The Novels of the French Socialist Realism

The corpus of works studied in this paper is defined by the novels written by Communist writers during the early years of the Cold War (1948–1954), published by the party, and considered by Communist critics to be representative of socialist realism. They are therefore novels of ideas, of a political nature, and indissociable from the Communist vision of the world and especially of its Stalinist variant. A dual set of criteria for differentiation, both thematic and cultural, leads to their classification into four categories depending first of all on whether they deal with immediate or recent history, tell a story about the struggles of a hero already blessed with the correct values and the truth (the activist), or describe the initiatory path of characters who are at the start far from the Good and the True. The novels are studied one by one in a synthetic manner, first the Cold War novels, then the Resistance novels, the struggle novels, and finally the progress novels.