Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
François de La Rocque
Summary
François de La Rocque (fʁɑ̃swa dəlaʁɔk; 6 October 1885 – 28 April 1946) was the leader of the French right-wing league the Croix de Feu from 1930 to 1936 before he formed the more moderate nationalist French Social Party (1936–1940), which has been described by several historians, such as René Rémond and Michel Winock, as a precursor of Gaullism.
La Roque was born on 6 October 1885 in Lorient, Brittany, the third son of a family from Haute-Auvergne. His parents were General Raymond de La Rocque, commander of the artillery defending the Lorient Naval Base, and Anne Sollier.
He entered Saint Cyr Military Academy in 1905 in a class known as "Promotion la Dernière du Vieux Bahut". He graduated in 1907 and was posted to Algeria and the edge of the Sahara and in 1912 to Lunéville. The next year, he was called to Morocco by General Hubert Lyautey. Despite the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, La Roque remained there until 1916 as officer of native affairs, when he was gravely wounded and repatriated to France. Meanwhile, his older brother Raymond, a major in the army, had been killed in action in 1915. However, La Roque volunteered to fight on the Western Front and was sent to the trenches of the Somme to command a battalion.
After the First World War ended in 1918, he was assigned to the interallied staff of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, but in 1921 he went to Poland with the French Military Mission under General Maxime Weygand. In 1925, he was made chief of the Second Bureau in the Rif War during Marshal Philippe Pétain's campaign against Abd el-Krim in Morocco. La Rocque resigned from the French Army in 1927 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
La Rocque came from the patriotic and social Catholic movement created by Félicité Robert de Lamennais in the late 19th century. He then joined the Croix de Feu in 1929, two years after it had been formed, and took it over in 1930. He quickly transformed the veterans' league; created a paramilitary organisation (les dispos, short for disponibles – availables); and formed a youth organization, the Sons and Daughters of the Croix de Feu (fils et filles de Croix de Feu).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.