Notebook: Alfred Rosmer (1877-1964)

On May 6 died in Paris in his 87th year Alfred Rosmer, a revolutionary of irreproachable character. He was not well known to the present generation of radicals, but to those who lived through the events of the First World War and of the ’20s and ’30s he was an impressive example of integrity and independence. Active in the pre-1914 anarcho- syndicalist movement, one of the few radicals who resisted the chauvinism that overwhelmed the French left in 1914, and who helped to found the 3rd International, he resigned as editor of L’Humanite in 1924 and broke with the Communist party in protest against the bureaucratic turn of the movement. He remained loyal to his socialist convictions and continued to write as a thoughtful observer of world politics and critic of the left.

Rosmer was an editor of the Vie Ouvriere (1910-1921) and later of the Revolution Proletarienne (1925-1964), the organ of the old syndicalist militants who had become...