André François-Poncet

André François- Poncet ( born June 13, 1887 in Provins, Seine- et- Marne, † January 8, 1978 in Paris) was a French German scholar, politician and diplomat, Ambassador of France in Nazi Germany and the French High Commissioner in Germany from 1949 to in 1953.

Life and work

François- Poncet was born the son of a former judge at the Paris Court of Appeal in Provins. He attended schools in Meaux and in Baden Offenburg, and the Paris Lycéen Carnot and Henri IV Subsequently, he studied from 1907 to 1910 German at the elite École Normale Supérieure and high school in Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin. François- Poncet's relation to Germany is visible in his then highly regarded thesis of the year 1909. Afterwards he was teacher in Montpellier and lecturer at the Polytechnic. After he was wounded as a reserve officer in the First World War, entered François- Poncet, 1917 in the service of the French Foreign Ministry and came to Bern as press attaché. After the war he worked as an observer in the occupied Rhineland and later in Berlin.

François- Poncet was 1928-1931 Undersecretary of State for Education, Arts and Economics. From 1931 to 1938 he represented his country as ambassador in Berlin. After the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933, he operated a flexible policy on Germany, which fluctuated between understanding and confrontation. Even Nazi Germany, he originally wanted to concede a controlled rearmament. When that failed, he sought a directed against Germany alliance. But François -Poncet soon returned to a policy of understanding. From her he promised an improved security of France. 1938 to 1940 he was ambassador in Fascist Italy. In Rome, he tried to influence Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini.

Mid-1930s was François- Poncet host of friends with his sons German artist of Fabius Gugel ( 1910-2000 ) during which stay in Paris. In 1940 he was briefly on the National Council and was after the French defeat a permanent consultant of the Vichy regime. As a columnist at Le Figaro, he represented in Vichy always the policy of Pétain and defended the development of Germany during the Nazi era. After the German occupation of Vichy France François- Poncet in 1943 was arrested by the Germans and interned in Kleinwalsertal comfortable in a hotel.

After the Second World War, François- Poncet advised in 1948 the French military governor of occupied Germany and the French government. From 1949 to 1955 he worked as High Commissioner of his country in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he resided at Castle Ernich. After the dissolution of the Allied High Commission in May 1955 he held until September, the function of the Ambassador in Bonn. Member of the Académie française ( fauteuil 18) he was since 1952; Furthermore, from 1955 to 1967 president of the French Red Cross. From 1955 to 1960 he served as president of the French Council of the European Movement. His son Jean François- Poncet was under Valéry Giscard d' Estaing from 1978 to 1981 the French foreign minister.

Publications

• As ambassadors of the "Third Reich". The memories of the French Ambassador in Berlin, from September 1931 to October 1938. Übers Erna Stübel. Florian Kupferberg, Mainz 1947 Original: Souvenirs d' une Ambassade à Berlin. Librairie Ernest Flammarion, Paris