While in exile in the United States during World War II (1939–45) he wrote a passionate defense of France's colonial mission.

He was a banker, owner of a racing stable, and one of the wealthiest members of Paris society in the period before World War I (1914–18).

[1] In 1928 Stern ran on the Left Republican list for the Digne district and was elected in the first round.

After getting their visas from Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, the family fled to Portugal.

While there he wrote a book that defended France's colonial history (Les colonies françaises, passé et avenir (1943), in which he asserted that France's role had always been to free the peoples from despotic rule and raise them to a higher level of civilization.

[6] According to Stern, Down the centuries, the peoples of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, have repeatedly called upon the French and the British to help them, to free them from the Turkish yoke, from an inferno in which the only civilizing influence, from the time of the Crusades, was the French religious orders and their educational institutions.

[8] Stern said that there was no racial discrimination in the colonies, and the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe might even be a colored Frenchman.