- Marie-George Buffet
Marie-George Buffet (born May 7 1949 in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French politician, currently the head of the French Communist Party (PCF). She joined the Party in 1969, and was the Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports from June 4 1997 to May 5 2002. Ms. Buffet was re-elected on June 16, 2002 to another five-year term in the National Assembly, as a representative of Seine-Saint-Denis. Buffet was elected in 2001 as National Secretary of the Party, succeeding Robert Hue, …
- Maurice Thorez
Maurice Thorez was a French politician and longtime leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1930 until his death. He also served as vice premier of France from 1946 to 1947. Thorez, born in Noyelles-Godauld, France, became a coal miner at the age of 12. He joined the French Socialist Party in 1919, but soon after, joined the Communist Party and was imprisoned several times for political activism. In 1923 he became party secretary and, in 1930, …
- Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a lifelong member and sometimes strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of the communist project.
- Georges Marchais
Georges René Louis Marchais was the head of the French Communist Party (PCF), and a candidate in the French presidential elections of 1981 - in which he managed to garner only 15.34% of the vote, which was considered at the time a major setback for the party.
- Robert Hue
Robert Hue, in full Robert Georges Auguste Hue (born October 19 1946, Cormeilles-en-Parisis in Val-d'Oise) is a French politician. He is a former leader of French Communist Party (PCF) and was a candidate in the presidential election of 1995, in which he received 8.7 % of the vote, and that of 2002, which won him only 3.37%. He lost his seat in the National Assembly of the French Parliament in February 2003, but he was elected to the French Senate in 2004.
- Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon, French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.
- Jacques Duclos
Jacques Duclos (October 2, 1896 in Louey, Hautes-Pyrénées-April 25, 1975 in Montreuil) was a French Communist politician who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly after defeating Paul Reynaud, until 1969, when he achieved a substantial proportion of the vote in the Presidential Elections. During World War I, Duclos fought in the Battle of Verdun, where he was wounded.
- Paul Ramadier
Paul Ramadier was a prominent French Socialist politician of the Third and Fourth Republics. Mayor of Decazeville starting in 1919, he served as the first Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic in 1947. On July 10, 1940, he voted against the granting of the full powers to Marshall Pétain, who installed the Vichy regime the next day. Paul Ramadier took part in the Resistance, and his name was included in the Yad Vashem Jewish memorial after the war.
- Maurice Papon
Maurice Papon was a French civil servant, known for his collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, later reconverted as a Gaullist politician. He is best known as prefect of police of Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, treasurer of the Gaullist Party and member of the French government under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. During the Second World War he was secretary general for police of the Prefecture of Bordeaux.
- Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 - March 6, 2007) was a French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.
- Francis Wurtz
Francis Wurtz is a French Member of the European Parliament. Elected in the Île-de-France constituency on the French Communist Party (PCF) ticket, he sits with the European United Left - Nordic Green Left group, and is its current President. He was nominated by EUL/NGL as their candidate for President of the European Parliament in the elections to be conducted on July 20, 2004. He received 51 votes.
- André Marty
André Marty was born in Perpignan, France, on 6 November 1886 and died of lung cancer in Toulouse, France, on 23 November 1956. He was a leading figure in the French Communist Party, the "PCF", for nearly thirty years. He was also: a member of the National Assembly, with some interruptions, from 1924 to 1955; Secretary of Comintern from 1935 to 1944; and Political Commissar of the International Brigades in Spain from 1936 to 1938.
- Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist, journalist and communist. He came to fame with the publication of his novel "Le Feu" (translated as "Under Fire") in 1916, which was based on his experiences during World War I. It shows his growing hatred of militarism and drew criticism at the time for its harsh naturalism. His book won the Prix Goncourt.
- Paul Nizan
Paul Nizan was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II.
- Anatole France
Anatole France was the pen name of French author Jacques Anatole François Thibault. He was born in Paris, France, and died in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France.
- Pierre Cot
Pierre Cot, French politician, was a leading figure in the Popular Front government of the 1930s. Born in Grenoble into a conservative Catholic family, he entered politics as an admirer of the World War I conservative leader Raymond Poincaré, but moved steadily to the left over the course of his career. In the 1920s Cot was a supporter of Aristide Briand, an independent socialist. In 1928 he was elected to the National Assembly as a Radical Deputy for Savoy.
- Samir Amin
Samir Amin is an Egyptian political author. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal. Amin was born in Cairo, the son of an Egyptian father and a French mother (both medical doctors). He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French High School, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat. From 1947 to 1957 he studied in Paris, gaining a diploma in political science (1952) before graduating in statistics (1956) and economics (1957).
- Gaston Defferre
Gaston Defferre was a French socialist politician. Lawyer and member of the Socialist party SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International), he led a Resistance Socialist group during World War II. A long-standing member of the National Assembly (1945-1958, 1962-1986) and member of the Senate (1959-1962), he also served for many years as mayor of Marseille (1944-1945, 1953-1986). He was a formidable political force in the South-East, …
- Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard was the pen name of Eugène Grindel, a French poet born in Saint-Denis, just outside of Paris, who was active in the surrealist movement. He later joined French Communist Party, which lead to his break from the Surrealists, and eulogised Stalin in his political writings. At age 16, after a happy childhood, Éluard contracted tuberculosis and interrupted his studies. He met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, whom he married in 1917, …
- Elsa Triolet
Elsa Yur'evna Triolet (September 12 (or September 24) 1896 - June 16 1970) was a French writer, a wife of Louis Aragon and a sister of Lilya Brik. Born Elsa Kagan into a Jewish family of a lawyer and a music teacher in Moscow, both sisters received excellent education and were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano. Elsa graduated from Moscow Institute of Architecture.
- Paul Langevin
Paul Langevin was a prominent French physicist who developed "Langevin dynamics" and the "Langevin equation". He was one of the founders of the "Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes", an antifascist organization created in the wake of the February 6, 1934 far right riots. He was also president of the Human Rights League (LDH) from 1944 to 1946 (he had just recently joined the French Communist Party).
- Jean-Claude Gayssot
Jean-Claude Gayssot is a French politician. A member of the French Communist Party (PCF), he was Minister of Transportation in Lionel Jospin (Socialist Party)'s government, from 1997 to 2002. He gave his name to the 1990 "Gayssot Act" repressing Holocaust denial and speech in favor of racial discrimination. He is also at the origins of the Act on housing projects (loi SRU), which imposes a 20% housing projects limits in each town lest they pay a penalty fine, …
- Henri Martin
Henri Martin (1923-) is a militant of the French Communist Party (PCF) famous for having been in the heart of the sabotage scandal Henri Martin Affair during the First Indochina War.
- Alain Savary
Alain Savary was a French Socialist politician, deputy during the Fourth and Fifth Republic, chairman of the Socialist Party (PS) and who held ministerial functions in the 1950s and in 1981, when he was nominated by President François Mitterrand as Minister of National Education.
- Pierre Villon
Pierre Villon (August 27 1901 in Soultz, Haut-Rhin - November 6 1980 in Vallauris, Alpes-Maritimes was a member of the French Communist Party and of the French Resistance during the war. With his true name of Roger Ginsburger, he was an architect. In spring 1944, with Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont and Jean de Voguë, he was one of the three leaders of the Committee of Military action created by the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR).
- André Lajoinie
André Lajoinie is a French politician, and a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). He was a member of the French National Assembly for Allier from 1978 to 1993, then from 1997 to 2002, and was president of the Communist group in the Assembly from 1981 to 1993. A close collaborator of party leader Georges Marchais, he was chosen to be the PCF's candidate in the 1988 presidential election.
- Pierre Georges
Pierre Georges (1919-1944), better known as "Colonel Fabien", was one of the two members of the French Communist Party who committed the first assassinations on the brutal invading army in World War II (see Military history of France during World War II). By then many French communists had died in concentration camps just as many French former soldiers had died on building projects as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, …
- Pierre Broué
Pierre Broué was a French historian and Trotskyist. His work covers various topics including the history of the Bolshevik Party, the Spanish Revolution and biographical works on Leon Trotsky. The recent republication of Trotsky's Autobiography, "My Life", has a foreword written by Broué. In his youth during the Second World War, as a young member of the French Communist Party Broué fought in the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers.
- Jacky Henin
Jacky Henin is a French politician and Member of the European Parliament for the north-west of France. He is a member of the French Communist Party, which is part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left group, and sits on the European Parliament's Committee on International Trade. He is also a substitute for the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and a substitute for the delegation for relations with Belarus.
- Henri Alleg
Henri Alleg, born Henri Salem, is a French-Algerian journalist, director of the "Alger républicain" newspaper, and a member of the French Communist Party. After Editions de Minuit, a French publishing house, released his memoir La Question in 1958, Alleg gained international recognition for his stance against torture, specifically within the context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), also known as the 'War Without a Name'.
- Georges Marrane
Georges Marrane (January 20 1888-August 27 1976) was a French politician. He was the candidate of the French Communist Party for the presidential election of 1958.
- Marcel Paul
Marcel Paul was a French trade unionist and communist politician. General Secretary of an electricity workers' branch inside the Confédération Générale du Travail, he joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1927, and became close to Maurice Thorez - without breaking his link to the unions. Drafted during the Phoney War, he was taken prisoner by the Germans, …
- Frédéric Dutoit
Frédéric Dutoit is a French politician from the French Communist Party.
- Jean-Pierre Timbaud
Jean-Pierre Timbaud was the secretary of the steelworkers’ trade union section of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). He took part in the strikes which preceded the Popular Front. During the Second World War, he joined the Resistance and organized clandestine trade union committees. Jean-Pierre Timbaud was executed by the Germans on October 22, 1941, along with 26 other Communist hostages detained in Châteaubriant, …
- Maxime Rodinson
Maxime Rodinson was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. The son of a Russian-Polish Jewish clothing trader who died in Auschwitz with his wife, Rodinson studied oriental languages, and became professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France). He joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons." He then turned away after the Stalinist drift of the party, from which he was excluded in 1958.
- Alexandre Adler
Alexander Adler is a French historian, journalist and expert of contemporary geopolitics, the former USSR, and the Middle East. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (2002). A maoist in his youth and then a member of the Communist Party (PCF), he shifted to the right at the end of the 1970s and has since become close to US neoconservatives, as did his wife Blandine Kriegel (daughter of the communist Resistant Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont).
- Albert Soboul
Albert Marius Soboul was a French historian of the French Revolution of 1789-1799 and of Napoleon. Born April 27, 1914 in Ammi-Moussa (Oran), Algeria, he lost his father in November 1914, during World War I. He and his older sister Gisele lived first in Algiers, then in Nîmes in the care of his aunt Marie after their mother died in 1922. He received a sound education at the lycee of Nîmes, then at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris and finally at the Sorbonne.
- Roger Roche
Roger Roche was a French political activist in Senegal. In 1925 he, along with two other persons, founded a cell of the French Communist Party in Rufisque. This was the first communist organisation in Senegal. Later Roche left the party and joined the SFIO.
- Jeannette Vermeersch
Jeannette Vermeersch (born Julie Marie Vermeersch; November 26 1910 - November 5, 2001) was a French politician. She is principally known for having been the companion (1932-1947) and then the wife (1947-1964) of Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), with whom she had three children, born before their union was made official.
- Outel Bono
Outel Bono was a Chadian medical doctor and politician. He was medical director of the hospital in Chad's capital, Fort-Lamy (now N'Djamena), in 1963 when he was arrested for plotting against the government of President François Tombalbaye. Condemned to death, his sentence was commuted after a vigorous campaign led by the French Communist Party. He was reprieved in 1965 and was able to resume his medical career.