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.
Activities and affiliations
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
- 1958.06Dies in Paris
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarFrench participant in the warHe served in the First World War, which made him an antimilitarist.
- 1934–1938The French Popular Front and the Strikes of 1936Leader of the SFIO's Revolutionary LeftAt the strikes' height he wrote 'Everything is possible', and argued for a revolutionary way out on the Popular Front's left frontier until his expulsion in 1938.
- 1940–1944The French Resistance and the Liberation of FranceExile who called for resistanceWhile exiled in Mexico, he called for resistance at home.
Exile in Mexico: anti-Stalinist publishing and the link to the internal Resistance
Pivert went into exile in Mexico after France's defeat by Germany in 1940. That same year the Petain government dissolved the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP), and from abroad he called for resistance at home. He kept in touch with L'Insurge, the underground network founded in Lyon in 1940 by PSOP militants; that link carried the party's people into the Resistance after the organisation itself was banned. In Mexico City he worked alongside Victor Serge and Julian Gorkin, and in 1942 published with them, in Spanish, a pamphlet accusing the Stalinist apparatus of preparing a new crime overseas. For a left that rejected both social democracy and the Third International, the exile years re-assembled an international anti-Stalinist network far from Europe.
After the war the PSOP was not rebuilt and split over what to do next. Pivert returned to France in early 1946, was allowed back into the SFIO, and rejoined it, while a minority of former members went to the French Communist Party, whose standing had grown out of its Resistance role. The anti-Stalinist polemics of the exile period marked his postwar position. Back in the party he stood on its left, but his radicalism moderated and his audience shrank; he was regularly re-elected to the leadership rather than shaping its line. His anticolonial commitment held, and in his last years he supported Algerian independence against the majority of the SFIO.