There are political books that read like novels. The Red Godfather (Plon) by the journalist François Bazin is like that of espionage, with its thousand and one ups and downs, times of war or peace, from Russia to Paris, with its secret agents, double agent, triple agent, mole, informant or even under -marine. Betrayals, eliminations, prison… Here, everything is true. The story, or rather the epic, of Pierre Broussel, known as Lambert, who died in 2008, a little-known figure on the French left – of which he led one of the most extreme fringes, the Internationalist Communist Organization (OCI). Little known, but influential even in the mysteries of the socialist party.
Lambert trained a whole generation of left-wing activists, trade unionists or politicians, ideologically structured and experienced in political combat, but also and above all more than one socialist, and not the least: one will become Prime Minister (Lionel Jospin), the the other First Secretary of the PS (Jean-Christophe Cambadélis) or even the one who today leads France Insoumise, the driving force of the New Popular Front, a certain Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
“Pierrot de Montreuil”
Pierre Broussel is the story of a name. Several, in fact. He preferred his other “blase”, more all-purpose, “Lambert”, when his first friends did not call him “Pierrot de Montreuil”. And to escape his adversaries or the National Security police officers of the pre-war Ministry of the Interior who hunted down communists and monitored trade unionists, he used his pseudonyms “Andréi”, “Lejeune” or “Témansi”. Pierre Broussel is the story of a partisan force, the OCI, “conceived like an army, formed like a bloc, united by the conviction drawn from sacred texts that the other is an enemy, or worse still a traitor – hence the deemed legitimate use of violence,” writes François Bazin. An organization of small-footed Trotskyist revolutionaries, a confidential but rich movement of active activists convinced for decades that the “Big Evening” must take place the next day – or perhaps it was the day after tomorrow? His supporters today are still waiting for him. And this most confusing leader, “a man of principle and a maneuverer, a dogmatist and a tactician,” recalls Bazin. He was entirely devoted to the revolutionary ideal to which he devoted his existence and this very ideal authorized his accommodations, notably in the trade union world.”
A spy named Lionel
Pierre Broussel is the story of missed appointments. In May 1968, he refused the protest movement which nevertheless linked workers and students. The affair is blamed on him internally. So, he purges those who criticize him, regardless of whether they were his relatives, his friends, his supporters, his devoted activists. Loyalty is an unalterable principle. Jean-Luc Mélenchon will draw inspiration from it for his purges, that of 2019 during the European elections and the most recent, which targeted Alexis Corbière, Raquel Garrido and others at the dawn of the legislative elections of 2024. François Bazin shatters a myth, largely maintained by Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself: the two men never really knew each other. The fact remains that the leader of LFI resembles him so much, in the method rather than the line, in the way of managing his political shop in the manner of “a small boss, paternalistic and sometimes cantankerous, who certainly could hit hard, writes François Bazin, but who generally left it to others to do the cleaning.”
The other big missed appointment will be 1981. Because if Jean-Luc Mélenchon is neither his heir nor his mole in the PS, the same cannot be said of Lionel Jospin… The “Lambertist” past of the great Lionel has fascinated generations of socialists as well as journalists. In short, was the former Prime Minister, candidate in the presidential election, one of these aspiring far-left revolutionaries, a sort of Lambert’s mole, a secret agent infiltrated into the ranks of the PS, before taking the reins, then land at the top of the state, at Matignon? François Bazin finally lifts the veil. In 1972, Lambert took charge of being Lionel Jospin’s “dealing officer” and actually sent him on a mission to the PS where he climbed the ranks. The two continue to meet for debriefings, not at OIC headquarters but in “discreet apartments.” At the PS, some close to François Mitterrand are surprised by the meteoric rise of young Jospin. The future president brushes it off: “leave it to me.” Mitterrand knew nothing of the young man’s pedigree. Lambert plasters his hat.
François Bazin reports that the latter even took credit for Lionel Jospin’s media success in April 1980 in “Dossiers de l’screen” against the communist Georges Marchais (whom Lambert hated). The legend, pushed by Lambert himself, says that he would have said to Lionel Jospin the famous reply to Marchais: “I, this morning, I was giving lessons to my students. You, it’s been a long time since you were no longer went to the factory.” But when Lionel Jospin becomes head of the “pink house”, Lambert loses his Latin: has the mole turned around, becoming the first of the socialists and no longer really a Trotskyist? We are on the eve of 1981, of the victory of François Mitterrand in which Lambert will participate, and not really on the eve of the revolution. The impetuous Lionel Jospin will have made only one career choice that cannot be refused, and Mitterrand will have used Lambert as much as he will have trapped him. Smart, smart and a half.
With The Red GodfatherFrançois Bazin, formerly head of the political service of the New Observertells, through a book as fascinating as it is colorful, rich and documented, the epic of a little-known politician, guardian of the proletarian and revolutionary temple that has now disappeared, who lived through the 20th century and its upheavals : totalitarianism, decolonization, the fall of liberal democracies and the rise of religious extremism. Pierre Broussel, known as Lambert, is also the story of a century of the left in France.
*The Red Godfather. Pierre Lambert, the secret lives of a revolutionaryby François Bazin, Plon
.