Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: La Roche-sur-Yon, Pays de la Loire, France
About Yvan Craipeau
- Yvan Craipeau (24 September 1911, La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée – 13 December 2001) was a French Trotskyist activist. Born in La Roche-sur-Yon, he helped found a local independent Marxist organisation while still in his teens.
- Expelled from school, he moved to Paris and became associated with the Trotskyist group around La Verité.
- In 1930 this group founded the Communist League.
- This considered itself an external faction of the Communist Party of France, and as such it only admitted current and former PCF members.
- However, this rule was relaxed and Craipeau was allowed to join in 1931.
- He joined the League's executive committee with responsibility for developing a youth wing. By 1933, he was able to organise a meeting attended by one thousand members of the youth wings of the Communist Party and the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière.
- During 1933, he was Trotsky's personal secretary. In 1936, Craipeau became a leading member of the new Internationalist Workers Party (POI).
- The following year, in reaction to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, he began a re-analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union.
- He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state, but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system - an idea he introduced to Trotskyism. During World War II, he was pronounced unfit for duty, and attempted, with Marcel Hic, to publish La Verité secretly.
- This was difficult, and following a series of setbacks, he turned instead to work influencing the German Army.
- He wrote an account of this activity in his books Contre vents et marées and La Libération Confisquée.
- The former work, on the Occupation period itself, was published in English in 2013. In 1944, Craipeau was the architect of unity between three of France's four Trotskyist groups: the POI itself,the Comités Communistes Internationalistes and the Octobre group.
- They formed the PCI Internationalist Communist Party, and in 1946, he was elected its General Secretary.
- In the same year, he was also elevated to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International.
- However, he could not agree with the International's perspective that a crisis in capitalism was imminent, and soon after the POI sided with the International, he was expelled. Craipeau temporarily withdrew from politics, and in 1951, he moved to Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, where he became a school teacher and soon secretary of the National Education Federation trade union. In 1954, Craipeau returned to mainland France, where he participated in the creation of the New Left.
- This fused with the Movement for the Liberation of the City to form the Socialist Left Union and, in 1960 with several groups to form the Unified Socialist Party.
- He remained a leading member of this party for many years, during which he wrote numerous books on left-wing politics and revolution.
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