Gérard Le Méteil

1959-2007

It is with profound grief that we inform our readers of the death of our beloved comrade Gérard Le Méteil, a member of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, who died in Dieppe on September 3 in unknown circumstances after having been taken into police custody, allegedly for public intoxication. We extend our deep sympathy especially to Gérard’s eight-year-old son Nicolas and also to Nicolas’ mother Valérie, the whole Le Méteil family and his many friends. A close comrade of Gérard’s wrote in tribute: “The loss of Gérard is immensely painful for us all, for our party, and for each of us individually. It is a political loss but it is also a personal loss. Everyone valued Gérard on both levels: as a comrade and as a friend. The party was his reason for living and he always put the party’s needs before his own personal options. He dedicated the best 25 years of his life to the party.”

Gérard joined the LTF in April 1982 and was elected to the Central Committee at the LTF’s Eleventh National Conference in December 1989. He was won to the Ligue Trotskyste, French section of the international Spartacist tendency (now International Communist League [Fourth Internationalist]), in part through his involvement in a December 1981 united-front labor mobilization against the fascists initiated by the LTF in Rouen, a port and industrial center in northwest France. Four to five hundred protesters were mobilized, including some 200 trade unionists and a bloc of students from the Ecole Normale (teachers college) that Gérard, working with an LTF comrade, had organized. The mobilization strengthened the roots of the LTF’s local in Rouen, where Gérard worked for much of his life.

Key issues in the recruitment of Gérard, who had been involved in a Communist Party sports organization, were the importance of the Leninist vanguard party and the Trotskyist position in defense of the Soviet Union. Before he joined, Gérard took part in an LTF meeting at the Tolbiac campus of the University of Paris on 2 March 1982. A move by the Polish Stalinist regime against the reactionary Solidarność “union” had taken place only months before in that deformed workers state. France, under social democrat François Mitterrand’s popular front, was the cockpit of the anti-Soviet mobilization in Europe, in which the pseudo-Trotskyists played an active role.

As elsewhere, the Tolbiac campus was polarized. LTF comrades in Rouen were literally spat on by leftists who had earlier marched with us against the fascists. Our comrades at Tolbiac had received phone threats, and Gérard came down from Rouen to join the successful defense of our meeting against a howling mob of over 30 fake Trotskyists and others. At the close of the meeting, a gauntlet of campus security guards (vigiles) and autonome youth combined to attack those leaving. A comrade recalled that in the raging street fight that ensued, “Gérard displayed considerable physical courage and connected with some well-placed punches.” Shortly after that experience, Gérard applied for membership in the LTF.

During the next seven years, he became known as an extremely energetic and talented activist on the Rouen campus. He would jump on a table in the campus cafeteria and, with a passionate speech, mobilize students to protest an atrocity perpetrated by the government or the campus administration. This work also meant daily political combat against our opponents on the left. Constantly seeking to win people over, trying to understand where they came from and finding the convincing arguments contributed to the political wisdom and depth for which he was known. Gérard later brought this experience to bear in his political education of our younger comrades, several of whom have become cadres in the LTF and other sections of the ICL.

Gérard was a teacher by profession and a longtime member of the SNUipp union. His death did not go unnoticed among leftists and unionists in the region and elsewhere. Postal workers organized a minute of silence in a general assembly during the night shift at the Créteil sorting center in Paris on September 5.

Since Gérard had been won hard to the understanding that we are above all the party of the Russian Revolution, it was completely in character that he took time off work to throw himself into the ICL’s intervention into the nascent East German political revolution in 1989-90. Known as one who looked outside the French “hexagon,” he followed the work of our entire international with the greatest attention. An excellent military leader, he was in charge of our security squad at the July 2001 mass demonstration against the Group of Eight imperialists in Genoa, Italy, where the cop rampage left at least one young protester dead.

Gérard’s detailed knowledge of French politics and of the history of the workers movement extended to the former and current French colonies. He researched and gave a forum on the French general strike of June 1936, when the Stalinists sabotaged the possibility of workers revolution. An article based on his talk was published in Le Bolchévik Nos. 179 and 180 this spring. He devoured new books, particularly about the crimes of French imperialism, and read extensively about the Algerian War, understanding well that these crimes still animate the French bourgeoisie in its racist oppression of North African immigrants, their children and grandchildren. It was often Gérard who proposed to the party to take up the cause of an immigrant family or Roma (Gypsy) encampment facing racist attack by the government or others.

One of his strengths was that he appreciated contradictions in society and on the left. His effectiveness flowed from his political understanding and his evident confidence in the power of our program. A comrade wrote in tribute: “He was a 100 percent person, in his love, his hatred, a 100 percent communist, a guy that could inspire you. He was an activist, a leader, a great speaker with a deep voice, somebody from a Zola novel, full of passion and always, some sad, tragic glimmer in his eye.”

In the mid 1990s, after capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, Gérard suffered a personal breakdown and left the party for a couple of years. His return to active politics followed the big strike wave in France in late 1995. He had thought through a lot of the problems of the French section, and comrades recalled that he was a breath of fresh air, brimming with enthusiasm over the recent class struggles and, as always, full of insightful and stimulating observations about events in the country and the world. In September 1996, he was again elected to the Central Committee, on which he continued to serve until his death.

Comrades and friends are struggling to come to grips with the loss of comrade Gérard, only 48 years old and a talented athlete from his youth who had run numerous marathons. We are hoping to clarify the circumstances of his death. In Paris on September 9, comrades, family and friends gathered to honor him at the Wall of the Communards in the Père Lachaise cemetery. A letter from the ICL’s International Secretariat in New York saluted our comrade and friend:

“Gérard fought for the emancipation of the workers and all the oppressed people of the world, and for the transformation of society from capitalism to socialism by means of workers socialist revolution. To be successful, this liberating revolution requires the leadership of a revolutionary political party of the workers vanguard—the Fourth International, which we of the International Communist League are fighting to reforge. This memory of Gérard, as a comrade, is our greatest assurance that the spirit of humankind, striving for human solidarity, is unconquerable.”