French politician, a minister and author. In youth, Debre entered civil service, advancing steadily. In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II, he was mobilized into the military. Captured and imprisoned by the Germans in May 1940, he managed to escape. After joining the Résistance in Rabat, Morocco, he returned to German-occupied France to work in the underground.
In August 1944, as the newly appointed commissioner for the Angers region after the liberation, Debré first met Général de Gaulle. The following year, in de Gaulle’s provisional government, he was entrusted with planning public administration reforms. Appointed head of the German and Austrian desk in the Foreign Ministry in 1947, he played a major role in devising a new status for the Saar territory. He was elected to the Senate in 1948 as a member of de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français and was reelected as a Social Republican (the party’s new name) in 1955. With de Gaulle’s accession as premier in June 1958, Debré became minister of justice and the principal author of the new constitution that inaugurated the Fifth Republic.
When he became president in January 1959, de Gaulle appointed Debré premier. As a result both of constitutional provisions and of his personal relationship to de Gaulle, he tended to act more as the chief minister to the president than as head of the government. Although he favoured retention of Algeria, he loyally supported de Gaulle’s policy of disengagement. His previous commitments to a French Algeria, however, created increasing embarrassment, and in April 1962 he was replaced by Georges Pompidou. Elected to the assembly in May 1963, Debré returned to the government in January 1966 as minister of economics and finance, committed to expansionary policies. He became foreign minister in May 1968 and in June 1969 moved to the Defense Ministry under Pompidou’s presidency, where he remained until 1973.
In 1976 he was a leader in the Rassemblement pour la Republique (RPR), the newly reorganized Gaullist movement founded by Jacques Chirac. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 1981. He was elected to the French Academy on 3/24/1988.
Debre married on 12/19/1936; four children, two of whom are the twins Bernard and Jean-Louis, who became Minister of the Interior in 1966.
Debre died on 8/02/1996 in Montlouis-sur-Loire, France, age 84.
Link to Wikipedia biography