Education
Born in Hergnies, Nord, a small town in the coal-mining region of northern France, Stil was educated at the University of Lille, earning a degree in philosophy.
Born in Hergnies, Nord, a small town in the coal-mining region of northern France, Stil was educated at the University of Lille, earning a degree in philosophy.
He taught at the University from 1941 to 1944. Having joined the Communist Party in 1940, he then held a series of increasingly senior editorial positions with communist newspapers. He was secretary-general of Liberté until 1949, then editor-in-chief of Ce Soir.
In 1956 he published a report from the Hungarian Revolution, describing an apparent mass murder of Hungarian communists.
A lifelong militant, he became a member of the French Communist Party in 1940, and remained loyal to the party. Beginning in 1949, he published some fifty volumes, comprising mainly socialist realist novels, but also short stories and a volume of verse.
He served as editor of the party"s main newspaper, L"Humanité, until 1956, continuing to contribute thereafter, and from 1950 to 1970 he was a member of the French Communist Party"s central committee. However Peter Fryer, a British journalist and Marxist who, unlike Stil was present during the Revolution and Soviet crack-down, questioned Stil"s account arguing that "Stil obviously performing the disagreeable task of a propagandist making the most of a small number of atrocities." Indeed Fryer refuted Stil"s account pointing out that those killed were in fact members of the hated AVH secret police.
