Activities and affiliations

Literature and arts Communism 1913–2008 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Négritude, pioneering critic of colonialism

"My turn to state an equation: colonization = 'thingification.'" In Discourse on Colonialism (1950) he argued that Europeans had already applied to colonized peoples the methods they later condemned as Nazism, and that Nazism was the natural conclusion of a civilization that justified colonization.

Born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the son of a tax inspector, he studied in Paris, where with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas he launched the Négritude movement; the journal L'Étudiant noir (founded 1934–1935) first used the term in its present sense in May–June 1935. Frantz Fanon was his student. Elected with Communist Party support in 1945, he was mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years and deputy for 47, and in 1946 secured the law making Martinique a French département. He broke with the PCF in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez (24 October 1956), citing the Khrushchev report and the repressive policy in the Maghreb; English-language accounts instead attribute the break to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1958 and left politics in 2001.

Military command Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP/FTPF) Communism 1919–1944 ✕ Killed in action

A communist pioneer of armed resistance to the Occupation

“We’ve avenged Titi!”

Pierre Georges was a French communist and Resistance fighter whose early anti-fascist experience included service with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. On 21 August 1941 he shot the German naval officer Alfons Moser at Paris’s Barbès metro station, an action that made the French Communist Party’s armed resistance visible while intensifying the occupiers’ hostage executions and repression. Under the names Frédo and later Colonel Fabien, he organised clandestine fighters and maquis units, then led the Colonne Fabien toward the eastern front after the Liberation of Paris. He was killed by a mine explosion in 1944, leaving a legacy that joins the decision to fight the Occupation to the severe reprisals that followed.