LA COURNEUVE, France — “The workers movement here has been pushed back hard for years, but we got woken up by the yellow vests,” Regis Lanier, a nurse from Amiens, on the left, told Pathfinder supporters at their bookstand at the Fete de l’Humanite held here in Sept. 13-15. Amiens is an old industrial center 100 miles north of Paris.
Lanier was attending the festival for the first time in two decades, along with his son Roman, second from left, a college student who brought his yellow vest. They both said they had participated in the yellow vest protests last winter. They decided to get French-language editions of Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs and In Defense of the US Working Class by Mary-Alice Waters.
Fete de l’Humanite, an annual event organized in a working-class suburb outside Paris by the French Communist Party, is open to all comers. Supporters of Pathfinder Press set up a booth every year, offering dozens of titles by leaders of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and other revolutionaries.
Thirty-one copies of In Defense of the US Working Class, released in French right before the book fair, were sold. Sales were 20% higher than last year.
Altogether, 190 Pathfinder books were sold at the festival, including 44 copies of Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Burkinabe revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara; 16 copies of The Communist Manifesto; and 11 copies of The First and Second Declarations of Havana.