Socialist Action Committee

The Socialist Action Committee (CAS) was a French Resistance movement founded in March 1941 by Daniel Mayer and Suzanne Buisson under the guidance of Léon Blum.

Its purpose was to reorganize the underground French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and coordinate socialist resistance against the German occupation and the Vichy regime.

Initially a clandestine publication, Libération-Nord emerged as a structured resistance movement in December 1940, advocating for non-communist CGT unions, CFTC, and the underground SFIO, under the leadership of Christian Pineau and the team behind the "Manifesto of the Twelve."

Stripped of his office by the Vichy regime, Jean-Baptiste Lebas, SFIO deputy-mayor of Roubaix, called for resistance as early as August 1940 through a pamphlet titled "Socialism Continues!"

By late summer, he founded one of the first Resistance networks in occupied France, "L'Homme libre" ("The Free Man"), which also published an underground newspaper of the same name.

Nevertheless, socialist militants played a key role in Libération-Sud, Combat, Ceux de la Résistance, the Brutus network, and the Organisation civile et militaire (OCM), particularly in Pas-de-Calais under Guy Mollet.

Memorial plaque for Suzanne Buisson , co-founder of the Socialist Action Committee, who died in deportation.