Lavollée Marcel-thomas, Oil On Cardboard, Study Of Willows In The Morning, 1910

LAVOLLÉE Marcel-Thomas Born and died in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), February 2 (1876-1940) craftsman and artist; socialist then communist activist of Indre-et-Loire. Oil on cardboard of a study of Willows on the banks of the Loire on the morning of September 21, 1910 signed lower left annotated on the back frame added frame: 28 x 25 cm cardboard: 16.5 x 12.5 cm Son of a blacksmith and a seamstress, Marcel-Thomas Lavollée was a bookbinder and painter of the banks of the Loire. A militant in the Socialist Federation of Indre-et-Loire before and after the First World War, he served on its administrative committee in 1919-1920 and was the editorial secretary of Le Réveil d'Indre-et-Loire until May 1920. At that time, he resigned to pursue his professional activities. He was a delegate to the Socialist Congresses in Paris (September 1919) and Strasbourg (February 1920), during which he voted for the Loriot motion in favor of the Third International. Upon his return from Alsace, he referred to the reconstructionists as "bourgeois socialists (...) who view the dictatorship of the proletariat with some terror" (Le Réveil, March 20, 1920). He was secretary of the "Clarté" group in Tours in February 1920. Lavollée was one of the key figures in the left's victory within the Federation, despite the opposition of Émilien Brigault, the federal secretary. The Cachin-Frossard motion garnered 65% of the departmental mandates, and Lavollée was one of the eleven delegates to the national congress in December 1920, held in his hometown of Tours. A communist activist, he was a correspondent for L'Humanité in Tours and a federal delegate. However, he left the Communist Party in 1922. The following year, he joined Sartori's La Bonne Guerre. He presented the manifesto of the Unitary Socialist Federation in August 1923, then withdrew from political life. In 1932, he was a member of the steering committee of the Popular University. Lavollée had married in Tours in October 1904.