The French statesman and author Édouard Herriot (1872-1957) was prominent in interwar politics and personified the radical-liberal tradition in French political and cultural life. He was also a biographer and historian of note.

The son of an army officer, Édouard Herriot was born at Troyes on July 5, 1872. After graduating with highest honors from the École Normale Supérieure in 1894, he rapidly acquired a reputation for outstanding scholarship and teaching. His doctoral thesis, Madame Récamier et ses amis (1904), followed by his brilliant Précis de l'histoire des lettres françaises (1905), secured that reputation.

Like many young turn-of-the-century French intellectuals, Herriot was politicized by the Dreyfus Affair. As an ardent Dreyfusard, he joined the Radical party, and for more than half a century he had few peers in his passionate dedication to justice and eloquent defense of liberalism and republican democracy.

Herriot...