Jeannette Vermeersch

Jeannette Vermeersch (born Julie Marie Vermeersch; 26 November 1910 – 5 November 2001) was a French politician.

She is principally known for having been the companion (1932–1947) and then the wife (1947–1964) of Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), with whom she had three children, born before their union was made official.

Born in La Madeleine, Nord as the seventh of nine children in a family of workers, Jeannette Vermeersch joined the workforce at the age of ten, despite the fact that at the time, children under the age of 13 were legally prohibited from working. Her first job was as a servant at a wine merchant's, then in a bourgeois family, before she entered a textile factory as a worker in 1921, all the while continuing to do chores after her hours of work at the factory.

Vermeersch began activity as a union activist in 1927. Through connections she formed in the union, she came to discover communism, whose growth as a movement was then in full swing in France, several years after the Tours Congress, and she founded a section of Young Communists. Her communist activity led her, in 1929, to be designated to take part in a delegation of textile workers who travelled to explore the Soviet Union. While her comrades returned to France, Jeannette Vermeersch chose to prolong her stay, remaining in Moscow for several months and working "for the cause". It is on this occasion that she would have heard the name of Maurice Thorez spoken for the first time in her presence, a little while before meeting him at the 16th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1930.

Their relationship only became intimate in 1932. During the following seven years, Jeannette Vermeersch focused on Party missions; as an agent, she was zealous but a little withdrawn. For example, under the guidance of Jacques Duclos, she organised an extraordinary congress of Communist Youth in 1933, retaking control of a movement suspected of drifting in an "avant-gardist" direction. She was also one of the pivotal members of a new organisation that the Party had asked to be formed, the Union of Young French Women. After the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, she also focused very clearly on getting together a network of people in solidarity with the Second Spanish Republic, in addition to her other responsibilities. She headed the operation that sent food and various materials to the Republicans and organised the welcome of political refugees on French soil by the Communist networks present in small French towns.

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