Pierre Rosanvallon (born 1 January 1948) is a French historian and sociologist. He was named a professor at the Collège de France in 2001, holding the chair in modern and contemporary political history.
His works are dedicated to the history of democracy, French political history, the role of the state and the question of social justice in contemporary societies.
Yvan Craipeau (24 September 1911, La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée – 13 December 2001) was a French Trotskyist activist.
Born in La Roche-sur-Yon, he helped found a local independent Marxist organisation while he was still in his teens. Expelled from school, he moved to Paris and became associated with the Trotskyist group around La Verité. In 1930, the group founded the Communist League. It considered itself an external faction of the Communist Party of France and so admitted current and former members of the French Communist Party. However, the rule was relaxed, and Craipeau was allowed to join in 1931. He joined the League's executive committee with the responsibility for developing a youth wing.
By 1933, he was able to organise a meeting attended by 1000 members of the youth wings of the Communist Party and the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. In 1933, he was Trotsky's personal secretary.
In 1936, Craipeau became a leading member of the new Internationalist Workers Party (POI). The following year, in reaction to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, he began a re-analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union. He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system, an idea that he introduced to Trotskyism.
During World War II, he was pronounced unfit for duty, and attempted, with Marcel Hic, to publish La Verité secretly. This was difficult, and following a series of setbacks, he turned instead to work influencing the German Army. He wrote an account of this activity in his books Contre vents et marées and La Libération Confisquée. The former work, on the Occupation period itself, was published in English in 2013.
In 1944, Craipeau was the architect of unity between three of France's four Trotskyist groups: the POI itself, the Comités Communistes Internationalistes and the Octobre group. They formed the Internationalist Communist Party, and in 1946, he was elected its General Secretary. In the same year, he was also elevated to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. However, he could not agree with the International's perspective that a crisis in capitalism was imminent, and soon after the POI sided with the International, he was expelled.
Craipeau temporarily withdrew from politics, and in 1951, he moved to Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, where he became a school teacher and soon secretary of the National Education Federation trade union.
In 1954, Craipeau returned to mainland France, where he participated in the creation of the New Left. This fused with the Movement for the Liberation of the City to form the Union of the Socialist Left (UGS) and, in 1960 with several groups to form the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). He remained a leading member of this party for many years, during which he wrote numerous books on left-wing politics and revolution.
Claude Bourdet (28 October 1909 – 20 March 1996) was a writer, journalist, polemist, and militant French politician.
Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet (French pronunciation: [vidal nakɛ]; 23 July 1930 – 29 July 2006) was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1969.
Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested (and deeply involved) in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War (1954–62), during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army, as well as Jewish history. He participated with Michel Foucault and Jean-Marie Domenach in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), which was one of the first French new social movements. He was part of debates over historiography in which he criticized negationism, and he was a supporter of Middle East peace efforts. To the end of his life, Vidal-Naquet never abandoned his fascination with Antiquity.
Jean Maitron (17 December 1910 – 16 November 1987) was a French historian specialist of the labour movement. A pioneer of such historical studies in France, he introduced it to University and gave it its archives base, by creating in 1949 the Centre d'histoire du syndicalisme (Historic Center of Trade-Unions) in the Sorbonne, which received important archives from activists such as Paul Delesalle, Émile Armand, Pierre Monatte, and others. He was the Center's secretary until 1969.
Maitron, however, is best known for his Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français (DBMOF or, more currently, Le Maitron), a comprehensive biographical dictionary of figures from the French workers' movement which was continued after his death, as well as a study of anarchism, History of anarchism in France (first ed. 1951), which has become a classic. Starting with the 1789 French Revolution, it includes 103,000 entries gathered by 455 different authors working under Maitron's direction. The Maitron has now extended itself with international versions, treating Austria (1971), United Kingdom (1979 and 1986), Japan (1979), Germany (1990), China (1985), Morocco (1998), United States from 1848 to 1922 (2002), a transnational one about the Komintern (2001) and the most recently published about Algeria (2006), almost all published at the Éditions de l'Atelier.Jean Maitron also founded and directed two reviews, L'Actualité de l'Histoire and then Le Mouvement social, which were directed after his death by Madeleine Rebérioux (1920–2005) then Patrick Fridenson (currently director of studies at the EHESS).
Édouard Gustave Depreux (31 October 1898 – 16 October 1981) was a French socialist journalist, essayist, and politician of the French Fourth Republic; he was born in Viesly (département of Nord) and died in Paris.
Eugène Charles Hernu (3 July 1923 – 17 January 1990) was a French socialist politician. He served as Minister of Defence from 1981 to 1985, until forced to resign over the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.