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From Moscow to Vichy: Three Working-Class Militants and the French Communist Party, 1920–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2001

Abstract

‘From Moscow to Vichy’ chronicles the political trajectory of Jules Teulade, Albert Vassart and Henri Barbé, three French labour militants of modest origins who were rapidly whisked into the top ranks of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the early 1920s, but later fell out of favour with Moscow just as the PCF entered its halycon years in the mid-to-late 1930s. Each of them, though for different reasons, turned against their former Russian patrons so violently that political participation in the ‘anti-Communist’ Vichy regime became thinkable. An examination of their unpublished memoirs – long ignored by Gaullist and communist historians, to whom the recollections of ex-Communist Vichy ‘collaborators’ gave little comfort – reveals both the powerful allure the Russian Revolution had for its earliest devotees, and the profound disillusionment that could result for working-class Communists who saw their faith in Moscow betrayed. In their stories, and those of others like them, we can discern something of the devastating fallout of Moscow's invasion of French politics between the two world wars.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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