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
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
