- 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.
- Boris Souvarine
Boris Souvarine was an Imperial Russian-born French socialist and communist activist, essayist, and journalist.
- Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon, French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.
- 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.
- Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor. His full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism.
- Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène, often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. He was considered one of the greatest authors of sub-Saharan Africa and has often been called the "Father of African film."
- 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).
- Albert Camus
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 - January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher. Although he is often associated with existentialism, Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist.
- Charles Tillon
Charles Tillon (July 3, 1897 - January 13, 1993) was a French politician.
- 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, …
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Missak Manouchian
Missak Manouchian was an Armenian-French communist militant in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) and the Resistance movement against the Nazi occupation of France.
- 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, …
- 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, …
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, …
- Claude Cahen
Claude Cahen (1909 - 1991) was a French orientalist. He specialized in the studies of the Islamic Middle Ages, Muslim sources about the Crusades, and social history of the medieval Islamic society (works on Futuwa orders). Claude Cahen was born to a French Jewish family. Cahen was married and had six children, including the historian Michel Cahen who wrote a biography of his father. Cahen was a member of the French Communist Party from the 1930s until 1960, …
- 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, …
- Roger Garaudy
Roger Garaudy or Ragaa (born July 17, 1913, in Marseille) is a French author and Muslim convert who drew public attention for his stance and writings as a Holocaust denier.
- Madeleine Pelletier
Madeleine Pelletier was a French physician, psychiatrist, first-wave feminist, and socialist activist. Pelletier originally trained as an anthropologist studying the relationship between skull size and intelligence after Paul Broca with Charles Letourneau and Léonce Manouvrier. When she left anthropology she attacked the concept of skull size as a determinant of intelligence distinguishing the sexes.
- Waldeck Rochet
Waldeck Rochet (April 5 1905, Sainte-Croix in Saône-et-Loire-February 17, 1983, Nanterre) was a French communist politician.
- Jacques Doriot
Jacques Doriot (September 26 1898, Bresles, Oise-February 22 1945, near Mengen, Württemberg) was a French politician prior to and during World War II. He began as a Communist but then turned Fascist.
- Jean-Pierre Brard
Jean-Pierre Brard, (b. February 7, 1948 in Flers, Orne, Normandy, France), is a French politician.
- 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 Breton
André Breton (February 19, 1896 - September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
- 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.
- 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.
- Jean Suret-Canale
Jean Suret-Canale (1921-). French historian of Africa, Marxist theoritican, political activst, WWII resistance fighter.
- Olga Bancic
Olga Bancic (born Golda Bancic; also known under her French pseudonym Pierrette; May 10, 1912 – May 10, 1944) was a Romanian communist activist, known for her role in the French Resistance. A member of the FTP-MOI and Missak Manouchian's Group, she was captured by Nazi German forces in late 1943, and executed soon after. Bancic was married to the writer and FTP-MOI fighter Alexandru Jar.
- Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (born 1929) is a noted French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the "ancien regime", focusing on the history of the peasantry. He is a noted pioneer in the fields of history from below and microhistory.
- Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara ("Sami Rosenstock a.k.a. Samuel Rosenstock") (April 16, 1896 - December 25, 1963) was a Romanian poet and essayist. He was one of the founders of the Dada movement, known best for his manifestos. He was a collaborater with Marcel Janco. It is speculated that the word "Dada" comes from the Romanian "Yes, yes" and is thus originated from Tzara and Janco's contributions.
- 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).
- 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.
- Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein, also known as "Colonel Gilles" and as "Joseph Andrei", was a Polish-born Jewish communist activist and leader of the French Resistance during World War II. He was executed by the Germans.
- Jean Jérome
Jean Jérome (born Michał - French: Mikhaël or Michel - Feintuch, took the pseudonym in 1940; 1906-1990) was a Polish Jew-French communist activist and Resistance member.
- Ludovic-Oscar Frossard
Ludovic-Oscar Frossard (also known as L-O Frossard or Oscar Frossard; March 5 1889, Foussemagne, Territoire de Belfort-February 11 1946, Paris) was a French socialist and communist politician, a member of six successive French governments between 1935 and 1940.
- 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.