With a good-natured demeanor, a gravelly, lilting accent, a smile on his lips, he embodied rural communism, in line with the former secretary general of the French Communist Party (PCF), Waldeck Rochet. Former deputy, communist candidate in the 1988 presidential election, André Lajoinie died on November 26 at the age of 94. Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the PCF, expressed his “tremendous sadness”greeting “his fights for the working classes, for his territory, for France”.
André Lajoinie was born on December 26, 1929 in Chasteaux (Corrèze). His father owns a modest farm. Very close to the radical-socialists and very anti-clerical, he plays the role of public writer in the village. His mother, very pious, goes to mass every Sunday. Until the age of 12, young André was an altar boy. After obtaining his school certificate, he had to stop his education, his family being too poor to allow him to continue. He will feel injustice. During the war, the family listened to Radio Londres and supplied the region’s maquis. Young Lajoinie does not hesitate to provoke his teacher by writing a “Long live de Gaulle” on the board.
At the age of 16, in 1946, André Lajoinie joined the Communist Youth, and two years later, preceded by his father, he joined the PCF. Self-taught, he took correspondence courses and after eighteen months of military service, he returned to the farm. In 1954, he was asked to be a permanent member of the Corrèze federation of agricultural farmers’ unions. In 1957, he was federal secretary in charge of propaganda. In 1958, during a demonstration against the Algerian war in Brive, he was seriously injured by the police. Plunged into a coma, he underwent trepanation and was treated in Tulle then in Paris before the party sent him to convalesce in Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia (today in the Czech Republic).
An admiration for the USSR
In 1961, he ran in two cantonal elections in Corrèze but was defeated. His life took a turning point in 1962, when Waldeck Rochet called him to Paris, to the agricultural section of the central committee. André Lajoinie contributes to the weekly Earth of which he became director in 1977 until 1996. He settled in La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis), in the city of 4,000, with Paulette Rouffiange, a communist activist (died in 1999) whom he married in 1960 and with whom he had a son, Laurent, sports journalist at Humanity.
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