Wartime Collaboration and Post-war Imprisonment
Even as a young engineer, Claude was unsympathetic to democratic rule. In 1933 he joined the Action française, which favored restoration of a monarchy in France. He was a close friend of the monarchist leader Charles Maurras. Following the 1940 defeat of France by Germany at the beginning of the Second World War, the subsequent German occupation of northern France and the German installation of the Vichy regime in the south, Claude publicly supported French collaboration with Germany. Among his other activities, he published several tracts supporting collaboration. He was a member of a Distinguished Committee of the Groupe Collaboration, which had been founded in September, 1940. He was nominated by the Vichy regime as a member of the Conseil National Consultatif in 1941.
Following the Allied liberation of France in 1944, Claude was taken into custody on December 2, 1944 because of his collaboration with the Axis Powers. He was removed from the French Academy of Sciences. In 1945 he was tried and convicted of propaganda work favoring collaboration, but was cleared of another charge that he helped design the V-1 flying bomb. He was condemned to life imprisonment, and was imprisoned. In 1950 he was released from prison, with acknowledgment of his research on ocean thermal energy conversion.
Read more about this topic: Georges Claude
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