Alfred Griot took the pen name "Rosmer" after the figure in Henrik Ibsen's play and became internationally known in the labor and socialist movement under that name. With his death, one of the last survivors of a forgotten or misrepresented period of the workers! movement passed away. Before the war of 1914-18 he belonged to the sector of the revolutionary syndicalist movement organized | around La Vie Ouvritre [The Worker's Life] edited by Pierre Monatte. This was without doubt the most revolutionary wing of the French workers! movement at the time; it reacted vigorously against the opportunism and parliamentarism of the Socialist party and also against the currents of skepticism in the cc? [Confédération Générale du: Travail] in those years, But this wing had no solid theoretical conception of the role of the state, among other things.
In France it was this wing that constituted the axis of resis. tance against the Sacred Union: [national unity based on class ocol~ laboration] in 1914 and for struggle against the imperialist war, In this struggle, Rosmer played a role of first importance, notably at the side of Alfred Merrheim and the Fédération des Métaux [metal workers! federation], He was one of the few partisans of the Zimmerwald nonference, this first attempt at an internationalist regroupment against the first imperialist war,” ~~ ~° © oe
It was likewise in this struggle for proletarian international-~ ism that Rosmer met Trotsky. It was in that epoch that the Long friendship was born which proved most solid in times of greatest difficulty, -
Rosmer adhered to the October Revolution. He was a member of the Committee of the Third International, and, after the split at Tours at the end of 1920, held leading posts in the Communist party which was born shortly thereafter, He was a member of the Political Bureau and was Likewise elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Following the Paris Congress in 1922 and the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, as a partisan of the left tendency of the Communist party of France, he was placed in control of LtHumanité [the party newspaper],
The crisis that broke out in the Communist movement: over the rise of bureaucratism,- which was to culminate in the victory of Stalinism, brought him among the very first into the opposition, and ‘he was expelled. from the Communist party with Monatte and Delagarde,.
From then on, he held a separate position, outside the organized opposition groups, He collaborated with La Révolution Prolé~ tarienne, although he cannot be identified with the positions and the evolution which this publication underwent. In 1929, after Trotsky was exiled from:the Soviet Union, and under his influence, he was in the center of the small group that launched La Verité [The Truth] and that really started the Trotskyist movement in France, But he left it after about eighteen months and this also caused a break in relations with Trotsky for some years before they were resumed in common action against the infamous Moscow trials, He participated in the Dewey Commission, which was a kind of counter
The basic cause for Rosmerts break with the organized Trotsky~ ist movement is to be found in the fact that great as was the evolution of his thinking from revolutionary syndicalism to communism (unlike his friends of La Révolution Prolétarienne he never went . back to his pre~1917 ideas in reacting against Stalinism), he did not become a party man, an organizer; his field was journalism, essays, history. He could not cope with the difficult problems raised by the effort which we, together with Trotsky, undertook to reconstruct a genuinely Communist movement, Rosmer conducted his work independently from us, but, at bottom, in the same direotion and his relations with us were most friendly. The Fourth Inter-~ national will never forget that its founding Congress in September 1938 was held at Rosmerts place in his "barn" at Périgny near Paris,
Beginning in the thirties, Rosmer served the workers! movement primarily through literary work, He wrote his two volumes Le Mouvement Ouvrier Pendant la Guerre [The Workers! Movement During the War], a historical study of the World War I period of great value; and during the last months of his life he was still working on a third volume, He likewise wrote his memoirs of stays in Moscow during the first years of the October Revolution, Moscow Sous Lénine [Mos~ cow under Lenin], which appeared in 1953 with a preface by Albert © Camus, In this noteworthy book, Rosmer presents, after thirty years and with unparalleled clearness of memory, a picture of the efforts made by Lenin and Trotsky to bring closer and win to Bolshevism the best currents then existing in the world workers't movement,
After Trotsky!s death, Natalia [his widow] placed Rosmer in charge of publishing the works of Trotsky in the European countries, After years of indifference among the publishing houses, he finally saw his efforts begin to bear fruit,
It is not possible to speak of Alfred Rosmer without remember~ ing his companion, Marguerite Rosmer, who devoted her life to the goal she shared with him. She died in January 1962 only a few days before Natalia Trotsky, her friend of half a century, passed away, ‘ The Fourth International pays homage to the memory of the mili-~ tant in the cause of the revolutionary proletariat, Alfred Rosmer,
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