Robert Verdier

Robert Jean Verdier (born November 28, 1910 in Saint-Girons , † February 27, 2009 in Meyrueis ) was a French politician. In 1946 and from 1951 to 1958 he was a member of the National Assembly .

Start of political career

Verdier was born in the Ariège department in the south of France and was shaped as a small child by the fact that his father lost a leg in the First World War . As a result, he developed a pacifist attitude that was widespread in the years after the war. After graduating from high school in Montpellier , Verdier studied human sciences in Paris , where he was one of the supporters of a socialist student movement and also made friends with Léopold Sédar Senghor . From then on he worked as a teacher and was committed to the SFIO . In the parliamentary elections in 1936 he took part in the election campaign for Paul Boulet , who entered parliament for the first time that year. However, he did not join the SFIO until shortly before the outbreak of World War II , when he was a teacher at a Paris school. When the war broke out, he was mobilized in September 1939. After the occupation of France by the Wehrmacht in 1940, Verdier decided to go underground. In October 1944 he chaired the Congress of Socialists, which had been convened after the liberation in the same year and, among other things, had to decide how to deal with parliamentarians who had voted in 1940 for the enabling law of the Vichy regime . They were almost completely expelled from the party. At the same time, Verdier was appointed to the provisional consultative assembly of France, which should initiate the reorganization of the country. In addition, he was vice secretary of the SFIO and campaigned for an alliance of convenience with the PCF .

Parliamentarian career

In the elections for the second constituent national assembly in June 1946, Verdier ran for the city of Paris in the Seine department and was elected to the transitional parliament. However, he could not be re-elected in the first regular elections in October of the same year because only the first in the département's list succeeded and Verdier had previously let Paul Rivet go first. In the following elections in 1951, Verdier topped the list and managed to return to parliament. In January 1956 he was re-elected, whereupon he was elected vice-president of the socialist faction in February. On May 1, 1958, in the National Assembly, he was one of the opponents of the law that gave Charles de Gaulle powers and thus the establishment of the Fifth Republic . Verdier first failed in re-election in 1958 and ran unsuccessfully in 1962, 1967 and 1968. After the dissolution of the SFIO and the founding of the PS , he faced the electorate for the last time in the Gard department in southern France , but was again unable to celebrate his entry into parliament. He died in 2009 at the age of 98.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Base de données historique des anciens députés , assemblee-nationale.fr