Gabriel Péri

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Gabriel Péri (1932)

Gabriel Péri (born February 9, 1902 in Toulon , † December 15, 1941 in Suresnes near Paris on Mont Valérien ) was a French communist , journalist and politician .

Life

Péri grew up in a Corsican family of seamen and officials. As a high school graduate, he received the post of secretary on the board of directors of a shipping and shipbuilding company.

In 1919 he took part in a May Day rally and became a supporter of the Socialist Party . He wrote reports for newspapers in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille , articles a. a. for "Avant-Garde" , the organ of the young communists and he campaigned for the affiliation of the Socialist Party to the Communist International (KI). In the spring of 1921 he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to political imprisonment. In 1922 he was elected secretary of the Communist Youth Union. In 1923 he was arrested again for conspiracy against State Security, went on a hunger strike in La Santé prison and was force-fed in Cochin Hospital. The next political prison sentence came six years later. From 1924 he was a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the Parti communiste français (PCF) and head of the foreign policy service of the magazine L'Humanité . From 1925 to 1939 he participated in almost all major international conferences and came into contact with numerous heads of state, party leaders and intellectual circles. In his political articles he warned against fascist warmongers in Germany, Italy and Japan. From 1932 he was a Member of Parliament for Argenteuil. In the French National Assembly , he mainly debated foreign policy issues. In 1936 he became Vice President of the Commission for Foreign Affairs, where he represented a patriotic position and influenced the position of the PCF Central Committee on French foreign policy. So he drew the displeasure of the Fifth Column and had to evade his arrest by going underground at the beginning of the war.

After the defeat of France in 1940 and during the German occupation, he wrote underground books and pamphlets that influenced the mobilization of public opinion against Hitler. Gabriel Péri was finally arrested on May 18, 1941 and wrote his diary in prison, knowing "that he is not facing judges, but murderers" . First in November 1941 the Gestapo offered him to deny his homeland and his convictions, and later, in December, to betray the PCF. In his suicide note , he wrote: "My friends may know that I have remained true to the ideal of my life, my comrades may know that I will die so that France may live. This is my last time to test my conscience. She looks good I would tread the same path if I had my life to live again ... I feel strong to look death in the face. Farewell! Long live France! " Gabriel Péri was executed on December 15, 1941.

Honors

Several French poets wrote obituaries in his honor. For example Paul Éluard (1895–1952) in 1944 or Louis Aragon with a homage with two poems (1943): La rose et le réséda and Celui qui chanta dans les supplices . In 2009, the Guillotière metro station in Lyon was renamed Guillotière - Gabriel Péri .

Fonts

  • Non, le nazisme, ce n'est pas le socialisme! (1941)
  • Les lendemains qui chantent is the title of his autobiography, published posthumously in 1947.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. wikilivres: Lettre d'adieu
  2. wikilivres: Gabriel Péri (Éluard)
  3. La rose et le réséda
  4. Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices
  5. wikilivres: Non, le nazisme, ce n'est pas le socialisme!