Danielle Bleitrach

In 2015, Bleitrach's attention turned to nazism. She co-authored, with Richard Gehrke, an essay called Bertolt Brecht et Fritz Lang. Le nazisme n’a jamais été éradiqué. The book analyzes Lang's film based on a story by Bretcht, Hangmen Also Die! The same year, she co-authored, with Marianne Dunlop, URSS vingt ans après : retour de l'Ukraine en guerre, a book reporting the testimonies of interviewees in Odessa and Crimea after the Maidan Revolution.

Bleitrach is among the 378 French scholars in human and social sciences listed with their respective bibliographies in Serigne Magaye Cissé's Recueil bibliographique en sciences humaines et sociales (2013).

In 2003, Bleitrach left the PCF. While still considering herself a communist, she refrained from joining any party until January 2016 when she decided to apply again for membership.

In the 2000s, Bleitrach's work focused on the geographic areas of Cuba and Latin America. Here she departed from her previous sociological analyses but continued to pursue a reflection on globalization, development, work and urbanization.

In her retirement, Bleitrach maintains a personal blog, Histoire et société, after creating an earlier one called Changement de société in the 2000s.

Bleitrach joined the French Communist Party, or PCF, at the age of fifteen. She was a member of the Central Committee, then the National Committee of the party from 1981 to 1996, when she resigned on the basis of her belief that the conditions for participating in the government had not been met.

Her thèse de 3e cycle (doctoral dissertation) in urban sociology (Structure sociale et organisation urbaine : les élus locaux et les actions régionales d'aménagement), presented in 1972, dealt with the attitude of French local elected officials to regional development policies.

In 1972-73 and 1973–74, Bleitrach delivered a course on "the sociology of the State" at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies.

In the 1960s, Bleitrach was a student at the University of Provence at Aix-en-Provence. She earned a licence (bachelor's degree) in history followed in 1966 by a diplôme d'études supérieures (master of arts degree) with a focus on Provençal medieval religious iconography. The 1967 Revue d'histoire de l'Eglise de France found that "her description of the sculptures of the Montmajour and Saint-Paul de Mausole cloisters was a fine job and her study of religious mentalities was interesting."

Bleitrach's second husband was Pascal Fieschi, a communist trade union and party official and former Resistance organizer in Aix-en-Provence whom she had met in 1958. The leader of the failed 1944 attempted escape of 1200 resistants from the Eysses prison at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Lot-et-Garonne, he was deported to Dachau.

Danielle Bleitrach (born 1938) is a French sociologist and journalist. From the 1970s through the end of the century, she was CNRS researcher and lecturer at the Aix-Marseille University, focusing on the sociology of the working class and urbanization. From 1981 to 1996 she was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, then the National Committee of the Party. She was also assistant editor-in-chief of the party weekly Révolution. She has contributed to La Pensée, Les Temps Modernes and Le Monde Diplomatique. In the 2000s and 2010s, after retiring from teaching, she co-authored texts on Cuba, Nazism and Ukraine.

Born in 1938 to a Jewish family, Bleitrach's early childhood was marked by "the flight from nazism." In September 1943, she and her family were refugees in Cannes during the German Occupation of France and she narrowly escaped a round-up by the Gestapo in the Palace Bellevue where refugees were housed.