Antonin Lecouteux

Antonin Lecouteux was born in 1895 with Paris and died in Barcelona the March 17th 1938.

First vice-consul of France with Barcelona, killed during an Italian bombardment the March 17th 1938, during the Spanish civil war.

Biography

The war of 14-18

During the war of 14, Antonin Lecouteux is a young officer of the photographic and cinematographic Section of armies (SPCA). He is also an officer of information to the staff of the French troops in Greece and is interested in all that touches with the history and the culture of the failing Ottoman Empire and the life of the Turkish people.

In station with Istanbul

In May 1919, he is diplomat with the embassy of France with Istanbul, which he persists in still calling Constantinople, like much of nostalgic French of the Byzantine Empire. The city loses its function of capital on October 1st 1923, in favor of Ankara, the capital of the Republic of Turkey. It remains at its station however with Istanbul.

Vice-consul with Barcelona

In 1926, after a short stay in Paris, it is named vice-consul in Barcelona, in Spain directed by Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930). This dictator is driven out capacity leaves in exile.

In 1932, after the fall of the king Alphonse XIII, Catalonia obtains a statute of political autonomy within the young person Second Republic Spanish.

The Spanish civil war

July 17th, 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, Antonin Lecouteux is responsible for the military office with the French consulate of Barcelona.

In addition to the military questions, it takes care of the refugees who are numerous and varied origins:

Spaniards and Catalans, first Taken refuge and exiled war of Spain. In Catalonia, they are several thousands of neutral, being wary or hostile people towards the republicans who leave by boat towards Marseilles or towards the Algérie. These departures are often clandestine. The people tracked go to the consulate, Lecouteux provides them uniforms of French sailors with whom they go to the port and leave there under false identities.

the alive French in Spain, who require or beg to be repatriated. It is necessary sometimes to make them leave prison, where they are held for various reasons, sometimes of false charges of espionage, but most of the time for out-of-date preserve traffics.

Of the members of the international Brigades turning over to France, desilvered and awaiting papers of the Catalan authorities hopelessly. Lecouteux sees in them only French citizens wanting to return in their country, in spite of the non-intervention of France. He advises them, gives them papers quickly and especially of the money to be able to eat and sleep in a hotel.

Antonin also worries about the fate of the former Spanish volunteers who fought with the French troops against the Germans. And it must also take care of the immigrants turned over to the country, or the Spaniard parents, alive to France or North Africa. They are very numerous to ask him of the assistance. Some of them are his/her friends, and the vice-consul likes Spain so much that him and its family lives like their Spanish neighbors. He knows him-also to them food restrictions after 1936.

To the beginning of the war, Antonin Lecouteux clandestinely sends to the French press photographs of the civil war in Catalonia.

For a photograph of ruins around the capilla of Dama, without much interest, Antonin Lecouteux will negra is stopped by the special police force , a group of investigators and executors of the Iberian anarchistic Fédération. It master key 24 hours in prison. Its apartment is excavated.

To the current of the settlings of score which ensanglantent the city, it always will prefer its car which raises the French flag and its autoritso of Generalitat de Catalunya to formed escorts militiamans of the special police force .

Its death

The February 22nd 1938, Teruel is taken by the pro-Franco ones. Bombardments of Barcelona operated by Italian aviation, the March 17th - March 19th 1936, takes place one year day for day after the Italian defeat at the time of the Bataille of Guadalajara. But they also correspond to the preparation of an offensive of the nationalists and Italian fascists. The April 15th, the pro-Franco forces will reach the the Mediterranean and will cut the republican Spain into two. Barcelona is thus not the only city concerned and the objectives are also soldiers.

The March 13rd 1938, the France reopened its borders with the transit of weapons towards the republican zone. Therefore, the media of France of the Popular front insist on the real losses and symbolic systems undergone by France in particular the destruction of the French School, but especially the repatriation of the body of the vice-consul Mr. Lecouteux, killed during these bombardments. They denounce the work of international Fascism to cause the active assistance of the French population.

The body of Antonin Lecouteux is repatriated in France, on the destroyer Vauquelin , which gives place to an official ceremony at the harbor station of Barcelona in the presence of a many crowd and members of the Catalan government.

On his arrival with Sète, the delegate of the Foreign Minister governs an imposing ceremony on arrival of the Vauquelin , transporting the body. He accompanies it to Paris, where the first vice-consul is entitled to state funeral in the presence of many personalities, of which Saint-John Perse, the poet who is general secretary of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Joseph Paul-Boncour, Foreign Minister. The ceremony is filmed and the film is diffused on the level of the current events of the majority of the cinemas of the free world and in the U.S.S.R., to show that everyone is threatened by Fascism, even the catholics and the Member States of the committee of non-intervention. Antonin Lecouteux is quoted with the order of the nation.

In 1939, its widow and her only daughter will flee Paris, the bombardments and the Nazis and will take refuge with Saignes, a village of the Cantal, far from the fury of the men.

Notes and references of the article

Random links: