John Bulaitis

Maurice Thorez (1900–1964) was a major figure in the history of twentieth-century France and European Communism for over three decades. Under his leadership, the French Communist Party (PCF) became France’s largest political party and one of the most important communist parties in the Western world. Born in a mining village and leaving school at the age of 12, Thorez’s rapid rise in the PCF paralleled Stalin’s consolidation of power in the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, he became a minister and, briefly, deputy prime minister, before the Cold War excluded communists from political power. The PCF became known as ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’, an expression of the leader cult around Thorez that mirrored the ‘cult of personality’ around Stalin. This book, based on a wealth of original source material including Thorez’s diaries and notebooks, is the only biography of Thorez available in English. John Bulaitis outlines how Thorez’s political life intersected with, and was shaped by, key historical events. Chapters are devoted to the Popular Front, the World War II years (spent in the Soviet Union), the trauma of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt and the crisis prompted by the Algerian War. The book also examines Thorez’s role as a leading player within the world communist movement. At its heart, the book explores the paradox of the mass communist movement in France: its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalinist practices.