His first term as prime minister lasted only nine weeks but dealt with weighty issues, such as the Russian Revolution, the American entry into the war, the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, quelling the French Army Mutinies and relations with the British.

[1] In his second term as prime minister he dealt with the outbreak of rebellion in Syria's Jabal Druze in July 1925 which had excited public and parliamentary anxiety over the general crisis of France's empire.

[3] Brought up within a family of skilled artisans (his father was a draughtsman) Painlevé showed early promise across the range of elementary studies and was initially attracted by either an engineering or political career.

[3] Painlevé's mathematical work on differential equations led him to encounter their application to the theory of flight and, as ever, his broad interest in engineering topics fostered an enthusiasm for the emerging field of aviation.

[4] These new transcendental functions, solving the remaining six equations, are called the Painlevé transcendents, and interest in them has revived recently due to their appearance in modern geometry, integrable systems[5] and statistical mechanics.

[6][7][8] In 1895 he gave a series of lectures at Stockholm University on differential equations, at the end stating the Painlevé conjecture about singularities of the n-body problem.

By 1910, he had vacated his academic posts and World War I led to his active participation in military committees, joining Aristide Briand's cabinet in 1915 as Minister for Public Instruction and Inventions.

[3] On his appointment as War Minister in March 1917 he was immediately called upon to give his approval, albeit with some misgivings, to Robert Georges Nivelle's wildly optimistic plans for a breakthrough offensive in Champagne.

Painlevé reacted to the disastrous public failure of the plan by dismissing Nivelle and controversially replacing him with Henri Philippe Pétain.

[13] He was also responsible for isolating the Russian Expeditionary Force in France in the La Courtine camp, located in a remote spot on the plateau of Millevaches.

Painlevé then played little active role in politics until the election of November 1919 when he emerged as a leftist critic of the right-wing Bloc National.

By the time the next election approached in May 1924 his collaboration with Édouard Herriot, a fellow member of Briand's 1915 cabinet, had led to the formation of the Cartel des Gauches.