Background
Jacques Duclos was born in Louey, Hautes-Pyrénées, France on 2 October in 1896. Jacques worked in the pastry trade from the age of 12 until World War I, when he joined the army.
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Jacques Duclos was born in Louey, Hautes-Pyrénées, France on 2 October in 1896. Jacques worked in the pastry trade from the age of 12 until World War I, when he joined the army.
Jacques was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans in 1917. From 1926 to 1932 Duclos served as a deputy for Paris in the Assembly, and from 1936 to 1940 as a deputy for Seine (Montreuil). At the beginning of World War II Duclos was arrested and imprisoned at Île de Ré for his opposition to the war. His position with a French war veterans' organization was influential in his release. After the Soviet Union's entrance into the war, Duclos became active in resistance work. Without the approval of General de Gaulle, Duclos planned the Paris Insurrection of August 1944. Considered "the wildest folly" by French military members of the Paris Committee of Liberation, it was later guided by Alexandre Parodi, De Gaulle's representative, because he feared loss of weapons used in the resistance movement. The October 1945 national elections gave the Communists a plurality in the Assembly and Duclos, again a member, became a vice-president of the Assembly and president of the Communist parliamentary group. He led his party in advocating a constitution for the Fourth Republic in which the president would be a figurehead. This and the Communist proposal for a drastic reduction of the armed forces caused President de Gaulle to resign in January 1946. In January 1948 Duclos was defeated as a candidate for first vice-president of the National Assembly. Duclos headed the French Communist Party during Maurice Thorez' stay in Moscow for medical treatment from October 1950 to April 1953. Unlike Thorez, Duclos had no nationalistic leanings and he kept party members close to the line laid down by Moscow. Following the split between the Soviet and Chinese Communists in the 1950's, Duclos supported the Soviet leaders. However, in 1964 he noted that most national parties would not favor the revival of "an international centralist organization, " such as the by-then defunct Cominform. At home, Duclos retained great popularity. Running for the presidency of France in 1969, he received 21 percent of the total vote.
In the Communist Party, which Duclos joined in 1920, he rose in 1935 to membership of the executive committee of the Communist International. In September 1947 Duclos attended the Communist meeting in Poland which established the Cominform. His influence in world Communist circles had been demonstrated a short time earlier when the publication of his article "On the Dissolution of the Communist Party in the United States, " in French and American party organs, resulted in the dismissal of Earl Browder as head of the American Communists.
