Pre-war Political Activities
Rassinier moved up to become the Party Secretary of the PCF in the Department of Belfort. In 1932, Lucien Carre, the Communist Youth Secretary of Belfort, was arrested, and a leftist coalition made up of several organizations, including the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (The SFIO), held protest rallies and demonstrations. Rassinier supported Henri Jacob's effort to enlist the middle-class parties, and for this and other acts "betraying the interests of the working class", both Jacob and Rassinier were expelled from the Communist Party in 1932.
Jacob had been slated to be the Communist candidate as deputy for the Canton of Belfort. After his expulsion, he still ran for office and won, which encouraged him, Paul Rassinier, and other alienated Communists to form a separate party, The Independent Communist Federation Of The East. Formed in 1932, Rassinier was the Party Secretary, Jacob the Assistant Secretary. Rassinier was also the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker. Neither the party nor the paper became popular, and both were dissolved in 1934.
The 6 February 1934 crisis seemed to create new opportunities for the worker's movement, and around this time Rassinier joined the SFIO. He became Secretary of Federation SFIO for the Territory of Belfort, and revived a moribund newspaper, Germinal, to serve as the party organ. He also ran for office several times, without success. Adopting the ideology of Marceau Pivert, he was a prolific author, denouncing the arms race, advocating the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, demanding more workers rights and supporting a pacifist ideology that would not be restricted to France, but become Pan-European.
As war clouds gathered, Rassinier wrote articles condemning Nazism and Fascism, describing their foreign policy as "a policy of gangsters", with warnings that neither Italy nor Germany could be trusted to respect their promises. But when the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, Rassinier was one of many Frenchman who would describe himself as "an inhabitant of Munich". Echoing the words of former Prime Minister Léon Blum, his support of the Accords was "without much pride, it is true, but without any shame", since he regarded war as the greatest catastrophe, and didn't believe "that even Mussolini after Ethiopia, even Hitler who makes blood run in the company of Spain, will risk such a madness". He received condemnation for his pacifist stance, but replied that while it's easy to be a fair-weather pacifist, a true commitment to peace is something done both in and out of season and he expressed his disappointment that so few Socialists were "on this side of the barricade".
In August 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Rassinier was arrested by French counter-intelligence, who suspected that his newspaper was receiving Nazi funding. Thanks to the intervention of Paul Faure and the SFIO, he was released a few days later, and when France was invaded in May 1940, he reported to his militia unit, where he and his comrades spent weeks in the barracks waiting for orders that never came. After France was overrun, he resumed teaching in Belfort.
Read more about this topic: Paul Rassinier
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or activities:
“The man possessed of a dollar, feels himself to be not merely one hundred cents richer, but also one hundred cents better, than the man who is penniless; so on through all the gradations of earthly possessionsthe estimate of our own moral and political importance swelling always in a ratio exactly proportionate to the growth of our purse.”
—Frances Wright (17951852)
“Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)