Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour

Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour (12 October 1907 – 29 September 1989) was a French lawyer and far-right politician.

Jean-Louis Tixier was born on 12 October 1907 in Paris, the son of Léon Tixier, a doctor, and Andrée Vignancour.

His maternal grand-father, Louis Vignancour, had been a member of parliament and senator.

Tixier-Vignancour earned a degree in law in 1926 and the following year qualified as a barrister at the Paris Court of Appeal.

He was an activist in the youth wing of the royalist movement Action Française, the Camelots du Roi.

He took part in the anti-parliamentary riots of 6 February 1934.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1936, he initially collaborated with the Vichy regime before leaving for Tunisia in 1941.

Tixier-Vignancour entered politics and defeated the independent leftist Georges Moutet in the French legislative election of the department of Basses-Pyrénées in May 1936.

His election was however declared non-valid after suspicions of fraud.

Tixier-Vignancour was eventually re-elected on 27 September 1936.

He was part of a parliamentary group which traveled to Spain to congratulate Francisco Franco on his fight against the Spanish Popular Front.

Tixier-Vignancour married Janine Auriol in January 1938, the daughter of a lawyer and member of parliament for Haute-Garonne.

Enlisted in the army in 1939, he took part in fights near Beuvraignes during the Battle of France in 1940, before voting for the law that gave full powers (pleins pouvoirs) to Philippe Pétain on July, 10 of the same year.

On 6 October 1940, in charge of "applying the instructions of the armistice commission", he confirmed the interdiction of movies like The Great Illusion or Entente cordiale, accused of "incitement to hatred against Germany".

Tixier-Vignancour served as the under-Secretary of State for Information under Nazi-collaborationist Vichy France and as director of Pétain’s "Propaganda Committee".

As the head of Radio-Vichy, he offered a large broadcast time to collaborationist Marcel Déat.

On 20 July 1941, he was interned in Vals-les-Bains after he resigned from the Vichy regime over its increasingly pro-collaborationist stance, but was freed by highly-placed friends and in December moved to Tunisia.

In early November 1942, the Allies invaded the German-occupied Maghreb during Operation Torch, and Tixier-Vignancour was interned by the German authorities for his links to the resistance.

He was released following the ejection of the Axis powers from North Africa by the Allies in May 1943.

After his liberation, Tixier-Vignancour joined the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy as a lieutenant but was recalled to Tunis in January 1944 and placed under house arrest by senior offices suspicious of his previous activities in the Vichy government.

Released in April he joined an Anglo-French unit before being arrested again on account of his collaborationist past and eventually being imprisoned in Paris by the French Committee of National Liberation before being cleared of the worst charges of collaboration in October 1945 but being declared ineligible to hold public office for ten years on 4 December 1945.

He had also served as a lawyer for Louis-Ferdinand Céline in 1948, and for Raoul Salan during the 1962 OAS trials.

In 1948, Tixier-Vignancour became the lawyer of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, accused of "collaboration with the enemy" for his antisemitic and pro-occupation writings.

While waiting for his electoral ban period to end, Tixier-Vignancou joined the neo-fascist party Jeune Nation soon after its creation in 1949.

He obtained Céline's amnesty on 26 April 1951, after he presented his client under his real name, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, with no judge able to draw a relationship between Destouches and his pen name, Céline.

He helped Maurice Bardèche establish the magazine Défense de l'Occident (an important arena for the discussion of right-wing ideas and Holocaust denial text) and the neo-fascist coalition European Social Movement in 1951-52.

Tixier-Vignancour was granted amnesty in 1953 and became once again able to run for public office.

After a military court declared Tixier-Vignancour ineligible to hold public office for ten years for his early WWII activities, he joined the nationalist group Jeune Nation but left in 1954, opposed to their use of violence.

Opposing the use of street violence promoted by Jeune Nation, he left the group to found his own party with Bardèche in May 1954: the Rassemblement National Français.

Opposed to decolonization and independence during the Algerian war (1954-1962), Tixier-Vignancour was, along with Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of the founders of the National Front for French Algeria (Front National pour l'Algérie Française) in July 1960.

He was re-elected to the Assembly in 1956, but lost his seat during the first legislative elections of the Fifth Republic.

Re-elected in the department of Basses-Pyrénées, Tixier-Vignancour served as a Non-Inscrit ("non-attached member") in the National Assembly between January 1956 and December 1958, where he allied himself with the Poujadists.

Following the May 1958 crisis and the return of Charles de Gaulle to power, he refused to vote a law that would temporarily authorize the president to revise the constitution until a referendum occurs on a new one.

Tixier-Vignancour declared ironically in parliament: "I would never have thought that, twice in my life, I will be asked to delegate the fraction of constituting power I held, and—even better—never would I have imagined that, for the second time, the man who asks for it will be the very same man who punished me for having delegated this power a first time."

The Fifth Republic was eventually established on 4 October 1958, approved by 82% of the French in September.

On 30 November 1958, Tixier-Vignancour lost his siege to a Radical candidate in the first legislative elections of the new regime.

After the dissolution of Jeune Nation by official decree earlier that year, he wrote articles for the group's magazine, launched on 5 July 1958 as an attempt to revive the banned movement.

Tixier-Vignancour was a candidate during the 1965 French presidential election, with Jean-Marie Le Pen as a campaign director, and received 5.2% of the votes, the biggest result for a far-right candidate since the war.

In his later life, he became known as the main instigator in the theft of Philippe Pétain's coffin in 1973, and as a spokesman for the far-right Party of New Forces in the late 1970s.

Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour died on 17 September 1989 at 81.