Maurice Thorez (1900-1964) was a major figure in the history of twentieth-century France and European Communism for over three decades. Under his leadership, the French Communist Party (PCF) became France's largest political party and one of the most important communist parties in the West. Born in a mining village, Thorez left school at the age of 12 and would go on to helm the PCF in a rapid rise that paralleled Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he became a minister, and briefly deputy prime minister, before the Cold War excluded communists from political power. The PCF became known as 'the party of Maurice Thorez', as a leader cult around Thorez was created that mirrored the cult of personality' around Stalin. This book is based on a wealth of original source material, including Thorez's diaries and notebooks. John Bulaitis outlines how Thorez's political life intersected with and was shaped by key historical events. At its heart, the book explores the paradox of the mass communist movement in France: its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalinist practices.

Maurice Thorez (1900-1964) was a major figure in the history of twentieth-century France and European Communism for over three decades. Under his leadership, the French Communist Party (PCF) became France's largest political party and one of the most important communist parties in the West. Born in a mining village, Thorez left school at the age of 12 and would go on to helm the PCF in a rapid rise that paralleled Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he became a minister, and briefly deputy prime minister, before the Cold War excluded communists from political power. The PCF became known as 'the party of Maurice Thorez', as a leader cult around Thorez was created that mirrored the cult of personality' around Stalin. This book is based on a wealth of original source material, including Thorez's diaries and notebooks. John Bulaitis outlines how Thorez's political life intersected with and was shaped by key historical events. At its heart, the book explores the paradox of the mass communist movement in France: its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalinist practices.

Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

The Communist Party appeared a hundred years ago on the French political and social scene. According to opinions and moments, it has been the party of Moscow, of those shot, of the working class, of the union of the left, the party of the foreigner or that of the nation. It has been underground, in government, in town halls, in factories or in the streets. Some considered it too revolutionary, others not enough. More than others, it aroused passions, positive or negative. It attracted many and repelled just as many. After the fall of the USSR, it decided to remain a communist party, while many others gave it up. But it no longer has the place it once had, in reality as in the imagination. This book does not intend to judge, but to provide keys to understanding. It is based on a considerable number of archives that are now available and is an ordered and distanced look at an object that is not lacking in complexity and no doubt even in mystery. This book has been translated from French to English thanks to a financial help from the Gabriel Péri Foundation and the LIR3S UMR Cnrs 7366 of Dijon.

This book recovers the lost history of colonial Algeria’s communist movement. Meticulously researched – and the only English-language book on the Parti Communiste Algérien – it explores communism’s complex relationship with Algerian nationalism. During international crises, such as the Popular Front and Second World War years, the PCA remained close to its French counterpart, but as the national liberation struggle intensified, the PCA’s concern with political and social justice attracted growing numbers of Muslims. When the Front de Libération Nationale launched armed struggle in November 1954, the PCA maintained its organisational autonomy – despite FLN pressure. They participated fully in the national liberation war, facing the French state’s wrath. Independence saw two conflicting socialist visions, with the PCA’s incorporated political pluralism and class struggle on the one hand, and the FLN demand for a one-party socialist state on the other. The PCA’s pluralist vision was shattered when it was banned by the one-party state in November 1962. This book is of particular interest to students and scholars of Algerian history, French colonial history and communist history.