Marcel Paul

Marcel Paul

Marcel Paul (born July 12, 1900 in Paris , † November 11, 1982 in L'Île-Saint-Denis ) was a French politician ( PCF ) and trade unionist. He fought in the Resistance and was Minister for Industry in three successive governments.

Youth and early years

Marcel Paul was a foundling who was found on July 12, 1900 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris on Place Denfert-Rochereau . The child was then placed in care in the municipality of Moncé-en-Belin . There Marcel Paul attended the entire primary school and began to work on a farm in the Sarthe department at the age of 13 . At the age of 15 he began to get involved with the Young Socialists against the First World War . After he was drafted into service in the Navy, he took part in a sailors' uprising in Brest, and then the seafarers' resistance to the forcible commissioning of a power station in Saint-Nazaire that was on strike by workers .

After his demobilization , he first lived in Saint-Quentin , where he found work and access to trade union activities in the construction industry. Then he was hired as an electrician for the municipal transport company Société des transports en commun de la région parisienne . He had previously learned this profession in the Navy. From 1923 he was a member of the French Communist Party .

Between 1931 and 1936 Marcel Paul was General Secretary of the Confederation of Trade Unions for Public Services Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU). He then became deputy and from 1937 first secretary of the electricity workers' union, Fédération réunifiée de l'éclairage . In 1932 he was assaulted while leaving a meeting of the nursing staff at the Hôtel-Dieu de Marseille hospital . Edmée Dijoud, a nurse who accompanied him, died in the attack. As a close colleague of Maurice Thorez , he was set up by the Communist Party for the municipal elections in the 14th arrondissement of 1935, where he was elected to office together with Léon Mauvais .

Resistance and Deportation

In 1939 Paul was mobilized for the infantry because the navy refused to call him up. After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact , he, like other communists, was removed from positions of responsibility in the Fédération de l'éclairage. Clément Delsol took over his function in the union, which was striving for a legal status. After the Germans invaded France , he was captured, but managed to escape twice. He made his way to Brittany , where he coordinated the interregional work of the Communist Party with Auguste Havez . First he collected weapons and explosives in order to set up temporary storage. Then in November 1940 he received an order from the party leadership to return to Paris, but was still responsible for actions in the West until January 1941. He organized energy supply and public service workers in the Paris region into action groups. As an employee of the underground group Organization spéciale, he learned how to handle explosives in July 1941, together with France Bloch-Sérazin , and in August 1941 he undertook a failed attack on a German service train.

In November 1941, Paul was arrested after being denounced . The first stages of his imprisonment were a police station, the Hôpital de Saint-Denis - where he was tortured and tried to take his own life - and the La Santé prison . He was then sentenced to four years in prison by a special tribunal . In the summer of 1943 he and other prisoners were transferred to the former abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontevraud , which served as a prison . When he was transferred to the Germans in February 1944, another attempt to escape failed. On April 27, 1944, his transport reached the extermination camp in Auschwitz , where a number was stabbed in him. On May 14th, the French prisoners were transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar .

As a high-ranking political prisoner, Marcel Paul was subject to relatively mild prison conditions. Together with André Leroy (1913–1982) and Jean Lloubes (1909–1994) he organized further underground resistance in Buchenwald in the so-called “comité des intérêts français”, of which he was a member of the board of five. His room for maneuver essentially also comprised the passing on of orders from the camp management. This enabled him to save numerous fellow prisoners, such as Marcel Dassault , from certain death, but also meant that he had to decide on the allocation of hard labor. One of the victims was Resistance member Jean Bertin. Camp survivor Pierre-Henri Teitgen recalled Paul's ambivalent position in an article published in January 1985 in the newspaper Ouest France . According to the unanimous statements of contemporary witnesses, Paul made an important contribution to the uprising of the camp inmates in April 1945, which preceded the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by the 3rd US Army .

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Paul was quickly returned to France as a political figure, but after a brief stay in Paris he soon returned to Buchenwald to speed up the return of the other French survivors. At the 10th Congress of the Communist Party in Paris in June 1945, Marcel Paul was elected to the party leadership. He resumed his trade union work and was appointed a member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly ( Assemblée consultative provisoire ). In the same year he founded the veterans and survivors organization Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes (FNDIRP) with Henri Manhès , which Marcel Paul held until his death. The bourgeois entrepreneur and baptized Jew Marcel Dassault, whose political standpoints were very far from those of Marcel Paul, was able to survive in Buchenwald, despite the differences, thanks to Paul's protection. He later supported the FNDIRP with extensive donations.

post war period

After an intra-party conflict about Georges Guingouin , who was confronted with accusations in the central French region of Limousin , Paul was elected in October 1945 in the Haute-Vienne department as the undisputed substitute for the constituent assembly. He received together with Alphonse Denis (1906-1997) a share of the vote of 33.95%, but he remained behind the result of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), under the direction of Adrien Tixier , which with a share of 50.53% won three parliamentary seats. Marcel Paul became a member of the Committee for National Infrastructure, Production and Communication, as well as the Working Groups for Home Affairs, Public Health, Prisoners of War and Deported Persons, and the Standing Commission for the Planning of Social and Economic Policy. On August 3, 1945, he voted in favor of the subsequent nationalization of gas and electricity.

On November 21, 1945 he was appointed Minister of Industry by Charles de Gaulle , an office which he took over from Robert Lacoste and which he held in the subsequent governments of Félix Gouin and Georges Bidault until December 1946. On December 2, 1945, he voted for the nationalization of the Banque de France and other credit institutions. On March 27, 1946, he submitted a bill for the formation of the state-owned companies Électricité de France - Gaz de France , which came to a vote on April 8, 1946. Thanks to the efforts of Marcel Paul, the new public company assumed a role model function. As part of the nationalization, he founded the Caisse centrale d'activités sociales (CCOS) on April 8, 1946 , which provided employees with comprehensive social benefits, such as meals at work and holiday offers. The welfare work was financed with a guaranteed share of 1% of the profit after deduction of VAT from the sale of gas and electricity. As a result, accusations were raised on various occasions that the CCOS was secretly financing the CGT union. As Minister of Industry, Paul initiated several draft laws, including, for example, labor law provisions on mining and the associated processing companies, the election procedure for professional associations, and access to the work as a hairdresser. On April 19, 1946, he voted for the adoption of a constitutional article on the nationalization of insurance companies.

In the elections for the 2nd National Constituent Assembly in June 1946, Marcel Paul was again put up as a candidate of the Communist Party for the Haute-Vienne department. The communist list achieved the best result there this time, with 66,815 out of a total of 175,214 valid votes. Marcel Paul and Alphonse Denis were confirmed in office. The SFIO, on the other hand, received only two seats with 63,942 votes. The SFIO MPs Jean Le Bail (1904–1965) and André Foussat (1911–1969) were able to keep in office. The other seat for the department went to Robert Schmidt (1909–1955) from the Mouvement républicain populaire , who received 36,977 votes in the first place on the list.

In November 1946 Paul was elected to the National Assembly. He became a member of a committee on industrial issues. He gave up the management of the ministry the following month. After the government had consisted only of socialists for a month , individual posts were then filled again with communists. Marcel Paul came away empty-handed. From January 1947, he therefore resumed his old work at the head of the CGT union. Formally, he held this position until 1966, but in 1963 he was de facto replaced as head of the energy section.

With the takeover of the SFIO politician Paul Ramadier in January 1947, the communists' participation in government ended again the following May. Marcel Paul was President of the CCOS at that time. He retained this function until the organization was dissolved on February 17, 1951 at the instigation of René Pleven . The next day, police stormed the CCOS offices at 22 rue de Calais in the 9th arrondissement of Paris and evicted the employees.

On April 20, 1948, Paul resigned from his office in the National Assembly and was no longer a candidate in the 1951 elections. After internal party quarrels about the social services he founded at Électricité de France and Gaz de France, Paul was no longer elected to the central committee of his party in 1964. The two state-owned companies were again privately run from 1951 and the government made Marcel Paul's union expulsion a condition for a renewed union presence in the EDF-GDF companies, which the CGT management accepted in 1962.

In recognition of his achievements for France, Marcel Paul was appointed Officier de la Légion d'Honneur in April 1982 and in a public ceremony on November 11, 1982 on the Place Charles-de-Gaulle , i.e. under the Arc de Triomphe de l 'Étoile , awarded the medal. Immediately after the event, he felt very unwell and died a few hours later in his home in L'île-Saint-Denis, near Paris.

Two years later, after the publication of an article by the author and local politician Laurent Wetzel ( CDS ) in the Courrier des Yvelines newspaper, a dispute broke out over the role of Paul in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the article, Wetzel stated that he was not ready to take part in the inauguration act for the naming of a Marcel-Paul-Strasse in his community. He wrote: «As soon as he was deported to Buchenwald, Marcel Paul was accepted into the internal management of the camp. He thus decided the fate - that is, life and death - of numerous comrades. In exercising this function, he mainly took into account the interests of his party. " The Dora Buchenwald Association in the veterans and survivors organization Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes responded to the allegation with a lawsuit of defamation . The same allegations were made against Paul in 1946. Several former deportees were questioned during the trial at the Versailles court . On January 17, 1985, Laurent Wetzel was acquitted of the lawsuit. The court found itself unable to judge historical truths. Wetzel was later elected mayor of the municipality of Sartrouville and ordered the renaming of the local rue Marcel Paul and numerous other streets that were named after communist politicians.

Honors

• Marcel Paul was an officer in the French Legion of Honor .
• Numerous streets in France bear his name.
• The German city of Weimar named a street after him in GDR times.

literature

• Pierre Durand : Marcel Paul: vie d'un "pitau". , Temps actuels, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-201-01635-6 (French)