The question often torments us: how is the sorting done of the characters who enter the history textbooks and those who are thrown into oblivion? Fascinating thesis subject, sometimes a little distressing. Staying in history is also an obsession for many personalities. The career of Pierre Henri Teitgen can shed light on this debate. It is the journey of a great forgotten man (he is not even sure that he has a room in his name at the Nancy law school). And yet this character was a very great resistance fighter, appointed by Charles de Gaulle in 1942 secretary general of the Studies Committee, a group responsible for targeting the first measures to be taken after the liberation of France. The following year, he was dismissed by the Vichy government while he was teaching at the University of Nancy. At the Liberation, he was charged by General de Gaulle with several missions in the field of information. He is the one who reorganizes all the press and in particular closes the newspapers which had continued to appear officially under the German occupation; and he will have their means of production transferred to the newspapers resulting from the resistance and born in clandestinity. He is thus at the origin of the World. It was Pierre-Henri Teitgen who called on Hubert Beuve-Méry to create the newspaper Le Monde in 1944. Teitgen also participated (with a Meuse, Paul Hutin, in the creation of Ouest France).
It is difficult to fit everything in Teitgen’s career, he was also minister thirteen times, in very important positions, justice, army, information, twice vice-president of the Council, co-founder of the Christian democratic party MRP, he was the he was one of the most influential politicians of the Fourth Republic and would also be co-drafter of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the political and academic world, some called him “Founding Father of Community Law”, in short, an immense figure, who died just 25 years ago, on April 6, 1997, and unjustly forgotten. It is not impossible that the oversight was voluntary, an oversight due to the fact that he had made enemies among the former collaborators but also among certain former resistance fighters who reproached him for not being severe enough when he supervised the delicate processes of purification. In any case, Pierre Henri Teitgen consolidates the idea that the path of nuance is rarely the one that guarantees you posterity…