The working class of the world has lost its mascot. Léon Landini, the last survivor of the legendary Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) – the Immigrant Workforce Partisans of France – has departed. His heart, which for nine decades resonated an unrelenting revolutionary rhythm, finally ceased to beat on September 21st.
He passed peacefully, yet his departure leaves a mortal wound in the ranks of the international working class movement. His life journey epitomised relentless battles waged against fascism, imperialism, and capitalist oppression, facing the harshest perils. He passed just short of his 100th birthday, a milestone he had planned to mark with an official meeting in honour of the FTP-MOI, whose memory Léon tirelessly defended and shared.
Landini was not merely a historical figure; he was a living bridge linking the battles of the 20th century to the urgent struggles of today. Born into a 'red family' of Italian anti-fascists, his childhood home was a sanctuary for comrades, from the clandestine Palmiro Togliatti underground movement to French communists fleeing the fascist plague. Resistance was inborn within him, and he took up its mantle without hesitation. Following in the footsteps of his father, Aristide Landini, a courageous Italian anti-fascist forced to flee to France, Léon carried the linking thread of the October Revolution, the anti-fascist Popular Fronts, the Resistance to the Nazi occupation, and the post-war struggles of the French Communist Party (PCF) for the “happy days” promised by the National Resistance Council (CNR). He maintained an unwavering dedication to social progress, the freedom of peoples, international socialism, the sovereignty of France, and world peace.
At the age of 16, Léon became entangled in the most dangerous of battles: communist urban guerrilla warfare. He took part in dozens of armed actions against the Wehrmacht, including attacks on German military trains and numerous derailments. Arrested in Lyon and subjected to torture, like 52 of his comrades who died at the hands of [Nazi Secret Police head Klaus] Barbie and Co., he emerged from the war as an FTP-MOI officer and a Grand Mutilé de Guerre (Great War Disabled). For his acts of resistance, Léon was awarded the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor by President François Mitterrand, a distinction anticipated by the Medal of Resistance.
This was no romantic adventure. “We were afraid twenty-six hours a day,” he recalled, “because, sometimes, the fear counts double.” Captured in Lyon in 1944, he underwent merciless torture at the hands of the French Milice and the Gestapo’s Klaus Barbie. They broke his nose, crushed his testicles, and fractured his skull. Still, he remained undeterred. His unbelievable escape from Montluc prison was an embodiment of an iron will, manufactured in the flames of class struggle.
After the liberation, his fight resolutely continued. He stood against France’s colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina, and against the rising wave of imperialism. He watched with agony as the French Communist Party (PCF), under the leadership of Robert Hue, erased Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary struggle from its statutes, “rivaling Gorbachev in terms of betrayal.” Léon never dropped the baton in fighting for French independence, for social gains, for world peace threatened by the EU-NATO, and to enrich and transmit a new generation of socialism-communism. In deep disagreement with the "reformist change" of the PCF engaged in the 1990s, he co-founded the Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF) in 2004. Declaring, “I did not abandon the party: it was the party that abandoned me,” he became the executive president of the PRCF.
Landini was a leader who relentlessly weaved the red flag of social struggle with the tricolour of a workers’ France. Just weeks before his death, he challenged the anti-communist mayor of Saint-Raphaël, who had removed a memorial to Landini’s own brother, Roger, a resistance hero, while erecting a monument to the “victims of communism.” Landini’s rebuking hit the very nail on the head: “Are the Nazis I killed during the Occupation counted among the so-called ‘victims’?”
Transcending the unwavering commander was a man who embodied humanism: a comrade ever smiling, always humming a song of the Italian proletariat or the French Revolution, and unwavering courtesy to all workers. On his deathbed, semi-conscious, he still wore a smile on his face and opened his eyes wide when his daughters played a quiet rendition of the ‘Song of the Partisans.’ For his arduous resistance struggle, his peaceful commitment, and his unwavering refuting of anti-Sovietism, which has more recently turned into Russophobic warmongering, Léon was decorated by the USSR. He also received the Medal of Friendship from the Republic of Cuba for his constant political solidarity with Cuban socialism.
A cherished friend of the USSR and a recipient of the Medal of Friendship from socialist Cuba, Landini’s internationalism was as rock solid as his patriotism. His life was a testament to revolutionary persistence and tenacity: that the fight against fascism and the fight for socialism are inseparable; that immigrants are often the vanguard of the proletariat, and that a communist’s duty lives till the very last breath.
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*Freelance journalist
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