Edvard Beneš (17 May 1884 -- 3 September 1948) was a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1940 to 1948. He was known to be a skilled diplomat. Edvard Beneš was born into a peasant family in the small town of Kožlany, Bohemia, on 17 May 1884. His brother was the Czechoslovak politician Vojta Beneš, grandfather of Emilie Benes Brzezinski. His grandnephew is Václav Edvard Beneš, a Czech-American mathematician. Edvard spent much of his youth in the Vinohrady district of Prague, where he attended a grammar school from 1896 to 1904. During this time he played football for Slavia Prague. 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 law 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. During World War I, Beneš was one of the leading organizers of an independent Czechoslovakia from abroad. He organized a Czech pro-independence anti-Austrian secret resistance movement called "Maffia". In September 1915, he went into exile, and in Paris he made intricate diplomatic efforts to gain recognition from France and the United Kingdom for the Czechoslovak independence movement. From 1916--1918 he was a Secretary of the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris and Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs in the Provisional Czechoslovak government. In May 1918, Beneš, Masaryk, and Štefánik were reported to be organizing a Czecho-Slovak army to fight for the Western Allies in France, recruited from among Czechs and Slovaks able to get to the front and also from the large emigrant populations in the United States, said to number more than 1,500,000. From 1918--1935, Beneš was the first and longest serving Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, a post he held through 10 successive governments--one of which he headed himself from 1921 to 1922. He served in parliament from 1920--1925 and from 1929--1935 a member of Parliament. He represented Czechoslovakia in talks on the Treaty of Versailles. He briefly returned to the academic world as a professor in 1921. 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 in 1922, Locarno in 1925, The Hague in 1930, and Lausanne in 1932. Beneš was a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (until 1925 called the Czechoslovak Socialist Party) and a strong Czechoslovakist he did not consider Slovaks and Czechs to be separate ethnicities. When President Tomáš Masaryk retired in 1935, Beneš was the obvious choice as his successor. He opposed Nazi Germany's claim to the German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938. In October 1938, the Sudeten Crisis brought Europe to the brink of war, which was averted only as Italy, France and Great Britain signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed for the immediate annexation and military occupation of the Sudetenland by Germany. Czechoslovakia was not even consulted on this agreement. Beneš was all but forced to agree to it after France and the United Kingdom let it be known that if he didn't do so, they would disinterest themselves in the fate of Czechoslovakia. Beneš was forced to resign on 5 October 1938 under German pressure, and Emil Hácha was chosen as President. In March 1939, Hácha's government was bullied into authorising the German occupation of the remaining Czech territory. (Slovakia had declared its nominal independence by then.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• published: 20 Sep 2013
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