Pierre Morain (12 April 1930 – 27 May 2013) was a building worker, a trades unionist, a militant libertarian communist and an anti-colonialist activist. For most purposes he would be considered a Frenchman. However, when he faced trial in connection with a newspaper article he had written opposing the government position in respect of the Algerian War, the president of the court noticed that his nineteen co-defendants were all Algerian and felt it necessary to clarify Morain's nationality: "But you .. are nevertheless French". Morain's defiant clarification is often requoted when Pierre Morain is discussed: "No, I'm not French. I'm a worker". When he was arrested on 29 May 1955 (or 29 June 1955: sources differ) Morain became the first French anti-colonialist activist to be sent to prison for supporting Algerian independence.
Life
Provenance and early years
Pierre Morain was born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a short distance down-river from Paris. Robert Morain, his father, worked for the government in an administrative capacity. Suzanne Courtois, his mother, worked as a typist. In 1947 Pierre Morain started working as a tiler for a small building company based at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. At some stage, probably quite early on, he joined the "Building Workers' Union" ("Syndicat Unique du bâtiment" / SUB). In 1949 he started working in the workers' cooperative, "Le Carrelage à Vanves" which had been founded back in 1936 by the Communist Party ("Parti communiste français" / PCF) and the CGT (trades union). Becoming unemployed, he joined the PCF and CGT.
National service and demobilisation
The German Federal Republic (West Germany) was relaunched in May 1949 through a coming together of three of the four military occupation zones into which the country had been divided after the war. Allied armies remained in the country, however, though by now the principal perceived risk came from the fraternal forces across the new "iron curtain", occupying what had been identified till October 1949 as the Soviet occupation zone. Morain undertook his military service between April 1950 and October 1951 with an Engineering Regiment based in Trier, close to the West German frontier with Luxembourg. The regiment had a "troubled" reputation with the political establishment, having had its "colours" withdrawn following a refusal to carry out orders to put down strikes during 1947/48. Military service exposed Morain to libertarian and anti-militarist ideas. Released from the military late in 1951, he returned to building work in the Paris suburbs. He also volunteered intermittently as an adult mentor at the "Cité de l'Esperance" (loosely "City of hopefulness"), a refuge for "difficult or delinquent young people" at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.
Trades union activism
The "Building Workers' Union" (SUB) was part of the National Labour Confederation ("Confédération nationale du travail" / CNT), a left-wing organisation which at the time would have seen itself as part of the Anarcho-syndicalist movement. Membership of the SUB evidently meant that Morain was also a member of the CNT in or before 1953, which was the year in which he became Paris Region Secretary of the SUB. He contributed to the journal "Combat Syndicaliste" and at the CNT's second Paris regional congress, held on 29 November 1953, he was elected to membership of the CNT's administrative commission. According to some sources it was also at around this time that he became a member of the Anarchist Federation, but this is strenuously disputed. He would, in any event, join its successor organisation in 1954.
Focus on Algeria
As an officer of the CNT Morain quickly became disenchanted with the destructive internal quarrels among comrades. He was already deeply supportive of the rising tide of an anti-colonialist sentiment among the intellectual classes and during the summer of 1954 he joined the Communist Libertarian Federation ("Fédération communiste libertaire" / FCL) which from its inception was always strongly supportive of Algerian independence. By this time he was living in the northern part of central Paris, close to the Gare de l’Est, in a building managed by the Movement for the Liberation of the People ("Mouvement de libération du peuple" / MLP), a small but dedicated party of the political left that traced its origins back to the 1930s.