Daniel Mayer

This article is about the journalist and politician Daniel Mayer. For the Austrian composer born in 1967 see Daniel Mayer (composer) . For other people with a similar name, see Daniel Meyer .

Daniel Mayer (born April 29, 1909 in Paris , † December 29, 1996 in Orsay , Essonne Department ) was a French journalist, politician and member of the Resistance .

Life

Daniel Mayer was involved in community issues when he began to get involved in politics at the age of 18 through the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti . In 1927 he joined the socialist party SFIO and worked from 1933 to 1939 for their daily newspaper Le Populaire , in which he wrote about social issues. As secretary of the 20th section of the Socialist Youth, he met Cletta Livian , a Jewish Romanian woman whom he married.

Although Mayer was a close friend of Léon Blums , he stayed in France after Henri Philippe Pétain's armistice of Compiègne on June 22, 1940. He joined the Resistance and in January 1941 founded the Comité d'action socialiste . Mayer settled in Marseille , where he worked underground on the newspaper Populaire , supported by his wife . Shortly thereafter, it received further impetus from Pierre Brossolette , who founded a bookstore in Paris with his wife , which served as a cover address for the Resistance. She organized her escape herself. Brossolette traveled to London in April 1942 to negotiate with General Charles de Gaulle , who wanted to unite the various Resistance groups under his leadership.

De Gaulle sent Jean Moulin back to France in 1942 to unite the various resistance groups into one organization. Moulin made it, alongside Mayer in secret

• Henri Frenay from Combat ,
• Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigeries from Liberation Sud ,
• Jean-Pierre Lévy of the Franc-Tireur ,
• Charles Tillon ,
• Pierre Fabien of the Francs-tireurs et partisans and

Charles Delestraint of the Armée Secrète . Jean Moulin managed to unite the eight most important resistance groups to form the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). The first joint meeting under Moulins chairmanship took place on May 27, 1943 in Paris. During the following year Mayer worked hard for a united resistance of socialists and communists.

In 1943 Mayer became general secretary of the underground Socialist Party SFIO. In August 1946 he was replaced as Secretary General as a supporter of Léon Blum . Nevertheless, he remained as Minister for Labor and Social Security from 1946 to 1949 as a member of the Blum cabinets, Paul Ramadier , Robert Schuman , Marie and Henri Queuille , belonged to the advisory national assembly, later to the constituent assemblies and was in the constituency of Seine from 1946 to April 1958 Member of the National Assembly .

He defended the still young social security and opposed the European Defense Community EVG, which is why his party, led by Guy Mollet, excluded him from their leadership. He was punished by his party in 1957 for his opposition to French policy on Algeria and his refusal to agree to the exceptional rights of the Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury and Félix Gaillard governments . He was chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly and was very committed to the State of Israel .

Mayer belonged to the minority of the SFIO, which did not agree to the return of General de Gaulle in 1958. He took part in the founding of the Parti socialiste autonomous PSA, from which the Parti socialiste unifié PSU emerged in 1960 . In 1967 he left this formation and in 1970 he joined the Jean-Baptiste Clément section of the newly founded Parti socialiste français in the 18th arrondissement of Paris in Orsay . Between 1958 and 1975 Mayer was also President of the French League for Human Rights . From 1977 to 1983 he worked for the international league for human rights . At the suggestion of President François Mitterrand , he was from March 4, 1983 to March 4, 1986 as President and then until March 4, 1992 as a simple member of the Conseil constitutionnel . Mayer appears today as a socialist of moral rigor.

Lionel Jospin emphasized his courage, his honor and his sense of justice at the funeral.

literature

• Claude Juin: Daniel Mayer (1909-1996). L'homme qui aurait pu tout changer . Romillat, Paris 1998, ISBN 978-2-8789-4051-0 .
• Martine Pradoux: Daniel Mayer, un socialiste dans la Résistance . Éditions de l'Atelier / Éditions Ouvrières, Paris 2002, ISBN 978-2-7082-3630-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Daniel Mayer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography (in English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ NEXINT: Constitutional Council. (No longer available online.) In: www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr. February 17, 2016, archived from the original on May 27, 2016 ; Retrieved May 27, 2016 (French). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.