Cerf Lurie

Cerf Lurie (born March 31, 1897 in Sète , † February 14, 1987 ibid) was a French politician of the UNR . From 1958 to 1962 he was a member of the National Assembly .

Life and career

Early life

Lurie began his military training at the age of 17 and took part in World War I , in the course of which he was seriously wounded. He was accepted into the Legion of Honor and awarded the Croix de guerre for his war service, but had to live with permanent damage. He then became an inspector at various private railway companies, before he got a post at the state company SNCF in 1938 . Due to the physical damage he had suffered in the previous war, he was not mobilized in September 1939 and he was spared participation in the Second World War . A little later, because of his Jewish faith, he still had to suffer from the consequences of the war, since he lost his job in 1940 under the Vichy regime , which Germany tolerated and which was anti-Jewish. As the situation worsened, he escaped his deportation, which would probably have led to his murder, by going underground. After France was liberated in 1944, he changed his occupation and from then on worked as a wine merchant.

Political career

He entered politics in 1947 when he was already 50 years old. At this time he joined the newly founded right-wing party RPF and from then on endeavored to spread Gaullism in his home region around the city of Sète, which was then strongly left-wing. In the parliamentary elections in 1958 Lurie stood for the Gaullist party UNR in the third constituency of the Hérault department against the long-time MP Jules Moch of the Socialists. He was initially considered an outsider, also because he had never previously held a political mandate at the local level, and in the first ballot he lagged behind Moch and the communist Raoul Calas with 18.3% . In the second round, however, he was able to prevail with 36.9% and benefited from the fact that the left had not agreed on a common candidate. In the National Assembly he was particularly committed to promoting French wine. From 1961 he was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe . On December 1, 1961, as a victim of the Vichy regime, he demanded the reintegration of officials of this government, some of whom were excluded from public life. In 1962 he stood for re-election and had the same rivals as the socialist Moch and the communist Calas as four years earlier. Even if he was able to increase his result to 30.1% in the first round, he clearly failed in the second round with 39.8% due to Moch, who benefited from Calas' withdrawal and clearly achieved the absolute majority. The then 65-year-old Lurie remained politically active and ran again in 1967, although the Gaullists had chosen André Collière as a candidate and he therefore had to run for a small party. He only got 4.4% of the vote, while Collière failed in the second ballot against the communist Pierre Arraut . In 1973 he took part in a parliamentary election for the last time as a substitute for a candidate, with the duo of Gérard Bastide and himself clearly losing the vote with just one percent. A street in Sète now bears the name of the politician who died in 1987 at the age of 89.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Base de données historique des anciens députés , assemblee-nationale.fr