Maurice Thorez
Maurice Thorez (pronunciation: [ mɔˈʀis tɔˈʀɛːz ]; born April 28, 1900 in Noyelles-Godault , Département Pas-de-Calais ; † July 11, 1964 while crossing the Black Sea ) was a French politician who lived from 1930 to 1964 General Secretary of the Parti communiste français (PCF) and Vice Prime Minister of his country from 1946 to 1947.
Life
Born into a family of miners , Thorez worked in a mine at the age of twelve and later as a construction worker. In 1919 he was already a member of the militants in the SFIO . After the Party Congress of Tours in 1920 he joined the Communists and soon took up important posts. In the same year he began his military service. In 1923 he became secretary of the communist federation of the Pas-de-Calais department , and a year later he became secretary of the northern region. In 1925, after a brief flirtation with the left inner-party opposition, he became a member of the Politburo of the PCF. In 1926 he became organizational secretary of his party. Between 1925 and 1926 he was actively involved against the war in Morocco . Between 1929 and 1930 he served a prison sentence for provoking military disobedience.
In 1930 Thorez was elected General Secretary of the PCF and enjoyed the support of Josef Stalin , whose fight against Leon Trotsky and the secession brought about by Trotsky supported Thorez. In 1932 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the constituency of Ivry-sur-Seine , which sent him to the provisional consultative assembly. He was later re-elected to the constituent national assembly in the Seine constituency , to which he belonged from November 10, 1932 until his death. While he explicitly named the Socialist Party as an enemy in January 1934, Thorez signed a pact six months later with the SFIO and the Parti Radical Socialiste on the formation of the Popular Front . As a result of the deep economic depression, the Popular Front came to power under Prime Minister Léon Blum , who was supported by Thorez , in which it introduced important social reforms, such as vacation for workers. Because of the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, the strengthened PCF was expelled from the Popular Front government under the leadership of Thorez. Tensions in the French population on the eve of the war had risen sharply. Right-wing circles planned attacks on left-wing politicians and trade unionists.
On October 4, 1939, shortly after the beginning of the war against Germany , Thorez, who was serving as a reservist in the 3rd Pioneer Regiment in Arras , deserted on orders from Moscow and fled to Moscow via Belgium. On November 29, 1939, a military court sentenced him to six years' imprisonment, and his French citizenship was revoked. In Moscow he was active in the Communist International and in 1943 participated in the dissolution of the Comintern.
After the liberation , after a pardon from General de Gaulle's provisional government , he returned to France on November 29, 1944, where he again took over the leadership of the PCF. He led the PCF on the path of the parliamentary struggle for power and made sure that the communist partisans surrendered their weapons to the Resistance . After his re-election as a member of the two constituencies in 1945, de Gaulle appointed him to his cabinet as Minister of State without portfolio in November 1945, where he worked on the law on the status of civil servants until January 1946. In the Félix Gouin , Georges Bidault and Paul Ramadier governments of the Fourth Republic with the Socialists, he became Deputy Prime Minister. Thorez took an active part in the post-war reconstruction of France alongside other political movements, using all his influence. As the Cold War began , the US government exerted massive pressure on the French government through the Marshall Plan to exclude the communist ministers from the government. But tensions between the communist and other ministers over economic and colonial policy, especially in Indochina, also grew. Finally, the controversy over the wage freeze during post-war hyperinflation contributed to the resignation of Thorez and the other communist ministers in May 1947. In the same year he married Jeannette Vermeersch , who had been a Communist Party member in the National Assembly since 1945 .
In 1950 he was surprised by a blood disease, whereupon he sought treatment in the Soviet Union . Under his leadership, the PCF enjoyed widespread popular support, but this declined as a result of the political process in the 1950s. When Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958 , the PCF suddenly lost 10 seats in the National Assembly, Thorez, however, retained his. Although his health deteriorated noticeably, he kept the leadership of the KPF until shortly before his death in 1964. After his resignation, the PCF elected him its honorary chairman. He died on a trip to the Black Sea in Turkey on board the "Latwija". His successor was Waldeck Rochet .
During the 34 years at the helm of the PCF, Maurice Thorez was ambitious and only opposed the Politburo once, actively advocating his opposition to the war in Morocco and paying a fine to avoid imprisonment, which he demanded, against the instructions Self-criticism carried out bored. Otherwise he was without great scruples, around 1930 when Barbé and Célor, two functionaries of the communist youth organization Jeunesses Communistes , were excluded , whose ultra-left course he had first supported. Subsequently, however, he blamed them for the high membership losses from 55,000 to 25,000 from 1927. Thorez was a pragmatic strategist in the alliance with the SFIO in the Popular Front and an absolute follower of Stalin, carried out orders from Moscow and the Comintern and blinded himself to the Stalinist crimes. For a long time Thorez was opposed to the process of de-Stalinization that Khrushchev began in 1956.
Honors
The city of Tores in the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast was named after him, as was a foreign language institute in Moscow (now the Moscow State Linguistic University ). In addition to various streets in France and the former Soviet Union, the Central Pioneer Camp in Arendsee ( Magdeburg district ) and the Könneritzstraße in Leipzig were named after him from 1965 to 1991 . A small side street in the Zwickau GDR development area Neuplanitz still bears the name Thorezweg. In Brandenburg an der Havel and in Leipzig there were polytechnic high schools called Maurice Thorez.
Works
- Maurice Thorez: Autobiography: Fils du peuple 1937-1960
- Maurice Thorez: Une politique de grandeur française 1945
literature
- (en) John Bulaitis, Maurice Thorez: A Biography, London, IB Tauris, 2018, 368 p.
- Philippe Robrieux: Maurice Thorez, vie secrète et vie publique. Fayard, 1975.
Web links
- Literature by and about Maurice Thorez in the catalog of the German National Library
- Newspaper article about Maurice Thorez in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- Maurice Thorez Marxists Internet Archive (biography in French)
- Laurent Vialette: Thorez Maurice École normal supérieure Paris (biography in French)
Individual evidence
- ^ Julian Jackson: The Popular Front in France. Defending Democracy, 1934-38 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1988, p. 22
Ludovic-Oscar Frossard (1921–1923) | Albert Treint (1923–1924, interim ) | Louis Sellier (1923–1924, interim ) | Pierre Semard (1924–1929) | Collective Secretariat (1929–1930): Henri Barbé , Pierre Célor , Maurice Thorez , Benoît Frachon , Jacques Duclos , Eugen Fried | Maurice Thorez (1930–1964) | Waldeck Rochet (1964–1972) | Georges Marchais (1972-1994) | Robert Hue (1994-2001) | Marie-George Buffet (2001–2010) | Pierre Laurent (2010-2018) Fabien Roussel (from 2018)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Thorez, Maurice |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French politician (Parti communiste francais), member of the National Assembly |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 28, 1900 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Noyelles-Godault , Pas-de-Calais department |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 11, 1964 |
| Place of death | Black Sea |