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
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
