Background
Rousset was born on January 18, 1912, in Roanne, in the Loire Valley, the son of a Protestant minister.
75005 Paris, France
Sorbonne University
Rousset was born on January 18, 1912, in Roanne, in the Loire Valley, the son of a Protestant minister.
Rousset received a degree in literature at the Sorbonne University.
Rousset had begun his journalistic career in 1939 as a political correspondent for Life and Fortune magazines. Throughout his career, he wrote for numerous papers and journals, including the Nation, Revue Internationale, and Figaro.
On 12 October 1943 Rousset was arrested because of his underground resistance activities and in late January 1944 was transferred from Fresnes prison to Buchenwald Concentration Camp; on 10 March he was transferred to Neuengamme Concentration Camp, where he was liberated by the Americans in April 1945.
Up to 1958 Rousset was a vice-president of the International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime and contributed to its reports on labour camps in the Soviet Union and China and also prisons in Spain.
After May 1968 he was a Gaullist deputy in the French parliament until 1973.
Rousset is noted for his criticism of the Soviet Gulag, Nazi internment camps, and political imprisonment. His first-hand knowledge of these horrors occurred when he was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo and charged with writing anti-Nazi propaganda during World War II.
Rousset also wrote several books. They include L’Univers Concentrationnaire (translated by Ramon Guthrie and published in the United States as The Other Kingdom; translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse and published in Great Britain as A World Apart), Pour la verite sur les camps concentrationnaires (with Theo Bernard and Gerard Rosenthal; published in the United States as Police State Methods in the Soviet Union), and Sur la guerre: Sommes-Nous en danger de guerre nucleaire?
He won the Prix Renaudot, a prestigious French literary award, in 1947 for ''The Concentration Camp Universe,'' in which he described the atrocities and systematic breakdown of the human spirit orchestrated by the Nazis.
Along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Gerard Rosenthal, Rousset was a founder of the left-wing Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Democratic Rally), which called for a European federation on democratic socialist lines.