David Rousset
David Rousset ( born January 18, 1912 in Roanne, † 13 December 1997, Paris) was a French writer and political activist.
Life
The son of a metal worker studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, traveled 1931-1936 Germany and Czechoslovakia. From 1931 he was a member of the Socialist Students of the SFIO. As a teacher, he approached the Trotskyism, whose leaders he met during his stay in France, which led to his expulsion from the SFIO in 1935. 1936 was one of the founders of Rousset Trotskyist Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste (POI). He devoted himself primarily to the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and Morocco. In 1938, he was a correspondent for the American magazine Fortune and Time. In 1939 he married Susie Elizabeth Elliot.
During the German occupation Rousset cooperated with the secret POI. On October 16, 1943 Rousset was arrested for his political work, tortured, detained in the notorious prison of Fresnes, then deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After a death march Neuengamme Wöbbelin Rousset is exempt from the advancing Allied troops.
After the war, Rousset published the book L' Univers concentrationnaire, a fundamental work on the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. In 1947 he published the novel Les Jours documentary KZ - de notre mort. In addition to the continuation of his anti-colonial struggle Rousset 1948, with Jean -Paul Sartre, the short-lived Rassemblement démocratique revolutionnaire ( RDR), a antitotalitaristische Left Party. Sartre but soon approached the PCF.
After the sensational success of the French version of the soviet book critical J'ai choisi la liberté (1947 ) a Soviet defector and the obtained process Kravchenko of the author against Les Lettres françaises, the literary magazine of the PCF, Rousset founded in October 1950, the Commission international contre le régime concentrationnaire ( CICRC ), who carried out studies on the concentration camps in Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Used for the first time in France Rousset the term gulag for the bearing system of the Soviet Union. He was then called by the Lettres françaises " Trotskyste falsificateur " ( Trotskyite counterfeiters ). Rousset sued and won the libel case in 1951, not least thanks to the testimony of Alexander Weissberg - Cybulski.
1952-1956 researched Rousset on the situation of the convicts in China and wrote a corresponding White Paper. In May 1957 CICRC condemned the repression in Algeria.
At the beginning of the 1960s Rousset worked for Le Figaro and Le Monde and interviewed personalities of the Third World: Nasser, Ben Bella, Che Guevara. In 1965 he supported as a left- Gaullist Charles de Gaulle and was elected in 1968 as deputy of the UDR party for the constituency Isère. After the retreat and death of de Gaulle, whom he had admired for his Entkolonialisierungspolitik in Algeria, Rousset ended his mandate as an independent.
Rousset decided his journalistic career as a reporter of Figaro littéraire, also worked for the radio station France-Culture and has published several books, including Fragments d' autobiography.
Works
- L' Univers concentrationnaire. Edition du Pavois 1946
- Les Jours de notre mort. Novel. Edition du Pavois 1947
- Jean -Paul Sartre, David Rousset, Gerard Rosenthal: Questions and Answers sur la politique. Gallimard, Paris 1949
- Vers une seconde révolution en Chine. No Saturne 1959. 19
- Sur la guerre. Nous sommes- en danger de guerre Nucléaire? Ramsay, Paris 1987