Call for papers

This international conference A Global Party.The French Communist Party in a Transnational Perspective (1917-1991) is organized by the ANR PAPRIK@2F Research project (Agence nationale de la Recherche: Portail Archives Politiques Recherches Indexation Komintern et Fonds Français), supported by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Centre Georges Chevrier of the university of Burgundy, in partnership with the Archives Nationales (Paris). It aims to consider the French Communist Party from a global point of view, in the light of a renewed and internationalized historiography.

Launched in April 2013, the PARPIK@2F research project aims to create an on-line free access to French Comintern archives, as well as to State surveillance archives, with a unique and practical inventory and research tool. From its inception onwards, this project has considered the history of the FCP in a comparative and connected way, especially in its two years long seminar. Our symposium will therefore conclude three years of intense technical and scientific work in this sense.

Communist studies have undergone profound changes during the last two decades. The reference to the “short 20th Century”, which played a major role in France, especially in “totalitarian” interpretations, is now challenged by a renewed “world history”. However violent it may have been, this “short 20th Century” is integrated into long term approaches which put the stress on wider processes such as State modernization, European imperialism and nascent globalization at the end of the 19th Century [1].

A new historiography (Anglo-Saxon mostly) has been dedicated to the study of the Soviet “civilization”. Despite its diversity, it shares the ambition of placing the communist phenomenon in a larger “zone of modernity” [2], where new forms of mass government, including in their Soviet version, have been set up. As a radical experience of social engineering in a closed society and economy, the Bolshevik experience is paradoxically “opened” to selective influences and cultural-technical circulations. However, the URSS is also a major hub from which are transferred new political, cultural and bureaucratic practices, through the action of specific institutions and instruments, such as the Comintern and the Cominform or the Soviet cultural diplomacy apparatus.

In the light of these new historiographical conditions – not to mention the so-called “révolution des archives” -, we think that the time has come to pay attention to the FCP as a transnational object. The directions we propose are three-fold.

First of all, the FCP embodies a new political offer, which is the combined result of French labor “indigenous” inheritances and imported Bolshevik practices and principles. As a “national section” of the Moscow-centered communist world, the FCP took part in a wider “communist history” that is transnational in itself. Our symposium therefore intends to weigh its role inside the international communist movement throughout the 20th Century – that is, before and during the Cold War, inside the Comintern, the Cominform and during its “multilateral” aftermath.

Besides, our symposium will particularly favor comparative and transnational history papers, in order to confront new archival evidence with old paradigms, such as the center/periphery issue or the “dependency” syndrome in French historiography.          

We will lastly consider the FCP as a specific agent of politicization and mobilization of the masses – whatever the form, including military -, through the shaping/inclusion of multiple actors and social groups within the colonial and political French order. The FCP will thus be viewed as a “hub” in itself within the international communist movement, with its own interests and its specific historical path.

Workshops

The conference aims to bring the largest number of French and foreign specialists in the history of communism together around a few themes with a transnational perspective. The conference will have twelve privileged themes: