Jacques Soustelle

Jacques Soustelle (3 February 1912 – 6 August 1990) was an important and early figure of the Free French Forces, an anthropologist specializing in Pre-Columbian civilizations, and vice-director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1939. Governor General of Algeria, he helped the rise of De Gaulle to the presidency of the Fifth Republic, but broke with De Gaulle over Algerian independence, joined the OAS is their efforts to overthrow De Gaulle and lived in exile between 1961 and 1968. On returning to France he resumed political and academic activity and was elected to the Académie française in 1983.

Jacques Soustelle was born in Montpellier, into a Protestant working-class family. A brilliant high school student, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm, which is still a major college within the French educational system (many Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists are among its alumni). At the age of 20, he was admitted at the first place at the competitive exam of agrégation de philosophie (high-level grade for teaching). An anti-fascist, he was general-secretary in 1935 of the French Union of Intellectuals against Fascism.

Soustelle developed an interest in Ethnology while working at the Musée de l'Homme under Paul Rivet. Rivet sent him to Mexico, after Soustelle became an Agrégé, to study the Otomi people. Soustelle wrote his first major book Mexique, Terre Indienne (Mexico is Indian) about his time with the Otomi.

After the Armistice of 22 June 1940, he left Mexico to join the Free French Forces (FFL) in London. Charles de Gaulle charged him of a diplomatic mission in Latin America (1941), to set up support committees to free France, to cut short the diplomatic efforts of Petainists throughout the continent. He headed the intelligence service Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA). He joined the Comité national français, (Government of the Free France, fighting Vichy France, and the Axis powers ) in London, then ran the commissariat national à l’Information (1942).

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