Notebook: Alfred Rosmer (1877-1964)
Schapiro, Meyer
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...
...Among his writings are a carefully documented two-volume history of the French working-class and its organizations during the First World War (Le Mouvement Ouvrier Pendant la Guerre, 1936, 1959) and Moscou sous Levine (1953), with a preface by Albert Camus—Rosmer's memories of the fateful years 1920-1924 in Russia and his experi ences in the Comintern of which he had been a member of the Executive in 19201921...
...He had a strong interest in literature and history and enjoyed nature deeply...
...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 convic tions and continued to write as a thoughtful observer of world politics and critic of the left...
...In his writing he showed a scruple and lucidity of statement that are in the best tradition of French culture...
...Rosmer was a model figure of a working-class revolutionary...
...In 1937 he came to America as a member of the Commission to Investigate the Moscow Trials and was an editor of its reports...
...The family returned to France in the 1880s...
...He was uncompromising, but gentle and modest, and charming in conversation, with a vein of irony...
...While in this country he contributed to an art magazine an essay on the painter Henri Rousseau, based on his own frequentation of art circles in Paris in the late 1890s...
...His long life was spent in his chosen milieu of radical action and thought, without his seeking a personal success through office, recognition, or financial rewards...
...it is an important - testimony by a pure-hearted man, free from ambition and sectarian zeal...
...On May 6 died in Paris in his 87th year Alfred Rosmer, a revolutionary of irreproachable character...
...Very early he was drawn to revolutionary syndicalism and for many years was a journalist for the labor press in Eng land and France...
...His wife, Marguerite, was a devoted comrade in anti-war and relief work...
...In his later years he earned a meager living as a proofreader for a Paris publisher...
...He was born Alfred Griot in Patterson, New Jersey, the son of a French worker exiled as a result of the Commune...
...Those who knew them will remember the warmth and good sense, the cordiality and selfless dedi cation of this noble couple, living in idyllic peace in a remodelled barn in a village near Paris, alert to all that concerned the well-being and future of the working-class throughout the world, and undiscouraged by the bitter experience of the last twenty-five years...
...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 'a dissident communist group...
...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...
...Rosmer's life was bound to his cause from the beginning...
...He was engaged also in a study of Walt Whitman...
...After his stay in Mexico, he lived in this country until the end of the war...
...As a close friend of Leon Trotsky since the days of their collaboration on Nasha Slovo in Paris during the First War, he wrote considerable prefaces and supplements for the French editions of several of Trotsky's books...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
