“What is exemplary about the Vietnamese people is its modesty and its pragmatism, a people that counts only on its own strength,” said Paul Vergès in 1977, interviewed for Chris Marker’s documentary Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge was the French title) on the rise and fall of leftist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War had not long ended and Vergès, a Réunion island politician who was born in 1925 in Siam, as Thailand was then called, was inscribed in the history of the anti-colonial struggle.
When he spoke of “a people that counts only on its own strength” one can imagine that he was referring also to another people who were for him among those yet to be de-colonised, namely that of La Réunion island. At the time, Marker questioned him in his role as general secretary of the Communist Party of the French Indian Ocean territory of La Réunion. Vergès was the founder of the Réunion Communist Party (PCR), which he had wanted to be directly linked with the Soviet Union and independent of the Communist Party of mainland France.
Vergès was a leading figure of international communism. Regularly hounded by the French state as a “representative in France of a foreign political party”, he carried the banner for “autonomy”, which stood out as a different development of independence for those former French colonies that were La Réunion, the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and Guyana in South America.
Paul Vergès died overnight last Friday in a hospital in La Réunion, aged 91. While he was less known in France than his brother, the controversial lawyer and provocateur Jacques Vergès, he played a crucial role in the relations between mainland France and its overseas départements (equivalent to counties), and right up to his death he represented for the population of La Réunion a figure of powerful and personalized communist authority.
“Vergès was a considerable figure, a monument of complexity, and his family origins were quite unusual in the communist movement, he was the son of a doctor, a bourgeois family,” commented historian Frédérick Genevée, a specialist on the French Communist Party. “What weighed in his [political] engagement was the colonial issue, not the social one.”
This charismatic leader was the son of Raymond Vergès, another giant of the communist movement in the Indian Ocean region, and the father of the départementalisation of France’s former colonies, alongside Aimé Césaire, Léopold Bissol and Gaston Monnerville. “Paul intended passing the relay to one of his sons and create a dynasty,” said Frédérick Genevée. It was the elder of his two sons, Laurent, who appeared shaped for the role. “But the great tragedy of his life was that [Laurent] killed himself in a road accident,” added Genevée.
After having held the posts – and sometimes simultaneously – of regional councillor, departmental councillor, president and vice-president of both these councils, mayor, Member of Parliament (MP), Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and senator, Vergès leaves no political heir. Following a career of almost 70 years, he also leaves the Réunion’s Communist Party in a poor state, reeling from its heavy defeats in recent local elections.
Paradoxically, the anti-colonialist that he was became over time an architect of forging the island’s development through French and European Union funding. “Paul Vergès was a politician who looked to what lay in the future, and his message, which reconciled autonomist ambitions and the need for France in the overseas territories, is still pertinent,” argued Ferdinand Mélin-Soucramanien, a professor of constitutional law at Bordeaux University, a deontologist for the French lower house, the National assembly, and who is himself from La Réunion. “At the time when was a journalist [editor’s note: for the Communist Party daily Témoignages, founded by his father] and persecuted by the French state, these two aims could have appeared antonymic but today that’s no longer the case. Giving an ever larger place to initiatives for the adaptation of policies and national laws in the overseas territories is now de rigueur, just as is also his strategy of opening up to countries in our geographical zone, [and] regional cooperation.”
Paul Vergès drove major projects on La Réunion, from transport infrastructures to the modernisation of social policies. During his term as head of the regional council, between 1988 and 2010, he was always able to work harmoniously with French governments, whatever their political colours. “In the first stage of his life, Paul Vergès was locked in a very tough conflict with [former French Gaullist MP for La Réunion, who served as prime minister and later foreign minister] Michel Debré and the Gaullists, but later on his attitude changed a lot,” said historian Paul Boulland, a member of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and who is a co-director of The Maitron biographical dictionaries of the French and international labour movements. “As of the 1990s, there was a strange period when he was an his island’s interlocutor with the government, and knotted local alliances that were not very orthodox. All of this was in an electoral approach.”
But the strongman of La Réunion was unable to see his ambitions for the island through to the end. In 2010 he lost the regional elections to the conservatives led by Didier Robert, and had to abandon his project of building a vast “tram-train” link. Until then, the communist leader was readily regarded as untouchable. He had his own legend, that of a communist through and through, who began his career accused of assassinating - and later charged with the manslaughter of – the leader of the island’s Right, Alexis de Villeneuve, in 1946. Villeneuve was fatally wounded during a public meeting in the town of Saint-Denis and eyewitnesses identified Vergès as the gunman. He was given a five-year suspended jail sentence for the crime in 1947 and was pardoned in 1953. He had always maintained his innocence, and even launched lawsuits against media reports of the case.
The incident was not the only dark side to Paul Vergès. Like his lawyer brother Jacques Vergès, he never talked in public about his relations with communist regimes known to have perpetrated mass crimes, such as that of Paul Pot’s Khmers Rouges in Cambodia during the 1970s.
But despite all this, his legend remained untarnished. Following his death, the French president, the prime minister, the president of the Senate, and the minister for overseas territories all paid homage to Vergès in statements that variously described him as “a Resistance fighter”, “a visionary” and “an ardent defender of the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity”.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse