East French socialist politician, He was born in Revel, Haute-Garonne on August 27, 1884 and died in Paris, Île-de France on January 1, 1966. The son of a baker, he excelled in his studies, obtaining a law degree in 1905 at age 21 of age, to later obtain the Doctorate in Law, which led him to practice the profession of law in the city of Toulouse where he was based.
To the founding of the SFIO, French Section of the Workers’ International he enrolls for the military under his ideals, which leads him to the creation of the newspaper Le Midi Socialiste in 1908 at the age of 24 and in that way he entered full political activity.
He was elected as a deputy by the town of Muret, belonging to the department of Upper Garonne for the first time in 1914 and for the second time in 1940. Thanks to his representation as a deputy in his first term, he became mayor of the same town in 1925 to later be appointed as secretary of the socialist group in the Chamber of Deputies since 1928. This experience leads him to become the financial expert of the Socialist Party and therefore, in one of its main leaders.
Thanks to his financial experience, he convinced the SFIO in 1921 and in 1922 by all the European socialist parties, to implement a recovery plan, which includes the creation of a central office with coordination capacity for all the devastated regions, acquiring funding through of a government loan, forcing Germany by this mechanism, to pay the repairs, deducting the necessary money, from the operations of its banks and industries. Although this project was of great importance, the socialist parties did not have the electoral and political force necessary to obtain the approval of a project of these characteristics.
When between 1924 and 1926 under the government that was called the “Cartel of the left”, Vincent Auriol assumed the presidency of the finance commission of the Chamber of Deputies. It was successively, Minister of Finance, Minister of Justice and Coordination of ministerial services of the presidency of the Council, while the government was led by the Popular Front. During this period he showed his total rejection of the Munich Agreements, joining the parliamentarians who denied full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain, on July 10, 1940.
This rejection would lead him to be arrested in the Vichy government, first in Pellevoisin, Indre, and then in Vals-les-Bains, Ardéche; while he was deprived of liberty, he established a large correspondence with Leon Blum in which he expressed his total conviction of the triumph of democracy over Nazism and fascism.
Despite the fact that Vichy had him investigate, the civil court of Muret acquitted him and he was finally released for health reasons, granting him house arrest in August 1941, an opportunity that he did not miss, giving advice to the socialists who remained in the Resistance.
Under pressure from the government, he went into hiding in 1942 to be able to join the Resistance forces. At this time he wrote “Yesterday and Tomorrow” published in Algiers in 1944, where he collected his reflections on the type of institutions that should exist in the future, disappearing those that existed at the time.
Even in hiding, he managed to fly to London in 1943 and a year later became president of the Finance Commission of the Algiers Consultative Assembly. As a curious fact, it has been known that on many occasions Charles de Gaulle He came to him for advice and opinions, which led him to appoint him as Minister of State without portfolio in 1945.
In 1946 he held the position of president of the first and later of the second Constituent Assembly. Thanks to its performance and notoriety, a year later it becomes the First President of the Fourth Republic, position he occupies between January 16, 1947 and January 16, 1954, fully exercising his role as referee in a difficult time for Europe and for his country.
He retired from the SFIO in 1958 due to differences with his maximum leader, Guy mollet and found a new Autonomous Socialist Party, getting support among the parties of the Socialist International, making people feel the importance of having always been the historical leader of French socialism.
By becoming a full member of the Constitutional Council in 1959, he made a frontal protest against the interpretation of the powers of the Council and Parliament that had De Gaulle, abandoning their attendance at the sessions, since some laws had been approved without passing through the Council, thus rebuking this action: “This boldness regarding national sovereignty and our fundamental charter guides the constitutional regime of 1958 towards a system of personal power and arbitrary in opposition to the essential principles and rules of democracy ”.
He returned to the Council on November 6, 1962 to exercise his vote on the constitutionality of the plebiscitary law that changed the way of electing the president of the republic and he retired from public life until 1965 when in a political act he invited voters to support François Mitterrand in the presidential campaign.