Jacques Doriot

Jacques Doriot , 1888-1945?, French collaborator during the German occupation of France in World War II. For many years he served as the mayor of Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. He was also a Communist leader in the chamber of deputies. In 1934 he was expelled from the Communist party for advocating an alliance with other leftist parties. Enormously popular, he was reelected to the chamber of deputies despite his split with the Communists. He soon became a virulent opponent of the Communists and organized (1936) a party on the extreme right, the French Popular party. By that time a strong supporter of Adolf Hitler, Doriot came into his own after the German defeat (1940) of France in World War II. Treated coolly by the Vichy government, but backed by the German occupation authorities, he organized a youth movement, recruited for a French legion to fight Russia, and sought to control the French laborers who had been sent to work in Germany. He fled (1944) to Germany after the overthrow of the Vichy government. Early in 1945 he was reported to have been killed in an air raid.

Doriot, Jacques (1898–1945),ex-communist French politician who by 1939 had become fervently pro-Nazi. One of the principal collaborators during the German occupation of France (see collaboration, 2), he formed the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme (French Volunteer Legion against Bolshevism) and fought with it during the German–Soviet war for several periods from September 1941 to January 1944. After the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD), he led those opposing de Gaulle and the Free French and the Allied occupation of France, forming for this purpose the Committee for French Liberation at Sigmaringen in southern Germany when the Vichy government was forced to move there. He was killed in his car in Germany, probably by an Allied aircraft.