Georges Mandel was a French journalist, politician, and French Resistance leader.
Background
Born Louis George Rothschild in Chatou, Yvelines, he was the son of a tailor and his wife. His family was Jewish originally from Alsace. They moved into France in 1871 to preserve their French citizenship when Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by the German Empire at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.
Education
Mandel began working life as a journalist for L'Aurore, a literary and socialist newspaper founded in 1897 by Émile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. They notably defended Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s. The paper continued until 1916.
Career
A member of a prosperous Jewish family, though not related to the Rothschild banking dynasty, Mandel served on the personal staff of Premier Georges Clemenceau from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 to 1920. He also served as a deputy in the National Assembly from 1919 to 1924 and from 1928 to 1940. Mandel was a conservative and was strongly opposed to the policies of the left, but he was equally opposed to the pro-German policies of many conservatives between World Wars I and II. He served as minister of posts in four successive governments (1934–1936) and as minister of colonies from April 1938 to May 1940, when Premier Paul Reynaud transferred him to the Ministry of the Interior. In May and June 1940 he supported Reynaud, who advocated continuing to fight the Germans from the French colonies in Africa.
Mandel was among the political leaders who vowed to refuse an armistice and, on June 21, 1940, sailed from Bordeaux to Africa aboard the Massilia. Arrested in Morocco, he was transported to France and imprisoned. Later he was delivered to the Germans in November 1942. In 1944 the German Ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz suggested to Laval that Mandel, Blum, and Reynaud should be executed by the Vichy government in retaliation for the assassination of Philippe Henriot, Minister of Propaganda, by the Algiers Committee, the Communist Maquis of the Resistance. Mandel was returned to Paris on 4 July 1944, supposedly as a hostage. While being transferred from one prison to another, he was captured by the Milice, the paramilitary force. Three days later, the Milice took Mandel to the Forest of Fontainebleau, where they executed him. He was buried at Passy Cemetery.