Georges Mandel

Origins and early life

Georges Mandel was born Louis Georges Rothschild in Chatou, near Paris, on 5 June 1885 — no relation to the banking dynasty — the son of a Jewish tailor from Alsace who had left the province in 1871 to remain French; he took his mother's name, Mandel, when he entered journalism, and though he practiced no religion he never denied what he was, and the antisemites of the Right, who called him 'the Jew Mandel' for thirty years, would kill him for it.

Work and career

At twenty-one he was on the staff of Clemenceau's newspaper, and in 1917, when Clemenceau took power to win the war, Mandel became his chief of staff, the feared and tireless organizer of the 'Tiger's' authority, who broke the defeatists and kept the ministries in line. Deputy for the Gironde from 1919, he was Minister of Posts from 1934 to 1936, when he modernized the telephone and gave France its first television broadcasts, and Minister of Colonies from 1938, when he mobilized the empire for the war he saw coming; in May 1940 Paul Reynaud made him Minister of the Interior, and he arrested the defeatists and the fifth column while the front collapsed.

He refused the armistice, tried to carry the government to North Africa aboard the Massilia, and was arrested at Casablanca; Churchill, who had wanted him as the leader of a France that would fight on, called him 'the first resister'. Vichy imprisoned him, then handed him to the Germans, who held him at Buchenwald with Léon Blum; on 7 July 1944, a month after the Normandy landings, the Germans gave him back to the Milice, which shot him in the forest of Fontainebleau in reprisal for the execution of the collaborator Philippe Henriot.