Abstract EN:

Among about ten big historic leaders of the French communist Party, Raymond Guyot (1903-1986) is one of the most underestimated one. His political career was nevertheless exceptional for its longevity and variety. He reached the ruling strata of the Party at the very beginning of the 1930s, and he remained there until the 1970s under Maurice Thorez’s, Waldeck Rochet’s and Georges Marchais’s successive posts of General Secretaries. Of the first one of these men he was the most faithful support for the Political Bureau, and he scrupulously followed his political line, sharing the successes and the setbacks: at first as General Secretary or President of the Communist Youths, then as leader of the Parisian Federation of the PCF (French Communist Party), finally as the man in charge of the Foreign Policy Section. As such, he was one of the key men of the international communist movement at the time of Khrushchev and Brejnev. But before the war he had already held an important place at the Comintern under the leaderships of Stalin and Dimitrov, as General Secretary of the Young Communist International, and during the war by assuring one of the safest contacts between Moscow and the occupied France. Up to the end he also remained one of the most influential men of the World Peace Council, empowered with the trust of the USSR and of its communist and progressist allies, in spite of some hard events. During all these years he increased the number of his international trips, particularly between Paris and Moscow. His loyalty to the USSR was nevertheless gradually shaken, especially because of the Czechoslovak events which affected him personally, but he never renounced it openly.