Edgar Faure

Early life and the postwar years

Edgar Faure was born in Béziers, Hérault, on 18 August 1908. He attended the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and the Lycée Voltaire in Paris, graduated from the School of Oriental Languages, practised as a lawyer in Paris from 1929 and qualified as a law professor in Roman law and legal history in 1962. According to his official biography at the Académie française, in June and July 1944 he handled legislative affairs for the presidency of the French Committee of National Liberation and the Provisional Government in Algiers, and in 1945 he was deputy French prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

Politics in the Fourth Republic

From 1946 to 1958 Faure sat in the National Assembly as a Radical-Socialist deputy for the Jura, serving as secretary of state for finance and then budget minister (1949–1951) and justice minister (1951). He was prime minister and finance minister for the first time from 10 January to 29 February 1952, then finance minister in the Laniel and Mendès France cabinets, and briefly foreign minister in early 1955. He was prime minister again from 23 February 1955 to 24 January 1956, attending the Geneva summit of the four powers in July 1955.

Contacts with China

In May 1957 Faure visited China in a private capacity and was received by Mao Zedong; he wrote a book on China, Le Serpent et la Tortue. From 1959 to 1966 he was a senator for the Jura.

On 20 August 1963 Faure met Li Qingquan, China's ambassador to Switzerland, in Bern and proposed visiting China in a private capacity; the invitation was issued in the name of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs. De Gaulle wanted him to go as his own representative and gave him a handwritten letter saying he had full confidence in everything Faure would say and hear. Faure arrived in Beijing on 22 October and held six rounds of talks with Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi in Beijing and Shanghai, focused on Taiwan. According to the Chinese scholar Zhang Jinling, Faure said it would be difficult for France to cut all ties with Taiwan, as de Gaulle had not forgotten standing with Chiang Kai-shek during the war; in early November the Chinese side set out a plan for establishing relations directly in a written “Summary of Premier Zhou Enlai's Remarks.” According to Ma Baofeng, a former counsellor in China's foreign ministry protocol department, Faure struck out the wording that France would “no longer recognise” the authorities on Taiwan, replacing it with the formula that recognising the PRC government “automatically implied” that this status no longer belonged to the government on Taiwan. De Gaulle approved after hearing Faure's report on 29 November, and after further talks in Switzerland the two countries announced diplomatic relations simultaneously on 27 January 1964. His official biography at the Académie française records the trip as a “mission to the People's Republic of China (October–November 1963).”

The Fifth Republic

Faure was minister of agriculture in Georges Pompidou's cabinets from 1966 to 1968 and minister of national education in Maurice Couve de Murville's cabinet from 12 July 1968 to 20 June 1969. He was later elected deputy for the Doubs, served as president of the National Assembly from 2 April 1973 to 2 April 1978, and from 1974 presided over the regional council of Franche-Comté. He was elected to the Académie française on 8 June 1978 and to the Senate for the Doubs in 1980. Faure died on 30 March 1988.