By the Communist Revolutionary Party of France
The working class of the world has lost a titan. Comrade 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 fallen. His heart, which beat for nine decades with an unyielding revolutionary rhythm, finally stilled on September 21st. He passed peacefully, surrounded by his family, yet his passing leaves a tremendous gap in the ranks of the international communist movement.
Landini was not merely a historical figure; he was a living thread connecting the battles of the 20th century to the urgent struggles of today. Born into a ‘red family’ of Italian anti-fascists, he was, as he said, ‘raised on red milk.’ His childhood home was a sanctuary for comrades from the clandestine Palmiro Togliatti underground revolutionary movement to French communists who were fleeing the fascist plague. Resistance was his inheritance, and he took up its mantle without hesitation.
By the age of 16, he was a seasoned urban guerrilla in the FTP-MOI’s Carmagnole-Liberté Battalion, a unit later described by FTP commander Charles Tillon as “the finest jewel in the crown of the French armed Resistance.” Landini’s war was one of direct action: dynamiting mines that fuelled the German war machine, derailing military trains, and launching attacks on the Wehrmacht. This was not a romantic adventure. “We were afraid twenty-six hours a day,” he recalled, “because, sometimes, the fear counts double.”
Captured in Lyon in 1944, he endured unimaginable 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. He never uttered a word. His miraculous escape from Montluc prison was a testament to a will forged in the fire of class struggle.
After the Liberation, his fight evolved but never ceased. He stood against the colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina, and against the creeping tide of imperialism. He watched with a heavy heart as the French Communist Party, under Robert Hue, erased Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary struggle from its statutes, “rivaling Gorbachev in terms of betrayal.” Declaring, “I did not abandon the Party: it was the Party that abandoned me,” he helped found and became the executive president of the Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF) in 2004.
Landini was a leader who seamlessly wove together 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 retort was characteristically sharp: Are the Nazis I killed during the Occupation counted among the so-called “victims”?
Beyond the resolute commander was a man of profound humanity a comrade with a ready smile, a song of the Italian proletariat or the French Revolution on his lips, and unwavering courtesy to all workers. On his deathbed, semi-conscious, he still smiled and opened his eyes wide when his daughters played a quiet rendition of the ‘Song of the Partisans.’
A decorated friend of the USSR and a recipient of the Medal of Friendship from socialist Cuba, Landini’s internationalism was as steadfast as his patriotism. His life is a masterclass in revolutionary persistence. He teaches us that the fight against fascism and the fight for socialism are one and the same; that immigrants are often the vanguard of the proletariat and that a communist’s duty ends only with their last breath.
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