Alain Savary

Alain Savary (born April 25, 1918, Algiers, Algeria—died February 17, 1988, Paris, France) was a French politician, best known for his proposed reform of the French educational system.

Savary, who was educated in France, joined the Resistance in 1940 and led the group that liberated (1941) the French dependency of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. He served as governor there (1941–43) before fighting with General Charles de Gaulle’s forces in Europe. Savary represented Saint-Pierre in the postwar government, but he soon broke with de Gaulle and joined the Socialist Party. He served as minister of Moroccan and Tunisian affairs in the 1956 Socialist government but resigned to protest the hijacking of a plane carrying Algerian nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella and Ben Bella’s subsequent arrest. Savary’s opposition to French colonialism led him to quit the Socialists (1958) in favour of a small leftist party (the Parti Socialiste Autonome), but in 1969 he was named first secretary of the reorganized Socialist Party, a position he held until François Mitterrand ousted him two years later.

In 1981 President Mitterrand appointed Savary minister of education with a mandate to merge all public and private schools into a unified secular school system. Savary presented a bill in 1984 giving local authorities greater control over private schools, but protests by Roman Catholic educators and parent associations, backed by a mass demonstration of more than one million people who came from all over France to Paris on June 24, 1984, prompted Mitterrand to abandon the proposed legislation. Savary retired from politics the following month.