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The development of socialist realism in plastic arts in France, under the influence of the French Communist Party, in the context of the beginning of the Cold War, has been as brief as intense. It reveals the tensions and the contradictions of a project of a politically-inspired art, closely linked to the goals and rhythm imparted by the Party, strong with its ability of attracting numerous intellectuals and artists. The political circumstances, the evolution in the orientations of the national and international communist movement, and more prosaically the internal struggles for power, determine, in fine, the various steps of this “French socialist realism.” Moreover, it illustrates one of the singularities of the PCF on the national political scene, as a promoter of a specific cultural policy embedded in the necessities of the ideological struggle of cold war. This esthetical and political phenomenon also sheds light on the particular forms of the commitment of these “the-Party- artists” who conceive their creative activity as inseparable from political action.