Socialist realism in France

The socialist realism in France is a conflict and fluctuating adaptation Soviet socialist Réalisme itself very chaotic ideologically speaking.

In France, the question of the working culture already very present since the Years 1920, becomes prégnante in the Thirties. Socialist realism is expressed in two different ways, on the one hand with a current nourishing narrow designs, close to propaganda and extremely sensitive to the more or less disguised injunctions of the various Soviet authorities and, on the other hand, with more flexible positions asserted by Henri Barbusse which was given an important literary credit in France (its book Fire had been an enormous success) and in the USSR since Stalin itself did not hide anything of its sympathy to the author. Barbusse proposed to be the leader of a committed literature independent and opened to the middle-class authors (“fellow travellers”) likely to be allured by Communism.

Characteristics of socialist realism

The main feature - and most stable historically - is that the History has a direction, i.e. all at the same time a direction and a significance, which can be only the realization of world socialism. In this direction, even when this literature used the springs of the tragedy, it remained carrying an unutterable optimism. In addition, and contrary to the populist School, the workman was not necessarily the prey of a literary species of exhibition. Lastly, the literature which claimed socialist realism was to be edifying: candidate with a political role, it had the role of framing and of encouraging the revolutionary aspirations.

In 1930, with the Congress of Kharkov, the position of Barbusse all was at the same time attacked by the Association of the writers side-Russian (RAPP or VAPP) then by Aragon - surrealist attempting to ridicule its style and, especially, to release the field of literature committed to take seat there - and by Paul Nizan which, at the moment when the USSR imposed on the local PC an industrial relations policy and cultural of “class against class”, recommended a toughening including arts person and reproached Barbusse his tepidity with regard to the middle-class writers.

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