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The article analyses the evolution of the concepts of literature and the organisation of writers? and intellectuals? in the French Communist Party from the second World War to the Cold War. The experience of German occupation leads to a change in the conception of the role of intellectuals within the PCF. Before the war, the prevailing model of commitment was the Dreyfus case: the mobilisation of the intellectuals mainly consisted in the charismatic support they were bringing to the defended cause. In the context of opposition to the occupying forces and to the Vichy regime, it was required of intellectuals that they put their art or their practice at the service of the cause to be defended. With the “smuggled” poetry, Aragon develops a formal model that becomes quite popular. At the same time, on the French Communist Party?s initiative, an intellectual Resistance takes place, organised by professional category (writers, artists, musicians, doctors, etc.). Kept after the Liberation, these professional associations born underground were federated in 1945 into the National Union of the Intellectuals (UNI). The war heritage thus governs the adaptation of socialist realism in France from 1947 onwards. It notably allows the Party?s intellectuals to defend, in the name of their speciality, their relative autonomy regarding the judgement of their practice against the tendency of worker control that intends to subordinate art to the approval of the workers and their representatives.