For decades, the French Communist Party (PCF) was among the strongest left parties in Western Europe. If it didn’t exert the same intellectual influence abroad as its Italian counterpart, it still commanded the loyalty of millions of workers — winning over 20 percent of the vote as late as 1978 — and dictated many of the terms on which the more moderate French Socialist Party operated.

But the party was always shrouded in debates around its attitudes toward French colonialism. These center primarily around its stances during the Algerian Revolution, which raged throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, the PCF had often-overlooked revolutionary and anticolonial origins. In the following interview, Selim Nadi, a PhD candidate at the Center for History at Sciences Po (Paris) and a member of the French Marxist theoretical online journal Période, argues that over the course of the twentieth century, the French Communist Party was transformed from an organization committed to internationalism and influenced by a young Ho Chi Minh to a body that embraced many aspects of nationalism.

The legacy of that transformation, he argues, still haunts the party, limiting its ability to combat Islamophobia and challenge the French state today.