Abstract EN:

Louis Joxe's name is connected with Algerian peace negociations of 1961-1962. In fact, as Minister for Algeria, he was the French chief negociator at Evian. As such, it was the peak of a very reach diplomatic career and more or less of a foreign-policy-oriented life. However, he was not trained for diplomatiy, but for teaching history. Born as the XXe century was one year old, he was impressed as a young man by the Great War, and the interwar period he was a journalist in the Louise Weiss's journal : "L'Europe nouvelle", so that he became familiar with the League of Nations. He had the opportunity to work in the staff of one of the young radicals Pierre Cot, Minister of the Air. And with friends, he created a foreign policy think tank, maybe the first in France : the "Centre d'études de politique étrangère", which was the predecessor of the well-known IFRI. During the Second World War, he went with his family to Algiers, where History made him up once more ; il was not so easy for a Frenchman to know where the future of France in the 1942 fall-winter : Darlan, Giraud, de Gaulle. Finally, Louis Joxe became the secretary general of the CFLN, a French provisory government in Algiers, headed by de Gaulle. After the war, Louis Joxe began a high civil servant career in the diplomatic services : head of the cultural relations Service, then ambasasdor in Moscow, where he had to deal with Stalin and the German problem. As secretary general of the Quai d'Orsay, he was informed of all the diplomatic affairs of this time : the Suez crisis, the events of the French decolonization, especially in Tunisia and Algeria, the Atlantic Alliance and so on. He was a genuine diplomat.