France-Observateur in British and Labour circles: democratic principles and socialist solidarities

In the wake of the uprising in Algeria in November 1954, censorship was established under state-of-emergency legislation on 3 April 1955, and extended in the decree of 17 March 1956. Bourdet’s most prominent appearance in the British media can probably be dated to the end of that month, after his arrest in Paris on charges of attempting to demoralise the French army. Featuring on the front page of The Herald Express on 31 March, the event was discussed the following day in The Observer and reported on the BBC. Bourdet, wrote the British journalist Nora Beloff, ‘was charged by a military tribunal for saying in his paper the same things about the horror and futility of the Algerian war as the Socialist leaders themselves had said during the recent election campaign’.¹³ The Times noted that the arrest of someone ‘with an exceptionally fine war record, met with the open disapproval of many people, including those who are by no means in agreement with M. Bourdet’s political views’.¹⁴ For Tribune, the weekly paper of the left of the Labour Party, Bourdet’s arrest was a ‘threat to French democracy and Socialism’: ‘If we value our own liberty’, the editorial added, ‘we cannot stay silent while the right to print is crushed across the Channel’.¹⁵ As France-Observateur argued, reprinting extracts from Tribune and The Economist, Bourdet’s arrest was damaging France’s reputation across the British political spectrum.¹⁶

By 1956, Bourdet was a well-known commentator for the British media, and his contacts in the anticolonial Union of Democratic Control (UDC) believed their relations to have been monitored.¹⁷ Even before France-Observateur was first seized in September 1955, Bourdet had featured in The Guardian in January 1955, as one of the French intellectuals, alongside François Mauriac, denouncing police brutality and torture in Algeria.¹⁸ A translated version of his article, ‘Your Gestapo in Algeria’ of 13 January 1955, was circulated by the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), ahead of the publication of a short article – ‘Torture by France’ – in Tribune two weeks after the Guardian piece.¹⁹ In the immediate post-war years, Bourdet was a regular guest on the BBC Third Programme, launched in September 1946 and described by art critic and wartime BBC producer Edward Sackville-West as ‘the greatest educative and civilising force England has known since the secularisation of the theatre in the sixteenth century’.²⁰ Beside discussing French foreign policy and international affairs, Bourdet took a direct interest in British politics, in his endeavours to promote world government. In February 1949, he spoke at a meeting of ‘The crusade for world government’ with the Liberal peer William Beveridge, and was involved in organising the non-Communist Peace congress in London in April 1949. In contact with the Labour MP Henry Usborne, for whom an international legislature charged with defining and enforcing international law was the only path to permanent world peace, Bourdet also spoke at a World Government meeting in Usborne’s Birmingham constituency in February 1950, where attendees sought to put ‘peace before party’.²¹ On issues of peace and world government, Bourdet was also in contact with Ritchie Calder and Brockway, who also liaised with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and with peace militant Harold Field in the United States.²²

Key in these endeavours, for Bourdet, was the British Labour Party, whose landslide victory in 1945 made it a central force in European socialist circles, as shown by the negotiations for the revival of the Socialist International after the war.²³ Even by 1950, when Labour’s foreign policy under Ernest Bevin had become firmly Atlanticist, Labour was seen as the best possible government to have in London. Speaking in support of Usborne ahead of the February 1950 general election, Bourdet stated: ‘If Labour loses, the Right wing in France will have tremendous impetus. This does not mean more Conservatives but more Fascist organisations in power. On the other hand the Left wing will go Communists [sic]’.²⁴ On polling day, The Daily Herald published Bourdet’s ‘Your vote and peace’:²⁵ ‘the course Britain takes today’, he argued, ‘will have immediate consequences on the peace of the world’, predicting that a Conservative victory would bolster political extremes in Germany and France. This faith in Labour’s importance persisted well into the 1950s, even after the electoral defeat of 1951, and particularly after the formation of the Keep Left movement and Aneurin Bevan’s resignation over the Korean war. Bevan’s support for a third way encouraged Bourdet – and ‘all the real socialists in France, whether they belong or not to the Socialist Party’, he told Labour MP Ian Mikardo in May 1951 – in his own support for an alternative vision of Europe. With Bevan heralding ‘a new orientation of socialism all over the world’,²⁶ France-Observateur translated ‘Keep Left’ for its readers in October 1951. Bourdet regretted what he saw as a Labour tendency to focus primarily on British affairs, wishing the ‘Bevan bomb’ had ‘exploded sooner!’²⁷ But as he later explained, the Bevanites did demonstrate that despite the existence of Stalin’s police regime, there was no need to fear Soviet aggression and that Western socialism was mistaken in supporting Atlanticist policies and the over-armament that went with it. ‘For a long time, when foreigners asked what our political orientation was,’ Bourdet continued, ‘many of us would reply: “Something akin to a French bevanism”’.²⁸

Bevan was kept informed of what France-Observateur published, rectifying the narrative on Labour when required – as in 1953, when he objected to a story that he would become Foreign Secretary if Labour won the election.²⁹ Shared opposition to the European Defence Community (EDC) led to further collaboration in 1954. After discussions with Labour MP Richard Crossman, Bourdet was hopeful that Labour ‘could make French socialists understand a little more clearly’ that the EDC could ‘gradually sever’ Franco-British links and was thus damaging.³⁰ He also liaised – as did French socialist Lucien Weitz, Tribune’s main correspondent in France – with Norman Mackenzie of the New Statesman and Nation, Jo Richardson, Mikardo’s secretary, and several MPs in the Labour left, including Jennie Lee and Konni Zilliacus.³¹ There again, the press stimulated cross-Channel relations. At Foot’s request, Bourdet gave Tribune a detailed French perspective on the dangers of German rearmament – ‘Why Frenchmen are afraid of EDC’ – which Foot called ‘absolutely first-class’.³² Simultaneously, Bourdet benefited from the insights of friends such as the Labour MP William Warbey, for whom Pierre Mendès France, as the man who had taken France out of Indochina, had the necessary clout to influence ideas and events in Britain – and, as rather seemed to be happening, to scupper anti-rearmament forces entirely.³³ Writing in France-Observateur after the Labour Congress of September 1954, Bourdet concluded that Mendès France’s favourable attitude to German rearmament had bolstered the Labour right.³⁴ Overall, Bevan remained a sort of guiding light for a European third way. As Bourdet put it in March 1955, ‘Bevan is not only British’:³⁵ it was his pressure on the Labour leadership which guaranteed parliamentary scrutiny of Conservative policies and held them in check. Bevan’s French contacts and their audience therefore saw him as a definite influence on decision-making in international affairs. Extracts from Bevan’s major speeches on international policy featured in France-Observateur, with a real exegesis sometimes provided. This was the case for his speech against the nuclear bomb in March 1955 – ‘a capital document’ and ‘a historical speech’.³⁶ A long article by Andrew Roth,³⁷ the left-wing American journalist who had become a prominent figure on London’s media scene, explained to French readers that only Bevan could unite the more ‘intellectual’ and the more ‘sentimental’ left-wing of the party. After Labour’s new defeat in 1955, Bourdet announced that Bevan was ‘not guilty’, as Roth stressed that on international affairs, British voters had not been given a choice, given Labour’s Atlanticist policies under Clement Attlee.³⁸ After Bevan lost to Hugh Gaitskell for the post of party treasurer, France-Observateur and Tribune held joint copyright of Bevan’s article ‘La signification de mon combat’, published in October 1955.³⁹

Connections also stemmed from the anticolonial networks that had emerged in the interwar years. K. M. Pannikar, India’s Ambassador to China, wrote for France-Observateur, while French socialists like Marceau Pivert and Jean Rous kept themselves closely informed of developments in Britain. In 1953, Bourdet’s letter to The Observer, after the French Embassy questioned critical reporting on North Africa, was never published because Rous’s own protest had arrived first.⁴⁰ But his letters were published on other occasions, as when he argued to The Guardian in December 1953 (optimistically perhaps) that for many in France, ‘the real way to deal with Communists in Western Europe is to solve social and colonial problems and not to throw people into gaol, which has never solved anything’.⁴¹ When North Africa gained prominence in British news, Bourdet became one of the key providers of information, notably for the MCF, as shown by correspondence with its chairman, Brockway, and its secretary, Douglas Rogers, in November 1954.⁴² Articles in France-Observateur (including René Capitant on Indochina and Gilles Martinet on Algeria) were promptly offered as useful sources of information, although Bourdet also indicated a wider range of publications to his British contacts.

Speaking out against the war in Algeria: Bourdet’s editorial contacts, between transnational action and national reflection

When questioned by the police in 1956, Bourdet praised the political analysis of the New Statesman and Nation as a model,⁴³ and in a later letter to Rous, the ability of the Daily Herald and News Chronicle to connect informed writers and the wider public.⁴⁴ But in 1956, it was undoubtedly Tribune that was used in France-Observateur to argue that French policy in Algeria was damaging to the reputation of France, of French socialism and, by extension, of Europe and European socialism in the rest of the world. In June 1956, France-Observateur published sections of Tribune’s article ‘Will Mollet never learn?’, which argued that Mollet’s policy would result in ‘another Indochina’ and considered Bourdet’s ‘criticisms [to be] no stronger than those frequently made in this country of the British government’s policy in Cyprus’.⁴⁵ Simultaneously, Tribune was focusing on repression in European colonies, notably in Kenya and Cyprus, with the MCF organising a large rally in Trafalgar Square in May.⁴⁶ Editorial circulations show a real attempt to form a joined-up front against violations. A photograph of the Cyprus rally featured alongside a long article by Weitz on Algeria in mid-May, and Bevan gave Tribune and France-Observateur joint copyright of an article on military bases in Singapore, Cyprus, Aden and Gibraltar as part of a wider Western strategy, which argued that denying political and social rights to the people living in these territories was a direct threat to international peace.⁴⁷

Editorial cooperation intensified in the autumn of 1956 over Egypt and Algeria. On 13 September, France-Observateur published a double page entitled ‘English socialism against the adventure’, with articles by Bevan and Crossman, and a piece by Roth. The following day, Tribune published Weitz’s ‘When Socialists become small town jingoes’, linking the Suez expedition and the Algerian war.⁴⁸ ‘Mollet attacks free speech’, Tribune titled on 5 October, charging in its international section: ‘Mollet tries to gag French socialists’. A week later, these statements were relayed to French readers, and the end of Tribune’s article calling for socialist resistance ‘all over the world’, translated in full. France-Observateur also noted that Bevan was now Labour’s treasurer, with Foot openly talking of a Bevanite strategy. France-Observateur concluded that Weitz’s contributions to Tribune – and Alexander Werth’s contributions to Reynold News – were ‘an important link between the French left and the English left. Trying to suppress it is either cynical or stupid’.⁴⁹ The following day, Tribune quoted Bourdet in France-Observateur: ‘I hope for a Socialist recovery – but I no longer believe that it can be done except by the elimination of Mollet and his blind supporters’.⁵⁰ With the arrest of the FLN leaders on 22 October, France-Observateur noted criticism by The Economist and The Times, but Tribune remained its prime contact.⁵¹ On 2 and 9 November, Bourdet was published in Tribune. ‘The Mollet machine,’ he argued, in terms he knew the left and right of Labour would appreciate, ‘based on bureaucrats who have no other political idea than anti-Communism, and supported by a large majority of card-carriers can effectively stifle the voice of the real militants’.⁵² ‘Whether Mollet realises it or not,’ Bourdet continued, ‘the generals and some of the Ministers are plotting to use general war against the Arabs as a means of establishing a dictatorship in France.’ This meant that ‘the best hopes’ of preventing undemocratic trends abroad and at home was for British Labour to realise that it benefited from ‘a huge wave of sympathy and admiration inside the French Left’ and ‘make things gradually uneasy for Mollet’.⁵³ In a further piece in France-Observateur, Roth claimed that Mollet’s policy in Suez and Algeria had united Labour against him.⁵⁴ As Claude Estier put it, Labour delegates to the Socialist International, Hugh Gaitskell, Morgan Phillips and Sam Watson, were far from being ‘extremists’ and all three had supported German rearmament. But all three considered that Mollet was being helped by the French right to conduct un-socialist policies.⁵⁵

The decision of the SFIO leadership in December 1956 to suspend Weitz, following his article of 14 September in Tribune, only encouraged the paper’s critical stance. Foot, Weitz noted in France-Observateur, had called the Suez expedition ‘a crime against the world’ – which Weitz translated as ‘crime against humanity’, thereby undoubtedly adding to the discontent of SFIO leaders.⁵⁶ Given the use of censorship in several British territories, including Kenya, Weitz’s picture of British press freedom was overly positive. But personal correspondence nonetheless confirms that left-wing publications in Britain were seen as useful channels, for British anticolonialists to provide an international perspective to their readers, and for French militants to denounce French and SFIO policy in Algeria to a wider audience, intensifying international pressure. On 4 January 1957, Basil Davidson published in Tribune what France-Observateur described the following week, as it gave Davidson its front page, as ‘the most scathing attack ever launched by a socialist publication against Guy Mollet’. For Tribune to publish this, the French editorial team added, ‘a large majority of Labour militants [must] share the opinion of Basil Davidson’.⁵⁷ The article was very much Davidson’s, but the material had in fact been partly provided by Bourdet at Davidson’s request in mid-October.⁵⁸ Perhaps in recognition of this, Davidson wrote to Bourdet on the day of publication, pleased at such a ‘broadside’ against Mollet.⁵⁹ Because it was identified as one of the major motives behind the Suez expedition, French policy in Algeria was given greater scrutiny in British anticolonial circles. The UDC asked Bourdet for a pamphlet, because after Suez ‘we feel it is very important for the public of this country to understand the type of policy with which the British government is aligning itself’.⁶⁰ While Bourdet had no time to write it himself, he sent the MCF and the UDC a wide range of documentation,⁶¹ from Pierre Henri Simon’s Contre la torture to newspaper clippings, journals and a letter from the dean of the law faculty in Algiers, Jacques Peyrega, after the death in custody of his former student Ali Boumendjel.⁶² Bourdet clarified the context of these publications, the politics and influence of the authors in France (Témoignage Chrétien, for instance, had a circulation of 80,000–90,000, was politically liberal but ‘strictly Catholic’ in all other matters and had been able, unlike France-Observateur, to publish long extracts of a Catholic pamphlet against torture in Algeria without censorship).⁶³

Contacts stimulated plans for a fairer international order. Davidson, who spent time in Paris, was also interested in socialist plans for a neutral belt in Europe,⁶⁴ and put Bourdet in touch with Labour MP Barbara Castle (although there is no evidence that she produced an article for France-Observateur).⁶⁵ Bourdet was not always the main point of contact. He put Michael Scott of the Africa Bureau in touch with Robert Barrat in May 1957, ahead of Scott’s visit to Paris.⁶⁶ But it was Robert Barrat who forwarded Brockway’s plans for peace in Israel, based on the recognition of the armistice border of 1948 as the condition to all negotiations,⁶⁷ and Brockway himself gained many of his insights into French politics from Pivert. But when the group of young socialists around Raphael Samuel formed the Universities and Left Review (ULR) after the Soviet repression in Central Europe in 1956, which depleted the British Communist Party, and the imperialist venture of Suez, Bourdet appealed to those wanting ‘to recruit students and dons to the Labour Party’, while ‘stimulat[ing] socialist thought at the University’. Esprit was mentioned, but as Stuart Hall later recalled of his time in the first new left, Bourdet ‘personified the attempt, after the war, to open a “third way” in European politics’.⁶⁸

The circulation of press articles across the Channel was facilitated by personal visits and public events, advertised beyond left-wing circles. When Bourdet spoke at the ULR Club at the Royal Hotel in Woburn Place in central London in April 1957, The Guardian drew attention to it.⁶⁹ In its publicity material, ULR noted that Bourdet would speak in English and ‘give many details on the repression in Algeria, on the character of the anti-colonial movement in France and on the effect of the war on the French left-wing parties – details not otherwise available in England’.⁷⁰ Other ULR speakers in April–June, at meetings which gathered 150–600 people,⁷¹ included the British academics E. P. Thompson (who had left the British Communist Party in 1956) and Eric Hobsbawm (who had not), as well as Doris Lessing and Basil Davidson.⁷² While there is no estimation of numbers for the meeting with Bourdet, the secretary of the Harrow West Constituency Labour Party still remembered the ‘privilege’ of attending it a year later,⁷³ and Samuel wrote of a ‘splendid meeting’, telling Bourdet ‘it was an indication of the rebirth of internationalism in Britain that people found your meeting so helpful and so moving’.⁷⁴ By then, Bourdet was already in touch with the Cambridge University Labour Club, but the ULR conference triggered the interest of the director of extra-mural studies at the University of Glasgow, and of the Oxford Majlis, who invited Bourdet in conjunction with the Oxford Socialist Club.⁷⁵ Samuel also started planning ULR lectures in seven university towns, to coincide with Bourdet’s attendance of the International Society for Socialist Studies meeting organised by G. D. H. Cole after the summer. There was particular interest from Nottingham, with Pat Jordan liaising with the ULR; Birmingham, with the cooperation of the Birmingham and District Council for African Affairs and the support of Labour MP Tony Benn; Hull, with the involvement of the university’s Labour Society and local Labour Party; and Liverpool, with the input of Stan Rushton, who like Jordan had left the Communist Party in 1956.⁷⁶ The Liverpool meeting, held on 22 November 1957, was advertised on the front page of the local paper, with Bourdet sharing the platform with UDC’s Mervyn Jones.⁷⁷

In the short term, Bourdet’s conference at Woburn Place was seized by the MCF to collect signatures for a protest letter to Guy Mollet.⁷⁸ On 2 May, France-Observateur published a facsimile of Tribune’s anti-Mollet front page, while the same issue of Tribune gave harrowing extracts from Des rappelés témoignent, in which young Frenchmen recalled for military service wrote of the abuses they had witnessed or perpetrated.⁷⁹ Labour’s Daily Herald also published some of the French soldiers’ letters and criticised the fact that France-Observateur had been seized for printing them.⁸⁰ Foot denounced censorship as part of ‘The Mollet touch’ on 4 May,⁸¹ and on 9 May France-Observateur published his ‘What is Mollet afraid of?’ For Foot, introduced to French readers as a British MP and editor of Tribune, France-Observateur was being attacked for publishing the truth. His conclusion was brutal: even if Mollet could temporarily hinder Algerian nationalism and enforce party discipline, he would ‘never manage to kill socialist faith in freedom, and particularly in the freedom of the press without which all other freedoms would be derisory’.⁸² The next day, Bourdet dominated Tribune’s front page, with the title: ‘I attack Mollet’s methods – then he throws me in jail!’ ‘Our best defence’, Tribune’s readers were told, ‘is the wave of protests coming from abroad, especially from Britain’.⁸³

The views of Foot, Davidson and others in the left-wing press were not, however, dominant in Labour. Bevan’s support for the SFIO minority on Algeria created a near diplomatic incident at the Toulouse Congress in June 1957,⁸⁴ but overall, the Labour leadership remained cautious. When Bourdet was arrested again in April 1957, Foot’s hope ‘to see Sir William Haley [The Times’s editor] and the Labour Party joining to protest against this menacing attack on freedom’⁸⁵ remained unfulfilled. The formation of ULR was a promising development, particularly given the involvement of the Jamaican-born Stuart Hall, whom Bourdet and Weitz had previously met in Paris, and ULR’s interest in ‘more theoretical material on the economic background to the current struggle, and more material on the sociology of the French colonists’, with Samuel specifically requesting issues of Présence africaine.⁸⁶ And yet Bourdet was struck by the absence of major political figures – there was no Bevan, no Foot. He was also aware that Bevan’s interest in Algeria was limited. The Labour Party Conference in Brighton on 30 September–3 October 1957 partly confirmed this. Bourdet was a guest speaker at the Tribune and the MCF and ULR meetings on 1 and 2 October, the first time he had attended the party conference since 1954. His friend Mikardo had given him advance notice, stressing that the ‘Labour movement here is in desperate need of a bit of information and education about what’s happening in France and what’s happening in Algeria’.⁸⁷ As Bourdet told his audience, and wrote subsequently in Tribune, the violations at the heart of France’s Algeria policy and the resulting damage to domestic institutions, were ‘not only our business, but also yours.… each country’s policy affects the other’. But active pressure, he stressed,

must be a constant pressure, and not only a few short editorials. It must come from the rank and file as well as from the Executive. The British reluctance to be seen meddling in other people’s affairs should be discarded here. After all, this is an international problem – and what is Socialism if it is not international Socialism?⁸⁸

Bevan himself had been discussing the contradictions between international socialism and the European project, which he saw as ‘an escapist conception in which the play of market forces will take the place of political responsibility’.⁸⁹ Bourdet was therefore hoping for a conversation with him during the Congress, even more so after Bevan stunned his audience by opposing a motion on unilateral nuclear disarmament, arguing that without proper plans in place, it would create a diplomatic shambles and increase international instability. Why, Bourdet asked Bevan over lunch, had he allowed nuclear issues, however important they were, to dominate, when they were likely to lead to passionate – rather than constructive – debates?⁹⁰ Bourdet does not recount what answer he got from Bevan, who never answered (either?) a list of questions which Bourdet forwarded in early October via Foot, hoping to print an interview in France-Observateur.⁹¹ Bourdet’s request to Barbara Castle to intercede, specifying that Bevan could ignore some questions and answer concisely, also failed to deliver.⁹²

If time constraints played a part in Bevan’s silence, he had also begun to give exclusivity to L’Express – with a major interview published in February 1957 – after pressure from the editors.⁹³ Until then, K. S. Karol, L’Express’s London correspondent who helped arrange Bevan’s personal trips to France – avoiding the French SFIO members Bevan disliked – had acted as a contact for both French papers.⁹⁴ He too spoke at a ULR meeting at the Left Book Centre in Soho on 1 May 1957, on ‘France in crisis’, attended by Mohamed Kellou of the small FLN London bureau and a member of the Muslim Committee for Algeria formed in 1956.⁹⁵ Ahead of the Labour conference, Bourdet had written to Foot to make the case for France-Observateur. Even though L’Express was also critical of Mollet’s policies, Bourdet explained, only France-Observateur was ‘consistently anti-capitalist’ and, more importantly, supported ending, rather than merely reforming, the empire.⁹⁶ Bourdet’s arguments, and reminder that they had been the first to publish Keep Left literature in translation, failed. But Bourdet’s reservations about Bevan were voiced in France-Observateur even before his interview questions were left unanswered. In their Labour Conference report, ‘Is Bevan still a Bevanite?’, Bourdet and Roth criticised Bevan’s abandonment of unilateral disarmament as political opportunism. In Tribune, Bourdet saw Bevan ‘much more like a statesman than a polemist’ and noted that his audience ‘responded well to his restraint and gravity’. But in France-Observateur, Bourdet and Roth concluded that his stand was tactically wrong, because grassroots voters were unlikely to follow him, and because he had no intellectually matured theoretical or practical plan to offer instead.⁹⁷ There is no evidence that this upset Bevan, but Bourdet was aware of the potential impact of questioning Bevan’s faithfulness. Writing to Castle the next day, he stressed that he wanted

to force Nye to bring out with your help (or to support) some really worked-out proposals for a positive foreign policy. On the Middle East and Germany for instance, the Executive’s proposals are rather vague and sheepish (although the intentions are good) like what used to come out of the SFIO before it became national-socialist.⁹⁸

The decision of the Labour executive not to send any observer to the first Congress of Bourdet’s Union de la gauche socialiste (UGS) in December 1957 was an additional disappointment. As he wrote to his friend Mikardo, he read UGS delegates private letters of support from British MPs ‘to prevent disgust’ against Labour – a strong term, clearly heartfelt.

Intersecting circles of friends: a decreasing place for Europe?

In its issue of 10 October 1957, France-Observateur included a roundtable of foreign correspondents: ‘Les Français acceptent-ils la guerre d’Algérie?’ The panel consisted of Luthar Ruehl of Die Spiegel, R. Kornecki of Warsaw’s Tribuna Ludu, Kamalesh Banerji of Amrita Bazaar Patrika, George Williamson of The Wall Street Journal and, representing the British press, Nora Beloff of The Observer. While Beloff was an obvious choice as the Paris-based correspondent of a nuanced paper, the round table also reflected the internationalisation of the war, the increasingly effective diplomacy of the FLN and mounting critical reporting in the foreign press. By the spring of 1958, the Anglo-American good offices mission after the French bombing of Sakiet made the headlines, while the high-profile trial of the young FLN militant Djamila Bouhired led to public and private appeals from Britons. A turning point for Bourdet seems to have been the publication of an article in The Economist on 19 April 1958, which France-Observateur reproduced in part the following week. The article was important, French readers were told, because the conservative Economist, which ‘reflected the views of most of the City, the Foreign Office and the Conservative Party, and influenced these circles and this party’, ‘now joined and perhaps outdid’ the Labour press, the Manchester Guardian and The Observer ‘in its condemnation of France’s aberration’.⁹⁹ Written after the French National Assembly had rejected Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba offer to mediate, the Economist article concluded (and France-Observateur reprinted):

As time passes, the chances increase of either a right-wing coup or a ‘popular front’ which would admit the Communists to a share of the power. The Americans have sown money and gathered abuse, without securing any progress towards a solution. What France needs is not gentle persuasion and dollar anaesthetics. It needs the dream to be broken.¹⁰⁰

Less than a month later, the coup launched in Algiers by the supporters of a ‘French Algeria’ raised fears of a military dictatorship in France and Algeria, including with the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle. The details of the coup, and reactions to it in Britain have been studied elsewhere.¹⁰¹ What is of interest here is how the circulation of articles across the left-wing press in France and Britain shows the tensions between international solidarities, common concerns in managing the end of the European colonial empires, and the strategic, pragmatic need to take national specificities into account. On 29 May, France-Observateur published long extracts from The Daily Herald’s reports of 17–27 May, which emphasised the dangers posed by the return of de Gaulle and the fears that he might support the military rebels in Algiers.¹⁰² In early July, Tribune printed an article by Claude Roy, which the authorities had censored in France-Observateur and which argued that only a popular front could repeal the threat of fascism in France, concluding: ‘our choice does not lie between the guillotine of Algiers and the gallows of Budapest’.¹⁰³ The issue featured an interview with the FLN leader Krim Belkacem, first given to L’Express, and an article on die-hard officers in Algeria. Tribune remained a key ally, but France-Observateur showed that criticism came from across the political spectrum, with a series of translated pieces about de Gaulle’s visits to Algeria from The Guardian, The Times and The Spectator.¹⁰⁴ The selection process tended to stress misgivings, consciously or not. The Times’s article, for instance, was less critical than suggested, with the paper waiting to see the results of the tour.¹⁰⁵ But there was certainly a wider press interest in the events taking shape in France, notably de Gaulle’s speech on 4 September to introduce the new constitution of the Fifth Republic, on which France and its empire would vote on 28 September, and the anti-Gaullist marches that accompanied it. Bourdet would also have been aware of other limits: E.P. Thompson, for instance, assured him that his article for the New Reasoner was well received but acknowledged its small circulation.¹⁰⁶ In France-Observateur, other outlets were highlighted: The Observer, which noted that de Gaulle’s enthusiastic audience on 4 September was carefully selected; BBC and Daily Telegraph correspondents, who faced police brutality in Paris; and the thoroughness of Italian – rather than British – reporting was appreciated.¹⁰⁷

Simultaneously, some editing became more influenced by national priorities during the May crisis. The passages edited out of Bevan’s Tribune article (‘De Gaulle’) for France-Observateur are a case in point. The first two major omissions concerned de Gaulle’s ‘pompous arrogance so egocentric and so blind, that it is hard to believe that the French people will turn to him even in their present extremity’; and more significantly perhaps, Bevan’s direct reference to the threat of ‘civil war’.¹⁰⁸ The second set of omissions concerned the similarities and complexities of colonies of settlement. ‘In what way and at what pace can the colonial powers adjust themselves to the demands of subject peoples for liberty and national independence?’, Bevan asked in Tribune, stressing constraints posed by ‘emotional overtones’, ‘racial animosities’ and ‘property interests’ in all settler colonies – Algeria, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Several reasons could explain the omissions. First, space: the focus was the immediate crisis, not a wider discussion of colonial policy and its intricacies. On de Gaulle, despite his misgivings, Bourdet gave his international audience a more nuanced picture than what Bevan had offered. De Gaulle, he wrote in Africa South, ‘is more realistic than the Socialist politicians, and … understands that the hour of independence of the North African peoples has sounded’.¹⁰⁹ At the ‘Cry Europe’ meeting organised by the ULR Club on 14 July 1958 at St Pancras Town Hall, Bourdet argued that de Gaulle was not a fascist but ‘a man of the seventeenth century, an autocrat who has just taught himself democracy, as a person might teach himself mathematics when he is old’.¹¹⁰ Also absent from France-Observateur’s version of Bevan’s article was the important disclaimer that ‘[t]here is no justification for smug self-righteousness on the part of the British people as they hear the news from France. Cyprus, Malta, Kenya all point in the same direction, and pose the same problem.’ Consequently, French readers were not aware that Bevan claimed no superiority, nor were they encouraged to think about the broader picture of violence and repression across the European empires. This might have been to maintain attention on the unparalleled dangers posed to French democracy. But it also showed that events in Britain’s colonial territories – Cyprus, Malaysia, Malta and Oman – and South Africa only featured occasionally in France-Observateur. This does not mean that Bourdet was not involved. He corresponded with leading figures against apartheid, including Michael Scott and the South African unionist Solly Sachs, exiled in Britain since 1953 and who had met Bourdet in Paris, with Audrey Jupp of the UDC a common acquaintance. Bourdet had in fact hoped that on apartheid, Sachs could produce an article ‘stressing the analogies and differences (of course, as far as you are acquainted with it) with the situation in North Africa, with some photos and about 3,000 words length’.¹¹¹ As mentioned above, Bourdet contributed to Africa South, the journal edited by the South African Ronald Segal, also in exile in Britain since 1953, and produced a detailed assessment of the impact of the Algerian war on both global and French politics.¹¹²

Socialist solidarities should also be considered in the light of other networks, with which they intersected. On Algeria, Bourdet corresponded with the Society of Friends. In 1955, he was contacted by Eric Baker, the general secretary of the National Peace Council in London, which had the support of the Quakers and several churches,¹¹³ and by Earlham College in late 1956, to talk about Algeria to US students enrolled on a Study in France programme.¹¹⁴ But on refugee relief, the contacts of British Friends were primarily the Moroccan and Tunisian Embassies in London, and various delegations at the United Nations through the American Friends Service Council Conference for Diplomats. In December 1957, Charles Read and George Whiteman of Friends House met Mohamed Kellou, the FLN’s representative in London, to discuss ways of assisting the Red Crescent’s work in Tunisia.¹¹⁵ Thanks to US Quaker Howard Reed, contacts were made with Cecil Hourani, Bourguiba’s personal assistant, while the British Quaker Horace Alexander facilitated access to Tayeb Slim, the Tunisian ambassador in London.¹¹⁶ A friend of the late Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander had been involved in negotiations for India’s independence after 1945 and was in India as an observer at the time of partition, taking a particular interest in the plight of refugees.¹¹⁷ British Quakers were also in close contact with Oxfam, particularly after the creation of the UK Committee for Algerian Refugees in 1959.¹¹⁸

Much of the important information on Algeria came to British Friends from their American counterparts. But here again, the importance of Bourdet surfaces, as a direct contact for American Friends, who then passed on, commented and interpreted his thoughts back to Friends House in London. Proof of the importance Bourdet gave Quaker networks, one of the longest letters found in his correspondence in English was addressed to the American Friends Service Committee in the spring of 1957.¹¹⁹ In 1954, Bourdet had spoken to various Quaker groups on the war in Indochina and now wrote them ‘a very grave letter and one which, I hope will shock you, and shock you into action’. The war in Algeria, he argued as he sent the same French documentation he forwarded the MCF and ULR, was ‘much worse’ than Indochina:

It is worse because the amount of horror is greater; it is worse because the morale of the French people is being very rapidly corrupted; how deeply you will, I am afraid, witness before many years go by; it is also worse because although the problem ought to be easier to solve, the outlooks for a peaceful settlement are in fact, worse.

Bourdet emphasised ‘the general use of tortures and mass murder by the French Army’ as the worst aspect of a war waged ‘with the feeling that the nationalists must be eradicated and the clock of history turned back’ – a war in which Algerian nationalists were still being called ‘rebels’ or ‘terrorists’. American inaction, for Bourdet, was due to the absence of any real Communist threat in North Africa, but the threat would become real if the war led Soviet Russia to become involved. An American reaction, therefore, and a Quaker reaction against the corruption of young soldiers ‘taken in a kind of moral trap and begin[ning] to accept what used to disgust them’, was crucial. No hope would come from the SFIO. ‘More than anything else’, Bourdet wrote, ‘they fear being called “unpatriotic” as your soft-Liberals feared being called unamerican’.

In Paris, Bourdet was in regular contact with Wolf Mendl, the Quaker International Affairs Representative (QIAR), discussing the plight of refugees in May 1959¹²⁰ and international affairs more generally.¹²¹ Overall, Mendl found it easier to liaise with foreign diplomats and men like Bourdet than with the French Foreign Office, and valued the information he was able to obtain.¹²² Mendl was not Bourdet’s only contact. Josephine Noble, who managed the British Quaker small relief programme for North Africa from 1960, also knew Bourdet from her time working at the Friends International Centre in Paris after 1945. In 1957, she had participated in the silent anti-war demonstration he organised in Paris, attended a large information meeting in Ivry,¹²³ and the general assembly of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, held at the home of pacifists André and Magda Trocmé near Versailles. Bourdet was not systematically asked to speak on Algeria. When Noble invited him to address a weekly meeting of young diplomats and civil servants in Paris, she asked him to avoid the topic, after it had ‘provoked rather regrettable reactions’ at a recent meeting on ‘Black Africa’.¹²⁴ But Mendl does appear to have been a central intermediary with British Friends, as an interpreter of both the French and the French new left. After his conversation with Bourdet in March 1960, he wrote a long letter to British Friends about his ‘concern to lay this, the only “major war” in the world, upon the conscience of Friends’. Mendl did not ‘necessarily shar[e] Claude’s political approach’, found him ‘a little bit too dogmatic’, with ‘a Frenchman’s capacity to tie up everything very neatly into a logical package, without loose ends and imponderables trailing around’; but he also thought him ‘an honest, fearless man and a natural fighter’. It was therefore ‘quite certain’, in Mendl’s view, ‘that he is extremely well informed and that when his immediate propaganda zeal is not involved, his judgment is very good’. His conclusion was that on Algeria, he had ‘an excellent grasp of the problem’. British Friends learnt from Mendl that Bourdet had told Castle that the FLN had already made a number of ‘very substantial concessions’ and that any negotiation plans that entailed more concessions was bound to fail.¹²⁵ After lunching with Bourdet in November 1960, Mendl further told Alun Davies and Jo Noble in Britain that it was dangerous for the West to underplay the importance of the FLN, with negotiations the only road to peace.¹²⁶ Another critical observer for Mendl was Robert Barrat, who shared these concerns. ‘Both these conversations’, he wrote to British Friends, ‘were with men of the left who are extremely critical of de Gaulle. We must therefore take their judgment with some reserve, yet it would be foolish to overlook them.’¹²⁷ The later stages of the war shifted dynamics somewhat, with British Quakers investigating community development projects in North Africa from March 1961, rather than simply relief work.¹²⁸ By the time independence was celebrated in July 1962, Quaker plans in Algeria focused on cooperation with the Norwegian Friends, through the European Yearly Meetings. By September 1962, the presence of a QIAR for Paris was considered less important, because of direct contacts among European Quakers in North Africa, and given the availability of the American Centre Director, Louise H. Wood, to represent Friends at UNESCO.¹²⁹

In parallel, anticolonial work focused on contacts and insights from outside Europe. Davidson needed Bourdet to enlighten him on French politics, but had had his own access to Ahmed Ben Bella for an interview in 1955.¹³⁰ In the autumn of 1957, Bourdet asked Mikardo for an article on Algeria for France-Observateur: ‘not a technical paper but the sort of crude expostulation which a British Socialist would thunder out at the meeting of a World People Assembly if there was such a thing’.¹³¹ The resulting article, published in late November, was entitled ‘The Algerian war seen from Africa’, following Mikardo’s visit to Ghana and Nigeria.¹³² For Mikardo, whose concerns also included South Africa, British East and Central Africa, Algeria was the litmus test for the application of universal suffrage, and a source of ‘doubts, reservations, suspicions, in the minds of Africans’ about any free and equal partnership with Europe. ‘French repression in Algeria’, Mikardo concluded, ‘is not only morally indefensible and politically stupid in itself: it also causes criminal damage to all interracial cooperation’. His expostulation was rooted not so much in Labour discussions but in his conversations with Africans in Africa. He was inevitably the European mouthpiece for such views, but the intention was clearly to convince Europeans of all political shades to mark the shifts in Africa and acknowledge African agency. In Africa South, comments on Algeria still came predominantly from British or European or white contributors – Colin Legum, Tony Benn, Catherine Hoskins, Robert Barrat and Bourdet himself – but they emphasised their experience of pan-African conferences, in Accra in 1958 and Tunis in 1960.¹³³ European rights activists extended relations and developed new contacts outside their own national spheres.¹³⁴ Post-Bandung and post-Accra, they were also increasingly only one component of the global liberation networks of African militants, and altogether bypassed at times.¹³⁵

The travails of an alternative European socialist movement: political conceptions and practical limits

From late 1958, Bourdet’s relations with the Labour Party suffered from a series of strategic and political differences. First was Labour’s refusal to send observers to the congresses of Bourdet’s UGS and, after 1960, the newly formed Parti socialiste unifié (PSU).¹³⁶ Labour criticised the SFIO but made no serious move to have it suspended from the Socialist International, or to sponsor the other French (and European) socialist parties that were not already members. This was partly due to the fundamental difference highlighted by André Philip in France-Observateur between Catholic countries, notably France and Italy, where ‘the party has become a Church with its dogmas, rites and, above all its fellowship of brothers’; and Protestant countries, which preferred ‘an action-group party’, bringing together ‘the most different philosophical and religious opinions’.¹³⁷ Secondly, Labour’s defeat in the general election of 1959 was a practical blow to the hopes of renewing socialism in Europe. A survey by Stuart Hall and Andrew Roth, ‘Can Labourism renew itself?’, was published in France-Observateur, which also reprinted one of Bevan’s articles from News of the World. Bevan’s suggestion that defeat was due to the relative economic satisfaction of the under-30s and to general political timidity gave limited hope for the future.¹³⁸ Third, the obituary written by Bourdet in France-Observateur after Bevan died in July 1960 caused a major rift with Foot. Bourdet suggested that Bevan’s interest in international affairs came from domestic concerns and that Bevan ‘did not consider himself in the least to be the leader of a world political trend’. His impact on the French new left was not minimised but Bourdet also wrote of an individualistic man who disliked contradiction, theory and method, and who had given Labour no ‘complete political doctrine’.¹³⁹ What Bevan had nonetheless achieved, was to give enough Labour members the ‘courage’ to reflect on socialist principles, particularly the young people and the academics around the New Left Review (NLR), which merged Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner in 1960.

Bourdet was a sponsor of the NLR and knew the editorial team well, particularly Ralph Samuel, Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson. He spoke at its launch in London in late 1959¹⁴⁰ and publicised it in both France-Observateur and Tribune des peuples. Writing to Bourdet in November 1961, Samuel spoke of plans to ‘internationalise the journal’, beginning with ‘a full historical and theoretical and detailed discussion of the evolution of Asia, Africa and Latin America’, and taking France-Observateur, which had changed formats, as a model to give more space to international questions. Samuel also spoke of the change as ‘a “European” turn (though not less strongly against the half Europe of the EEC), so that we want to give much more space to articles and material from the continent’.¹⁴¹ Or as he put it to ULR’s contributor Michael Barrat Brown, the objective was that ‘Africa and Asia stopped being seen as “colonial” subjects, and America only as the heartland of NATO’.¹⁴² This was not, however, entirely new and several NLR members had more radical objectives. For Peter Worsley, reviewing Davidson’s Old Africa Rediscovered in the first issue of NLR in early 1960, ‘we can no longer do with a “world” history focussed only on a few European countries.… We cannot be satisfied that an intimate knowledge of French or German culture provides an adequate corrective to the notion of the superiority of Western Europe’.¹⁴³ History such as Davidson’s, he argued, should be part of the British school curriculum, particularly after Suez and the racist violence at Notting Hill. For Perry Anderson, a truly international perspective had methodological implications: as ‘any account of a colonial area is one account of the metropolitan country’, societies and economies could not be treated interchangeably, and a comparative perspective was essential.¹⁴⁴ There was therefore a conscious attempt to ‘translate’ national circumstances to a broader audience in the NLR, but also in publications like Africa South, with Bourdet writing explicitly for ‘the British reader’ and ‘anglo-saxon minds’.¹⁴⁵ This was not a specific call for a transnational or world movement, but an endeavour to analyse a national (French) situation to a national (British) public. By including a self-critical reflection on (anti-)colonialism, these editorial adaptations formed part of the incomplete but significant ‘epistemic reversal’ described by Christoph Kalter as characteristic of a New Radical Left.¹⁴⁶

At the turn of the 1960s, Bourdet remained a frequent speaker in Britain, on a wide range of topics rooted in his quest for peace and opposition to colonialism. He was an active supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), formed in 1958, and spoke at a CND conference in Manchester in May 1960, alongside the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the German theologian Heinz Kloppenburg and the Labour MPs Will Griffiths and Konni Zilliacus. He also joined a CND meeting in London in June, with Canon L. John Collins, J. B. Priestley and, again, Ehrenburg.¹⁴⁷ He continued to address students clubs and was involved in getting support for young Frenchmen who had refused to serve in Algeria and gone to Britain.¹⁴⁸ He was on the platform of the ‘Stop the War’ meeting organised by Tony Benn in central London on 24 June 1960. He spoke to the British media on regular occasions, although he did not always find the questions well informed.¹⁴⁹ He was on the radio in January and May 1961,¹⁵⁰ on ITV in December 1961, spoke on the situation in France in London in February 1962,¹⁵¹ and participated in the BBC’s special programme on de Gaulle in June 1962, which also debated the General’s place in the resistance and his immediate post-war career.¹⁵²

Back in 1958, Thompson had suggested to Bourdet that

if we are to educate public opinion in the direction of policies which break decisively with the whole NATO concept, it is of the utmost importance that we should discuss this question not as Englishmen but as Europeans. Are these opportunities for working towards a European ‘Bandung’? … Can we link the cause of peace with a new vision of a socialist community of nations in Europe?¹⁵³

By early 1961, plans were in place for a conference to be held in English and French in London on the main theme of NATO and neutralism, ‘the occasion – the first for some years – for an exchange of information and views about the reconstruction of the socialist movement in Europe’.¹⁵⁴ People, rather than parties, would be invited from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia; Spanish democrats in exile would also be represented. With Mervyn Jones’s contribution, invitations were officially issued by Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson of NLR, Richard Clements of Tribune, Nigel Harris of the National Association of Labour Student Organisations, John Horner of the Fire Brigades Union, Bert (H. W.) Wynn of the National Union of Mineworkers, and Professors Ritchie Calder (International Relations, Edinburgh) and Kenneth Muir (Literature, Liverpool). The suggested agenda had four themes: the rebuilding of European socialism; the Cold War and the division of Europe; Socialist perspectives for Europe; and practical proposals for future cooperation. Delegates would have their expenses in London covered, and Bourdet was enlisted by Samuel to help stimulate interest.¹⁵⁵ Bourdet had earlier liaised with Zilliacus and the Italian Socialist Party of Pietro Nenni on a European workshop with the British and German left, and with Jo Richardson, then secretary of the East-West Round Table Conference in early 1960.¹⁵⁶ He encouraged the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel to attend, to reinforce the intellectual, theoretical and technical endeavours of the NLR,¹⁵⁷ and advertised it with the PSU and the non-Communist left in France.¹⁵⁸ A few days before it was due to open, the conference was cancelled as several people pulled out, including Marten Lange and Gerhard Gleißberg from Die Andere Zeitung in Hamburg, due to parliamentary and electoral events. As Samuel conceded, it ‘seemed wiser not to hold a conference with inadequate representation’.¹⁵⁹

The failure of the conference may account for Bourdet’s uncharacteristically positive view of Britain’s application to the EEC in late July, which he described as ‘perhaps the last chance to avoid sclerosis’, despite his strong reservations and his prescient belief that de Gaulle was ‘the number one obstacle’ to British membership.¹⁶⁰ Britain and Scandinavia had ‘a role of progress and mediation’ to play, and Scandinavia featured regularly in his correspondence with Zilliacus, who was fluent in Swedish and liaised with the socialist parties there, in a bid to protect the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) (‘minus Portugal!’,¹⁶¹ as Zilliacus specified) and Commonwealth connections.¹⁶² But Bourdet did not think that the European Free Trade Association, formed in January 1960, could realistically become a neutral force, even if Yugoslavia ever joined.¹⁶³ British membership of the EEC, by contrast, could help counter Franco-German militarism and German economic domination.¹⁶⁴ His view may also have rested on the comparatively positive assessment he made of British attitudes to end-of-empire affairs. Labour’s record on colonial policy, Bourdet told Mikardo in 1957, was ‘not so bad’,¹⁶⁵ and he was also impressed by the Devlin Report of July 1959, which admitted the existence of a ‘police state’ in Nyasaland after mass arrests and deaths had made the headlines in March, and which demonstrated that repressing nationalism led to cyclical violence. Every France-Observateur reader who knew English, Bourdet concluded, should read the report.¹⁶⁶ Bourdet, Jones told him in early 1960, was ‘too optimistic in [his] picture of the Labour Party’.¹⁶⁷ But by the summer of 1961, Bourdet’s assessment also came from broader international developments, including the departure of South Africa from an expanding Commonwealth of newly independent countries, with Roth penning an article in France-Observateur in March.¹⁶⁸ South Africa’s ‘expulsion’, Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson argued, reflected ‘the reciprocal communication of new mental and political attitudes back on Britain through the mediation of African and Asian states’.¹⁶⁹ But this, for them, was an additional reason to oppose EEC membership, as the combination of EFTA and Commonwealth circles ‘could precipitate precisely the kind of transition of feeling and attitudes in this country upon which a genuine inter-nationalism, viable for the Seventies and Eighties, could be based’.¹⁷⁰ This meant using British specificities and staying out of the EEC, at the very least to ‘make economic sense of our Commonwealth and EFTA ties’ or, more radically, to forge ‘a close alliance with, not merely Europe’s neutrals and the Commonwealth, but the emergent powers too’.¹⁷¹ What Bourdet continued to share with his anti-EEC acquaintances in Britain was a fundamental ideological opposition to the principle of the common market, and he was invited to the New Left Summer School at Ruskin College in Oxford on socialism in Europe in 1961.¹⁷²

As Bourdet’s relations with his co-editor Martinet soured at France-Observateur in early 1963, Thompson wrote to his friend: ‘not only has FO under your directorship been of the greatest inspiration at critical moments to us, but you personally have done more than any other individual to assist a similar tendency into being over here, to give us confidence and assistance at important junctures.’¹⁷³ Thompson himself, for whom internationalism should be ‘embedded with the national English context’,¹⁷⁴ was finding relations within the new left increasingly tense. He thought Hall too involved in CND, and as for the NLR, found its general approach ‘over-academic, disengaged and perhaps too much influenced by academic sociology’.¹⁷⁵ But the movement for nuclear disarmament was a concern dear to Bourdet, who helped found the French movement against nuclear armament (Mouvement contre l’armement atomique) the same month, a ‘CND-type organization’.¹⁷⁶ His resignation from France-Observateur was lamented by CND members,¹⁷⁷ even though he continued to exchange information with conscientious objector Tony Smythe of the War Resisters’ International. As Benn campaigned for re-election in his Bristol constituency in 1963, he too asked Bourdet for a few sentences on ‘the things that you would like to see Britain do at the United Nations and in international affairs’ so that he could ‘use these, as quotations or texts’ in his own speeches.¹⁷⁸ Benn also asked others – friends ‘in India, Kenya, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, France, the USA, the Soviet Union, Italy and Algeria’ – but it shows Bourdet’s importance nonetheless. On North Africa, Bourdet remained an important source of contacts and information, particularly on the kidnapping of Mehdi Ben Barka, the leader of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces in Morocco, in 1965.¹⁷⁹ In fact, Bourdet’s role was so central that Brockway admitted to him that ‘it would be good if we had another voice’ (provided they had Bourdet’s ‘status’ and command of English).¹⁸⁰ Bourdet’s earlier connections with anticolonial and Quaker circles also meant that by the mid-1960s he was an equally important source of information, commentary and action on Vietnam. Mendl sought Bourdet’s advice on North Vietnam in June 1965 and acted as a transmission belt for British Friends with France, with Le Monde deemed a better source of information on Vietnam than the British media.¹⁸¹ In their correspondence of October 1966, Bourdet and Brockway discussed both the trial in the Ben Barka affair and peace efforts in Vietnam, with Bourdet suggesting speakers and contacts to Brockway’s British Council for Peace in Vietnam, including the mathematician Laurent Schwartz, engaged against torture in Algeria, for decolonisation and international peace, and now chair of the Comité de soutien au peuple vietnamien.

Conclusion

Thanks to Bourdet’s Labour contacts and the cooperation of sympathetic editors, particularly Foot at Tribune, France-Observateur showed that the war in Algeria mattered across the Channel, and that violations should be ended, if the reputation of socialism was to be salvaged. But interests worked both ways. As Stuart Hall put it, Bourdet was a means of ‘translation to a wider stage’ of the concerns of New Left Review.¹⁸² Bourdet’s particular appeal, and influence, came from a notoriety that preceded the Algerian war and from two qualities: a broad humanism that chimed with Labour circles but went beyond them; and an internationalist outlook that brought into his address book individuals in Asia, Africa and America – mirroring and complementing Labour’s own contacts outside Europe. If a movement is understood as ‘working within society to spread information’, ‘to raise awareness and organise the population as widely as possible’,¹⁸³ Bourdet undoubtedly played a key role in helping the left of the Labour Party explain (and at times realise) why events in Algeria should matter to Britons, and to British socialists specifically. Political activism rested on a transnational base, which in turn stimulated contacts across the British left. In 1957–58 for instance, Bourdet’s selected documentation against torture, for a negotiated peace and independence, was exchanged several times by the UDC, the MCF and the ULR, as they prepared their own publications.¹⁸⁴ Bourdet also connected generations, in ways that older or younger French anticolonial figures could not, even though Bevan’s death did deprive France-Observateur of a useful commentator and symbol of European socialism that was never quite replaced. But there was no undisputed intention to translate transnational channels into a transnational Franco-British or European movement. In France-Observateur, comparisons remained few. Algeria was on occasion used as a reference point, for instance by Roth when discussing Nyasaland in March 1959, or as a means to attract the readers’ attention, as in ‘The Commonwealth’s Algeria’, an article on Kenya, the Rhodesias and South Africa, which made no particular mention of Algeria beyond its title.¹⁸⁵ In Tribune, or even NLR, Algeria was a unique case, matched only by the denunciation of Portuguese colonial rule, led notably by Davidson, while discussions about the wider French empire – including the war in Cameroon – were marginal. What readers thought of the articles exchanged across the Channel is difficult to assess. Discussions were inter-national rather than transnational as such and resulted in no immediate ground-breaking policy change. But the activities studied above did challenge ‘Western’ European interpretations of events and trends, at the nexus of party and non-party circles, and contested the restrictive geography of the European Six. Ultimately, the core characteristics of Bourdet’s British circle of friends gave it its force and its limits: nationally grounded and European, decentring but not quite decentred. But it was, at the very least, significant for the reflection it pursued on the tensions placed by location, place and space on socialist aspirations and practice.

Notes

1. 1.  Claude Bourdet in Olivier Wieviorka, ‘Nous entrerons dans la carrière’: de la résistance à l’exercice du pouvoir (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

2. 2.  Paul Barker, ‘Obituary of Douglas Johnson’, The Independent, 30 April 2005.

3. 3.  Douglas Johnson, ‘Obituary of Claude Bourdet’, The Independent, 23 March 1996, 20.

4. 4.  Its circulation averaged 100,000; Michel Winock, Le XXe siècle idéologique et politique (Paris: Perrin, 2013), 440.

5. 5.  Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold Story of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Laura Kottos, Europe between Imperial Decline and Quest for Integration: Pro-European Groups and the French, Belgian and British Empires (1947–1957) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016); Muriam Haleh Davis and Thomas Serres, eds. North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, institutions and culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

6. 6.  Megan Brown, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France and the European Community (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2022), 105, 140.

7. 7.  Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World. Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

8. 8.  Andrea Brazzoduro, ‘Algeria, Antifascism, and Third Worldism: An Anticolonial Genealogy of the Western European New Left (Algeria, France, Italy, 1957–1975)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 5 (2020): 960; also Daniel A. Gordon, ‘A “Mediterranean New Left”? Comparing and Contrasting the French PSU and the Italian PSIUP’, Contemporary European History 19, no. 4 (2010).

9. 9.  Daniel Gorman, Uniting the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 185.

10. 10.  Isabelle Richard, ‘The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anti-colonialism and Socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 21, no. 4 (2014).

11. 11.  Quentin Gasteuil, ‘A Comparative and Transnational Approach to Socialist Anti-colonialism: The Fenner Brockway-Marceau Pivert connection, 1930s–1950s’, in Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910–1960s, ed. Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

12. 12.  In Bourdet to G. H. D. Cole, 20 October 1956; Bourdet to Foot, 24 September 1957, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Papers of Claude Bourdet, NAF 28091/46.

13. 13.  Nora Beloff, ‘Peace pressure grows in France’, The Observer, 1 April 1956, 1.

14. 14.  ‘Paris editor detained. Algeria policy resented. Ministry alleges demoralisation’, The Times, 2 April 1956, 6.

15. 15.  ‘Tribune Says’: ‘Stop this war – and free the man who says so’, Tribune, 6 April 1956, 1.

16. 16.  ‘Grande-Bretagne: L’arrestation de Claude Bourdet’, France-Observateur, 5 April 1956.

17. 17.  Nor Lose the Common Touch. The Memoirs of Audrey Jupp, 1990 (unpublished), p. 366, Hull History Centre, Papers of Audrey Jupp, GB 50 U DJT/5.

18. 18.  ‘Charges of police brutality in Algeria’, The Guardian, 15 January 1955, 5. On the use of torture in Algeria, and on the impact of the war on the metropole, there is a rich literature, including Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, Gallimard, 2016 [2001]); Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli eds, La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1991); Thomas Augais, Mireille Hilsum and Chantal Michel, eds. Écrire et publier la Guerre d’Algérie. De l’urgence aux résurgences (Paris: Kimé, 2011).

19. 19.  ‘Torture by France’, Tribune, 4 February 1955, 4. Douglas Rogers to Bourdet, 17 January 1955, NAF 28091/45. The New Statesman and Nation mentioned torture the following month, but less prominently; ‘What follows Mr France?’, 12 February 1955, 200; no mention was made of Bourdet or France-Observateur, contrary to Rogers’s hope.

20. 20.  In David Hendy, The BBC: A People’s History (London: Imprint Books, 2022).

21. 21.  Birmingham Gazette, 15 February 1950, 5.

22. 22.  Bourdet to Field, 15 May 1950, NAF 28091/41.

23. 23.  See Guillaume Devin, ‘L’internationalisme des socialistes’, in La gauche en Europe depuis 1945. Invariants et mutations du socialisme européen, ed. Marc Lazar (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996).

24. 24.  ‘Einstein backs world government’, Birmingham Post, 21 February 1950, 6.

25. 25.  ‘Your vote and peace’, The Daily Herald, 23 February 1950, 3.

26. 26.  Bourdet to Mikardo, 3 May 1951, NAF 28091/42.

27. 27.  Bourdet to J. Cook, Cardiff Labour Party, 25 June 1951; Bourdet to Mikardo, 3 May 1951, NAF 28091/42.

28. 28.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Bevan’, France-Observateur, 14 July 1960, 9.

29. 29.  Correspondence between Bourdet and Bevan, 15 and 21 October 1953, NAF 28091/42.

30. 30.  Bourdet to Thomas Balogh, 24 September 1953, NAF 28091/43.

31. 31.  Labour expelled Zilliacus in 1949 for voting against NATO; he was re-admitted in 1952, regaining a Labour seat in 1955.

32. 32.  Foot to Bourdet, 6 April 1954, NAF 28091/44.

33. 33.  Warbey to Bourdet, 24 August 1954, NAF 28091/44.

34. 34.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Ne pas aller à Londres’, France-Observateur, 9 September 1954, 6; ‘Scarborough: M. Mendès-France a facilité l’échec de Bevanistes’, France-Observateur, 30 September 1954, 9. Alexander Werth also believed that ‘Mendes’s gutless, kowtowing interview for US News’ had done much damage, although he equally blamed Labour for not supporting Bevan against German rearmament; Werth to Bourdet, 2 October 1954, NAF 28091/44.

35. 35.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Bevan n’est pas que britannique’, France-Observateur, 24 March 1955, 8–9.

36. 36.  ‘Un document capital: Bevan contre la bombe’, 10 March 1955; the issue also included two cartoons from the Daily Mirror.

37. 37.  Roth was France-Observateur’s permanent London correspondent by the autumn of 1950 (Bourdet to Ross, 29 November 1950, NAF 28091/40; H. de Galard to Roth, 2 November 1950, Bishopsgate Institute, Roth Papers, ROTH 2/17). It also followed Bourdet’s correspondence with the editors of several left-wing and pro-peace publications in the United States (The Nation) and Britain (New Statesman and Nation, Peace News). Roth was also in contact with Jean Rous of Franc Tireur in 1950, on North Africa, Indochina and international affairs, ROTH 2/16.

38. 38.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Bevan pas coupable’, France-Observateur, 2 June 1955, 1; Andrew Roth, ‘Les Anglais ont voté “constructif”’, France-Observateur, 2 June 1955, 9.

39. 39.  Aneurin Bevan, ‘La signification de mon combat’, France-Observateur, 13 October 1955, 7.

40. 40.  Charles Davy to Bourdet, 12 December 1953, NAF 28091/44. Jean Rous, Letter to the editor, ‘France and North Africa’, The Observer, 6 December 1953.

41. 41.  Claude Bourdet, Letter to the editors, The Guardian, 5 December 1953, 4.

42. 42.  Brockway to Bourdet, 10 November 1954; Bourdet to Brockway, 19 November 1954, NAF 28091/44.

43. 43.  Report of police questioning, 13 April 1956, NAF 28091/167.

44. 44.  Bourdet to Rous, 23 October 1957, NAF 28091/46.

45. 45.  Tribune reporter, ‘Will Mollet never learn?’, Tribune, 22 June 1956.

46. 46.  ‘Cyprus in Trafalgar Square’; Lucien Weitz, ‘That French war’, Tribune, 18 May 1956, 3. See also Fenner Brockway, ‘Kenya: they try to extort “confessions”’, Tribune, 9 March 1956, 1; ‘Kenya: here are the facts’, Tribune, 15 June 1956, 1 and 6–7.

47. 47.  Aneurin Bevan, ‘La stratégie occidentale est-elle édifiée sur des sables mouvants?’, France-Observateur, 31 May 1956, 8. This was partly taken from Aneurin Bevan, ‘Bases: the plan that failed’, Tribune, 25 May 1956, 12.

48. 48.  Lucien Weitz, ‘When Socialists become small town jingoes’, Tribune, 14 September 1956, p. 10. Weitz’s article was the most prominent on the page, with quotes in bold.

49. 49.  ‘ “Tribune” commente l’ostracisme des dirigeants de la SFIO’, France-Observateur, 11 October 1956, 2.

50. 50.  Special correspondent, ‘French socialists hit back at Mollet’s gag policy’, Tribune, 12 October 1956, p. 3.

51. 51.  Andrew Roth, ‘Londres: “Les conséquences seront graves”’, France-Observateur, 1 November 1956, 16 (US condemnation of French action was also noted).

52. 52.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Labour can unseat Mollet’, Tribune, 9 November 1956, 3.

53. 53.  Bourdet, ‘Labour can unseat Mollet’.

54. 54.  London correspondent, ‘Les travaillistes contre Mollet’, France-Observateur, 15 November 1956, 2.

55. 55.  Claude Estier, ‘L’Internationale socialiste aide les minoritaires de la SFIO’, France-Observateur, 6 December 1956.

56. 56.  Lucien Weitz, ‘Mon exclusion de la SFIO’, France-Observateur, 27 December 1956, 5. Michael Foot, ‘A crime against the world’, Tribune, 2 November 1956, 1 (which also featured Weitz’s ‘France plunges into lunatic policy over North Africa’, 5).

57. 57.  ‘ “Tribune”: Guy Mollet est-il notre camarade?’, France-Observateur, 10 January 1957, 1, 5.

58. 58.  Davidson to Bourdet, 17 October 1956, NAF 28091/46.

59. 59.  Davidson to Bourdet, 4 January 1957, NAF 28091/46.

60. 60.  Jupp to Bourdet, 6 February 1957, NAF 28091/46.

61. 61.  It is difficult to establish how frequently this occurred; correspondence with the MCF and the UDC suggests that several parcels were dispatched in the spring of 1957.

62. 62.  See Malika Rahal, Ali Boumendjel. Une affaire française, une histoire algérienne (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010).

63. 63.  Jupp to Bourdet, P. Rushton to Bourdet, 2 May 1957, Bourdet to P. Rushton, 20 May 1957, NAF 28091/46.

64. 64.  Davidson to Bourdet, 4 January 1957; Bourdet to Davidson, 16 April 1957, NAF 28091/46. Interest was strong as the right of the party, including Gaitskell and his Shadow Defence Secretary Denis Healey, was investigating options preserving Britain’s full commitment to NATO. See for instance Gerald Hughes, ‘ “We are not seeking strength for its own sake”: The British Labour Party, West Germany and the Cold War, 1951–64’, Cold War History 3, no. 1 (2002).

65. 65.  Bourdet to Castle, 30 May 1957, NAF 28091/46.

66. 66.  Bourdet to Scott, 22 May 1957, NAF 28091/46.

67. 67.  Barrat to Bourdet (and others), 22 January 1957, NAF 28091/46.

68. 68.  Stuart Hall, ‘Life and times of the first new left’, New Left Review, 61, January–February 2010, 178.

69. 69.  The Guardian, 24 April 1957, 10.

70. 70.  Bishopsgate Institute, Papers of Ralph Samuel, RS 1/002.

71. 71.  ULR Club to members and subscribers, April 1957, RS 1/002.

72. 72.  On E.P. Thompson, and the changing British left after 1956, see Cal Winslow, ed., E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left. Essays and Polemics (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Evan Smith and Matthew Worley, eds. Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).

73. 73.  Alan Williams to Bourdet, undated, NAF 28091/46.

74. 74.  Samuel to Bourdet, undated, NAF 28091/46.

75. 75.  Colin Bell to Bourdet, 1 April 1957, W. Lloyd to Bourdet, 30 April 1957, NAF 28091/46; A. Banerjee to Samuel, 30 June 1957, RS 1/004.

76. 76.  Also: P. Rushton to Samuel, 8 July 1957; Otley to Samuel, July and December 1957, RS 1/007; Benn to Samuel, 19 August 1957; Jordan to Samuel, 25 August 1957, RS 1/005.

77. 77.  Liverpool Echo, 19 November 1957, 1; Kenneth Kaunda, Basil Davidson and Doris Lessing were also considered as possible speakers, alongside Bourdet, Sedgwick to Samuel, Sedgwick Papers, 1/1. The Birmingham meeting seems to have taken place during Bourdet’s same visit, Knight to Samuel, 16 November 1957, RS 1/007.

78. 78.  Rushton to Bourdet, 1 May 1957, NAF 28091/46.

79. 79.  Britain was not spared criticism. The paper featured a photograph of Gladwyn Jebb, the British ambassador in Paris, and a quote from his speech on 14 July 1956: “We are on your side in Algeria. We understand your pride in your civilizing mission … we ardently desire the success of your efforts in Algeria.” Tribune, 2 May 1956.

80. 80.  ‘A French soldier writes of butchery in the Algerian fighting / Police ban tales of torture’, Daily Herald, 7 May 1957, 7.

81. 81.  Michael Foot, ‘The Mollet touch’, Daily Herald, 3 and 9 May 1957.

82. 82.  Michael Foot, ‘De quoi Mollet a-t-il peur?’, France-Observateur, 9 May 1957, 3 (also listed in the table of contents on the front page).

83. 83.  Claude Bourdet, ‘I attack Mollet’s methods – then he throws me in jail’, Tribune, 10 May 1957, 1, 4.

84. 84.  Claude Estier, ‘Après le Congrès de Toulouse: Guy Mollet sur la défensive’, France-Observateur, 4 July 1957, 5.

85. 85.  Foot, ‘The Mollet touch’, 4.

86. 86.  Samuel to Bourdet, undated; Bourdet to Samuel, 5 June 1957, NAF 28091/46.

87. 87.  Mikardo to Bourdet, 12 July 1957, NAF 28091/46.

88. 88.  Claude Bourdet, ‘My appeal won’t be in vain!’, Tribune, 4 October 1957, 7.

89. 89.  Aneurin Bevan, ‘Back to free markets – and the jungle’, Tribune, 30 August 1957, 5.

90. 90.  Bourdet, ‘Bevan’.

91. 91.  Bourdet to Foot, 8 October 1957, NAF 28091/46. The list of questions did not feature with the archived letter.

92. 92.  Bourdet to Castle, 11 October 1957, NAF 28091/46.

93. 93.  ‘Deux heures d’entretien avec “Nye” Bevan – Dans la tête d’un vrai socialiste’, L’Express, 22 February 1957.

94. 94.  K. S. Karol, interviewed by Pierre Beuchot, Grands entretiens patrimoniaux de l’INA/Itinéraires, https://entretiens.ina.fr/itineraires/Karol/k-s-karol/print.

95. 95.  ULR Club, RS 1/009.

96. 96.  Bourdet to Foot, 24 September 1957, NAF 28091/46.

97. 97.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Bevan reste-t-il toujours bévaniste?’, France-Observateur, 10 October 1957,

98. 98.  Bourdet to Castle, 11 October 1957, NAF 28091/46.

99. 99.  ‘Les Anglo-Saxons ont assez de la guerre d’Algérie’, France-Observateur, 24 April 1958, 12.

100. 100.  ‘France’s misdirected fury’, The Economist, 19 April 1958, 187.

101. 101.  See Geoffrey Barei, ‘The Algerian War of Independence and the Coming to Power of General Charles de Gaulle: British Reactions’, The Maghreb Review 37, no. 3–4 (2012); Mélanie Torrent, Algerian Independence and the British Left: Resistance and Solidarities in a Decolonising World (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

102. 102.  ‘Le “Daily Herald” contre les factieux’, France-Observateur, 29 May 1958, 2.

103. 103.  Claude Roy, ‘Banned – by order of de Gaulle’, Tribune, 4 July 1958, 1.

104. 104.  ‘Le gaullisme inquiète les Anglais’, France-Observateur, 21 August 1958, 9.

105. 105.  ‘The General’s tour’, The Times, 19 August 1958, 9.

106. 106.  Thompson to Bourdet, 3 July 1958, NAF 28091.

107. 107.  ‘Pour suivre l’actualité française, faudra-t-il désormais lire la presse étrangère?’, France-Observateur, 11 September 1958, 5.

108. 108.  Aneurin Bevan, ‘De Gaulle’, Tribune, 29 May 1958.

109. 109.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Algeria and France’, Africa South 2, no. 3, April–June 1958, 70.

110. 110.  In ‘London Letter’, The Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1958, 6.

111. 111.  Bourdet to Sachs, 11 April 1957, NAF 28091/46.

112. 112.  Bourdet, ‘Algeria and France’.

113. 113.  Baker to Bourdet, 11 November 1955, NAF 28091/45.

114. 114.  Mary Lane Charles to Bourdet, 25 October 1956, NAF 28091/45.

115. 115.  Charles Read to Paul Johnson, 5 February 1958, Archives of Friends Service Council, FSC/NAF/2/7.

116. 116.  Read to Johnson, 5 February 1958, FSC/NAF/2/7. Read to George Whiteman, 14 February 1958, FSC/NAF/2/7.

117. 117.  Geoffrey Carnall and J. Duncan Wood, ‘Alexander, Horace Grundy’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/38403.

118. 118.  Jo Noble, ‘Report to Friends Service Council’, 5 January 1961, FSC/NAF/2/3.

119. 119.  Bourdet to AFSC, undated but c. March 1957, NAF 28091/46.

120. 120.  Mendl to various correspondents including Whiteman, 28 May 1959, FSC/NAF/1/10.

121. 121.  Mendl to Bourdet, 14 December 1961, NAF 28091/53.

122. 122.  FSC Europe Committee minutes, 21 February 1962.

123. 123.  Noble, Occasional report, Centre Quaker International, 12 August 1957, FSC/NAF/2/4. She also noted Robert Barrat’s activity and Quaker concerns about the impact of the war on young conscripts; Noble, ‘Report from the Mill of Peace’, July 1957, FSC/NAF/2/4.

124. 124.  Noble to Bourdet, 15 March 1957, NAF 28091/46.

125. 125.  Mendl to Whiteman and Frank Hunt, 23 March 1960, NAF/1/10.

126. 126.  Mendl to Davies, Noble and others, ‘Some conversations on the Algerian problem’, 22 November 1960, FSC/NAF/1/10.

127. 127.  Mendl to Davies, Noble and others, ‘Some conversations on the Algerian problem’.

128. 128.  Noble, ‘Notes on development of Quaker relief in Morocco’ for Advisory Group on North Africa Relief, 9 March 1961, FSC/NAF/2/3.

129. 129.  6 September 1962, FSC GP Committee Minutes.

130. 130.  Basil Davidson, ‘I meet the man the French would like to catch’, Daily Herald, 8 February 1956, 4.

131. 131.  Bourdet to Mikardo, c. October 1957, NAF 28091/46.

132. 132.  Ian Mikardo, ‘La guerre d’Algérie vue d’Afrique’, France-Observateur, 28 November 1957.

133. 133.  Colin Legum, ‘Ghana: the morning after (III) The Accra conference’, Africa South 3, no. 1, July–September 1958; Catherine Hoskins, ‘Tunis Diary’, and Tony Benn, ‘The Algerian War’, Africa South 4, no. 4, July–September 1960.

134. 134.  Victor Barros, ‘The French anticolonial solidarity movement and the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’, The International History Review 42, no. 6 (2020).

135. 135.  Ismay Milford, African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

136. 136.  On the PSU, see Marc Heurgon, Histoire du PSU. 1. La fondation et la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1994); Noëlline Castagnez, Laurent Jalabert, Jean-François Sirinelli et al., eds. Le parti socialiste unifié (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013); Bernard Ravenel, Quand la gauche se réinventait. Le PSU, histoire d’un parti visionnaire, 1960–1989 (Paris: La Découverte, 2016).

137. 137.  André Philip, ‘Un socialisme pour aujourd’hui’, France-Observateur, 18 December 1958, 7–8.

138. 138.  ‘L’opinion de Bevan’, France-Observateur, 15 October 1959.

139. 139.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Bevan’, France-Observateur, 14 July 1960, 9; Foot to Bourdet, 20 July 1960, NAF 28091/51.

140. 140.  Janet Hase to Bourdet, 5 November 1959, NAF 28091/49.

141. 141.  Samuel to Bourdet, 10 November 1961, NAF 28091/53.

142. 142.  Samuel to Barrat Brown, 25 October 1961, RS 1/018.

143. 143.  Peter Worsley, ‘Africa rediscovered’, New Left Review, January–February 1960, 59.

144. 144.  Perry Anderson, ‘Portugal and the end of ultra-colonialism 3’, New Left Review, Winter 1962, 113.

145. 145.  Claude Bourdet, ‘The last quarter of an hour’, New Left Review, January–April 1962, 21. See also Lelio Basso, ‘The centre left in Italy’, New Left Review, Winter 1962, 71; Eric Heffer, ‘Conversations in Italy’, New Left Review, November–December 1960, 57.

146. 146.  Kalter, Discovery, 96, 432.

147. 147.  The Guardian, 5–6 May 1960; The Observer, 26 June 1960.

148. 148.  Bourdet to Briottet, 22 November 1960, NAF 28091/51.

149. 149.  Although he seemed disappointed in the BBC’s ‘The Listener’ in January 1961; Bourdet to Bernard Ellis, 20 January 1961, NAF 28091/51.

150. 150.  Bourdet to Bernard Ellis, 20 January 1961, NAF 28091/51.

151. 151.  Daily Herald, 26 February 1962.

152. 152.  Philip Donnellan to Bourdet, 12 June 1962, NAF 28091/53.

153. 153.  Thompson to Bourdet, 28 February 1958, NAF 28091/47.

154. 154.  Samuel to Bourdet, 20 January 1961, RS 1/016.

155. 155.  Samuel to Bourdet, 20 January 1961, RS 1/016.

156. 156.  Bourdet to Zilliacus, 11 February 1959; Richardson to Bourdet, 3 January 1960, NAF 28091/49.

157. 157.  Bourdet to Mandel, 28 February 1961, NAF 28091/52.

158. 158.  Bourdet to Samuel, 4 March 1961, RS 1/016.

159. 159.  Draft letter from organisers, RS 1/016.

160. 160.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Une, deux, trois Europes’, France-Observateur, 3 August 1961.

161. 161.  Zilliacus to Bourdet, 9 June 1962, NAF 28091/53.

162. 162.  See for instance Zilliacus to Bourdet, 28 December 1961, 22 February 1962, NAF 28091/53.

163. 163.  He shared this hope, voiced by Michael Barrat Brown in NLR, but did not think it would happen; Michael Barrat Brown, ‘Neutralism and the Common Market’, New Left Review, November–December 1961, 27.

164. 164.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Une, deux, trois Europes’.

165. 165.  Bourdet to Mikardo, October 1957, NAF 28091/46. Mikardo, in his article for France-Observateur in late 1957, argued that Ghana and Nigeria had their own constitutional problems and faced foreign-owned companies, but that little blood was shed during their struggle for independence.

166. 166.  Claude Bourdet, ‘Le rapport Devlin honore l’Angleterre’, France-Observateur, 30 July 1959, 9–10; Andrew Roth, ‘Epreuve de force au Nyasaland’, France-Observateur, 12 March 1959.

167. 167.  Jones to Bourdet, 5 January 1960, NAF 28091/49.

168. 168.  Andrew Roth, ‘Commonwealth: l’apartheid au coeur des débats’, France-Observateur, 9 March 1961, 8.

169. 169.  Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson, ‘The politics of the Common Market’, New Left Review, July/August 1961, 13.

170. 170.  Hall and Anderson, ‘The politics of the Common Market’, 14.

171. 171.  Hall and Anderson, ‘The politics of the Common Market’, 14.

172. 172.  John Thurwell to Bourdet, NAF 28091/52.

173. 173.  Thompson to Bourdet, 28 February 1963, NAF 28091/54.

174. 174.  Stefan Berger and Christian Wicke, ‘A very rooted cosmopolitan: E.P. Thompson’s Englishness and his transnational activism’, in The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 258.

175. 175.  Thompson to Bourdet, 28 February 1963, NAF 28091/54.

176. 176.  Bourdet to Dan Elwyn Jones, 28 January 1963, NAF 28091/54.

177. 177.  Evelyn Antal to Bourdet, 27 August 1963, NAF 28091/54.

178. 178.  Benn to Bourdet, 5 August 1963, NAF 28091/54.

179. 179.  Birmingham Daily Post, 10 May 1966, 33.

180. 180.  Brockway to Bourdet, 28 October 1966, NAF 28091/55.

181. 181.  Mendl to Bourdet, 11 June 1965, NAF 28091/55.

182. 182.  Hall, ‘Life and Times’, 182.

183. 183.  Olivier Wieviorka, ‘France’ in Resistance in Western Europe, ed. B. Moore (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2000), 130.

184. 184.  Bourdet to Samuel, 5 June 1957, NAF 28091/46, and Bastable to Samuel, 11 February 1958, RS 1/009.

185. 185.  Emile R. Braudi, ‘L’Algérie du Commonwealth’, France-Observateur, 3 May 1962, 11–12.

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