Les Lettres Françaises (French for "The French Letters") is a French literary publication, founded in 1941 by writers Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan. Originally a clandestine magazine of the French Resistance in German-occupied territory, it was one of the many publications of the National Front resistance movement. It received contributions from Louis Aragon, François Mauriac, Claude Morgan, Édith Thomas, Georges Limbour, Raymond Queneau and Jean Lescure.
After the Liberation and until 1972, Les Lettres Françaises, managed by Aragon, was financially supported by Soviet government and the French Communist Party. Originally supportive of Stalinism, the paper became critical of the Soviet regime during the 1960s, and ceased publication after losing communist support. It was revived in the 1990s as a monthly literary supplement of the left-wing newspaper L'Humanité .
The newspaper frequently served as a reflector of Soviet state propaganda, in late 40's engaging in defense of pseudo-scientific Lysenkoism. Pierre Daix wrote "French scientists recognize superiority of Soviet science" article which was then reprinted in Eastern Bloc newspaper, intending to create an impression that Lysenkoism was already accepted by the whole progressive world. [1]
In 1949, Soviet dissident Victor Kravchenko sued the newspaper in a polemical and a sensational trial. After the publication of his book I Chose Freedom , which denounced the Soviet Gulag camps, Les Lettres Françaises accused him of being an agent of the United States, and backed this claim with false documents written by journalist André Ulmann (who worked for Soviet intelligence). The truth about the origin of these documents were not known until the late 1970s.
Kravchenko filed a complaint for defamation against the newspaper, which was defended by counsel Joe Nordmann. The trial, dubbed "the trial of the century", held in 1949 brought together a hundred witnesses. The Soviet Union presented Kravchenko's former colleagues and his former wife to denounce him. Kravchenko's legal team enlisted testimonies from the survivors of Soviet prison camps. Among them was Gulag survivor Margarete Buber-Neumann (widow of the German Communist leader Heinz Neumann). At the time of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, she had moved to Nazi Germany and was again imprisoned. Her experience helped anti-communist groups in stating that there was a close similarity between the Soviet and the Nazi regimes. The trial was won by Kravchenko in April 1949, and he received a nominal sum for libel.
Les Lettres Françaises was edited by Aragon between 1953 and 1972. During this interval, it supported De-Stalinization and liberalization efforts, looked with sympathy toward the Prague Spring, and, in August 1968, criticized the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The latter decision proved problematic, as the Soviet government decided to withdraw its subsidies, as did the French Communist Party. Consequently, the review was stripped of its financial lifeline and eventually ceased publication.
Since the 1990s, the literary magazine is published on the first Saturday of each month, with the newspaper L'Humanité . It has columns on Letters, Arts, Cinema, Theater and Music, and publishes the works of debuting prose writers and poets. Its new head editor is Jean Ristat.
Louis Aragon was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France. He co-founded with André Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review Littérature. He was also a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

L'Humanité, is a French daily newspaper. It was previously an organ of the French Communist Party, and maintains links to the party. Its slogan is "In an ideal world, L'Humanité would not exist."
The National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement created to unite all of the Resistance Organizations together to fight the Nazi occupation forces and Vichy France under Marshall Pétain. Founded in 1941 in Paris by Jacques Duclos, André Pican and Pierre Villon, along with their wives all members of the French Communist Party (PCF) they felt that to be a vital force against the Nazis, the collaborationists and the informers that all of the Resistance movements, no matter their party or religion had to band together. Its name was inspired by the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition which governed France from 1936 to 1938. This helped them coordinate attacks all across France, to move weapons, food, false identity papers, information and food, protect and move people who were to be arrested or executed and supply multiple safe houses for the Resistance and for Jews. They also formed fighting units in early 1942 to assassinate German leaders and soldiers among the occupation forces, perform acts of sabotage on railroads and other forms of distribution of people and goods being taken from France to Germany and to help organize sabotage in factories forced to produce armaments and goods for the German military.

Robert Brasillach was a French author and journalist. Brasillach was the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which advocated fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot. After the liberation of France in 1944, he was executed following a trial and Charles de Gaulle's express refusal to grant him a pardon. Brasillach was executed for advocating collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and several other European academics documenting a history of political repression by communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and deaths in labor camps and artificially created famines. The book was originally published in France as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression by Éditions Robert Laffont. In the United States, it was published by Harvard University Press, with a foreword by Martin Malia. The German edition, published by Piper Verlag, includes a chapter written by Joachim Gauck. The introduction was written by Courtois. Historian François Furet was originally slated to write the introduction, but he died before being able to do so.

Charlotte Delbo was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon, and director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and communist states.

Maurice Bardèche was a French art critic and journalist, better known as one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism in post–World War II Europe. Bardèche was also the brother-in-law of the collaborationist novelist, poet and journalist Robert Brasillach, executed after the liberation of France in 1945.
Viktor Andreevich Kravchenko was a Ukrainian-born Soviet defector, known for writing the best-selling book I Chose Freedom, published in 1946, about the realities of life in the Soviet Union.
Gabriel Péri (Peri) was a prominent French Communist journalist and politician, and member of the French Resistance. He was executed in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
Combat was a French newspaper created during the Second World War. It was founded in 1941 as a clandestine newspaper of the French Resistance.
David Rousset was a French writer and political activist, a recipient of Prix Renaudot, a French literary award. A survivor of the Neuengamme concentration camp and the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, he is famous for his books about concentration camps.
Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier was a member of the French Resistance as well as a photojournalist, Communist and later, French politician.
Margarete Buber-Neumann was a German writer. As a communist, she wrote the memoir Under Two Dictators about her imprisonment within a Soviet prison, and later a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. She was also known for having testified in the so-called "trial of the century" about the Kravchenko Affair in France.
Pierre Kaan was a professor of philosophy, Marxist essayist, and prominent member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Vladimir Solomonovich Pozner was a French writer and translator of Russian-Jewish descent. His family fled the pogroms to take up residence in France. Pozner expanded on his inherited cultural socialism to associate both in writing and politics with anti-fascist and communist groups in the inter-war period. His writing was important because he made friends with internationally renowned exponents of hardline communism, while rejecting Soviet oppression.
Maria Reese was a German teacher who became a writer and journalist. She was also politically active, and sat as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag) between 1928 and 1933.
The clandestine press of the French Resistance was collectively responsible for printing flyers, broadsheets, newspapers, and even books in secret in France during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The secret press was used to disseminate the ideas of the French Resistance in cooperation with the Free French, and played an important role in the liberation of France and in the history of French journalism, particularly during the 1944 Freedom of the Press Ordinances.
Ce soir, was a French daily newspaper founded by the French Communist Party and directed by Louis Aragon and Jean-Richard Bloch.