Functions
Member of the Constitutional Council
March 1968 – March 1977
Minister of Veterans Affairs and War Victims
December 6, 1962 – January 8 1966
Pompidou II government
Deputy for the 2nd district of Paris
November 25, 1962 – January 6, 1963
Second Legislature (Fifth Republic)
Birth name Jean Roger
Date of birth May 29, 1907
Place of birth Le Vésinet (Seine-et-Oise)
Date of death February 25, 1978 (aged 70)
Place of death Paris
Jean Sainteny born Jean Roger (May 29, 1907 in Vésinet - February 25, 1978 in Paris) was a French politician, Companion of the Liberation.
Jean Roger (in May 1949, he was authorized to officially wear his pseudonym of Sainteny resistance fighter) studied in Paris, at the Condorcet and Janson-de-Sailly high schools. He joined the Banque de l'Indochine, which sent him to French Indochina in 1929. He returned to France in 1932 to set up an insurance consulting business. In 1933, he married Lydie Sarraut (1907-2001), thus becoming the son-in-law of the President of the Council Albert Sarraut (also former Governor General of Indochina). They have a son. Demobilized in 1940, he joined the Resistance in the Cotentin. Head of the Normandy sector for the Resistance Alliance network under the pseudonym "Dragon", he was captured by the Gestapo, then managed to escape and became one of the architects of the Normandy landings. He brings General Patton the information that will allow him to invest Paris. In 1946, he was Commissioner of the Republic for Tonkin and Northern Annam and negotiated with Ho Chi Minh. He is also at the origin of an agreement with the Viet Minh leader for Indochina to remain in the French Union:the Hô-Sainteny agreement, which will become null and void with the outbreak of the Indochina war. . From then on, the supporters of negotiation having become a minority, Sainteny only played a secondary role on the Indochinese theater. He was also injured in an ambush. After the Geneva Accords of 1954, he returned to Hanoi as the French government's delegate to North Vietnam.
In 1955, divorced, he married Claude Dulong, archivist-paelographer, who would later be a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.
He was General Commissioner for Tourism from 1959 to 1962. Elected UNR-UDT deputy in 1962 for the second constituency of the Seine (2nd and 3rd arrondissement of Paris), he entered the Georges Pompidou government as Minister for Veterans and Victims of war and held this portfolio between November 28, 1962 and January 8, 1966.
From 1967 to 1972, he was a director of Air France. He is also a director of the International Institute of Public Administration (in 1967), founder and president of the General Air Office (in 1969) and of the French Fund for Nature and the Environment (in 1970).
In 1968, he founded the International Buddhist Institute which gave rise to the creation of the pagoda in the Bois de Vincennes1.
General de Gaulle appointed him a member of the Constitutional Council in 1968. He remained there until the end of his mandate in 1977.
To pay tribute to him, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences annually distributes a Jean Sainteny prize, intended "to crown a work concerning political, economic or cultural development or international relations, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa, in the fleeing spirit of Jean Sainteny's action."