Members of the National Council of Vichy France

René_Leriche

Henri Marie René Leriche (12 October 1879 – 28 December 1955) was a French vascular surgeon and physiologist.
He was a specialist in pain, vascular surgery and the sympathetic trunk. He sensitized many who were mutilated in the first World war, he was the first to be interested in pain and to practice gentle surgery with as little trauma as possible.
Two symptoms have the name Algoneurodystrophy and the aortic iliac obliteration. He has trained many students, such as Michael E. DeBakey, Jão Cid dos Santos, René Fontaine et Jean Kunlino.

Georges_Claude

Georges Claude (24 September 1870 – 23 May 1960) was a French engineer and inventor. He is noted for his early work on the industrial liquefaction of air, for the invention and commercialization of neon lighting, and for a large experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths. He has been considered by some to be "the Edison of France". Claude was an active collaborator with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War, for which he was imprisoned in 1945 and stripped of his honors.

Marcel_Boussac

Marcel Boussac (17 April 1889 – 21 March 1980) was a French entrepreneur best known for his ownership of the Maison Dior and one of the most successful thoroughbred race horse breeding farms in European history.
Born in Châteauroux, Indre, France, Boussac made a fortune in textile manufacturing. In 1911 he acquired the Château de Mivoisin, a 36 square kilometre property located 1½ hours south of Paris in Dammarie-sur-Loing, Loiret.
In 1941, Boussac was made a member of the National Council of Vichy France.
In 1946, he financed Christian Dior's new Paris fashion house that became one of the most famous clothing and perfume marques. In 1951 Boussac expanded into the newspaper business with the acquisition of L'Aurore.
An avid horseman, Marcel Boussac acquired the Haras de Fresnay-le-Buffard horse breeding farm in Neuvy-au-Houlme in Lower Normandy and the Haras de Jardy in Marnes-la-Coquette. As part of his breeding operation, Boussac bought and sold horses from across Europe plus from the United States. He acquired the U.S. Triple Crown winner Whirlaway and sold the mare La Troienne to Edward R. Bradley's Idle Hour Stock Farm in Lexington, Kentucky who became one of the most influential mares to be imported into the U.S. in the 20th century.
Boussac's horses, carrying Boussac's signature orange silk and grey cap, dominated French horse racing from the 1930s through to the 1960s making his stable the leading money winner fourteen times and the leading breeder on seventeen occasions. In addition to being a six-time winner of France's most important race, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Boussac's horses also won the prestigious Epsom Derby, Epsom Oaks, 2,000 Guineas, St. Leger Stakes, Ascot Gold Cup and others in the United Kingdom.

With the Fall of France in the Second World War, Boussac paid a British Royal Air Force officer on secret business to fly him from Paris to the UK. This caused the officer Sidney Cotton to be removed from his position. During the German occupation of France in World War II, the Nazis seized some of the best racehorses in the country. They shipped more than six hundred of them out of the country, some to Hungary but most back to Germany for racing or for breeding at the German National Stud. Among them was the champion Pharis, owned by Marcel Boussac.
He was married for many years to the Belgian opera singer Fanny Heldy. They are buried together in the Cimetière de Montmartre in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris.
On his death in 1980, Boussac's estate was liquidated and L'Aurore sold to Robert Hersant who merged it with his Le Figaro newspaper. The property itself would eventually be acquired by Stavros Niarchos. The Aga Khan IV had purchased the bulk of the Boussac farm's breeding stock in 1978 when Boussac's companies were declared bankrupt.In his honor, the Prix Marcel Boussac, a Group One Stakes Race, is run annually at the Longchamp Racecourse.

André_Siegfried

André Siegfried (April 21, 1875 – March 28, 1959) was a French academic, geographer and political writer best known to English speakers for his commentaries on American, Canadian, and British politics.
He was born in Le Havre, France, to Jules Siegfried, the French minister of commerce, and Julie Siegfried, the president of the National Council of French Women. An active member of the Democratic Republican Alliance like his father, André Siegfried was several times a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, but never won an election. On 23 January 1941, he was made a member of the National Council of Vichy France. A few months after the liberation of France in mid-1944, he was elected to the Académie française, taking the vacant seat of Gabriel Hanotaux (who had been elected in 1897). He died in Paris in March 1959.

Paul_Faure_(politician)

Paul Faure (3 February 1878 in Périgueux, Dordogne – 16 November 1960) was a French politician and one of the leaders of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) between the two world wars. He was a minister of state under Camille Chautemps's third Ministry from June 1937 to January 1938, during the period of the Popular Front.
Faure first became a member of Jules Guesde's Parti ouvrier français (POF) in 1901 and was editor-in-chief of the Populaire du Centre. Starting from 1915, he rallied to the centrist and pacifist minority of Jean Longuet in the SFIO, and during the Tours Congress in 1920 he opposed adhesion to the Third International. The Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci underscored how, when Faure visited Imola in 1919, after the Bologna Congress, he had seemed to be in perfect agreement with the representatives of Italian "unitarism". Even after the Tours Congress Faure continued using Marxist rhetoric, but he became a moderate and, along with Léon Blum, directed the SFIO. He was elected to the National Assembly several times.
After Édouard Daladier negotiated the Munich Agreement in 1938 Paul Faure supported the appeasement policy. After the Battle of France in 1940 he rallied to Vichy. In January 1941, he was made a member of the National Council of Vichy France. This led to his being expelled from the SFIO in 1944. He then founded the Democratic Socialist Party (PSD) which participated to the Rassemblement des gauches républicaines. The PSD attracted only deputies accused of collaborationism and dedicated part of its efforts to attempts at rehabilitation of Philippe Pétain's reactionary regime. It had almost no influence in postwar France.