Historical Figures

Madeleine Braun, First Vice-President of the National Assembly

Madeleine Weill, later Madeleine Braun (1907 – 1980), was a French politician. She is the first to have been elected vice-president of the National Assembly.

Peace and anti-fascist activist

Daughter of Gabrielle Hirsch, painter, and Albert Weill, company director, Madeleine was born on June 25 1907 in Paris. Growing up in a bourgeois environment, she studied at the Ecole Villiers before embarking on law at the Faculty of Paris. On July 8, 1930, she married Jean Braun, managing director of the Société parisienne de verrerie. Salomon Braun, her father-in-law, then put her in charge of managing the social service of the hospital he ran, where she became aware of social inequalities.

An activist, she became involved in the pacifist and anti-fascist movement Amsterdam Pleyel, created in 1933, becoming a member of its steering committee. During the Spanish Civil War, she assisted Victor Basch and Paul Langevin in the International Coordination and Information Committee for Aid to Republican Spain, and became closer to the Communist Party.

First woman elected vice-president of the National Assembly

When the Second World War broke out, Madeleine Braun joined her husband in the free zone and joined the Front National Resistance movement, of which she became one of the leaders. Editor of Le Patriote, she also took big risks to liaise between resistance fighters; his involvement will earn him, at the end of the war, many awards including the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Honor and the Croix de guerre with palm.

In November 1944, the Front National delegated Madeleine as a representative to the Provisional Consultative Assembly, notably in Foreign Affairs. It focuses in particular on the question of the status of immigrants, on relief for the families of deportees or on foreign labour. She was elected on October 21, 1945 on the list of the Communist Party deputy of the Seine to the 1 era Constituent Assembly and reelected on June 2, 1946 to the 2 th Constituent Assembly.

On June 14, 1946, Madeleine Braun was the first woman elected vice-president of the National Assembly; she will be re-elected four times. It proposes, among other things, a law aimed at having women admitted with equal titles to all public functions and liberal professions. She also took up the defense of the Spanish Republicans who had taken refuge in France and protested against the presence in the country of Nicolas Franco, sent by his brother General Franco. She defends the rights of the press.

In 1951, Madeleine Braun did not stand for re-election and went into publishing, becoming co-director with Louis Aragon of the United French Publishers.

Madeleine Braun died on January 22, 1980 in Saint-Cloud.