“As the name of this journal indicates, we are partisans.” This was the opening line in the first issue of the journal Partisans in September 1961. For the Left who looked to the Third World, the journal was the most important medium in France in the 1960s. The French word partisan, the first editorial went on to say, described first of all the passionate advocate of certain convictions: the editors believed in democracy and justice, in the equality of individuals and races, in their liberation from oppression and alienation, in short, in the socialist revolution. But it was also used for the guerilla fighter, who, in an asymmetrical war, launched surprise attacks on the enemy. In fact, the editorial claimed, those involved in Partisans were actually preparing to defend their own values in a guerilla war – a war against fascists, racists, and colonialists.

The author of this editorial was Vercors, alias Jean Bruller. With a few lines, he laid out what the points of reference and topics of the journal were, and whom it regarded as its enemies. At the same time, this program for the future contained a symbolic reference to the past: in France, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) stood for the resistance to the Germans in World War II. The journal's name thus evoked both the history and present of the “small wars” in China, Cuba, and Algeria, and the Résistance in which Vercors himself had been involved: his novel Le Silence de la mer was considered its literary symbol and launched the underground publishing house Éditions de Minuit in 1942. If necessary, the radical Left wanted to revive the Résistance in decolonization. To be sure, only a few authors of Partisans gained experience with actual guerilla warfare, including Georges Mattéi, Gérard Chaliand, and Régis Debray, and none of them resorted to arms in France, since the feared fascist overthrow of the Republic did not come to pass. But the rhetorical militancy of the first issue, which showed armed Cuban guerilleros on the cover, shaped the journal permanently. Its founders understood themselves as revolutionary intellectuals who also had to be practitioners of resistance – even if the self-proclaimed partisans used only journalistic weapons to create an anticolonial counter-public.