RAYMOND MARCELLIN was the iron-handed French Interior Minister who put down the l968 student rising and gave France a national police force.
Facing his last crisis, President de Gaulle seemed unable to quell the revolt that put students in charge of the streets of Paris for more than two weeks in May l968.
So, on May 31, he called in Raymond Marcellin, his seasoned supporter and an experienced minister, and put him in charge of the Interior Ministry. Within days the streets of Paris were reconquered by the police. And Daniel CohnBendit, one of the leaders of the revolt, had fled to his native Germany.
Marcellin routed the students by imposing the toughest policing Paris had ever witnessed. He invented zero tolerance two decades before it became the fashion in New York. He also clearly defined the “enemy”: it was any and every far-left caucus, such as the Trotskyist Communist League and the Maoist Proletarian Left. He banned and outlawed them. He went on to order the arrest of anyone suspected of “endangering the state”. And he gave France’s counterintelligence service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, a special section to infiltrate revolutionary movements.
With that he permanently marshalled the secret services and the uniformed police against the revolutionary Left. Marcellin massively reinforced the police and within the next five years its numbers had increased by nearly 20,000. He also welded France’s fragmented gendarmerie into a national force, co-ordinated from Paris, with the creation of the Direction Générale de la Police.
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Communism, and its various factions, which had been a force on the streets and in the factories and local government of France throughout the Gaullist era, began to be neutered before the end of the l960s. It never again became a threatening force in French politics. With that, Marcellin also won a major battle in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Raymond Marcellin was born at Sézanne, in the Marne. After studying law, he taught it to undergraduates during the war. In 1946 he was elected deputy for the département of Morbihan, in Brittany. He served as a junior minister in several governments and, though he was a conservative rather than a Gaullist, he welcomed de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958. When Georges Pompidou became Prime Minister in 1962 he appointed Marcellin to a series of ministerial portfolios, including health and industry, before he was called to become what Pompidou called “le premier flic de France” — France’s top cop.
Nearly six years on, Marcellin’s iron rule at the Interior Ministry ended in what he described as a farce and the French media labelled a “scandale”. A team of secret service agents were surprised in the offices of the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. They were attempting to install microphones to bug the paper in an attempt to trace the source of sensitive leaks it had published.
Marcellin sought to tough it out and ridiculed the episode by calling it “Watergaffe”. But the Left, backed by almost the entire press, were after his blood. Marcellin’s political allies panicked and his support rapidly ebbed away. He resigned on February 28, l974 — to be succeeded by the next rising star in the French political firmament, Jacques Chirac. The ailing President Pompidou made Marcellin Minister of Agriculture as a face-saver and consolation. Within two months Pompidou had died of cancer, and his successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, felt that with his job done, Marcellin had become at best an irrelevance and at worst a liability, so he shunted him off the national stage.
Marcellin went back to his home base, the local politics of Britanny. He was still Mayor of Vannes, and would remain so until 1977. He went on to chair the regional assembly. In Brittany he transformed himself overnight from a tough into a nice guy. He abandoned confrontation in favour of consensus. He was willing to lunch and dine with any opponent, and listen to every dissident. He cut deals and made compromises, but also made it clear that retirement was not on his agenda. So he ruled the prosperous province for most of the next 20 years and gave up with such grace as he could muster in 1997, a little before his 83rd birthday.
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Ironically, he made headlines once more at the age of 86 when burglars forced their way into his Paris apartment. They bound and gagged him, but left without a centime or a credit card. And even the national police force, which he had created, was unable to hunt them down.
He never married.
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Raymond Marcellin, French Interior Minister 1968-74, was born on August l9, l914, and died on September 8, 2004, aged 90.