Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play (French: [lə.plɛ]; April 11, 1806 – April 5, 1882) was a French engineer, sociologist and economist.

Life

The son of a custom-house official, Le Play was educated at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. In 1834, he was appointed chairman of the permanent committee of mining statistics. In 1840, he became engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines, where he became inspector in 1848.

For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play travelled around Europe, collecting a vast amount of material bearing on the social and economic condition of the working classes. In 1855, he published Les Ouvriers Européens, a series of 36 monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from a wide range of industries. This work was crowned with the Montyon prize conferred by the Académie des Sciences. In 1856, Le Play founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d'économie sociale, which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, La Réforme Sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly.

Pierre Guillaume (born 1940) is a French political activist. He was the founder of the Paris book shop La Vieille Taupe in 1965 and later the negationist publishing house of the same name. A former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he moved to Pouvoir Ouvrier with Jean-François Lyotard and Pierre Souyri.

Biography

Guillaume's name is associated with La Vieille Taupe, which was an ultra left bookstore founded in 1965 and closed in 1972. The name was taken over by Guillaume, Serge Thion and Alain Guionnet in 1979 for the distribution of Holocaust denial books and the Amadeo Bordiga pamphlet, Auschwitz, or the great alibi.

From 1957 to 1959 he prepared for archery at the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr at the Prytanée National Militaire, and became eligible, but changed his mind. He joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, without playing a "remarkable role" according to the account of Cornelius Castoriadis. He fought in the Algerian War. In 1965, with the help of Jacques Baynac, he opened La Vieille Taupe bookstore, which was linked to the group Pouvoir ouvrier, a French ultra-left group sharing a critical stance to Marxism as Socialisme ou Barbarie from whom they had split in 1963.

Pierre Guillaume (11 August 1925 — 3 December 2002, also known as "'Commandant' Pierre Guillaume") was an officer of the French Navy. He took part in the Algiers putsch of 1961 and in the Organisation de l'armée secrète right- wing terrorist group, which opposed what it regarded as De Gaulle's treacherous abandonment of Algeria to the FLN terrorists.

Born to a divisional General of the French Army, Pierre Guillaume graduated from the École Navale in 1948. During the First Indochina War, he was officer in an assault naval division. In 1954, he was promoted to lieutenant de vaisseau. He attempted to sail to France on a junk named Le Manohara but ran aground on the coasts of Somalia on 13 November 1956.

In late 1956, Guillaume reached Paris where he learned of the death of his brother, Jean-Marie Guillaume, a paratroop lieutenant killed in the Algerian War. He requested and was granted a transfer to the Army, and took his brother's office, from 14 July 1957 to 12 March 1958. During the Algiers putsch of 1961, he was naval counselor to general Challe. After the putsch attempt failed, he was sentenced to 4 years of imprisonment. He joined the Organisation de l'armée secrète, was arrested in May 1962, and sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment in Tulle prison.