Marcel Bleibtreu (August 26, 1918 – December 25, 2001) was a French trotskyist activist and theorist.
Bleibtreu was born during his family’s refuge in Marseille from wartime bombing, Marcel Bleibtreu became a radical thinker as a child. After studies at the Condorcet high school, he studied medicine in Paris, and graduated in 1947. He joined the Bolshevik Leninist Group, the Trotskyist organization, in September 1936. By 1944 the Trotskyist was a member of the Internationalist Communist Party , (PCI), the French section of the Fourth International. Bleibtreu led workplace cells of the PCI around Puteaux-Suresnes-Nanterre under the pen-name Pierre Favre. In November 1944, he became an editor of the party’s newspaper, The Truth. He was named general secretary of the PCI in 1946, and led the party’s growth after its post-war legalization.
In 1952 he and Pierre Lambert played a key role in the split in the PCI with a minority composed of co-thinkers of Michel Pablo .
In 1954 the Algerian War of Independence escalted. The PCI naturally supported independence. However, Lambert and Bleibtreu started to disagree over tactics in Algeria. Lambert supported the MTLD of Messali Hadj while others, along with Bleibtreu, supported CRUA (the fore-runner of the FLN). Lambert was able to win a majority in 1955, expelling Bleibtreu and its comrades. The expelled group took over the Bolshevik-Leninist group and published the Trotskyism review. The GBL later joined the New Left , Within qui Bleibtreu created the Revolutionary Socialist Tendency, a founding member of the UGS and the PSU. Bleibtreu became a member of the political committee of the PSU, then also its general secretary until he left that party in 1964.
Bleibtreu ‘s militued art as well. He organized in Paris, in 1967, an exhibition named “Art for Peace to Vietnam”, a method which he would use again, in 1993, in Athens against the embargo in Iraq.
Bleibtreu supported the development and coordination of the ‘Base Committees’ in 1968, endeavor to reduce the clashes between the Trotskyist groups, from where he nickname of “John XXIII of Trotskyism” comes, following a famous appeal he made in the broad reading theater of the Sorbonne . Bleibtreu was an activist in various associations, in particular in SOS Children of the South, and the coordination for the lifting of the embargo imposed on Iraq, which he directed.
External links
- Biography and Inventory of the Marcel Bleibtreu Collection at the Contemporary International Documentation Library