Michel Maurice-Bokanowski

Michel Maurice-Bokanowski (born November 6, 1912 in Paris ; † May 3, 2005 ibid) was a French politician who was a member of the National Assembly for several years and between 1959 and 1960 State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior. Between 1960 and 1962 he served as Minister of Post and Telecommunications and was subsequently Minister of Industry from 1962 to 1966. In 1968 he became a member of the Senate , to which he was a member for 27 years until 1995.

Life

Professional activities and World War II

Michel Maurice-Bokanowski was the son of the politician Maurice Bokanowski , who was Minister of the Navy in 1924 and Minister of Trade and Industry from 1926 until his death in a plane crash on September 2, 1928. After attending the traditional Lycée Condorcet in 1932, he became an employee of the automobile designer André Citroën and was later head of the service department of the Societé Philips France from 1937 to 1939 . After the start of the Second World War , he was called up for military service in 1939 and, because of his good knowledge of English, was transferred to a school of the British Army where liaison officers were trained.

In June 1940 he participated in the Battle of Dunkirk and left France in the summer of 1940. With the assistance of his stepbrother, the fighter pilot was, he went in 1942 to Algiers , where he a joint Franco-British special unit of the 1st British Army under Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson assigned has been. In this he took part in the Tunisian campaign and was a member of the 1st Division of the Forces françaises libres , where he was first assigned to the naval fusiliers. Afterwards he was in command of a tank unit with which he took part in the battles for Alsace and Lorraine in 1944 .

At the end of the war he was first lieutenant and was honored, among other things, with the Croix de guerre and various mentions in the war report. On October 19, 1945 he was appointed Compagnon des Ordre de la Liberation by General Charles de Gaulle .

Fourth republic

Member of the National Assembly

After the end of the war, Maurice-Bokanowski worked as a manager for various companies and as a consulting engineer. His political career began when he was elected a member of the municipal council of Asnières-sur-Seine in 1947 . He joined the Gaullist Rally of the French People at (RPF) and was its general secretary in the Region Ile-de-France .

In the elections of June 17, 1951, he ran on the list of the RPF for the fifth constituency of the Seine department . He took second place on the list after Edmond Barrachin , who was a member of the National Assembly for the Parti républicain de la liberté (PRL) between 1936 and 1940 and became a member again in 1946. With 97,325 votes, the list won 28.5 percent of the vote and was able to have three members. In his first legislative period, he first became a member of the Economic Committee (Commission des affaires économiques) and in July 1953 a member of the Finance Committee (Commission des finances) , for which he was several times rapporteur on subjects such as the taxation of companies and the working conditions of freelancers.

The elections of January 2, 1956 were troubled as the 1951 split of parties resulted in a large number of electoral lists. For example, Edmond Barrachin, who on March 6, 1956, together with 26 other MPs from the RPF, voted for the appointment of Antoine Pinay as Prime Minister , founded the Action républicaine et sociale (ARS). Like him, Maurice-Bokanowski headed a list supported by the right-wing Center national des indépendants (CNI). As the top candidate of the Républicains sociaux in the fifth constituency of the Seine department, he had to defend his party's positions against the Gaullist-related Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste (RRRS) of Pierre Mendès France , which also ran in his constituency. In the end, he achieved 19,253 of the 422,225 votes cast and was re-elected as close as possible with 4.6 percent of the votes.

Maurice-Bokanowski then became a member of the Committee on Industrial Production and Energy (Commission de la production industrial et de l'énergie) and, in 1957, also a member of the Commissions des pensions and the Committee on Beverages (Commissions des boissons) . During a debate on March 10, 1957, he severely criticized the government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet for its pricing policy, the decline in foreign exchange reserves and the chronic deficit of nationalized companies. Furthermore, on March 13, 1958, he was also the representative of France in the joint parliamentary assembly of the European Communities .

Fifth Republic

Member of Parliament, State Secretary and Minister

In the elections for the first National Assembly of the Fifth French Republic, founded on October 5, 1958, on November 30, 1958, Maurice-Bokanowski ran for the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR) in the 37th constituency of the Seine department and was again elected to the Elected MPs. On January 20, 1959, he took over the role of State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior in the government of Prime Minister Michel Debré , making him one of the closest collaborators to Interior Minister Jean Berthoin and his successor Pierre Chatenet . In 1959 he became mayor of Asnières-sur-Seine for the first time and held this office for 25 years until 1994.

As part of a cabinet reshuffle, Debré appointed him on February 4, 1960 to succeed Bernard Cornut-Gentille as Minister of Post and Telecommunications (Ministre des Postes et Télécommunications) . He remained in this ministerial office until the end of Debre's term of office on April 14, 1962.

In the first government of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou that followed , Maurice-Bokanowski took over the office of Minister of Industry (Ministre de l'Industrie) on April 15, 1962 . He held this position in Pompidou's second government until January 8, 1966. In the meantime he was re-elected as a member of the National Assembly in the elections of November 18, 1962 for the Union pour la Nouvelle République-Union Démocratique du Travail (UNR-UDT) in the 37th constituency of the Seine department, but placed this mandate on January 6 1963 after being appointed to the government again.

senator

Maurice-Bokanowski was elected to the Senate for the first time in the elections of September 22, 1968 as a candidate for the Union pour la défense de la République (UDR) in the Hauts-de-Seine department . After his entry into the Senate, he became a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and the Armed Forces on October 8, 1968 (Commission des affaires étrangères, de la defense et des forces armées) . During the following period he joined the Union des démocrates pour la République (UDR), founded in 1971 , before moving to the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) founded by Jacques Chirac in 1976 . During this time he also became a member of a committee of inquiry on May 17, 1977, which dealt with proceedings against Senator Georges Dardel .

In the elections on September 25, Maurice-Bokanowski was re-elected as a member of the Senate for the RPR in the Hauts-de-Seine department. He was then also confirmed as a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and the Armed Forces, before becoming a member of the Culture Committee (Commission des affaires culturelles) on October 7, 1980 . At the same time, on October 1, 1981, he became a member of a joint committee of the Senate and the National Assembly to examine the state broadcasting monopoly, and on April 13, 1982 of a special committee to examine research and technological development in France. On October 5, 1983, he switched to the finance committee (Commission des finances) and was also a member of a special committee from May 27 to June 14, 1983 to investigate the possibilities of hosting a world exhibition . Later, because of this legislative period, he became a member of a control committee for the distribution of frequency bands for public broadcasting on May 2, 1985 and on November 14, 1985 a member of the administrative board of public broadcasters.

On September 28, 1986, Maurice-Bokanowski was re-elected Senator as a candidate of the RPR in the Hauts-de-Seine department and was then re-elected to the Culture Committee on October 9, 1986, before becoming a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee on October 5, 1989 ( Commission des affaires étrangères) . He was a member of this committee until he left the Senate on October 1, 1995.

Web links

• Entry on the homepage of the National Assembly
• Entry on the Senate homepage
• French Ministeries (rulers.org)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry on the homepage of the National Assembly (1st legislative period)
2. ^ Debré cabinet
3. ↑ Pompidou I cabinet
4. ↑ Pompidou II cabinet
5. ↑ Entry on the homepage of the National Assembly (2nd legislative period)