French thinker who held that society should be led by its productive “industrials”
Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Fourier and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialist systems born before the class struggle had developed.
Born in Paris to an aristocratic family, Saint-Simon fought in the American War of Independence and took part in the siege of Yorktown. During the Revolution he made money speculating in national property and was imprisoned under the Terror. In L’Industrie, L’Organisateur and the Catéchisme des industriels he argued that the productive “industrials” — scientists, entrepreneurs and workers alike — rather than the idle classes should direct society; his last work, Nouveau Christianisme, made the improvement of the poorest class society’s aim. The Communist Manifesto’s classification of him as a critical-utopian socialist who saw no independent political movement of the proletariat is Marx and Engels’ assessment, not his own self-understanding.
Career timeline
1779–1783Fought in the American War of Independence and took part in the siege of Yorktown.
1793–1794Imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie and the Luxembourg during the Terror; released after 9 Thermidor.
1803Published his first work, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève.
1816–1817Published L’Industrie; from 1817 Auguste Comte worked with him as secretary.
1823–1824Published the Catéchisme des industriels.
1825Published Nouveau Christianisme and died in Paris the same year.
French social thinker who designed the cooperative phalanstery
He attacked commercial civilization and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community where people would work according to their passions; the Communist Manifesto counts him among the critical-utopian socialists.
Born into a merchant family in Besançon, Fourier worked from 1791 to 1816 as a travelling salesman and correspondence clerk in several cities. After publishing his Théorie des quatre mouvements anonymously in 1808, he attacked commerce as a source of fraud and misery and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community organized around “attractive labour” matched to each person’s passions. Followers such as Victor Considerant spread his ideas, and community experiments were attempted in several countries. Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Saint-Simon and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialism and criticizes his disciples for clinging to experiments such as phalansteries and opposing workers’ political movements; this is Marx and Engels’ assessment.
Career timeline
1791–1816Worked as a travelling salesman and correspondence clerk in Paris, Rouen, Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux.
1808Published the Théorie des quatre mouvements anonymously in Lyon.
1822Published his major treatise on domestic-agricultural association.
1829Published Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, a summary of his theory.
July Monarchy premier who as chief executive in 1871 crushed the Paris Commune and became the Third Republic’s first president
After ordering the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, Thiers secured the early departure of German troops from French territory, then resigned in 1873 amid monarchist opposition.
A lawyer and journalist from Marseille who made his name with a History of the French Revolution, he helped bring Louis-Philippe to the throne in 1830 and served the July Monarchy as interior minister and premier, putting down the Lyon silk workers’ and Paris risings of 1834. Under the Second Empire he led the liberal opposition. The National Assembly made him chief executive in February 1871; when the seizure of the Montmartre cannon failed on 18 March he moved the government to Versailles and crushed the Commune in Bloody Week. President from August 1871, he paid off the German indemnity early but was forced out by the monarchist Assembly in 1873.
Career timeline
1823–1827Published his ten-volume History of the French Revolution, establishing his reputation as a historian.
1836Served as prime minister under the July Monarchy.
1840Served as prime minister under the July Monarchy.
1871–1873Served as president of the French Third Republic.
Journalist who fought on the Commune’s last barricade and wrote the History of the Paris Commune of 1871 in exile
French revolutionary socialist journalist Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray took part in the Paris Commune and wrote its history from survivor testimony and documents.
Born in Toulouse to a Basque family, he was a republican lecturer and journalist under the Second Empire and was prosecuted several times. During the 1870 war he joined the military organisation of the provincial government of National Defence, and during the Commune he published the papers L’Action and Le Tribun du peuple in Paris. He fought to the last barricade in Belleville in Bloody Week, escaped to London, grew close to the Marx family and was engaged to Eleanor Marx. He published his History of the Paris Commune of 1871 in Brussels in 1876 and, after the 1880 amnesty, returned to edit La Bataille.
Career timeline
1871Took part in the Paris Commune and founded and edited L’Action and Le Tribun du peuple.
1876Published the first edition of History of the Paris Commune of 1871, drawing on survivors’ testimony and contemporary documents.
French Marxist economist who theorized the USSR as state capitalism and shaped Third World development economics
'Control by the producers over their conditions of existence requires the development of entirely new social relations.' — Economic Calculation and Forms of Property (1971)
French Marxist economist. Founder of CEMI, he pioneered Soviet planning studies and served as economic advisor to Nasser, Nehru, and Ben Bella. In the 1963 Cuban 'Great Debate' he opposed Che Guevara's centralized industrialization, arguing for decentralized planning with market elements. Drawn to Maoism, he collaborated with Althusser to critique Marxist 'economism,' insisting socialism requires active political reshaping of social relations, not mere state ownership. His Class Struggles in the USSR (1974–1982) theorized the Soviet Union as state capitalism; Le Monde (1972) called him 'the most visible Marxist in the capitalist world.'
Career timeline
1933Joined Jeunesses communistes, then French Communist Party
1936Five months in Moscow, witnessed purges, excluded from PCF
1944–1948Official at Ministry of Labor, Director of Studies at EPHE
1950sEconomic advisor to Egypt, India, Algeria; UN expert for India's Second Five-Year Plan
1958Founded CEMI at EHESS
1963Cuban 'Great Debate': opposed Che Guevara's centralized industrialization
1966–1977President of Franco-Chinese Friendship Association
1974–1982Published Class Struggles in the USSR (3 vols.), theorizing USSR as state capitalism
The thinker who found a new continent in Marx: founder of structural Marxism
“Ideology 'hails' the individual — like a policeman shouting 'Hey, you there!' — and the moment one turns around, one becomes a subject.” — 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'
French Marxist philosopher who argued an 'epistemological break' separates Marx's scientific works from his early humanism, founding structural Marxism through concepts of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and overdetermination. As philosophy professor at the École Normale Supérieure, he taught a generation of French intellectuals: Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Badiou among them. He sought to fill the theoretical vacuum of Stalinism, and despite tensions with the Communist Party and lifelong mental illness, he pushed postwar Marxism to the center of philosophy. His strangling of his wife Hélène Rytmann during a psychotic episode in 1980 long overshadowed his intellectual legacy.
Career timeline
1945Enters ENS, studies under Gaston Bachelard
1948Appointed philosophy tutor at the ENS
1948Joins the French Communist Party (PCF)
1954Secrétaire de l'école littéraire at the ENS
1965Publishes For Marx and Reading Capital — founding structural Marxism
1968Hospitalized during May 68 — "Of what use is Althusser?" graffitied on walls
1970Publishes 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'
1976Openly opposes PCF's abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat
1980Strangles his wife Hélène Rytmann during a psychotic episode — declared unfit for trial
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
A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory
In 2017 the historian of wartime memory was himself detained for ten hours at Houston's airport, nearly deported after U.S. border agents questioned the stipend for his lecture.
Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.
Career timeline
1974–1979Student, École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud
1977Passed the agrégation in history
1981–presentResearcher, French National Centre for Scientific Research
1988–1990Teacher, Institut d’études politiques de Paris
1994–2005Director, Institut d’histoire du temps présent
2001–2010Professor, Paris Nanterre University
2019–presentPresident, prefiguration mission for the National Museum on the History of Terror
