Roland Dumas

Roland Dumas (born 23 August 1922) is a French lawyer and Socialist politician who served as Foreign Minister under President François Mitterrand from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1993. He was also President of the Constitutional Council from 1995 to 1999. Roland Dumas is the son of Elisabeth Lecanuet and Georges Dumas, a civil servant in Limoges's region and Socialist resistant to the German Occupation during the Second World War. shot at by the Gestapo, he conveyed weapons for the Resistance.

He was arrested after organizing a boycott of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra by French students. After the war, he completed his law and political science studies in the Ecole libre des sciences politiques and the London School of Economics. As a journalist and lawyer, he defended Jean Mons, Secretary-General of the Defence Committee, from charges of negligence in a case where Mons's assistant was accused of passing secrets of national security to communists. In this, he became close to François Mitterrand, president of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance (UDSR) party, himself suspected in the same scandal.

In 1956, he was elected deputy for Haute-Vienne département under the UDSR banner. He lost his seat in the 1958 legislative election, which followed the return of General Charles de Gaulle to power.