Julien Francois Gabriel Toublet

The son of a concierge and a carpenter, Julien Toublet began to work very young as a jeweler’s worker and, in 1922, joined the Parisian union of Bijou CGTU, of libertarian coloring, but which voted Monmousseau at the 1st confederal congress, in June 1922. Member of the Youth Trade Unionists he actively participated in the committees of unemployed. Called under the flags in 1926, he managed to be postponed for a year and then to be poured into a health service that saved him from leaving for Syria.

In 1932, he joined the CGT-SR, affiliated with the International Workers Association (ITA). Quickly promoted to secretary of the union of the Metals of the Seine, he was elected member of the administrative commission confederal from the CGT-SR congress of November 1932.

In October 1934 he was elected secretary of the confederation, a post to which he was reappointed until October 1938. He was replaced by German-born activist George Adam*. Toublet was also a member of the Comité d’Entraide de Paris, with Louis Charbonneau* and Auguste Huet*, and treasurer of the Committee for the Assistance of Prisoners of the Fourth Region of the CGT-SR region, to which he was replaced in January 1936 by Louis Laurent*.

Julien Toublet was one of the main editors, including Pierre Besnard, of the confederal organ, Le Combat syndicaliste, which became a weekly from 1 May 1935, and whose broadcast increased significantly at the time of the strikes of May-June 1936 and the events of Spain.

After the beginning of the Spanish Revolution, Julien Toublet was, with Charles Marchal*, responsible for the recruitment of volunteers from the CGT-SR for the front. Throughout the Civil War he had to coordinate the delivery of weapons and funds for the CNT-FAI. He was also, together with Pierre Besnard, Louis Laurent, Albert Ganin*, Charles Marchal and Paul Lapeyre*, one of the leaders of the French edition of L’Espagne antifasciste (Barcelona-Paris, 1936-1937).

During the first months of the civil war in Spain, material aid to the columns of the CNT-FAI was provided by the Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee for the Defense and Liberation of the Spanish proletariat (CASDLPE), which brought together the AU, the FAF and the CGT-SR, each with 5 delegates. However, after the departure of the AU and the constitution of the Free Spain Committee (see Lecoin), the CGT-SR animated almost alone the CASDLPE. In November, his office was composed of Pierre Besnard, secretary; Julien Toublet, assistant secretary; Victor Giraud*, treasurer.

In the autumn of 1936, Toublet was also a member of the board of the AIT.

During the early 1939 Retirada and the influx of Spanish refugees into France, he was commissioned by the CNT-FAI to organize a relief committee. He was particularly involved in the liaison with the lawyers, while Paul Lapeyre visited the internment camps. This is in doubt the committee whose seat was 108, quai de Jemmapes, in Paris 10th, and reported by the Italian newspaper Almanaco libertario pro vittime polititiche (Geneva, 1939).

In September 1939, as the war approached, the CGT-SR, fearing a dissolution, decided to dissolve and destroy its archives, a practice that it regularly carried out. Julien Toublet also married his partner Denise Boutiller, with whom he already had two children Monique (1927) and Christiane (1929). A third child, Jacques, was born in 1940.

Mobilized as a nurse to the declaration of war, Julien Toublet was in the army corps encircled at Dunkirk and evacuated to England. Immediately repatriated to Normandy, he managed to return to Paris without being taken prisoner by the German army.

Under the Occupation, he constituted, with former companions and members of his family, the workers’ cooperative of jewellery Art and Applied Technique, allowing him to survive. He managed to publish two bulletins, Action et Problems, and joined the clandestine action carried out by Henri Bouyé’s group, organizing a sector to hide fugitives and provide them with false documents. Julien Toublet insisted that the group do not join the official Resistance, and stay away from the cegetistic network organized around the Bulletin Résistance ouvrière, by Robert Bothereau, considered too progaulistic.

At the Liberation, Julien Toublet campaigned at the CGT du Bijou union, and participated in the purification commission of the Fédération du Bijou. He participated in the French Trade Union Federation (FSF), which brought together the revolutionary trade unionist opposition within the CGT. In May 1946, the FSF left the CGT and, in December, founded the French CNT (CNT-F). Julien Toublet was elected to his administrative commission, then became secretary. At the time, he wrote in Le Combat syndicaliste under the name of Jean Thersant.

In 1949 he founded with a group of comrades — including Roger Boucoiran, Portier and G. Pouget — the monthly Hands and Brain, “organ of the astatosyndicalist movement.” About ten issues were published in Antony in 1949-1950. An Esperantist activist, he abandoned Esperanto for the interlingual universal language at the same time and became the representative in France of the Association of Interliguist Anationalists.

In May 1952 he was admitted to the CGT union of the Paris correctors and began working at the Georges Lang printing house. Since the early 1950s, he had distanced himself from the CNT, which he left in 1954 to get closer to the core of the Proletarian Revolution animated by Pierre Monatte, and to join the Union of Trade Unionists.

In 1954, under his pseudonym Jean Thersant, he was the manager of the newsletter Le Trait d’unionistes, domiciled at 20, rue Sainte-Marthe, in Paris 10th, which had taken over from the internal bulletin Le Trait d’union (Paris, 1952-1953) and was subtitled “free tribune for an inter-confederal militant trade unionist opposition, for trade union independence”. The two bulletins published at least 25 issues, and published articles including by Louis Mercier, Charles Patat*, Aimé Capelle*, René Herbe(Roger Boucoiran?), M. Landry, François Boudignon, Pierre Davron, Madeleine Lemarchand, Levras and Yvette Richaud.

Julien Toublet then worked at the printing press of the Crescent and then at the Parisian liberated, from where he retired in 1971.

After the movement of May 68, which he followed with passion, Julien Toublet participated, with his son Jacky, also a corrector, in the Revolutionary and Anarcho-Syndicalist Trade Union Alliance (ASRAS), a new attempt to bring together anarcho-syndicalist activists scattered throughout the various unions (CGT, FO, CFDT, FEN).

Julien Toublet was incinerated at Père-Lachaise on 11 April 1991.