Roger Picard
Roger Picard (1 September 1884 – 16 March 1950), was a French jurist, academic and politician, active in several associations and secretary of two ministers during the Third Republic.
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
Born at Besançon into a Jewish family in the Doubs region of France, the eldest son of Louis Picard, president of the Eastern France section of the Chamber of Commerce of Tailors and Confections and Stéphanie (née Fraincaud), Roger Picard studied law at the Faculty of Law in Paris, where he became a friend of Bernard Lavergne, Gaëtan Pirou, and William Oualid, all of whom were future academics.
He was interested in law, but also in history, particularly the French Revolution, and in the working class. One of his two doctoral theses in 1910 was on Les cahiers de 1789 et les classes ouvrières and in 1911 he was admitted to the Société d'histoire moderne. In 1919, he received a degree in literature and a doctorate in law and economics, and passed the competitive examination for the agrégation of law faculties.
Academic career
He was a professor of law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lille from 1923 to 1927, when he was called to the University of Paris as a lecturer. In October 1930, he was appointed to the chair of political economy in March 1937, and then in November 1938 to the chair of statistics at the Faculty of Law in Paris.
He published, translated and prefaced numerous works, and wrote many articles and reports. He contributed to several journals and newspapers, such as the Revue d'économie politique (before 1914 he was in charge of reviews of books published in English), La Victoire économique, L'Europe nouvelle, La France judiciaire, Le Capital, Le Journal du commerce, L'Orientation économique, the dailies L'Intransigeant and Le Journal (1938-1939), etc. He was one of the two secretaries of the editorial staff of the Revue d'histoire économique et sociale from 1920, then its editor in chief in 1931 and finally one of its directors with François Albert-Buisson, from 1935 to 1936.
In 1929, he was chairman of the board of directors of the Kra publishing house (Éditions du Sagittaire), which had just been incorporated as a limited company.
Twice, in 1938 and 1940, he failed to be elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
The socialist beginnings and the cooperative commitment
Like his friends Bernard Lavergne, Gaëtan Pirou and William Oualid, he was influenced before the World War I by the reformist socialist Albert Thomas and participated under his guidance in a group of socialist studies. He collaborated with La Revue socialiste run by Thomas, its editor and then director — he published reviews of works from 1909 onwards — and became its editorial secretary in July 1913. In 1913, he published a pamphlet entitled Le minimum légal de salaire (The legal minimum wage) in the collection Les Cahiers du socialiste. He was also influenced by the social protestanism of Charles Gide. In 1910, he was elected to the central committee of the Cooperative Union, chaired by Gide, and in 1912 to the central council of the new National Federation of Consumer Cooperatives.
He was interested in the working conditions and low wages of home-based workers, especially women workers. He was one of the few Frenchmen to participate in international congresses on home-based work (Brussels in 1910, Zurich in 1912). He was appointed correspondent of the International Office for Home Work and was in charge of setting up its French branch, which he chaired, assisted in particular by the socialist deputy Édouard Vaillant.
Mobilized in 1914, he was called during the war by Albert Thomas to the Ministry of Armaments. He criticized the post-war strikes, calling on the workers to become aware of "their present responsibilities in the economic management of the nation's interests" while the strike "causes harm to the entire nation", and also calling on the bosses to accept social laws, in particular the law on the 8-hour day. He published a study on the possibility of workers' control over the management of companies.
He then directed the bulletin of the French Association for the fight against unemployment and for the organization of the labor market, of which Albert Thomas and Charles Gide were members. In 1919, he was also deputy secretary general of this association. In 1926, the latter merged with two others to form the French Association for Social Progress (AFPS), at the instigation of Albert Thomas, its first president. Its members included Charles Gide, Léon Jouhaux, the leader of the non-communist CGT, as well as business leaders such as Ernest Mercier — like other members of the AFPS, Roger Picard participated in Mercier's French Resurgence — and Henri de Peyerimhoff de Fontenelle. The AFPS emphasized the virtues of economic modernization and the collaboration of the social classes. Roger Picard was its deputy secretary general in 1926 and, together with Max Lazard edited the Association's bulletin, Les Documents du travail, which gave a voice to industrialists, workers' unionists and academics alike.
He contributed to the Revue des études copératives by Gide and Lavergne, to Action coopérative and to Coopérateur de France. As a member of the co-operative movement, he was a substitute member of the National Economic Committee, where he worked with Charles Gide.
Human Rights League
A member of the SFIO in the early 1920s, of the association Peace through Law and of the French Association for the League of Nations, he was elected member of the central committee of the French League for the Defense of Human Rights from 1923 to 1947, general treasurer (1928–1932) and vice-president (1933–1936).
In 1923, he was very critical of the mistakes made by the German, American, English and French governments concerning the question of reparations for the World War I, of the errors of the French chambers of commerce and economic groups, and of the Occupation of the Ruhr. In 1924, he was the rapporteur of a text on tax justice, and he affirmed his reformist convictions: "We are told: We must not be afraid of revolutionary solutions. Well, my apologies, but I am a little afraid of them. We have just been through a war for years, I don't feel brave enough to endure a revolution! It is a question of temperament. And, on balance, I would still go along with it if I were certain that the revolution would produce what is expected of it, but I have a feeling that the revolution will not bring us what we can legitimately expect of it, and I have the conviction that it is only in calm and composure that a social system can be reformed and improved." In 1933, he co-signed a manifesto of the Committee for the Reception and Assistance of Victims of German Anti-Semitism.
Ministerial secretary
He was appointed secretary general of a technical committee on food, an advisory commission of the Ministry of Commerce, and director of its documentation office, and in 1932 he was appointed director of the cabinet of the Minister of Commerce and Industry Julien Durand. This earned him the title of Officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1934, he was questioned by the parliamentary commission of inquiry set up following the Stavisky affair. At the end of January 1936, he was appointed chief of staff to the Minister of National Education, Henri Guernut, one of the vice-presidents of the League of Human Rights.
Member of CAED and advocate of liberalism
In 1921, he was admitted as a member of the Political Economy Society, a bastion of orthodox liberalism. The very liberal Jacques Lacour-Gayet, also a member of this association, brought him into the 1930s to the Comité d'Action Économique et Douanière (CAED), linked to the world of big business in Paris. He became its legal advisor. He also managed another organization linked to the CAED and to big business: he was director of the French office for the study of distribution.
During the 1930s, when liberal ideas were challenged by the crisis, he defended economic liberalism. He lent his support to Pierre Lhoste-Lachaume's Group for the Defense of Economic Freedoms.
After the World War II, he contributed to Achille Dauphin-Meunier's Nouvelle revue de l'économie contemporaine. He also continued to support the CAED by publishing three books or brochures published by the Spid publishing house, founded by Lacour-Gayet before the war and directed by Lacour-Gayet's son, Michel.
Exile during World War II
As a Jew, he was threatened by the new laws of the Vichy government and the German occupation authorities. At the beginning of the 1940 school year, the first status of Jews was applied to the law faculty. Picard was suspended from his duties for two years on October 31. But he had already gone into exile in the United States, obtaining the help of the Rockefeller Foundation. In New York, he taught at the New School for Social Research and participated in the formation of the École libre des hautes études. But he was excluded from it in 1941 because of his anti-Gaullist stance. He gave numerous lectures on behalf of the Alliance française in New York and Canadian universities, to glorify French thought. The American publisher and Francophile Brentano's allowed him to publish several books or pamphlets, devoted to literature but also to the question of democracy to be rebuilt in France. For example, he notes in La Démocratie française, hier, aujourd'hui, demain: "As liberal as I am, I have always been shocked by the freedom given in France to the propaganda, violent in deed as well as in word, that the royalists and communists indulged in".
Picard was reinstated in October 1944 but he preferred to remain in the United States and returned to France only a few weeks before his death.
Works
- Les Idées sociales de Renouvier (1908)
- Les Cahiers de 1789, au point de vue industriel et commercial (1910)
- Pages choisies, Auguste Comte. Notice sur la vie et la doctrine de Comte et commentaires reliant les divers morceaux (1912)
- La Crise économique et la baisse des salaires (1921)
- Le contrôle ouvrier sur la gestion des entreprises (1922)
- Les Assurances sociales. Commentaires de la loi du 5 avril 1928 (1928)
- Le Mouvement syndical durant la guerre (1928)
- Le Problème des dettes interalliées. Nécessité d'une revision (1934; with Paul Hugon; awarded the Fabien Prize by the Académie française)
- Questions actuelles d'économie rurale (1939)
- Manuel de législation ouvrière (1939; with André Choquet)
- Les Salons littéraires et la société française, 1610-1789 (1943)
- La Démocratie française, hier, aujourd'hui, demain (1944)
- Le Romantisme social (1944)
- Le Conflit des doctrines économiques en France à la veille de la guerre (1944)
- Artifices et mystifications littéraires (1945)
- La reconversion économique aux États-Unis: de l'économie de guerre à l'économie de paix (1945)
- La leçon des grèves américaines: 1945-1946 (1946)
- L'unité européenne par l'intercitoyenneté (1948)
