Looks at the years from 1941-1947 when the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain became allies in order to defeat Hitler and reconstruct war torn Europe. The study focuses on the French Communist Party as one of the largest groups supporting Soviet aims in Western Europe.

This up-to-date new analysis of the French Communist Party reveals it as an entirely unconventional political force: not a normal party vying for office, but a Leninist bureaucracy armed with an apocalyptic mission to deliver humanity from capitalism. Its interests have been defined as part of an outpost of a world revolutionary movement; and whilst its strategies may have varied, they have done so in order to serve Soviet foreign policy purposes. D. S. Bell and Byron Criddle trace the history of the Communist Party in France from its origins. They focus in particular on the period since 1958 and explore the Party's unique organizational structures and international loyalties. They examine structure and ideology, relations with the Socialist Party, electoral performance, and the 1980s decline in the Party's fortunes. This study will be essential reading for all students of contemporary French history and politics.

Recent events in the United States have shown the workings of little-known elements of the Communist Party, like the secret section whose members are unknown to the rank and file. All this and much more is explained in Rossi’s remarkable disclosure of the entire structure of the Communist Party of one country—in this case France—where we are able to see the Party as it acted under the varying pressures of peace, war, and armistice; how it operates as a legal part of the political scene; how readily it can go underground; how the members are schooled in its principles (an hour-a-day reading of the primary Party books is required); how the overall directives are issued and carried out; how a mass following was to be recruited from the disaffected veterans of the lost war, distraught housewives and families of prisoners, from labor unions and peasants in the Catholic hinterland. This book, based on published and unpublished sources, provides a vast fund of information about the whole range of Communist activities, from the secret instructions that foresaw, in the early days of the German occupation, that the Nazi tolerance of the Party in France would be short-lived to advice on how to meet a comrade with the least chance of being observed. It shows why Party members returning from prison must always be regarded with suspicion, and how and through what means the eventual seizure of the government was to take place. These observations are based on the operations of the French Communist Party, but they apply with only minor changes to the Communist parties of all the Western countries, with their dexterous capacity for maneuver and their unrelenting pursuit, ruthless and with no holds barred, of the ultimate goal of the seizure of power.

The French Communist Party