Jean Luchaire

Jean Luchaire (21 July 1901 – 22 February 1946) was a French journalist and politician who became the head of the French collaborationist press in Paris during the German military occupation. Luchaire supported the Révolution nationale declared by the French Government after it relocated to the spa town of Vichy in 1940.

Jean Luchaire was born in Siena, Italy, a grand-nephew of historian Achille Luchaire. He was married, with four children.

Before World War II Luchaire frequented the French Chamber of Deputies, where Aristide Briand had taken up with Luchaire in a big way, the latter's newspaper supporting Briand's policy for a rapprochement with Germany (while it was still the Weimar Republic). Manchester Guardian journalist Robert Dell is on record as saying that Luchaire was "most frightfully corrupt", and in 1934 Foreign Minister Louis Barthou related that Luchaire was receiving "quite incredible" subsidies for his newspaper Notre Temps (which Luchaire had founded in 1927), some 100,000 francs a month from Paul Boncour.

Jean Luchaire first met and became friends with Otto Abetz, a "francophil" (who later became German Ambassador in Paris during World War II), in 1930, when Abetz was still living in Karlsruhe. Abetz later married Luchaire's secretary, Suzanne. Luchaire was convinced that the appointment of Abetz as Ambassador to Paris was a godsend to France and that, between them, he and Abetz could moderate the rigours of the German military occupation and prepare the ground for a happy Franco-German union. He suggested that, in effect, he was adapting his old Briandism to new conditions.

Pierre Laval, aware of Luchaire's friendly relations with Abetz, sent him to Paris in July 1940 to re-establish contact with him. Luchaire consistently maintained that he represented a certain respectable "rightist" anti-British French political tradition. He founded a further newspaper, the evening daily Les Nouveaux Temps, in 1940, and subsequently became the President of the Association de la presse parisienne (Association of the Parisian Press) in 1941 and presided the Corporation nationale de la presse française (National Corporation of French Press). During the occupation, however, it was claimed that Luchaire dished out Nazi propaganda, fulminating against England, America, de Gaulle, the Soviet Union, Bolshevism and the Maquis. By the end of 1943 he advocated a "real" collaborationist government, Laval being, in his opinion, "inadequate". During the occupation, as editor of Nouveaux Temps, he drew a salary of 100,000 francs a month, besides 'extras', lived in great luxury, lunched at the Tour d'Argent and according to his daughter Corinne, even started keeping expensive mistresses, which he had not done in the past.

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