René Belin
| René Belin | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
14 April 1898 Bourg-en-Bresse, Ain, France |
| Died | 2 January 1977 (aged 78) Lorrez-le-Bocage, Seine-et-Marne, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Trade unionist |
René Belin (14 April 1898 – 2 January 1977) was a French trade unionist and politician. In the 1930s he became one of the leaders of the French General Confederation of Labour.
He was strongly opposed to communism. In the prelude to World War II (1939–45) he favored a policy of appeasement. After the defeat of France, he was Minister of Industrial Production and Minister of Labour, holding the latter office until April 1942. He oversaw the destruction of unionism. As a result, he was expelled from the CGT in 1944. After the war he tried to form an anti-communist union movement, but with limited success.
René Belin was born on 14 April 1898 at Bourg-en-Bresse, Ain.
Belin was a clerk at the telephone company, then a writer at the PTT (Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones) in 1920. In 1926 he became secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT: General Confederation of Labour) union of postal workers in the Lyon region. He then became secretary of the national federation of the PTT. He was dismissed in 1930 for going on strike. In 1933 he joined the national office of the CGT as permanent secretary, with Léon Jouhaux. After the PTT was reunified in 1935, Belin opposed the Communist faction. He gathered like-minded activists around the journal Syndicats, whose purpose he defined as resistance to communist colonization.
During the Munich Crisis in September 1938 Belin endorsed Édouard Daladier's policy of appeasement and revision of the Treaty of Versailles. At the November 1938 national meeting of the CGT in Nantes Belin obtained the support of one third of the attendees for a pacifist and violently anti-communist resolution. Belin had no difficulty in getting the communists excluded from the CGT after the signature of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.Georges Bonnet, together with his allies in the "peace lobby" both within and without the government such as Anatole de Monzie, Jean Mistler, Marcel Déat, Paul Faure, Paul Baudouin, Pierre Laval, René Belin, Adrien Marquet, and Gaston Bergery, all spent 1–3 September 1939 lobbying the Daladier government, the Senate and the Chamber against going to war with Germany.
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