Pierre Broué


Pierre Broué was a French historian and Trotskyist revolutionary militant whose work covers the history of the Bolshevik Party, the Spanish Revolution and biographies of Leon Trotsky.

Background

Broué was born in Privas, Ardèche, around 1926.
His father was a civil servant and mother a school teacher: they had "strong republican views".

Career

In 1936, Broué supported a French general strike as well as the Spanish Republic.
By 1940, with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in a non-aggression pact, he helped organize a Communist party cell at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. The French Communist Party expelled these organizers; they said Broué suffered from Trotskyism. The accusation piqued his interest, and he began reading about Trotsky from the private library of teacher Élie Reynier.
With the Party, he fought in the French resistance against Nazi occupiers during Second World War.
When Joseph Stalin disbanded the Comintern in 1943, Broué became strongly critical of Stalinism, resigning from the FCP as a result. By 1944, he became a Trotskyist, joined the Fourth International, and remained a Trotskyist for the rest of his life.
In 1952, he followed Pierre Lambert during a split in the movement and continued as a "Lambertist" for many years.
He was active in the Internationalist Communist Party and then the Internationalist Communist Organisation before expelled in 1989.
He became a secondary school teacher, until 1965 when he became lecturer in history at the University of Grenoble and then professor.
In 1977, he set up the Trotsky Institute, to publish in French all of Trotsky's writings. He also founded and edited the Cahiers Léon Trotsky, devoted to the history of Trotskyism.
Between 2003 and his death, he was a close collaborator and supporter of the International Marxist Tendency.

Personal life

Broué married three times. His third wife Andrée died in 1989 from cancer.
Former student Jean-Pierre Juy was a long-time friend. Alan Woods was a late-life friend and admirer.
Broué died in Grenoble, France, in his sleep in the early hours July 27, 2005, age 79. He had prostate cancer. Five children survived him: two sons and three daughters.
His son Michel Broué is a notable mathematician.

Works

The basic inspiration for Broué's books was his desire to explain Stalinism.
His book Trotsky counters the work of Isaac Deutscher. He worked for three years at Harvard, to which Trotsky had sold his papers in 1940. Broué and assistants were the first researchers to use them since the archive opened in 1980. Alan Woods has called it "a very healthy antidote to the superficial and pretentious philistinism of Isaac Deutscher".
The recent republication of Trotsky's autobiography, My Life, has a foreword written by Broué.

Books written

The U.S. Library of Congress lists the following books.
The U.S. Library of Congress lists the following books.
Marxists' Internet Archives lists the following articles by Broué that appeared in Revolutionary History: