Paul Faure (politician)

Paul Faure (1878-1960) was a French politician, one of the leaders of the SFIO (French Section of the Second International) between the two wars. He was minister of state under Camille Chautemps's third Ministry from June 1937 to January 1938 during the Popular Front.

He first became a member of Jules Guesde's "Parti ouvrier français" (POF) in 1901 and was editor-in-chief of the "Populaire du Centre". Starting from 1915, he rallied to the centrist and pacifist minority of Jean Longuet in the SFIO, and was opposed during the 1920 Tours Congress to the adhesion to the Third International. Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci underscored how Faure had been to Imola in 1919, after the Bologna Congress, and seemed in perfect agreement with the representants of Italian "unitarism". However, if Faure continued even after the Tours Congress using the Marxist discourse, he became rather moderate. Along with Léon Blum, he directed the SFIO and was several times deputy.

After Edouard Daladier's negotiations of the Munich agreement in 1938, Paul Faure supported, as did the vast majority of France, the appeasement policy. After the 1940 Battle of France, he rallied to Vichy, which led to his being excluded from the SFIO in 1944. He then founded the "Parti socialiste démocratique" (PSD) which participated to the "Rassemblement des gauches républicaines". The PSD only gathered ineligible deputies (accused of collaborationism) and it dedicated part of its time to the rehabilitation of Marshall Pétain's reactionary regime. Thus, it had almost no influence at all.