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At the start of the 1950s, French socialists, like other European socialist and social democratic parties, entered into relations with the Communists in Yugoslavia, despite the distance separating them politically. They opened an amazing doctrinal dialog and observed with great interest the experience of worker self-management undertaken by Tito. Belonging to the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) (French Section of the Workers’ International), these socialists, without an innovative approach to economic and social issues, turned out to be effective, precocious makers of a myth about Yugoslavia in France. Paradoxically, they took part in adapting the ideas on self-management that, relayed by the events of May 1968, were used to dismiss the traditional parliamentary socialism that these socialists represented in the eyes of the “new left.” This article uses archives and printed sources to reconstitute this little-known episode of the Cold War.