Robert Louzon

Robert Louzon (1882–1976 He studied engineering at the . He joined the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party in 1900, and the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905. In 1906, he lent the CGT 90,000 francs for the purchase of a building on . When his employers discovered this, he was sacked. ). In 1910, he spent time in Le Havre investigating the case of , a dockside union activist framed for a murder. ) and earning a National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Louzon was jailed for six months in 1922 in Algiers for his anti-colonial publications, and expelled from the colony. Released in August

In August 1936, He closely followed the activities of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the US, often donating them and forming a friendship with IWW activist Bill Hayward.

Although in the 1900s he was part of the Dreyfusard movement, in solidarity with the Alfred Dreyfus (a French Jew targeted by the growing antisemitic movement), as with some other followers of Sorel (such as Hubert Lagardelle), Louzon expressed some antisemitic views. In "La faillite du Dreyfusisme ou le triomphe du parti juif", an article in Le Mouvement socialiste in 1906 when Dreyfus was acquitted, Louzon denounced "Semitism" and wrote that "there exists a party of which Judaism, thanks to its financial power, its commercial and intellectual activity, is in charge." He saw this "party" of Judaism as competing for dominance within the bourgeoisie with the party of "clericalism".

In his time in North Africa, Louzon became an advocate of decolonialism: In a 1922 article, he wrote that "there is no equivalence between the nationalism of an oppressor people whose nationalism consists in oppressing another people, and the nationalism of an oppressed people whose nationalism only tends to get rid of the oppressor people." He said that the European Communist "must not believe himself superior to the native because he wears a hat instead of a fez."

Although he was close to Trotskyism, he was critical of Lenin and Trotsky. Monatte said "Louzon has never been and is not a Zimmerwaldian" and Rosmer was angered by Louzon’s comparison of Trotsky and Lenin's suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion with Thiers and Cavaignac's suppression of the Paris Commune. From 1924, he became an anti-Stalinist, seeing the Soviet Union as totalitarian. He condemned the Communists for betraying the Spanish revolution, writing in late 1937: "The present situation in Spain can be summed up in two facts: First: total loss of power by the working class; Second: transfer of power into the hands of the Spanish fascists, by the intermediary of the communist party."

He was a militant anti-fascist. In March 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler had become Germany's Chancellor, Louzon called on “the European proletariat” to engage in “a fight to the death against the regime of Hitler and Mussolini.” As an immediate first measure, he proposed “the boycott of all products from the two countries where fascism reigns.”

After World War II, Louzon became a passionate anti-Zionist.