Frédérick Genevée
in maitron.fr
Léo Matarasso was born in Salonika to Albert Matarasso and Esther Cohen. His family belonged to the important Sephardic Jewish community of this city nicknamed the Jerusalem of the Balkans. Judeo-Spanish was spoken there, but the Matarasso family was also French-speaking and Francophile. Albert Matarasso was a banker and owner of L’Indépendant, the French-language newspaper of the Jewish community. Léo Matarasso was therefore born under Ottoman sovereignty. In 1912, he became Greek after the Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War and the Greek takeover of the city. However, he did not master either language. Léo Matarasso arrived in France in 1925-1926 probably to continue his schooling. He was naturalized in 1932. He then studied law in Toulouse, obtained a doctorate in this discipline and was admitted to the Paris bar in 1934.
Continuing or wanting to accelerate his republican integration, he was initiated in 1933 at the Fraternity of the Peoples Lodge in Paris, affiliated to the Grand Orient of France. He became master in 1938. It is unlikely that after the war, he continued to be a mason even though the PCF lifted the ban on dual membership in 1945.
He evolved in surrealist and artistic circles like his uncle Henri and his cousin Jacques, booksellers in Paris and then in Nice. Léo Matarasso was mobilized at the beginning of the war and took refuge in July 1940 in Aurillac in the Cantal, the home department of his wife, Blanche Poirier, herself a lawyer, with whom he had a daughter Agnès. He joined the Libération-Sud resistance movement in July 1942 and became its leader in the Cantal in March 1943 under the pseudonym Sorel. In contact with his brother Jacques, who had taken refuge in the psychiatric clinic run by Lucien Bonnafé in Saint-Flour in Lozère, he acted as an intermediary for the printing of Paul Éluard resistance works.
Léo Matarasso took part in the departmental board of the MUR and joined the PCF in September 1943. Illegal from February 1944, he was part of the departmental Liberation Committee. After the war, he was active in the National Judicial Movement and was chosen in 1946, after a positive opinion from the PCF’s executive committee, by Joë Nordmann to become one of his collaborators. He had his parents, who were among the few survivors of the Jewish community in Salonika, come to his home on Avenue Hoche. His brother Jacques was then an engineer and a permanent member of the CGT.
In 1948, he presented a report to the meeting of communist jurists and participated in the life of the International Association of Democratic Jurists. In 1949, he voted for the exclusion of the Yugoslav section against the background of the rupture between Tito and Stalin. With Joë Nordmann, he took part in the great trials of the Cold War, such as the Kravchenko case and the International of traitors. From 1952, when it was founded, to 1955, when it was closed, he was editor-in-chief of the Revue progressiste de Droit français. In 1952, he took part in the collective defence of those accused of the “pigeon plot”. In particular, he defended Jacques Duclos*, who was charged with undermining state security. In 1955, he was elected to the national office of Secours populaire.
With the Algerian war, Léo Matarasso became one of the main anti-colonialist lawyers. In particular, he defended Henri Alleg; it was he who encouraged him to write what became The Question and got the manuscripts out of prison. Convinced of the essential character of this testimony on torture, he sought to have it published outside the PCF publishing houses and finally convinced Jérôme Lindon, head of the Minuit publishing house, to do so.
In 1960, he offered “professional asylum” to Georges Kiejman, then a young lawyer. They shared the same law firm on rue de Tournon for more than thirty years. He was also a specialist in press matters and in 1963, he had Maurice Papon convicted for illegal seizure of Libération.
The Algerian experience was essential for him and made him discover the realities of the Third World, which became the centre of gravity of his action. He was the defender of Ben Barka, of Henri Curiel… He participated in 1966 in the Russell Tribunal against the war in Vietnam.
He came into conflict with the PCF leadership over May 1968. He signed an open letter to the PCF leadership published in Le Monde with some forty communist intellectuals. On June 1 and 3, 1968, he took part in the debate between the PCF leadership and the protesters. We can also think that the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia contributed to his distancing from the PCF. From 1969 onwards, he participated in the protest magazine Politique Aujourd’hui. According to René Boyer, himself a lawyer and then secretary of the PCF’s 1st arrondissement committee, this participation and his political criticism led to his formal exclusion from the PCF. No trace of this decision can be found in the PCF archives, but it would have taken place in October 1969 at the same time as that of the lawyer Roger Dosse, whose temporary exclusion is attested to by these same archives.
In spite of this break, he continued his action against the Viet-Nam war and participated in the Viet-Nam National Committee. He then deepened his legal and political reflection, particularly on the Courts of Opinion. He joined the efforts of the Italian left-wing socialist Lelio Basso to create the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples in 1976. He even became its first president. On July 4 of the same year, he was one of the main drafters of the Algiers Declaration. At the initiative of the Lelio Basso Foundation and the International League, the participants adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples. This declaration had a strong impact and was used to support courts of opinion such as the Russell Tribunal 2 on Latin America. It was also the basis for the creation of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in 1979. Léo Matarasso then became involved in the Palestinian cause and the defence of the Sandinista revolution, which was facing American intervention… Culturally attached to the PCF, he did not join any other political organisation.
To cite this article:
https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article139889, notice MATARASSO Léon, Albert dit Léo (dit Sorel) by Frédérick Genevée, version put online on 10 March 2012, last modified on 29 April 2013.
By Frédérick Genevée
WORK: La Nationalité française, commentary on the Code de la nationalité française, Paris Editions techniques, 1948. – Preface to Jacques Duclos, Écrits de la prison, Editions sociales, 1952
SOURCES: Archives of the PCF national committee. – Archives of the Grand Orient de France. – Fonds Nordmann, IHTP. – La Défense, the progressive magazine of French law. – L’Humanité. – Tribute to Léo Matarasso, seminar on the right of peoples, CEDETIM, LIDLP, CEDIDELP, L’Harmattan, 2004. – Interviews with Laure and Jacques Matarasso.
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