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At the end of World War II, the PCF was one of the strongest parties in France. This favorable balance of power in 1944 pushed the party to adopt a very optimistic view of the political moment. With Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Communists returned to the Popular Front in 1941, and continued it throughout the war and into the postwar period. The Popular Front thus became not simply a strategy, but almost a political habit, a style, the very way of being of a Communist. The Resistance movement received an important infusion of strength in June 1941, when Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union brought the French Communist Party into active participation in the anti-German struggle. In France, socialists set up a government known as the Paris Commune after the fall of Napoleon III in 1871, but they were soon overthrown and many of their members executed by counter-revolutionaries. When France was liberated in the summer of 1944 the country's new leader, General Charles De Gaulle, acknowledged the important role played by communists by permitting Maurice Thorez to return from the Soviet Union. French forces were pitted against a Communist-led revolution for national independence; at no point did France offer Vietnam the alternative of non-Communist independence. The political line imposed by Moscow from 1927 to 1934 saw anyone who was not a Communist as an enemy. This ‘class against class’ policy meant denouncing socialists as ‘social-fascists’ rather than trying to bring about a broad socialist-communist movement to challenge fascism. This paper will recount the stages of communist resistance in France during World War Two and its relationship to the French Resistance overall, as well as analyse the effect that communist resistance in France had on the war. The French Communist Party, one of the largest and most active Communist Parties in western Europe, won a strong position within France by its sacrifices first in the Resistance and then in the national effort of reconstruction. The French Communist Party (PCF), founded in 1920, emerged from a split in socialism, gaining significant influence in 20th-century France. It opposed fascism, contributed to labor rights, and played a pivotal role in the French Resistance during WWII.

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