Once independence had been won, Kramář's National Democrat Party, whose supporters were mostly conservative and middle-class, had lost much of its "raison d'être". The conservative Kramář was out of touch with the left-leaning mood of the voters, and because he was in Paris for the first months of 1919, credit for his reforms went to his finance minister, Alois Rašin, and Antonín Švehla. Kramář, a strong Russophile who was married to a Russian, represented Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 but resigned over Foreign Minister Beneš's failure to support anti-communist forces in Russia.