General who commanded the French at Valmy, Marshal of the Empire
At Valmy on 20 September 1792 Kellermann joined Dumouriez with the Army of the Centre at Dumouriez's request and placed his artillery on the western slopes. He steadied infantry shaken by an exploding ammunition cart and rallied them with the cry 'Vive la Nation'; the Prussians withdrew.
French soldier born in Strasbourg on 28 May 1735. His family, of Saxon origin, had settled in Strasbourg and was ennobled in his grandfather's generation. He entered the royal army in 1750 (or 1752), fought in the Seven Years' War, and became a brigadier in 1788, making him the only Marshal of the Empire to reach general rank under the old regime. Favourable to the Revolution of 1789, he commanded the Army of the Centre at Valmy on 20 September 1792 and drove back the Prussians, earning the name 'the victor of Valmy'. Arrested in November 1793 on suspicion of disloyalty, he spent 13 months in prison during the Terror and was released and reinstated after Robespierre's fall. Marshal in 1804 and Duke of Valmy in 1808, he voted in the Senate for Napoleon's abdication in 1814 and became a peer under Louis XVIII. He died in Paris in 1820.
Career timeline
1750Entered the French royal army (1750 or 1752)
1788Promoted maréchal de camp (brigadier)
1792Commanded the Army of the Centre at the battle of Valmy
1799Senator
1804Appointed Marshal of the Empire (19 May)
1808Created Duke of Valmy (3 June)
1814Voted for Napoleon's abdication in the Senate; peer of France under the Restoration
Bourbon prince who commanded the émigré Army of Condé
A Bourbon prince du sang who fled Revolutionary France and commanded the émigré Army of Condé against it.
A Bourbon prince of Condé, Louis Joseph left France soon after the Revolution began. He organized and commanded the émigré Army of Condé, which fought Revolutionary France alongside foreign monarchies. He returned to France after Napoleon’s fall.
Career timeline
1736–1740Born a cadet of the House of Bourbon; succeeded as Prince of Condé in 1740 on his father Louis Henri I's death.
1753Married Charlotte de Rohan at Versailles, consolidating his position at court.
1750년대–1760년대Served as Grand Maître de France under Louis XV and Louis XVI and fought in the Seven Years' War as a general.
1791Based at Coblenz, where he organized and led an émigré counter-revolutionary corps.
1792–1801Commanded the Army of Condé alongside Austria, later in British and Russian service; the corps was disbanded in 1801.
1814–1818Returned to Paris after Napoleon's defeat, resumed his court duties under Louis XVIII, and died in 1818.
French Revolutionary general and statesman who defected to Austria in 1793
He saved the Revolution at Valmy and Jemappes in 1792, but after defeat at Neerwinden on 18 March 1793 he tried to march on Paris and handed the Convention's envoys over to Austria before crossing to the Austrian side. That defection buried the Girondins.
A general and politician of the French Revolutionary Wars. An officer of the royal army in the Seven Years' War, he later commanded the port of Cherbourg. After the Revolution he joined the Jacobin Club, and with Girondin backing he became foreign minister in March 1792, pushed for the declaration of war on Austria and briefly served as war minister. After a conflict with Louis XVI he resigned, then took command of the Army of the North and, with Kellermann, defeated the Prussians at Valmy (20 September 1792) and won at Jemappes (6 November 1792). Beaten at Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, he attempted to march on Paris, dissolve the Convention and restore the 1791 constitution and constitutional monarchy; lacking the army's support he went over to the Austrian side. He died in Britain after years of exile, and his name is inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Career timeline
1739Born at Cambrai; sources disagree, recording 25, 26 or 27 January.
1792Backed by the Girondins, became foreign minister, pushed for the declaration of war on Austria and briefly served as war minister.
1792As commander of the Army of the North, won at Valmy (20 September) and Jemappes (6 November).
1793Defeated at Neerwinden on 18 March and defected to the Austrian side in April.
Radical journalist and publisher of L’Ami du peuple
A physician and scientific writer before the Revolution, he founded L'Ami du peuple in September 1789. Elected to the National Convention in September 1792, he was acquitted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in April 1793 and helped bring down the Girondins. Corday killed him on 13 July 1793.
Originally a physician and scientific writer, Marat published the newspaper L’Ami du peuple during the Revolution. His fierce attacks on alleged counter-revolutionaries and the Girondins made him a radical voice linked to Parisian popular politics and the Mountain. He was assassinated by Charlotte Corday in July 1793.
Career timeline
1743–1789Worked as a physician and scientific writer, publishing experimental studies on optics, electricity and light and political works such as The Chains of Slavery (1774). He received an MD from the University of St Andrews.
1777Appointed in June as physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d'Artois (later Charles X).
1783Resigned his court appointment in April to concentrate on scientific research.
1789When the King called the Estates General in 1788, he abandoned his scientific and medical career and entered revolutionary polemic, anonymously publishing Offrande à la Patrie in February 1789.
1789Launched his own newspaper, the Publiciste parisien, on 12 September, renaming it L'Ami du peuple four days later.
1791After the Champ de Mars massacre and the ensuing crackdown on the radical press, his paper was seized and its printing formes broken up, yet he kept publishing; about 500 issues appeared in 1791.
1792Elected to the National Convention in September. After the fall of the monarchy on 10 August he was appointed one of the Paris Commune's adjoint administrators on its Committee of Surveillance, signed its September circular, and has been credited with drafting it.
1793Indicted on Girondin initiative, he became the first representative of the people tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal in April; defending himself without counsel, he was acquitted.
1793Played an active part in the insurrection of 31 May–2 June that brought down the Girondins, presiding over the Convention and helping determine which deputies were to be arrested.
1793Assassinated on 13 July: Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathiser, stabbed him in the chest while he sat in a medicinal bath.
Writer who demanded women’s civil and political rights
She demanded abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman claimed voting rights and legal equality for women. The Revolutionary Tribunal condemned her to death in 1793.
Born Marie Gouze, she was a French playwright and political writer. She criticized slavery and in her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen demanded legal equality, public speech and political participation for women. The declaration challenged exclusions in existing declarations; it was not enacted legislation. She opposed revolutionary violence and the power of the Montagnards, and was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed in 1793.
Career timeline
1765Married Louis-Yves Aubry, a caterer in Montauban, in a marriage the chronology describes as forced
1766Her son Pierre Aubry was born; after her husband's death soon after, she took the name Olympe de Gouges
1770Moved to Paris, completed her education, and frequented literary salons
1784Published the autobiographical 'Mémoire de Madame de Valmont'
1785Her slavery-critical play 'Zamore et Mirza' entered the Comédie française repertoire but was not performed
1788Published 'Lettre au peuple', advocating free expression, divorce, sex equality, and abolition of slavery and the death penalty
1789Intervened in the revolutionary debates with posters and pamphlets
1791Published 'Les Droits de la femme' containing the Declaration of the Rights of Woman; the Legislative Assembly refused to examine it
1792After the fall of the monarchy she joined the moderate Girondins, opposed the Terror, and attacked Robespierre
1793Imprisoned in July for writings considered counter-revolutionary; the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned her to death in November
His Death of Marat, depicting his friend Jean-Paul Marat after Charlotte Corday assassinated him on 13 July 1793, became a leading image of the Revolution. After Napoleon's fall the painting long disappeared from public view before its rediscovery.
French painter born in Paris in 1748 and died in Brussels in 1825. He was the preeminent Neoclassical painter of his era, winning fame in the 1780s with The Oath of the Horatii, and an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Robespierre as a member of the Jacobin Club. As a deputy to the National Convention he voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and as a member of the Committee of General Security he took part in the Reign of Terror. After Robespierre's fall he was imprisoned twice in 1794 and 1795, then released. After the Empire was proclaimed in 1804 he became Napoleon's court painter and painted The Coronation of Napoleon. After Napoleon's fall in 1815 he lived in exile in Brussels, where he died. His pupils included Girodet, Gérard, Gros and Ingres.
Career timeline
1784Won fame with The Oath of the Horatii
1789–1794Supported the Revolution; deputy to the National Convention and member of the Committee of General Security
1794–1795Imprisoned twice after Robespierre's fall
Clergyman and political theorist of Third Estate sovereignty
Amid the 1788–1789 Estates-General crisis he identified the Third Estate with the whole nation, and later ended the Directory through the coup of 18 Brumaire.
A clergyman and political theorist, Sieyès linked the Third Estate to the nation in his 1789 pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? He helped bring the National Assembly into being and later sat with the Plain in the National Convention. Near the end of the Directory he participated in the coup of Brumaire and helped establish the Consulate.
Career timeline
1775–1788Secretary and deputy to the bishop of Tréguier, then vicar general and chancellor of the diocese of Chartres; sat in the Estates of Brittany.
1789Published What Is the Third Estate?; as a Third Estate deputy he pushed for the National Assembly and joined the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
1792–1795Sat in the National Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI, and served on a diplomatic mission to The Hague in 1795.
1799Made a Director in May; helped lead the coup of 18 Brumaire and became a provisional Consul of the Consulate.
1799–1830Served in the Sénat conservateur, was expelled from the Academy after the Restoration, left for Brussels, and returned to France after the July Revolution.
1836Died in Paris aged 88; unpublished manuscripts credit him with the first use of the term sociologie.
French writer and author of the Manifesto of the Equals
A radical writer of the revolutionary era whose 1796 Manifesto of the Equals demanded real equality and community of property beyond equality in law.
A French writer who also worked as a lawyer and librarian, Maréchal wrote the 1796 Manifesto of the Equals. It demanded equality in everyday life and common enjoyment of property, beyond equality written into law. Although associated with Babeuf’s movement, the text is Maréchal’s work. Its formulations should not all be treated as the leadership’s agreed programme or as enacted policy. It helps trace connections, as well as differences, between revolutionary egalitarianism and later socialism.
Career timeline
1770Appointed assistant librarian at the Mazarin Library in Paris, where he built his classical erudition.
1788His Almanach des Honnêtes Gens was condemned to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, and he was imprisoned for three months; afterwards he published anonymously.
1790–1792As chief editor of Révolutions de Paris he led an anticlerical campaign and published articles opposing the war.
1793–1796Met Babeuf and wrote the 1796 Manifesto of the Equals, sitting on the conspiracy's secret directorate of public safety.
1801Proposed a bill forbidding the teaching of reading to women; his De la vertu appeared posthumously in 1807.
Hébertist general who commanded the Parisian Revolutionary Army
Appointed commander of the Parisian Revolutionary Army in September 1793, he was arrested with Hébert, Vincent, Momoro and others in March 1794 and executed on 24 March.
Born in Soissons, Ronsin served in the army as a young man and after leaving it lived as a playwright and tutor. During the Revolution he became an orator of the Cordeliers Club; in 1793 he took charge of a department of Bouchotte’s War Ministry, was sent to the Vendée and was rapidly promoted to general. In September that year he became commander of the Parisian Revolutionary Army and in November led a detachment to the repression at Lyon. In the course he appears among the Hébertists arrested in March 1794 with Hébert, Vincent, Momoro and others and executed on 24 March. The charge of a military plot built on the Revolutionary Army was the prosecution’s case and should be read as such. The Revolutionary Army was disbanded days after his execution.
Career timeline
1772Left the army and worked as a playwright and tutor.
1792Appointed supply commissioner to Dumouriez’s army in Belgium.
1793Took charge of a department of Bouchotte’s War Ministry in April, was sent to the Vendée in May and was promoted to general in July.
1793Became commander of the Parisian Revolutionary Army in September and led a detachment to Lyon in November.
1793–1794Arrested on 17 December and released on 2 February after a Cordeliers campaign.
1794Re-arrested with the Hébertists in March and executed on 24 March.
Enragé priest who demanded controls on subsistence prices
The leading spokesman of the Enragés, he demanded action against the wealthy in the name of poor Parisians' survival, presented the Enragés' programme to the Convention in 1793, and was arrested amid Montagnard and Jacobin attacks.
A priest and radical activist in Paris’s Gravilliers section, Roux became a leading figure among the Enragés. He attacked food monopoly and speculation, demanded forceful price controls and economic equality, and presented the Enragés’ programme to the Convention in 1793. Arrested after attacks from Montagnard and Jacobin leaders, he died by suicide in prison.
Career timeline
1791Elected to the Paris Commune.
1793When food-price riots broke out in Paris, he defended such direct action.
1793Presented the Enragés' programme to the Convention: the 25 June address demanding taxation of necessities and punishment of speculators.
1793Arrested in August, released, then rearrested on 5 September and interned at Sainte-Pélagie.
1794On being sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he tried twice to kill himself in prison and died on 10 February.
Leading Girondin orator in the National Convention
On 31 December 1792 he urged an appeal to the people in the trial of Louis XVI and failed; days later a letter he had signed reached the king's enemies as evidence of treason.
A Bordeaux lawyer, Vergniaud became a celebrated orator in the Legislative Assembly and National Convention. He supported the war policy, spoke for the Girondins, and voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI. Arrested after the purge of the Girondins in June 1793, he was executed with other Girondin deputies.
Career timeline
1789Appointed by Bordeaux as an administrator of the Gironde department.
1791.03.29Served as director of the jury at the Gironde criminal court.
1791.08.31Elected deputy to the Legislative Assembly for the Gironde.
1791.10.30Elected president of the Legislative Assembly.
1792.08.10Presided as the Tuileries was stormed and had the king suspended.
1793.01.10Elected president of the National Convention.
1793.01.16Voted for the death of Louis XVI.
1793.06.02Decreed for arrest with the Girondin deputies.
The mathematician who organized the army of the Revolution
As the Committee of Public Safety member in charge of personnel and troop movements from 1793, he created fourteen armies and contributed to Jourdan's victory at Wattignies in autumn 1793. Mass conscription raised the army from roughly 645,000 in mid-1793 to about 1.5 million by September 1794.
French mathematician, military officer and politician, born at Nolay in Burgundy in 1753 and dead at Magdeburg in 1823. Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and to the National Convention in September 1792, from 1793 he handled personnel and troop movements on the Committee of Public Safety, directing conscription and organization and steering France's military successes of 1793–94, for which he was called the 'Organizer of Victory'. Known as an honest administrator and a convinced republican, he broke with Robespierre and helped bring about his overthrow on 9 Thermidor in 1794, and was one of the five initial directors of the Directory. Ousted in the Coup of 18 Fructidor in 1797, he went into exile; Napoleon made him Minister of War in 1800, but he opposed the imperial coronation and withdrew from public life. Exiled by the Second Bourbon Restoration, he died in exile.
Career timeline
1791–1792Deputy, Legislative Assembly; Deputy, National Convention
1793–1795Member, Committee of Public Safety; military organization and operations
1795–1797Director of the Directory
1800Minister of War
1815Minister of the Interior during the Hundred Days
Girondin journalist and deputy who championed revolutionary war
In 1791–92 he led the Legislative Assembly's push for war against Austria, which led to the declaration of war in April 1792. Sentenced on 30 October 1793, he was guillotined the next day.
A journalist and deputy in the Legislative Assembly and National Convention, Brissot also participated in antislavery activism. In 1791–92 he became the chief advocate of foreign war in the name of defending and extending the Revolution and emerged as a leading Girondin. He was arrested after the Girondins’ fall in June 1793 and later executed.
Career timeline
1770년대~1780년대Trained as a law clerk, then worked as a journalist contributing to the Mercure de France and the Courier de l'Europe.
1788년Founded the antislavery Society of the Friends of the Blacks and served as its secretary.
1789년Elected a member of the Paris municipality and founded the Patriote français, which he edited until 1793.
1791년 10월~1792년 9월Sat in the Legislative Assembly for Seine and, on the diplomatic committee, shaped much of France's foreign policy.
1792년 9월~1793년 10월Represented Eure-et-Loir in the National Convention; arrested in June 1793 and executed that October.
French king deposed and tried during the Revolution
The National Convention ruled on 3 December 1792 that it would try Louis XVI itself; convicted of high treason by vote, he was guillotined on 21 January 1793.
King of France from 1774, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in 1789 amid a fiscal crisis. He accepted the Constitution of 1791, but the Flight to Varennes and foreign war deepened distrust of the crown. The monarchy was suspended in 1792; the National Convention convicted him and he was executed in January 1793.
Career timeline
1774–1792King of France from 1774 until the monarchy was abolished in September 1792.
1789Summoned the Estates-General amid fiscal crisis and, after the storming of the Bastille, recognized the National Assembly’s legislative authority.
1791His flight to Varennes failed in June; he accepted the constitution, and a constitutional monarchy was declared in September.
1792Arrested in the insurrection of 10 August and held in the Temple; on 21 September the National Convention abolished the monarchy.
1792–1793The National Convention ruled on 3 December that it would try him; trial opened on 11 December and he was convicted of high treason.
1793Executed by guillotine on 21 January at the Place de la Révolution in Paris.
Author of the Le Chapelier Law banning guilds and workers’ combinations
On 14 June 1791 the law he moved was adopted, banning guilds and forbidding workers or employers of the same trade to combine for their common interests.
A lawyer from Rennes, he was elected to the Estates-General for the Third Estate in 1789, helped found the Breton Club, and as president of the Constituent Assembly in August 1789 presided over the night session of 4 August that abolished feudalism. On the constitutional committee he drafted much of the 1791 Constitution. The law bearing his name, adopted on 14 June 1791, banned guilds and workers’ combinations, a prohibition that lasted until 1864. In September 1791 he also presented a law restricting concerted political action by popular societies. Suspected during the Terror for his Feuillant ties, he was guillotined on 22 April 1794.
Career timeline
1789Elected to the Estates-General for the Third Estate of the sénéchaussée of Rennes; a founder of the Breton Club.
1789As president of the Constituent Assembly in August he presided over the night of 4 August; joined the constitutional committee in late September.
1791The Le Chapelier Law was adopted on 14 June; after the Champ de Mars massacre in July he left the Jacobins for the Feuillants.
1791Carried a law of 30 September restricting concerted political action by popular societies.
1794Arrested, he was guillotined in Paris on 22 April.
Committee of Public Safety member allied with Robespierre
A lawyer elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and the National Convention in 1792, he joined the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. Working with Robespierre and Saint-Just, he drafted the Law of 22 Prairial, which stripped defendants of counsel and sharply increased executions.
A lawyer and deputy in the Legislative Assembly and National Convention, Couthon joined the Mountain. On the Committee of Public Safety he worked closely with Robespierre and Saint-Just and played a central role in the Law of 22 Prairial, which sharply restricted defendants’ rights. Arrested on 9 Thermidor, he was executed with Robespierre.
Career timeline
1787Member, Provincial Assembly of Auvergne
1791Deputy for Puy-de-Dôme in the Legislative Assembly
1792Deputy for Puy-de-Dôme in the National Convention
1793Member of the Committee of Public Safety
1793Representative on mission to the Army of the Alps and Rhône-et-Loire; took Lyon
1793President of the National Convention
1794Rapporteur of the Law of 22 Prairial
1794Arrested on 9 Thermidor; guillotined on 28 July
Committee of General Security member who reported the ban on women’s clubs
On 30 October 1793, reporting for the Committee of General Security, he argued that women were unsuited to political association, and the Convention banned women’s clubs and popular societies.
A Grenoble lawyer elected to the Convention for Isère in 1792, he sat with the Mountain and voted for Louis XVI’s execution. Joining the Committee of General Security in 1793, he became, with Vadier, one of its most influential members. In October he delivered the report indicting the Brissotin deputies, and on 30 October he presented the report that banned women’s clubs and popular societies, a measure historians see as checking women’s political gains in the Revolution. He later investigated the India Company affair. Imprisoned after Thermidor and then amnestied, he was implicated in Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals but acquitted.
Career timeline
1792Elected to the Convention for Isère and sat with the Mountain.
1793Joined the Committee of General Security; on 3 October reported for the indictment of the Brissotin deputies.
1793On 30 October secured the ban on women’s clubs and popular societies.
1794Reported on the India Company affair, a report Robespierre criticised.
1795–1797Imprisoned in 1795 and amnestied; acquitted at the trial of the Conspiracy of the Equals.
Convention deputy who bridged the Plain and Committee of Public Safety
As the Committee of Public Safety's voice, he presented its reports on war, mass mobilization and revolutionary government to the Convention. Nicknamed 'the Anacreon of the Guillotine', he joined Robespierre's fall in 1794, then was impeached for the Terror.
A deputy to the Estates-General and National Convention, Barère sat with the Plain in 1792. From 1793 he served on the Committee of Public Safety and acted as a principal spokesman, presenting reports on war, mass mobilization, and revolutionary government. He joined the move against Robespierre in 1794 but was later impeached for his role in the Terror.
Career timeline
1789Elected deputy to the Estates-General by the estates of Bigorre.
1791–1792Served as a judge of the newly instituted Court of Cassation (October 1791 – September 1792).
1792Elected to the National Convention for Hautes-Pyrénées, presided over the Convention, and chaired the trial of Louis XVI.
1793–1794Elected to the Committee of Public Safety and served throughout its existence, presenting its reports on war, mass mobilization, and revolutionary government to the Convention.
1794Joined the Thermidorian coup that brought down Robespierre.
1795Decreed arrested and deported for the Terror; after Oléron and Saintes he escaped on 26 October and hid in Bordeaux.
1799Amnestied by Napoleon; under the First Empire he worked as a writer.
1815Sat in the Chamber of Deputies during the Hundred Days, then was banished for life as a regicide after the Bourbon Restoration.
1830–1841Returned to France, served Louis Philippe under the July Monarchy, and died on 13 January 1841.
Cordelier printer who spread the motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”
As a member of the Paris departmental directory he and Mayor Pache had a motto including “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or death” inscribed on the façades of public buildings.
A printer and bookseller from Besançon, Momoro became a master in the Paris printers’ guild in 1787 and, once the Revolution began, styled himself “the first printer of national liberty.” As secretary and a leading orator of the Cordeliers Club he printed and circulated its resolutions and posters, and after the flight to Varennes he argued for the king’s deposition. As a member of the Paris departmental directory he and Mayor Pache had a motto containing “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” inscribed on public buildings. In 1793 he assisted Ronsin in the Vendée and helped lead the Festival of Reason in November, a leading figure of dechristianization. In the course he appears among the Hébertists arrested in March 1794 and executed on 24 March.
Career timeline
1787Admitted as a master to the Paris printers’ guild.
1791Elected secretary of the Cordeliers Club, drafting and circulating its resolutions and posters; after Varennes he argued for the king’s deposition.
1793As a member of the Paris departmental directory, had the motto with “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” inscribed on public buildings together with Mayor Pache.
1793Assisted Ronsin in the Vendée from May and led the Festival of Reason on 10 November.
1794Arrested with the Hébertists in March and executed on 24 March.
Finance specialist who led the Convention’s finance committee
On 26 July 1794 (8 Thermidor), when Robespierre named him among the enemies in charge of the finances, he answered at once from the tribune that the man paralysing the Convention’s will was Robespierre himself.
From a Montpellier cotton-merchant family, he drew up a petition for a republic after the flight to Varennes in 1791. In the Legislative Assembly and the Convention he led the finance committee and oversaw the treasury, and in August 1793 presented the plan for the Great Book of the Public Debt consolidating the state’s debts. His push to end state pay for the clergy set him against the deist Robespierre. When Robespierre named him on 8 Thermidor he replied at once, a clash often counted among the triggers of Robespierre’s fall the next day. He was nonetheless pursued in the Thermidorian Reaction, and exiled as a regicide in 1816 he died near Brussels.
Career timeline
1791After the flight to Varennes he petitioned the Assembly to proclaim a republic, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly.
1792Re-elected to the Convention and joined its finance committee in October.
1793Presented the plan for the Great Book of the Public Debt on 24 August.
1794On 26 July (8 Thermidor) answered from the tribune Robespierre, who had named him in his speech.
1816–1820Exiled to Belgium under the law against regicides; died near Brussels in 1820.
Revolutionary journalist whose Le Père Duchesne spoke to a sans-culotte readership
Founder of Le Père Duchesne, which became the voice of the Parisian sans-culottes, and a leading figure behind the fall of the Girondins in 1793; pressed radical dechristianisation, was arrested with his followers in March 1794 and guillotined on 24 March.
A journalist of the French Revolution and deputy prosecutor of the Paris Commune. The earthy, popular language of Le Père Duchesne, founded in 1790, gave him influence among sans-culotte readers and he became prominent in the Cordeliers Club. In 1793 he attacked the Girondins and supported stronger economic controls and dechristianisation. The “Hébertists” were not a formal party but a label for overlapping newspaper, Cordelier, and Commune networks. After a failed call for insurrection, revolutionary government arrested him and he was executed on 24 March 1794.
Career timeline
1790Founded the popular revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchesne
1791–1792Prominent Cordelier; deputy prosecutor of the Paris Commune
1793Attacked the Girondins and backed sans-culotte demands and dechristianisation
1794.03Arrested after a failed call for insurrection; executed on 24 March
French general who fought in the revolutions of two continents
He presented a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 11 July 1789, and after the storming of the Bastille was made commander-in-chief of the National Guard. The Guard's firing on the crowd at the Champ de Mars in 1791 cost him popular trust and ended his middle course.
French military officer and politician, born in 1757 to a land-owning family at Chavaniac in Auvergne and dead in Paris in 1834. He volunteered for the American Revolutionary War, served as a Continental Army major general at the siege of Yorktown, sat in the Estates General of 1789, commanded the National Guard, and helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In the Revolution he sought a middle course and defended constitutional monarchy, but the bloodshed on the Champ de Mars in 1791 cost him popular trust, and the Austrians held him over five years after his arrest was ordered in 1792. He refused to serve Napoleon and sat as a liberal deputy under the restored Bourbons. In the July Revolution of 1830 he again commanded the National Guard and backed Louis-Philippe. He advocated the abolition of slavery and was called the 'Hero of the Two Worlds'.
Career timeline
1777–1781Continental Army major general in the American Revolutionary War; commanded the American right at the siege of Yorktown in 1781
1787–1789Member of the Assembly of Notables; deputy of the nobility to the Estates General of 1789
1789–1791Commander-in-chief of the National Guard; presented a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
1791–1792Commander of the Army of the Centre and then the Army of the North; fled after a warrant for his arrest in August 1792
1792–1797Held prisoner by Austria and Prussia at Olmütz and elsewhere; released in 1797
1814–1830Liberal member of the Chamber of Deputies under the Bourbon Restoration
1830Commanded the National Guard in the July Revolution and backed the accession of Louis-Philippe
Count of Artois who led émigré royalism during the Revolution
At his 1825 coronation at Reims he tried to revive the royal touch, asserting the sacredness of monarchy; in July 1830 his ordinances dissolved the chamber and censored the press, and the Paris rising forced his abdication on 2 August.
Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Count of Artois left France soon after the fall of the Bastille in 1789. Abroad he promoted Bourbon restoration and became a political centre of émigré royalism. He succeeded as Charles X in 1824 and was overthrown by the July Revolution of 1830.
Career timeline
1765Death of his father, the Dauphin Louis
1773Married Marie Thérèse of Savoy
1789Left France on 17 July, three days after the storming of the Bastille
1791–1792Set up a court-in-exile in the Electorate of Trier and prepared a counter-revolutionary invasion
1814Acted as Lieutenant General of the realm during the Bourbon Restoration
1824–1830King of France; crowned at Reims in 1825
1830Issued the July Ordinances; abdicated on 2 August
Jacobin politician who argued for subsistence rights and revolutionary government
On 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794, Convention deputies arrested him with about 90 others; he was executed without trial.
A lawyer and National Convention deputy during the French Revolution, Robespierre served on the Committee of Public Safety. His 1792 speech on subsistence placed access to necessities first while recognizing legitimate property and trade. His February 1794 report defended virtue and terror as principles of revolutionary government. This was a participant’s justification of repression; decisions made by the Convention and its committees cannot all be treated as his personal orders. He was executed after his defeat at Thermidor.
Career timeline
1789Elected deputy to the Estates-General for Artois
1780Graduated in law and was admitted to the Arras bar
1792Elected deputy to the National Convention
1793–1794Served on the Committee of Public Safety, a leading figure of the revolutionary government
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars commander, Marshal of the Empire
At the Second Battle of Zurich in 1799 he led the Army of Helvetia to defeat Korsakov's Austro-Russian force, and in 1800 he held Genoa for about sixty days, tying down Austrian troops so Bonaparte could win at Marengo.
Commander of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He was born Andrea Massena on 6 May 1758 in Nice, then the County of Nice in the Kingdom of Sardinia. He began as an enlisted soldier in the royal Italian regiment, reached the highest rank open to a commoner in 1784, and became a brigade general in August 1793 and a general of division on 20 December 1793. On 19 May 1804 he became one of the first eighteen Marshals of the Empire created by Napoleon, and he was made Duke of Rivoli in 1808 and Prince of Essling in 1809, though some sources record January 1810. He died of tuberculosis in Paris on 4 April 1817, aged 58.
Career timeline
1758Born in Nice
1784Senior non-commissioned rank (adjudant) in the royal Italian regiment
1793Brigade general in August; general of division on 20 December
1799Commander of the Army of Helvetia; victory at the Second Battle of Zurich
1800Commander of the Army of Italy; defence of Genoa
1804Appointed Marshal of the Empire
1808Duke of Rivoli
1809Prince of Essling (some sources record January 1810)
1810Invasion of Portugal; defeated by Wellington at Bussaco
1811Relieved of his command on 11 May
1815Naturalised French by Louis XVIII on 20 January
A peddler and sacristan from Le Pin-en-Mauges, he took up arms in March 1793 over conscription and the clergy's civil constitution; the Vendéan chiefs elected him generalissimo at Saumur on 12 June 1793. Mortally wounded storming Nantes on 29 June, he died on 14 July.
A peddler from Anjou and devout Catholic, Cathelineau joined the anti-conscription rising of 1793. He helped unite peasant forces and was chosen as the first generalissimo of the Catholic and Royal Army. He died from a gunshot wound received during the attack on Nantes.
Career timeline
1793. 3. 12.After the rising at Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, he gathered neighbours and marched on Jallais, followed by twenty-seven men.
1793. 3. 13.He fought his first battle at Jallais, seizing the château and a cannon, then took Cholet with Stofflet.
1793. 4. 23. – 5. 5.He seized Beaupréau and won the Battle of Thouars.
1793. 5. 16. – 6. 9.Defeated at Fontenay-le-Comte, he retaliated by taking Montreuil-Bellay and Saumur.
1793. 6. 12.After the capture of Saumur, the assembly of Vendéan chiefs proclaimed him generalissimo of the Catholic and Royal Army.
1793. 6. 29.Leading some 40,000 men in the storming of Nantes, he was mortally wounded by a shot from a window.
1793. 7. 14.Carried to Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, he died of his wounds.
Revolutionary leader associated with the Cordeliers and Indulgents
From Cordeliers orator to minister of justice after the monarchy fell on 10 August 1792, and a disputed figure in responsibility for the September Massacres. He sat on the first Committee of Public Safety in 1793, later led the Indulgents demanding an end to the Terror, and was guillotined in 1794.
A prominent Cordelier, Danton became minister of justice after the monarchy fell in August 1792. He rallied support for defence of the Republic and served on the first Committee of Public Safety in 1793. Later associated with calls to moderate the Terror and stabilize the Revolution, he clashed with the ruling committee and was executed in April 1794.
Career timeline
1789–1792Rose to prominence in the radical politics of the Cordeliers district, earning the nickname 'the Thunderer', and became president of the Cordeliers Club in 1790.
1792Became minister of justice after the fall of the monarchy on 10 August and appealed for resistance in his 2 September 'daring' speech.
1793Backed the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal in March and was appointed to the first Committee of Public Safety on 6 April.
1793–1794After losing his committee seat in June, he became the leading Indulgent demanding an end to the Terror, and was tried and executed in April 1794 on charges of conspiracy and venality.
Feuillant politician and advocate of judicial reform
One third of the triumvirate of which the Assembly said, “What Duport thinks, Barnave says, Lameth does”, he led the 1791 Feuillant split, arguing the Revolution was over and the constitutional order should be stabilised.
A magistrate and National Assembly deputy, Duport promoted jury trial and criminal-justice reform. He formed the “triumvirate” with Barnave and Lameth and helped organize the Feuillants in 1791. After the monarchy fell in 1792 he went into exile and died in Switzerland.
Career timeline
1778Admitted as an advocate in the Parlement de Paris, and appointed a councillor in that same parlement, remaining in office until 1790.
1787–1788Founded the "Parti des nationaux" in 1787, demanding that the Estates-General be convened, and in 1788 organised the Société des Trente against the distinction between the three orders.
1789Elected deputy for the Paris nobility to the Estates-General on 13 May; in late June joined the Third Estate among the 47 liberal nobles.
1789–1791Formed the "triumvirate" with Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth in the Constituent Assembly, and as rapporteur of the criminal jurisprudence committee advanced the reform of the judiciary (report of 29 March 1790) and the introduction of the jury (8 February 1791); presided over the Assembly from 14 to 26 February 1791.
1791Led the Feuillant split in July, was the chief architect of the decree of 27 September granting full emancipation to the Jews, and took part in the 24 September revocation of the rights of free men of colour.
1792After the fall of the monarchy on 10 August he left his post as president of the criminal tribunal of the Seine, was arrested, then released and fled into exile via England and Switzerland.
1798Forced abroad again after the 18 Fructidor coup (4 September 1797), he died of tuberculosis at Gais in Switzerland.
Revolutionary journalist associated with both the Bastille rising and Indulgents
Journalist and Convention deputy whose 1789 call to arms at the Palais-Royal helped set off the Bastille rising; he died on the guillotine with Danton after Le Vieux Cordelier demanded clemency and an end to the Terror.
On 12 July 1789 Desmoulins called the Palais-Royal crowd to arms, helping mobilize the unrest that preceded the storming of the Bastille. A Cordelier journalist, he later campaigned against the Girondins, but in late 1793 used Le Vieux Cordelier to call for clemency and an easing of the Terror. He was executed with Danton in April 1794.
Career timeline
1785Admitted as an advocate in the Parlement of Paris, but a stammer and weak connections hampered practice
1789Began radical pamphleteering and journalism with La France Libre, the Discours de la lanterne and the Révolutions de France et de Brabant
1790Joined the Club des Cordeliers and became a prominent member
1792Became Secretary-General to Justice Minister Danton, then was elected deputy for Paris to the National Convention in September
1793Led the attack on the Girondins in the Histoire des Brissotins, then from December published Le Vieux Cordelier demanding clemency and an easing of the Terror
1794Arrested on 31 March, tried as a Dantonist and executed on 5 April
Girondins
1760–1794
✕ Died by suicide while in hiding
Girondin deputy who argued after Varennes that the king could be tried
After the flight to Varennes in 1791 he cited English precedent in the Constituent Assembly to argue that the king could be tried; Barnave answered him in his speech of 15 July.
A lawyer from Évreux, Buzot was elected for the Third Estate to the Estates-General in 1789 and in the Constituent Assembly demanded the nationalization of church property. After the flight to Varennes in 1791 he cited English precedent to argue that the king could be tried; Barnave replied that England, having no written constitution, could not serve as a model. Re-elected to the National Convention in 1792, he became a leading Girondin orator under the influence of Madame Roland, attacked Marat and proposed a guard drawn from the departments to protect the Convention. Proscribed with the Girondins on 2 June 1793, he fled to Normandy and helped organize the revolt there. He later hid near Bordeaux and in 1794 was found dead with Pétion, most likely by suicide.
Career timeline
1789Elected for the Third Estate of the bailliage of Évreux to the Estates-General; called for the nationalization of church property.
1791After Varennes, cited English precedent to argue that the king could be tried; Barnave rebutted him.
1792Presided over the criminal tribunal at Évreux, then was elected to the National Convention for the Eure and joined the Girondins.
1793Proscribed with the Girondins on 2 June; fled to Normandy and helped organize the revolt against the Convention.
1794Found dead with Pétion after hiding near Bordeaux.
Advocate of substantive equality in the Conspiracy of the Equals
Born François-Noël Babeuf; a journalist who judged the Revolution's legal equality powerless against poverty and property inequality, he led the 1796 Conspiracy of the Equals against the Directory, was arrested and executed in 1797.
Born François-Noël Babeuf, he was a journalist and activist during the French Revolution who challenged inequalities of property and living conditions beyond legal equality. He participated in the 1796 Conspiracy of the Equals against the Directory, was arrested and was executed in 1797. Sylvain Maréchal wrote the Manifesto of the Equals; it is neither a text authored by Babeuf nor a record of enacted policy. Later socialists received and transformed this legacy rather than simply inheriting an unchanged doctrine.
Career timeline
1789Drafted the first article of the electors' cahier at Roye, demanding the abolition of feudal rights.
1794Published Le Tribun du peuple, defending the Thermidorians while attacking the Revolution's economic outcome.
1796Took part in the Conspiracy of the Equals; the plot was disclosed in May and he was arrested on 10 May.
1797Tried before the high court at Vendôme, convicted, and executed with his associates.
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.
Politician who moved from the revolutionary triumvirate to the Feuillants
He joined the Third Estate in 1789 but, through the triumvirate and the Feuillants, sought to stabilise the Revolution behind a constitutional monarchy; when the monarchy fell in 1792 he emigrated.
An aristocratic officer and veteran of the American War of Independence, Lameth joined the Third Estate in 1789 and supported the abolition of privilege. He formed the “triumvirate” with Barnave and Duport before becoming a Feuillant defender of constitutional monarchy. After exile and return, he served as a prefect under Napoleon and later as a liberal deputy.
Career timeline
1777–1785Entered the king's bodyguard corps and served as a cavalry officer; in 1782 he fought in the American War of Independence as a colonel under Rochambeau.
1789Elected deputy of the nobility of Péronne to the Estates-General, he rallied to the Third Estate and was among the promoters of the abolition of privilege on the night of 4 August.
1789–1791With Barnave and Duport he formed the triumvirate leading the Assembly's left; on 20 November 1790 he was elected president of the Assembly.
1791–1792A founding Jacobin and then a Feuillant leader defending constitutional monarchy; promoted maréchal de camp in the Army of the North in May 1792, he crossed to the enemy with Lafayette on 10 August and was interned by Austria.
1800–1814Returning to France, he served as prefect of the Basses-Alpes, Rhin-et-Moselle, Roer and Pô, was made a Baron of the Empire in 1810, and became lieutenant general and prefect of the Somme in 1814.
1820–1827Under the Restoration he sat as a liberal opposition deputy for Seine-Inférieure and then Seine-et-Oise, fighting the Villèle ministry.
Leading Feuillant orator who sought to preserve constitutional monarchy
On 15 July 1791 he defended the king’s inviolability: “Are we going to end the Revolution, or begin it again?” One step further, he warned, would destroy the monarchy, and one step further toward equality would destroy property.
A Third Estate deputy and leading National Assembly orator, he formed the “triumvirate” with Duport and Lameth. After the Flight to Varennes he helped lead the Feuillants in defence of constitutional monarchy and secretly advised the royal family. Papers revealing those contacts contributed to his conviction and execution.
Career timeline
1789Elected deputy of the Third Estate for Grenoble to the Estates-General; defended the union of the orders and voting by head.
1790Elected president of the Constituent National Assembly; became mayor of Grenoble the same year.
1791Escorted the royal family from Varennes to Paris, then helped form the Feuillants and defended the king’s inviolability.
1792–1793Denounced in August 1792; imprisoned at Grenoble and Fort Barraux, condemned for treason by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed in Paris in November 1793.
French Revolutionary Wars general, royalist conspirator
In February 1794 he took command of the Army of the North and fought at Fleurus; crossing the frozen rivers in the winter of December 1794–January 1795, he entered Utrecht and Amsterdam, while French hussars captured the Dutch fleet over the ice.
French general of the Revolutionary Wars. In the Flanders campaign he overran the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, then fought on the Rhine front; he later adopted Royalist positions, was deported to Cayenne after the Coup of 18 Fructidor (1797), escaped to exile in London and served on Korsakov's staff in 1799. He returned to France, was arrested in the royalist conspiracy against Napoleon, and was found dead in prison in April 1804.
Career timeline
1783Entered the 1st artillery regiment; briefly served in the American Revolutionary War
1793Promoted brigade general, then divisional general and given command of the Army of the Rhine
1794Took command of the Army of the North; led the Flanders and Netherlands campaign
1795Crushed the 12 Germinal insurrection and was titled 'Saviour of the Fatherland'
1797Became a member of the Council of Five Hundred; arrested at 18 Fructidor and deported to Cayenne
1799Served on Korsakov's staff
1804Arrested in the royalist conspiracy and found dead in prison
General of the Revolutionary Wars, victor of Fleurus and framer of the 1798 conscription law
His defining revolutionary moment was the decisive victory over the First Coalition at Fleurus in 1794. In 1798, in the Council of Five Hundred, he proposed with fellow deputy Pierre Delbrel the Jourdan Law, conscripting single and childless men aged 20 to 25.
A French soldier who served in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars and became a Marshal of the Empire in 1804. Born at Limoges in 1762, son of the surgeon Roch Jourdan, he fought in the American War of Independence, then in the revolutionary wars led the Army of the North to victory at Wattignies in October 1793 and broke the siege of Maubeuge. He went on to command the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and won a decisive victory over the First Coalition at Fleurus in 1794. A Jacobin politician under the Directory, he sat in the Council of Five Hundred (1797–1799) and framed the conscription law of 1798, the Jourdan Law. Defeated at Vitoria in 1813, he supported the July Revolution of 1830 and served as governor of the Hôtel des Invalides until his death.
Career timeline
1778–1783Joined the Auxerrois regiment and fought in the American War of Independence, serving at Savannah in 1779 and in the West Indies
1793Promoted brigadier general on 27 May and general of division two months later; named to lead the Army of the North on 22 September and won at Wattignies in October
1794Led the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, formally named on 29 June, and won at Fleurus on 26 June
1797–1799Elected to the Council of Five Hundred, where he proposed and carried the conscription law of 1798; defeated at Ostrach and Stockach in 1799
1804–1815Made marshal and count by Napoleon, governor of Piedmont, chief of staff to Joseph Bonaparte in Spain in 1808, and defeated at Vitoria in 1813
1816–1833After 1815 adhered to the Bourbons, becoming governor of Grenoble in 1816 and Peer of France in 1819; backed the July Revolution of 1830, briefly held the foreign affairs portfolio, then served as governor of the Hôtel des Invalides until his death
Paris Commune prosecutor prominent in dechristianisation
As the Commune’s procurator he linked social policy to sans-culotte pressure, advanced the Terror and dechristianisation, opposed women’s political activity, and split with Robespierre before his 1794 execution.
As procurator of the Paris Commune, Chaumette was involved in urban policies on prices, relief, and public education as well as radical popular politics. He became a prominent promoter of dechristianisation in 1793 and was close to Hébert and Cordelier networks. He was arrested after the government’s purge of the Hébertists and executed in April 1794.
Career timeline
1790As a member of the Jacobin Club, he edited the radical Revolutions de Paris journal.
1792In August he became chief procurator of the Paris Commune and was delegated to inspect the prisons with power of arrest during the insurrection of 10 August.
1792Elected president of the Commune on 31 October, he defended the municipality before the National Convention and was re-elected on 2 December.
1793He helped lead the attack on the Girondins and in October acted as prosecutor at their trial alongside Hébert.
1793In September, amid the subsistence crisis, he led popular mobilisation and contributed to the establishment of the Terror.
1793He led the dechristianisation campaign, organising the Festival of Reason of 10 November.
1794Arrested on 13 March, after the Hébertists’ arrest on 4 March; convicted over the Luxembourg prison plot and guillotined on 13 April.
Royalist commander who led guerrilla war in the Lower Vendée
A royal navy officer of the Breton petty nobility, he became the emblematic commander of the Vendéan insurgency against the Republic. His choices and rivalries made him its most controversial general, even among royalists.
A former French naval officer, Charette became a commander of the Catholic and Royal Army in the War in the Vendée. He led guerrilla warfare in the Lower Vendée, signed the Treaty of La Jaunaye in 1795, and later resumed the revolt. Captured in 1796, he was executed by firing squad in Nantes.
Career timeline
1779–1790Entered the royal navy as a garde de la Marine at Brest in 1779; promoted lieutenant de vaisseau in 1787 and resigned in 1790.
1793Took command of the insurgents around Machecoul and was elected general of the Catholic and Royal Army of Bas-Poitou in December 1793.
1795Signed the Treaty of La Jaunaye in February, recognizing the Republic, but resumed fighting in May and was recognized as generalissimo by Louis XVIII in July.
1796Captured at La Chabotterie in March and executed by firing squad at Nantes.
French Revolutionary general, victor of Hohenlinden
On 3 December 1800 he led the Army of the Rhine to a decisive victory over an Austrian-Bavarian force at Hohenlinden. The allies' disastrous retreat forced an armistice and led to the Treaty of Lunéville, effectively ending the War of the Second Coalition.
A general produced by the French Revolution, he campaigned on the Rhine and in Italy and won a decisive victory at Hohenlinden in 1800, breaking the Second Coalition. He later became Napoleon's leading rival and was banished; returning to Europe in 1813 as an adviser to the coalition, he was mortally wounded at Dresden.
Career timeline
1791Elected lieutenant-colonel of the Ille-et-Vilaine volunteers.
1793Promoted to général de brigade; served under Dumouriez.
1794Made général de division by Carnot; served under Pichegru in Flanders and won at Tourcoing.
1795–1796Took command of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle; won renown in 1796 for a celebrated 40-day retreat through the Black Forest.
1799Recalled to Italy against Suvorov; defeated at the Adda and Novi, where Joubert fell, and retreated to Genoa. He then assisted Bonaparte in the Brumaire coup.
1800Commanding the Army of the Rhine again, he won at Hohenlinden on 3 December.
1804Implicated in the Pichegru–Cadoudal conspiracy; sentenced to imprisonment, commuted by Napoleon to banishment. He left via Spain for America and settled near Philadelphia.
1813Returned to Europe as an adviser to the allied monarchs; mortally wounded at Dresden on 27 August and died on 2 September.
Civil commissioner who proclaimed emancipation in northern Saint-Domingue
On 29 August 1793, as civil commissioner in Saint-Domingue, he proclaimed all slaves of the Northern Province free, five months before the Convention abolished slavery in all the colonies.
A lawyer at the Parlement of Paris who wrote in support of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks and was close to Brissot, he was sent to Saint-Domingue as a civil commissioner with Polverel and others in 1792. Their stated mission was not emancipation but equal rights for free people of colour. Amid conflict with white colonists and the threat of Britain and Spain, he proclaimed freedom for the slaves of the Northern Province on 29 August 1793, with an obligation for non-combatants to return to plantation labour. On 4 February 1794 the Convention extended abolition to all French colonies. Historians debate whether his motives lay in revolutionary ideals of equality or in the need to hold on to power.
Career timeline
1784Took his law degree and became a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris.
1792Sent to Saint-Domingue as a civil commissioner with Polverel and others.
1793Proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves of the Northern Province on 29 August.
1794–1795Recalled to France to answer charges brought by the colonists, and was vindicated.
1796–1797Returned to Saint-Domingue, but Toussaint Louverture had him put aboard a ship for France in August 1797.
Enragé activist who championed section assemblies and direct democracy
Enragé who linked subsistence riots and section politics to the removal of the Girondins; a deputy in the 1792 National Convention.
A former postal employee and Paris section activist, Varlet joined the Enragés in pressing subsistence demands and direct democracy. He participated in the insurrection of 31 May–2 June 1793 that removed the Girondins. He later criticized the revolutionary government for suppressing popular sovereignty and was repeatedly arrested.
Career timeline
1789–1792In the Revolution's early years he wrote patriotic songs, campaigned by petition against the king's flight and for his deposition, and took part in popular mobilisation in the Paris sections.
1792After the Legislative Assembly suspended the king and called elections for a National Convention to write a new constitution, he was elected a deputy and argued for direct universal suffrage and the recall of elected officials.
1793He joined the Parisian poor's demands for price controls on 22 February, was arrested on 24 May and released three days later, then sat on the nine-member insurrectionary committee formed by section delegates on 29 May, which led the insurrection of 31 May to 2 June.
1793–1795Arrested again at the start of the Terror and released on 29 October 1793, he was arrested once more after the fall of Robespierre and spent almost a year in prison.
1800 이후After his release he settled at Pailly in the Yonne, married and had three children; from 1800 he supported Bonaparte and lived for a time in Nantes.
1830–1837He returned to Paris for several months in 1830 to take part in the July Revolution; in 1836 he left Nantes for Corbeil-Essonnes, where he drowned the following year.
Cordelier and Hébertist who served as secretary-general of the War Ministry
As secretary-general of the War Ministry he filled its offices with radical patriots; arrested with the Hébertists in March 1794, he was executed on 24 March.
The son of a Paris prison concierge, Vincent worked as a lawyer’s clerk. An early member of the Cordeliers Club, where he served as secretary, he entered the General Council of the Paris Commune after the rising of 10 August 1792. In April 1793 he became secretary-general of the War Ministry under Bouchotte and filled its offices with radical patriots. Arrested in December 1793 and freed the following February, he joined the Hébertist campaign against the Indulgents and the revolutionary government. In the course he appears among those arrested in March 1794 with Hébert, Ronsin, Momoro and others and executed on 24 March. No material evidence was produced for the conspiracy charges against them.
Career timeline
1792Entered the General Council of the Paris Commune after 10 August, replacing Fabre d’Églantine.
1793Appointed secretary-general of the War Ministry under Bouchotte in April.
1793–1794Arrested on 17 December on the orders of the Committee of General Security; released on 2 February.
1794Re-arrested with Hébert on 14 March and executed on 24 March.
Committee of Public Safety member and theorist of revolutionary government
The youngest deputy ever elected to the National Convention and Robespierre's closest ally, he pushed to confiscate the property of the Republic's enemies for poor patriots. He fell with Robespierre on 9 Thermidor.
The youngest deputy in the National Convention, Saint-Just became a leading Montagnard and close ally of Robespierre. On the Committee of Public Safety he served on missions to the armies and delivered reports against the Girondins, Hébertists, and Dantonists. He defended a strongly centralized revolutionary government and was arrested with Robespierre on 9 Thermidor and executed the next day.
Career timeline
1792.9–1794.7Deputy of the National Convention (for Aisne; youngest member)
1792.11–1793Reports condemning the Girondins; speech demanding the King's execution
1793.5–1794.7Member of the Committee of Public Safety
1793.11–1794Representative on mission to the armies, overseeing the Rhine and North armies
French revolutionary general, commander of the 1798 Irish expedition
On 22 August 1798 he landed at Killala and on 27 August defeated British forces under Lord Lake at Castlebar. The Connacht republic was proclaimed on 31 August, and on 8 September he was defeated and taken prisoner at Ballinamuck.
Born in 1767 at Saint-Nabord in the Vosges, he volunteered in 1792, rose quickly, and became a général de brigade in 1794. In 1798 he commanded the expedition to Ireland, landing at Killala on 22 August and defeating British forces at Castlebar on 27 August; he took part in the proclamation of the Connacht republic on 31 August, but surrendered at Ballinamuck on 8 September and returned home in a prisoner exchange. He later served in the Saint-Domingue expedition, moved to the United States in 1813, aided US forces at New Orleans in 1815, and taught French in his last years; he died at New Orleans in 1823.
Career timeline
1792Enlisted as a volunteer in the 13th battalion
1794Promoted to général de brigade
1798Commanded the Irish expedition, landing at Killala and winning at Castlebar
Norman noble and Girondin sympathizer who assassinated Marat
On 13 July 1793 she gained an interview with Marat by claiming to know of a Girondin plot, then stabbed him to death in his medicinal bath.
A figure of the French Revolution who supported the Girondins. On 13 July 1793 she assassinated the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, whom she held responsible for the September 1792 massacres; she judged that the radicalised Jacobins had placed the Revolution in danger. Arrested at the scene and convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was guillotined on 17 July.
French Revolutionary Wars general killed at Marengo
Returning to Europe in March 1800, he arrived at Marengo on 14 June as the Austrians were victorious along the line and led his three regiments against the enemy centre, yet was killed by a musket ball at the moment of victory.
A general of the French Revolutionary Wars. Born in 1768 at Ayat-sur-Sioule in Auvergne, he was educated at the Effiat military school and served in the royal army. In 1792, when most of his family emigrated, he refused and joined the Army of the Rhine, becoming provisional brigadier general on the merits of the combat at Lauterbourg. He served with the Army of the Rhine and in the 1795–1796 campaigns, covering Moreau's retreat, and was provisional commander-in-chief of the Army of England. In Egypt his division bore the Mamluk attack at the Battle of the Pyramids, and his Upper Egypt campaign won him the name 'Just Sultan' among the local population. Returning to Italy in 1800, he led the counterattack at Marengo with Boudet's division and was killed at the moment of victory. He is counted among the greatest generals of the Revolutionary Wars.
Career timeline
1783Commissioned sub-lieutenant in the Régiment de Bretagne
1793Made brigadier general on the merits of the combat at Lauterbourg, then general of division
1797–1798Provisional commander-in-chief of the Army of England
1798–1800Egyptian expedition; commanded the campaign in Upper Egypt
1800Fought at Marengo with the Army of Italy; killed in action
A conqueror who rose from revolutionary general to emperor
In the coup of 9–10 November 1799 (18 Brumaire), he conspired with Talleyrand and Sieyès and used troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the Council of Five Hundred and overturn the Directory, then took effective power as First Consul.
Born into an Italian-descended Corsican family, he was commissioned in the French royal artillery in 1785, supported the Revolution of 1789, and rose through his victories over royalists at Toulon in 1793 and Vendémiaire in 1795. The Italian campaign of 1796 made him a national hero, and in November 1799 the Brumaire coup overthrew the Directory and made him First Consul; in 1804 he became emperor of the First Empire. He won at Austerlitz in 1805 but was ruined by the Russian campaign of 1812 and Leipzig in 1813, was exiled to Elba in 1814, and after the Hundred Days lost at Waterloo and died on Saint Helena in 1821. His reforms such as the Napoleonic Code and public education endure, while the plunder of occupied lands, suppression of the press and deportation or imprisonment of critics, and the restoration of slavery in the colonies make him a contested figure.
Career timeline
1785Commissioned as an artillery second lieutenant in the French royal army.
1793Led the recapture of Toulon and was promoted to brigadier general.
1795Suppressed the royalist rising of Vendémiaire.
1796–1797Commanded the Army of Italy, defeating Austrian forces.
1798–1799Commanded the Egyptian and Syrian expedition.
1799Overthrew the Directory in the Brumaire coup and became First Consul.
1804–1814Ruled as emperor of the French First Empire.
1815Returned to power for the Hundred Days and was finally defeated at Waterloo.
French Revolutionary Wars general and commander of the Guadeloupe expedition
Commander of the Guadeloupe expedition Napoleon sent in 1801–1802; he suppressed Delgrès's resistance but died of yellow fever at Basse-Terre on 3 September 1802, and the insurgency continued until 1804.
Born in Metz in 1770, he joined his father's Conti Dragoon Regiment as a cadet at five. A supporter of the Revolution, he rose from second lieutenant in 1791 to captain in 1793 and chef d'escadron in 1794, and Kléber made him a brigade general in 1796. He served under Hoche in the Army of Sambre and Meuse and distinguished himself at Neuwied. In 1800 he commanded a division in Moreau's Army of the Rhine, leading the flank envelopment at Hohenlinden on 3 December that decided the victory. After the army was dissolved in 1801 he became inspector-general of cavalry of the Batavian Republic. In 1801–1802 Napoleon named him commander of the Guadeloupe expedition; he suppressed Delgrès's resistance and enforced the forcible reinstatement of slavery. He died of yellow fever at Basse-Terre on 3 September 1802.
Young noble officer elected generalissimo of the Vendéan army
Emerging as a Vendéan commander in 1793, he was elected royalist commander-in-chief at 21 after Cholet. He led the campaign north of the Loire in late 1793 and died fighting a guerrilla war in January 1794.
A former royal army officer, La Rochejaquelein joined the Vendéan rising in 1793 and led forces in its major battles. After the defeat at Cholet he was elected generalissimo of the Catholic and Royal Army at age twenty-one and took part in the campaign north of the Loire. He was killed in a skirmish in 1794.
Career timeline
1787Joined the Royal Polish Regiment, in which his father was colonel
1792As an officer of the Constitutional Guard, fought in the defence of the Tuileries on 10 August
1793After refusing conscription, joined the rising with Lescure and won at Fontenay-le-Comte and Saumur
1793-10Elected commander-in-chief of the Catholic and Royal Army after the defeat at Cholet
1793-11In the campaign north of the Loire, failed to take Granville and fell back on Angers
1793-12Defeated at Le Mans and Savenay, where his army was destroyed
1794-01-28Shot dead by a Republican soldier near Nuaillé while on reconnaissance
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.
Founder of the Icarian movement who coined the term 'communism'
On February 3, 1848, sixty-nine of Cabet's followers boarded a ship at Le Havre. 'To Icaria!' They set sail to build a communist paradise in the New World.
French utopian socialist and founder of the Icarian movement. In 1840 he published Voyage en Icarie, laying out a blueprint for a communist society based on workers' cooperatives, and was the first to establish 'communism' (communisme) as a political term. The most popular socialist advocate of his day, with some 400,000 adherents in France, he fused Christianity and communism in Le Vrai Christianisme, recasting Jesus's teachings as a gospel of social equality. In 1848 he led followers to America, founding Icarian communities in Texas and Illinois that lasted until 1898, the longest-running non-religious communal experiment in U.S. history. A bridge between Enlightenment utopianism and the workers' movement.
Career timeline
1788Born in Dijon. Qualified as a lawyer.
1830–1831July Revolution participant. Attorney-general in Corsica, then elected deputy for Côte-d'Or.
1833–1834Founded Le Populaire. Convicted of treason; exiled to England.
1834–1839Developed communist ideas in England under Robert Owen's influence.
1840Published Voyage en Icarie. First to call himself a 'communist'.
1841–1847Revived Le Populaire (~400,000 readers). Published Le Vrai Christianisme.
1848Emigrated to U.S. Founded Icarian communities in Texas and Illinois.
1849–1856Led Nauvoo Icarian community. Died 1856 in St. Louis, Missouri, after internal rift.
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.
1836, 1840Served as prime minister under the July Monarchy.
1871–1873Served as president of the French Third Republic.
Insurrectionary strategist who spent 37 years in prison; Blanquism paved the road to Leninism
"I am accused of having told thirty million French people, proletarians like me, that they had the right to live." — defence speech at the 'Trial of the Fifteen', 12 January 1832
French revolutionary socialist. He systematised Blanquism (armed insurrection by a disciplined vanguard followed by revolutionary dictatorship) which influenced Marxist theory and the Bolshevik party concept. He spent 37 years in prison and was known as L'Enfermé ('The Prisoner').
Career timeline
1824Joins the Carbonari, a secret society dedicated to overthrowing the monarchy
1827Participates in street protests against Charles X; wounded three times, including a near-fatal bullet wound to the neck
1830Fights in the July Revolution; disillusioned by the Orléanist monarchy, turns to republicanism
1832Founds the 'Amis du peuple' society; arrested — declares his profession 'proletarian' at trial
1837Co-founds the secret 'Société des Saisons' with Armand Barbès and Martin Bernard
1839.5Leads armed insurrection in Paris; crushed, sentenced to death commuted to life imprisonment
1848Released by the February Revolution; founds the Central Republican Society, demands the red flag and postponement of elections
1849–1859Sentenced to ten years for the failed May 15 uprising; imprisoned in multiple facilities
1865–1870Exile in Brussels; writes key theoretical works including 'Instructions for an Armed Uprising'
1870Leads the La Villette insurrection; founds the newspaper and club 'La Patrie en Danger'
1871.3.17Arrested on the eve of the Paris Commune; elected in absentia; Versailles refuses to swap the Archbishop for him
1872Writes the cosmological meditation 'Eternity by the Stars' in Clairvaux prison
1879Elected deputy for Bordeaux (invalidated); released under a general amnesty
1880Launches 'Ni Dieu ni maître' newspaper; tours France for amnesty and abolition of standing armies
Marshal captured at Sedan who led the Versailles army against the Paris Commune and became the president of “Moral Order”
As commander of the Versailles army, he led the suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Elected president in 1873, he headed a “Moral Order” government; after Republicans won a parliamentary majority in 1877, he resigned in 1879.
A soldier from a family of Irish descent, he won his marshal’s baton and dukedom in the conquest of Algeria, the storming of the Malakoff in the Crimea and at Magenta in 1859. In 1870 he led the Army of Châlons to relieve Metz and was wounded and captured with the emperor at Sedan. Released by Germany, he commanded Thiers’s Versailles army, entered Paris in May 1871 and directed the repression and mass executions of Bloody Week. Succeeding Thiers as president in 1873, he led a “Moral Order” government awaiting a restoration, lost the 1877 confrontation with parliament and resigned in 1879.
Career timeline
1827Entered the French Army.
1855Won the Battle of Malakoff during the Siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War.
1859Contributed to the French victory at Magenta and was made Marshal of France and Duke of Magenta.
1864Was appointed Governor General of Algeria.
1870Commanded French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and was wounded and captured with Napoleon III at Sedan.
1871Became commander of the Versailles army under President Thiers and led the suppression of the Paris Commune in May.
1873Was elected president of the French Third Republic and pursued “Moral Order” policies.
1877–1879After conflict with parliament and a Republican victory in the 1877 election, resigned as president in 1879.
Jacobin journalist of 1830 and 1848 who became the Commune’s war delegate and walked to his death on a barricade
On 25 May 1871, the final day of Bloody Week, Commune war delegate Delescluze walked unarmed to the barricade at the Place du Château-d’Eau and was shot dead amid the fighting.
Born in Dreux, he fought in the July Revolution of 1830, published republican papers after February 1848 and went into exile. Arrested under the Second Empire, he served time in the penal colony of Cayenne in Guiana, and in 1868 founded the newspaper Le Réveil. Elected to the National Assembly in February 1871, he resigned to join the Commune. A Jacobin “independent revolutionary”, he sat on the Committee of Public Safety and on 11 May became war delegate as a civilian. On 25 May, with defeat certain, he climbed onto the barricade at the Château-d’Eau and was shot dead.
Career timeline
1830Took part in the July Revolution.
1848Worked as a republican journalist after the February Revolution and later went into exile.
1868Founded the newspaper Le Réveil.
1871After election to the National Assembly, resigned and joined the Paris Commune, serving on its Committee of Public Safety and as its war delegate.
Textile designer and poet, a member of the Commune, who wrote the words of “The Internationale” in hiding after Bloody Week
After the Paris Commune's defeat, he wrote the words of “The Internationale” while hiding in Paris in June 1871. In exile in the United States, he organized solidarity for deported Communards.
Born to a Paris box-maker, he worked as a textile designer and wrote songs and poems from the 1830s, taking part in the June Days of 1848. He founded a designers’ union and joined the International. Elected to the Commune in an April 1871 by-election for the 2nd arrondissement, he wrote “The Internationale” in hiding in June after Bloody Week. Condemned to death in absentia, he fled to the United States and returned under the 1880 amnesty. He died poor in 1887; the next year Pierre De Geyter set “The Internationale” to music and it became the anthem of the world labour movement.
Career timeline
1830Composed his first song, “Long Live Liberty.”
1848Took part in the 1848 Revolution.
1864Helped found the textile designers’ union, which later joined the First International.
1871Elected to the Paris Commune, he served on its Public Services Commission and fought during Bloody Week.
1880Returned to France after the amnesty.
1887Chants révolutionnaires, the first collection to print the words of “The Internationale,” was published.
Realist painter who led the Commune’s Federation of Artists and went into Swiss exile blamed for the Vendôme Column
In the 1871 Paris Commune, Courbet chaired the Federation of Artists and served as a councillor, advocating the opening of museums. After its defeat, he was imprisoned for six months over the Vendôme Column’s destruction; a later order to pay reconstruction costs led him into exile in Switzerland.
Born to prosperous farmers in Ornans in the Jura, he launched Realism with A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers and was close to Proudhon; in 1870 he refused the Legion of Honour. As president of the Commune’s Federation of Artists in 1871 he demanded self-government for museums and an end to censorship, and after winning a by-election in the 6th arrondissement he sided with the minority against the Committee of Public Safety. For proposing to remove the Vendôme Column he was sentenced to six months after Bloody Week; ordered in 1873 to pay for its rebuilding, he fled to Switzerland and died at La Tour-de-Peilz.
Career timeline
1849–1851In works such as The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans, he painted everyday scenes in a large-scale realist style that challenged Paris Salon conventions.
1870He publicly refused the Legion of Honour, declaring his independence from government authority.
1871As president of the Federation of Artists during the Paris Commune, he worked to open museums and organize an exhibition, and served as a councillor.
1873After being ordered to pay 323,000 francs toward rebuilding the Vendôme Column, he left for Switzerland and settled in La Tour-de-Peilz.
French soldier who served as the Paris Commune’s Delegate for War
As the Commune’s Delegate for War, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but was arrested amid conflicts with its leaders.
Cluseret served in the French army, Garibaldi’s volunteers and the Union Army during the American Civil War. As Delegate for War of the Paris Commune in 1871, he sought to reorganize the National Guard but clashed with Commune leaders and was arrested on a charge of betrayal; an ad hoc court acquitted him. He escaped France after the Commune’s defeat, returned under the 1880 amnesty, and was elected a socialist deputy for Toulon in 1888, 1889, 1893 and 1898. He later moved away from socialism and joined the anti-Dreyfus camp.
Career timeline
1823Born in Suresnes, France.
1848As a French army officer, took part in suppressing the June Days uprising.
1860Joined Garibaldi’s volunteers and took part in the Italian unification campaign.
1861–1863Served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and reached brigadier general.
1871As the Paris Commune’s Delegate for War, sought to reorganize the National Guard. Arrested on May 1 amid conflict with its leaders, he was acquitted by an ad hoc court on May 21.
1880Returned to France under the amnesty for Communards.
1888–1898Elected four times as a socialist deputy for Toulon.
French bookbinder and activist in the Women's Union of the Paris Commune
Born in Brest in Brittany, Le Mel worked as a bookbinder in Paris and joined the workers' movement. In 1865 she helped win equal pay for women and men in bookbinding, joined the International Workingmen's Association, and ran the cooperative restaurant La Marmite with Eugène Varlin. During the 1871 Paris Commune she was a leading activist in the Women's Union and fought on the barricades. Arrested after the Commune's defeat, she was deported to New Caledonia with Louise Michel and returned to Paris under the 1880 amnesty.
Career timeline
1865Helped win equal pay for women and men in bookbinding; joined the International Workingmen's Association.
1860년대–1871Ran the cooperative restaurant La Marmite with Eugène Varlin.
1871Worked in the Women's Union of the Paris Commune and fought on the barricades.
1871–1880Arrested and deported to New Caledonia; returned to Paris under the 1880 amnesty.
Montmartre teacher who fought on the Commune’s barricades, was deported to New Caledonia and became the anarchist “Red Virgin”
Louise Michel led Montmartre’s Women’s Vigilance Committee and fought in the Paris Commune. Deported to New Caledonia after its defeat, she returned to France in 1880 and devoted herself to workers’ meetings and anarchist activism.
Born in a château in Haute-Marne to a servant, she became a teacher, opened a school in Montmartre in the 1850s and frequented republican and socialist clubs. On 18 March 1871 she turned out to defend the cannon on Montmartre, and during the Commune she served on the vigilance committee, in ambulance work and with a Guard battalion. After Bloody Week she surrendered in place of her mother, demanded death in court and was sentenced to deportation to New Caledonia, where she supported the Kanak revolt of 1878. Amnestied in 1880, she spoke and was jailed again and again as an anarchist, dying on a lecture tour in Marseille in 1905.
Career timeline
1850s–1860sAfter teaching in villages, she moved to Paris in 1856. She opened a school there in 1865, published poetry, associated with Blanquist revolutionaries, and joined efforts for women’s civil rights and girls’ education.
1871During the Paris Commune, she headed the Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee, fought with the 61st Montmartre Battalion and organized ambulance stations. During Bloody Week she surrendered to protect her mother. At her military trial she demanded death, but was sentenced to penal transportation to the French colony of New Caledonia.
1873–1880Deported to New Caledonia, she befriended Kanak people, taught French, and supported the 1878 Kanak revolt. She returned to France in 1880 under the amnesty for participants in the Commune.
1880–1905After returning, she spoke at workers’ meetings and demonstrations and continued activism in France and Europe despite repeated imprisonment as an anarchist. She led an unemployed workers’ demonstration in 1883 and co-founded the anarchist periodical Le Libertaire with Sébastien Faure in 1895. She died in Marseille in 1905.
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.
Bookbinder who led the Paris International, ran the Commune’s finances and was shot on the last day of Bloody Week
He linked the bookbinders’ union to the First International and helped build a Paris federation of workers’ associations, then organised the Commune’s finances and labour relations. Captured by Versailles forces, he was shot with other prisoners at Montmartre on 28 May 1871.
A peasant’s son who became a bookbinder in Paris, he led the bookbinders’ strike of 1864 and founded mutual-aid societies and the cooperative restaurant La Marmite. The central figure of the International’s Paris section, he was tried twice in 1868 and organised a federation of trade unions. In 1871 he joined the Central Committee of the National Guard and, as a member of the Commune, handled finance and supplies; he belonged to the minority that opposed the Committee of Public Safety. Captured on 28 May, he was dragged to Montmartre, beaten by a crowd and shot.
Career timeline
1857Helped found a bookbinders’ mutual-aid society.
1864Was a principal organiser of the first Paris bookbinders’ strike.
1869Helped found the Parisian Federation of Workers’ Associations.
1871Elected to the Paris Commune, he became commissioner of finance and handled labour relations.
Radical French prime minister at the end of the First World War who pressed harsh terms on Hungary at the Paris Peace Conference
A physician turned journalist from the Vendée, he became mayor of the 18th arrondissement of Paris in 1870 and the next year tried to broker a compromise between the Paris Commune and the government. A key figure of the Independent Radicals, he advocated the separation of church and state. As interior minister in 1906 he ordered repressive policies toward the workers’ movement and was nicknamed “the Tiger”, and he was prime minister in 1906–1909 and 1917–1920. Appointed in November 1917 at one of the darkest hours of the war, he demanded total victory over Germany and achieved the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference. Seeking to weaken Hungary as Germany was weakened, he brought about the stringent terms of the Treaty of Trianon. He died in 1929.
Marx's son-in-law, author of The Right to Be Lazy, first socialist deputy in the French parliament
"Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one by one." — Suicide letter, 25 November 1911
French Marxist theorist born in Cuba. Co-founded the French Workers' Party (POF) with Jules Guesde and systematized economic determinism as a historical method. In his later years, defended revolutionary Marxism against Jean Jaurès's reformism.
Career timeline
1864–1865Studied medicine in Paris; joined French section of First International as a Proudhonian anarchist
1866–1868Moved to London, frequented Marx household; General Council member, corresponding secretary for Spain
1868Married Laura Marx, Karl Marx's second daughter
1871–1872Fled to Madrid after Commune's fall; propagated Marxism via La Emancipación, fought anarchist dominance in Spanish section
1880Co-founded French Workers' Party (POF) with Jules Guesde; serialized first draft of The Right to Be Lazy in L'Égalité
1882–1891Returned to Paris as POF's leading theorist; led strikes and electoral campaigns, repeatedly imprisoned
1891Elected from Lille as first socialist deputy in French parliament — campaigned from prison
1890s–1905Defended orthodox Marxism against Jaurès's reformism; published major works on economic determinism, origins of property
1908–1911Retired from active politics after Toulouse unity congress; wrote memoirs of Karl Marx
French army officer who served as the Paris Commune’s war delegate
He sought to reorganize the Commune’s defenses, but National Guard units largely refused to serve outside their own districts.
Louis-Nathaniel Rossel was a French army officer and the only senior French officer to join the Paris Commune in 1871. As its war delegate, he sought to reorganize the defenses and artillery, but National Guard distrust of centralized command hindered his plans.
Career timeline
1864–1871Served in the French Army.
1871Joined the Paris Commune as war delegate and resigned after nine days.
1871Captured after the Commune’s defeat and executed by firing squad at Versailles on 28 November.
Veteran founder of French Marxist socialism who entered the Union sacrée government in 1914
After war began in 1914, Guesde left the socialist antiwar camp and entered the French government as minister without portfolio. At Stuttgart in 1907 he had rejected special antiwar measures apart from the socialist struggle; wartime office brought that position into government practice.
A journalist exiled for supporting the Paris Commune, he drafted the programme of the French Workers’ Party with Marx in 1880 and became the standard-bearer of French Marxism. He long opposed the reformist Jaurès and took part in founding the unified Socialist Party (SFIO) in 1905. At Stuttgart in 1907 he argued that class struggle would abolish war and that no special anti-war action was needed. In August 1914, seeing France itself in danger, he joined the Union sacrée government as a minister without portfolio and stayed until 1916.
Career timeline
1880Drafted the French Workers’ Party programme with Karl Marx; the party adopted it at its founding congress in November.
1907At the Second International’s Stuttgart Congress, presented the French minority’s resolution rejecting special antiwar measures apart from the general socialist struggle.
1914–1916Entered the French government as minister without portfolio after war broke out and served until 1916.
Blanquist revolutionary and head of the Paris Commune police
“Long live the Commune! Down with the assassins!”
A Blanquist under the Second Empire, Rigault wrote for republican and atheist newspapers and was repeatedly imprisoned for political activity. After the Republic was proclaimed in September 1870, he worked in the political section of the Paris police; following the Commune's uprising, he became head of the police prefecture in March 1871. He served as a Commune councillor and on its General Security Commission, then became its prosecutor in late April, participating in hostage policy and arrests of opponents. During Bloody Week he had the imprisoned lawyer Gustave Chaudey shot; on 24 May 1871, Versailles government troops captured and shot Rigault without trial.
Career timeline
1860년대Joined Blanquist and republican circles and contributed to newspapers; repeatedly imprisoned for political activity.
1870년Worked as an official in the political section of the Paris police after the Republic was proclaimed in September.
1871년Appointed head of the Paris police on 20 March and elected to the Commune on 26 March; served on the General Security Commission and became the Commune's prosecutor in late April.
1871년Ordered the execution of Gustave Chaudey during Bloody Week. Captured by Versailles troops on 24 May and shot without trial.
A marshal whose Verdun prestige ended in Vichy collaboration
On 17 June 1940, Pétain broadcast that France must cease fighting.
Philippe Pétain was a French general who became a national hero through his command at Verdun and his effort to restore the army’s morale after the 1917 mutinies. In 1940 he opposed continuing the war against Germany and sought an armistice; after parliament granted him constituent powers, he became head of the French State at Vichy and replaced the republic with an authoritarian regime. His government collaborated with Nazi Germany and enacted antisemitic laws, binding French state institutions to the occupation order. After liberation, the High Court condemned him to death for treason and intelligence with the enemy, but Charles de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Career timeline
1876Entered Saint-Cyr military academy
1916Commanded French forces at Verdun
1917–1918Commander-in-chief of the French Army
1934Minister of War
1939–1940French ambassador to Spain
1940.06President of the Council of Ministers of France
1940–1944Head of the French State at Vichy
1945–1951Convicted of treason and imprisoned for life
French socialist leader who united the left, founded L'Humanité, and was assassinated fighting to prevent the Great War
"In the vat of the Republic, prepare the wine of the Social Revolution!" — to winegrowers at the Maraussan cooperative, 1 May 1905
Jean Jaurès was the central figure in the unification of French socialism, leading the French Socialist Party from 1902 and merging it with Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France in 1905 to create the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). Through L'Humanité, the daily he founded in 1904, he championed reformist social democracy, while during the Dreyfus Affair he stood as the republican conscience against anti-Semitism and militarism. His Marxist class analysis in the multi-volume Socialist History of the French Revolution (1900–1903) left a lasting mark on French revolutionary historiography. In July 1914, he fought to prevent world war through an international general strike with the German Social Democrats, but was assassinated by nationalist Raoul Villain three days before France entered the conflict.
Career timeline
1885Elected to Chamber of Deputies as Opportunist Republican for Tarn
1892–1893Supported Carmaux miners' strike; re-elected as Independent Socialist deputy
1898–1902Leading Dreyfusard voice; edited La Petite République
1902Founded and led the French Socialist Party
1904Founded L'Humanité
1905Unified French socialist parties into SFIO
1900–1903Published Socialist History of the French Revolution
1914Assassinated while leading international anti-war general strike campaign
The voice of Action Française, the polemicist who pushed a scandal from the page into the street day after day
Through January 1934 his columns called out the implicated deputies one by one, and on the morning of 6 February the paper urged its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. At the front of the columns that filled the square that night were the Camelots du Roi, the action squads of Action Française
The son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, a medical student turned polemicist, who founded the daily Action Française with Maurras and set its tone. He sat as a deputy for Paris from 1919 to 1924, and his method of personal attack and denunciation left its mark on a generation of French political language. After losing a libel case brought over his claim that the police had killed his son Philippe in 1923, he fled to Belgium in 1927 and returned under an amnesty in 1930. In January 1934 he printed the names of the politicians touched by the Stavisky affair day after day, building the picture of a 'republic of thieves' that carried the paper's readers to the square on 6 February.
Career timeline
1867–1890Born in Paris, son of Alphonse Daudet; studies medicine
1900–1908Turns royalist and joins Action Française
1908–1942Co-founder and leading writer of the daily Action Française
1919–1924Deputy for Paris
1923–1927The lawsuits over his son Philippe's death; convicted of libel and flees to Belgium
1930Returns under an amnesty
1934.01–02The press offensive over the Stavisky affair that produced the demonstration of 6 February
From Foch's brilliant staff officer to a general of defeat and accommodation
On 12 June 1940, Weygand advised the French government to capitulate.
Maxime Weygand was a French general who served as Ferdinand Foch's key staff officer in the First World War, coordinating Allied operations and reading the armistice terms to the German delegation in 1918. Between the wars he carried French military influence in Poland and the Levant, then became commander-in-chief of the French armies in May 1940 and, after the German breakthrough, judged that continued fighting in metropolitan France was no longer feasible and advised an armistice. He joined the Vichy government and later directed French North Africa, choosing limited accommodation with Germany while enforcing antisemitic measures harshly. Detained after the war on treason charges and cleared in 1948, he later defended Marshal Pétain's memory.
Career timeline
1885–1888Studied at Saint-Cyr and the Saumur Cavalry School
1914–1918Chief of staff to Foch and senior staff officer at Allied Supreme Headquarters
1918Read the armistice terms at the Compiègne negotiations
1920Military adviser to the Inter-Allied Mission in Poland
1923–1924High Commissioner of the Levant
1931–1935Vice-president of France's Superior War Council and Inspector-General of the Army
1940.05–06Commander-in-chief of the French armies; advised an armistice
1940.06–1941.11Vichy Minister for Defence and Delegate-General in North Africa
1942–1945Held by Germany, including internment at Itter Castle
The brain of Action Française, the royalist theorist who denied the republic itself in the name of integral nationalism
'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!', on hearing his life sentence in the court at Lyon, 27 January 1945
A poet and polemicist from Martigues in Provence, deaf from his youth, who led Action Française for half a century after the movement formed out of the Dreyfus affair. His 'integral nationalism' called for the restoration of the monarchy and the abolition of the parliamentary republic, and named Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners as the 'four confederate states' eating France from within. The movement survived the Vatican's condemnation of 1926, and in 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française. Through January 1934 his paper named 'the thieves' day after day, and on the morning of 6 February it called on its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. He welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 as a 'divine surprise', backed Vichy, and denounced resisters and Jews in print throughout the occupation. In January 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and national degradation for collusion with the enemy.
Career timeline
1868–1890Born at Martigues; loses his hearing; begins writing in Paris
1899–1908Joins Action Française out of the Dreyfus affair; the daily is founded in 1908
1908–1939Theorist of integral nationalism, shaping the whole of the French far right
1926The Vatican condemns Action Française
1934.01–02Press offensive over the Stavisky affair; calls for the demonstration of 6 February
1938Elected to the Académie Française
1940–1944Backs Vichy; denounces resisters and Jews in print
1945.01Sentenced to life and national degradation for collusion with the enemy
1952Released in ill health and dies at Tours the same year
Leader who took the SFIO majority into the Comintern at Tours in 1920, founding the French Communist Party, and ran L’Humanité
At the 1920 Tours Congress, he backed SFIO affiliation with the Comintern, led the majority split, and helped found the French Communist Party. Arrested in 1923 for opposing France’s Ruhr occupation, he was cleared by the Senate sitting as a High Court.
Born in Paimpol in Brittany, he joined Guesde’s French Workers’ Party in 1891 and the unified SFIO in 1905, and from 1918 ran L’Humanité for the rest of his life. As his supporters swung towards the October Revolution after the war, he led the vote to join the Comintern at the Tours congress of 1920 and became a founder of the French Communist Party. He was jailed in 1923 for denouncing the French occupation of the Ruhr. A deputy and senator, he remained the party’s elder statesman until his death in 1958.
Career timeline
1892Joined the Gironde section of the French Workers’ Party, founded by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue.
1905Took part in the founding congress of the unified Socialist Party (SFIO) and became its propaganda delegate.
1918Elected director of L’Humanité, which he led until his death in 1958.
1920At the Tours Congress, supported SFIO affiliation with the Comintern and helped found the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC), predecessor of the French Communist Party.
1923Arrested for opposing France’s Ruhr occupation and brought before the Senate sitting as a High Court; it ruled there was no case to answer.
1936Elected senator for the Seine, becoming the first senator from the French Communist Party.
French socialist and teachers’ union activist who led the Committee for the Third International
He organised internationalist socialists against the war and served as secretary of the Committee for the Third International during the founding of the French Communist Party.
A teacher, Loriot joined the Socialist Party in 1901 and became active in the teachers’ union. During the First World War he opposed support for the war and backed the Zimmerwald position, serving as secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations and later the Committee for the Third International. At the Tours Congress in 1920 he joined the leadership of the newly formed French Communist Party.
Career timeline
1901Joined the Socialist Party
1917Became secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations
1919Secretary of the Committee for the Third International
1920Elected to the Executive Committee of the newly formed Communist Party and as international secretary at the Tours Congress
1925Active in opposition to the party’s Bolshevisation
1926Left the party and joined the revolutionary syndicalist movement
A French journalist who moved from antimilitarist socialism toward nationalist authoritarian politics.
“When war comes, do not fire on your brothers ... You will not march to defend the capitalists’ strongbox.”
A former history teacher, Hervé was dismissed from teaching in 1901 after publishing an antimilitarist article and became a socialist journalist. He took part in founding the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905 and was active in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT); through his paper La Guerre sociale, he advocated antimilitarism and insurrection in the event of war. At the outbreak of the First World War he turned to patriotism and support for the war, and in 1919 he helped launch the National Socialist Party. Between the wars he attacked parliamentary government and called for an authoritarian republic led by Philippe Pétain. He briefly supported German Nazism in the 1930s but condemned its persecution of Jews.
Career timeline
1901Dismissed from teaching after an antimilitarist article.
1905Took part in founding the SFIO and was active in the CGT.
Last president of the Third Republic, who signed the 1940 transfer of power
After Paul Reynaud's cabinet fell on 16 June 1940, he appointed Philippe Pétain to head the government; Pétain requested an armistice the next day. He signed the Constitutional Law on 10 July, and Pétain became head of state the day after.
A French centre-right republican politician trained as a mining engineer, he entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1900 at 29 for Meurthe-et-Moselle and presided that department's general council for 26 years from 1906. He was Minister for the Colonies in 1911–1914, briefly Minister of War in 1913 and Minister for the Blockade and Liberated Regions in 1917–1919, entered the Senate in 1920 and became its president in 1931. Elected last president of the Third Republic in 1932 after Paul Doumer's assassination, he was re-elected in 1939 but had little executive room under Third Republic practice. On 16 June 1940 he appointed Pétain to head the government; on 10 July he signed the Constitutional Law carried 569 to 80, and on 11 July Pétain became head of state. He never resigned and was seized by German forces in 1943. He died in Paris on 6 March 1950, aged 78.
Career timeline
1896–1901Mining engineer, Vesoul and Nancy
1900–1920Deputy, Briey
1911–1914Minister for the Colonies, briefly Minister of War in 1913
1917–1919Minister for the Blockade and Liberated Regions
1920–1931Senator, then Vice-President and President of the Senate
1932–1940President of France, last president of the Third Republic
1940Promulgated the 10 July Constitutional Law, transferring power without resigning
France's first Socialist prime minister, who left behind paid holidays and the 40-hour week
'I rarely left my desk while in power; but whenever I went out and crossed the Paris suburbs and saw the roads covered with processions of jalopies, motorcycles and tandems, with working-class couples in matching pullovers, I had the feeling that, despite everything, I had brought a kind of clearing, a break in the clouds, into difficult and obscure lives', statement at the Riom trial, March 1942
A literary critic drawn into politics by the Dreyfus affair, he kept the Socialist SFIO's 'old house' standing at the 1920 Congress of Tours when the majority left to found the Communist Party. As prime minister of the 1936 Popular Front government he brokered the Matignon Agreements and enacted two weeks of paid holidays and the 40-hour week, becoming France's first Socialist and first Jewish head of government and a target of the far right. One of the eighty parliamentarians who voted against full powers for Pétain in 1940, he turned Vichy's Riom trial into a platform for defending the Popular Front, survived internment near Buchenwald, and briefly headed a caretaker government in late 1946.
Career timeline
1894–1906Conseil d'État jurist and literary critic; the Dreyfus affair draws him to Jaurès and socialism
1914–1919Chef de cabinet to a Socialist minister in the war government; elected deputy in 1919
1920.12At the Congress of Tours, keeps 'the old house' as the majority founds the Communist Party
1921–1936Rebuilds the SFIO; political director of Le Populaire; parliamentary leader
1936.02Beaten nearly to death by the royalist Camelots du Roi
1936.06–1937.06Prime minister of the Popular Front: Matignon Agreements, paid holidays, the 40-hour week
1938.03–04Second Blum government collapses within a month against the Senate
1940.07One of the eighty who vote against full powers for Pétain at Vichy
1942–1945Defends the Popular Front at the Riom trial; interned in a special camp near Buchenwald
1946.12–1947.01Heads the caretaker government; postwar reconstruction and the Blum-Byrnes loan agreement
A commander-in-chief caught between defensive doctrine and forward deployment
On 16 May 1940, when Churchill asked him 'Where are the strategic reserves?', Gamelin answered: 'There is none.'
Maurice Gamelin was a French general who rose through the high command on the strength of his First World War staff experience and his reputation as a republican military coordinator. Expecting a long war against Germany, he built strategy around the Maginot Line, yet he limited the Saar Offensive and committed the main Allied movement toward the Dyle and the Belgian frontier when Germany invaded in 1940. After the German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940, he was dismissed, later detained by Vichy and Germany, and became a central figure in the contested assignment of responsibility for France's defeat.
Career timeline
1893Graduated first from Saint-Cyr
1906–1914Staff officer to General Joffre
1914–1918Served in the First World War; commanded the 9th Infantry Division
1919–1924Head of the French military mission in Brazil
1924–1929Commander of French forces in the Levant
1931–1939Chief of the Army General Staff; senior coordinator of the armed forces
1939–1940Commander-in-chief; directed the Saar Offensive and Dyle Plan
The perfume magnate who bought both the far-right leagues and a mass newspaper
In 1928 he launched a daily at ten centimes a copy and drove its circulation toward a million. The paper lost money, which was not the point: it was cheap enough to be read everywhere, and the language grown on its pages became the language of the columns that filled the square in February 1934
A Corsican who built the largest fortune in the European perfume industry of his day. He bought Le Figaro in 1922 and founded the cheap mass daily L'Ami du peuple in 1928, using both as instruments of anticommunist, antisemitic and antiparliamentary agitation. He financed Georges Valois's Faisceau and the early Croix-de-Feu, and in 1933 created and funded Solidarité Française outright. His career is a large part of the answer to the question that hangs over the French leagues of the 1930s: who paid for them. The organisation he had founded was on the Place de la Concorde as a column on 6 February 1934, and he died that July, ruined by a divorce settlement and his debts.
Career timeline
1874–1904Born at Ajaccio in Corsica; starts in perfumery in Paris
1905–1920Builds one of the great fortunes of the perfume industry
1922Buys Le Figaro
1925–1928Finances Valois's Faisceau and the early Croix-de-Feu
1928Founds the mass daily L'Ami du peuple
1933Creates and funds Solidarité Française
1934.07Dies after a divorce settlement and financial ruin
French officer who headed the Entente military mission in Budapest and delivered the Vix note in March 1919
An Alsatian-born French professional soldier, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1898 and served as a staff officer of the colonial troops. At the end of the First World War he was on the staff of the French Army of the Orient in Belgrade, and on 26 November 1918 he arrived in Budapest as a lieutenant colonel at the head of the Entente military mission, charged with overseeing the Padua armistice and the Belgrade military convention. He passed several notes demanding withdrawals to the Hungarian government; the note he handed President Károlyi on 20 March 1919 brought the government down the next day. Harassed after the Soviet Republic was proclaimed, the mission left by train for Szeged on 26 March. He later served with colonial troops in the Levant and elsewhere, became a général de division in 1933 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1941.
Career timeline
1898Graduated from Saint-Cyr
1918–1919Head of the Entente military mission in Budapest
From syndicalism through the Comintern to the Fourth International: a French internationalist across a century of revolution
Lenin described Rosmer as "a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut in five or six languages." — quoted in Philippe Robrieux's internal history of the French Communist Party
American-born French revolutionary syndicalist and a key figure in the Comintern leadership. With Pierre Monatte he published La Vie ouvrière and organised anti-war internationalism; he spent seventeen months in Moscow helping found the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern). A Political Bureau member of the French Communist Party, he was expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, thereafter committing to the Left Opposition and Trotskyism. In 1938 he hosted the founding conference of the Fourth International at his home in Périgny. In his later years he signed the Manifesto of 121 against the Algerian War and wrote the classic memoir Lenin's Moscow.
Career timeline
1909–1914Co-editor of the CGT journal *La Vie ouvrière* with Pierre Monatte; leading figure in revolutionary syndicalism
1915–1918Organised French participation in the Zimmerwald Conference; sustained anti-war activity throughout WWI as an internationalist
1919–1920Active in the Committee for Adhesion to the Third International; sent to Moscow, elected to the ECCI during a seventeen-month stay
1921Helped found the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) at its inaugural congress; served on the provisional council with Lozovsky and Tom Mann
1922–1924Political Bureau member of the French Communist Party and general secretary of *L'Humanité*; core leader of the party's Left current
1924.10Expelled from the PCF alongside Boris Souvarine and Pierre Monatte for opposing the anti-Trotsky campaign
1929–1931Co-founded the Communist League, France's first Trotskyist organisation; resigned in 1931 over tactical differences
1938.9Hosted the founding conference of the Fourth International at his home in Périgny, held clandestinely under threat of GPU assassinations
1939Visited Trotsky in Mexico; served on the Dewey Commission and acted as guardian to Trotsky's grandson Sieva
1940–1947Stranded in the United States by WWII; returned to France in 1947
1953Published *Lenin's Moscow* (*Moscou sous Lénine*), with a preface by Albert Camus
1960Signed the Manifesto of 121, supporting those who refused to fight in the Algerian War
The Paris prefect of police, hard on the left and indulgent to the leagues, whose dismissal lit the fuse of 6 February
'Then I shall be in the street', on the telephone with Daladier as he was removed, 3 February 1934. The right-wing press read it as notice that he would take to the streets; Chiappe said he had meant only that he would be out of a job
A Corsican from Ajaccio who rose through the police administration and served as prefect of police of Paris from 1927 to 1934. He had a standing reputation for severity toward left-wing demonstrations and indulgence toward the street actions of the far-right leagues, and was popular with the right-wing press and the veterans' associations. When Prime Minister Édouard Daladier removed him on 3 February 1934, the right read it as the republic striking down its own policeman, and three days later the Place de la Concorde erupted. He remained a central figure of Paris right-wing politics after his dismissal, and died in 1940 when the aircraft carrying him to take up the Vichy post of high commissioner in the Levant was shot down over the Mediterranean.
Career timeline
1878Born at Ajaccio in Corsica
1900년대–1926Rises through senior posts in the police administration
1927–1934Prefect of police of Paris
1934.02.03Removed by Daladier; refuses the residency-general in Morocco
1935–1940Remains a central figure of the Paris right
1940.11Appointed Vichy high commissioner in the Levant; shot down on the way
A French general whose 1940 command exposed the tension between mountain-war expertise and an old command system
On Christmas night 1914, wounded, he led his company in holding the Tête des Faux summit against a numerically superior German attack, earning two citations.
Robert Touchon was a French general who built his reputation through mountain warfare and infantry instruction, rising on the strength of First World War combat and Alpine commands. After the German breakthrough in May 1940, he commanded the Sixth Army, hastily placing forces moved from the Maginot Line along the Aisne and committing Charles de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured Division at Montcornet. The armoured force lacked full integration and coordinated support, while his army could only hold parts of the front before retreating. Retired after the armistice, Touchon later served on Vichy’s National Council and the Lyon section of its State Court, leaving a record that joins military authority to collaboration with an authoritarian regime.
Career timeline
1899–1901Cadet at the Saint-Cyr military academy
1914–1918Commanded Alpine Chasseur battalions; served in the First World War and received multiple citations
1928–1930Commander of the 159th Infantry Regiment at Briançon
1932–1935Commandant of the Infantry and Combat Tanks Application School at Saint-Maixent
1938–1939Military governor of Lyon and commander of the 14th Military Region
1939.11–1940.02Commander of the XXIII Army Corps
1940.02–07Commander of the Sixth Army during the Aisne defence and the Montcornet counterattack
1941–1942Member of Vichy’s National Council and judge on the Lyon section of the State Court
A republican statesman who urged resistance in the face of defeat
In June 1940, he argued that France should continue the war from North Africa.
Paul Reynaud was a French republican statesman and lawyer whose independent positions ranged across economics, colonial policy, and defence. Facing Nazi Germany, he pressed for wartime financial mobilisation and modern warfare built around tanks and air power. When France collapsed in 1940, he sought to preserve the alliance with Britain and continue the war from North Africa, but resigned as premier after the armistice camp prevailed and was subsequently detained by Vichy and Germany. After liberation he returned to parliament and remained a prominent defender of parliamentary government.
Career timeline
1910First secretary of the Paris Bar Conference
1919–1924Deputy for Basses-Alpes
1928–1940Deputy for Paris
1930Minister of Finance
1931–1932Minister of Colonies
1938Minister of Justice
1938–1940Minister of Finance
1940President of the Council, also Foreign Affairs and War Minister
A tank-war innovator who became the Secret Army's first commander
On 9 June 1943, the Secret Army commander Vidal was arrested at Paris's La Muette station.
Charles Delestraint was a French general shaped by captivity in the First World War and by command of armoured units, whose advocacy of tanks reflected a changing theory of modern war. After France's defeat and the armistice, he chose resistance and, selected by Charles de Gaulle, became the first commander of the Secret Army, bringing several movements' military structures together. Working with Jean Moulin, he helped extend the organisation across occupied France, but his arrest on 9 June 1943 created the succession crisis behind the Caluire meeting. Deported to Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau, he was killed shortly before liberation and posthumously made a Companion of the Liberation.
Career timeline
1897–1900Cadet, Saint-Cyr military academy
1914–1918First World War service, German prisoner of war
1923–1936Armoured-unit commander, colonel
1936–1939Commander, 3rd Tank Brigade; brigadier general
1939–1940Commander of the 7th Army's tanks and 1st Armoured Group
1942–1943First commander of the Secret Army, code name Vidal
1943–1945Imprisoned at Natzweiler and Dachau; executed
The syndicalist who led the CGT for 31 years, signed the Matignon Agreements and won the Nobel Peace Prize
'The labour movement has never won a greater victory', radio address just after the conclusion of the Matignon Agreements, June 1936
A match-factory worker who became secretary-general of the CGT at thirty in 1909 and led it until 1940, the public face of French trade unionism. Starting as a revolutionary syndicalist, he moved to reformism when he accepted the union sacrée in 1914, helped draft the labour clauses of the Versailles Treaty and co-found the International Labour Organization. He led the reunified CGT into the Matignon Agreements in 1936, was interned under Vichy and deported to Germany, and after the war became founding president of Force Ouvrière, the 1948 breakaway from the communist-led CGT, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.
Career timeline
1895–1906Match-factory worker at Aubervilliers; sacked for striking against the white phosphorus that blinded his father
1909–1940Secretary-general of the CGT
1914.08Abandons the antiwar general strike for the union sacrée; speaks at Jaurès's funeral
1919–1921Helps draft the Versailles labour clauses and found the ILO; the CGT's revolutionary wing splits off as the CGTU
1936.03–06Leads the reunified CGT into the Matignon Agreements; membership soars from one to four million
1940–1945CGT dissolved by Vichy; house arrest, then deported to Germany in 1943
1947–1948Breaks with the communist-led CGT; founding president of Force Ouvrière
1947–1954President of the French Economic Council; Nobel Peace Prize, 1951
A general who embodied the military case for defeat and armistice
On 22 June 1940, he signed the armistice for France in the Compiègne forest.
Charles Huntziger was a French Army general who built his career in the colonial infantry, on the Balkan front in the First World War, and in overseas commands and negotiations between the wars. Commanding the Second Army at Sedan in 1940, he failed to stop the German breakthrough, and his decisions remained part of the dispute over responsibility for France’s defeat. He judged that the capacity to continue fighting was nearing its limit and chaired Pétain’s delegation that signed the 22 June armistice. As Vichy’s Minister of War, he then helped reorganize the military of the collaborationist state until his death in a plane crash in 1941.
Career timeline
1900Graduated from Saint-Cyr, second lieutenant in the colonial infantry
1918Operations chief, Allied Army of the Orient, planner of the Vardar offensive
1924–1928Commander of French occupation troops in the Tianjin concession
1934–1938Commander-in-chief of French forces in the Levant
1939–1940Commander of the Second Army at Sedan
1940Commander of Fourth Army Group; chairman of France’s 22 June armistice delegation
1940–1941Vichy Minister of War and commander-in-chief of the Armistice Army
In Moscow in August 1939 he negotiated a military accord with the USSR, but his own delegation's written powers were limited, the British head had none, and the talks stalled on Red Army transit through Poland.
French army general Aimé Doumenc organized motor transport in the First World War and later drafted a design for an autonomous armored division. In August 1939 he headed France's military delegation in Moscow, negotiating a military accord with the USSR on limited written powers; the talks stalled on Red Army transit through Poland and were suspended as the German-Soviet pact was concluded. In 1940 he served in the high command through the collapse in the Ardennes, and afterwards was Commissioner-General for National Reconstruction and wrote military history.
Career timeline
1898–1900Student at the École polytechnique
1907–1909Student at the École supérieure de guerre
1916–1918Deputy director and director of the Automobile Service, organizing Verdun supply and relief
1925Served in the Rif War
1928Proposed an autonomous armored-division design
1938Member of the Superior Council of War
1939Head of the French military delegation in Moscow
1940–1942Major general at army headquarters, Commissioner-General for National Reconstruction, then left active service
A republican politician who became an architect of Vichy collaboration
In 1942, while calling for labor mobilization, he publicly declared that he desired a German victory.
Pierre Laval began as a lawyer and Socialist politician, then moved rightward and became a leading minister and prime minister of the Third Republic. After France's defeat in 1940, he helped secure Pétain's full powers and the dismantling of the constitutional order, making himself central to the Vichy regime. He believed collaboration with Germany could preserve France's position, and after returning to power in 1942 he expanded labor provision and police cooperation. Convicted of treason after liberation, he was executed in 1945.
Career timeline
1903–1922Socialist activist and lawyer
1914–1919Deputy in the Chamber of Deputies
1923–1944Mayor of Aubervilliers
1931–1932President of the Council
1934–1936Foreign minister and President of the Council
1940.06–1940.12Vice-President of the Vichy Council of Ministers
The Radicals' 'Bull of Vaucluse', who helped build the Popular Front and dismantled it with his own hands
'Ah! les cons! s'ils savaient...', the words attributed to him on seeing the crowds cheering at Le Bourget airfield on his return from Munich on 30 September 1938. Whether he said them, and where and to whom, is disputed.
A baker's son and history teacher who rose to lead the Radical Party. He quit as premier after the 6 February 1934 riot, then as defence minister from June 1936 helped sustain the Popular Front, but after returning as premier in April 1938 he ended the 40-hour week by decree in November and broke the general strike. He signed the Munich accords in September 1938, declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 and banned the Communist Party after the Nazi-Soviet pact. He fell over the failure to aid Finland in March 1940, stood trial at Riom and was interned near Buchenwald and at Itter Castle until 5 May 1945. Back in the Chamber after the war, he opposed de Gaulle's full powers in 1958 and died in Paris on 10 October 1970.
Career timeline
1884–1914Baker's son from Carpentras; history teacher
1914–1918Fights the First World War, rising from private to lieutenant
1919–1933Radical deputy; rises to lead the party
1934.01–02Premier; resigns the day after the riot of 6 February
1936–1940Defence minister, also premier from 1938
1938.04–09Returns as premier; signs the Munich agreement
1938.11Dismantles the 40-hour week by decree and breaks the general strike
1939.09Declares war on Germany; bans the Communist Party after the Nazi-Soviet pact
1940.03Falls over the failure to aid Finland
1940–1945Defendant at the Riom trial; interned near Buchenwald and at Itter Castle
1946–1958Returns to the Chamber; elder of the Radical Party
The colonel of the Croix-de-Feu who turned his columns away from the Chamber
That night his columns reached the rear of the Chamber and he ordered them to disperse rather than storm it. The left saw a dress rehearsal for fascism in the same night; the far right called him a traitor. Both verdicts followed him for the rest of his life
The son of a general, trained at Saint-Cyr, who served in Morocco and the First World War and retired as a lieutenant-colonel. From 1931 he led the veterans' association Croix-de-Feu and built it into a mass movement of several hundred thousand, whose discipline and motorised rallies looked to the French left like the face of fascism. On the night of 6 February 1934 his columns reached the rear of the Chamber and he ordered them to disperse rather than storm it, a caution for which the far right called him a traitor. When the Popular Front government dissolved the leagues in 1936 he founded the Parti Social Français and turned toward electoral politics, building what became the largest party of the French right by the late 1930s. He backed Pétain and sat on Vichy's National Council while running an intelligence network that passed information to the British, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and interned in Germany, and after the liberation was detained again by the French authorities as a Vichy man before dying of illness in 1946. Whether he was a fascist or the French form of authoritarian conservatism has been the central argument in the study of the French right from Sternhell onward.
Career timeline
1885Born at Lorient, the son of a general
1907–1918Saint-Cyr, service in Morocco and the First World War
1919–1928Staff service; retires as a lieutenant-colonel
1929–1931Joins the Croix-de-Feu and becomes its president
1931–1936Expands the Croix-de-Feu into a mass movement of hundreds of thousands
1934.02.06Disperses his columns at the Chamber
1936.06Founds the Parti Social Français after the leagues are dissolved
1936–1939Builds the PSF into the largest party of the French right
1940–1942Backs Pétain; sits on Vichy's National Council
1942–1943Runs an intelligence network for the British; arrested by the Gestapo in March 1943
1943–1945Deported to Germany and interned
1945–1946Detained by the French authorities after the liberation; dies the next year
1961Posthumously recognised as a deported member of the Resistance
The naval engineer who led the Black Sea mutiny and rose to the Comintern Secretariat
On 19 April 1919, the red flag rose above the battleship Jean Bart in the Black Sea. André Marty, ringleader of the sailors who refused to fight the Bolsheviks, was arrested and sentenced to twenty years at hard labour by a Constantinople court-martial.
A French naval mechanic who in 1919 led the mutiny aboard the battleship Jean Bart in the Black Sea, refusing intervention against the Bolsheviks. He was sentenced to 20 years' hard labour. Pardoned in 1923, he joined the PCF as a deputy and Central Committee member, rising to Comintern Secretary and Presidium member in 1935. As political commissar of the International Brigades in Spain, he organized the Albacete base and earned the epithet 'Butcher of Albacete' for his harsh discipline. Expelled from the PCF in 1952, he remained a central figure in French communism and Comintern work for three decades.
Career timeline
1908Enlists in the French Navy as a mechanic
1919Leads the Black Sea mutiny aboard the Jean Bart; court-martialed, 20 years' hard labour
1923Pardoned after international campaign; joins the PCF
1924–1955National Assembly deputy for Seine-et-Oise; PCF Central Committee member
1931–1935Active in the Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI)
1935–1943Comintern Secretary and Presidium member
1936–1938Political Commissar of the International Brigades; organizes from Albacete
1939–1943Works for Comintern in Moscow; 1943 liaison with de Gaulle in Algiers
1944Returns after Liberation; attempts revolution — vetoed by Stalin
1952Marty-Tillon affair: accused as police spy; expelled from the PCF
The deputy who founded the Jeunesses Patriotes, holding a street force and a seat in the Chamber at once
He kept a parliamentary seat and a paramilitary organisation at the same time, on the principle that the street belonged to his side too. The Jeunesses Patriotes were among the columns that reached the Concorde on the night of 6 February 1934, and several of the fifteen dead were their members
A First World War veteran turned deputy who founded the Jeunesses Patriotes in 1924 against the incoming Cartel des Gauches and built it into a paramilitary body tens of thousands strong. Equipped with blue raincoats and berets, it broke up Communist meetings and fought for the streets, while its leader kept his seat inside parliament: a doubleness characteristic of the French leagues. On 6 February 1934 the Jeunesses Patriotes formed one of the main columns on the Place de la Concorde, and some of the dead came from its ranks. He voted full powers to Pétain in 1940, presided over the Paris municipal council under the occupation, and was detained and then released after the liberation.
Career timeline
1887–1918Born in Paris; serves in the First World War
1919–1940Deputy in the Chamber
1924Founds the Jeunesses Patriotes
1925–1936Commands a paramilitary league tens of thousands strong
1934.02.06The Jeunesses Patriotes form one of the main columns on the Concorde
1940.07Votes full powers to Pétain
1943–1944Presides over the Paris municipal council under the occupation
1944–1945Detained after the liberation, then released
SFIO general secretary who led the Tours vote to join the Comintern, became the first PCF general secretary and left in 1923
At the 1920 Tours Congress, Frossard led the move to join the Comintern and became the French Communist Party’s first general secretary, but left in 1923. Later a minister, he joined Pétain’s cabinet in 1940, voted for his full powers, and was acquitted of collaboration after the war.
A teacher from the Belfort region, he joined the SFIO and became its general secretary in 1918. After visiting Moscow with Cachin in 1920 he backed joining the Comintern at the Tours congress and became the first general secretary of the new French Communist Party. Clashing with the Comintern’s demands for discipline, he left in January 1923 and returned to the SFIO. He served as a minister in several governments in the 1930s and joined Pétain’s first cabinet in June–July 1940, but declined to serve Vichy; after the war he was tried for collaboration and acquitted.
Career timeline
1918–1920General secretary of the SFIO
1921–1923General secretary of the French Communist Party
1923Left the Communist Party and founded the Unitary Communist Party (PCU)
1928–1936Socialist deputy for Martinique and Haute-Saône
1935–1940Minister in several governments
1940Minister of Public Works in Pétain’s cabinet; voted in July to grant Pétain full powers
The general who defied Vichy and led the Liberation Army
In January 1945, defying a retreat order, he commanded that the symbolic city of Strasbourg be defended, anticipating de Gaulle's own instruction by twenty-four hours 'with perfect convergence.'
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was a French professional soldier shaped by the First World War and the Moroccan war, and a commander who preserved his division’s cohesion amid France’s defeat in 1940. He remained in Vichy’s army, but in November 1942 he refused orders not to resist the German occupation of southern France, and joined the Free French after imprisonment and escape. Commanding Army B and then the French First Army, he led the liberation of Toulon and Marseille after the Provence landings, advanced to the Rhine and Danube, and represented France at the German surrender in Berlin in 1945. He later commanded the French colonial war in Indochina, where illness ended his life in 1952; he was posthumously made Marshal of France.
Career timeline
1911Graduated from the cavalry school and commissioned as an officer
1914–191812th Dragoons and 93rd Infantry Regiment, First World War
1921–1926Served in Morocco during the Rif War
1940Commanded the 14th Infantry Division in the Battle of France
1942–1943Commander of the 16th Military Division; imprisoned after defying Vichy and later escaped
1943–1945Commanded Army B and the French First Army in the Liberation campaign
1950–1951High Commissioner in Indochina and Commander-in-Chief of the Far East Expeditionary Corps
Carmelite friar and Free French admiral whose Republic of Cochinchina as High Commissioner opened the road to war
On 1 June 1946, while Ho Chi Minh was negotiating in France, he unilaterally proclaimed Cochinchina’s provisional government, intensifying the conflict with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
A naval officer from Brest who became a Carmelite friar after the First World War, he returned to the navy in the Second and led de Gaulle’s Free French naval forces. Arriving as High Commissioner for Indochina on 31 October 1945 to restore colonial administration, he set up an autonomous Republic of Cochinchina in 1946 while the Viet Minh leaders were negotiating in France, breaking the Ho–Sainteny agreement of 6 March and effectively starting the war. He directed a hard line including the Haiphong shelling and was recalled in 1947.
Career timeline
1920Entered the Carmelite order as a friar.
1940Joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces.
1945De Gaulle named him High Commissioner for Indochina; he arrived there on 31 October.
1946Proclaimed Cochinchina’s provisional government on 1 June and supported the armed seizure of Lang Son and Haiphong in November.
1947On 4 March, the French government recalled him and relieved him of his post.
The Popular Front's interior minister, hounded to death by the far-right press
In a note to Blum before turning on the gas, he wrote: "If they could not succeed in dishonouring me, they will at least bear responsibility for my death. I am neither a deserter nor a traitor."
A Socialist politician, mayor of Lille, and Blum's interior minister. In the strike wave of June 1936 he refused to clear the occupied factories by force, and he carried out the dissolution of the far-right leagues, the first item of the Popular Front programme. When the far-right weekly Gringoire barraged him with a fabricated story of desertion in the First World War, a military court of honour and an overwhelming vote of the Chamber cleared him twice over; the campaign did not stop, and on 17 November he took his own life at his home in Lille. Hundreds of thousands came to his funeral, and his death set off the debate on legislating against press defamation.
Career timeline
1890–1914Socialist student politics in Lille; party journalist
1914–1918Captured retrieving a comrade's body; German prison camps
1925–1936Mayor of Lille
1928–1936Deputy; leader of the SFIO's Nord federation
1936.06Interior minister: no force against the occupations; dissolves the leagues
1936.07–11Gringoire's fabricated desertion campaign; cleared by a court of honour and the Chamber
1936.11.17Takes his life in Lille; vast crowds at his funeral
A statesman who declared that France would continue the war amid defeat
“Must hope disappear? Is the defeat final? No!”
Charles de Gaulle was a French soldier, resistance leader, and statesman who claimed to represent France’s continued war effort after the defeat of 1940. From London he organized Free France and challenged Vichy’s claim to legitimacy, then led the provisional government after liberation while confronting disputes over the shape of reconstruction. He prized a strong executive and national autonomy, founding the Fifth Republic, but his rule also left enduring tensions over personal power and the colonial wars.
Career timeline
1912–1918Infantry officer; served in the First World War and was held as a German prisoner
1932–1937Officer on the Supreme War Council staff; wrote on armored and mobile warfare
1940.05–06Commanded the 4th Armored Division; promoted brigadier and became under-secretary for national defence and war
1940–1943Leader of Free France in London; organized French forces and overseas committees
1943–1944Chairman of the French Committee of National Liberation
1944–1946President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic
1958–1959Prime minister; led the establishment of the Fifth Republic constitution
1959–1969First president of the French Fifth Republic
A feminist who carried anti-fascism into clandestine resistance
“Life is not worth much, and dying is not important. What matters is living according to one’s honour and ideal.”
Berty Albrecht was a French activist who joined feminism to anti-fascism, publishing a journal that defended contraception and abortion rights. Her early warning about Nazism and aid to German refugees led to cooperation with Henri Frenay and the formation of the clandestine Resistance movement Combat. She helped produce Les Petites Ailes and Vérités and organized Combat’s social services, continuing after arrest, imprisonment and escape. Captured and tortured in 1943, she died in Fresnes prison and was posthumously named a Companion of the Liberation.
Career timeline
1912Qualified as a nurse
1918–1931Lived in the Netherlands and London; encountered feminism and birth-control activism
1933–1935Founded and edited Le Problème sexuel
1933–1940Aided German refugees, worked against fascism, and collaborated with Henri Frenay
1940–1941Produced the underground papers Les Petites Ailes and Vérités
1941–1943Leadership collaborator and social-services organizer in Combat
The Socialist left's tribune who wrote 'Everything is possible', the Popular Front's left frontier
'Everything is possible', the title and the conclusion of his front-page article in Le Populaire as the strikes surged, 27 May 1936
A schoolmaster who became the leader of the Socialist SFIO's left. In 1935 he founded the Revolutionary Left tendency, supporting the Popular Front while arguing for a revolutionary way beyond it, and at the height of the strikes in May 1936 he planted himself at the centre of the argument with 'Everything is possible' in Le Populaire. He ran the premier's press service under Blum without ceasing to radicalize, and when the party expelled him in 1938 he founded the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP). Exiled in Mexico during the war, he returned to the SFIO afterward and stood on its left and in the anticolonial camp until his death.
Career timeline
1895–1914Teacher's family in Seine-et-Marne; trained and worked as a schoolmaster
1914–1918The war turns him into an antimilitarist
1924–1935SFIO Paris federation; teachers' union activist
1935Founds the Revolutionary Left tendency inside the SFIO
1936.05Publishes 'Everything is possible'
1936–1937Runs the premier's press and information service
1938Expelled; founds the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party
1940–1946Exile in Mexico
1946–1958Returns to the SFIO; on its left and in the anticolonial camp
The only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies. And author of the first critical Stalin biography.
Ten days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the twenty-two-year-old Souvarine wrote on 17 November 1917: "It is to be feared that, for Lenin and his friends, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' must be the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and their leader. This could become a calamity for the Russian working class, and eventually, for the world proletariat. […] What we wish is agreement among socialists to organise a stable power that truly becomes the power of the people and not the power of a man." — 'La Commune maximaliste,' *Ce qu'il faut dire*, No. 78
The only non-Bolshevik to serve on all three leading Comintern bodies. Expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, he turned independent anti-Stalinist and published the first critical biography of Stalin (1935), remaining a pioneering Sovietologist throughout his life.
Career timeline
1914Mobilised into the French Army; experiences trench warfare on the Western Front
1916Joins the SFIO and writes for the anti-war minority paper *Le Populaire*; adopts pseudonym 'Souvarine'
1919Joins the Committee for the Third International; distributes Comintern propaganda across Europe
1920.5Arrested in government crackdown on 'anarchist plot'; writes *Bulletin Communiste* from La Santé prison
1920.12Tours Congress: Souvarine motion adopted, creating the French Communist Party (SFIC); named honorary president
1921–1924Member of the ECCI, Presidium, and Secretariat — the only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies
1924Defends Trotsky at the 13th Bolshevik Congress; expelled from the Comintern and the French Communist Party
1926First publishes Lenin's Testament in France, received from Krupskaya via Christian Rakovsky
1927–1935Breaks with Trotsky, analysing the USSR as state-capitalist; organises the Democratic Communist Circle (CCD)
1935Publishes *Staline, aperçu historique du bolchévisme* — the first critical biography of Stalin
1935Founds the Institute of Social History — French branch of the Amsterdam-based IISH
1939.5Predicts the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 100 days in advance in *Le Figaro*
1940–1947Arrested by the Vichy regime, freed through an officer's intervention, exiles to the USA; returns to Paris in 1947
1947–1976Edits *Est & Ouest* and *Le Contrat Social* — leading voice of anti-Stalinist left Sovietology during the Cold War
The PCF's number two for 37 years: a Stalinist who moved between parliament and the underground
'There was opportunism, legalitarianism and parliamentary illusions... If we courageously carry out this self-criticism before the Party, we shall arouse among the masses a state of mind favourable for the fight,' founding Cominform conference, Szklarska Poręba, September 1947
Number two in the French Communist Party leadership for 37 years alongside Maurice Thorez, entering parliament by defeating Léon Blum in Paris's 20th arrondissement. He directed the clandestine PCF throughout the German occupation and served as vice-president of the National Assembly after the war. At the founding Cominform conference in 1947, he publicly admitted that the party's participation in government had been 'parliamentary illusions,' symbolising the PCF's turn to militant opposition against the Marshall Plan. In 1969, he won 21.3% of the vote as the Communist presidential candidate, the party's best-ever result.
Career timeline
1915–1917Fights at Verdun, wounded; captured at Chemin des Dames
1920–1926Founding PCF member; enters Central Committee and Chamber of Deputies
1928–1936Defeats Léon Blum; enters Political Bureau; Chamber vice-president
1940–1944Heads the clandestine PCF; directs the Communist Resistance
1945–1947Deputy and vice-president; PCF in tripartite government
1947–1953Cominform self-criticism; anti-Marshall Plan turn; acting secretary-general
1959–1975Senator, Communist group president; 21.3% in 1969 presidential election
A communist who carried working-class militancy into armed resistance
“They have numbers; united, they will have strength.”
A metalworker and trade-union organizer, Charles Tillon entered the French Communist Party after leading a 1919 naval mutiny and rose through the CGTU and party leadership. In 1940 he called for national liberation joined to working-class unity, then organized and led the communist armed resistance by consolidating the FTP from 1941. After Liberation he served as a minister and deputy in reconstruction, but conflicts with the party leadership removed him from power in 1952 and ended in his expulsion in 1970.
Career timeline
1916–1921French Navy mechanic; led the 1919 mutiny aboard Guichen and was imprisoned
1921–1931Joined the French Communist Party; led CGTU unions in Ille-et-Vilaine and Nantes
1931–1936CGTU national leadership; Communist Party Central Committee member and alternate Politburo member
1936–1940Deputy in the Chamber of Deputies; assisted Republican refugees in Spain
1940–1944Clandestine Communist leadership; founded and commanded the National Military Committee and FTP
1944–1947Minister of Air, Armaments, and Reconstruction; mayor of Aubervilliers and deputy
1952–1970Removed from the Communist leadership, rehabilitated in 1957, and expelled in 1970
The Saint-Denis Communist who demanded the popular front first and ended a fascist
In April 1934 he sent an open letter to the Comintern demanding immediate joint action with the Socialists. In June he was expelled; in July the party signed the very pact he had demanded
A metalworker from Saint-Denis who became a deputy at twenty-six and rose to the executive committee of the Comintern as one of the French Communist Party's young leaders. He was jailed for agitation against the Rif war, sent to China as a Comintern envoy in 1927, and elected mayor of Saint-Denis in 1931. Immediately after the February 1934 crisis he demanded, publicly and ahead of the party line, immediate joint action with the Socialists; he refused a summons to Moscow and was expelled on 27 June. A month later the party signed the very pact of unity of action he had called for, and he was already outside it. In 1936 he founded the Parti Populaire Français and moved toward fascism; in 1941 he helped create the Légion des Volontaires Français against Bolshevism and fought on the Eastern Front in German uniform; he was killed in Germany in February 1945 when Allied aircraft strafed his car.
Career timeline
1898Born to a working-class family at Bresles in the Oise
1915–1922Metalworker at Saint-Denis; joins the Communist youth movement
1923–1924Leads the Communist Youth International; elected deputy in 1924
1925Jailed for agitation against the Rif war
1927Sent to China as a Comintern envoy
1931–1937Mayor of Saint-Denis
1934.02–06Publicly demands joint action with the Socialists, refuses a summons to Moscow, expelled on 27 June
1936Founds the Parti Populaire Français
1941–1944Helps found the anti-Bolshevik French volunteer legion; serves on the Eastern Front in German uniform
1945.02Killed in Germany when Allied aircraft strafe his car
Last commander of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, who chose to fortify Điện Biên Phủ and met defeat there in 1954
Navarre ordered French troops into Điện Biên Phủ in November 1953 and directed its defense. He did not order a withdrawal during the siege, which began in March 1954; the fortress fell in May, erasing France’s expected negotiating advantage.
A French army general of both world wars, he succeeded Salan as commander of French forces in Indochina in May 1953, and soon reported to his government that the war could not be won and that stalemate was the best hope. Under the “Navarre plan” of holding the cities and main roads to force the Viet Minh to negotiate, he dropped paratroopers into Điện Biên Phủ in November 1953 to block the Viet Minh route into Laos and fortified the valley. The fall of the fortress in May 1954 sealed France’s defeat.
Career timeline
1916–1918Entered Saint-Cyr military academy and served at the front in World War I as a cavalry platoon commander.
1942–1945Went underground after being recalled for anti-German activity, joined the French Resistance, and commanded an armored regiment of the First Army in the liberation of France.
1945–1953Promoted to brigadier general, he served in Germany as commander of the 5th Armored Division and chief of staff to Marshal Alphonse Juin, with a division command in Algeria in 1948–49.
1953–1954As commander of French forces in Indochina, he directed the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ and was replaced after the fortress fell.
1956Retired from the Army and published Agonie de l’Indochine, a book on the Indochina War.
The republican who bound a divided Resistance together
When German officers tried to force his signature on a false statement, Moulin chose attempted suicide rather than dishonour.
Jean Moulin was a senior French civil servant and republican organiser who linked the internal Resistance to Free France against the Nazi occupation. As Charles de Gaulle’s representative, he coordinated rival movements and brought political parties and trade unions into the National Council of the Resistance. His work of unification unfolded amid fierce tensions over the movements’ independence and ended with his arrest and death after torture in 1943.
Career timeline
1922Chief of staff to the prefect of Savoie
1925–1930Sous-prefect of Albertville
1936Chief of staff in the Popular Front Air Ministry
1937–1939Prefect of Aveyron
1939–1940Prefect of Eure-et-Loir
1941–1943de Gaulle’s representative to the internal Resistance
1943First President of the National Council of the Resistance
From Resistance chief to architect of the Marshall Plan response, the foreign minister who told Molotov that Soviet actions divided Europe
On July 2, 1947, when Molotov denounced the Marshall Plan as a plot to divide Europe, Bidault rose and quietly replied that it was the Soviet Union, by its own actions, that was splitting the continent; the next day he and Bevin sent invitations to 16 nations.
Bidault succeeded Jean Moulin as president of the National Resistance Council in 1943, leading the French internal Resistance, and after the Liberation co-founded the Christian-democratic MRP. As foreign minister at the 1947 Paris Three-Power Conference, he answered Molotov's charge that the Marshall Plan was 'dividing Europe' with the retort that Soviet actions alone were splitting the continent; when Molotov walked out, Bidault and Bevin rallied 16 Western European nations behind the plan. He served as premier in 1946 and 1949–50, and as foreign minister during Dien Bien Phu he even asked the US for atomic bombs. An irreconcilable opponent of Algerian independence, he organized a clandestine 'second CNR' in 1962, lost his parliamentary immunity, and spent four years in Brazilian exile before the 1968 amnesty.
Career timeline
1899Born in Moulins, Allier, France
1925First in the agrégation in history and geography; teaching and Christian-democratic journalism
1943–1944President of the CNR, succeeding Jean Moulin; led unified Resistance
1944–1946Foreign minister under de Gaulle; chief French delegate to the UN founding conference in San Francisco
1947Foreign minister; faced down Molotov at the Paris Three-Power Conference and led Marshall Plan adoption
1946, 1949–1950Prime minister twice: chairman of the Provisional Government (1946) and president of the Council (1949–50)
1954Foreign minister during the Dien Bien Phu crisis
1962–1968Stripped of immunity for opposing Algerian independence; exiled in Brazil; returned under the 1968 amnesty
French commander in the First Indochina War and leader of the OAS.
Salan commanded French forces in Indochina in 1952–53 and later served as the French government's delegate in Algeria. Opposed to Algerian independence, he joined the generals' April 1961 coup; after its failure, he went underground and founded and led the clandestine Organisation armée secrète (OAS), which sought to keep Algeria French and carried out attacks and violence in Algeria and France. Arrested in 1962, he was sentenced to life detention and pardoned and amnestied in 1968.
Career timeline
1952–1953Commander-in-chief of French forces in Indochina
1958–1960French government's delegate in Algeria
1961–1962Participant in April coup; subsequently OAS leader
The undersecretary for leisure and sport who designed the workers' first holidays
'Our simple and human aim is to let the mass of French youth find joy and health in sport, and to organize the leisure of the workers so that they may enjoy the joy of life and the dignity regained', radio address on taking office, 10 June 1936
A lawyer and Socialist deputy who took the post the Blum government created first in the world: undersecretary for leisure and sport. With the railways' 40-per-cent-discount 'popular tickets', a boom in youth hostels and a popular sports certificate, he organized 600,000 first paid holidays in the summer of 1936, defining leisure policy as the restoration of dignity to workers. Volunteering for service in 1939, he was killed by shellfire on the Aisne front on 9 June 1940. Thousands of stadiums and gymnasiums across France carry his name today.
Career timeline
1900–1932From the Nord; lawyer in Paris
1932–1940Socialist deputy
1936.06The world's first undersecretary for leisure and sport
1936600,000 first holidays on the discounted 'popular tickets'
1936–1938Youth hostels; creates the popular sports certificate
1939–1940Volunteers for service; killed on the Aisne front, 9 June 1940
A miner's son who built the Popular Front and led the French Communist Party for 34 years
'The French people will never make war against the Soviet Union' — address to the PCF Central Committee, February 1949, as France prepared to join NATO (reported by The New York Times, 23 Feb. 1949)
A coal miner's son who led the French Communist Party for 34 years (1930–1964). He designed the 1936 Popular Front and pioneered the 'French road to socialism' after the war, becoming a forerunner of Eurocommunism.
Career timeline
1912Begins work as a coal miner at age 12
1919–1920Joins the SFIO; helps found the PCF at the Tours Congress
1930–1964PCF general secretary; leads the party for 34 years
1936Architect of the Popular Front; supports Blum's social reforms
1939–1944Deserts the French army, exiled in Moscow; PCF runs the Resistance
1945–1947Minister of state under de Gaulle; deputy prime minister (1946–1947)
1950–1953Stroke; medical treatment in the USSR; Jacques Duclos runs the party
1964Resigns as secretary-general; dies on a Black Sea cruise ship
At Kufra in 1941, he had his men swear not to lay down their arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg Cathedral.
Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque was a French general who joined de Gaulle's Free French after the 1940 defeat and forged colonial troops and exiles into a fighting force. He set an objective that ran from Kufra to Strasbourg and transferred the mobile warfare learned in Africa to the 2nd Armored Division. In August 1944 he challenged the Allied plan to bypass Paris, driving on the capital and making its liberation French-led alongside the Resistance. After the war he recognised in Indochina that military victory could not settle the conflict, but died in a 1947 air crash before he could develop that judgement.
Career timeline
1924Graduated from Saint-Cyr military academy
1925–1939Cavalry officer, service in Morocco and graduation from the War College
1940Joined Free France and was sent to Africa under de Gaulle
1940–1943Military commander in Cameroon and Chad, leading the Kufra and Fezzan campaigns
1943–1945Commanded the 2nd Armored Division in Normandy and the liberation of Paris and Strasbourg
1945–1946Commander of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps and French representative at Japan's surrender
1946–1947Inspector General of Land Forces in North Africa
Vincent Badie was a French Radical Socialist lawyer and politician who worked in local government and parliament, defending veterans and republican institutions. In July 1940 he accepted that constitutional revision might be considered, but rejected transferring power to Pétain in a way that would abolish the Republic; he tried to present a motion signed by 27 parliamentarians and then voted against the grant of full powers. After Vichy suspended him as mayor, he joined the Resistance, was arrested, and deported to Dachau. After the war he returned to parliament and twice served as minister for veterans, while also defending French colonial rule and overseas presence.
Career timeline
1923Lawyer at the Montpellier bar
1931–1938General councillor for Montpellier and Gignac, Hérault
1936–1942Deputy for Hérault
1938–1941, 1944–1971Mayor of Paulhan
1945Member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly
1946–1958Deputy in the Fourth Republic's National Assembly
1955–1956, 1958Minister for Veterans and War Victims
1957–1958Chair of the Radical Socialist parliamentary group
French general who commanded the Điện Biên Phủ fortress in 1954 and was captured when it fell
He commanded French forces at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 and was captured after their defeat. After his release, he commanded a division and later ran a recycling firm.
A cavalry officer from an old French noble family, he served through the Second World War and into the Indochina War, taking command at Điện Biên Phủ in December 1953. After the Viet Minh attack began on 13 March 1954, artillery wrecked the airstrips and the monsoon cut supply until only three strongpoints remained. On 7 May General Cogny in Hanoi ordered him to cease fire and destroy his equipment without raising a white flag, and de Castries was taken prisoner as the fortress fell, to be released after the Geneva Accords.
Career timeline
1923Enlisted in the army and attended the Saumur Cavalry School.
1926Commissioned as a cavalry officer, then left the army to pursue equestrian sports.
1940–1945Rejoined the army during World War II, was captured and escaped, then fought with Allied forces in North Africa, Italy, southern France and Germany. Near the war’s end, he commanded the 3rd Moroccan Spahis.
1946Was sent to Indochina and commanded a battalion of Moroccan goumiers.
1953–1954After a wound and a year recovering in France, he returned to Vietnam. As a colonel he was charged with defending Điện Biên Phủ and was promoted to brigadier general near the end of the siege. French forces were defeated on 7 May 1954; he was held prisoner for four months while the Geneva armistice was arranged.
1954–1959After returning to France, commanded the 5th Armored Division stationed in West Germany. Retired from the army after a car accident in 1959.
A Resistance organizer who moved from Vichy sympathies to opposition
“I believed in Marshal Pétain, in the double game, and even in a humane and social National Revolution.”
Henri Frenay was a French army officer who turned military discipline and patriotism into an organizing force for clandestine resistance after the defeat of 1940. He initially hoped that Pétain and the National Revolution might save France, but changed course as Vichy’s collaboration and repression became clear. With Berty Albrecht, he founded the Mouvement de Libération Nationale and expanded an underground press into Combat, one of the principal resistance movements, before overseeing the return of prisoners, deportees and refugees after the war.
Career timeline
1924–1926Cadet, École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr
1935–1938École supérieure de guerre; German studies
1939–1940Staff officer, 43rd Fortress Army Corps on the Maginot Line
1940Escaped captivity and began organizing the MLN
1941–1943Founder and leader of Combat; organized its underground press
1943–1945Commissioner and minister for prisoners, deportees and refugees
1948–1954President, Union of European Federalists
1976Published The Night Will End: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
French resistance veteran and official who concluded the 6 March 1946 preliminary agreement with Ho Chi Minh
On 6 March 1946, he reached an agreement with Ho Chi Minh that allowed French troops to enter Hanoi without fighting.
Born Jean Roger, he led the Normandy section of the Alliance resistance intelligence network during the Second World War. After the war, appointed French Republic commissioner for Tonkin and northern Annam, he negotiated with Ho Chi Minh; their 6 March 1946 agreement enabled French troops to enter Hanoi without fighting.
Career timeline
1907Born in Le Vésinet, France.
1940–1944Led the Normandy section of the Alliance resistance network.
1945–1946French Republic commissioner for Tonkin and northern Annam; negotiated with Ho Chi Minh.
1946Signed the preliminary agreement on 6 March.
1954Appointed French government delegate to North Vietnam.
1962–1966Served as minister for veterans and war victims.
French prime minister who promised a ceasefire within four months after Điện Biên Phủ and concluded the 1954 Geneva Accords
As prime minister in 1954, Pierre Mendès France negotiated directly with the Viet Minh at Geneva, securing the July armistice that ended the fighting in Indochina, while also initiating talks on Tunisian autonomy.
A Radical Party lawyer and economist of Jewish descent, he joined the Free French during the war. An early critic of the Indochina War, he became prime minister on 17 June 1954, after the fall of Điện Biên Phủ, promising to resign if he failed to secure a ceasefire within four months, and kept the promise with the Geneva Accords of 21 July. In eight months in office he conceded autonomy to Tunisia, and the Algerian War broke out that November; he also laid the groundwork for military co-operation with Israel and the French nuclear programme.
Career timeline
1932Elected Radical deputy for Louviers in the Eure département.
1938Served as undersecretary of state for finance in Léon Blum’s government.
1943–1945Served Free France as commissioner for finance and then minister of national economy; he resigned in April 1945 after Charles de Gaulle rejected his austerity program.
1954–1955As prime minister, negotiated an end to the Indochina War and opened talks on Tunisian autonomy. He opposed the European Defence Community and left office after his government lost a confidence vote in February 1955.
Communist Resistance leader who directed the Paris uprising
On 21 August 1944, he ordered posters put up across Paris calling for barricades.
Henri Rol-Tanguy was a French communist metalworker and veteran of the International Brigades whose military experience shaped his work in the anti-Nazi Resistance. As commander of the Paris-area French Forces of the Interior in August 1944, he organized and directed the uprising before the Allied entry. His importance lies in combining labour-movement organization with armed resistance to drive the capital’s liberation from within. After the war he remained active in the army and the French Communist Party, publicly defending the Resistance’s independent role.
Career timeline
1925Metalworker at Talbot; joined the Young Communists
1936Secretary of the Paris-region metalworkers’ CGT
1937–1938Political commissar in the International Brigades’ XIV Brigade; fought at the Ebro
1941–1942Organizer of armed groups in Paris; part of the FTP’s founding leadership
1943Reorganized the Paris FTP and joined the regional FFI staff
1944Commander of the Paris-area FFI; directed the Paris uprising
1945–1962Lieutenant-colonel in the French Army; held postwar military assignments
1962–1987Member of the French Communist Party Central Committee
Vichy police chief who negotiated with the occupier
On 2 July 1942, he agreed to place the French police at the occupier’s disposal for the arrest of Jews.
René Bousquet was a senior French civil servant who pursued Vichy police collaboration while presenting it as a defense of French administrative sovereignty. He negotiated with German security officials for room to operate a French police force, while supplying that force to the persecution and deportation of Jews. His decisions helped make the July 1942 Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup possible, after which he escaped the main force of the post-Liberation purge and returned to influential business and political circles.
Career timeline
1930Gained national recognition for rescue work during the floods and received the Légion d’honneur
1931Chief of staff to Pierre Cathala at the Interior Ministry
1933Sub-prefect
1939–1942Prefect of the Marne and regional prefect
1942–1943Secretary-general of the Vichy police
1950년대–1993년Businessman and political influence broker in finance and the press
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
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.
Career timeline
1935Co-founded L'Étudiant noir in Paris; coined the term 'négritude'
1939Published Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
1941Co-founded Tropiques review with Suzanne Roussi
1945Elected PCF deputy to National Assembly and mayor of Fort-de-France
1946Secured law departmentalizing Martinique as part of France
1950Published Discours sur le colonialisme
1956Resigned from PCF via Lettre à Maurice Thorez over Soviet suppression of Hungary
1958Founded Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM)
1983–1988President of the Regional Council of Martinique
1993Retired from National Assembly after 47 years
2001Retired as mayor of Fort-de-France after 56 years
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
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.
Career timeline
1936–1939International Brigades fighter in the Spanish Civil War
1939–1940Cadre of the French Communist youth movement
1940–1941Underground communist organiser in occupied France
1941–1942Military commissioner of the Organisation spéciale
1942–1943FTP maquis organiser in the Doubs
1943–1944FTP maquis commander across eastern and central France
1944FTP and FFI commander during and after the Liberation of Paris
1944Commander of the Colonne Fabien, killed on the eastern front
1941.08.21Shot German naval officer Alfons Moser at Barbès metro station
1944.12.27Killed by a mine explosion at Habsheim, Alsace
A young Communist activist executed under occupation
Before his execution, he wrote in his farewell letter, “What I wish with all my heart is that my death may serve some purpose.”
Guy Môquet was a French Communist youth activist from Paris who entered underground activity after his father was imprisoned. Arrested at sixteen in 1940, he passed through French imprisonment and administrative detention before being transferred to the Châteaubriant camp in 1941. The German occupation authorities selected him as a hostage in retaliation for the killing of Karl Hotz in Nantes and executed him on 22 October 1941; his death became a symbol of the cost imposed on young Communists by occupation and collaboration.
Career timeline
1924Born in Paris
1930년대 후반Student at Lycée Carnot and activist in the Communist Youth
1940.10Arrested by French police and imprisoned at Fresnes
1941.01–02Held administratively after acquittal, then transferred through Santé and Clairvaux
1941.05Transferred to the Choisel camp at Châteaubriant
The psychiatrist who diagnosed colonialism itself as the disease
“For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must set afoot a new man.” — The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
Psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary from Martinique. His Black Skin, White Masks (1952) dissected the psychological violence of colonialism; The Wretched of the Earth (1961) theorized the liberation struggle. Joined the Algerian FLN and died of leukemia at thirty-six.
Career timeline
1944–1945Fights with the Free French forces
1952Black Skin, White Masks
1953–1956Runs the Blida hospital, treating torture's victims and its practitioners alike
1956–1961Joins the FLN; editor and roving ambassador
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–현재Researcher, 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–현재President, prefiguration mission for the National Museum on the History of Terror
