Suret-Canale, Jean

Born Apr. 27, 1921, in Paris. French scholar and public figure. Member of the French Communist Party (FCP) since 1939.

Suret-Canale graduated from the University of Toulouse in 1942. In 1945 and 1946 he was a lecturer at the University of Rennes, and from 1946 to 1949 he taught in lycées in Dakar (Senegal). In 1949 he was deported to France by the colonial authorities for taking part in the trade union movement; there he worked as a teacher.

From 1959 to 1962, Suret-Canale was director of the National Institute of Research and Documentation in Conakry in the Republic of Guinea. He became a teacher at a lycée in France in late 1963 and later deputy director of the Center of Marxist Studies of the Central Committee of the FCP. He became a member of the Central Committee of the FCP in January 1967.

Suret-Canale’s main works deal with the history, economic geography, and geography of Africa, the economic geography of France, and general sociological problems. He was awarded the degree of doctor of historical sciences in 1963 by the academic council of the Institute of Africa of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR for his Africa West and Central (Russian translation, 1961).