Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux

Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux (born February 26, 1904 in Paris ; died February 25, 1964 in Lake Pontchartrain , Louisiana ) was a French resistance fighter , politician and suffragette .

Origin, education and family

Marie-Hélène Postel-Vinay was the daughter of Marcel Postel-Vinay and his wife Madeleine (née Delombre). She was one of the first women to attend the Paris School of Political Science , and she also took piano lessons at the École du Louvre . In 1925 she married the lawyer and engineer Pierre Lefaucheux . Due to an accident in her youth, she was unable to have children with him.

Her husband was killed in a car accident in 1955. She was the day before her 60th birthday among the casualties of an aircraft accident: A Douglas DC-8 of Eastern Air Lines crashed on the Eastern Air Lines Flight 304 shortly after takeoff from New Orleans on the flight back to New York because of an error in the trim of the elevator in Lake Pontchartrain. All 58 inmates were killed, in addition to Lefaucheux, the American- German singer and actor Kenneth Spencer .

Occupation and Resistance

During the Second World War , Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux and her husband (like her brother André Postel-Vinay) were active members of the Resistance and made their apartment available as a shelter and headquarters for fighters. They belonged to the Organization civile et militaire (OCM) branch of the Resistance. From the spring of 1942 they had connections to prisoners of war through Yvonne Churn and were able to smuggle messages in and out of prisons. This led to the establishment of the COSOR committee within the Resistance Council . In March 1944, Lefaucheux became a representative in the Committee for the Liberation of Paris. Her husband was arrested by the German security service in June 1944 and taken to Buchenwald . She managed to move him to Metz , where the couple met again in September after the German withdrawal.

Political life after World War II

For her actions in the resistance she received the Order of the Legion of Honor , the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance . Her husband was appointed chairman of the Renault automaker after the war ; she herself was sent to the constituent assembly of the Provisional Government of the French Republic as a representative of the OCM and for Aisne on the part of the MRP and was also elected to the city council of Paris, where she became vice-president. After the new constitution was passed in 1946, Lefaucheux was elected to the First Council of the Republic (Senate) of the Fourth Republic. In 1947 she gave up the council seat in favor of a seat in the Assembly of the Union française .

As the only woman in the first French delegation to the United Nations , she attended the first General Assembly of the United Nations in London in 1946. She was one of the fifteen founding members of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women within the United Nations Economic and Social Council . She chaired this commission from 1948 to 1952. Until 1959 she was a French delegate to the United Nations.

She also founded the Association of Women of the French Union ( Association des Femmes de l'Union Française ), which wanted to campaign for the welfare of Algerian and African French women within the (short-lived) Union. From 1954 to 1964 she was President of the National Council of French Women ( Conseil National des femmes françaises ), the French umbrella organization in the network of the International Women's Council . She was also active in this international body and served as ICW President from 1957 to 1963.

Web links

• Photo of Lefaucheux with UN staff on July 19, 1948

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 58 ON JET KILLED IN CRASH IN LAKE AT NEW ORLEANS. The New York Times , February 26, 1964, accessed November 1, 2018 . 
2. ^ Accident data set. National Transportation Safety Board , accessed October 28, 2018 . 
3. ^ Assemblée nationale: Biography (fr.)