Jacques Duclos

Jacques Duclos (1896-1975), French political leader, influential member of the Communist Party in France. Duclos was born in Louey, in the department of Hautes-Pyrénées. He worked in the pastry trade from the age of 12 until World War I (1914-1918), when he joined the French army. Duclos was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans in 1917. He joined the Communist Party in 1920, and by 1935 he had risen to head of membership for the executive committee of the Communist International, an organization that promoted world revolution (see Communism).

From 1926 to 1940 Duclos served as a deputy in the National Assembly of France. Near the beginning of World War II (1939-1945) he was arrested and imprisoned on the Île de Ré for his opposition to the war. His position with an organization for French war veterans was influential in his release. After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) entered the war in 1941, Duclos became active in resistance work, and, without the approval of General Charles de Gaulle, Duclos planned an insurrection in Paris in August 1944.

The October 1945 national elections gave the Communists a plurality in the National Assembly, and Duclos, again a member of the assembly, became vice president of the assembly and president of the Communist parliamentary group. Duclos led his party in advocating a new constitution for the government in which the president would be a figurehead.

In September 1947 Duclos attended the Communist meeting in Poland that established the Cominform, a European Communist organization. His influence in world Communist circles had been demonstrated a short time earlier when the publication of his article, 'On the Dissolution of the Communist Party in the United States,' resulted in the dismissal of Earl Russell Browder as head of the American Communists. In January 1948 Duclos was defeated as a candidate for vice president of the National Assembly. Duclos then headed the French Communist Party from October 1950 to April 1953. Following a split between the Soviet and Chinese Communists in the 1950s, Duclos supported the Soviet leaders. However, in 1964 he noted that most national parties would not favor the revival of an international centralist organization such as the Cominform, which was by then defunct. Duclos ran for the presidency of France in 1969 but received only 21 percent of the total vote. He died six years later.