Guy Mollet

Guy Alcide Mollet (; 31 December 1905 – 3 October 1975) was a French politician. He led the socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) from 1946 to 1969 and was the French Prime Minister from 1956 to 1957.

As Prime Minister, Mollet passed some significant domestic reforms and worked for European integration, proposing the Franco-British Union. He became unpopular in both the left and the right in the country for his international policy, especially during the Suez Crisis and the Algerian War.

Early life

He was born in Flers in Normandy, the son of a textile worker. He was educated in Le Havre and became an English teacher in Arras Grammar School. Like most other teachers, he was an active member of the socialist SFIO, joining in 1923, and in 1928 he became SFIO Secretary for the Pas-de-Calais ''département''.

World War II

He joined the French Army in 1939 and was taken prisoner by the Germans. Released after seven months, he joined the French Resistance, where he was a captain, in the Arras area and was three times arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.

Early political career

In October 1945, Mollet was elected to the French National Assembly as a representative from Pas-de-Calais. In 1946, he became Secretary-General of the SFIO, standing against Daniel Mayer, the candidate supported by Léon Blum. He was also Mayor of Arras at this time. Mollet represented the left-wing of the party, which feared the dissolution of the Socialist identity in a centrist alliance.

Although he retained Marxist terminology, he accepted the alliance with the centre and centre-right parties during the Fourth Republic, and his relations with the French Communist Party (PCF), which had become the largest left-wing party, were very poor: "the Communist Party is not on the left, but in the East".

Cabinet roles

He served as deputy prime minister in 1946, in Blum's government.

From 1950 to 1951, he was Minister for European Relations in the government of the Radical René Pleven, and in 1951, he was deputy prime minister in the government of Henri Queuille.

Europe

Mollet supported a Western European Federation. He represented France at the Council of Europe, and he was President of the Socialist Group on the council's Assembly.

Socialist international

From 1951 to 1969, he was vice-president of the Socialist International.

Premiership

During the 1956 legislative campaign, Mollet created a centre-left coalition, the Republican Front, containing the Radical Party of Pierre Mendès-France, the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance of François Mitterrand and the Social Gaullists of Jacques Chaban-Delmas.

The coalition won the election with a promise to re-establish the peace in Algeria. As leader of the main party of the coalition, Mollet led and formed a cabinet in January 1956.

Foreign policy

In foreign policy, Mollet negotiated and signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community. Liberalising reforms were carried out in various parts of the French Empire but not in Algeria. Gaston Defferre's '' loi-cadre'' of 23 June 1956 generalised universal suffrage throughout the ''territories d'outre-mer'' and based their assemblies on a single voting roll.

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Suez Crisis

Despite those successes, Mollet, who wanted to concentrate on domestic issues, found himself confronted with several major foreign policy crises. Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, continued to support the Algerian rebels and also nationalised the Suez Canal, which led to the Suez Crisis.

The Anglophile Mollet and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden shared a mutual concern for maintaining their overseas possessions. Eden also feared that Nasser intended to cut off oil supplies to Europe. In October 1956 Mollet, Eden and the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, met and colluded, in the Protocol of Sèvres, in a joint attack of Egypt.

The Israelis invaded Egypt first, with British and French troops invading the northern Suez Canal area shortly afterward, under the pretext of restoring order in the area. However, the scheme met with unexpected opposition from the United States, both at the United Nations General Assembly and with economical measures. France and Britain were forced into a humiliating backdown.

Eden resigned as a result, but Mollet survived the crisis despite fierce leftist criticism.

In Michael Karpin's 2001 documentary ''A Bomb in the Basement'', Abel Thomas, the chief of political staff for France's defense minister in 1956, said that Francis Perrin, the head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, told Mollet that Israel should be provided with a nuclear bomb. According to the documentary, France provided Israel with a nuclear reactor and staff to set it up in Israel, together with enriched uranium and the means to produce plutonium, in exchange for support in the Suez War.

Algeria

In the post-war period, Mollet was aware of, and approved of, the fraudulent elections held in French Algeria while the Socialist Naegelen was governor-general of Algeria from 1948 to 1951. Like the rest of the French Left, Mollet opposed French colonialism and had supported Mendès-France's efforts in office to withdraw from Tunisia and Morocco, which were granted independence in 1956 by the ''loi-cadre Deferre''. Mollet's government was left with the issue of the three French departments of Algeria, where the presence of a million non-Muslim French residents made a simple withdrawal politically difficult.

At first, Mollet's policy was to negotiate with the National Liberation Front (FLN). Once in office, however, he changed his mind and argued that the FLN insurgents must be defeated before negotiations could begin. Mollet's visit to Algiers, the capital of French Algeria, was a stormy one, with almost everyone against him. He was pelted with rotten tomatoes at a demonstration in Algiers on 6 February 1956, a few weeks after he became prime minister. The memorable event was referred to as ''la journée des tomates'' ("the day of tomatoes").

He poured French troops into Algeria, where they conducted a campaign of counterterrorism, including torture, particularly during the Battle of Algiers (January to October 1957). It was too much for most French people, and Mollet's government collapsed in June 1957 on the issue of the taxation to pay for the Algerian War. The Secretary of State to Foreign Affairs, Alain Savary, also a SFIO member, resigned because of his opposition to Mollet's hardline stance in Algeria.

Domestic policy

Mollet's cabinet carried out a programme of progressive social reform, which was almost unnoticed because of both the international context and the Algerian War. Substantial improvements were made in welfare provision for the sick and elderly, funding for regional aid and housing was increased veterans' payments were extended and a third week of paid holidays was introduced. Mollet's government passed other pieces of social legislation during its time in office, including an increase in wages and improved medical benefits.

The level and mechanism of state pensions to both the elderly and chronically-ill was improved, and working-class housing was also given close attention. HLM

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