Maurice Berteaux Minister Of War Visits A School In Poissy In 1905, By Ernest Delahaye

The Minister of War Maurice Berteaux during a visit to a girls' school in Poissy (78-yveînes) on May 7, 1905. Accompanied by senior army officers, the minister congratulated the students in white dresses who presented him with flowers and presents. 
Oil on canvas in very good condition signed lower right.
Ernest Paul Delahaye is a painter born in Paris in 1855 and died in 1921 in the same city. He was a painter for the Army and exhibited at the Salon from 1875. He appears in numerous public collections such as Louviers, Carnavalet, Petit Palais, Versailles, etc.
Henri Maurice Berteaux, born June 3, 1852 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and died accidentally on May 21, 1911 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, is a French politician. Radical deputy mayor of Chatou in the western suburbs of Paris, he was Minister of War several times and one of the architects of the renovation of the French army before the First World War.
Mayor of Chatou from 1891, deputy of Seine-et-Oise in 1893, president of the general council of Seine-et-Oise in 1908, Maurice Berteaux, at 56, became a striking and influential personality in the western Parisian suburbs of the good times. In particular, he actively intervened in 1904 to prevent the demolition of the Château de Maisons-Laffitte.
A specialist in military and financial issues, an ardent republican and a convinced secularist, he contributed, after the Dreyfus affair, to defending and consolidating a still fragile Third Republic.
Minister of War then president of the Army Commission, he participated in the work of renovation of the military institution undertaken by the Third Republic in anticipation of "revenge" on the German Empire which annexed the North of Lorraine (Moselle) and Alsace in 1871. His action to ensure equality for all in military service and to develop the social role of the Army allowed, shortly before the Great War, the establishment of an army which identifies with the Nation.
He campaigns and actively participates in popular education within the Education League founded by Jean Macé. With Jean Jaurès, he passed a law on the coverage of workplace accidents favorable to railway workers and employees. He was also a supporter of the progressive income tax, the separation of church and state (passed in 1905), and the reduction of time for military service.
He died accidentally on May 21, 1911, at the age of 58, at the Issy-les-Moulineaux airfield, during the Paris-Madrid aviation race, while aviator Louis Émile Train, on a monoplane of his design, attempts an emergency landing which ends catastrophically on the group of personalities who had invaded the runway.
He rests in the old cemetery of Chatou