Farewell Pierre Frank

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The following article is reprinted from the May 21, 1984, issue of Internation al Viewpoint, a news publication of the Fourth International.

Pierre Frank was a revolutionary militant for 60 years. A leader of Trotsky's Left Opposition and a founding member of the Fourth International, he remained an active leader of the Fourth International, and its French section, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, until his last years.

In this long life of revolutionary activity he met and inspired many, some who spent only a short time in the Trotskyist movement, others who, like Frank himself, made a lifelong commitment to it.

At his funeral at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris on April 27, 1500 of these past and present comrades came to pay their last respects to Pierre Frank.

It was this aspect of the funeral that the French press particularly remarked: the ability of the Fourth International to bring together both the other Trotskyist groups in France, and former members of the movement whose subsequent development has taken them away from the revolutionary Marxist Thus, Le Monde, the top Paris daily, noted not only the presence of a large contingent of Lutte Ouvriere and a delegation of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste led by Pierre Lambert, but also a number of former Trotskyists now well-known in other fields. David Rousset, for example, a Trotskyist in the war years and now a retired Gaullist deputy, or Fred Zeller, Trotsky's secretary and envoy to Spain in the 1930s, who afterwards became the grandmaster of an order of freemasons.

Le Matin, the Socialist-inclined daily, devoted a two-page spread to the funeral and the "Frank generation" of the Trotskyist movement. This report also highlighted the internationalism of Frank and the movement he spent his life building.

It noted the presence of Vlady, son of Victor Serge, now a well-known painter in Mexico. Also present were Mohammed Harbi, leader of the Algerian National Liberation Front in France in the 1950s, and Zbigniew Kowalewski, exiled leader of Solidarnosc in Poland.

Particularly noted was the presence of two leaders of the Sandinista youth of Nicaragua, presently touring Western Europe, whose offering of red roses was placed on the coffin. Other wreaths also gave an idea of the internationalism of this event, from the Vietnamese Trotskyists, from sections of the Fourth International in Europe and North America, and from the Antilles.

The hundreds of members of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) who had left work for the afternoon to come to pay their last tribute bore witness to the new breath of life the Trotskyist movement won from the radicalized youth of 1968 and the succeeding years.

Marguerite Metayer, Pierre Frank's companion for some 40 years, was in the front ranks, accompanied by leaders of the LCR. Also a political militant from her youth, she was deported at the age of 20 to Ravensbruck.

The cortege was an impressive sight as it wound its way on a bright April day from Place de la Nation to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Behind an immense portrait of Pierre Frank came a guard of honor with the red flags marked with the symbol of the Fourth International, followed by the international and other guests and then the large number of comrades and friends of the movement, many wearing red carnations. As it proceeded, there came a soft slow singing, of the Russian "Song of the martyrs" or "The Internationale" accompanied by a single trombone.

So impressive it was that Le Matin noted, "not since the death of Trotsky has any leader of the Fourth International had such a funeral, and Le