Jean Zay

Origins and early life

Jean Zay was born in Orléans on 6 August 1904, the son of Léon Zay, the editor of the radical newspaper Le Progrès du Loiret, a secular Jew whose parents had left Alsace in 1871 to remain French, and of Alice Chartrain, a Protestant schoolteacher in whose church he was raised; this fiche rests on his Jewish father and paternal grandparents, and records that the antisemites of Vichy needed no more to call him a Jew.

Work and career

A lawyer at twenty-four and a deputy for the Loiret at twenty-seven, he was thirty-one when Léon Blum made him Minister of National Education and Fine Arts in the Popular Front government of June 1936, the youngest minister of the Third Republic, and in three years he changed the face of French culture: he raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, opened the lycées to the children of the people, gave the schools sport and reading, created the National Centre for Scientific Research, the CNRS, in October 1939 in the last weeks of his ministry, founded the Museum of Man and the Palais de la Découverte, and planned for September 1939 the first International Film Festival at Cannes, which the war postponed until 1946.

He enlisted as a lieutenant in 1939, sailed for North Africa on the Massilia in June 1940 to continue the fight, and was arrested by Vichy, tried for 'desertion' and sentenced to deportation for life, a sentence Vichy's own press explained by his 'Jewish origin'; he spent four years in the prison of Riom, writing the memoir Souvenirs et solitude. On 20 June 1944 three men of the Milice took him from his cell under a false transfer order, drove him into the forest near Molles, and shot him; his body was found in 1946. On 27 May 2015 the Republic placed him in the Panthéon, beside two women of the Resistance and Pierre Brossolette.