What is the “Party autobiography”? The injunction to tell one’s story, a practice imported from Moscow that has become obligatory for future Party cadres PCFThis study of the life stories of activists is part of the growing field of “Soviet Subjectivities”.
In 2017, the centenary of the Russian revolutions sparked an unprecedented critical return to collective biographical trajectories and revolutionary commitments, discussed in Moscow from the perspective of national, imperial and decolonial comparisons, analyzed in Basel from the perspective of the intersecting experiences of the dissolution of the old order in Russia, or proposed in serial form in Paris. The work by Bernard Pudal and Claude Pennetier is part of this commemorative moment, while continuing the reflection on communism understood as “biocracy” that they have developed since the 1990s in the broader field of Soviet Subjectivities.
Being a communist in the interwar period
The Breath of October 1917 proposes to capture the lives of around fifteen activists of the French Communist Party, through the prism of the very particular source that is the “Party autobiography”, which is presented in the form of a free narrative (autobiography) or questionnaire (anketa), and whose 74-question model is published in the appendix.
This practice, which was kept secret for a long time, was born in the 1920s in the Party schools and exported to France from 1931 under the dual impetus of Maurice Thorez and the Moscow envoy Eugen Fried. It became obligatory for future leaders. It allowed them to prove the reliability of the activist and to test their ability to improve themselves in order to reach the ideal of the communist man – a true “technique of the self”, according to the Foucauldian notion taken up by Brigitte Studer and Berthold Unfried.
The book offers a representative selection of ideal-typical trajectories characterized by gender, first commitment (anarchist, Catholic), national and social origin (worker, peasant, teacher, Algerian, Central European Jew) or by the form of action (unionist, leader, party intellectual). Published for the first time in full and written for the most part in 1932-1933, these life stories are put into perspective by the encyclopedic knowledge of political and social history of Bernard Pudal and Claude Pennetier.
From the “origin and social situation” section, we see a vivid picture of two generations of activists in France (the oldest was born in 1885, the youngest in 1910). Many were orphans or had broken up with their families, which was particularly striking among young Jewish immigrants like Basi Reisbaum (Thérèse Capitaine) or Georges Politzer. With the exception of Paul Nizan, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, all of them worked very young — tailor, typographer, metalworker, factory worker, plaster modeler, employee, “professional unemployed person,” etc. Hard, precarious lives, with political or union involvement leading to dismissals, imprisonment, or expulsions for foreigners.
By emphasizing personal journeys, the questionnaire reveals the energy of a desire for emancipation put at the service of others. The singularity of strong characters (Marta Desrumaux lists, at the age of 35, no fewer than 13 strikes and a number of arrests linked to her union struggle in the textile factories of the North) contrasts with the fragility of other journeys. We think of the dismay of Issad Rabah, the Algerian orphan who arrived in France at the age of 18, tossed from small job to small job, who disappears from the historical radar after his recruitment at the Communist University of Workers of the Orient.
The “sociological intuition” of the Party questionnaire should not mask its main objective: to select the best cadres for the French Communist Party, based on their origins and loyalty. The management of organizational and linguistic skills by the Communist International (with a ranking from A to D) does not make it an organization like the others. The disciplinary and ideological influence turns to paranoia in 1937, with the addition of a battery of questions on Trotskyism.
The first reader of these texts is the evaluator, whose pencil underlines such and such a notary father-in-law, such and such an anarchist past, to enrich a case for or against him which will be carefully archived in Moscow.
Self-writing, working lives
Bernard Pudal and Claude Pennetier rightly insist on the hybrid nature of these self-narratives, written under formal and political constraints, which reveal an unequal mastery of the codes of the “communist man”. Neither “absolute authenticity” nor “total discursive tactics” can characterize them. The obligatory presence of family and friendly circles is to be understood in the spirit of a project that privileges the collective and demands discipline and self-surrender from the activist.
This highlights the unique practice of white marriages with foreign comrades threatened with expulsion, sometimes at the cost of sacrificing one’s own choices. The self-critical strategies intended to proletarianize class origin or break compromising ties are often clear. The confession sometimes goes as far as a very intimate self-analysis.
The uneven length of these texts, their form which ranges from near illiteracy to the ease of the teacher, their style sometimes carefully descriptive, sometimes narrative with real writing gifts, invite us to place Parti’s autobiography in the larger corpus of workers’ writings, thanks to the section “instruction and intellectual development”. The investigation crosses the emancipation through the school of the Republic with the traditions of an anarchist and socialist left turned towards education. Bernadette Le Loarer-Cattanéo, raised in Breton by her grandmother, thus pays homage to her socialist and anticlerical teacher.
The anticipation of the expectations of the Moscow comrades is also present, since the autobiography itself is a step towards the social and political promotion proposed by Bolshevism. The questionnaire opens towards a reflection on autodidacticism (“did you educate yourself by reading books?”) before directing it towards the norm of expected Marxist-Leninist readings. This gives rise to beautiful passages on readings prevented (by poverty, by the difficulty of political language), but also on the revelation of Tolstoy and Barbusse, opening towards a cultural history of communism through these “working-class lives”.
The impact of Russian October
We could almost forget the initial purpose, which is to enrich the debate on communist commitment and “exit” after the Russian October. This is where the book proves disappointing. The direct impact of the Bolshevik revolution is barely present, due to a directive questionnaire which, in the midst of the construction of Stalinism, eludes the moment of 1917 and does not concern the founding generation of French communism, already eliminated by “Bolshevization”.
Only two autobiographies mention her, including that of the farmer Fernand Herpin:
1917, I am transferred to the infantry, the Russian revolution upsets me somewhat.
War, the experience of social injustice, the power of the texts of Lenin or Bukharin come more under the pen of the activists. Even Georges Politzer and Eugen Fried, who lived the experience of the Council Republic in Hungary and Slovakia in 1918-1919, do not dwell on October. The Soviet model and its mythology are not mentioned either.
In these autobiographies written at a time when their authors were at the height of their rise in the communist apparatus and therefore need to be verified, one can only guess at the seeds of a later disaffection, which would be marked by exclusion (the self-critical confession of the Party functioning here as a trap), departure or voluntary withdrawal from responsibilities. To account for this, Bernard Pudal and Claude Pennetier call upon other documents: correspondence, letters of resignation, later testimonies.
We can then understand how the biographical approach allows us to move away from the grand narratives of the communist “system” by working on militant identity. The authors of Breath of October 1917 become bogged down in a dated polemic against François Furet, whose theses are reduced to a system of explanation by fervor “tending towards psychologizing historical anthropology.”
Now it would have been interesting to discuss the use that The Past of an Illusion made of biography, certainly more empathetic with the “disenchanted” (from Pierre Pascal to Vassili Grossman) than with the “believers”, but also to question the absence, in these Party autobiographies, of revolutionary universalism which F. Furet makes a key spring of the “communist idea”.
Analogies with religion and light
If Bernard Pudal and Claude Pennetier outline interesting avenues on “adherence” rather than adhesion, doubts and “crises of belief”, it is without really questioning this persistent temptation to use analogies with religion to explain communist attraction.
Similarly, if they denounce with great force of ironic quotation marks the thesis of “blindness”, it would remain to question further, from a perspective of transnational history of socialism, the meaning of the naturalist metaphors that abound from 1917 to the present day, to evoke the revolution and its consequences, whether those of blinding light or of the twilight sunset, or, as here, that of the “breath”, derived from a formula of Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, who commented in 1984 on the events in Eastern Europe: “The propulsive force that originated in the October Revolution has now been exhausted.”