Background
Emmanuel La Vigerie was born in Paris, France.
Emmanuel La Vigerie was born in Paris, France.
He attended the Naval Academy.
He graduated in 1918 from the naval academy, left the navy in 1924. In 1933 he became a journalist and a poet and was involved with the integralist and monarchist journal Action Française, but turned towards the Left after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and rejoined the navy when France went to war. He was head of naval intelligence at Lorient. Demobilized in the summer of 1940, he soon joined a small group of saboteurs in the south of France. In Dec 1940 this expanded to form the cadre of la Derniere Colotme (the Last Column), a leftist group that skirted the law by using crafty propaganda against collaborators and the Vichy regime. (Larousse.) In Jan 1941 the resistance leader went underground and founded Liberation, a leftist group in the unoccupied zone. In July 1941 the conspirators began putting out a clandestine weekly of the same name. The gauchist journalist’s resistance movement was the first of real significance in France and one of the three major groups that Jean Moulin later attempted to unite. Called to Algiers in 1943, d’Astier became commissioner of the interior in de Gaulle’s CNL, then was minister of the interior. In this post until Oct 1944, Emmanuel d’Astier was a prime mover in getting Allied aid for the Maquis. After the liberation he directed Liberation as a daily, and it had Communist Party support until 1964. Meanwhile, in 1945 the journalist became a progressisle deputy from the Department of Ille-et-Vilaine. In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. D’Astier published many books, including De la chute a la liberation de Paris. He died in Paris on 12 June 1969.