Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party
노동자농민사회당(프랑스)
A French revolutionary socialist party formed on 8 June 1938 around Marceau Pivert by the Gauche Révolutionnaire, a left-wing faction expelled from the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). Appealing to a minority dissatisfied with both the SFIO and the French Communist Party, it had between 8,000 and 10,000 members, and it was dissolved by the Vichy regime in 1940.
In depth
Alongside moderate Marxists the party grouped Trotskyists, who had come in as an outcome of the French Turn, and Luxemburgists such as the publisher René Lefeuvre. Besides Pivert its best-known leader was the libertarian socialist Daniel Guérin, and its youth wing was the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Youth (JSOP). Its paper, Juin 36, was named after the general strike of 1936 that had caused the split between Pivert and the Popular Front government.
Internationally it was affiliated with the London Bureau of left-wing socialist parties, which also included the British Independent Labour Party and the Spanish POUM. It struggled to grow between the SFIO and the Communist Party, and in 1939 a small Trotskyist faction split away to found the Trotskyist group now known as Lutte Ouvrière.
The party collapsed at the beginning of the Second World War and was dissolved by Pétain's regime in 1940. Most former members joined Resistance groups affiliated with the SFIO or the Communists, or L'Insurgé, an independent group around Lyon. The party was not re-formed after the Liberation; most of its activists returned to the SFIO and a minority joined the French Communist Party.