Raymond Aubrac - After The Second World War

After The Second World War

After the end of the Second World War, Aubrac was appointed to a senior post by the Ministry of Reconstruction from 1945 to 1948, during which he oversaw reconstruction and mine clearance.

In 1947 and 1950, he was a witness for the prosecution during two trials of fellow French Resistance leader René Hardy, who was accused of betraying Jean Moulin to the Gestapo but eventually acquitted.

Aubrac's relations with Charles de Gaulle were sometimes tense because of his Communist leanings. When Ho Chi Minh came to France to negotiate Vietnam's independence in 1946, he decided to stay in the Aubracs' home for several months and he and Raymond Aubrac became friends. Aubrac's undisguised Communist sympathies made him a controversial figure with the French right. He supported the Vietnamese rebellion against French colonial rule in the 1950s.

In 1948, Aubrac founded an institute - Bureau d'études et de recherches pour l'industrie moderne (BERIM) (the Study and Research Group for Modern Industry) - to encourage trade with Communist countries in the Eastern Bloc. He headed this institute for ten years. He also served in a series of international roles. He was a director of the United Nations' Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) from 1964 to 1975. In 1978, he joined UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization cultural agency, to work on cooperation projects.

Aubrac worked on many civil engineering projects in Europe, North Africa and Asia. In 1948, He helped to create a civil engineering consultancy firm, at first working mainly with Communist-run local authorities, then in eastern Europe. It established close links with eastern Europe, and this later led to allegations that it was really a front to raise funds for the Communist party.

He served as an technical adviser to the government of Morocco, which has just attained independence from France, from 1958 to 1963.

Aubrac was to be used in the late 1960s by Henry Kissinger as a secret intermediary between the Americans and the North Vietnamese at the height of the Vietnam war. In the early 1970s, as America tried to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War, Aubrac served as a mediator between the American and Vietnamese governments. He also joined a group of intellectuals and scientists working to end the war. In 1973, he worked with the United Nations Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, on the follow-up to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 to end the Vietnam War. In 1975, he was employed by Kurt Waldheim to communicate with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in the last few months of the war. In 1975, while working on rebuilding projects in Vietnam, Aubrac witnessed the Fall of Saigon.

Shortly before his death in 1990, Klaus Barbie issued a statement saying it was not René Hardy who had betrayed the secret of Jean Moulin's 1943 Caluire meeting with the Resistance leaders, but Raymond Aubrac. The same allegations were then insinuated in a book (Aubrac, Lyon 1943; first published by Albin Michel in 1997) written by a French journalist and historian, Gérard Chauvy. In 1997, the Aubracs, feeling outraged by such allegations and attempting to clear their names, submitted themselves to a “jury” of French historians set up by the Libération newspaper and led by Moulin’s secretary and biographer, Daniel Cordier. Their report cleared the Aubracs of collaboration with the Nazis. However, the questioning of the "jury" exposed inconsistencies in the Aubracs' accounts of the events pertaining to the Caluire meeting of 1943. Both the Aubracs, especially Lucie, remained bitter about what they perceived as unnecessarily hostile treatment. It has been suggested, in the book Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance (2002) by Patrick Marnham, that Moulin was betrayed by the Aubracs. Patrick Marnham made the case that Communists such as the Aubracs did at times betray non-Communists such as Moulin to the Gestapo and that Raymond Aubrac was linked to harsh actions during the purge of collaborators with the Nazis after the war ended.

In 1996, Aubrac published his autobiography Où la mémoire s'attarde ("Where the memory lingers").

In his later life, Aubrac made frequent visits to schools to educate the younger generation about the dangers of totalitarianism. He also sought to promote remembrance of the French Resistance.

Aubrac endorsed the Socialist Party's François Hollande for France's 2012 two-round presidential election, starting on April 22. Hollande said that he had met with Aubrac about three weeks before his death and Aubrac told him that he would be closely monitoring the election.