Politician, Military figure. André Maginot received recognition as a French civil servant, soldier, and Member of Parliament. He is known, as the Minister of War, for developing the Maginot Line, a line of defense of 58 elaborate forts, bunkers, walls and other obstacles that would be used to ward-off the advancing Nazi Army during Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Although he was born in Paris, he spent his early years in Alsace-Lorraine, where French families under the German Empire government, were strongly discouraged to use their French language and culture in favor of High German. After taking the civil service exam in 1897, he began a career in the French government that would last the rest of his life, including in French colonies in Africa. In 1910 he was an assistant to the governor of Algeria. On March 2, 1912, his sister Marguerite Maginot married Gaston Joseph, who would eventually become an award-winning author and colonial governor of the Ivory Coast in West Africa. In 1910 Maginot was elected as Chamber Deputy in the French parliament and by 1913, was serving as Under-Secretary of War. During World War I, he served in the army along the France-Germany border of Alsace-Lorraine. At the rank of sergeant, he was critically wounded in the leg in November of 1914, and though the leg was saved, the injury caused a life-time painful limp. For this, he was awarded the Médaille militaire. The Great War taught him there needed to be a defensive barrier between France and the aggressor, Germany. In 1926 he, in his second term as Secretary of War, was successful in having the government allocate 3.3 million francs to build several experimental sections of the defensive line, the Maginot Line. In 1930, he reported back to parliament the progress. He failed to see the completion of the defense wall as he became ill with thyroid fever after eating contaminated oysters, while celebrating the holidays in December of 1931 and dying within a couple of weeks. The project was completed in 1938 with a wall hundreds of miles long. Sadly, in May of 1940, Nazi troops bypassed his wall of defense by using tanks advancing through marsh lands in Belgium. His wall gave a false sense of security in France that became known as the "Maginot Mentality." As Allied armies pushed Nazi troops east in 1944, the Germans often used his wall of defense as bunkers while fighting against United States General George Patton's army. Today, dotting along the French border, parts of the wall with a fort are found as uninhabitable white elephants with little practical use, yet the land has been purchased for historical reasons by Frenchmen and foreigners, including Germans. In 1966 a massive monument in the honor of André Maginot was dedicated near the Verdun Battlefield, where he received his World War I battle wound.