A Radiant Future: The French Communist Party and Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

The French Communist Party (PCF) was one of the strongest in the world communist movement after the Second World War. Politically powerful in France, it also had a voice in East-West politics internationally. Its positions on political and social developments in Eastern Europe were influential, but have been little studied. This book remedies the lack by tracing PCF reactions to the Popular Democracies from their birth in 1944-45, through social and political crises, to the dramatic events of 1956 in Moscow, Poznan and Budapest. Drawing on original sources and archive material, Richard Sacker shows how the PCF’s approach was shaped not only by Cold War antagonisms and a slavish adherence to the Moscow line, but also by the domestic context of the French labour movement and political conflicts in France. This is a study which opens up new perspectives on a period which is beginning to emerge from memory, into history.