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
- 1950s–1993Businessman 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
- 1990Dies of a heart attack in psychiatric care
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
- late 1930sStudent 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
- 1941.10.22Executed as a hostage 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
- 1961The Wretched of the Earth; dies of leukemia
A committed historian of revolutionary movements
He read Spain’s revolution not as a side episode of the war, but as a defeated social revolution.
Pierre Broué was a French Trotskyist historian and teachers’ activist who studied communism and twentieth-century revolutionary movements. His 1961 history of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, written with Émile Témime, interpreted the defeat of the revolutionary process through the clash of class forces inside the Republic and Stalinist policy. He combined political commitment with archival and editorial work on Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement.
Career timeline
- 1944Joined the Parti communiste internationaliste and entered the Trotskyist movement
- 1953Completed an early historical study of a historian of the French Revolution
- 1960–1965Taught history and geography in secondary schools
- 1961Published La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne with Émile Témime
- 1965–1975Taught contemporary history at Grenoble’s institute of political studies and organized in the OCI
- 1972Published Révolution en Allemagne, 1917–1923
- 1977Founded the Institut Léon Trotsky
- 1997Published Histoire de l’Internationale communiste, 1919–1943
A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory
In 2017 the historian of wartime memory was himself detained for ten hours at Houston's airport, nearly deported after U.S. border agents questioned the stipend for his lecture.
Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.
Career timeline
- 1974–1979Student, École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud
- 1977Passed the agrégation in history
- 1981–presentResearcher, French National Centre for Scientific Research
- 1988–1990Teacher, Institut d’études politiques de Paris
- 1994–2005Director, Institut d’histoire du temps présent
- 2001–2010Professor, Paris Nanterre University
- 2019–presentPresident, prefiguration mission for the National Museum on the History of Terror
