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 and/or career:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)
“I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the mainstream culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldnt think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partners job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)