Pierre Cot
Pierre Jules Cot (born November 20, 1895 in Grenoble , † August 21, 1977 in Coise-Saint-Jean-Pied-Gauthier , Savoie department ) was a French socialist politician of the Third , Fourth and Fifth Republic . From 1933 to 1938 he was a minister in several cabinets, including twice aviation minister. Because of his resolute anti-fascism in the 1930s, his political closeness to the Soviet Union and his exposed position in the development of the French air forces , which were unsuccessful in the 1940s , he was the target of bitter hostility.
Life
Early years
Pierre Cot was born in 1895 into a Savoy family whose members had held various elected mandates for three generations; his grandfather and father, moderate Republicans, had both been mayors of their hometown of Coise-Saint-Jean-Pied-Gauthier . Pierre Cot was raised Catholic ; in Grenoble , where his father had been a sales representative, he attended the Notre-Dame ecclesiastical school. He then began studying law in Grenoble, too . Cot has been interested in politics from a very early age. He was active as a member of the conservative Catholic youth association Association catholique de la jeunesse française , became deputy chairman of the Catholic student association Conférence Saint-Hugues in 1913 and founded several Catholic working groups. At that time he was already very interested in social issues.
During World War I he volunteered and took part in the battles of Verdun and the Chemin des Dames . He was awarded the Croix de guerre and made an officer of the Legion of Honor for his military services . After the war he completed his studies in law and political science in Paris with a doctorate . In 1921 he became a lawyer and first secretary of the Lawyers' Conference at the Paris Court of Appeal. In 1922 he acquired the Agrégation and became a university professor at the Faculty of Law in Rennes . Raymond Poincaré appointed him legal advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Cot was the youngest in this position. In 1924, Poincaré also persuaded him to run for a seat in parliament for the first time on a list of moderate rights. The candidacy was unsuccessful.
Political offices in the Third Republic
After the failed parliamentary candidacy in 1924, Pierre Cot gradually turned to the political left. In 1926 he joined the Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste , the radical socialists. For this he stood in the parliamentary elections in April 1928 in the constituency of Chambéry 2. He prevailed in the second ballot and entered the Chamber of Deputies , which he was to belong to for the Savoie department without interruption until the war . 33-year-old Cot had not yet held an elected mandate, not even at the local level.
As a supporter of the League of Nations , he often stayed at its headquarters in Geneva and, with the support of Aristide Briand and Joseph Paul-Boncour, became a representative of France in the organization.
After he had successfully defended his mandate in the parliamentary elections in May 1932, he became State Secretary (Sous-Secrétaire d'État) in the Foreign Ministry in the cabinet of Joseph Paul-Boncour on December 18, 1932 . After his resignation on January 28, 1933, he continued to run the business until he became Minister of Aviation in the Daladier I cabinet on January 31, 1933 . The office he had taken over from Paul Painlevé , he kept in four rapidly changing, successive cabinets; apart from the first Daladier government, these were the cabinets of Albert Sarraut (I), Camille Chautemps (II) and the second Daladier cabinet. When Édouard Daladier resigned after a few days because of the unrest of February 6, 1934 , Cot lost his ministry - his successor was Victor Denain - and returned as a member of the Chamber of Deputies. In 1936 he was re-elected in the first ballot.
Since the mid-1930s, Pierre Cot became a prominent member of several organizations backed by the Communist International (Comintern), such as the "Defense Committee of the Ethiopian People" ( Comité de défense du peuple Ethiopia , founded in September 1935) and one year later , in the Rassemblement universel pour la paix ("World Association for Peace"), which he served as chairman. Since 1935 he was a member of the "Association of Friends of the USSR".
On June 4, 1936, in Léon Blum reappointed Aviation Minister in his first cabinet. His head of cabinet was the future head of the Resistance , Jean Moulin . Cot and Moulin had already met in 1928 during Cots parliamentary election campaign in Savoy, where Moulin was sub-prefect of Albertville . After Blum resigned at the end of June 1937, Cot remained minister of aviation in the ensuing Chautemps III government until Chautemps' resignation on January 14, 1938. Subsequently, Cot became trade minister, first in the Chautemps IV cabinet (January 18 to March 10, 1938), then in the Blum II cabinet (until April 8, 1938).
Second World War, Post War and Fourth Republic
From June 1940, Pierre Cot was initially in London . The Vichy regime revoked his political mandates from him, withdrew his French citizenship and confiscated his property. The "Council for Political Justice" (Conseil de justice politique) created by Philippe Pétain ruled that the former Aviation Minister Cot had "betrayed the duties of his official duties". That same year he settled in the United States , his wife's country of origin. There he taught at Yale University and the New School for Social Research and was a member of the Gaullist organization France Forever .
In November 1943 he left the United States to become a member of the Assemblée consultative provisoire convened by the Committee for National Liberation in Algiers . He was a member of this and the subsequent assembly convened in Paris from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946 he was a member of the Savoie department in the two constituent national assemblies . He was then a member of the National Assembly in the Fourth Republic , initially from 1946 to 1951 again for the Savoien department.
After falling out with the Radical Socialists , he and Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie founded a party closely related to the communist party, the Union progressiste, in December 1950 . With the help of the Communists, he was re-elected to the National Assembly, where he represented the Rhône department from 1951 to 1958 .
In 1953, Pierre Cot received the Stalin Peace Prize .
Fifth Republic
As a determined opponent of de Gaulle, Pierre Cot did not succeed in winning a political mandate at the national level for nine years after de Gaulle took over the government and changed the constitution in 1958. He failed both in the parliamentary elections in November 1958, to which he ran in the Savoyard constituency Chambéry -Süd / Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne , and four years later as a candidate of the Union progressiste in the constituency of La Salpétrière / La Gare des Départements Seine .
During this forced break as a member of the National Assembly, he remained Mayor of Coise-Saint-Jean-Pied-Gauthier (in office from 1929 to 1971) and Member of the General Council of the Savoien department for the canton of Chamoux-sur-Gelon (1954-1973). He also taught at the 6th section of the École pratique des hautes études , the forerunner of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , where he held a chair in the sociology of law and international relations created in 1960, which was the cradle of a Maoist group at the College became. He was also active in various organizations, mostly close to Moscow, such as the "International Association of Democratic Jurists" (Association Internationale des juristes démocrates) , of which he was chairman from 1960 to 1975, the Central Committee of the League for Human Rights ( Ligue des droits de l'Homme ) and in the Mouvement de la Paix . He was director of the monthly published by the World Peace Council ( Conseil mondial de la paix ) magazine Horizons and member of the editorial board of the Cahiers du progressisme . The Soviet Union called him a "great friend of the USSR". In 1961 and 1963 he spent a spa stay in a CPSU sanatorium . Also in 1961 and 1962 he traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the "Soviet Peace Defense Committee". In August 1970, as chairman of the “International Association of Democratic Jurists”, he was awarded an anniversary medal for Lenin's 100th birthday .
In March 1967 he again won a seat in the National Assembly, in the same constituency in the Seine department in which he had failed in the previous legislative period, and with the same political affiliation and renewed support from the CP. His election campaign was focused on the struggle against de Gaulle's personal power and for disarmament. In the National Assembly he was affiliated with the communist faction. With the dissolution of parliament by de Gaulle on May 30, 1968, Cot lost his seat in parliament once and for all; he failed to defend his constituency in the June 1968 elections.
Political positions, achievements, reception
Cot, who had been active in right-wing conservative Catholic circles during his school and university days and at the beginning of his professional career had belonged to the moderate right, has taken increasingly left-wing positions since the 1920s and ended his political career as a member of the extreme left strong ties to communism and the Soviet Union .
Since 1923 he was turned towards pacifism , especially in the environment of the League of Nations , in which and for which he was active. Despite his belief in the institution, he was aware of the fragility of peace in the interwar period and the weak position of the League of Nations. He also recognized the danger that fascism posed to peace in Europe as early as the mid-1920s . From 1930 he warned the French public of the dangers posed by the economic situation in Germany and, in particular, by mass unemployment there.
In the 13 months of Pierre Cots first term as Minister of Aviation 1933-1934 he was responsible for the formation of the French air force as an independent armed forces (Armée de l'air) as well as the national airline Air France, which emerged from the merger of several smaller companies . Cot made his pilot's license and was convinced of the paramount importance of the Air Force in future wars. He met clear resistance from the war and naval ministries. After a trip to Moscow , from which he returned impressed by the Soviet Union , he launched a Franco-Soviet cooperation in the aviation sector.
In his second phase as Minister of Aviation from 1936 to 1938, Pierre Cot drove the nationalization of the aviation industry. In addition, with the knowledge of Prime Minister Léon Blum and with the help of the Ministry of Finance headed by Vincent Auriol , he had aircraft sent as military aid to the republican forces in the Spanish civil war , which was a violation of the official standstill policy of France. This and the continued cooperation with the Soviet Union in the aviation sector earned him fierce criticism not only from the right, but also from parts of his own camp, the radical socialists , from whom more and more alienated the alliance of the left.
Immediately before World War II and during the Vichy regime, Cot was blamed for the structural problems facing the French air force and was identified as one of the culprits for the 1940 defeat. However, aircraft production had not declined during the social conflicts shared by the Popular Front in 1936, despite strikes in the private sector, and in January 1938 production was only 10% behind the plan of the Army General Staff, for which Cot mainly blamed the non-nationalized engine manufacturers . He also suggested that France spent only 22% of its defense budget on air forces versus 34% in Great Britain and that France's economic strength in 1936 was only a third of that of Germany. Above all, however, he attributed the defeat in 1940 to the loss of Czechoslovakia as an ally and the temporary abandonment of the alliance with the Soviet Union , both of which were consequences of the Munich Agreement , which he strongly rejected .
The unrest of February 6, 1934 , for the bloody course of which Pierre Cot was held jointly responsible by the opposition because of his determination to defend order and covered with tirades of hate, even though he had no direct influence on the police operation as aviation minister, led him to believe that the republic was in danger. Together with the external threat to peace from Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, this moved him to strive even more than before to unite the left. He had already entered into dialogue with the SFIO at the beginning of the 1930s . Now he intensified his relations with the Soviet Union and the Comintern . He was also one of the most resolute advocates of the Front Populaire , an alliance of left-wing parties that formed the government from 1936 onwards.
The Munich Agreement recognized as morally reprehensible Cot capitulation to Nazi Germany; it was the climax of his conflict with party leader Édouard Daladier . Likewise, from the beginning of the war it was clear to Cot that the Hitler-Stalin pact , which he had always rejected despite his affinity with the Soviet Union, would not last long. From September 1940 he informed the Comintern that he supported Great Britain in the war against Germany and was ready to take on any useful task. From 1941 he was in close contact with the Soviet embassy in Washington. As a university professor and member of the Gaullist organization France Forever, he campaigned for the USA to enter the war against Nazi Germany . After this was done, Cot publicly urged the opening of a second front against Germany.
In his work Le procès de la République , written in exile, he defended the Third Republic, sharply condemned the Vichy regime and analyzed the defeat of France in 1940. For this he primarily blamed the French bourgeoisie , who according to him had the choice between fascism and democracy have.
Cot's ever-increasing closeness to communism led to a final break with the radical socialists after the Second World War. The party excluded him after he had supported the first draft of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic , written by the SFIO and communists , and brought it into the parliamentary debate. The Union Progressist , which he then newly founded , was regarded as a satellite of the communists , despite Cot's efforts to establish it as an independent link between the PCF and the other parties of the left spectrum.
In the Fifth Republic, too, Pierre Cot hoped for the Union of the Left as the basis for a new popular front. In 1965 he supported the presidential candidacy of François Mitterrand “out of duty and conviction” , including in an article in the daily Le Monde . However, he remained stuck with the thinking shaped by his experiences from the 1930s, was an opponent of European unification for fear of too much influence from Germany and a resurgence of fascism and advocated non-alignment of France and decolonization in the spirit of the Soviet Union . He described the communists as his "friends of the heart and of reason" (" amis par le coeur et par la raison ") . His admiration for Soviet communism only waned with the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the move by the PCF under Georges Marchais to the French policy of nuclear deterrence in 1972 in the joint government program with the Socialist Party .
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Pierre Cot's relationship with Charles de Gaulle was difficult from the start. De Gaulle had already refused in June 1940 in London to entrust him with responsibility in his organization because of Cots' controversy. Cot then traveled on to the United States, where his wife's family lived. His close companion for many years, Jean Moulin, refused his allegiance to him in the autumn of 1941 by not traveling to the United States, contrary to Cot's wishes, but instead subordinating himself directly to de Gaulle in London. Although Cot was then active in a Gaullist organization in American exile and clearly committed himself to de Gaulle and against François Darlan at the end of 1942 , in October 1943 he justified his visa application to the US authorities for the trip to Algiers in all frankness with the fact that he suspect dictatorial intentions in de Gaulle. At the end of the Fourth Republic, Cot finally positioned himself as a staunch opponent of de Gaulle. When he took over the government in 1958, Cot refused to trust the general on June 1, 1958 and declared in front of parliament: “And if General de Gaulle is asked the question: 'Who made you king?', Then he will honestly only be able to answer : 'It was violence and riot, and not the French parliament.' ”A day later, he also voted against the constitutional amendment to introduce the fifth republic with full rights for the president.
Suspicions of espionage for the Soviet Union
In 1987 the book by a British intelligence officer appeared in the USA, in which Pierre Cot was named as an agent of the KGB . The allegations were taken up in 1990 by historian Christopher Andrew and in 1993 by French journalist Thierry Wolton . As a result, there was a debate among historians in France from 1993 to 1995 about the veracity of the allegations. Wolton had stated that he had found documents in Moscow archives in 1992 that proved Cot's activity as an agent for the Soviet Union before and after World War II, interrupted only between August 1939 (Hitler-Stalin Pact) and July 1942.
In response to a request from Cot's family, a commission of historians was set up to clarify the allegations, led by Serge Berstein . She came to the conclusion in January 1995 that there was no source available to her to support the allegations. Thierry Wolton countered with reference to the minutes of a debriefing by the NKVD defector Walter Kriwitzki as well as messages from Soviet diplomats in the USA to Moscow that had been deciphered by British and American agencies. At the time of the Commission's report, these sources were not generally accessible and therefore not verifiable. However, some of them were published in the fall of 1996 and seem to suggest that Cots work for Soviet intelligence services; however, it remains unclear whether this cooperation went beyond communicating political assessments.
Works (excerpt)
- Le Procès de la République . Editions de la Maison française, New York 1944 (French).
- L'Armée de l'air, 1936-1938 . B. Grasset, Paris 1939 (French).
literature
- Sabine Jansen: Pierre Cot. Un antifasciste radical (= Histoire Contemporaine . Volume 36 ). Fayard, Paris 2002, ISBN 978-2-213-61403-8 (French, 682 pages).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Charles-Louis Foulon: COT Pierre (1895–1977). In: Encyclopædia Universalis (online). Retrieved March 10, 2020 (French).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Sabine Jansen: COT Pierre. In: Le Maitron - Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier (Online). Éditions de l'Atelier, March 22, 2019, accessed on March 10, 2020 (French).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Pierre, Jules Cot. In: Base de données des députés français depuis 1789. National Assembly (France) , accessed on March 10, 2020 (French).
- ^ Pierre Péan : Vies et morts de Jean Moulin . Fayard, 2014, ISBN 2-213-64470-5 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ a b c Guillaume Piketty: Sabine Jansen, Pierre Cot. Un antifasciste radical . In: Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine . tape 53 , no. 3 . Belin, 2006, ISBN 2-7011-4343-8 , ISSN 0048-8003 , pp. 211 (French, full text on cairn.info - book review).
- ^ Pierre Péan: La rupture avec Pierre Cot. In: lexpress.fr . November 19, 1998, accessed March 25, 2020 (French).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cot, Pierre |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cot, Pierre Jules (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French socialist politician of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 20, 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Grenoble |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 21, 1977 |
| Place of death | Coise-Saint-Jean-Pied-Gauthier , Savoie department |