Foundation and History
On April 1 and 2, 1939, the Union of Communist Students held its first, constitutive, national congress. It then boasted 1,000 members and groups in all of France, in particular in Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble and Strasbourg (where the local section was headed by Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont). Their main struggle was then anti-fascism, carried out in a difficult context because of the Munich Agreement. The UEC then gathered mainly university students, but also high school students. At the beginning of the war, the UEC became the UELC (Union des étudiants et lycéens communistes, Union of Communist Students and Lycéens - lycéens being high school students). The Congrès des lycéens anti-fascistes (Congress of Antifascist Lycéens) merged into it.
Dissolved after the Liberation, the UEC was re-created during the Fourth Republic, in 1956. Ten years later, "leftist" elements were excluded: those included Trotskyists who rejected Stalinism, such as Alain Krivine, future leader of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League, and Maoists. The first created the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR, Revolutionary Communist Youth) and the second the Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJC (ml); Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth).
Read more about this topic: Union Of Communist Students
Famous quotes containing the words foundation and/or history:
“The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them.... Yet at the very first planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first governor, the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.” To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that should be next shipwrecked on to them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)