Maurice Couve de Murville (politician)

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Maurice Couve de Murville (right) at a banquet in Paris in February 1968

Maurice Couve de Murville (born January 24, 1907 in Reims , † December 24, 1999 in Paris ) was a conservative French politician .

Life

Maurice Couve de Murville, son of an old Protestant family, studied law in Paris and turned to politics at an early age. As early as 1930 he was involved in the committee to review the financial situation .

From 1937 to 1940 he was director of the foreign department of the Ministry of Finance .

After the defeat in 1940 , Maurice Couve de Murville was a member of the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden . In the Vichy regime , he was director of external finance and foreign exchange.

After the Anglo-Americans landed in North Africa in November 1942, Maurice Couve de Murville changed sides in March 1943. He was one of the few officials in the Vichy government who placed himself in the service of General Henri Giraud in Algiers . On June 7, 1943, he was appointed Treasurer of the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN).

In February 1945 he became a member of General de Gaulle's provisional government with the rank of ambassador to Italy. In the following years he held other ambassadorial posts for his country, for example in Cairo (1950-1954), with NATO (1954), in Washington (1955-1956) and in Bonn (1956-1958).

With the establishment of the Fifth Republic by Charles de Gaulle , Maurice Couve de Murville became Foreign Minister in 1958 and held this office until 1968. Subsequently, at the suggestion of Georges Pompidou , he became Prime Minister for a year before he devoted himself to politics in the National Assembly and later in the Senate until old age .

The Protestant's cousin of the same name, Maurice Couve de Murville (1929–2007), was Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham .

Political offices

June 1, 1958 to May 31, 1968   Foreign minister
July 10, 1968 to June 20, 1969   Prime Minister (see also Couve de Murville's cabinet )
1968 and 1973 to 1986   MP from Paris and member of the National Assembly , initially for the UDR , later for the RPR
1973 to 1978   Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly
1986 to 1995   Senator from Paris

Books

  • Une politique étrangère 1958–1969 (German: foreign policy 1958–1969 ), 1971.
  • Le monde en face (Eng .: The world vis-à-vis ), 1989.

Quotes

  • From a speech:

"Knowing the right time is half the success."

  • From the book Une politique étrangère 1958–1969 :

“The will means that you control your own fate as best you can, and you can do it better than you might think. You must not let yourself be influenced by internal or external impressions and not - quite simply - by daily events. It is necessary to have a considered, well-planned policy that you determine yourself. Allowing oneself to be influenced in one's politics, by the way, means to be safe from thinking, from any action - and these are the only negatives. "

literature

Web links

Commons : Maurice Couve de Murville  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quotes from Maurice Couve de Murville on zitate.eu.
  2. ↑ Couve de Murville, 1950–1954 Ambassador to Cairo, supported the vision of cooperation between European and Arab states in the Mediterranean region (“Eurabia”) on the basis of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism .
personal data
SURNAME Couve de Murville, Maurice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, member of the National Assembly
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Reims
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1999
Place of death Paris