Aimé CésaireÉcrits politiques (Vol. I à V)

Aimé Césaire has always put the incandescence of his words at the service of political commitment. It is difficult to find a man in the literary field whose consciousness is so powerfully anchored in history. A veritable scansion of history, his writings offer a political crossing of the 20th century in the light of one of its major actors. The man was mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years, a member of parliament for forty-eight years, three times elected to the General Council of Martinique and twice president of its Regional Council. He never suffered a single electoral defeat. President of the Martinique Students’ Association, then elected to the French Communist Party, which he joined in the aftermath of the Second World War, he was a black intellectual and activist deeply committed to the anti-colonial struggle.
His break with the Communists in October 1956, after a long series of disagreements, marked an important turning point in his political commitment.

After resisting for more than a year the requests of his friends to form a political party, Césaire created the first nationalist party in the country: the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. The entry of this new party onto the political scene made it a force to be reckoned with from the outset, and after its third congress in 1967 it sought to unite the Martinique left. From 1981 onwards, it was involved in the decentralisation laws before opposing the draft programme law on the development of the overseas departments presented by the Chirac government in 1986.