A committed historian of revolutionary movements
He read Spain’s revolution not as a side episode of the war, but as a defeated social revolution.
Pierre Broué was a French Trotskyist historian and teachers’ activist who studied communism and twentieth-century revolutionary movements. His 1961 history of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, written with Émile Témime, interpreted the defeat of the revolutionary process through the clash of class forces inside the Republic and Stalinist policy. He combined political commitment with archival and editorial work on Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement.
Career Timeline
- 1944Joined the Parti communiste internationaliste and entered the Trotskyist movement
- 1953Completed an early historical study of a historian of the French Revolution
- 1960–1965Taught history and geography in secondary schools
- 1961Published La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne with Émile Témime
- 1965–1975Taught contemporary history at Grenoble’s institute of political studies and organized in the OCI
- 1972Published Révolution en Allemagne, 1917–1923
- 1977Founded the Institut Léon Trotsky
- 1997Published Histoire de l’Internationale communiste, 1919–1943