Jules Moch

Origins and early life

Jules Moch was born in Paris on 15 March 1893 into a family of the Alsatian Jewish bourgeoisie; his father, Captain Gaston Moch, was an officer, a militant Dreyfusard and a pacifist writer, and the family's Jewish identity is documented in the French National Archives.

Work and career

He entered the École polytechnique, served as an artillery officer and naval engineer in the First World War, and joined the socialist SFIO, becoming a deputy in 1928 and chief of staff to Léon Blum during the Popular Front. On 10 July 1940 he was one of the eighty parliamentarians who refused full powers to Marshal Pétain, and he then sailed on the Massilia to North Africa, was arrested and, on release, joined the Free French Naval Forces in London, serving as a lieutenant on convoy escorts.

Under the Fourth Republic he was minister of public works, then minister of the interior from 1947 to 1950, in which post he broke the insurrectional strikes of November 1947 by creating the compagnies républicaines de sécurité and calling up reservists, an episode that made him hated by the Communist party and that this fiche states plainly as the most contested act of his career. He was minister of defence from 1950 to 1951 and, from 1951, France's permanent representative to the United Nations disarmament commission, where he spent years arguing for controlled, verified reduction of armaments and wrote several books on the subject.

His son Gabriel, a member of the Resistance, was captured, tortured and shot by the Germans in 1943, an event that marked him for life. He left the socialist party over Algeria and returned to it later, and died at Cabris on 1 August 1985.