LOUCHEUR, LOUIS (1872-1931), French politician, was born at Roubaix on Aug. 12, 1872. After studying at the Ecole Polytechnique he began a highly successful career as an engineer and contractor. When, in Dec. 1916, Briand decided to give cer tain offices to non-political men of high technical ability, he called upon Loucheur to be an under-secretary of State. In the Clemen ceau cabinet of 1917-20 he was minister of munitions, and re mained at the head of the department, when it was converted at the end of the World War into a department of industrial re construction. In this capacity he was consulted in the drafting of the economic section of the Versailles Treaty. Loucheur entered the Chamber in Nov. 1919 as deputy for the Nord Depart ment, and became minister for the liberated regions in the Briand cabinet in Jan. 1921. In that capacity he negotiated with the German minister of reconstruction, Walter Rathenau, the Wies baden Convention for facilitating payment in kind of part of the reparations. During the next two years Loucheur upheld before the Chamber, with great argumentative ingenuity, various schemes for remedying the financial situation. In the second Poincare cabinet of 1924 he was minister of commerce. On
Nov. 28, 1925, Briand appointed him minister of finance in his new cabinet. But he found every group in parliament violently hostile to the seven proposals which he submitted for alleviating the financial crisis, especially to the proposal for the forced con solidation of Government bonds. The finance commission of the Chamber twice rejected five of these proposals and he therefore resigned on Dec. 15, having held his portfolio exactly i7 days. He was one of the French delegates to the League of Nations Assem bly in 1924 and 1925.
In the Herriot cabinet of 1926 Loucheur was minister of com merce. On the fall of the Herriot Government he again devoted himself to industry, and was a prime mover in the arrangements made for an international steel cartel. As one of the French delegates at the World Economic Conference at Geneva in 1927, he played an important part in the deliberations, and when Poin care received a fresh mandate at the elections of 1928 he included Loucheur in his cabinet as minister of labour. Loucheur was pro prietor of the Petit Journal. He died Nov. 23, 1931.