Vergeat, Lepetit and Lefebvre¶
Core Argument¶
In this short but powerful obituary, written on 26 February 1921, Leon Trotsky memorialises three French revolutionaries—Vergeat, Lepetit and Lefebvre—who drowned in the North Sea the previous September while travelling from Soviet Russia to Norway. The chapter’s core argument is that their deaths, though one among countless losses in the global civil war, possess a singular tragic romanticism that symbolises the convergence of different revolutionary currents into a unified communist movement. Trotsky uses the three men as typological figures, each representing a distinct path to revolution, to illustrate the breadth and depth of the proletarian cause.
Vergeat, whom Trotsky knew least, embodied calm confidence and a discerning revolutionary temperament—the kind of level-headed fighter the French proletariat urgently needed. Lepetit, a Parisian navvy Trotsky knew from his exile in France, is portrayed as the quintessential proletarian rebel: distrustful, indignant, and instinctively revolutionary. His self-identification as an anarchist is treated not as a theoretical error but as a class instinct against bourgeois betrayal, which would inevitably have led him to embrace the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Communist International had he lived. Lefebvre, by contrast, was a bourgeois intellectual turned revolutionary enthusiast, who adopted a Russian blouse to signal his total break with his class and his commitment to Soviet Russia. Trotsky recounts a telling anecdote from the Second Congress of the Communist International, where Lefebvre, in debate with the Italian communist Bordiga, insisted on the “benefit and pleasure” of denouncing the traitor Millerand face-to-face in parliament—a remark that captures the moral fervour of the revolutionary intellectual.
The chapter draws on the immediate historical context of the imperialist blockade of Soviet Russia and the ongoing civil war, which made even travel a mortal undertaking. Trotsky’s polemical targets are twofold: the bourgeois parliamentarians and “lap-dog syndicalists” who betrayed the working class, and the “drawing-room, priestly-intellectual, individualist claptrap” of French anarchism. Against these, he counterposes the authentic, combative spirit of workers like Lepetit, whose distrust was a weapon, not a weakness. The three men, so different in origin and temperament, are united in death as they would have been in life—at the combat posts of the proletarian dictatorship. Trotsky’s prose is dense with pathos and political conviction, turning a tragic accident into a lesson in revolutionary unity and class loyalty.