Dick Nichols
The death on July 26 of renowned French Marxist historian Pierre Broue after a long and painful battle with cancer closes the life of one of European Trotskyism's most remarkable figures.
Born in 1926 into a family of deeply republican civil servants, as a 10-year old, Broue threw himself into solidarity work with the insurgent workers in the 1936 French general strike, and later with the anti-fascist cause in Spain.
By 1940, Broue and his high-school friends had already been expelled from the youth organisation of the French Communist Party (PCF) for wanting to organise "internationalist agitation" within the occupying German army. These were the days of the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the party leadership informed Broue and his mates that they were "Trotskyists" — without them knowing what that condition was. It was only in 1944 that Broue finally made contact with the microscopic French Trotskyist movement.
Both an activist and Marxist scholar, Broue's main contribution was to revive Marxist historiography in a country where the intellectual life of the left was for decades dominated by the PCF, one of the most rigidly pro-Moscow of Europe's communist parties. His classic 1961 work, The War and Revolution in Spain (written with Emile Temime and one of his few books to be translated into English), ended the myth of "anti-Francoist unity" propagated by the PCF and restored such organisations as the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) to their proper place in the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War.
Broue's other major works include his Histoire du Parti bolshevique, an invaluable analysis of the political roots of Stalinism, Histoire de le Internationale communiste, 1919-1943, and his monumental biography of Trotsky, published in 1988 after Broue had spent eight years researching in the Trotsky Archive in Harvard. Broue also produced works on the Moscow trials, the 1919-1920 German revolution, Stalin's role in the Spanish Civil War and on the assassination of Trotsky. He completed his political memoirs a few months before his death.
Broue also founded the Leon Trotsky Institute in Grenoble with the aim of translating the complete works of the founder of the Red Army into French.
Most of Broue's life as a political activist was spent in the ranks of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI), the branch of French Trotskyism led by Pierre Lambert with a permanent tactical orientation towards the French Socialist Party (SP).
Broue suffered from the authoritarian methods of the PCI when he was expelled from the organisation in 1989. From then until his death he collaborated with the Democracy and Socialism current within the SP at the same time as producing the "Leon Trotsky Notebooks" and editing the magazine Le marxisme aujourde hui.
Pierre Broue's death deprives the working-class movement of one of its great historians. Long may his works continue to be read by new generations of revolutionaries.
From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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