FREE FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 April 1942, Page 4

FREE FRANCE

PIONEER REFORMER OF LAST CENTURY LEDRU-ROLLIN'S CAREER. ESTABLISHMENT OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. (By Norton Webb in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) General de Gaulle’s activities on behalf of French freedom in England had, although in a different way, a counterpart in the nineteenth century when Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior during the Second French Republic, fled to London from tyrannical elements in France, and from there organised and continued to battle for democracy. Ledru-Rollin laboured unremittingly all his life against oppression and his achievements stamp him not only as ao reformer and philanthropist but as a French Lincoln and emancipator, as his career, still too little known, eminently shows. In 1830, at 22 years of age, Alexan-dre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin, member of a wealthy and cultured Parisian family, was already a brilliant lawyer. Because of his wealth and position he could have chosen an easy and. worldly path of glamour. But he refused. Instead he threw himself wholeheartedly into helping his oppressed countrymen under the monarchical authoritarianism of Louis Philippe. He began by such things as assiduously fighting to have the trials of French revolutionaries removed from military tribunals to civil courts with juries. He laboured for reforms and spent his wealth ungrudgingly to promote the welfare of the common citizen and to this end founded his newspaper, La Reforme.

In 1843 Ledru-Rollin consummated his ideal marriage with the young Protestant Englishwoman, Henrietta Sharpe. As his wife and partner she was to give him unswerving support in the stormy years ahead and also contribute her own fortune to their labours as he was his.

Ledru-Rollin’s great' opportunity came in 1848 with the advent of the Second French Republic, when he was appointed Minister of the Interior in the new Republican Government. He immediately began to vigorously and fearlessly put into practice many of the democratic ideals he had long cherished. First came his establishment of universal suffrage for the French nation that remained in force for nearly a century until the Petain-Vichy regime decreed its so-called abolition. Few doubt, however, that this great achievement of Ledru-Rollin will not

again live' with still greater virility when the curtain falls on the world’s present violent wave of reaction. The second achievement of Minister Ledru-Rollin was as important as his first since it was the definite abolition of slavery in all of France’s colonies. These two humane acts alone made him worthy of being called the French Abraham Lincoln.

Other notable acts of Ledru-Rollin were his abolition of corporal punishment in the French Navy, suppression of the death penalty for political offences, and securing a twelve-hour day for labour. He was a staunch advocate of a free Press and sponsored measures to safeguard it. He improved on laws for free assembly and association and founded credit institutions for the common people. This great humanitarian once told Francois Raspail, natural scientist and statesman, that he believed the barriers of money between menshould be removed, but considered ignorance and hate as the prime social offenders and these should be replaced by understanding and goodness. When Louis Napoleon got himself elected as a deputy, LedrU-Rollin sensed danger for the French Republic and moved for his arrest on charges of fraud. But in this as some other things, the French reformer acted a little too hastily and the opposition and resentment that had been piling up against him from powerful French reactionaries and clericals sent him into exile with his wife to London in the summer of 1849. There, as de Gaulle is doing today, he continued his fight for French freedom and republicanism. By underground means he kept in touch with militant French republicans in the homeland. t In 1851 when Louis Napoleon by his coup restored the French Empire, Ledru-Rollin was condemned to death and excluded from all amnesties. But when Napoleon 111. fell at Sedan, the French emancipator, after twenty-one years in England, returned to Paris. With Mazzini and prescript republicans from all over Europe he worked to establish his dream—the Universal Republic. After Ledru-Rollin passed on in 1875 his wife had this to say: “He was a man of principle, devoted to his work and selfless. He thought little of his own person and mostly of his duty to his fellow-man. His whole life work was to achieve justice.”