Alain Krivine died Saturday at the age of 80. He was undoubtedly the last major figure from the far left of the 1970s. It was in black and white that the French found him on their television, in 1969, as a presidential candidate. He did military service and was granted leave during the campaign. Then don’t tender with PCF. “True communists are those associated with the news of the world revolution and not those who represent nothing more than political corpses”, he said at a meeting in Paris. He would gain 1.1% of the vote, before running again in 1974 and for a total, this time, 0.4%.

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Half a century later, he has not changed his beliefs. Even if he had fun with his first appearance: “The guy who eats his soup at 8 p.m. and looks at me must think I’m crazy, she confessed in 2017 in Charles magazine. It’s usually left. »

One of the leaders May 68

Born in 1941 in Paris into a family of Ukrainian Jews who emigrated after an anti-Semitic pogrom in the late 19th century, Krivine joined the PCF youth structure, the Union of Valiants and Valiants, at the age of 12. In 1957 he went to a youth festival in Moscow. “In this pilgrimage, everything is too beautiful, too orderly”he recalls in his autobiography, You will graduate with age (Flammarion). His break with Stalinism and the PCF was in progress: in 1966, he was expelled from the party. And definitely embrace the causes of Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism.

Then editorial secretary at Hachette, he became one of the leaders of May 68. In 1969, with Daniel Bensad and Henri Weber, he founded the Communist League, which would become the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in 1974. In the 1999 European elections, he elected for the first time. His parliamentary assistant will be Olivier Besancenot, who will lift the torch. In 2009, to break out of the Trotskyist secession, he launched the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), of which Besancenot would become his puppet. “I still hear you say that the best way to celebrate the memory of the deceased is to perpetuate their struggle”tweeted on Saturday, in tribute, France’s most famous postman.