Archives of Pierre Le Grève

Archive fonds description:

The archives of Pierre Le Grève document the numerous actions undertaken by him with regard to human rights throughout his life.

Pierre Le Grève was born in 1916 into a bourgeois family. As a student at Free University of Brussels (ULB) he discovered Marxism and the ideology and action of Trotsky. He first joined the socialist students although he identified more with communism and the Russian revolution. Georges Vereeken helped him understand the bureaucratic evolution of the Soviet Union and Stalinism at a time of the Moscow Trials. He got engaged in the Vereeken organisation, which was a splinter group of the Trotksyst movement.

He was mobilised in 1940 and evacuated to France from where he returned through underground connections. He got in touch with his organisation which was one of the first that could produce false documents. At the end of the war, he was in favour of reuniting the two Trotskyist movements. He became a member of the Political Bureau of the unified organisation International Communist Party. He was a member of the directorate of the Belgian section, the 4^th International, for over 25 years.

His political views were an obstacle to his first attempt to obtain a job in education. He then had a career at Solvay and eventually became a teacher at the public secondary school Athenée d’Ixelles. He held this post until his election to parliament in 1965 and became a teacher again after his political mandate expired.

In 1951, when Leopold III abdicated, the International Communist Party had campaigned for the creation of a republic but lost many supporters. Pierre Le Grève managed to become a member of the Socialist Party, not without some difficulty, where he led his efforts to implement Trotskyist ideology. At the congress of 1956, he presented and passed a resolution which claimed equal democratic rights in the Congo colony. In 1957, he started his contribution to the journal “La Gauche”.

As from 1955, Pierre Le Grève supported the Front de Libération Nationale de l'Algérie and founded the “Comité pour la Paix en Algérie” in 1958. This was the period of the so-called “porteurs de valises” (money curiers) who helped and saved many militants of F.L.N., transported money for the "rebels" chased by French secret services, who tried to get rid of these troublemakers by sending letter bombs. When peace was re-established the committee re-oriented its actions towards non-governmental aid to Algeria.

From December 1960 to January 1961, Belgium was struck by its most intense wave of general strikes the country had witnessed in its entire history. Pierre Le Grève became the de facto leader of the teachers’ union in Brussels and was elected as its president by a leftwing majority.

In December 1964, the congress of the Belgian Socialist Party decided that its participation in the weekly “La Gauche” and the right to political wing formation and expression were incompatible with a membership in P.S.B. The left-leaning wing of the party immediately created small socialist political group called “Confédération Socialiste des Travailleurs”, to which adhered the “Parti Wallon des Travailleurs” in Wallonia and the “Union de la Gauche Socialiste” in Brussels. When he put himself up for election on a common list with the Communist Party, he was the only representative who got elected. For two and a half years, he sat in the Chamber and voiced numerous interventions.

As from 1967, three committees were founded by Le Grève: the Comité National Viêtnam, the equal pay defense committee “A travail égal, salaire égal”, and the committee against repression in Morocco “Comité contre la Répression au Maroc”. He later got also interested in the situation in Rwanda and Burundi, in Spain under the Franco regime, in the people expelled from Mauritania, etc. He was attentive to all kinds of Human Rights violations.

In the early 1970s, Pierre Le Grève no longer stood for election as director of the Blgian section of the 4^th International that had become the “Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs” (L.R.T.) and would soon cease to be a militant in this movement while staying in touch however. His revolutionary ideal remained intact. Nevertheless, he admitted that a “slight doctrinal evolution” had occurred and recognises that his hopes to see his ideals realised in Europe had faded. Being a hands-on type of man, he continued his political and trade union engagement until 1988. He died in 2004.

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