Philippe Robrieux

Philippe Robrieux (born January 20, 1936 in Paris , † October 1, 2010 ) was a French politician and historian focusing on the history of the Parti communiste français (PCF).

biography

While attending a high school in Paris, he became a member of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF) and joined a communist cell while visiting the Lycée Buffon , where he held political disputes with Gabriel Cohn-Bendit , brother Daniel Cohn-Bendits , and Laurent Terzieff led. After the re-establishment of the communist student organization Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) in 1956, although he did not follow the orthodox stance of the leadership of the PCF, he was nevertheless general secretary of the UEC from 1959 to 1961.

As such, he held on the XV. He gave an impressive speech at the PCF Congress in June 1959 and then attended the party's Central Committee (CC) for a year , even though he was not an official member.

In December 1960, he was, however, not re-elected at the 4th Congress of the UEC as secretary general of this organization and was rather in February 1961 one of the victims of the so-called "affair Servin - Casanova ", which is prominent to unseat PCF politicians like Marcel Servin and Laurent Casanova came after this revisionism was accused of reorienting the policies of the Soviet Union and the CPSU . In the following years he was one of the proponents of an " Italian course" within the UEC based on the more critical attitude of the Italian Communist Party towards the CPSU. In 1968 he finally resigned from the PCF.

As a chronicler of the PCF, he was mainly influenced by one of his high school teachers, Jean Dautry, who was also a recognized expert on the history of the labor movement . His book Maurice Thorez , published in 1975 . Vie secrète et vie publique sparked controversy because it uncovered how the leadership of the PCF under General Secretary Maurice Thorez tried to "defuse" the publication of the report by Nikita Sergejewitsch Khrushchev at the 20th party congress of the CPSU in February 1956. This questioning of Stalinism particularly affected the closest party leadership around Thorez and Jacques Duclos . Instead, Robrieux saw a possible rapprochement between the PCF and the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1960s .

He then continued his studies on the history of the PCF and worked as a historian at the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He published his own experiences in the PCF and the UEC in 1977 in the autobiography Notre Génération communiste (1953-1968) .

His Histoire intérieure du Parti communiste , published in four volumes between 1980 and 1984 , is a treatise on internal party history, although it is viewed negatively by the official historians of the PCF. A similarly knowledgeable account has so far only been made by Annie Kriegel in her work Aux origines du communisme français 1914-1920 , published in 1964 , although this was limited to a very short period of time.

His other publications include La Secte (1985) and L'Affaire Manouchian (1986).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Robrieux, Philippe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French communist party official and historian
DATE OF BIRTH	January 20, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	October 1, 2010