The Lubitz TrotskyanaNet – Trotskyists – Bio-Bibliographies

— Biographical sketch —

Contents:

• Basic biographical data
• Summary
• The meaning of Pierre Broué
• Some quotations

Basic biographical data

Note: Biographical material relating to Pierre Broué (including obituaries, appreciations and memoirs) has been listed in the section Books and articles about Pierre Broué within our Selective bibliography of Pierre Broué (1926-2005). The most interesting source concerning Broué's life and work, however, would have been probably his Souvenirs et portraits 1945-2000 (3) which had been announced for publishing by Fayard (Paris) in 2005 but unfortunately later was cancelled by this publishing house.

Summary

Family, youth, and political affiliation

Pierre Broué was born on May 8, 1926, in Privas (the capital of the Département Ardèche <07>, Rhône-Alpes region, southeastern France) as a son of Léon Broué (1890-1972), a state employee, and his wife Renée (b. Verrot, 1898-1980), a teacher. Although Pierre was raised in a little town in rural southern France, he nevertheless got aware of what was going on in Paris and in the world around France, as for example the people's front and the great strike waves and class struggles of 1936, the Spanish civil war, the rise of fascism. In 1940, the 14 years old college boy got the opportunity to browse through hundreds of Marxist books and educational pamphlets at the home of Elie Reynier (4), one of his junior high school teachers and a veteran syndicalist and working class militant. Among the many books of the Reynier collection which made the boy getting fascinated by history, was the French edition of Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian revolution. In 1942, at the age of only sixteen, he began to participate in the French Résistance, joining the youth arm of the illegally operating Parti Communiste Français (PCF) [French Communist Party] and actively fighting against fascism and German occupation. He soon learnt that the resistance movement was composed of progressive as well as of backward and conservative or reactionary forces. He began to hate French chauvinism and considered the struggle against Nazism as an internationalist one. Consequently, towards the end of the War, young Broué got in conflict with the PCF which at the time strongly advocated French nationalism and favoured a post-war government of national unity. He found himself excluded from the ranks of the PCF as a 'Trotskyist renegade' and thus an enemy of the party. From 1944 to his death, Broué considered himself an internationalist Marxist. From 1944 for several decades, he joined the ranks of the French Trotskyists, more precisely: he was a militant of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) [Internationalist Communist Party] which later was renamed Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) [Internationalist Communist Organization], from 1953 being one of the rival currents of French Trotskyism resulting from the tragic 1952/53 split of the French section of the Fourth International which was soon followed by a split of the entire International. The OCI, inspiring an international tendency with offsprings in various countries and in the 1980s launching the Mouvement pour un Parti des Travailleurs (MPPT) [Movement for a Workers' Party] in France, later re-adopted its old name, PCI, before eventually becoming the Parti des Travailleurs (PT) [Workers’ Party; main organ: Informations ouvrières]. However, PCI/OCI/PT was (or, is) generally better known as the Lambertist current of French Trotskyism, named after its co-founder, longtime leader and moving spirit, Pierre Lambert (Boussel). For many years, Broué was a member of the Bureau Politique of the OCI, recruited a lot of students for the cause of Trotskyism and contributed, mostly under pseudonym, to the Trotskyist press. In 1966 he participated in the 3rd international conference of the International Committee in London. However, as an intellectual feeling hampered by the quite rigid and authoritarian regime of the Lambertist party leadership and after having more and more retired from party politics and from contributing to the Lambertist press in the 1980s, Pierre Broué eventually suffered the same fate as several other more or less prominent long-time party members and was excluded in a shameful manner from the then PCI: he was deprived of membership at the end of May 1989 blamed for having held a lecture about Trotsky within the framework of a gathering organized by Nouvelle Action Royaliste (NAR), a reactionary society (5). After his exclusion from the Lambertist party, Pierre Broué remained unaffiliated, persuading an independent road and remaining open to discussion or collaboration with various leftwing currents. Thus for example, in the 1990s he closely co-operated with a group of French independent left socialists around the paper Démocratie & socialisme (D&S) while at the same time he attended the 13th world congress of the Fourth International led by Ernest Mandel; during the last years of his life, already battling with cancer, he came close to positions advocated by the International Marxist Tendency which is grouped around the British Socialist Appeal group founded in 1992 and inspired by the veteran Trotskyist and long-time leader of the Militant Tendency, Ted Grant (6). According to the spokesman of that tendency, Alan Woods (7), Pierre Broué enthusiastically agreed to collaborate with the tendency's Trotsky Project (8). Since 1989 prefering to call himself simply a Marxist (instead of a Trotskyist), Broué repudiated neither his past nor his long-time Trotskyist commitment and dedication, but remained faithful to the cause of revolutionary socialism, internationalism and to the ideas and legacy of Trotskyism, never wavering in his belief in the socialist future of humanity.
Broué was married three times: short after Second World War, he married Simone Charras, in 1953 he re-married with Simone Pleynet and eventually in 1960 with Andrée Jacquenet (a professor who died of cancer in 1989). From his first wife he got a son, Michel (b. 1946), who later became a renowned mathematician; from his third wife he got three daughters and one son: Françoise (b. 1956), Cathérine (b. 1959), Martine (b. 1961) and Jean-Pierre (b. 1966).

 
Career, occupations

After the War, Broué studied history and political science at the Université des Sciences Sociales (9), Grenoble, earning a degree (diplôme d'études supérieures, DES for short) by submitting a work about Paul Mathieu Laurent (1793-1877, also known as "Laurent d'Ardèche"): Un Saint-Simonien dans l'arène politique: Laurent de l'Ardèche, 1848-1852 in 1953. He later continued his studies in Paris and Grenoble and eventually took his doctor's degree (docteur ès lettres) with high honors at Université de Paris X (Nanterre) in 1971. His monumental doctoral thesis for habilitation was titled Spartakisme, bolchevisme, gauchisme face aux problèmes de la révolution prolétarienne en Allemagne, later published as a book with title Révolution en Allemagne, 1917-1923 (10). After having earned his living by teaching history in secondary schools at various places in France and Switzerland, Broué became a longtime affiliate to the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) of the Université de Grenoble II: from 1965 to 1969 as assistant historian, from 1969 to 1972 as assistant master, and from 1972 to 1981 as lecturer, before in 1981 he secured the position of a professor of contemporary history (11) which he held until his retirement in 1988. Whether as a teacher, professor, union leader (12) or author and editor - Broué's views were always outside the so-called mainstream, i.e. they were rejected - or mostly boycotted and passed over in silence - by the many adherents of the PCF within the academic milieu of France as well as by scholarly advocates of the Cold War and of all variants of anti-communism; thus Broué always fell between two stools, and even within the 'Trotskyist community', i.e. within the many rival groups, tendencies and personalities in France and elsewhere claiming the label of Trotskyism for themselves, Broué's positions caused many controversies and were often rejected, particularly by those who must be considered sectarian in substance.

 
The meaning of Broué

What makes the meaning of Broué is the fact that he was both a Trotskyist militant and a great Marxist scholar and historian, outstanding and exceptional in a country where the political and intellectual life was strongly shaped and almost dominated by the Communist Party which for decades was characterized by a quite rigid Stalinist (or, neo-Stalinist), Moscow-oriented course. Broué’s activities as a historian aimed at a revival of genuine Marxist historiography in France, at a reconstruction of historical truth, e.g. by the cleansing of the historiography of the workers’ movement from the old and new Stalinist web of lies and falsifications as well as from historical misinterpretations produced by post-Stalinist authors as for instance Volkogonov and Vasetskii. By his teaching and writing history, Broué deeply influenced a considerable number of students, of new generations of young militants and other people seeking for non-distorted and non-sectarian historical accounts of the Left in the 20th century. What follows is a short summary of Pierre Broué’s written legacy and of his meaning for the left movement in general and for Trotsky research in particular:

• Pierre Broué published a considerable number of important books — as a rule originally appearing in French language — some of which fortunately have been translated into other languages as for example into English, Spanish, German and Italian. The first book-length publication from Broué's pen was La révolution et la guerre d'Espagne [English version: The revolution and the civil war in Spain] which he co-authored with Emile Témime and which first appeared in 1961. With this work Broué made his name; it was re-issued again and again and translated into several other languages; it soon became a classic and a reference work, ending the myth of anti-Franco unity and restoring the historic role of the POUM and of other non-Stalinist left-wing parties and tendencies in the Spanish revolution and civil war. The fate of the Spanish revolution as an outstanding example for the tragic history of the European working class in the 20th century and of the devastating consequences of Stalinist policies was also at the focus of some other books by Broué, notably his Staline et la révolution : le cas espagnol (1936-1939) (published in 1993) and his La révolution espagnole, 1931-1939 (published in 1973).
  
  
  Broué's magistral habilitation thesis (1971) about Spartakisme, bolchevisme, gauchisme face aux problèmes de la révolution prolétarienne exhaustively dealt with the history and fate of the German revolution and was published as a book of almost 1,000 pp. with title Révolution en Allemagne, 1917-1923 in the same year; it is also available in English (The German revolution, 1917-1923) and Italian language, while abridged versions appeared in German and Spanish.
  
  
  After having already published L'assassinat de Trotsky [Trotsky's assassination] in 1980 and after having already made a name for himself as a renowned international expert on the history of the Trotskyist movement, Broué, in 1988, set a new benchmark by his promising magnum opus, Trotsky (1,105 pp.), probably the only existing biography of this eminent revolutionary which can hold a candle to Isaac Deutscher's famous Trotsky trilogy (The prophet armed, The prophet unarmed, The prophet outcast) which originally had appeared some thirty years before. Preparing his Trotsky, Broué spent several years in Harvard University's Houghton Library, the main repository of Trotsky's archival heritage, and he intensively searched other relevant archival holdings, too, as for example the Trotsky-Sedov correspondence within the Boris Nicolaevsky Collection at Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California. Taking into consideration the original French edition only, more than 10,000 copies of Broué's Trotsky were sold (13). Appearing midst of the Glasnost and Perestroika years, Broué's Trotsky biography was much debated and found a lively, although not constantly positive or affirmative, reception in France and abroad. Unfortunately, an English translation of this undoubtedly eminent work has not been published until today, so that its dissemination in the non-Francophone world has been seriously hampered; at least there are Italian and (abridged) Russian translations available; after a long delay, a German version, provided with a new introduction, eventually appeared in 2003. [For the Trotsky biography see also Broué's own assessment below and the review section of our Selective bibliography of Pierre Broué.]
  
  
  However, Broué's centennial work is far from being his only book on Trotsky and Trotskyism: besides the above-mentioned book on Trotsky's assassination, Broué wrote a considerable number of other books and booklets dealing with Trotsky's life, action and thought, with certain aspects of Trotskyist policies, with the fate of the Trotskyist opposition in the Stalinist USSR and last not least with the life and action of some close collaborators and co-fighters of Trotsky. In this connection, mention must notably be made of
  
  — Broué's outstanding biography of the Bolshevik veteran, internationalist per excellence and most faithful supporter of Trotsky in the USSR, Kh.G. Rakovskii (Rakovsky, ou, La révolution dans tous les pays), published in 1996 [published in Polish language, too],
  
  — a biography of Trotsky's son and closest collaborator, Lev Sedov, published in 1993 with title Léon Sedov : fils de Trotsky, victime de Staline,
  
  — a biography about the French Trotskyist Claude Bernard (pseud.: Raoul), published with title Raoul in 1995 as a special issue of Cahiers Léon Trotsky.
  
  
  
  More recently, the struggle of the Russian opposition against Stalin, its fate and eventual liquidation was balanced by Broué in his Communistes contre Staline : massacre d'une génération, published in 2003.
  
  Mention should also be made of the fine iconographic work of David King (Trotsky, Paris 1979) to which Broué provided the text.
  
  Apart from Trotsky, Trotskyism, the German and the Spanish revolution, Broué's books dealt with other topics, too: thus, he repeatedly wrote about the anti-Stalinist resistance and about — as Trotskyists used to call it — the political revolution in Eastern Europe (e.g. Le printemps des peuples commence à Prague [1969], or La révolution hongroise des conseils ouvriers [1976]) and about Latin American affairs, class struggles and political developments (e.g. Quand le peuple révoque le Président : le Brésil de l'affaire Collor [1993]).
  
  Furthermore, Broué again and again dealt with the history and degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, both becoming tools of Stalin; the most noteworthy books resulting from his studies in this field are his classic Le parti bolchevique : histoire du P.C. de l'U.R.S.S. (originally published in 1963 with various reprints and translated into Spanish language) and his monumental Histoire de l'Internationale Communiste, 1919-1943 (published in 1997, comprising some 1,100 pp.) which appeared in the same year as the notorious Le livre noir du communisme [Engl. version: The black book of communism] of Stéphane Courtois et al.

• Pierre Broué was also very productive as editor and as co-editor, respectively. To list only some of the very highlights of his editorial activities, we should like to mention:
  — the Cahiers Léon Trotsky (CLT, founded in the late 1970s) and Le Marxisme aujourd'hui (LMA, founded in 1990), journals which were his very brainchildren and to which he was the moving spirit and most busy contributor;
  — Les congrès de l'Internationale Communiste (1974), Du premier au deuxième congrès de l'Internationale Communiste (1979), Ecrits à Prague sous la censure (1973), Pologne-Hongrie 1965 ou "le printemps en octobre" (1966), La question chinoise dans l'Internationale Communiste, 1926-1927 (1965), to mention some examples for collections of documents which he selected and extensively annotated;
  — most noteworthy, however, are the altogether 27 volumes of Trotsky's Oeuvres, the authoritative French edition of Trotsky's works from 1928 to 1940 which Broué edited and provided with rich annotations. This ambitious and fairly unparalleled editorial project was carried out during the 1970s and 1980s, a truly Herculean task. The volumes, issued in 2 series, were published between 1978 and 1989. The Oeuvres were preceded by two thematic collections of Trotsky's writings which were edited, annotated and prefaced by Broué: Le mouvement communiste en France (1919-1939), published in 1967, and La révolution espagnole, 1930-1940, published in 1975;
  — innumerable other writings (e.g. by Trotsky, Jean Van Heijenort, Alfred Rosmer, Victor Serge, Nikolai Bukharin) were edited and provided with notes and critical apparatuses by Broué, partly published as books, partly appearing as articles, features or documentary sections in Cahiers Léon Trotsky and other journals;
  — furthermore, Broué was involved into major projects of other scholars in France and abroad; thus for instance he closely collaborated with biographical, archival and editorial projects directed by Jean Maitron, Jacques Droz and Bernhard Bayerlein;
  — Broué also was a member (or, consultative member) of the editorial boards of many foreign journals and newsletters such as for example In Defense of Marxism, Journal of Trotsky Studies, Labor Standard, Links.

• Although the above-mentioned listing of books authored or edited by Broué undoubtedly is impressive enough to illustrate his meaning with regard to Trotsky research, some further relevant aspects must be mentioned, too, in particular:
  — Pierre Broué contributed (14) a very considerable number of articles, research notes, book reviews and similar items to Cahiers Léon Trotsky and to innumerable other French and international journals, newsletters, bulletins and collections. These items include more than a dozen of papers and oral contributions delivered by him on the occasion of international conferences and other scholarly meetings — between 1980 and 2002, Broué actively participated in at least 20 international conferences dealing with Trotsky, Trotskyism and related subjects.
  — as teacher and professor, Broué trained up and stimulated a new generation of devoted scholars; some of his disciples later made a name for themselves with substantial books and other contributions to Trotsky(ism) research, e.g. Olivia Gall, Gilles Vergnon, René Revol, Jean-Paul Joubert, Damien Durand, Serge Lambert, Jean-Pierre Juy;
  — Broué closely co-operated with a great number of already renowned as well as with younger ambitious historians of the revolutionary movement, thus as for example Alan Wald, Enzo Traverso, J.-F. Godchau, Michel Dreyfus, Morris Slavin, George Novack, George Breitman, Suzi Weissman, Gabriel García Higueras, A.M. Podshchekoldin, A. Pantsov, Reiner Tosstorff, Bernhard Bayerlein, to mention only a modest number out of many dozens;
  — Broué gave decisive new impetus to Trotsky research, too, by launching the Institut Léon Trotsky in 1977, by establishing and maintaining close contacts with many distinguished scholars and devoted Trotskyists engaged in serious research work on Trotsky and Trotskyism and thus creating an (unofficial) international network to which belonged for instance in America George Breitman and the Pathfinder Press team editing Trotsky's Writings, in Britain Socialist Platform and its journal Revolutionary History with Al Richardson as moving spirit, in Japan the Torotsuki Kenkyushu [Trotsky Institute of Japan] and its journal Torotsuki-Kenkyu [Trotsky Studies], in Argentina the Centro de Estudios, Investigaciones y Publicaciones 'León Trotsky' (C.E.I.P.), in France the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Révolutionnaires Internationaux (C.E.R.M.T.R.I.), as well as the (International) Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy with its chief organizer Marilyn Vogt-Downey;
  — for many years, Pierre Broué successfully and tirelessly brought to light innumerable treasures from archival goldmines such as for example the Trotsky Archives deposited at Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. and the Trotsky-Sedov Collection within the Nicolaevsky Collection of the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Cal. Broué and a small group of colleagues (A. Calvié, M. Dreyfus, J.-P. Joubert et al.) were the pioneering researchers who systematically searched the Trotsky Archives at Houghton Library from January 2 to February 29, 1980, after this unique collection of primary sources was opened to the public. Many of the results of this intensive archival research left their marks in the volumes of the Trotsky Oeuvres edition and on the pages of the Cahiers Léon Trotsky. Broué's archival search in Houghton Library was facilitated by his exceptional friendship and co-operation with Jean Van Heijenoort, the long-time ex-secretary of Leon Trotsky and curator of his archives at Houghton Library. Broué also belonged to the first Western historians who began to search those Soviet state, party and Comintern archives which were opened to research only in the early 1990s. In a number of articles and conference contributions, Broué gave reports about the results of his extensive archival explorations;
  — last not least, Broué established contacts with a considerable number of Trotskyist veterans, ex-Trotskyists, relatives of Trotsky and other people who had first-hand knowledge of him and of the early history of the Left Opposition, the Fourth International and the history of the Trotskyist movement in their respective country. Broué made oral history interviews with those contemporary witnesses becoming a true friend of many of them, for example of Esteban (Sieva) Volkov, Trotsky's grandson, of Adolfo Zamora, Octavio Fernández Vilchis, John Archer. He wrote substantial biographical sketches and/or obituaries about a great number of (former) Trotskyists, thus so to speak putting up a memorial to them and snatching them from sinking into oblivion. Short biographies, vignettes and similar historical miscellanies from Broué's pen as well as memoirs and other autobiographical documents relating to those people, edited and annotated by Broué frequently appeared on the pages of Cahiers Léon Trotsky, or as translations in Revolutionary History and elsewhere;
  — furthermore, mention must also be made of Broué's substantial contributions to ambitious biographical reference works such as for example to the multi-volume Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, better known as "the Maitron".

 
Illness and death

After a long and painful battle against cancer of prostate, Pierre Broué died in Grenoble (the capital of the Département Isère <38>, Dauphiné region, eastern France) on July 26, 2005, at 03h04 in the early morning. Only a few months earlier, Broué had finished work on his autobiography.
His funeral took place at La Tronche (near Grenoble) on July 30, 2005 in the presence of his five children and of about some fifty friends, colleagues, disciples, collaborators, Trotskyists and syndicalists, inter alia René Revol, Jean-Pierre Juy, Damien Durand, Jean-Paul Joubert, Gérard Filoche, Pierre Ruscassie, Pierre Timsit, Raymond Vacheron, Karel Kostal. Funeral speeches were given by Louis Astre, Jacques Faucher, René Revol and Jean-Pierre ('Piou'), his youngest son.⁽¹⁵⁾

On the occasion of the funeral celebration and during the following months, several events in honour of Pierre Broué as well as publications about his life and work were announced or took place, respectively. Thus, a special issue of the journal Le Marxisme aujourd'hui and a collective work containing recollections and appraisals by friends and collaborators of Broué were announced at the funeral. According to the Boletín electronico de la Fundación Andreu Nin, nr. 50 (Dec. 2005), an Acto de Homenaje a Pierre Broué was held on Dec. 12, 2005 at the Ateneo de Barcelona (Spain), organized by the Fundación Andreu Nin. Speakers included Bernard Castany, Andy Durgan, Pelai Pagès, Bernat Muniesa and Pepe Gutiérrez Alvarez. In France, Les Amis de Pierre Broué, an association of former friends, colleagues, disciples etc., was founded at the end of 2005, Jean-Pierre Juy functioning as its president (contact: amipierrebroue@wanadoo.fr).⁽¹⁶⁾ It is hoped that the Amis de Pierre Broué in the near future will be succesful in making available to a broader public most of the obituaries, reminiscences and appraisals about Broué's life, that probably the Cahiers Léon Trotsky will continue to be published, that the archives of Broué will be preserved and made acccessible to researchers and other people interested, and that further colloquia will be organized where Broué's work can be discussed.

Broué's considerable book collection now is deposited at Bibliothèque Universitaire de Droit et Lettres (Grenoble) [address: 1130 Avenue centrale, F 38402 Saint Martin d'Hères Cedex], his rich archives are preserved at Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) (Nanterre) [address: 6, Allée de l'Université, F 92001 Nanterre Cedex].

Some quotations

Broué on his Trotsky (1988):

Broué’s personal estimation of his writing:

Some short quotations from obituaries and reminiscences: