Charles Trochu | |
|---|---|
 Charles Trochu in Le Matin (1942) | |
| Born | 1898 Chile |
| Died | 1961 |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Known for | Secretary General of the National Front |
Charles Trochu (1898-1961) was a French businessman, architect and right-wing politician. He was Secretary General of the National Front and president of the Municipal Council of Paris.
Charles Trochu was born in Chile in 1898 of a Breton father and a Basque mother.[ citation needed ] He was a descendant of the Napoleonic General Jean Baptiste Kléber. His grandfather was General Louis Jules Trochu, who had been President of the Government of National Defense during the Franco-Prussian War. [1] World War I began in July 1914. Trochu joined the army when he was seventeen, and was wounded and decorated. [2] He was taken prisoner by the Germans. [3]
After the war Trochu became a wholesale cod merchant. [4] He was also involved in architecture.
Bonapartist in background, Trochu was close to the Action Française of Charles Maurras, and participated in all the squabbles of the extreme right in the 1930s. [5]
In 1932 he was the Jeunesses Patriotes candidate for the Paris municipal council. [4] Violently antisemitic, he called Jews the "scum of the orient." [6] In March 1934 he was director of journal La Révolution nationale and an executive committee member of the Democratic Republican Alliance. [7] On 7 May 1934 he was chosen as the first secretary-general of the National Front. The Croix-de-Feu did not join. [8] However, it was indirectly associated. [9]
In 1935 he was elected municipal councilor for the Auteuil quarter of Paris, a position he continued to hold until being made president of the council in 1941. [3] In 1936 Trochu and 29 other councilors proposed building underground highways so the population could be evacuated safely in case of an air attack with chemical weapons. [10] Trochu was president of the National Association of Returned Officers, a veterans' organization. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he used this position to recruit Frenchmen willing to fight for the right-wing forces led by General Francisco Franco. He and his private secretary, Jacques Pecheron, arranged for these men to travel to Bordeaux to join the Jeanne d'Arc Battalion being assembled by Henri Bonneville de Marsagny. [11] [12]
In October 1938 he called for Jewish refugees from Austria who had recently arrived in Paris to be expelled from the city. [13] In 1938, Trochu attacked the pacifists and anti-militarists such as Jean Zay and Léon Blum who refuse to take the rearmament of Germany seriously. Thus, during the municipal council meeting of 21 December 1938, he spoke out against "ignoble Jews" such as Bernard Lecache and his friends of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, which, among other infamies, trample on military honor." [14] On 4 March 1939 in the Salle Wagram he gave Charles Maurras his sword as an academician, funded by national subscription and designed by Maxime Real del Sarte.
World War II broke out in September 1939. Trochu volunteered in 1940, and was mentioned in dispatches. [15] He was taken prisoner, but was released after a short captivity. [16]
A law of 16 October 1941 gave a new administrative organization to the City of Paris and the Department of the Seine under the traditional name of the Municipal Council, but with appointed rather than elected members. [17] The PUP members remained in office, but new councilors were selected from the syndicalist workers' movement to replace the communists, an illegal party since 1940, and socialists who had been excluded because they were Jews or Freemasons. [18] On 3 October 1941 Trochu was named president of the new assembly, before the law officially came into effect. [3] In 1942 Trochu and Le Corbusier published a special issue of Architecture et urbanisme devoted to Le Corbusier's work. [19]
Truchu was not considered to be conformist with the Vichy regime, and continued to push for the independence of France. [20] The assembly was given little scope for political action. [21] In 1943 Trochu was removed from office as president. A new administration was named on 30 April 1943 headed by Pierre Taittinger. [22] Taittinger said later that Trochu combined the most stunning imagination with the most rigorous punctuality, and that the Municipal Council of Paris owed much to him. [16]
After leaving office, Trochu no longer attended council meetings. [22] Trochu managed to leave France, and arrived in allied-occupied Algiers on 12 January 1944. [23] He was dropped from the council on 10 June 1944, shortly before the liberation of Paris. [22] Presented as a veteran and a former member of the resistance, he testified in favor of Pétain during his trial in 1945. [24] During the trial Trochu also said that he had "nothing but admiration" for the communists, whom he had bitterly opposed in the 1930s. [25]
Charles Trochu died in 1961.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, politician, poet, and critic. He was an organizer and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that is monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-communist, anti-Masonic, anti-Protestant, and anti-Semitic views, though he was highly critical of Nazism, referring to it as "stupidity". His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, with a major tenet of his views being that "a true nationalist places his country above everything".
The oldest traces of human occupation in Paris are human bones and evidence of an encampment of hunter-gatherers dating from about 8000 BC, during the Mesolithic period. Between 250 and 225 BC, the Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, settled on the banks of the Seine, built bridges and a fort, minted coins, and began to trade with other river settlements in Europe.
Maurice Pujo was a French journalist and co-founder of the nationalist and monarchist Action Française movement. He became the leader of the Camelots du Roi, the youth organization of the Action Française which took part in many right-wing demonstrations in the years before World War II (1939–45). After World War II he was imprisoned for collaborationist activity.
Pierre-Charles Taittinger was the founder of the Taittinger champagne house and chairman of the municipal council of Paris in 1943–1944 during the German occupation of France, in which position he played a role during the Liberation of Paris.
Henri Vaugeois was a French teacher and journalist who was one of the founders of right-wing nationalist Action Française movement.
Antoine Redier was a French writer who was leader of the far-right Légion organization in the 1920s.
Albert Laprade was a French architect, perhaps best known for the Palais de la Porte Dorée. During a long career he undertook many urban renewal projects as well as major industrial and commercial works. A skilled artist, he published a series of sketch books of architecture in France and other Mediterranean countries.
Pierre Winter was a French doctor and hygienist.
François de Pierrefeu was a French engineer and urban planner.
René-Charles Platon was a French admiral who was responsible for the Colonial Ministry under the Vichy government. He was a passionate supporter of the Révolution nationale of Vichy France, which he wanted to export to the colonies. He was hostile to elected bodies, anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic and supported the back-to-the-soil movement. He saw Britain as the enemy of France. After the Allied invasion of Normandy, he was captured by French partisans in the summer of 1944, given a summary trial, and executed.
Pierre Ferri was a French stockbroker and conservative politician who was Minister of Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones in 1953–54.
Eugène Frot was a French politician who was Minister of Merchant Marine (twice), Minister of Labor and Social Assurance (twice) and Minister of the Interior in various short-lived cabinets between December 1932 and February 1934. While he was Minister of Interior, right-wing groups organized street demonstrations in Paris on 6 February 1934 in which the police shot dead fourteen people. In the aftermath the cabinet was forced to resign. Frot supported Republican institutions, but by the late 1930s was a committed pacifist. In July 1940 he voted for the constitutional change that established the collaborationist Vichy government. As a result, he was barred from politics after the war.
Alex Moscovitch was a French politician and analyst. He was also an associate and companion of General Charles de Gaulle.
The Ligue de la patrie française was a French nationalist and anti-Dreyfus organization. It was officially founded in 1899, and brought together leading right-wing artists, scientists and intellectuals. The league fielded candidates in the 1902 national elections, but was relatively unsuccessful. After this it gradually became dormant. Its bulletin ceased publication in 1909.
La Cité de Refuge is a building in Paris, France designed by the architect Le Corbusier. It was designed for the Salvation Army and opened in 1933. Since that time it has been occupied by the French Salvation Army. The building, one of Le Corbusier's first urban housing projects, was designated a National Historical Monument of France in 1975.
Count Bernard de Vésins was a French soldier, essayist, practicing Catholic and right-wing Action Française militant. He was hostile to Freemasons, Jews and socialists, whom he considered to be working together in conspiracy to undermine the traditional Catholic values of France. In the 1920s he was President of the Ligue d'Action Française during a period when the Catholic Church was disassociating itself from the movement.
Pierre-Charles Krieg was a French politician and lawyer.
Marius Plateau was a French engineer, WWI sergeant, and French Royalist militant. Plateau was an editor of Action Francaise and a former secretary general of the Camelots du Roi. In 1923, Plateau was assassinated by the French anarchist Germaine Berton, who was later acquitted.
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