Maurice Thorez | |
|---|---|
 Thorez in 1936 | |
| Deputy Prime Minister of theProvisional Government of the French Republic | |
| In office 22 January 1947 – 4 May 1947 | |
| Prime Minister | Paul Ramadier |
| Succeeded by | Pierre-Henri Teitgen |
| In office 24 June 1946 – 28 November 1946 | |
| Prime Minister | Georges Bidault |
| In office 26 January 1946 – 12 June 1946 | |
| Prime Minister | Félix Gouin |
| Minister of State | |
| In office 22 January 1947 – 4 May 1947 | |
| Prime Minister | Paul Ramadier |
| In office 21 November 1945 – 20 January 1946 | |
| Prime Minister | Charles de Gaulle |
| General Secretary of theFrench Communist Party | |
| In office 18 July 1930 – 17 May 1964 | |
| Preceded by | Pierre Semard |
| Succeeded by | Jacques Duclos(interim; 1950–1953) Waldeck Rochet |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1900-04-28)28 April 1900 |
| Died | 11 July 1964(1964-07-11) (aged 64) |
| Political party | PCF |
| Other political affiliations | SFIO(1919–1920) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
| Signature | .jpg) |
Maurice Thorez (French:[mɔʁistɔʁɛz,moʁ-]; 28 April 1900 – 11 July 1964) was a French politician and longtime leader of theFrench Communist Party (PCF) from 1930 until his death. He also served asDeputy Prime Minister of France from 1946 to 1947.[1]
Thorez, born inNoyelles-Godault,Pas-de-Calais, became a coal miner at the age of 12. He joined theFrench Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1919 and was imprisoned several times for his political activism. After the 1920 split in the SFIO led to the formation of theFrench Communist Party (PCF) in December 1920, Thorez became party secretary in 1923 and, in 1930, general secretary of the party, a position he held until his death. After he took office as secretary general, he was supported by Soviet leaderJoseph Stalin and theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union. Throughout his tenure, Thorez was aStalinist.[2]
In 1932 Thorez became the companion ofJeannette Vermeersch; they had three sons before marrying in 1947, and remained married until his death.
Thorez was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1932 and reelected in 1936. In 1934, following aComintern directive, he helped form the Popular Front, an alliance between Communists, Socialists, and radical Socialists. The Front, because of strong popular support as France was reeling from the impact of theGreat Depression, won the 1936 election. With the support of the Communists under Thorez, the socialistLéon Blum became Prime Minister of a Popular Front government and managed to enact much of the Front's social-legislation programme. Meanwhile, Thorez presided over massive growth of the Communist Party, beginning with the elections of 1936.[3]
Following theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and the subsequent Soviet response to Germaninvasion of Poland, the Communist Party was against the French war effort against the Soviet Union, because the Daladier government planned sending troops to fight against it. The party was outlawed by the French government. The Party supported theSoviet Union's tactical treaty with Germany in order to direct German aggression away from the USSR and toward theUnited Kingdom and France. For impeding the fight against the Nazis, the Party's publications were banned and many Party members were interned. Thorez himself had his passport revoked. Shortly thereafter, he was drafted.
Following theGerman invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the French Communist Party openly declared it would violently resist the German occupation; even before this, the Party organized a demonstration of thousands of students and workers against the occupation on 11 November 1940, and in May 1941 organized a strike of 100,000 miners in theNord andPas-de-Calais departments. During this time, articles written by and ghostwritten for Thorez appeared frequently in the party's underground newspaper,Humanité Clandestine. Each of these letters was signed 'Maurice Thorez, somewhere in France'. It was not until several years after the war that the party admitted that this was false, and that Thorez had been inMoscow for the entire war. In his absence, the affairs of the PCF and of theFrancs-Tireurs et Partisans, the party's resistance movement, in France were organised by his second in command,Jacques Duclos.
When GeneralCharles de Gaulle'sFree French Forces liberated France in 1944, Thorez received a pardon. After theLiberation, Thorez was ordered by Stalin to lead the PCF immediately after theSecond World War to a non-revolutionary road to power. The instructions were not to seize power as had been done elsewhere, but have the reluctant wartime Communist partisans surrender their weapons, and the party would become a powerful force in the post-war governments since it thought that it would soon win legally.
In November 1944, Thorez returned to France from his exile in the Soviet Union, and in 1945 his citizenship was restored. The PCF emerged from the Second World War as the largest political party in France based on its role in the anti-Nazi resistance movement during the occupation of France, at least after 1941. Thorez was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies and reelected throughout theFourth Republic (1946–1958).
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Forming a popular front with the Socialist Party in the 1945 elections, Thorez becamevice premier of France from 1946 to 1947.
By 1947 a combination of the emergingCold War between theUnited States and the Soviet Union and growing social conflicts in France, linked to the increasing gap between wages and prices, put the three party union (SFIO, PCF andMRP) under heavy pressure, culminating in theMay 1947 crisis. Prime MinisterPaul Ramadier received threats from the United States that the presence of Communist ministers in the government would have consequences, such as the blocking of U.S. aid from the comingMarshall Plan, or worse: "I told Ramadier,"Jefferson Caffery, thenU.S. ambassador to France, wrote in his diary, "no Communists in gov. or else."[4]
Simultaneously, the1947 strikes in France caused rumours to spread among the non-Communist members of the government that the PCF would attempt acoup d'état on 1 May:Jules Moch, SFIO Public Works Minister, claimed to have "certain information" on preparations of a coup by the PCF. Ramadier is alleged to have worked secretly with Georges Revers, the Army Chief of Staff, to set up a secret transport and communications network within the military to safeguard against such a coup, all without the knowledge ofFrançois Billoux, the Communist Minister of Defence.[5] The crisis was also escalated by the beginnings of thecolonial war in Vietnam, with the communist deputies in the National Assembly voting against the war.
Combined, that led Ramadier to look for a pretext to dismiss Thorez and his colleagues from the ruling coalition. On 4 May, the PCF ministers voted against the government overdeflationary policies such as wage and price controls, which was given as the reason for the PCF ministers being forced out of the ruling coalition on 7 May 1947. Thorez later recalled the May 1947 events:
All my colleagues were full of praises and kindnesses for us – they were prodigal with their declarations of appeasement. Ramadier told us: 'I have no reproaches to make of you. You have always been loyal.' AndTeitgen came forward to say 'We shall miss you a lot!' They all threw flowers on us, the better to bury us. I knew that Ramadier was cooking up something bad, but never did I think he'd go this far…[5]
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In 1950, at the height of his popularity among party members, Thorez suffered astroke and remained in the Soviet Union for medical care until 1953. That March, Stalin died and Thorez was a member of the French delegation to Stalin's funeral. During the absence of Thorez, the party wasde facto controlled byJacques Duclos. Thorez resumed his duties upon returning to France. Although his health had deteriorated, Thorez remained party leader until shortly before his death in 1964 on aBlack Sea cruise.
He published in 1937 an autobiography,Fils du peuple (Son of the People, 1938). The book had been written with the help offr:Jean Fréville, who had inserted in the story a passage where the initials of the words formed the phrase "Fréville a écrit ce livre" ("Fréville wrote this book"). The passage, present on pages 36-37 of the first edition, was deleted in the following editions.[6][7]
In 1945, he publishedUne politique de grandeur française (1945; "Politics of French Greatness").
A French research institution linked to the French Communist Party and set up in the mid-1960s was named theInstitut Maurice Thorez. The city ofTorez inUkraine was named after him in 1964. In 2016, the city was given back the former name ofChystyakove by decision of theUkrainian Parliament.[8] TheMoscow State Linguistic University was named theMaurice Thorez Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages (Russian: Московский институт иностранных языков имени Мориса Тореза) between 1964 and 1990.
Les effectifs de la SFIO et du PCF (1913-1939)
| Party political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Secretary General of theFrench Communist Party 1930–1964 Jacques Duclos as acting Secretary General from 1950 to 1953 | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Vacant | Deputy Prime Minister of France 22 January – 4 May 1947 | Succeeded by |
| International | |
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| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
