2024-03-26 14:47:04
Few men have lived as many lives as Claude Alphandéry, who died on March 26 at the age of 101. He was first a great resistance fighter, which shaped the rest of his long life. Born on November 27, 1922 in Paris, the only son of a bourgeois Parisian couple who divorced very early, he was 18 years old when the German army invaded France.
In hypokhâgne in Bordeaux, he moved to Lyon to join the prestigious Parc high school. He distributed leaflets and underground newspapers there and made some connections. A classmate’s reflection on “Jewish scum” will accelerate its commitment. “I felt rejected, excluded from society, an outcast; I had to find an identity, to prove my personality, my capacity for resistance. (…) After a restless night, I decided to leave my room and the school without delay. he says in A committed family. Secrets and transmission (Odile Jacob, 2015), the last of her eleven books.
He went underground during the winter of 1942 and, the following year, became the departmental leader of the Resistance in Drôme and Ardèche. He ended the war as president of the departmental liberation committee of Drôme and lieutenant-colonel of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Despite his young age, he managed to reorganize networks deeply divided between communists and Gaullists.
“This touches on one of the common threads of my life: if I am capable of anything, it is to bring together, he says in Such strong resistance (Rue de l’échquier, 2011). This undoubtedly comes from a kind of empathy that I have towards people: my personal commitments do not exclude the consideration of those opposite. »
Political beliefs
Those who knew him remember his intellectual liveliness, his sense of negotiation, his modesty and his eternal smile, frank and mischievous. In the maquis, thanks to long gun vigils, he formed political convictions through contact with communist fighters, rejecting the “money powers” of the Thirde Republic. He became radicalized, having been looked after during his holidays by a radical-socialist grandfather, mayor and deputy of Chaumont, a small conservative town in Haute-Marne.
He joined the Communist Party in 1946. After the Liberation, he was in Moscow as information attaché at the French embassy. Barely enough time to learn Russian and Marxism, the Iron Curtain falls on Europe. He returned to Paris to take the ENA exam, but he resigned very quickly. Going against the grain of history, this great romantic returns to Moscow with a dual project: to find the young Russian woman he is in love with and to try to create a weekly in the French language. Torpedoed by Soviet power, the adventure is cut short.
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