Christmas Day marks one hundred years since the beginning of the Congress of Tours, where the French Socialists voted to affiliate with the Communist International, thereby creating the French Communist Party (PCF). In an act of revealing symbolism, the honorary presidents of the Congress were veterans of the Black Sea mutinies that had taken place the previous year.

The mutineers of 1919 had rebelled against French intervention against the young Soviet state — the actions would bear great significance for the PCF for years to come. Indeed, although the role of these events would subsequently be displaced by the World War II–era Resistance and the liberation of France in 1944, the mutiny provided a key foundation myth for the PCF.

Telling was the case of the French governess Jeanne Labourbe, part of a group of French citizens living in Russia who joined the Bolsheviks in the course of the revolution. She disseminated Bolshevik literature among the French troops in Odessa, before being murdered for her actions. She was posthumously lauded as the “first French communist,” and her story was told according to a biblical pattern. The PCF cast her as a communist Eve in the Soviet Garden of Eden, whose fraternization with mutinous French troops had handed the apple to Adam, sharing with him the knowledge of good and evil.