Cassin, René Samuel

French National Committee (1941-1943)

Date of birth:: October 5th, 1887 (Bayonne, France)
Date of death:: February 20th, 1976 (Paris, France)
Buried on:: Panthéon Paris
Nationality:: French

Biography

In 1906 he performed his military service as a private then resumed his studies. A graduate in Letters, he also won first prize in the general competition for law faculties.

In 1914, he obtained a doctorate in legal, economic and political sciences when he was mobilized, with the rank of master corporal.

At the head of a free corps, he was seriously wounded by machine gun bullets on October 12, 1914 in Saint-Mihiel and was treated in Antibes. He received the Croix de Guerre with palm and the military medal.

Reformed, René Cassin is sent back to civilian life; he taught at the Faculty of Aix-en-Provence and in Marseille, then participated in 1917 in the creation of one of the very first departmental associations of war victims.

Agrégé de droit in 1919, René Cassin was, from 1922, president of the Federal Union of War Disabled and Widows; professor at the faculty of Lille, he drafts and passes laws in favor of the employment of war victims and spends himself without counting in his various activities.

In 1924, and until 1938, Professor René Cassin became a member of the French delegation to the League of Nations and fought in all fields for peace.

In 1929, he was appointed professor of law at the faculty of Paris and became vice-president of the Superior Council of the Pupils of the Nation. In 1930, after a trip to the Middle East where he met many German Jews in Palestine, he led an active campaign against Nazism upon his return. The same year, he obtained the vote of the law on the retirement of the combatant.

At the end of the thirties, he denounced in several speeches the danger that the Third Reich represents for Europe and the world.

At the declaration of war, René Cassin was appointed to the direction of documentation at the Information Commission and, at the time of the debacle, he urged the liquidation of the republican regime. Refusing the idea of an armistice, he decided, on June 17, to join England and embarked with his wife, on June 24 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on a British troop transport boat, the 'Ettrick, bound for Plymouth.

On June 29, he presented himself at Saint Stephens House and General de Gaulle entrusted him with the mission of drafting an agreement with the British government, maintaining the purely French character of the army of Free France, Charter signed on August 7, 1940 between Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.

Head of the legal service of Free France, member of the Defense Council of the Empire when it was created in October 1940, René Cassin is the drafter of the statutes of the Order of Liberation created by ordinance n ° 7 of November 17 1940.

René Cassin, who will multiply during the war the interventions on the radio in London and the articles in the free French press, is appointed Commissioner for Justice and Public Education of the French National Committee in September 1941. He begins, at the end of 1941, a three-month tour of the Middle East and AEF.

From 1942, he chaired the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU).

When it was created in August 1943, he took on the presidency of the Legal Committee of Combatant France (which acts as the Council of State) which he retained within the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) before becoming at liberation, vice-president of the Council of State (until June 1960) then honorary president.

He also sat in the Consultative Assembly of Algiers from November 1943.

Between 1942 and 1944, René Cassin was the representative of France on the Committee of Allied Ministers of Education and, from 1943 to 1945, French representative on the commission of inquiry into war crimes.

From 1946, he chaired for sixteen years the Board of Directors of the National School of Administration (ENA), constantly emphasizing in these functions the demanding principles which are his in the service of the Nation.

In 1946, he was part of the small international group, chaired by Eleonor Roosevelt, which was responsible for drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, voted in Paris, on December 10, 1948, by the United Nations General Assembly. .

In 1958 he chaired the provisional advisory committee responsible for preparing the Constitution of the Fifth Republic and received, at the Elysee Palace, the oath of General de Gaulle, President of the Republic in January 1959.

In June 1960, Professor Cassin was appointed to the Constitutional Council of which he was a member until February 1971.

Vice-President (1959) then President (1965-1968) of the European Court of Human Rights, René Cassin received in October 1968 the Nobel Peace Prize.

Member of the Institute since 1947, President of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Doctor honoris causa from the universities of Oxford, London, Mainz and Jerusalem, he founded in 1969, in Strasbourg, the International Institute of Human rights.