Ian Birchall is the author of Sartre Against Stalinism and many articles and essays on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Socialist leader Marceau Pivert played a central role in the turbulent history of French politics during the 1930s. Pivert’s inside-outside strategy toward the established workers’ movement is an important case study in how to win mass support for socialism.
French socialist thinker Daniel Guérin lived a life of extraordinary political commitment, from anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles to his pioneering advocacy of gay liberation. Guérin’s writings and record should be a touchstone for the modern left.
Sixty years ago today, French police under the command of a former Nazi collaborator massacred anti-imperialist Algerian demonstrators. For decades, the French authorities concealed the evidence of one of the worst atrocities in postwar Europe.
France waged a brutal colonial war in Algeria during the 1950s. But a group of writers clustered around Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes played a courageous role, exposing French war crimes and supporting the right of the Algerian people to self-determination.
Seventy-five years ago today, Vietnam launched a bid for national freedom with its Declaration of Independence. The French colonial regime answered with brutal repression, kick-starting thirty years of destructive conflict.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre died forty years ago today. Sartre’s philosophy and political values can still inspire struggles for freedom today.
For François Mitterrand, France’s atrocities in Algeria were stepping-stones to power.
The French secular ideal of laïcité is not a misused noble idea — it is deeply flawed at its roots.
As a young man in Paris, Ho Chi Minh embraced a radical internationalism.