Could France Have Gone Communist?
Martin Evans and Emmanuel Godin ask how close was France to becoming a Communist country in the years after the Second World War.
On October 4th, 1944, Pablo Picasso formally joined the French Communist Party (PCF) at the Paris offices of L'Humanité, the party newspaper. Attended by the poets Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, the painter André Fougeron and the writer Albert Camus, the ceremony was a simple affair overseen by Jacques Duclos, the deputy leader. Given the stature of Picasso - it would be no exaggeration to say that he was one of the most famous living artists in the whole world - this was a huge coup for the Communist movement, reported the following day on the front page of L'Humanué across five columns along with an illustration of his drawing 'Man with a Lamb'. Three weeks later, in an interview with the left-wing American journal New Masses, Picasso explained the significance of his decision. For him it was the logical progression of his work as a whole:
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