Early Life and Career
The son of a cobbler, Rochet was named in honor of politician René Waldeck-Rousseau. After completing his service in the army, he worked in market gardening. In 1923, he joined the youth wing of the French Communist Party (PCF), and the following year the Party itself. He was sent over to the Soviet Union, in order to receive political training at Moscow's International Lenin School. Rochet was local Party secretary in Lyon, then joined the central leadership in Paris; from 1936 to 1940, he was a communist representative in the lower chamber (the Third Republic equivalent of today's French National Assembly), elected in Colombes-Nanterre. During those years, Waldeck Rochet founded and edited the periodical La Terre.
Charged by Party leader Maurice Thorez with agricultural matters and reporting to the Politburo, he took steps to ensure that divisions between peasants and urban dwellers were not to be encouraged within the Party structure. In 1939, he refused to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (as did the entire Party leadership), placing himself outside French law. He was detained in the French colony of Algeria, passing into the custody of Vichy France after the German invasion of France (1940), being set free by the Allies on the wake of the North African Campaign.
In 1943, after joining the Free French Forces, he represented the communists in London and was elected to the provisional legislative body in Algiers. In late 1944, after the Liberation of Paris, Waldeck Rochet regained the French capital, where he carried on as representative.
Read more about this topic: Waldeck Rochet
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)