Marcel Body

Marcel Body (1894-1984) was typographer, Communist militant, diplomat, and translator.

Born in Limoges in a working-class family, Marcel Body becomes at twelve years apprentice typographer. He discovers the reading there, so much political press (in particular socialist) that novels. Its passion for Tolstoï pushes it to learn Russian. Concerned to an improvement of the working condition, it approaches the mediums Marxiste S, and attends Limoges with meetings of Jean Jaurès.

Mobilized in 1916, its knowledge of Russian leads it to be sent in Russia within the French military mission. It assists with the Russian Révolution to with it. In 1918, it belongs to the members of the French mission who refuse to take part in the military offensive carried out by the allies (of which France) against the new mode, and who join the French communist Group in Moscow.

He works for the Internationale Communist, then spends several years as diplomat to Norway, at the sides of Alexandra Kollontaï.

Hostile with the Stalinist mode, it leaves the the USSR in 1927. Returned to France, it becomes adverse within the PCF, which it leaves in 1928. It takes part then in the anti-Stalinist communist current.

It translates of Russian of the texts of Lénine, Trotsky, Bakounine…

In the Sixties, it takes part in the review of Boris Souvarine: the social Contract .

Its memories until 1927, written in 1980, were published under three successive titles: a piano in birch of Karelia (Hatchet, 1981), a Limousin workman in the middle of the Russian revolution (Spartacus, 1986), In the middle of the Revolution: My years of Russia, 1917-1927 (Editions of Paris, 2003).

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