters of Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague

Edvard Beneš (pronounced [ˈɛdvard ˈbɛnɛʃ] (help·info)) (28 May 1884 – 3 September 1948) was a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second President of Czechoslovakia. He was known to be a skilled diplomat.

Contents 1 Youth 2 First exile 3 Czechoslovakia 4 Second exile 5 Second presidency 6 Death 7 See also 8 Footnotes 9 References 10 External links

Youth

Edvard Beneš 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 a grammar school from 1896 to 1904. During this time he played football for Slavia Prague.^[1] After studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University in Prague, he left for 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 became a lecturer in sociology at Charles University. He was involved in Scouting.^[2]

First exile

During World War I, Beneš was one of the leading organizers of an independent Czechoslovakia abroad. He organized a 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 the United Kingdom for the 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.

Czechoslovakia

From 1918–1935, Beneš 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.

Beneš was a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (until 1925 called Czechoslovak Socialist Party) and a strong Czechoslovakist - he did not consider Slovaks and Czechs to be separate ethnicities.

In 1935, Beneš succeeded Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk as President. He opposed Germany's claim to the German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938. In October, the Sudeten Crisis brought Europe on the brink of war, which was averted only as France and Great Britain signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed for the immediate annexation and military occupation of the Sudetenland by Germany.

After this event, which proceeded without Czechoslovakian participation, Beneš was forced to resign on 5 October 1938 under German pressure and Emil Hácha was chosen as President. In March 1939, Hàcha's government was bullied into authorising the German occupation of the remaining territory of Czechia. (Slovakia had declared its independence by then.)

Second exile

On 22 October 1938 Beneš went into exile in Putney, London. In November 1940 in the wake of London Blitz, 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 1940 he organized the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London with Jan Šrámek as Prime Minister and himself as President. In 1941 Beneš and František Moravec planned Operation Anthropoid, with the intention of assassinating Reinhard Heydrich.^[3] This was implemented in 1942, and, predictably, resulted in brutal German reprisals such as the execution of thousands of Czechs and the eradication of two villages of Lidice and Ležáky.

Although not a Communist, Beneš was also on friendly terms with Stalin. In 1943 he signed the entente between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. According to British writer Nigel West's book on the Venona project, Edvard Beneš was Soviet spy codename "19".^[4]

Second presidency

After the Prague uprising at the end of World War II, Beneš returned home and reassumed his former position as President. He was not elected President in 1945 but unanimously confirmed as the former president of the republic by the National Assembly on 28 October 1945. Under article 58.5 of the Constitution, "The former president shall stay in his or her function till the new president shall be elected." On 19 June 1946 Beneš was formally elected to his second term as President.^[5]

The Beneš decrees (officially called "Decrees of the President of the Republic"), among other things, expropriated citizens of German and Hungarian ethnicity, and paved the way for the eventual expulsion of the majority of Germans to West and East Germany and Austria. The decrees are still in force to this day and remain controversial, with the expellees demanding their repeal. The Czech government's repeated assurances that the decrees are no longer applied have been accepted by the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Beneš presided over a coalition government involving Democrats and Communists, with the Communist leader Klement Gottwald as prime minister. On 25 February 1948, the Communists assumed complete power in a coup d'état. Beneš resigned as President on 7 June 1948 and Gottwald succeeded him as President.

Death

Beneš died of natural causes at his villa in Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia on 3 September 1948. He is interred along with his wife in the garden of his villa and his bust is part of the gravestone.

See also

• Hrad
• History of Czechoslovakia
• Beneš decrees

Footnotes

This article uses bare URLs. Please help improve this article by turning bare URLs into proper citations containing all of the information on the referenced work's title, date, publisher, publication, and author, so that the article remains verifiable in the future. (There are several templates available that can help to make formatting such citations simple.) This page may also be able to help find problematic links. (November 2008)

1. ^ Stalo se před 100 lety: Robinson a Beneš - Radio Praha
2. ^ "Skauting »Historie" (in Czech). Junák - svaz skautů a skautek ČR. http://verejnost.skaut.cz/skauting/historie/. Retrieved 23 September 2007. 
3. ^ HISTORIE: Špion, kterému nelze věřit - Neviditelný pes
4. ^ Nigel West, Venona, the Greatest Secret of the Cold War, London: HarperCollins, 1999.
5. ^ Prozatimní NS RČS 1945-1946, 2. schůze, část 1/4

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2008)

• Milan Hauner *(ed.): Edvard Beneš’ MEMOIRS: THE DAYS OF MUNICH (vol.1), WAR AND RESISTANCE (vol.2), DOCUMENTS (vol.3). First critical edition of reconstructed War Memoirs 1938-45 of President Beneš of Czechoslovakia (published by Academia Prague 2007. ISBN 978-80-200-1529-7)

• Rees, Neil (2005). The Secret History of the Czech Connection: The Czechoslovak Government in Exile in London and Buckinghamshire During the Second World War. Buckinghamshire: Neil Rees. ISBN 0-9550883-0-5. OCLC 62196328. 

• Zbyněk Zeman, Antonín Klímek: The Life of Edvard Benes 1884-1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War, Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, ISBN 019820583X ISBN 978-0198205838
  book review by Richard Crampton

• Zinner, Paul E. (1994). "Czechoslovakia: The Diplomacy of Eduard Benes". in Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert. The Diplomats, 1919-1939. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 100–122. ISBN 0-691-03660-8. OCLC 31484352. 

• John Wheeler-Bennett Munich : Prologue to Tragedy, New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.

External links

• Biography at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic (Czech)
• ""Sons of Death"". Time Magazine. 26 September 1938. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,788783,00.html. Retrieved 14 August 2008.  (English) - an article published in Time Magazine on 26 September 1938 - free archive
• Pictures of Edvard Beneš funeral (1) - lying in state (in the opened coffin)
• Pictures of Edvard Beneš funeral (2) - funeral procession with wreaths and laying of coffin into grave
• Pictures of Edvard Beneš and his wife - archive of Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography

Government offices
Preceded by -	Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia 1918–1935	Succeeded by Milan Hodža
Preceded by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk	President of Czechoslovakia 1935–1938	Succeeded by Emil Hácha
Preceded by Emil Hácha	President of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and President of Czechoslovakia 1940–1945 and 1945–1948	Succeeded by Klement Gottwald
Awards and achievements
Preceded by Marshal Ferdinand Foch	Cover of Time Magazine 23 March 1925	Succeeded by George Sisler

v • d • e Presidents of Czechoslovakia Tomáš G. Masaryk  · Edvard Beneš  · Emil Hácha  · Klement Gottwald  · Antonín Zápotocký  · Antonín Novotný  · Ludvík Svoboda · Gustáv Husák  · Václav Havel

v • d • e Prime Ministers of Czechoslovakia 1918-1939 Karel Kramář · Vlastimil Tusar · Jan Černý  · Edvard Beneš · Antonín Švehla  · František Udržal · Jan Malypetr · Milan Hodža · Jan Syrový  · Rudolf Beran 1939-1945 Protectorate: Rudolf Beran  · Alois Eliáš  · Jaroslav Krejčí  · Richard Bienert Government in exile: Jan Šrámek · Zdeněk Fierlinger 1945-1992 Zdeněk Fierlinger · Klement Gottwald  · Antonín Zápotocký · Viliam Široký · Jozef Lenárt · Oldřich Černík · Lubomír Štrougal · Ladislav Adamec · Marián Čalfa  · Jan Stráský

v • d • e Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia First Republic Edvard Beneš · Milan Hodža · Kamil Krofta Second Republic František Chvalkovský Transition to Communism Jan Masaryk Communist era Vladimír Clementis · Viliam Široký · Václav David · Jiří Hájek · Ján Marko · Bohuslav Chňoupek · Jaromír Johanes Czech and Slovak Federal Republic Jiří Dienstbier · Jozef Moravčík

v • d • e Presidents of the Assembly of the League of Nations Paul Hymans (1920–21) · Herman Adriaan van Karnebeek (1921–22) · Agustín 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) · José Gustavo Guerrero (1929–30) · Nicolae Titulescu (1930–32) · Paul Hymans (1932–33) · Charles Theodore Te Water (1933–34) · Richard Johannes Sandler (1934) · Francisco Castillo Nájera (1934–35) · Edvard Beneš (1935–36) · Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1936–37) · Tevfik Rüştü Aras (1937) · Aga Khan III (1937–38) · Éamon de Valera (1938–39) · Carl Joachim Hambro (1939–40, 1946)

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