Nobel Prizewinner

In the years before World War I, Leon Jouhaux, radical young secretary general of France's labor federation (C.G.T.), raised the hair of his countrymen by plunging Paris into darkness, freezing the railroads and docks, introducing the quickie strike (greve eclair) and the slowdown (greve perlee). A red-hot anarcho-syndicalist risen from the factories, Jouhaux liked to boast that if war came, labor in all Europe would quench it by a general strike. But when war came, Jouhaux was a Frenchman after all. ("Heinous traitor," shrieked Lenin.)

After the war, Jouhaux helped found the International Labor Organization at the Paris peace conference. In the '30s, he and his C.G.T. were a linchpin of the Socialist Front Populaire; fighting Franco, Laval and Hitler, he worked alongside the Communists. The Germans interned him in a castle in Bavaria during World War II. When he returned, he found that the Communists had moved into the C.G.T. like moths. He had to accept a Communist as "co-secretary general." For a time Jouhaux put up with the comrades, but by the end of 1947, he saw that he was simply being used as a respectable front. Reluctantly, he and his non-Communist colleagues pulled out of the powerful C.G.T., which he had bossed for 38 years. They set up the Force Ouvriere, with Jouhaux as president, as an actively anti-Communist trade union movement.

Bulky and slow-moving, Jouhaux, anarchist turned respectable, at 72 sits nowadays at official functions fourth from the President of France. Last week the Grand Old Man of European Labor was awarded the 1951 Nobel Peace Prize ($32,400). In selecting its man of 1951, Norway's Nobel committee passed over Norway's own Trygve Lie, India's Pandit Nehru and Britain's Sir Hartley Shawcross. It was a surprise choice, and not a universally applauded one. Said Jouhaux: "It is not Leon Jouhaux who is being honored; it is the working class, which has always striven for peace."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.