Gramsci’s Imaginary Prisons

Abstract This essay aims to investigate the first attempt in the 1950s to translate and publish Gramsci’s works into French. It reveals the blocking if not the censorship on the part of the major French publishers. If the French Communist Party (PCF) decides to take on the edition, it is with great suspicion regarding a “liberal heresy” fueled by the anti-Stalinist line which comes from Togliatti’s PCI. It is ultimately a clandestine, contraband work undertaken by illustrious French intellectuals, historians such as François Furet and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, to make a heterodox Marxist known.