7 - Restoring the Republican legal order: the ‘Comité Juridique’

Summary

Between 1943 and 1945, the route to the restoration of the Republican order passed through the Comité Juridique. Its work changed the character both of Free France and of Cassin’s place in it. The construction in Algiers of the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN) enabled France not only to wage war but also to reconstruct the state in order to govern the country as soon as possible. This objective required drafting the rules through which the new government would act. On 6 August 1943, the Comité Juridique was created to examine and define precisely these rules, the nature of which was crucial to the transition from war to peace. The same day, ‘Mr René Cassin, professor of law in the Paris Faculty’, was named president of this committee. This appointment constituted a shift for him from work in the political to work in the administrative arena. This new stage of his life led to his being named head of the Conseil d’Etat, in which post he served for sixteen years.

What now?

It is impossible to account for the creation of the Committee and the appointment of Cassin as its head outside of the context of the spring and summer of 1943. De Gaulle arrived in Algiers on 30 May, and with Giraud created the CFLN on 3 June, a kind of dual power shared between them. As a consequence, Free France had to move its centre of operations from London to Algiers and to bring into its executive Giraud’s followers. Even before the list of ministers in the CFLN was announced, de Gaulle charged Cassin ‘with ongoing responsibility for the day-to-day work of the civil administration in Britain’. It was evident that Cassin would not be needed in Algiers, and would not be named a minister in the new National Committee. On 7 June, Jules Abadie, a physician and a Giraudiste, was named Minister of Justice, National Education and Health.