Pierre Mendès France

Pierre Mendès France came from an old Sephardic family of Portuguese-Jewish descent, the Mendes de Franca, settled in France since the seventeenth century; he said of himself that he knew he was Jewish and that antisemites regarded him as such, describing it as a sensibility rather than a religious or racial fact. A deputy at twenty-five, he was imprisoned by Vichy on a fabricated charge, escaped, and joined the Free French air forces; he represented France at Bretton Woods in 1944. As prime minister from June 1954 he ended the Indochina war within the month he had given himself, opened Tunisian autonomy, and pressed an economic policy of honest arithmetic explained directly to citizens in weekly radio talks. He was a constant target of antisemitic attacks throughout his career, and remained afterwards a reference point for a politics of candour.