Jean-Paul Sartre on the French Communist Party

I was dealing with men who only considered people of their party as comrades, men who were covered with orders and prohibitions, who judged me as a provisional fellow traveler, and who placed themselves in advance in the future moment when I’d disappear from the melee, taken back by the forces of the right. For them I wasn’t a whole man; I was a dead man on reprieve. No kind of reciprocity is possible with men like that; nor any mutual criticism, which would have been something to hope for…. We lived in a poisoned atmosphere of thoughts that didn’t resist examination, but that they avoided examining. It was putrid, and we were never sure that they weren’t in the process of slandering us somewhere.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party, 1972

Algeria and the defeat of French Humanism

Chapter six of The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, by James Heartfield, Sheffield Hallam University, 2002. Marxists Internet Archive 

The founding of the modern French state is unique in history. The state is created in the name not just of the French citizen, but of all mankind. The document adopted by the Constituent Assembly in June 1789 is headed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The declaration is a sincere expression of the sentiments of the revolutionaries who created the state. It was also a beacon to liberals across Europe,^[1] and as far afield as Haiti in the West Indies, where the ‘black Jacobin’ Toussaint L’Ouverture was inspired to lead a slave revolt.^[2] The most adamant of the French revolutionaries deplored slavery as they deplored feudal privileges. ‘The moment you pronounce the word “slave” you pronounce your own dishonour’, said Robespierre, who also defended the civil and voting rights of free blacks in the West Indian colonies.^[3] Even after the restoration of a more centralised power under Napoleon Bonaparte’s military leadership, France remained a beacon of the universal rights of man to radicals and liberals across Europe. Napoleon’s army swept through Europe welcomed by some as an army of liberation. The Jewish ghettoes were emancipated. The Code Napoleon is, to this day, the basis of many countries’ civil law. Revolutionary France represented the hopes of the Enlightenment, of reason and of humanism for progressive Europe.

Aimé Césaire's Letter of Resignation from the French Communist Party (1956)

Aimé Césaire
Député for Martinique
To: Maurice Thorez
General Secretary of the French Communist Party

It would be easy for me to articulate, as much with respect to the French Communist Party as with respect to the Communist International as sponsored by the Soviet Union, a long list of grievances or disagreements.