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 | |
|---|---|
 Charles Trochu in Le Matin (1942) | |
| Born | 1898 Chile |
| Died | 1961 |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Known for | Secretary General of the National Front |
Biography
editEarly years
editCharles 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]
Inter-war years
editAfter the war Trochu became a wholesale cod merchant.[4] He was also involved in architecture.
Bonapartist in his 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.
Later career
editWorld 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.
Publications
edit- Architecture et urbanisme, with Le Corbusier, Paul Boulard, Pierre Winter, Paris, Les Publications techniques & librairie Charpentier, 1942.
- Hommage rendu à Charles Maurras, 2 July 1937, Paris, Front national, 1937.
- La Commune, rempart de la famille, 1942.
References
editCitations
- ^ Callil 2008, p. 494.
- ^ Callil 2008, p. 212-213.
- ^ a b c Nivet 1994, p. 35.
- ^ a b Callil 2008, p. 212.
- ^ Epstein 2008, p. 581.
- ^ Jackson 2001, p. 193.
- ^ Bernard 2007, p. 82.
- ^ Courtine-Denamy 2000, p. 64.
- ^ Morin & Richard 2008, p. 67.
- ^ Mysyrowicz 1973, p. 197.
- ^ Keene 2007, p. 155.
- ^ Pike 2011, p. 332.
- ^ Caron 1999, p. 192.
- ^ Epstein 2008, p. 582ff.
- ^ Action Française, n° 49, 28 May 1940.
- ^ a b Taittinger 1956, p. 27.
- ^ Nivet 1994, p. 30.
- ^ Nivet 1994, p. 34.
- ^ Fishman 1979, p. 189.
- ^ Nivet 1994, p. 36.
- ^ Michaud 2004, p. 91.
- ^ a b c Nivet 1994, p. 37.
- ^ Combeau 2002, p. 82.
- ^ Les Silences du Marechal.
- ^ Callil 2008, p. 380.
Sources
- Bernard, Mathias (2007-08-23). Guerre des droites (La): De l'affaire Dreyfus à nos jours. Odile Jacob. ISBN 978-2-7381-8575-4. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Callil, Carmen (2008-12-10). Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 212. ISBN 978-0-307-48188-7. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Caron, Vicki (1999). Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-4377-8. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Combeau, Yvan (2002). "Le jeunesse et le sport à Paris". Le sport et les français pendant l'Occupation, 1940-1944. L'Harmattan. ISBN 9782747520775. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Courtine-Denamy, Sylvie (2000). Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil. Cornell University Press. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-8014-8758-3. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Culot, Maurice; Lambrichs, Anne (2007). Albert Laprade: architecte, jardinier, urbaniste, dessinateur, serviteur du patrimoine. Norma. ISBN 9782915542110. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Epstein, Simon (2008). Un paradoxe français: antiracistes dans la Collaboration, antisémites dans la Résistance. Albin Michel. p. 581. ISBN 978-2-226-17915-9. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Fishman, Robert M. (1979). L'utopie urbaine au XX ème siècle: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. Editions Mardaga. p. 189. ISBN 978-2-87009-111-1. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
- Jackson, Julian (2001-04-26). France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944. Oxford University Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-19-162288-5. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Keene, Judith (2007-01-01). Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39. Continuum. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-8264-2571-3. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Les Silences du Marechal. Nouvelles Editions Latines. 1948. p. 179. GGKEY:3P3G0GRE4GJ. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Michaud, Yves (2004). Paris. Odile Jacob. p. 91. ISBN 978-2-7381-1453-2. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Morin, Gilles; Richard, Gilles (2008-06-01). Les deux France du Front populaire. Editions L'Harmattan. ISBN 978-2-296-19897-5. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Mysyrowicz, Ladislas (1973). Autopsie d'une défaite: origines de l'effrondrement militaire français de 1940. L'AGE D'HOMME. ISBN 978-2-8251-3011-7. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Nivet, Philippe (1994). Le Conseil municipal de Paris de 1944 à 1977. Publications de la Sorbonne. p. 22. ISBN 978-2-85944-244-6. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Pike, David Wingeate (2011). France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain. Sussex Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-84519-490-1. Retrieved 2013-07-04.
- Taittinger, Pierre (1956). Et Paris ne fut pas détruit. Nouvelles Editions Latines. GGKEY:STT49QJ726Y. Retrieved 2013-07-04.