The Popular Front's interior minister, hounded to death by the far-right press
A Socialist politician, mayor of Lille, and Blum's interior minister. In the strike wave of June 1936 he refused to clear the occupied factories by force, and he carried out the dissolution of the far-right leagues, the first item of the Popular Front programme. When the far-right weekly Gringoire barraged him with a fabricated story of desertion in the First World War, a military court of honour and an overwhelming vote of the Chamber cleared him twice over; the campaign did not stop, and on 17 November he took his own life at his home in Lille. Hundreds of thousands came to his funeral, and his death set off the debate on legislating against press defamation.
Career Timeline
- 1890–1914Socialist student politics in Lille; party journalist
- 1914–1918Captured retrieving a comrade's body; German prison camps
- 1925–1936Mayor of Lille
- 1928–1936Deputy; leader of the SFIO's Nord federation
- 1936.06Interior minister: no force against the occupations; dissolves the leagues
- 1936.07–11Gringoire's fabricated desertion campaign; cleared by a court of honour and the Chamber
- 1936.11.17Takes his life in Lille; vast crowds at his funeral