British Communists and Anglo-French relations, 1914-1945

Abstract

Studies of the entente cordiale tend to focus on various aspects of Anglo-French inter-state relations. This is entirely right and proper: the entente was, after all, an agreement between two states. It is to be expected that any volume covering the entente historically will focus primarily, as this one does, upon relations between governments, statesmen, diplomats and soldiers. Nonetheless, these are not the sum total of the contacts between the two countries. In particular, many people in both countries considered themselves to be a part of a wider international movement of revolutionaries who were working together to overthrow capitalism and imperialism and build a ‘better’ world. From 1917 onwards, in particular, Communists believed that theirs was the ideology of the future, and that their success was only a matter of time. From 1919 onwards, the efforts of Communists were, in theory at least, directed from the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, a world party of which the British and French communist parties were – again, in theory at least – only branches. This paper, then, sets out to analyse the importance of France for the British Communist party in the era of the World Wars. It focuses on the impact that France itself had upon British Communists’ views of the world, and also upon the nature of the British Communist party’s relationship with its French counterpart.