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‪This article looks at the French Communist Party’s relationship with “le music-hall” between the end of the World War II and 1958, a period paradoxically marked both by the permanence of its policy of cultural openness begun in the 1930s and by the echoes of the Cold War in its musical apparatus. The Communist movement promoted choral singing, as well as great musical and theatrical frescoes composed and written by fellow travelers, embodying an aesthetic, themes and a musicking in line with its current doctrine and propaganda, and opposed to both the “formalism” and “uprooted cosmopolitanism” of “bourgeois music” and mainstream productions. It also perpetuated its support to sympathizing performers of French chanson and variety shows, the most representative and popular being Yves Montand. The failure of the party’s countercultural strategy, and the evolution of the singer’s ties with the Communist Party, from fellow traveler to harsh critic following the 1958 break-up, reveal the political and cultural crisis the movement was undergoing in the late 1950s – the prelude to its cultural aggiornamento.‪