Annie Lacroix-Riz (born 1947) is a French academic Marxist historian specializing in France's relations with Germany and the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s, as well as World War II collaboration.
A former student of the ÃÂcole normale supérieure de jeunes filles and a pupil of Pierre Vilar, she is a professor emeritus of contemporary history at the Paris Diderot University, now part of Paris Cité University.
Lacroix-Riz is a founding member of the Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF), established in 2004.
Her research interests are on the political, economic and social history of the French Third Republic and the Vichy regime, the relations between the Vatican and the Reich, as well as the "strategies of the French elites" before and after the Second World War.
In her early works, examining post-war reconstruction of France, Lacroix-Riz studied labor union tensions, investigating issues within the General Confederation of Labour union (French: Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT), the work of the communist minister of Labor and syndicalist Ambroise Croizat on social labor reforms, and American trade unionist Irving BrownâÂÂs involvement in the labor movement of France. Subsequent works by Lacroix-Riz probe American influence in Europe, as, for example in Sweden, and in the French colonies of North Africa, questioning the motives of the Marshall Plan.
One of her primary theses is that the profit-driven complicity of French industrial and financial institutions in the rise of Nazi Germany contributed to France's 1940 defeat, paving ultimately the path to U.S ascendancy in Europe.
Lacroix-Riz's writings on the 1930s and WWII, particularly regarding financial and industrial interests, the fascist group La Cagoule, her views on Synarchism and the 1930s famine in Ukrainian have been met with varying responses. On one hand, she is recognized for the detailed and comprehensive nature of her work, rooted in archival evidence. On the other hand, her work sometimes faces criticism for ostensible anti-capitalist bias, a criticism based on her challenges of traditional perspectives and conventional narratives.