Gino G. Raymond - The French Communist Party During the Fifth Republic_A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology

The French CommunistParty during the Fifth

RepublicA Crisis of Leadership and Ideology

Gino G. Raymond

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Gino G. Raymond THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY DURING THE FIFTH REPUBLIC A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology

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The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology

Gino G. Raymond


© Gino G. Raymond 2005

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raymond, Gino.

The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic : a crisis ofleadership and ideology / Gino G. Raymond.

p. cm. — (French politics, society, and culture series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–9612–1 (cloth) 1. Parti communiste français. 2. France—Politics and government—1958– I. Title. II. Series. JN3007.C6R39 2005 324.244′075′09045—dc22 2005047038

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vii

Contents

List of Tables viii

About the Author ix

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Part I The Premier Party of France 5

1 Political Credibility 7

2 Dynamics of the Counter-culture 23

3 The Anti-system Party 40

Part II The Seeds of Failure 65

4 The Rise of the Socialists 67

5 Failing the Presidential Challenge 93

6 Marchais: The (Dis)course of Leadership 120

Part III A Party Without a Role? 139

7 A Tale of Clashing Counter-cultures 141

8 The End of Ideology 168

Notes 206

Bibliography 221

Index 230


viii

List of Tables

3.1 Results of second round of legislative elections, 30 November 1958 50

3.2 1974 Presidential election 62 4.1 Social composition of SFIO–PS membership

(in percentages), 1951–73 75 4.2 Performances of PS and PCF in the constituencies 85 5.1 Electoral performance of PCF since 1969 96 7.1 PCF and FN election results in metropolitan

France 1978–89 166 8.1 Performance of left-wing and ecology candidates in

the first round of the presidential elections 2002 192 8.2 Performance of left-wing and ecology parties in the

first round of the legislative elections 2002 193


ix

About the Author

Gino Raymond is Reader in French at the University of Bristol, England.He received his BA from the University of Bristol and his PhD fromCambridge University. He is trained in both French studies and politicalscience. His interest in the evolution of French society and culture washoned by periods of teaching in a number of French institutions,including the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Since returning toteach in England, he has continued to develop his research interests inthe emanations of France’s political culture, both through politicaldiscourse and through strategies of literary commitment. This has so farresulted in five books: France during the Socialist Years (ed., 1994), AndréMalraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth (1995), A Historical Dictionaryof France (1998), Structures of Power in Modern France (ed., 1999) andRedefining the French Republic (ed. with A. Cole, 2005). His journal publi-cations include articles in Patterns of Prejudice, French Cultural Studiesand the Revue André Malraux. His work has also been translated intoseveral languages. He is married, with two children.


x

Acknowledgements

This book developed over a period of years, drawing on a sustained periodof interest in the Parti communiste français that gave rise to a number ofjournal articles and chapters in edited books on the subject of theCommunists in France, both as a party and as a community. Chapters 5and 6 are versions of contributions to other works, and I am grateful tothe editors, John Gaffney and Helen Drake, for their permission to adaptthem for the purposes of this book. I am indebted also to the PCF staffat place Colonel Fabien, who, while their building looked like a bunker,displayed anything but a bunker mentality. The completion of this projectwould not have been possible without the generous research leaveafforded by the Department of French of the University of Bristolduring 2003–2004, and the material support provided through the ArtsFaculty Research Fund of the University of Bristol that sustained meduring the indispensable periods of research in France. Last but notleast, I wish to express my thanks to the staff of the French Departmentoffice, especially Christina Hollow, for their exceptional dedication inhelping me to negotiate the technical hurdles involved in preparing themanuscript. Any flaws in the form or the content of the book are, ofcourse, entirely attributable to me.


1

Introduction

A formidable body of research exists on the Parti communiste français(PCF), comprising distinguished narratives in English and French chartingits highs and lows during most of the twentieth century.1 Other studieshave traced the way its fortunes have been crucially tied to those of itsideological mentor,2 together with enduringly valuable studies exploringthe culture that enabled it to survive for so long as a counter-communityand assume the role of a tribune party.3

Objective analyses of the party in recent years have identified veryclearly the impact on its credibility and electoral performance of the wayits Leninist origins continued to shape its political choices up to theend of the twentieth century.4 From the 1970s onwards there has beenno shortage of subjective accounts from former insiders of the effect onparty members of its inability to change,5 while the failure of the partyto defend the viability of its ideology has been illustrated by the disillu-sionment and desertion of its own intellectuals, fatally impoverishingits culture.6 The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the SovietUnion forced the pace of change and the leadership after GeorgesMarchais has tried to define a vision that might revive the party’s hopesfor the future.7 Recent academic contributions to the field have movedbeyond the familiar inventory of leadership failures to suggest thatwhile the party has shrunk almost beyond recognition, it has providedFrance with a legacy that remains part of the fabric of its social andintellectual culture.8

The purpose of this study is to trace the way the destiny of the PCF iswoven into the evolution of French society as a whole, especially duringthe life of the Fifth Republic: at times standing in opposition to it, atothers embodying and exaggerating the changes within it, but in bothcases reflecting on the state of French society at that particular time as


2 French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic

well as the state of its own existence. Departing from the now familiarevocations of the PCF’s recent history as a catalogue of missed opportu-nities and self-inflicted wounds, the study will situate the fortunes ofthe PCF into the wider context of the challenges faced by all parties inFrance today promoting a certain vision of society at a time when theinstitutions and agencies mediating change appear to be challenged asnever before.

Thus in Part I: The Premier Party of France, we begin with the turmoil onthe Left in France during the 1920s, with the hardening of the demandsfor ideological conformity from Moscow that led to the emergence ofthe Communists as a party. From a position of weakness and isolation,by the middle of the next decade the Communists seized the initiativein rallying the Left in defence of democracy thanks to the emergence ofthe extreme Right and began the attempt at establishing a ménage with theSocialists that will be a constant process of rupture and reconciliationfor the rest of its existence. Contingent factors will once more play inthe party’s favour during the occupation of France when, following theinvasion of Russia by Hitler’s troops, the formidable organisationaltalents and ideological commitment of the party’s members were investedin the French resistance. As evidence of the capital of credibility enjoyedby the PCF, the party was able to pursue a course of action during thepower struggle that followed the liberation of France and the inceptionof the Fourth Republic that allowed it to force an end to its participationin the government of Socialist Paul Ramadier and even question thewisdom of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of the country, whilepreserving the electoral base that made it the premier party of France.

A unique combination of objective and subjective factors made thePCF, even in isolation, an irreducible force. Its rivals had to concedethat the charisma it had acquired during the occupation had enabledthe PCF to fuse ideological conviction, acts of resistance and patrioticfervour in a manner that insulated it against the consequences, at theballot box, that might have been expected to flow from accusationsof harbouring divided loyalties in the climate of global ideologicalantagonism that characterised the 1940s and 1950s. The party’s resiliencewas, of course, underwritten by the strength of its culture as a self-sufficientcommunity. With an organisational prise en charge or assimilation of itsadherents that was without equal, a powerful presence among thelabour battalions whose work was crucial in the primary industries thatwere vital to the renascent French economy, and an intellectual castecapable of dominating the battle of ideas in academic and cultural life,the leadership had the means to make the party’s default switch one of


Introduction 3

automatic opposition to the political system at home while beinggenerally unquestioning in its obedience to the Moscow line abroad.

However, as Part II: The Seeds of Failure demonstrates, a static party inan evolving polity is bound to atrophy. While, on the one hand, thefacts of economic change that saw France shift from labour-intensive tocapital-intensive industry, thus thinning the ranks of the proletariat,represented an evolution that the party leadership could not reverse,its refusal to adapt to the changing political game made it culpable ofpoor decision-making. This failure was highlighted by the resurgence ofthe Socialists who, by the beginning of the 1970s, were reorganised,rechristened and revived by a leadership determined to subordinateideological convictions to the dictates of a successful electoralist strategy.Pragmatically reaching out to the middle classes with one hand andreaching out to the new home-owning and consumerist workers of Francewith the other, by the end of the decade the silhouette of the Partisocialiste (PS) as an electoral force had come to overshadow that of thePCF. The effect, in terms of the dynamic of left-wing politics in France,was to sharpen the oscillations in the relationship between the twomajor sister parties of the Left and sometimes damage the perception ofthe PCF’s integrity as, now relegated to a subordinate role, it struggledon occasion to contain the ignoble preference to see the Right in powerrather than the Socialist-led Left.

More significantly in the context of the wider struggle for power, thePCF leadership had failed to adapt to the challenge of presidentialism.While François Mitterrand had also condemned the creation of a ‘repub-lican monarch’ resulting from the prerogatives of executive power asdefined by the constitution of the Fifth Republic, he adapted to theinescapable reality of it and under his leadership the PS in electoralmode became a formidable presidential vehicle. By contrast, the PCFleadership wedged itself in the impossible position of condemning theultimate prize in French politics as being an obstacle to the flowering ofa genuinely democratic society, while at the same time promoting itscandidate as a credible contender for that office. The cost of being caughton the horns of this dilemma was illustrated by the way the party wasripped apart in the presidential elections of 1988. Not only was thecredibility of its official candidate undermined by the all too obviouspresence of the deus ex machina, the party general secretary, but by thealternative programme of an unofficial communist candidate representingthose members determined to see the party break out of its ideologicalghetto. Part II concludes with a discussion of the ‘(dis)course’ of theparty’s general secretary at that time, Georges Marchais, analysing the


4 French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic

discursive strategies that expressed his attempts to keep the party oncourse in terms of its ideological vocation, and the way this was blownoff course both by events and the profound change in the expectationsof the members he purported to represent.

Part III: A Party Without a Role? addresses the wider intellectual andsocial context in which the decline of the PCF occurs, using the PCF asa weathervane for which the consequences of a buffeting by the windsof change are all the more exaggerated, given its unbending self-definitionin ideological terms. The misreading of the student protests in Paris inMay 1968 by the PCF leadership was indicative of a party that was alreadyout of touch with the natural constituency of revolution – the young.The totalising world-view of Communists clouded their ability to graspthe myriad ways in which the notion of revolt was being interpretedand individualised. The decades that followed were marked by missedopportunities with regard to the way other communist parties in Europewere reforming and recasting their appeal in line with the changedexpectations of their electorates, and the challenge of appealing tonew constituencies which in principle were natural allies of the PCF as‘frères dans la misère’ or brothers in poverty, namely the wave of newnon-European immigrants to France.

This study ends with an appraisal of the problematic that character-ises the situation of a party with a revolutionary vocation in a post-revolutionary and post-modern age. It examines the way the crisis ofrepresentation affects all parties engaged in the processes of politicalparticipation and the way the grand narratives of modernity, so crucialto the self-understanding of the PCF, seem no longer able to mobilisethe citizens of France. With the burgeoning growth of associations andsocial movements accompanied by new record highs in abstentionismat the polls, it is clear that disenchanted voters are not so much apoliticalbut increasingly determined to pursue political objectives by othermeans, through grassroots mobilisations usually around specific issuesas opposed to ideologically driven priorities dispensed in a top-downmanner. The way the post-Marchais leadership of the party has attemptedto formulate a response to this challenge is scrutinised and an assessmentis made of the way the PCF is now reaching out in the attempt to secureits survival as a credible component of the Left in France, through theopportunities that are available to it nationally and internationally.


Part I

The Premier Party of France




7

1 Political Credibility

Introduction: Riding the political see-saw

The argument that modern French communism is a child of theResistance1 encapsulates the source of much of the credibility whichenabled it to become such a formidable political force during the threedecades following World War II, but it is also reminiscent of the factthat contingent factors influenced the fortunes of the party, sometimesfor the worst, before the war, and that contingent factors militated againstits success at the end of the twentieth century (as they militated againstthe success of that other child of the Resistance, the Gaullist party).

The French communists suffered a decade of decline during the 1920swhen it lagged far behind the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière(SFIO), following the break-up in French socialist ranks at the Congressof Tours in 1920. The inception of the PCF, after its split with the morepluralist members of the SFIO and their refusal to accept the Leninistparty blueprint which formed the essence of the demands by Moscowin the 21 conditions for adhesion to the Third International, was followedby a slide in the membership base from 118,000 in 1921 to 29,000 by1931. The party’s fortunes were restored by the revival of republicansolidarity against the rising threat of the far right in France and theformation of the Popular Front. The PCF was the first to seize on thedisquiet created in the public mind by the riot on 6 February 1934 inParis, on the Place de la Concorde and the boulevard Saint-Germain,when far right ligues (notably Colonel de La Rocque’s Croix-de-Feu)appeared to threaten the Chamber of Deputies in an expression ofviolent anti-parliamentarism that left 15 dead and hundreds injured.Three days later the PCF and the Confédération générale du travail unitaire(CGTU) organised a demonstration against the far right. On 12 February


8 The Premier Party of France

two demonstrations organised separately by Socialists and Communistscame together on the Place de la Nation. The ground was thus preparedfor Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the PCF, on 9 October 1934, topropose the constitution of a ‘popular front’ against the threat from thefar right.

The revival in the party’s fortunes, which had allowed the membershipto virtually double between 1933 and 1935, from 42,000 to 82,000, tookoff remarkably in 1936, when it reached 285,000, with the peak comingin 1937 at 340,000.2 In reality, the transition from ‘anathema to unity’3 onthe Left was less miraculous and more self-interested than it appeared tobe on the part of the PCF. Even as late as the spring of 1934 the policyof the PCF was centred on the capture of support from socialist ranksaccording to the post-Tours formula of ‘plucking the chicken’ in thecampaign against social democracy, or ‘social fascism’ as it was called. Thechange in the PCF tune was called by the Communist International,and was confirmed by the telegram sent to Thorez during the partyconference in Ivry, 21–26 June 1934, when his closing address was to beused to announce the new line of ‘left unity at all costs’ in the struggleagainst fascism.

As the socialist leader Léon Blum remarked in Le Populaire of 8 July1934, everything had changed in the wink of an eye, but as he alsonoted, it was impossible to ignore such an appeal for unity. And it wasan appeal that brought the richest reward for the PCF in the legislativeelections of 1936. In the campaign for the legislative elections of 1936,it was the PCF that expressed most directly the ideal of republican unityagainst fascism. Maurice Thorez was the most adept of the political leadersat using the airwaves to put his message across, such as in his broadcastof 17 April 1936, ‘Pour une France libre, forte et heureuse’ (‘for a free,strong and happy France’). In contrast to this message, the Rightmounted a campaign based on a fear of Bolshevism fuelled by theevocation of catastrophic scenarios if the Left came to power. The parlia-mentary majority which emerged after the second round of the electionson 3 May 1936 gave the Left two-thirds of the seats in the new Assembly,and although the Socialists had the biggest bloc with 149 seats, itwas the PCF which enjoyed the most dramatic progression rising from11 seats to 72.

The depiction of the period of Popular Front government as essen-tially one glorious summer carnival when, for a brief but inspirationalmoment, the people of France were reconciled with themselves and therepublican solidarity of the Revolution was realised has been graphicallydocumented.4 Beneath the triumph, the factor which had facilitated the


Political Credibility 9

success of the Front was also its greatest weakness: the Front was analliance designed to obtain electoral success which gave Léon Blum amandate to manage the crisis of capitalism, but not one which extendedto a maximalist transformation of the socio-economic system. The PCFhad signalled its intention not to compromise its position by declaringits wholehearted support for the government on 6 May, while decliningto participate in it. As the glorious summer of 1936 gave way toautumn, the gains enjoyed by the workers resulting from the MatignonAccords of June 1936 began to pall due to the government’s inability toreflate the economy in the face of worldwide deflationary policies. ThePCF pledge to support the government was further stretched by thelatter’s inability to define a more proactive role in support of theirfellow Socialists in Spain after the fascist threat to the democraticallyelected government there became a reality in July. Blum’s announce-ment of the ‘pause’ in the programme of reform, in February 1937, wasfollowed by the Senate’s refusal to vote for the powers he required tomanage the economic crisis in the country. His resignation on 21 Junein effect brought the Popular Front experiment to an end, although ithas been argued that he chose this option rather than fighting on inorder to maintain at least a semblance of a coalition.5 However, theway the PCF had distanced itself from government did not insulate itfrom the effects of a widespread sense of disillusionment. In fact, all thegains it made in terms of membership and credibility were soon to bemore than washed away in the prelude to war.

The isolation of the PCF worked to its detriment, for what was upper-most in an increasingly conservative public opinion was a fear ofcommunism. But the hammer blow that shook the party came whenfidelity to Moscow required it to defend the indefensible. When theworld learned, on the evening of 21 August 1939, that the SovietUnion and Nazi Germany had decided to sign a treaty of non-aggression,the stupefaction was universal, including among the leadership ofthe PCF. There was no editorial by Thorez in the communist paperL’Humanité the following day, as might have been expected. On24 August, a day after the treaty was signed in Moscow, L’Humanité wasfully restored to its vocation and justified the Moscow line by arguingthat the pact placed the Soviet Union at the heart of the search forpeace and also underlined the limits of Hitler’s power. While the PCFcould maintain a disciplined reaction to the Nazi–Soviet pact at thesummit of the party hierarchy, at the base of the party there was wide-spread dismay.6 Federation secretaries charged with explaining thepolicy to members were shouted down, the administrative commission of



the communist Confédération générale du travail (CGT) passed a motioncondemning the pact, and two communist Deputies elected in 1936,Saussot and Loubradou, resigned from the party.7 By 1940 the PCF hadfallen even below its 1932 low point when it could count on only 8.3per cent of the popular vote, as all the gains of 1934–38 and more werewiped out.

What the fortunes of the PCF between its inception and the commit-ment to the Resistance indicated was that in addition to the consequencesof its own doctrinal orientation, contingent factors like the vagaries ofthe world economy – notably the inability of any one country to reflatein a global deflationary climate – have a fundamental role in determiningits success. Furthermore, as the reactions of its own membership baseillustrated in response to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, for all their ideologicalconditioning they too could follow the lead of the wider electorate andsanction the party for its mistakes, thereby undermining the archetypalnotion of the party as an irreducible bloc comprised of unconditionaladherents.

The heroic years

The idea that the years of Resistance were a ‘serene combat’8 for the PCFis a paradox that needs to be placed against the background of the time.The party had been forced to defend a position on the Nazi–Soviet pactthat laid it open to vilification from its erstwhile partners on the Leftand many of its own grassroots members. The Nazi attack on the SovietUnion on 22 June 1941 transformed hitherto opposing interests intoidentical ones: the defence of the Soviet Union and the defence ofFrance had converged and the PCF threw itself into the struggle with allits pent-up energy. The PCF rehabilitated the ‘national front’ proposalwhich had surfaced sporadically during the period 1937–39 and madethis their rallying cry for the resistance to the Nazi regime and its Vichypuppet government in France. By July the party had fixed seven object-ives for the population to adopt: preventing French resources servingthe German war machine, stopping French factories working for Hitlerby supporting French workers’ demands, preventing the railways fromexporting French goods to Germany, organising the resistance of the peas-ants to the delivery of foodstuffs to the occupiers, organising the struggleagainst the repression by the Vichy regime, spreading the informationprepared by the Front National in order to counter enemy propaganda,and encouraging citizens to believe and participate in the liberation ofFrance.



The anti-communist hysteria in collaborationist newspapers likeJe suis partout proved counter-productive, as the Vichy regime rushed toprove its craven attitude towards the occupiers by sponsoring, in July,the creation of a legion of French volunteers (légion des volontaires français)to fight Bolshevism, wearing German uniforms. The policy of the Vichygovernment and the German occupiers of equating the Resistance withthe Communists and of blaming the latter for most acts of resistance,rather than discouraging prospective recruits simply served to enhancethe popular legitimacy of the PCF and made propaganda on its behalf.9

The Communists were the first to cross the threshold of meticulouslypre-meditated acts of war against the occupier, and were also exemplaryin their sacrifices. When Pierre Georges, better known by the pseudonymColonel Fabien, shot dead a German officer on the platform of Barbès-Rochechouart metro station on 23 August, it pulled France into theinevitably tragic cycle of Resistance actions and German reprisals. Butthe Communists could not be accused of just burdening others with theconsequences of their acts. The killings of two German officers in Nantesand Bordeaux on 20 and 21 October was attributed by the authorities tothe Communists and followed by the execution of scores of hostages,comprised largely of the party members and associates who could berounded up. The execution, however, which most shocked public opinionand which served as an inspiration to the youth of France was that ofthe seventeen-year-old Guy Môquet, whose sole crime was to be the sonof a communist Deputy, detained in Algeria. In his broadcast fromLondon on 25 October, Charles de Gaulle described those who had beenexecuted as martyrs and asked for a national gesture of remembrancethrough a halt of all activity on 31 October between 4.00 and 4.15 p.m.,as proof to the enemy of the strength of the national solidarity thatwould defeat them. The link between the Resistance, the communistmovement and the love of France had been forged in the public mindby the rhetoric of de Gaulle.

With Thorez in Moscow, the responsibility for the PCF in France wasdivided between Jacques Duclos for the press and propaganda effort,Benoît Frachon for union organisation and material resources, andMarcel Prenant as head of the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), the militarywing of the political resistance effort headed by the Front National. ThePCF decentralised its organisation, creating a delegation for the south ofthe country in Lyon, which became the capital of the Resistance. It alsocreated ‘interrégions’ which each covered several départements, resultingin nine for the northern zone and five for the south. In one respect,however, the vertical lines of communication established by the classic



organisational model for communist parties, that is, democraticcentralism, proved an invaluable training for the work of the Resist-ance. At grassroots level the Communist résistants were organised ingroups of three and absolutely forbidden from contacting other groups,but only allowed to communicate with the controllers in the echelonsabove them. In motivation, organisation and training, the Communistsset the benchmark for the other Resistance groups and when, in 1943,the metropolitan Resistance forces were finally unified, the Commu-nists gained a strong position in the Conseil National de la Résistance(CNR). The question that arises, therefore, is why the Communists didnot try and assume the kind of dominant role in shaping the post-Resistance political settlement that would have been commensuratewith the weight they deployed in the Resistance effort.

The Communists and the Gaullists used each other. The first contactsbetween the two are believed to have taken place through the offices ofa certain ‘Colonel Rémy’ in May 1942, but the first PCF representativeto join de Gaulle in London, Fernand Grenier, did not arrive until8 January 1943. The imperative for de Gaulle was clear: to use the FrontNational of the PCF to create as all-embracing a Gaullist movement aspossible and thereby underlining to the Allies the legitimacy of hisclaim to represent all of France. As for the PCF, the alliance with deGaulle provided an official stamp of approval for their patriotism. Inreality, whatever the ambitions might have been in senior PCF ranks topilot the Resistance, events in 1942 had determined things in a differentway. The US landings in Morocco and the British success against theAfrika Korps at El Alamein showed that the tide had been turned andadumbrated the spheres of influence that would ultimately constitutethe post-war world. Guiding the PCF was the international strategy ofthe Soviet Union, which would not be served by any line taken by westerncommunist parties like the PCF that might antagonise the Allies andprejudice Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. Conversely, the import-ance of the Communists was recognised when they were given two placeson the five-man executive committee of the CNR. When the Comitéfrançais de libération nationale (CFLN) was established in Algiers on3 June 1943 under the dual leadership of de Gaulle and General Giraud(before the latter was edged out of power by de Gaulle), one of its firstactions was to declare the 1939 dissolution of the PCF null and void.

What occurred subsequently was a process of give and take that allowedthe Communists to participate at the highest level in the structuresmanaging the Resistance and laying the foundations for the post-warpolitical settlement, and which at the same time was designed to



contain their influence. Thus when the Consultative Assembly was setup in Algiers on 17 September 1943 to debate in a quasi-parliamentarymanner the shape of government in France post-Liberation, the Commu-nists were allotted 27 out of the 102 seats. But the conditions of theirparticipation in the more crucial CFLN were not agreed until 4 April 1944,shortly before the CFLN was itself transformed into the Gouvernementprovisoire de la république française (GPRF), which swung into operationafter the Liberation and governed France until the Fourth Republicwas established. In military terms on the ground, the communist FTP,particularly active in the southwest of France, accepted the process ofconsolidation with the rest of the metropolitan Resistance forces whenthe Forces françaises de l’intérieur were created on 1 February 1944. To thedisquiet of the Gaullists, however, in contrast to the unification of theResistance movement the PCF established milices patriotiques, patrioticmilitias, with a parapolicing function who proved particularly zealousin pursuing collaborators. But this focus of insurrectionary potential, asthe Gaullists and the Allies saw it, was quickly neutralised by Thorezhimself on his return from Moscow in November 1944, when he madeclear to the party that public security should be guaranteed by the regularpolice forces alone. Already at the end of 1943 the PCF had condemnedthe inclination of the very effective Resistance leader in the Limousin,Georges Gingouin, to interpret maquis activity as preparation for civilinsurrection in pursuit of a new order. The party line was that it wascommitted to a return to the old order based on the primacy of parlia-ment.10 As has been persuasively argued elsewhere, French and SovietCommunists recognised the irresistible weight of American militarypower on the Western front, and did not doubt its willingness to crushcommunist insurrection behind its lines.11 Moreover, the Communistshad acquitted themselves well in the battle for the liberation of France,culminating in the temerity they showed in launching the liberationof Paris,12 and could bring to the political table a stock of credibilitythat would have been unimaginable during the dark days of theNazi–Soviet pact.

From government to isolation: A stable clientele

The strategy of the PCF in the immediate aftermath of the Liberationwas the classic twin-track approach dictated by the ideological convictionof the need to transform society according to the tenets of the party,attenuated by the realpolitik of working within the constraints dictatedby the disposition of forces around the party. This dual approach



characterised the party’s attitude to the Socialists, to the interimGaullist establishment and to the challenge of participation in govern-ment, until fidelity to the ideological line emanating from Moscowcould no longer be reconciled with participation in the bourgeois partypolitics of the Fourth Republic.

The PCF enthusiasm for unity with the SFIO, which re-emerged afterthe Liberation, sprang from the same ambitions as during the 1935–37period and foundered for the same reasons. A Comité permanent d’ententehad been set up between the two parties in December 1944 with theoverall purpose of exploring the avenues to achieving the organic unityof the Left. However, the remit of the committee was not activelypursued before the first elections in liberated France took place, in theform of the municipal elections of April–May 1945. The electionsproved a great success for the PCF, enabling it to take approximately25 per cent of the vote and to triple its control of medium and largemunicipalities compared with its representation in 1935. Notwith-standing this show of its electoral strength as an individual force, on 12June the PCF leadership made the unilateral proposal of a unity charterthat would cement the organic unity of the Left. The strategic reasonfor this was manifest in the emergence of an alternative suitor for theSFIO, the Christian Democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP),which had sprung up around Georges Bidault to fill the void left by thedecline of the Radicals and the Right in general, thus providing thethird element in the nascent tripartite party system. For the Socialists,the fatal stumbling block to unity remained the PCF’s vocation as theembodiment of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, in spite of discur-sive strategies aimed at sweetening the pill by laying the emphasis onthe fight against ‘the dictatorship of capital’. Rather than fostering thepro-unity movement within the ranks of the SFIO that had developedunder Daniel Mayer during 1943–44, the sudden proposal of a unitycharter by the PCF undermined it, especially in the light of the Frenchcommunist refusal clearly to disavow the viability of the Soviet socialistmodel for France. Thus by the end of the summer of 1945 the Comitéd’entente was marginalised by the SFIO and within twelve months theexecutive of the party voted formally to terminate its existence,confirming once more the depth of the schism that had split the Left atthe Congress of Tours.

This setback to the PCF strategy of acceding to power by uniting theLeft and working through the institutions of civil society was matchedby another, when the party tried to build on its success as a dominantplayer in the Resistance by attempting to persuade strands in the



Mouvements de Libération Nationale to rally to its Front National after theLiberation, and thus project the unity ranging from Communists toCatholics into the peacetime political game. But by July 1945 and theonset of the campaign for the election of a Constituent Assembly, oldideological cleavages had begun to reappear among the former Resist-ance leaders and the popular perception of the Resistance as a possiblekeystone for a new regime began to wane. However, the PCF did enjoyone successful campaign of unification, even if more by stealth than byopen negotiation. The CGTU was founded as the PCF’s trade unionancillary in 1922, but by 1936 there was a reconciliation with the CGTresulting in an executive which shared the power between the Socialistsand the Communists, with the former in the majority. Although thecommunist leaders were expelled in 1939, the rehabilitation of theparty after the collapse of the Nazi–Soviet pact had, by the spring of1943, reopened the door to the reintegration of the Communists. Whenthe decision was taken in March 1945 to reconstitute the federal execu-tive of the CGT, the communist trade unionists were given officialparity with their Socialist counterparts. And by the time of the nationalcongress of the CGT in April 1946, communist success in spreading itsinfluence through the organisation became clear. Most of the delegateshad been elected by communist trade unionists and this enabled themto change the statutes of the organisation, by a four to one majority, sothat a new voting system would guarantee the preponderant weight ofthe seven largest communist-controlled federations and thus deliver aregular majority sympathetic to the communist line.13

In spite of the success in the sphere of trade union activity, itremained nonetheless true that the stature given to the PCF by itsResistance activities could not allow it to absorb the socialist rival itneeded in order to gain governmental credibility, or to deploy its weightamong its former Resistance partners in order to transform that cooper-ation in wartime into an enduring vehicle for its political ambitions inpeacetime. As for its attitude towards the interim arrangementscovering the government of France until a new constitution was estab-lished for the Republic, the PCF reacted to the Gaullist presidentialisationof power with the pragmatism which reconciled the pursuit ofcommunist goals with the means at its disposal, mindful, as ever, toposition itself in such a way as to accommodate the interests of theSoviet Union, as articulated by Moscow.

The timetable to fully-fledged parliamentary democracy after theliberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 envisaged that the provisionalgovernment and the consultative assembly would pursue their functions



until 21 October 1945, at which point a constituent assembly would bevoted into power to draw up a new constitution that would give rise toa new government. During that period France was governed by whathas been described as a ‘consensual dictatorship’14 due to the executivepower wielded by de Gaulle as the head of a de facto presidentialgovernment. De Gaulle acted with little to constrain him in terms offormal limitations on his powers, and chose his ministers knowing thathis prestige could not be compromised by the countervailing strengthof parties or factions. While there was disquiet among the PCF leader-ship that the principle of popular sovereignty might be placed in ques-tion the longer the practice of presidential government was pursued inFrance, they accepted the modest roles attributed to them by de Gaullein a compliant manner, even after the success of the party in the muni-cipal elections of April–May 1945.

As Thorez made clear in speeches as he toured the country in thesecond half of 1945, and in keeping with the tone set at the tenth partycongress in June, the line taken by the PCF was a productivist one. Theappeal to class sentiment was couched in terms expressing the effortneeded to secure France’s material independence, rather than in termsof class war.15 Instead of an appeal based on a specifically communistplatform, the PCF cast its rhetoric in a way that identified it with theCNR and echoed the latter’s programme for the reconstruction of thecountry. The imperative for the party was clearly to portray itself in amoderate light and the party had determined to work within thesystem, for in so doing lay the greatest opportunity to influence theemerging relations between France and the Soviet Union in a positivemanner. Within those limitations the PCF did attempt to pursue itsprinciple of popular sovereignty in opposition to the concentration ofpower in the executive. Thus when it came to the prerogatives of theConstituent Assembly that were to be voted in on 21 October, the PCFcampaigned for a fully sovereign body able to determine the length ofits session and the form of interim government it would bring in. Thecampaign failed and two-thirds of the electorate voted to limit the dura-tion of the Constituent Assembly’s life and deprive it of the mandate tofix an interim regime. The fact that only one third of Socialistssupported the PCF campaign reflected the reality borne out by theballot boxes on 21 October: a tripolar system had emerged which leftthe PCF with 159 seats, the SFIO with 139 and the MRP with 150 in thenew Assembly.

Knowing that the SFIO would not support a PCF candidate as presidentof the new government, and in view of the SFIO’s disinclination to put



forward their own candidate, there was little option for the party, shortof provoking a political crisis, but to accept the MRP proposal of arenewed de Gaulle presidency. As Thorez himself observed, the impossi-bility of a governing coalition between the PCF and the SFIO forced theCommunists to rally to the tripartite government formula.16 There wasan inevitable attempt by the Communists to maximise the benefit totheir party through their support for the government by demanding akey ministry such as defence. The compromise that eventuallyprevailed did not give them all they wanted, but nonetheless provided asignificant degree of representation: the responsibility for defence wassplit between two ministers with Charles Tillon becoming Minister forArmaments (as opposed to the more sensitive Armed Forces Minister);Thorez became Minister of State with responsibility for civil servicereform; other ministerial posts went to François Billoux for NationalEconomy, Marcel Paul for Industrial Production and Ambroise Croizatfor Labour. Of lesser importance were two undersecretaryships attributedto the Communists, but one of which covered the key area of coalproduction.

The Communists used their presence on the constituent committeeentrusted with the task of drafting the new constitution to pursue theirgoal of popular sovereignty while mindful of the need to avoid fright-ening the bourgeosie. The PCF preference for a unicameral legislatureelicited a sympathetic response from the SFIO, in view of the sharedmemories of what a hostile Senate had done to Léon Blum’s PopularFront government. The PCF were careful, however, to present their pref-erence as an advance on the Third Republic, as opposed to a revolu-tionary system.17 After months of negotiation the committee cameforward with proposals that, to a significant degree, reflected thecommon ground between the Communists and Socialists on constitu-tional issues, in contrast to their differences over other matters, and leftthe MRP with very little of its original agenda (including a proposal fora second house). The draft constitution that emerged from the constituentcommittee proposed a unicameral legislature and reduced the role ofthe President of the Republic to largely ceremonial functions.

Although de Gaulle had resigned as President of the provisionalgovernment at the height of the negotiations on the constitution on20 January 1946, and been replaced as head of government by themuch more modest figure of Félix Gouin, it was still assumed that thedraft constitution would be accepted by the French people in the refer-endum of 5 May. The reality proved somewhat different, as the Frenchelectorate rejected the draft constitution by a margin of 53 to 47 per cent.



What had occurred was a grafting of other popular grievances onto thereferendum, such as dissatisfaction over shortages in certain foodstuffsand consumer goods. In addition to this negative factor, the oppositionfrom the MRP and the Right had fostered the idea that what was beingproposed in the referendum was a PCF–SFIO constitution.18 The defeatwas a turning point in that the SFIO decided to maximise its advantageas a hinge party by articulating its efforts with the MRP, and gave evid-ence of this in the campaign for the election of a second ConstituentAssembly on 2 June by distancing itself from the PCF. The result of theJune election pushed the PCF into second place, with the MRP claiming5.6 million votes against the PCF’s 5.12 million. Its room formanoeuvre circumscribed, on the one hand, by the loss of its formersocialist ally, and on the other hand by its desire to portray itself as aparty of government, the PCF gave passive assent to the candidature ofthe MRP leader, Georges Bidault, as head of the government to replaceGouin’s. In recompense, the PCF were accorded an additional ministerialportfolio in the tripartite division of posts under Bidault. But in spite ofthis increased representation in government, the PCF’s hand in thenegotiations over the second draft constitution was severely weakenedas the SFIO and MRP joined forces to push through proposals that werevery different to those elaborated under the PCF–SFIO alliance. Theunicameral system demanded by the PCF gave way to a bicameralsystem with a second chamber called the Council of the Republic. Theprospect of the President being held accountable, or hostage, to asingle-party majority in a single-house legislature was removed by theproposal that he should be elected by both houses.

In spite of diminishing the prospects for the kind of popular sover-eignty that the PCF wanted, the party found itself having to endorse theMRP–SFIO proposals for fear that its opposition would align it withthe Gaullists and the Right, and precipitate the need to elect a thirdConstituent Assembly, engendering a general political climate increasinglyhostile to the ideas for change that it was attempting to plant. Ultimately,the draft constitution was endorsed by the electorate on 13 October 1946,but the majority in favour was not a resounding one: 53 to 47 per cent.The Constitution of the Fourth French Republic having been broughtinto being, the first act confirming its operation was the election of aNational Assembly scheduled for 10 November. The PCF based its elect-oral campaign on support for the continuance of the tripartite systemin an effort to convince the electorate of its moderation, and in ordernot to push the SFIO further into the MRP camp. The PCF campaignwas justified by the results, which saw the PCF emerge with an



increased share of the votes and the biggest bloc of seats at 166, whilethe MRP lost over 500,000 voters and obtained 158 seats, with the SFIOcontinuing to decline, with its number of seats dropping below threefigures to 90.

Emboldened by its success and its ambition as a party of government,the PCF tried once more to float the idea of a government based on atwo-party alliance with the SFIO, by proposing Thorez as a replacementfor the outgoing Bidault in the role of President of the ProvisionalGovernment. In an attempt to enhance the image of the PCF as a partyin earnest pursuit of other progressive partners, Thorez gave his famousinterview to the Times which appeared on 17 November 1946 in which,for the first time, a French communist leader articulated the idea thatthe road to socialism followed by the Soviet Union was not the onlyone, and that a people like the French, rich in their own tradition ofstruggle for social justice, would find their own, national road tosocialism. The promotion of Thorez was intensified in an effort to pres-surise the Socialists, leading to a trade-off that was designed to allow theSFIO leaders to endorse Thorez as President of the Government inreturn for the PCF’s endorsement of the socialist Vincent Auriol as firstPresident of the Fourth Republic. However, the SFIO were unable todeliver the support of all of their Deputies and Thorez failed to get therequisite number of votes in the ballots held in the Assembly. Deter-mined to forestall manoeuvres by the MRP to bring conservativefactions into the political game with a view to shutting the PCF out ofgovernment, the Communists proposed a single-party SFIO governmentunder a figure acceptable to the majority, the now veteran parliamen-tarian Léon Blum, to run the nation’s affairs until the major institutionsenvisaged by the new constitution of the Republic were established.Consequently, Blum’s ministry took up the reins from 16 December1946 and relinquished them a month later in January 1947, once theCouncil of the Republic and the President had been elected.

Blum’s SFIO colleague Paul Ramadier formed a new tripartite govern-ment on 22 January, and of the 26 ministerial portfolios five went tothe PCF, the same number to the MRP, nine to the SFIO and seven weredistributed to the smaller parties, notably the Radicals. But in spite ofthe successful return of the PCF as a major player in tripartite government,the passage of time had exacerbated the contradictions in the communistposition as part of the political mainstream and foreshortened the pros-pects of success. The Communists had applauded Ramadier’s speech tothe Assembly on 21 January, when he affirmed the determination ofFrance to avoid being sucked into a power bloc in pursuit of either



hegemony or aggression, alluding in the first place to the United Statesand in the second to the Soviet Union. But it was precisely the kind ofchoice the PCF would be forced to back into and which would lead tothe great schism with the rest of the political establishment in France.

The difficulties began to manifest themselves clearly when, in theAssembly debate of 18 March, the Communist Deputies refused tostand up in response to Ramadier’s exhortation to honour the sacrificesmade by French troops in attempting to preserve the unity of theFrench Union against the growing insurrectionary threat in Indochina.For the PCF, the fact that the movement for independence in Indochinawas of communist inspiration meant that it could not be put down bythe French authorities as simply a wave of civil disturbances. Whenincipient rebellion followed in Madagascar and resulted in the arrest ofMalagasy parliamentarians, Communist Deputies protested that thearrests were in contravention of the constitution of the FourthRepublic. But what triggered the break with government was the strikethat was called at the Renault auto works at Boulogne-Billancourt on25 April, against the original advice of the CGT. The situation had beensimmering since February and by the end of April it was clear to theCGT and the PCF that the workers would not be placated. On 30 Aprilin cabinet, Thorez declared his support for the demands of the workers,notwithstanding Ramadier’s reminder that it had been agreed to deferthe discussion of salary increases until the following July. At the minis-terial meeting of 1 May, Thorez confirmed his party’s refusal to endorsethe economic and social policy of the government, and because thecommunist members of the government nonetheless refused to resign,Ramadier dismissed them, which was formalised on 5 May.

The PCF leadership’s switch from moderation over prices andincomes to a virulent criticism of government policy on these issuescould be partly explained by the fear of no longer being able to controlits left.19 It was also connected, however, with events occurring inter-nationally and the adversarial positions that were becoming fixed. Thedoctrine articulated by President Truman of the United States on 12March predicated on the belief that the independence of the countriesof post-war Europe (most immediately Turkey and Greece but alsoFrance and Italy) was dependent on the provision of aid and the tacitunderstanding that they would purge themselves of communist influence,formed part of the backdrop to the conference in Moscow of the formerallied nations later in the month. The conference, aimed at resolvingthe issues concerning German reparations and French rights overthe Saar, ended on the eve of the strike at Renault and illustrated the



inevitable separation of interests between East and West. The Sovietview on reparations was found unacceptably punitive by the Westernallies and, more significantly, the agreement by the Western representa-tives, Marshall for the US, Bevin for Britain and Bidault for France, thatthe coal from the Saar should be attributed to France, underlined thefragile basis of the assumption by the PCF that French national self-interest could be pursued without necessarily siding with the otherWestern allies.

The PCF’s belief that the Ramadier government would not be able tocarry on without them had been proved wrong, but at the party’s 11thCongress in Strasbourg, beginning on 25 June, there were still voicespresenting the PCF as a party of government and wondering at theaberration of the Ramadier government in marginalising a man of statelike Thorez. Beyond the domestic front, notwithstanding the denunci-ation in L’Humanité of the Marshall plan for the reconstruction of Europeas little more than a capitalist trap, leadership figures like Duclos werestill affirming two days into the conference that they were still hopefulthat the Marshall plan could serve to rebuild Europe, even thoughStalin had committed himself to opposing it.20 The PCF was not uniqueamong European communist parties in not being sure of the lineMoscow would take or the timing of it, but the hostility of some otherEuropean parties towards the PCF when they all met at the Kominformcongress in Poland from 22 to 27 September took the leadership bysurprise. Jacques Duclos was forced on the back foot by accusations thatthe PCF had failed to denounce the American pressure that had led totheir expulsion from government. This failure, it was alleged, reflectedthe opportunism of the PCF. There were even criticisms which revisedthe role of the French Communists in the Resistance, accusing them ofhaving opened the door to de Gaulle’s seizure of power by not organ-ising an insurrection to fill the vacuum left by the departing Germans.

The chastening lessons of the summer had their effect on the direc-tion taken by the PCF. In the central committee meeting of 29–30October Maurice Thorez confessed the mistakes he and therefore thecommittee had made (in keeping with the responsibility demanded bydemocratic centralism), in persisting with the idea that the PCF couldbe a party of government and that the difficulties with the Ramadiergovernment had occurred within the context of a domestic ministerialcrisis, rather than being the reflection of a global crisis. Ramadier andBlum were vilified for having betrayed France’s national interest infavour of those of the United States. Thorez’s reassessment covered thePopular Front and the Resistance, and underlined what he argued was



the fatal mistake of believing that alliances could be cemented at thesummit, rather than at the base, resulting in the same misreading of theintentions of the PCF’s partners. The central committee had beenwrong not to recognise and proclaim the changes in the world orderthat had occurred and the way the new global division of interests wasreflected in France. There could therefore only be two parties in France,the ‘American party’ stretching from the Socialists to the Gaullists andthe party that refused to submit to the domination of American capit-alism. In short, the PCF had stridently adopted the Soviet cold-war lineand renounced its attempt to navigate a French course to socialism thatsought to reconcile ideological conviction with popular acceptance as aparty of government. Thus the great schism was consummated.

Conclusion

In terms of its electoral spread of support and the sources of thatsupport, the PCF did experience some notable fluctuations during thelife of the Fourth Republic. In the aftermath of the war, for example,rural support for the party rose significantly in those areas where Resist-ance activity had been most marked. Party membership reached manytimes its pre-war levels in areas like Aude, Côtes-du-Nord, Loire-Atlantique,Haute-Marne and Morbihan, so that by 1948 peasants and agriculturalworkers represented the second largest constituency in the PCF,accounting for 28 per cent of members, ranking behind only the indus-trial workers who accounted for over 47 per cent.21 The proportion ofpeasants and agricultural workers was to slip to 14 per cent within adecade, as the PCF increased its members among the still expandingindustrial working class. But in view of the way the PCF’s score in electionsin October 1945, June 1946, 1951 and 1956 hovered more or less withina point of 25 per cent, it can very plausibly be argued that its clientelehad assumed a consistent shape and mass, in short, had stabilised, as,on the Right, the Gaullist clientele had done.22 While the great schismtherefore brought isolation, throughout the remaining life of theFourth Republic, the PCF possessed an electoral weight that could notbe denied, and deployed a presence on the political landscape thatenabled it to foster its identity as a counter-community with a counter-vailing culture to capitalism.


23

2 Dynamics of the Counter-culture

Introduction: A charismatic party

During the life of the Fifth Republic in France the discussion of charismahas been largely situated in a presidential context, and while its analysishas moved on from the Weberian notion of charisma as a seductivelegitimation of the state’s monopoly of violence,1 it has tended to focuson the exceptional qualities of the charismatic leader rather than thegiven social structure that is conducive to the deployment of thatcharisma. When surveying the heyday of the PCF, it is possible to perceivea hierarchy of relations in which a charismatic general secretary, Thorez,exercised his influence over a party which itself deployed a charismaticinfluence over France. The Communist mobilisation in the Resistancetapped a collective sensibility among the French people to the charismaticprofile of their nation internationally. The fight against Nazi barbarismwas a fight for the kind of fundamental humanist values that theRevolution of 1789 had proclaimed universally, and by distinguishingthemselves in that struggle the Communists were endowed witha charisma that was not so much a power in terms of what the partycould impose, but the strength of an appeal to a sense of identity,2 orco-identity, between the PCF and France.

The apparent irreducibility of the PCF vote and the fidelity of its coresupport, until what is generally perceived to be the crucial turningpoint in its fortunes when the legislative elections of 1978 showed it tohave lost its position as the dominant party of the Left,3 gave other partiesa perceptible sense of inferiority. In the closing stages of the war, asSoviet troops were sweeping across Eastern Europe, it was not unknownfor MRP leaders to make complaisant noises regarding the intentions ofthe USSR, partly motivated by the fear of being tarred with the brush of



bourgeois anti-communism, or even worse, having to defend themselvesagainst the charge of collaboration. Maurice Schumann, for example,felt able to maintain that in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe whathad replaced Nazism would not inevitably prove to be an exclusivelyLeninist or Stalinist brand of communism.4 In the immediate aftermathof the war and notwithstanding his own credentials as an enemy ofNazism, Charles de Gaulle had to acknowledge the countervailingcredibility of the French Communists. There is a clear note of self-congratulation in his recollection of the elections of 21 October 1945,when, by opting for an electoral system based on proportional represen-tation, he was able to limit the PCF share of the vote to 26 per cent.5

And it is noteworthy that the political figure who, directly andindirectly, devoted his post-war political career to supplanting theCommunists with the Socialists as the dominant left-wing party inFrance expressed a keen awareness of their claim to a unique kind ofcredibility. Thus François Mitterrand, among other exhortations to theSocialists, warned against allowing the PCF to claim, unchallenged,a monopoly on authenticity.6

As we shall see, the objective factors which determined the PCF’sstrength, allied to the subjective perception of it by its adversaries, madethe party a feature on the political landscape that had to be negotiatedwith consideration, even after its dismissal from government in 1947.We shall begin by outlining the electoral success that allowed the PCFto continue casting an intimidating shadow over its erstwhile partnersin government, situate that analysis in the context of the strong identi-fication afforded by the Communist ‘ethno-culture’, and conclude byadducing the contrast with a wider political culture that was generallyperceived as lacking in conviction and coherence.

Electoral roots

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the relationship between the Communistsand the Socialists following the Congress of Tours and until the PopularFront ranged from veiled antagonism to overt hostility, and theconsequences of this were very soon in evidence in terms of the electoralperformance of the PCF. The party’s fallacious belief that it wouldinherit the Socialist’s electoral patrimony was exposed in the legislativeelections of 1924, when the vehicle for its ambitions, the Bloc Ouvrier etPaysan, obtained a 9.5 per cent share of the total poll and returned26 Communist Deputies to the Assembly, whereas the Socialists reaped the


Dynamics of the Counter-culture 25

benefit of their alliance with the Radicals and as a result saw 104 oftheir Deputies returned.

Analysis of the concentration of votes showed that one-third of thePCF votes came from the Paris region, but that the bulk of the rest couldnot be attributed to the fidelity of the proletariat. Out of the 15 provincialdepartments where more than 10 per cent of the registered voters optedfor the Bloc Ouvrier et Paysan, only 4 could be characterised as industrial.In short, the Communist electorate seemed to fall into two categories:first, the Parisian workers directly susceptible to the influence of theKomintern and ideologically convinced of the Communist cause;secondly, rural voters (notably small farmers) who were less convincedideologically and who were susceptible to the pull of personalitiesamong local leaders. The latter category were often resentful as a resultof the hardships endured during the war and what they perceived aspost-war neglect of their interests, and their tradition of republicanextremism made them naturally sympathetic to a communist cause thatappeared to have the rich and powerful in its sights. The asset repre-sented by that rural tradition of support for the PCF was to become veryclear after World War II.

In contrast to the performances before World War II, the strikingaspect of the Communist vote in the legislative election of 1945 was theway it was spread throughout the country. In the Paris suburbs over35 per cent of registered voters supported the PCF, and across the countrythe Communist share of the vote fell below five per cent in only twodepartments, and it fell below ten per cent in only another nine.7

Predictably, the Paris region and the industrial north proved the mostformidable bastion of the Communist vote in absolute terms, but thedividend provided by communist Resistance activity in rural areas wasparticularly marked in the Haute-Saône, the Pyrénées-Orientales, Savoy,the Nièvre, the Côtes-du-Nord, the Alpes-Maritimes and the Creuse.Britanny, which for so long was associated with counter-revolution andCatholic reaction, showed some remarkable gains for the PCF. TheCommunist vote in the Morbihan, for example, multiplied fourteenfoldin comparison to what it had been before the war. In the depths ofsome of these hitherto profoundly conservative communities, thearrival of Resistance activity during the war had undone the ties ofdeference to rich landowners that had often overlaid long-heldresentments.

Interestingly, in many rural departments, it was the Radical votethat switched to the Communist party, as for example in Aude andHaute-Marne, rather than the Socialist one. The eclipsing of local notables,



whether by choice or force, and the arrival of résistants who were alsoparty workers of humble origins, had tapped a desire for change thathad deep roots. In spite of the doctrinal influence of Moscow, formany of the new voters for the PCF, what the party brought was notcommunism but the prospect of greater real democracy, in the vein ofa historical tradition rooted in the Jacobinism of the Montagne and thelater radical republicanism of Ledru-Rollin and his fellow combatantsfor universal male suffrage half a century later.8 Also significant was thedecline of the local presses that had sustained Radical influence, whereasamong the ex-Resistance publications vying for readership, theCommunist press had obtained a very good start. By the autumn of1945 the circulation for L’Humanité had reached 456,000 and its stable-mate Ce Soir had reached 419,000, whereas the surviving centre-rightdailies, Le Figaro and L’Aurore, were selling 382,000 and 101,000 respec-tively.9 Thus the party possessed the votes, rural and industrial, and thevoice, in media terms, with which to project itself as the most powerfulunified political formation in France.

However, those electoral roots were anchored in a substratum ofassumptions generated by communist self-identification as an ethno-class. And it is difficult to avoid a pattern that shows that it is always inperiods of rupture, either with allies in opposition or in government,that cultivation of the PCF’s distinctness serves to underwrite itsendurance.

The Communist ‘ethno-class’

An overview of the PCF’s survival during the twentieth century ismarked by the reinforcement of its self-sustaining sense of communityat moments of greatest external pressure, until the establishment of theFifth Republic. There is a well-established argument that a ‘people’ canexist culturally, even if they do not exist territorially,10 and that sucha lack of territorial definition can be all the more powerfully compen-sated by a perceived sense of community.11 The notion of the FrenchCommunists as a ‘people’ is a familiar one since it was cogently estab-lished by Annie Kriegel,12 and it is susceptible to further refinementthrough the characterisation of the Communists as an ethno-class: apeople marked by those traits conferred by their economic situation(‘class’) and those traits which express their membership of a com-munity habitus (‘ethno-’). This combination is what constitutes the‘practice-unifying and practice-generating principle’13 that enables thePCF to operate in terms of its own structures and functions, as well as in



the political and economic context determined by its existence as aclass in industrial society. Practice unification and generation providedthe motive force for the majority of the delegates to the 18th NationalCongress of the SFIO, meeting in Tours in December 1920, to adopt theLeninist blueprint for structuring the party. At the 2nd Congress of theThird International in Moscow from July to August 1920, Lenin hadexpounded the very definite conditions of affiliation to the CommunistInternational and those conditions effectively challenged the delegatesat Tours to commit their party to a much more centralised structure,14

thereby sacrificing pluralism to a much more unified practice ofsocialism.

Attempts to situate the emergence of the French communist move-ment in terms of deeper historical trends may vary. The PCF has beenperceived as heir to a revolutionary tradition that was abandoned bythe bourgeois parties.15 It has also been portrayed as the response thatemerged to an antagonistic and inflexible ruling elite, disinclined toassimilate the working class into a more broadly based social structure(in contrast to comparable societies like Britain with a more concili-atory ruling class).16 What is beyond question, however, is the determi-nation that was forged in the PCF to define itself through the operationof a hermetic habitus after the break with socialist pluralism thatoccurred at Tours. As the break with tripartite government in 1947heralded a period when the PCF would invest its energy in the vibrancyof its existence as a self-sustaining community, so a generation earlierthe PCF could be perceived as pursuing the incorporation of thosevalues that would enable it to become, subsequently, self-sustaining.The division in socialist ranks which led to the formation of the Sectionfrançaise de l’internationale communiste (SFIC), as it was to be called untilOctober 1921, was predicated on the Leninist assumption that theCommunists should rally as many followers as possible to their flag,and that thereafter the task of homogenisation, or of creating a Bolshevisedparty, should begin. The initial success of the Communists, under OscarFrossard, lay in their successful claim to the SFIO’s material and humanresources, including the daily paper L’Humanité and ostensibly 140,000of its 180,000 members. But as tensions among the party’s leaders wereto show, there remained elements of competition between personalitiesand groups in the SFIC that hindered the generation of a unifyingvision, of themselves and the role they had to play in the worldto come.

The view by the Komintern, or the Communist International, thatFrossard was not committed to the strict application of the 21 conditions



for membership of the Third International was not without justification.The majority within the SFIO that had voted for it was an amalgam ofidealists, extreme leftists, pacifists, anarcho-syndicalists and others whosegrasp of Leninist doctrine was often untutored. The need, perceived bythe Komintern leadership, to school and discipline French communismwas evinced by the instruction to Frossard to go to Moscow, but whichhe declined to obey during 1921–22.17 The scope of communistambitions in Europe had to be rethought as the prospect of takingpower receded with the hopes of revolution in Germany and the failedimpact of the massive strikes in Italy and Czechoslovakia. The emphasisturned to the creation of much more cohesive national movements,making them like the members of a diaspora evermore faithful to theirspiritual home, Moscow, as the isolation in their host societies increased.Growth would come, according to the Komintern, through theimplementation of a ‘united front from below’, effectively a policy ofinfiltration in the unions and other bodies of the Left in order to winthe membership over to the communist cause. In this instance also,Frossard showed little enthusiasm given that he was being asked torebuild bridges with SFIO leaders who only a short time beforehandhe had strenuously opposed. The tensions in a party which had yet tobe ‘Bolshevised’ were apparent at the 1st Congress of the FrenchCommunists, held in Marseille in December 1921, when Frossard hadto reconcile opposing factions on the left and the centre, against abackdrop of falling membership (notwithstanding the party’s claim tohave 130,000 activists at its disposal).

At the 2nd Congress of the French Communists in October 1922Frossard came once more to embody the conflict between loyalty tothe movement in France and loyalty to Moscow and expressed hisresistance to Komintern interference. But the ground had begun to shiftaround him. Albert Treint, an erstwhile teacher and former armycaptain, was being groomed by the Komintern to organise the purge ofthe party and establish a Soviet-style Politburo leadership for Frenchcommunists. With the disappearance or switch of loyalties of his sup-porters, Frossard’s isolation forced him to resign on 1 January 1923.Although the purge was actually conducted by Frossard’s former sup-porter Marcel Cachin, the post of General Secretary was attributed toCachin’s ally, Louis Sellier, at the congress in Lyon in January 1924,with Treint remaining a power-broker within the party organisation.Thereafter, the opposing forces created by loyalty to the communistcause in France and loyalty to Moscow became neutralised as the inter-ests of Moscow became the guiding interests of France. This change was



reflected by a process of structural incorporation of those mechanismsthat generate the same dispositions. The replication of the Soviet partyapparatus was, for example, extended in France with the creation ofworkplace cells in 1924.

Just as in the Soviet Union, however, the growing organisationalstability of the Communist party in France was concomitant withmanoeuvrings at leadership level that reflected the power shifts inMoscow. Treint’s star waned and in 1925 the former railway workerPierre Sémard, the Komitern’s candidate, was confirmed at the party’s4th Congress as its next General Secretary. In the meantime, newfigures were emerging through the Central Committee and the Direct-ing Committee, such as Maurice Thorez and Jacques Doriot, whowould be entrusted by Moscow with the task of eliminating the differ-ences that could hinder the creation of unanimity as to the practice-unifying principles of the Communist ethno-class in France and itsfidelity. Whereas Doriot had given himself a more individual profilein promoting the party’s opposition to the Rif war in 1925,18 when theFrench government launched a military offensive to crush the attemptby the Rif tribes of Morocco under Abd el-Krim to establish an inde-pendent republic, Thorez secured his progress through close coopera-tion with Moscow.19 The latter route to a leadership role was the morefruitful, particularly in the light of the party line determined byMoscow that would force the party in France to defend its positionunanimously, or crumble in the face of the hostility it created,especially on the Left.

The sectarianism of the French Communists was given a more bittertwist in 1928 when Stalin decided that the obstacle to revolution inGermany lay in the attitude of the Socialists. As a consequence, the linethat came from Moscow led to the indictment of the Socialists as ‘socialfascists’ and precluded the prospect of cooperation with them and other‘bourgeois parties’.20 The result was marginalisation, recrimination anddefeat. In the election of April 1928 the Communist party applied theMoscow line of ‘class against class’ by refusing to observe the practice ofdésistement, or standing down in favour of the best-placed left-wingcandidate, in the prelude to the second ballot of the election over tworounds. By their refusal, the Communists split the left-wing vote andhanded victory to the Right, according to some estimates,21 in approxi-mately 67 seats which could have gone to representatives of the Lefthad their parties cooperated. The net result left the Communists with14 deputies, in comparison with 26 before the election, and reducedthe SFIO to 101 representatives in the Assembly. Nonetheless, the



Communist party persevered with the ‘class against class’ line into the1932 elections, when its share of the vote fell to 8.4 per cent and thenumber of Deputies it could return diminished to 12. It was not until1934 that an appreciation of Nazism as a greater threat to communismthan social democracy began to turn Moscow towards the kind of alli-ances that might be able to counteract that menace. In France, the‘putsch manqué’ of 6 February 1934,22 when far-right groups led bycolonel de La Rocque and his Croix de Feu threatened to march on theNational Assembly, illustrated that the real danger lay not with LéonBlum and the SFIO but the vacuum created by a discredited parliament-ary Right and a disunited Left.

Within a decade and a half the French Communists had gone fromdivorce from the Socialists, to sectarianism and then a united frontagainst fascism, but that circuitous development in relation to the restof the Left had been accompanied by a linear development in theprocess of self-identification as a community, a culture and an ethno-class. Thorez’s own progress through the ranks of the party could beseen as emblematic of the culture of unquestioning identificationbetween the individual and the vocation proclaimed by the communistmovement. As the Komintern toiled to lend credibility to the ‘classagainst class’ strategy, it had to find ways of deflecting responsibility forits failure. In France, Henri Barbé and Pierre Celor of the Young Com-munists, who together with Thorez and Benoît Frachon had beenempowered to form a collective secretariat by the 6th Congress of theparty in 1929, were found guilty of betraying the party. A campaignagainst factional work within the party eventually led to accusationsagainst Celor of being a police agent and Barbé of being a saboteur,resulting in their respective expulsions in 1932 and 1935.

It is significant that the practice-unifying principles of the party weresuch that Thorez could switch from one line to an antithetical line andsuccessfully make it his, as long as its identification with the interests ofthe ethno-class could be sanctioned by the discourse of the leadership.While Jacques Doriot challenged, individually, the slowness of theKominform in recognising the need for cooperation with the SFIO,Thorez waited for the line to change in order for that cooperation toserve the consolidation of the party. By June 1934 Doriot had beenexpelled from the party, yet barely a month later the Communists andthe Socialists signed an agreement for the defence of democracy, withThorez prominent in his advocacy of the new line approved by Moscow.The new identification of the interests of the Communist ethno-classwith the wider democratic constituency even allowed for the apparent



compromising of the structures that gave it its distinctness. Thus thecommunist sectarianism embodied in the union organisation of theCGTU was set aside as the CGTU was dissolved and its members werereintegrated into the CGT in March 1936. It was an intention that wassignalled a year beforehand by the CGTU’s disapproval of nascent strikemovements, and after the PCF’s success in the Popular Front electionsof May 1936 when its representation in the National Assemblyincreased from 12 seats to 72 seats. It was then that Thorez made thememorable observation that it was necessary to know when to endstrikes, in the face of the strike-happy euphoria that greeted the victoryof the Popular Front.

The Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 was undoubt-edly an enormous blow to the cohesion of the party. There were numerousexamples of the hostility of rank-and-file members to the pact, such aswhen party membership cards were pointedly torn up in front ofAuguste Lecoeur, the federal secretary of the Pas-de-Calais, at a meetinghe tried to address on 24 August. A generation later Lecoeur recalledhow even in the café owned by Thorez’s uncle, swastikas had beendrawn on the illustrious nephew’s portrait.23 The announcement of thepact on French radio on 23 August should not have come as a totalsurprise to the leadership of the PCF. L’Humanité had announced thesigning of a trade agreement between Germany and the Soviet Unionon 21 August, and the PCF leadership knew that negotiations betweenthe two sides were continuing more intensely than ever. But when thenews of the pact broke, the timing of it, at the height of the Augustvacation, caught everybody off-balance. For Charles Tillon, catchingshrimps in the Haute-Vienne, for Thorez, touring in the southern Alps,and for the majority of the other leaders similarly absent from Paris, theauguries had been forgotten or ignored. Having returned hastily to Paristhe leadership tried to tread the impossible line of both congratulatingitself on the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact and rallying the nationagainst Nazi aggression. Thorez’s aggressively convoluted attempt todefend the line before the group of Communist Deputies in the Assem-bly prompted the resignation from the party of the Deputies GustaveSaussot and Paul Loubradou. But, precisely at the point when the prac-tices of the party appeared unable to preserve its cohesion, it wasthrown into the kind of isolation where its unifying practices wouldbecome most potent.

The Daladier government seized on the disarray in communist ranks,especially following the majority that emerged from the meeting of thecommission administrative of the CGT on 24 August to condemn the



pact, to crack down on the PCF’s means of expression. On 25 and26 August respectively, the presses of L’Humanité and Ce Soir were seized;on 28 August censorship was imposed on the press, the radio and thecinema; and on 29 August the PCF was banned from the meeting hall ofla Mutualité. Nonetheless, the Communist Deputies continued to votewith the rest of the Assembly in support of the Daladier-Reynaudgovernment, and voted for war credits to be passed the day after Germantroops entered Poland on 1 September. But a fortnight after France’sentry into the war on 3 September, the Red Army invaded Poland,revealing the truly cynical nature of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The PCF’srefusal to denounce this act of aggression gave Daladier the pretext heneeded to outlaw the party and its affiliated organisations on 26September, although the parliamentary group was rechristened Groupeouvrier et paysan français on 29 September and survived. For Léon Blum,the forcible dissolution of the PCF was mistaken and a less powerfulsanction than the universal condemnation of the French public.24 ForDaladier and Reynaud, by identifying the PCF as the enemy in a warwithin France’s frontiers it distracted attention from the phoney warwith Nazi Germany and the immobilism of their own governmentfaced with that threat. However, whether those were the underlyingmotives of the government or not, by banning the PCF it succeeded inending the debate within it. The dissolution of the party enabled it torediscover the independence and integrity of its structures because theproblematic relationship between the massed ranks and the party lead-ership was transformed into a struggle between the PCF and the State.25

Once the pact had been consigned to history by the Nazi invasionof the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was the discipline and practice-unifying principles inculcated into the Communists that allowed themto offer the most effective resistance to the German occupiers of France.The acceptance of information and instructions along a vertical axisconditioned by the practice of democratic centralism was the best train-ing for action in such extreme circumstances. The fact that Thorezhimself had deserted the French army in October 1939 and spent theduration of the war in the USSR was now no longer a liability, as theleadership of the Resistance, whether in London or Moscow, was work-ing to the same end. The process of instant mythification is a familiaroutcome of conflict in the post-modern world of constant soundbitesand satellite images, but it was less commonplace and more perform-ative in the immediate aftermath of the war. The PCF claim to be the partyof the 75,000 shot in the defence of France certainly gave a dramaticedge to its profile, but even the much more realistic calculation of



10,00026 gave it a moral capital and self-sufficiency which no otherparty political formation could match. In contrast with other instancesof rupture with the Socialist left or Socialist-led government during thethree preceding decades, the PCF departure from the tripartite governmentof Paul Ramadier in 1947 provided uniquely propitious conditions for itto reinforce its identity as an ethno-class. The exit from participation inpower came when the position of the party as the representative of theworking class was at its most secure in electoral terms, before anunequivocal awareness at large of Moscow’s abuse of its position duringthe Cold War could damage it, and at a time when it could cultivate itsdistinctness as a community more vigorously than ever, under Thorez.

Familiar analyses of Thorez’s influence are right to point to thereliance on Stalinist communism for the substance and style of his lead-ership of the PCF. The preparations to mark his fiftieth birthday in 1950required the deployment of the kind of resources that could only bereminiscent of a Stalinist cult of personality: 40,000 posters, 200,000invitations and 150,000 postcards depicting Thorez in various poses,not to mention the special stamps printed.27 Yet the mythificationwhich, viewed from the outside, damns its subject, may, viewed fromthe inside, be what binds the subject to the group for which it is inten-ded. In 1949 and 1950 the PCF had been thrown into reliance on itsobdurately defensive qualities by the hostility of the political establish-ment. The departure from government had also resulted in the PCFbeing forced out of participation in the running of nationalised indus-tries like the Charbonnages de France (coal) and new prestigious bodiessuch as the commission for atomic energy. As for its voice in thenational media, the government was engaged in the removal ofcommunist influence in state-owned sources of information like theradio and Agence France Presse. In such circumstances, the mythifica-tion of self in Thorez’s memoir, Fils du peuple, and in his speeches,may be precisely what is most apposite for the group feeling itself undersiege, and most pregnant with meaning, underpinning the charisma ofthe leader and the cohesion of the group. The portrayal of Thorez ashero and martyr exploited the potential in the image of the leaderwho is distinguished ‘par le haut’,28 standing above his community,while at the same time assuming the sacrificial role that is testamentto the humblest and most unconditional identification with thatcommunity.

In his own discourse, Thorez deployed the charisma of the partythrough a referential chain of images that tied the party to the mostillustrious aspects of France’s intellectual past, and projected it into the



future pursuit of better tomorrows (‘les lendemains qui chantent’).29

The crucial contingent factor was that this came at a time when thetheme of faith in the future was in step with the aspirations of Frenchsociety at large. While the PCF was endowed with a solid structure andthe prospect of an expanding mission, the society in which it operated wasitself highly receptive to the imperative of renewal and modernisation.In his treatment of this imperative, Thorez was able to depict the‘centralité soviétique’ that characterised PCF ideology as coterminouswith the ‘centralité française’ that expressed itself in the life of thecommunist movement in France. Thorez’s discourse was ‘en phase’ orin step with a society looking to re-emerge into a positive sense of iden-tity and to rebuild after the trauma of war and occupation. This positiveconjunction would, a generation later, stand in marked contrastwith the dysjunct that characterised Georges Marchais’ discourse anddistanced the party from French society, as we shall see.

A sense of destiny was not an incongruous theme, in either party ornational terms, and on the Right there was also a powerful evocation ofthe need to redefine a national identity and destiny as a means offinally overcoming the sense of collective defeat engendered by theoccupation. It was the period when de Gaulle’s chief eulogist AndréMalraux was engaged in speeches and pronouncements that resonatedwith a cultish admiration for heroic leadership.30 If, on the Right, theanswer to the existential néant, or nothingness, that was the legacy ofFrance’s collapse in 1940, was dependent on faith in de Gaulle’s abilityto restore France’s vocation to greatness, the choice between the experi-ence of ‘being’ in the party and the experience of ‘nothingness’ outsideit was even more acute for the members of a party with such a peculiarhistoric vocation as the PCF. Whereas the fear of a néant ethnique orethnic non-identity was related to the nation in the first case, in thesecond case it was related to the party. For the PCF members, the morethey participated in the practices of the party, the more confident theywere of their identity.

The PCF was far from omnicompetent in the management of thosewho were faithful to it. It can certainly be argued that PCF strategyvis-à-vis its support in the labour movement was costly and misguided.Its promotion of industrial action in the immediate aftermath of itsexpulsion from the tripartite government overestimated working-classcombativeness.31 The failure of the strikes in the mining industry in1948 not only created disillusion among workers generally but also setmining unions against each other. By 1951 the communist-dominatedCGT was down to approximately half of its peak 1946 membership,



three million instead of six million.32 Similarly, the perception of thecommunist vote as an irreducible quotient needs to be attenuated bythe fact that historic patterns indicate that long periods of decline wereinterspersed by short periods of growth, and that decline coincidedwith periods of isolation while growth coincided with periods of alli-ance with the non-communist left. Thus, during the period in question,the 5.5 million votes and the 28.6 per cent share of the votes cast in theNovember 1946 elections marked the high point from which the PCFdeclined in the 1951 election, winning 4.9 million votes and a 26.9 percent share of the votes cast. Among the 600,000 votes lost could becounted the 8 per cent or so of the Communist electorate who hadswitched their allegiance to the the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuplefrançais (RPF).

Notwithstanding these considerations which balance the uncriticalview of the then PCF as the premier party of France, as Annie Kriegelpoints out, the allegiance to the party was still an existential one, as theparty was the milieu in which the member defined himself or herself,33

and ordering this milieu were structures that ensured the integration ofthe individual. From cradle to grave, the party offered an ideologicalétat providence or welfare state that assumed that it could respond to theneeds of all its members, provided they conformed to the policies ema-nating from the party’s central institutions. Thus the Jeunesses commu-nistes had their independence in organisational terms, that is, the youthgroups could organise themselves independently of the party cells atfactory or neighbourhood level, but the party did not concede the pointthat they might constitute a separate community of interest with a dis-tinct culture. At that particular juncture in France’s socio-economicdevelopment this did not diverge from the prevailing view that youngpeople were simply more maladroit versions of their elders. A gener-ation later, however, the party’s inability to recognise the decisive andsingular influence of an emerging youth culture would cost it dear. Thepaternalism towards youth was part of a wider sense of benevolentpatriarchy that worked also to convince women that the party coulddefend their interests with campaigns like ‘equal pay for equal work’,and which allowed the leadership to rejoice in the fact that between1946 and 1954 the proportion of female party members doubled, risingfrom 11.1 per cent to 20.2 per cent.34

The operation of the communist milieu was crucially dependent onthe internal apparatus, mechanisms and procedures that constitutedparty practices and defined it as an ethno-class.35 The preservation ofthe milieu was the vocation of the cadres. Tightly aligned on matters of



party policy and thoroughly conditioned, they had originally beentrained in Moscow until the PCF’s central school was set up in 1924.From 1930 onwards Thorez had begun to establish a practical controlover the theoretically different functions of the three elements of centralpower: the secretariat, the political bureau and the central committee.And after the expulsion from government, the imperative of disciplinesprang even more naturally from the central organs to the structures onthe ground in the form of work sections, schools, press organs and soon. In opposition to the hierarchy of the State, the ethno-class had itsown hierarchy, peopled by functionaries who communicated the visionof the leadership from one level of the hierarchy to the next, in a waydesigned to keep the community on course to meet its destiny. Theinterface between the different strata in the party operated so that thosemilitants selected to serve from a particular echelon were orientedtowards those from upper echelons endowed with ready-madedecisions. It was a centralism that offered the possibility for the party tofunction as a closed society when the need arose and remain faithful toits fundamentally conservative preoccupation: preserving the party.

But the mission to preserve the party was not then perceived as themanifest mark of a self-serving bureaucracy. The leadership discourse,and especially Thorez’s, focused on the notion of French Communismas neither pressed from the mould of marxism nor a tradition of ouvri-erisme, but as an organic and original movement that was distinguishedby three overriding characteristics. The first of these characteristics wasthat the existential identification with the party was the only authenticway of connecting with the life of France; secondly that only throughthe party could the survival of France be ensured; and finally thatalthough the party was representative of an ideology and associatedwith a great power, this did not compromise the integrity of its exist-ence as a unique and independent counter-society.36 The card played bythe leadership tapped the emotive force that Marx identified whenworkers came together. Although what gathered communists togetherwas a doctrinal aim, once the community was constituted the domi-nant experience was the fulfilment of a ‘besoin de société’, a socialneed, and the aim was superseded by the need for society from which wasforged the sense of ‘ethnicité révolutionnaire’, of belonging to a revolu-tionary ethno-class.37 In contrast to subsequent chapters in the PCF’shistory, especially during the Fifth Republic, under Thorez the party couldsuccessfully claim to give a sense of permanence and identity, in markeddistinction to the sense of drift and uncertainty which characterised theoperation of the other political constituencies in the Fourth Republic.



Conclusion: An island of certainty in a sea of indecision

Though once more in the political wilderness after the exit from tripar-tite government, the PCF found itself operating in a general political cli-mate notable for its inability to favour consensus, in contrast to thecohesion of the PCF. The raw facts show that during its short existencethe life of the Fourth Republic was punctuated by the formation of25 governments and the appointment of 15 prime ministers. This could beread as a testament to the conciliatory talents of the political class dueto the processes to be negotiated in the perpetual remaking of govern-ing coalitions, or it could be seen as indicative of the overriding desireby the participants to exclude the extremes of Left and Right. That thelatter analysis is more plausible is underlined by the stabilising factorsabsent from the play of forces present in the political arena. Unlikecountries like Britain or Germany, there was no party to dominate thecentre ground and around which a consensus could be built. Further-more, as there was a pole of attraction to the left of the Socialists repre-sented by the PCF, so the Gaullists and more extreme tendenciesconstituted a pole of attraction to the right of the traditional represent-atives of the parliamentary centre-right.

If one looks at the legislative elections between 1946 and 1958, it isclear that the electorate’s faith in the party regime of the Fourth Repub-lic quickly dissipated. In the elections of June 1946, 60.9 per cent of thevoters supported the regime, spreading their votes between the Social-ists (21.1), the Radicals and their allies (11.6) and the Christian Demo-crats (28.2), as opposed to the 25.9 per cent represented by the PCF whoopposed the regime. In the elections of 1951, the total of voterssupporting the regime had fallen to 36.2 per cent, in contrast to the48.5 per cent of voters who spread their votes between parties opposingthe regime, notably the PCF (26.9) and the Gaullists and their allies(21.6). Although the parties supporting the regime increased their shareof the votes again in the election of 1956 to 41.5 per cent, theirperformance was still eclipsed by the parties opposing the regime,who obtained a 42.6 per cent share of the vote.38 The frailty of partyformations other than the PCF was very clear in those elections of1956. Whereas the PCF held a 26.7 per cent share of the vote, theSocialists polled 16.2, the Radicals 13.0, the MRP also 13.0 and theConservatives 17.3.39

It was on the Right particularly that party fortunes were marked bytransience and volatility. The Christian democratic MRP was born outof the Catholic Resistance and founded in 1944. The middle way it



seemed to offer between the materialist assumptions of liberalism andcommunism was popular in 1945 and placed it second only to the PCF,but that popularity had already begun to evaporate by the early 1950s.The Gaullist RPF, though not intended originally to be a party in thetraditional mould, obtained a 16.5 per cent share of the vote in the1951 legislative elections, but by July 1955 its fate was sealed when adisillusioned de Gaulle severed his ties with it. But most transient of allwas the movement led by Pierre Poujade, the shopkeeper from the Lot.The union founded by Poujade in 1953 to defend small business peopleand artisans against what they saw as the punitive tax regime of anauthoritarian centralist government, peaked with the 52 Deputiesreturned to the National Assembly in the elections of 1956, but beganto decline again in the following year and de Gaulle would acquire thesupport of Poujadist Deputies and supporters when he returned topower in 1958.40

The fractured nature of the centre-right could not fail to enhance theelectoral standing of the PCF. As for the Socialists, in some respectstheir participation in government was bound to enhance the reputationof the PCF as the great party of the Left. Jules Moch’s decision to send introops against striking miners in 1948 was not what many on the leftmight have expected from a Socialist Interior Minister. It was a moredramatic scenario still which saw a Socialist Prime Minister, Guy Mollet,in July 1956, conspire with the British and the Israelis to retake the SuezCanal by military means after it had been nationalised by PresidentGamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

One could argue that it was fortuitous for the PCF to be excludedfrom government during a period when those parties participating ingovernment were buffeted by a succession of foreign policy crises, mostdramatically those linked with the painful process of decolonisation.The conquest of North Vietnam by the nationalists under Ho Chi Minhin September 1944 had set the stage for the post-war débâcle that wouldculminate in the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, andbarely was this defeat digested in May 1954 before the Front de libérationnationale (FLN) in Algeria launched their war of independence againstFrance in the following November. In spite of the Cold War and the dis-credit attached to the PCF’s ideological obedience to Moscow, especiallyin the light of events like the crushing of the Hungarian uprising bySoviet troops in 1956,41 the PCF did not face the disadvantage of beingcompared with a governing elite distinguished by its ability to managethe convulsions of representative government either in the Hexagon orits territories overseas.



The foregoing factors all contributed to the unrivalled consistency ofelectoral support for the PCF during 1945–78, which averaged 23.4 percent over 11 legislative elections, while all the other parties suffered farmore dramatically fluctuating fortunes.42 However, the great mistakefor the PCF was to miss the constitutional turning point in the politicallife of the Republic in the twentieth century, and to fail to readjust itsattitudes, as a Third Republic blueprint for the exercise of power wassuperseded by the new model which defined the Fifth Republic.


40

3 The Anti-system Party

Introduction

As suggested in the conclusion to Chapter 2, the appeal of the PCF tothe French electorate was in no small measure due to the certainty itrepresented when all around it seemed characterised by uncertainty anddrift. Indeed, the continuity represented by the PCF at the height of itspopularity could be contrasted with the debate about the very incep-tion of the Fourth Republic. Historically, it could have been 25 August1944, since that was the date on which the capital was liberated. Polit-ically, the departure of de Gaulle from the presidency of the Conseil desministres on 20 January 1946 was a watershed in terms of the break thisconstituted with the whole period of the Resistance. Juridically,however, one would opt for the period from October 1946 to January1947, the creation of Paul Ramadier’s government and the establish-ment of new institutions, to situate the birth of a new constitutionalsystem.

In this febrile atmosphere of rapid change, high expectations andreversals of fortune, an irony of circumstance had aligned the PCF withde Gaulle’s RPF in a common rejection of what is often called la poli-tique politicienne, that is, the self-interested behaviour of the politicalclass. But as has been cogently pointed out elsewhere,1 after de Gaullerejected the atavistic nature of party politics under the Fourth Republicand the RPF was dissolved, there was only one refuge left for dissentingvoters. With the Socialists behaving as a major prop of the system, theCommunists were the sole anti-system party for an electorate weary ofpolitical immobilisme and social and economic instability.

But while a fixed position of no compromise with the political systemcan be electorally profitable in a situation where all else is flux and drift,


The Anti-system Party 41

those dividends can only diminish as that situation settles and the insti-tutions that govern it prove their efficacy. As the foundations of theFifth Republic sank solidly into place, the PCF began to find itselfisolated by its opposition and forced willy-nilly to compromise with therules of a game that it had ostensibly rejected. Thus, as party politicsassumed the new pattern of left- and right-wing allegiances described asa ‘quadrille bipolaire’, the party found itself pooling its resources, if notits ambitions, with its sister party of the Left, the Parti socialiste. And theambiguity this created in terms of the authenticity of the PCF’s desire toshare power in the management of the Fifth Republic’s affairs becamemore evident in the stop–go, in–out posture of the Communists, as theconfident electorate of a successfully established republic edged closerto voting the Left into power.

An anti-system party resistant to change

The ferment of the years immediately preceding the establishment ofthe Fifth Republic had left the PCF wrong-footed by events, both inter-nally and externally. The year of the PCF’s 14th Congress, 1956, was toprove one where its inability to read the changes occurring around itwould be all too obvious. The talented enfant terrible of the party, PierreHervé, was excluded on 14 February, with unintentional irony, on theday the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU)opened in Moscow. Hervé’s opposition to Stalinist dogmatism hadproved too much for a party which still proclaimed Stalin to be thegreat continuateur of Lenin’s work and which prided itself in havingin Thorez a leader who was his faithful disciple. What an irony, there-fore, when the heresies for which Hervé had been punished were thosearticulated by the Soviet leader, Nikita Kruschev. While Kruschevdenounced Stalin’s management style and his theses on the inevitablewithering away of capitalism, another prominent party figure, AnastasMikoïan, attacked more directly the illegalities that were rife underStalin and the cult of personality he encouraged.

The message could not have been lost on Thorez, since he waspresent at the CPSU’s congress, along with Jacques Duclos and MarcelServin. The public criticism of Stalin was glossed over in the pages ofL’Humanité in its reporting in the days following the CPSU Congress.But the article which appeared first in the New York Times of 16 March1956 on Kruschev’s secret report of 25 February indicting Stalin for hismisdeeds had, eventually, to draw a response from Thorez. When itappeared in L’Humanité on 27 March, Thorez’s article did admit that,



especially in the latter stage of his career, Stalin himself had forgottensome of the rules that he had taught to communist movements aroundthe world. This, however, amounted to little more than a caveat in anoverview that continued to situate Stalin at the heart of a process thathad successfully constructed a socialist system covering a sixth of theworld’s surface and defended Lenin’s legacy.

In contrast to Thorez and his colleagues, communist leaders behindthe iron curtain, such as Gomulka in Poland, were making tentativesteps towards liberalisation within the parameters of a programme ofdestalinisation, while attempting to balance this with their continuedsupport for the status quo through their fidelity to the Warsaw Pact. ButImre Nagy in Hungary embarked on a course of reform that was toassume a dramatic momentum of its own. What started as a rejection ofthe straitjacket of the Stalinist legacy which Hungary had had to endureturned into a repudiation of communism. Nagy’s proclamation ofHungary’s neutrality on 2 November 1956, and the decision to create aWestern-style government, was condemned in the pages of L’Humanitéas a compromise with anti-communist parties. Reporting on the delib-erations of the PCF’s central committee, Etienne Fajon went further andaccused Nagy of covering up a Saint Bartholomew’s day elimination ofcommunists in which Hungarian fascists were engaged. The PCF leader-ship’s clear rejoicing in the ‘final defeat of the counter-revolution’,2

following the Soviet army’s occupation of Budapest on 4 November,expressed its insulation from the wave of sympathy across France forNagy’s experiment in democracy and also from within its own ranks. Atgrassroots level, the CGT union was divided, with figures like Pierre LeBrun and Alain Le Léap openly hostile to the military intervention ofthe Soviet Union in Hungary. From the factory floor, incidents werereported of militants refusing to distribute tracts and even tearing uptheir membership cards. However, it was in the party’s coterie of intel-lectuals that the disillusionment drew the most attention. Four communistwriters, Claude Roy, Roger Vailland, Claude Morgan and J.-F. Rolland,joined in the protest articulated, notably, by Jean-Paul Sartre against theSoviet government’s use of tanks and cannons to break the revolt of theHungarian people. On 23 November a motion appeared in the pages ofLe Figaro, endorsed by an iconic figure of modern art, Pablo Picasso, andnine other communist intellectuals, calling for an extraordinaryCongress of the party to address the deep disquiet caused by the eventsin Hungary.3 But the PCF kept to its line and seemed justified in doingso, to judge by the election results of the period. Even its support for theSoviet repression in Hungary did not seem able seriously to undermine



its apparently immovable presence on the French political landscape. Inthe 52 cantonal by-elections in 1956 its share of the vote slipped barelyto 26.9 per cent as opposed to 27.1 per cent on the previous occasion.In the 57 such elections that were to follow in 1957 the party’s share ofthe vote would dip noticeably to 17.2 per cent from the previous levelof 21.4 per cent. But in the three elections of the same year for parlia-mentary seats, the party would score 25.3 per cent in the second round,very close to the 26.1 per cent gained in the general elections of2 January 1956. Finally, the pattern was reinforced in municipal elec-tions also, enabling it to take 32.1 per cent in 1957, in line with the31.9 per cent in 1953.

As well as holding the line against anti-communist counter-revolutionin the east, the PCF was also mindful of the excesses of capitalist imperi-alism in the pursuit of France’s own interests. The Anglo-French ulti-matum to President Nasser of Egypt on 30 October 1956 over hiscountry’s nationalisation of the Suez canal was followed by the seizureof Port Saïd by an Anglo-French force of paratroopers on 5 November.The fact that it came a day after the Soviet intervention in Budapest wasin a sense a tragic coincidence for the Hungarian insurrectionists. Notonly did this final act of imperialist hauteur by two declining Europeanpowers furnish communists with a means of castigating the West for itsvaunted democratic credentials, it could be exploited to attenuate theenormity of what the Soviet Union had sanctioned in Hungary.However, the insurrection that would have the greatest impact on thelife of the Fourth Republic, and therefore the standing of the PCF as anational political force, had already been ignited across the water fromFrance’s Mediterranean shore.

The start of the insurrection in Algeria on 1 November 1954 was anevent that the PCF was not alone in underestimating. Although itreceived well-informed briefings from the Parti communiste algérien, theleaders of the insurrection were first and foremost nationalist, notcommunist, and in a communiqué in L’Humanité on 9 November 1954,the party criticised the insurrectionists for individual acts that mightplay into the hands of the colonists. The theoretical reference for thePCF was still the position taken by Thorez in a speech delivered inAlgiers in February 1939. What Thorez saw at that point was a meltingpot of twenty races, in a process of transition towards nationhood, andwhich would depend, crucially, on the Parti communiste algérien,formed a mere three years beforehand, to guide it there.4 It was not untilJanuary 1958 that the PCF recognised the FLN as the sole interlocutorsof Algerian nationalism.5



During 1958 the scale of the crisis unfolding in Algeria impresseditself on everyone and Thorez campaigned across the country againstFrench policy there. He made a cause célèbre of Alban Liechti, whorefused the call-up, although the young party member had taken theinitiative of refusing the draft without the support of the PCF. But, ascertain chroniclers have argued, Thorez and the party leadership stilldid not appreciate the extent to which the Algerian crisis threatenedthe continued existence of the Fourth Republic.6 Nor did Thorez appearto appreciate the latent susceptibility of the French public to the appealof the kind of Caesarism personified by de Gaulle. When, in May,Paris-Presse asked a number of leading political figures whether theevents in Algeria justified the recall of General de Gaulle to the helm,Thorez condemned de Gaulle as an advocate of colonial wars, someonewho had attempted to evict the PCF from the life of the nation, and anindividual who aspired to exercise dictatorial powers.7

As was implied by the PCF’s posture following the fall of the SocialistGuy Mollet’s government in 1957, it was the fixed point around whichthe Left should revolve. The overtures that were made to the Socialistsassumed, as ever, that compromise could be reached on matters ofpolicy across a broad front, but that on the issue of the party’s structureand organisational identity, it would remain the bastion determined bythe co-identification (in the leadership’s perception) of Stalinism andcommunism. While the fortunes of other parties and players waxed andwaned, that of the PCF remained constant. In the light of the undeni-able political advantage enjoyed by the party, it is perhaps notsurprising that Thorez should also not appreciate the power of attractionof a figure like de Gaulle to both the army and civil society. To manyeyes, de Gaulle represented the positive personalisation of power andseemed to possess the mystique of a historical destiny. But to Thorez hewas, after all, the figure who had folded his tent and retreated into thepolitical wilderness in 1946, whereas the PCF had become an inescapablefeature of the political life of the Fourth Republic.

The Algerian crisis served to prove once more the superiority the PCFenjoyed as a cohesive force, vis-à-vis the other parties of the politicalsystem. Mollet had tried a policy of increasing severity and failed, underthe governor-general he appointed to Algeria, Robert Lacoste. TheFrench government’s position was to negotiate only with elected repre-sentatives of the Algerian people, once the FLN had laid down its arms.The effect on the ground was to make the prospect of anything resem-bling capitulation even more unacceptable to both sides concerned. Asthe disregard for human rights grew among the parachutists of General



Massu, so the terrorist bombings executed by the FLN escalated, reaching apeak during the ‘battle of Algiers’, between January and September1957, when the systematic use of torture on suspected terrorists andstreet by street searches by French troops was countered by calculatedbombing outrages. On the mainland, the enfeebled political partieswere further divided by the way the conflict muddied the distinctionsbetween them. Thus, the Algérie française camp could draw notableRadicals, Gaullists, Christian democrats and moderates, while theRepublican front against government policy in Algeria had to containtensions of the kind generated by the resignation of the liberal left-winger Pierre Mendès-France in protest at Mollet’s management of thecrisis.

The crisis came to a head on 13 May 1958. The leader of the MRP,Pierre Pflimlin, was called upon to form a new government. However,due to the perception of him by the Algérie française activists in Algiersas a man of compromise, a mass demonstration was organised with thecomplicity of the army which rapidly became an insurrection, leadingto the formation of a ‘Comité du salut public de l’Algérie française’, ledby generals Salan and Massu. In the perfervid atmosphere that reigned,the Gaullists found little difficulty in persuading the insurgents to makean appeal to General de Gaulle, and on 15 May Salan and Massudeclared officially that de Gaulle’s was the only authority that theywould recognise.

The reaction of the PCF to the events of 13 May was for the politicalbureau to issue a call to the people during the night of the thirteenth, inwhich it condemned the events in Algiers as a fascist coup against theRepublic and exhorted the workers in their factories and businesses tomobilise with the slogan, ‘the Fascists will not pass’.8 In spite of thisappeal, Thorez himself decided that caution was the better part ofvalour and chose secretly to seek refuge in Switzerland, until he waspersuaded to return by Marcel Servin.9 It is unlikely, however, that thephysical presence of Thorez would have made the kind of anti-fascistmobilisation that the party had been capable of in 1934 any more prob-able. The PCF’s tacit support had enabled the Pflimlin government tobe formed, and after the events of 13 May it supported the governmentfurther in the vote that accorded it special powers. But, essentially, thePCF was incapable of defining a positive position that could provide adynamic for its own constituency or offer an alternative to de Gaulle.

De Gaulle’s declaration, on 15 May, that he was willing to assume thepowers of the Republic, elicited a critique of his ambitions by the PCFthat warned of the prospective advent of a regime characterised by the



personalisation of power. But the deepening of the crisis simply servedto heighten the providential appeal of de Gaulle. The seizing of theprefecture of Ajaccio in Corsica, by paratroopers from Algeria on 26 May,seemed to bring the possibility of civil war in France a step closer. Thecall from the PCF on mainland France to Corsican communists to ‘hurlthe fascists into the sea’10 fell on deaf ears, and this powerlessness in theface of events could only enhance the attraction of de Gaulle, given thediscredit attached to political parties.

Ironically for the anti-system party, it was the only formation tooppose the end of the Fourth Republic system of party politics, bydeclaring itself against the investiture of General de Gaulle. On theeve of his investiture the party warned that the personalisation ofpower was not reconcilable with the regular functioning of representativedemocracy. But these arguments could not resist the way de Gaullehad effectively played Algiers and Paris off against each other, usingthe threat of the events in Algiers to portray himself in Paris as theindispensable interlocutor for the insurrectionists, and using hisgrowing importance in Paris to call for calm in Algiers. The pressure ofevents left President Coty with no choice but to call on de Gaulle toform a government, whose investiture by the Assembly took place on1 June. On 2 June it was voted full powers, and on 3 June theAssembly voted to grant de Gaulle the right to revise the constitutionof the Republic.

Stranded by the shift from fourth to fifth

During the summer months following de Gaulle’s investiture, Thorezwent onto the attack and the pages of L’Humanité chronicled hisdramatic depictions of where the personalisation of power would lead.Before the central committee at Ivry on 10 June he described the forma-tion of an administration under de Gaulle as a personal dictatorshipthat opened the way to fascism.11 The attack was renewed in greaterdetail before the national conference of the PCF at Montreuil on17 July, when the party was exhorted to fight against Gaullism. On thisoccasion, Thorez identified the foundations supporting the Gaullistphenomenon as the most chauvinistic and the most pro-colonialistelements of the grande bourgeosie, reiterating the encouragement thisgave to the rise of fascism.12 During the fête de l’Humanité thatSeptember, Thorez focused his criticism on the incompatibility ofCaesarism and democracy.13 But this less strident tone was to have nomore successful an impact.



The content of the constitutional reforms that de Gaulle presented tothe French people on 4 September was clearly aimed at reinforcing theauthority of the French State by enhancing the powers of the President.Also implicit in de Gaulle’s decision to seek approval for the changes bya national referendum rather than a simple ratification in the Assemblywas his desire to marginalise political parties. In a radio broadcast sixdays before the referendum, without citing de Gaulle, Thorez drew acomparison between the ambitions of the insurrectionists for an Algériefrançaise and the ambitions espoused by some in metropolitan France:the suppression of political parties, the subordination of civil power tomilitary power and the substitution of police powers for the rule oflaw.14 But the very nature of the campaign preceding the referendumillustrated why the parties had lost the confidence of the electorate. Noless than 23 ‘recognised’ political formations or groupings were author-ised to use the radio and billboards to make their arguments. Under thename Union des forces démocratiques the groupings allied with the PCFwere the Radicals behind Mendès-France, François Mitterrand’s UDSR(Union démocratique et socialiste de la résistance), the left-wing Catholicsof Jeune République and the Union de la Gauche socialiste. However, theirright to be heard on the airwaves and voice their opposition to the newconstitution did not diminish the perception of these groupings asweak and ‘satellisé’, that is, mere satellites of the PCF.15

Once the result of the referendum on 28 September was declared, itwas clear that France had undergone a sea change, at least in terms ofthe expectations of the electorate. Whereas in October 1946 only 53 percent of voters gave their approval for the constitution of the FourthRepublic, in September 1958 almost 80 per cent of them approved thetext that was submitted to them, and with a turn-out of 85 per cent ofthose eligible to vote. All of the départements of France returned major-ities in favour of the new constitution, and although the majoritieswere predictably greater in those regions where the Right was tradition-ally implanted, like the Gironde, Basses-Pyrénées and Haute-Loire, thevote against was significantly lower than might have been expected inthose regions with a left-wing tradition like the Nord, Massif centraland Mediterranean coast. Of the PCF electorate, the party itself wouldrecognise that one in five had ignored the party line. An analysis of thefigures, however, showed that only 60 per cent of members had voted‘no’. Or, if one adds in the abstentionists, a third of party membersignored the party’s instructions.16

While on the one hand it could be argued that de Gaulle had bene-fited from the fact that the communist working-class electorate was far



from unanimous in sharing the pro-independence position of the PCFregarding Algeria, on the other hand, their voting behaviour was lessissue-led. Many of them also shared in the general expectation, evenhunger, for change, which de Gaulle personified. The communist elect-orate was no more insulated than the rest of the population from whatmany saw as the decade of national failure that had preceded the returnof de Gaulle. But the official party line was that the millions who hadvoted against the new constitution nonetheless represented a base onwhich the democratic forces of the country could build their offensive,most obviously in the legislative elections that were looming inNovember. Conversely, flushed with the success of the referendum, thenew administration was determined to drive home its advantage at thecost of the political parties, especially the PCF.

The new voting system to be adopted was not settled by the refer-endum of 28 September, and in the deliberations that followed, it wasclear that de Gaulle was determined not to sanction a system that couldeither exaggerate party representation or lend itself to skilful manipula-tion by the parties. The system of proportional representation that hadserved the Fourth Republic was obviously no longer acceptable. TheBritish-style, first-past-the-post system which Michel Debré was knownto lean towards was also discounted, as the single round of votingcould again favour a party like the PCF with a strong base and theability to mobilise its voters. Ultimately, at their meeting on 7 October,de Gaulle and his ministers made a pragmatic choice and revived thefirst-past-the-post system used during the life of the Third Republic, butwith a number of important caveats. This time, although there would betwo rounds of voting as in the Third Republic, only a week would separatethem (as opposed to a fortnight); no new candidate could present himor herself at the second round; and no new candidate could go forwardto the second round who had polled less than 5 per cent of the votes inthe first round. Two related reforms would further reduce the weight ofthe parties in the new Assembly. The decision to reduce the number ofDeputies elected in metropolitan France from 544 to 465 necessitatedthe redrawing of constituency boundaries and resulted in a level ofrepresentation of approximately one Deputy per 93,000 inhabitants.While the exercise could be justified as a reasonably honest reflection ofthe demographic realities of the time, the effects were not entirelyneutral. The fact that no Department should be allowed to return lessthan two Deputies favoured those that were the least populated and, notsurprisingly, the PCF found itself to be the party the most systemati-cally disadvantaged by the boundary changes.



While the new regime’s determination to secure its advantage vis-à-visthe Left, and especially the PCF, was clear, the Left nonetheless playedinto its hands. We have already noted the cost to the PCF, in terms ofthe disaffection of its own voters, of its refusal to admit the importanceof the other factors that made the presidentialisation of power accept-able to the French electorate. Other formations of the Left and Centrerendered themselves less credible in the eyes of the electorate throughtheir increasing divisions. The Socialists of the SFIO could not be recon-ciled with the Socialists of the newer UDSR; the Radicals, alreadydivided into three groupings, found themselves faced with a fourthdue to the creation of the Union des forces démocratiques by PierreMendès-France and his friends; and the MRP found that the middleground it hoped to occupy had become the territory of the Gaullistvehicle, the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR). The endorsementthe new regime hoped to receive from the legislative elections ofNovember 1958 was therefore predictable, but the scale of it was not.17

But the scale of the PCF’s failure to protect its position as the premierparty of France was also unexpected.

At the end of the first round of voting on 23 November, the PCF hadsuffered its biggest decline since 1932. It lost 1,600,000 votes comparedto its performance in the elections of 1956, losing almost a third of itselectorate, with 14.3 per cent of the vote in contrast to 20.5 per cent in1956. The high level of abstentionism, at 22.9 per cent, offered littlecomfort, as it could be interpreted as further evidence of the electorate’smistrust of the parties. Between the rounds of voting, additionaldamage was done by the disunity of the Left. The ‘discipline républicaine’which should have characterised a transfer of votes from less well-placed Socialists to better-placed Communist candidates in the secondround was weak and unquestionably undermined by figures like GuyMollet, who declared that there could be no compromise with thedefenders of Bolshevism. By the time the results of the second round ofvoting on November 30 were established (Table 3.1), it was undeniablethat the PCF, which had emerged with 150 Deputies in 1956, was thegreat loser.

Again, however, contingent factors were to have a considerable effecton PCF fortunes, and this time in a positive sense. Though isolatedduring the Fourth Republic, the political actions of the non-communistleft served, paradoxically, to undermine their own credibility andunderline the PCF’s as a party of the Left. The alliances of the SFIO withcentre-left and centrist groups during the life of the Fourth Republic,aimed at holding off the PCF on the left and the Gaullists on the right,



had in fact pulled the SFIO towards the right. The reality of the disap-pearing middle ground became more manifest with the decliningfortunes of the MRP. The aspirations of this ‘social Catholic’ party, bornout of the Catholic Resistance, to break the left–right mould, faded withits electoral fortunes as the party dissolved into old squabbles aboutchurch-state relations and the attitude to take over the unravelling ofcolonial ties. As France passed from one Republic to the next, theSocialists found themselves isolated, and the polarisation that served sowell to highlight the dominance of the PCF as the party of the Left,reasserted itself. The moot point, however, would be whether theensuing periods of alliance with the Socialists could overcome the limitsplaced by the oppositional posture of an anti-system party and allow itto position itself convincingly vis-à-vis the electorate as a prospectivepart of an elected left-wing establishment.

Uneasy steps: Dancing in the ‘quadrille bipolaire’

The term ‘quadrille bipolaire’ neatly summarises the electoral alliancesthat were a precondition for success under the political system createdfor de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. The high point for the operation of thesealliances was reached in the legislative elections of 1978, when fourparties of comparable strength, the Gaullist RPR allied with the centre-right UDF and the PCF allied with the PS, split the vote along a clearleft–right axis. The bipolar nature of the system was most stark of coursein the ultimate electoral contest, the presidential election, when priorto the second round the competitors who had lost out in the battle to

Table 3.1 Results of second round of legislative elections,30 November 1958

* Deputies elected in metropolitan France and not including 67from Algeria, 4 from the Sahara, 10 from overseas Departmentsand 6 from overseas territories.

Number of deputies*

PCF 10SFIO 44Radicals and allies 23MRP 57UNR 198Centre-Right moderates 133



be the best placed candidates would step down in order to facilitate aclear left–right battle.18

The ground for such an evolution was prepared by de Gaulle, andreinforced by him with the constitutional amendment of 1962 thatallowed the President to be elected directly by the people. Although theamendment was approved by the electorate in a referendum, a generalelection was nonetheless called because of the vote of censure passedby a parliament hostile to the change. It was at this point that theSocialists, counting the cost to themselves of the new electoral systemintroduced in 1958, announced that they would desist in the secondround of voting in favour of the best-placed opposition candidate ineach constituency, including the Communist ones. The reaction of thePCF was rapid and generous. It announced that it would take the sameline as the Socialists, and in the event, even withdrew some of its candi-dates who were marginally ahead in the first round, to the benefit ofother opposition candidates with more hope of rallying moderatevoters. The ‘désistement’ which was the fruit of this revival in ‘disciplinerépublicaine’ on the Left allowed the partners to claw back in the elec-tions of 1962 some of the losses suffered in 1958. The four-million votespolled by the PCF secured them a 21.8 per cent share of the turnout and40 seats. The much more modest 12.65 per cent share of the vote takenby the SFIO, nonetheless, secured 65 seats for the Socialists in the newAssembly. The fact remained, however, that though polarisation madethe PCF clearly incontournable or unavoidable on the left, its oppositionto the system limited the party’s potential gains from it. Conversely,while the Socialists were forced to accept their junior status in thepartnership with the Communists, it was precisely this unequal alliancethat offered it the prospect of ultimately rivalling the PCF. On the non-communist Left it was François Mitterrand who was the first to graspthis paradox fully and begin to exploit it.19 The retirement of Thorezin 1964 and his replacement by Waldeck Rochet had not greatlyattenuated the suspicions of the Socialists vis-à-vis the PCF. With theprospect of a presidential election looming in 1965, the Socialists triedto construct a centre-left alliance around the candidature of GastonDeferre as an alternative to Gaullism. The SFIO was forced to accept,however, that the potential for a common platform of that kind nolonger existed with the centre parties, which included the remnantsof the MRP. Mitterrand emerged as the compromise candidate of theLeft essentially due to his profile as an outsider who, rather than beinga powerfully identifiable standard-bearer for the SFIO or the PCF, wasin fact rooted in the middle ground of Fourth Republic politics. He



announced his candidature on 9 September 1965 without consultinghis prospective allies, and although his ambition was to rally all theanti-Gaullist forces of the Left, his own political support was providedby the small and fragile Convention des institutions républicaines (CIR).Mitterrand’s isolated standing meant that the two main parties of theLeft could distance themselves from him in the event of a crushing defeatand thus minimise the cost to their credibility. Moreover, for the PCF itwas an additional step towards the alliance that they hoped wouldconsolidate its dominance on the Left.

On 23 September 1965 the PCF central committee decided officiallyto support the candidature of François Mitterrand. Furthermore, thePCF accepted the need to row back on its demands in order to give thecandidate of the Left the impetus he needed in persuading the Frenchelectorate to trust him. It therefore renounced the requirement for ajoint manifesto and allowed Mitterrand the freedom he wanted interms of policy-making, while using its resources to support hiscampaign on the ground. When de Gaulle declared his candidature on4 November, it was not without a degree of drama. As summarised bythe media, de Gaulle offered the people of France a stark choice: ‘Moiou le chaos’ (‘me or chaos’). Confident of his triumph, de Gaullerefused to beat the campaign trail and left the political stage tohis adversaries. But contrary to expectation, Mitterrand pushed deGaulle into a second-round confrontation when, in the first round on5 December, he took more than a 32 per cent share of the vote againstde Gaulle’s 44.65 per cent. Notwithstanding de Gaulle’s easy victory inthe second round of voting on 19 December, when his share of the voterose to 54.6 per cent, Mitterrand’s 45.4 per cent enabled him to score amoral victory and held significant lessons for the future.

The lesson embodied in Mitterrand’s performance was the inescapableway in which the institution of the presidency dominated the politicalsystem of the Fifth Republic and shaped the electoral process. The fulfil-ment of de Gaulle’s ambition to create a strong presidency implied acorresponding diminution in the standing of the parties which meantthat, in electoral terms, those parties which could put forwardsuccessful presidential candidates would expect to reap the benefitsin parliamentary elections. The price to be paid for this success wouldbe to transform themselves, to an important extent, into presidentialvehicles. Conversely, as we shall see in a later chapter, the failure totake this lesson on board would cost the PCF dearly at the pollingbooth. Moreover, Mitterrand’s success adumbrated the possibility thatthe presidential mantle that appeared constitutionally tailor-made for



de Gaulle could successfully pass on to someone else, even in thelong-run to someone not of the centre-right.

However, the challenge that would confront an anti-system party inthe case of a genuine alternance was some way from materialising, andindeed seemed to recede in the light of the peculiar circumstancessurrounding the 1969 presidential elections. The party vehicle for deGaulle’s ambitions, the Union pour la défense de la République (UDR), hadharvested votes in the legislative elections of 23 and 30 June 1968 thatgave it an absolute majority of 293 out of 487 Deputies in the Assembly.But underlying this success was the fact that a major factor in themotivation of the electorate was the fear of social disorder and thedesire to bring to a close the chapter of social upheaval that had peakedviolently in ‘la nuit des barricades’ (the night of the barricades) in theLatin Quarter of Paris on 10–11 May. With the restoration of politicalnormality came also the brooding resentment among the electorate ofde Gaulle’s paternalistic presidency and in particular his government’smanagement of the country’s economic affairs. De Gaulle’s subsequentdecision to invite the electorate to give their verdict on his programmeto decentralise decision-making processes in France and to reform theSenate would inevitably, therefore, run the risk of allowing voters theopportunity to vent their frustration. The stakes were further raised byhis decision to effect this consultation by means of a plebiscite, therebyplacing his personal credibility on the line.20

In spite of the fact that the polls by mid-April 1969 indicated approxi-mately 52 per cent of the voters in favour of the reforms proposed byde Gaulle, the swing that occurred from that point onwards until theday of the referendum on 27 April resulted in a 53.2 per cent vote againstthe reforms. Faced with this personal disavowal de Gaulle promptlyissued a statement the following morning announcing his decision torenounce his presidential powers, effective from midday. Interestingly,as the candidates began to emerge for the presidential contest, GeorgesPompidou, the prime minister de Gaulle had replaced once the crisisof May 1968 had subsided, appealed to the desire for change in Franceby declaring ‘Je ne suis pas le général de Gaulle’ (‘I am not Generalde Gaulle’).

The fact that the Left could not capitalise on the mood swing amongthe French electorate, away from the benevolent authoritarianism ofGaullism resulted from the inability of the non-communist left and thePCF to dance in step in the pursuit of power. Ill feeling generated by theevents of May 1968 had driven a wedge between the PCF and the otherconstituencies on the Left.21 As we shall see later in the chapter on



clashing counter-cultures, in May 1968 the PCF had failed to understandthe aspirations of the new youth culture that was emerging, and thisincomprehension was summed up in Georges Marchais’ famous denunci-ation of student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, as a German anarchist. Thisisolation vis-à-vis the non-communist left was exacerbated by the eventsthat followed on the international stage in the ensuing summer.When, on 21 August, Soviet forces rolled into the Czech capital to endthe experiment in reform being pursued by the Communist Party ofCzechoslovakia and the figurehead for the Prague spring AlexanderDubcek, this was to the dismay of the Left in general and many Commun-ists in Western Europe. The party intellectual Roger Gauraudy who was inYalta with Italian and Spanish communist leaders when the news wasbroken to him of the Soviet action, took the lead in expressing oppos-ition to it and initially at least found an echo in the pronouncements ofWaldeck Rochet, who led the PCF politburo in framing a communiquéwhich criticised the Soviet intervention. Published on the evening of theintervention and endorsed by the central committee the day after, thecommuniqué marked a notable break with the usual policy of alignmentwith the Soviet Union and, as Waldeck Rochet admitted in a radiointerview, was drawn up with ‘bitterness and heart-rending’.22

The PCF attitude, however, would not retain the ideological inde-pendence or express the unequivocal moral outrage that characterisedthe reactions of other sections of the Left. By the beginning ofNovember, the party’s position had moved from criticism of theSoviet Union to criticism of Dubcek and the authors of the Praguespring, and finally to an emphasis on the values which united theinternational communist movement, implicitly, around the Soviet Union.It has been argued by some commentators that Waldeck Rochet, asparty general secretary at the time of the crisis, had tried to establish aPCF line that was sympathetic to the aspirations behind the Praguespring and attempted to attenuate the conflict between Dubcek andLeonid Breznev in the Kremlin,23 but that he was ultimately caught onthe back foot by adversaries within the party. For others, WaldeckRochet’s apparent sympathy for Dubcek’s liberal interpretation ofcommunism was a fig leaf to cover the temporising born of an absenceof genuine faith in reform.24 But that temporising nonetheless allowedthe PCF to save face to a certain extent vis-à-vis its own constituency,while on the international stage, it could resume its stance as one ofthe CPSU’s most faithful sister parties in the light of the impendingworld conference of communist parties destined to take place inJune 1969.



With regard to the impending presidential elections in France,however, the excellent personal relations that Waldeck Rochet was saidto enjoy with François Mitterrand and his progress in developing theidea that the unity of the Left was the crucial means of challengingGaullism were put on ice. The decision of the SFIO in May 1969, at itscongress in the Paris suburb of Alfortville, to go it alone in the presidentialelections with Gaston Deferre as its candidate was a kind of intellectualrecidivism that divided an already fractured non-communist left evenfurther. Deferre, mayor of the socialist bastion of Marseille, hadnarrowly outmanoeuvred the SFIO leader, Guy Mollet, by evoking thepossibility of reviving a ‘third force’ that could acquire the means tochallenge both the Gaullists and the Communists. For others on thenon-communist left, the alliance of the SFIO, MRP, centre-left andcentrist groups that ended in failure in 1952, would be even less likelyto be emulated successfully under the less propitious circumstances thatobtained in the Fifth Republic. Having attempted to position himself asthe candidate for a united Left, François Mitterrand was ultimatelyobliged to relinquish this ambition and the CIR declined to supportDeferre. But others on the non-communist Left were not averse toundermining its cohesion and also came forward as presidential candi-dates: Michel Rocard for the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) and the extremeleft-winger who had been prominent in the turmoil of May 1968, AlainKrivine.

It has also been argued that the SFIO gambled on the familiarassumption that, for all the popularity of communist candidates inmunicipal and mayoral elections, since only a socialist figurehead forthe Left was acceptable to the electorate at national level, the PCFwould not put one forward.25 But from the PCF perspective, whatevervague ideas Waldeck Rochet may have entertained of supporting theDeferre candidacy were soon dispensed with by the bureau politique ofthe party. The feasibility of supporting Deferre was made more remoteby the fact that Guy Mollet himself appeared to have more enthusiasmfor the candidacy of Alain Poher. Poher was the centrist President of theSenate who had taken over as acting President of the Republic after theGeneral’s resignation, and Poher’s benign image in the public eye wasone of the factors that inclined the SFIO leader to see him as the bestway of defeating the Gaullist front runner, Georges Pompidou. Theright-ward drift of the Socialists strengthened the hand of the membersof a Thorézien persuasion in the bureau, and notwithstanding theopposition of liberals like Paul Laurent, when they put up one of their ownin the shape of Jacques Duclos as the PCF candidate for the presidency,



they were unstoppable. The unanimous decision of the central committeeto endorse Duclos’ candidacy on 3 May 1969 marked the defeat of theline adopted by Waldeck Rochet in 1965.26

In a curious way, all the major players lost or scored hollow victoriesin the outcome of the 1969 presidential elections. The performances ofDeferre and Rocard in the first ballot on 1 June were unequivocal fail-ures, given their respective scores of 5.1 and 3.7 per cent. They hadendured two inescapable and interconnected lessons: the socialistmovement in France had to be overhauled and could not contemplatean electoral strategy that could carry it to power without accommo-dating the PCF. Georges Pompidou may have comfortably outdistancedhis nearest rival, Poher, by 44 to 23.4 per cent in the first round, but theadvice of the PCF and the PSU to their supporters not to turn out for thesecond round had weakened the credibility of the democratic processby effectively promoting a third option to Pompidou and Poher: absten-tion. The 30.9 per cent abstention rate in the second ballot meant thatthose 10.7 million electors who cast their vote for Pompidou on 15 Juneactually represented only 37.2 per cent of the total electorate.

The initial scepticism regarding Duclos’ candidacy proved unfounded.In contrast to the other non-Gaullist candidates, he had a large andefficient party organisation to rely on, which was able to swing intooperation on the ground behind his campaign. His 21.5 per cent shareof the vote in the first round placed him third and less than2 percentage points behind Poher. Had the PCF decided to mobilise itsvoters in order to stop the Gaullist candidate in the second round,Pompidou’s victory would have been by no means certain. The PCF’spreference, however, was politically partisan, if not indeed factional. Bypromoting abstentionism in the second round it was unquestionablysuccessful in eliminating the possibility of finding itself marginalisedby a resurgent and cohesive centre force, and it obliged the non-communist left to confront the unpalatable reality of the electoralmisfortunes it was destined to experience without an alliance with thePCF. But in so doing, the PCF had given its victory a hollow ring, sincethe Left as a whole was the loser.

By assuming a fixed position that would force the rest of the Left togravitate around it if they wanted to taste electoral success, the PCFgave its prospective allies a powerful incentive to become more fleetand sure-footed in the dance to constitute alliances. As we shall see ingreater detail later, in the intervening period between the election ofPompidou to the presidency and his premature death, precipitatingnew presidential elections in 1974, the Socialists in particular made



frantic efforts to reorganise themselves into a more cohesive vehicleand combined that with a dose of realism that enabled Mitterrand toput them back on track. The Fédération de la gauche démocrate et socialiste(FGDS) effectively lost its raison d’être after the presidential elections of1969. Mitterrand had renounced his presidency of it at the end of theprevious year and had invested his ambitions into pulling the non-communist left together in the CIR.

The rump of the FGDS reconstituted itself into the PS in 1969 andwithin two years the energetic action of Alain Savary began to attackthe structural deficiencies that were in large measure responsible for theongoing decline in the old SFIO membership base. What might havebeen perceived as the grip of the old gerontocracy of the party’s federalsecretaries was prised away by Savary and there was a 20-year drop inthe average age of office-holders in the party.27 Given this orientation,it is perhaps not surprising that Savary was suspicious of Mitterand. AsSavary was later to underline when his position on the Left was under-mined by Mitterrand, throughout his very long (even at that stage)political career, Mitterrand had never shown socialist conviction, letalone belief in a genuine partnership with the Communists.

The truth remained, however, that amid the rubble of socialist aspir-ations, Mitterrand’s vision of an alliance with the PCF that wouldsqueeze out the centre and mobilise the breadth of national supportthat could topple a Gaullist presidential succession remained the mostcogent. The failure of the two parties to dance in step and its conse-quences in the presidential elections of 1969 were contrasted, in somesocialist minds, with the success of the non-communist left during thatperiod in 1965–67 when the Mitterrandist vision of the Left appeared tobe in the ascendant. Moreover, by the time of the PS Congress atEpinay-sur-Seine in 1971, Mitterrand had managed to broaden hisappeal to the left-wing of the PS, the Centre d’Etudes de Recherches etd’Education Socialistes (CERES). This dynamic socialist element, whichwanted to turn the page on the discredited opportunism of the Social-ists under Mollet and lay the foundations of a party based on socialistprinciple, found in Mitterrand someone who offered the prospect ofnegotiating a common programme with the PCF, while Savary had sethis face against it.28

What occurred at Epinay could best be described (in the language ofcorporate competition) as a ‘reverse takeover’. Mitterrand had backedhis CIR into the PS, with the former Secretary-General of the CIR takingup a place in the PS Secretariat. While Mitterrand could only directlyinfluence the 14 per cent of the delegate vote largely represented by



former Conventionnels, a deal with Gaston Deferre enabled him to secureDeferre’s bloc vote, which, as the largest in the party, was the mostprized. These two elements, tallied with the support from the oppositewing of the party provided by CERES, enabled Mitterrand to winthe election to be the new first secretary of the party – by a majority of1 per cent.

The fruits to be enjoyed from the willingness of the sister parties ofthe Left to move in step with each other had already become apparentto some in the PS even before the Epinay congress. In the March 1971municipal elections, the de facto alliances between PCF and PS at citylevel illustrated the extent to which the tide was pulling in favour ofa formal alliance. A large number of PS mayors, like Pierre Mauroy atLille, had benefited crucially from the withdrawal of the communistcandidate in the second ballot, and as the figures show, this coord-inated movement occurred in two-thirds of large towns in 1971, incontrast to little more than one-third in 1965.29 But this successoccurred against a background of tension within the PCF occasioned bya crucial change at the top of the party.

In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968,Georges Marchais had exploited his responsibility for the PCF’s inter-national relations to the full and distinguished himself as one of theparty figures most responsible for reconciling the PCF to the SovietUnion’s excuses for its actions. At the world conference of communistparties in Moscow in June 1969, Marchais had worked energetically tosecure his position in the eyes of the CPSU as the natural heir to theleadership of the PCF. While Waldeck Rochet fell seriously ill at thebeginning of the conference and was written out of the script, Marchaisset about securing the kind of conference statement that, while notcapable of ensuring unquestioning unanimity on the leadership of theCPSU in the worldwide struggle against imperialism, could nonethelesscircumvent the reservations of important figures like the Italiancommunists concerning the events in Czechoslovakia.

On his return to France, Marchais presented the report of the confer-ence in Moscow to the central committee of the PCF. While Marchaiswas buoyed by the credit he had gained in Moscow, Waldeck Rochetsuffered another relapse in his health (partially undermined, somebelieved, by his immense disappointment at the actions of the SovietUnion in Czechoslovakia). As the evidence of Waldeck Rochet’s inabilityto resume his responsibilities became incontrovertible, the politburo ofthe party met to discuss the future leadership of the PCF. The atmos-phere was muted when Gaston Plissonier put forward Marchais as the



appropriate person to step in as assistant general secretary of the party,arguing that this was the wish of the Soviet comrades in the light ofMarchais’ high profile in the international communist movement. Itwas Plissonier again who put Marchais forward as the incumbent generalsecretary of the party at the 19th Congress of the PCF in February 1970.More tendentiously, he adduced Waldeck Rochet’s approval forMarchais’ designation. Whether the muted surprise and the lukewarmapprobation of the Congress reflected for Marchais an uneasy appreci-ation of the turn the party was taking, away from Waldeck Rochet’s lesspliant attitude to the USSR, is a matter for conjecture. But as has beenpointed out, the significance of Marchais’ accession to power found apowerful metaphor in the contemporaneous move of the PCF into itsnew concrete and steel bunker-like seat at Place Colonel Fabien, whichcould not have been financed without the help of the comrades of theCPSU.30

Marchais pursued the policy of seeking a joint manifesto aroundwhich to forge an alliance with the PS, but the nature of his relation-ship with his future partner, Mitterrand, would be quite different toWaldeck Rochet’s. In October 1971 the PCF set the pace by publishingChanger de cap (‘Changing direction’), as the basis for a common plat-form. But it had to wait almost half a year for the PS to respond with itsown document in March 1972 and thus prepare the ground for thehorse-trading that would result in a common programme. A hiatus wascreated by President Pompidou’s spoiling tactic when he announceda referendum for the following month on British entry to the EuropeanEconomic Community (EEC). Pompidou gambled on being able topre-empt the formation of the PCF–PS alliance in light of the PCF’swell-known hostility to the EEC, and the PS’s attitude in favour of it. Inthe event, Mitterrand avoided being drawn into open conflict with thePCF by advocating abstention, in the face of the PCF’s resolute rejectionof enlargement. While the referendum was carried by 67.7 per cent infavour of enlargement, this approval was undermined by a rate ofabstentionism and spoilt ballot papers that hit 46.6 per cent, more thanjustifying the feeling that Pompidou’s strategy of exploiting the refer-endum had backfired.31

By the end of April the negotiations were back on track to establishthe bases for a common programme. The principal planks to be assem-bled covered foreign, social and economic policy, and reform of thepolitical institutions of the Republic. The PCF acknowledged thatFrance could not renounce its Atlanticist orientation nor its inde-pendent nuclear deterrent or force de frappe. A wave of nationalisations



was agreed covering nine major industrial groups and those banks thathad avoided nationalisation after the World War II. On the institutionaland constitutional front, the wish list included the introduction ofproportional representation and a clipping of the powers of the president,notably by limiting his use of referenda, the emergency powers avail-able to him under article 16 of the constitution and ultimately a reductionof his mandate down to five years. A number of liberalising socialmeasures were agreed on, covering issues such as divorce and abortionrights, and in the important field of education the state sector was toextend its control to cover key aspects of church school provision.

In the early hours of 27 June 1972 Marchais and Mitterrand signedthe agreement that became the Common Programme, and on 12 Julythe Mouvement des radicaux de gauche (MRG) also put their name to theagreement. The challenge now was to what extent this CommonProgramme would live up to its billing as a platform for the generalelection of 1973. Both parties, especially the PCF since it had striven sohard for it, had to play the game of coalition politics, but the essentiallycompetitive nature of their relationship could not be denied either, asthey aspired to encroach on each other’s constituencies, as well asbroadening their appeal beyond the Left. Thus the PCF campaignedunequivocally on the Common Programme and sought to anchor itsleft-wing constituency through its overt commitment to it, in contrastto Mitterrand’s PS which refused to align its campaign solely with it, forfear of being identified too closely with the PCF by the centrist voters ithoped to woo.

In the event, the competitiveness between the two parties was largelycontained within a dynamic tension that allowed both to draw satisfactionfrom the results of the election: the PCF obtained 21.40 per cent of thevote and emerged with 73 seats while the PS–MRG secured 20.71 per centof the vote and took 102 seats.32 The PCF could derive satisfaction fromthe fact that it had regained ground since 1968 and tied the PS to itsalliance strategy. More markedly, the PS–MRG could take heart from aperformance that restored the credibility of the non-communist left.But a closer analysis of the second-ballot contests indicates that acompetitive edge had not allowed the PCF and the PS to coordinatetheir steps quite so harmoniously. In contrast to 1967 and 1968, theoverarching prospect of getting a left-wing candidate elected was notenough for the PCF to withdraw those of its candidates who had faredbetter than their PS rivals in the first ballot, and in the second ballotthere were 68 instances where left-wing candidates faced off in triangularcontests against a candidate of the Right.



Ironically, however, one could argue that the Left was better-organisedto meet the challenge thrown up by the bipolar nature of presidentialcontests under the Fifth Republic, than the Right, in the contest of 1974.Although the centre had in effect aligned itself with the governingcoalition as they squared up to the alliance on the Left, this bipolarconfrontation did not inevitably entail a bipartisan approach amongthe forces of the centre-right. While officially supporting JacquesChaban-Delmas, there were nonetheless tensions within the GaullistUDR provoked by those conservative Gaullist elements suspicious ofChaban-Delmas’ reformist tendencies, and others, like Jacques Chirac,who made no secret of their preference for the style of conservatismrepresented by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, supported by his RépublicainIndépendants (RI). For his part, Giscard d’Estaing played the card ofrepresenting change but without disorder, by pursuing the prospect of anew alignment between traditional conservatism with the centristformations represented by figures like Jean Lecanuet and Jean-JacquesServan-Schreiber, in the bid to constitute a prospective presidentialmajority that would emancipate itself from the shadow of Gaullism.

In contrast to these manoeuvrings, Mitterrand stood for the unitedLeft with the endorsement of the PS, PCF, MRG and PSU. With a soundparty base in a revitalised PS, Mitterrand slipped into a presidentialcampaigning mode, eschewing the constraints of the CommonProgramme and opting instead for his own platform, in a mannerworthy of a prospective president of the Fifth Republic who stood abovethe fray of party politics. The reality for the PCF was that it was tied tothe consequences of its own logic in pursuing an alliance with the PS.Backing Mitterrand as opposed to its own candidate was the onlyserious option if it hoped to maximise the appeal of the Left, as wasintended by the alliance, since the possibilities of a communist beingelected president were remote indeed. Moreover, the leadership recog-nised the possibility that the PCF electorate might, even if a partycandidate were put up, vote according to the bipolar logic of the systemanyway and throw their weight behind the left-wing candidate with therealistic chance of winning, Mitterrand, as opposed to a candidate withno prospects at all, even if he was the chosen one of the PCF.

The implications of Mitterrand’s performance, as illustrated in Table 3.2,underlined the impossibly janus-faced nature of the PCF’s posturevis-à-vis its principal ally on the Left. His 43.4 per cent share of the firstballot was the highest left-wing vote in a national election under theFifth Republic. His failure in the second ballot, by the narrowest ofmargins, pointed to the way the presidential system of the Fifth



Republic would reward candidates capable of harvesting the approba-tion of the centrist voters, as Giscard d’Estaing had done and Mitterrandwould do. As the analysis of voting intentions revealed, the fact thatMitterrand fell at the last hurdle was significantly affected by reluctanceof centrist voters to trust his alliance with the PCF. Were the PS tobecome the dominant partner on the Left, the fear of that alliancewould recede and hasten the ensuing electoral benefit. With regard tothe PCF electorate itself, 1965 and 1974 had proved that it wouldmobilise successfully behind the candidature of a socialist in a presidentialcontest. Furthermore, the inescapable fact that the PS candidate mightattract votes from the centre while a PCF one would only frightenthem, dictated the logic of the PCF twice accepting a socialist candidateof the Left in a tacit admission that a PCF one was unelectable. But theunderlying significance of this could not have been more profound forthe PCF’s self-understanding and the sense of its historic mission. As, by1974, Mitterand and the PS could realistically look forward to themedium-term prospect of taking power and becoming the system, theinvidious choice that would be left to the PCF would be of abandoninga core feature of its identity in order to join a winning left-wing estab-lishment and putative system, or marginalising itself further in the eyesof the electorate.

Conclusion

Five years after the PCF tactic to stop the resurgence of the centre in thepresidential elections of 1969 had compromised its ability to coordinate

Table 3.2 1974 Presidential election

Source: Frears (1991, p. 154).

5 May 19 May

Electorate 28.9 m 28.9 mAbstentions 15.1% 12.1%Spoilt papers 0.8% 1.2%

Million votes % Million votes %

Mitterrand 10.9 43.4 12.7 49.3Giscard d’Estaing 8.3 32.9 13.1 50.7 Chaban-Delmas 3.6 14.6



its steps with the rest of the Left, the overhaul of the PS was to providemore misgivings for the PCF. But this time the cause was the prospectthat its sister party on the Left might be too successful. By forcing the PSto dance around it and find ways of pressing its suit in terms of electoralattractiveness, the PCF had overlooked the possibility that the virtues ofits suitor might appeal to a much broader audience. Mitterrand mighthave lost the presidential contest in 1974, but the way he closed the gapon Valéry Giscard d’Estaing represented a moral victory and a quantumleap in the presidential credibility of the Socialist leader.33

The year 1974 marked a veiled but nonetheless tectonic change in thepsychology of the PCF because thereafter the subliminal anxiety in theparty hierarchy turned into an ultimately fatal resentment at the factthat the changing perception of the PS among the electorate wasreversing the roles between the parties and turning it, the PCF, into thesuitor. The lessons that the PCF had wished to teach the rest of the Leftconcerning the need for alliance and a common electoral platform hadbeen too well-digested by the PS, and would in return be vitiated by afateful communist ambiguity in its attitude to the Left’s success. As PartII will illustrate, while for the PS the momentum of change that hadbrought success would be pursued further to revitalise the party andestablish a broad constituency, the immobilism and ambiguity of thePCF vis-à-vis its principal partner of the Left would isolate it in thepublic eye and exacerbate its decline.




Part II

The Seeds of Failure




67

4 The Rise of the Socialists

Introduction

The rise of the Socialists was a portent of Communist failure because ithinged on lessons learned about the evolution of French politics andsociety under the Fifth Republic, which the PCF was slow to take onboard. From three decades of contraction in its core membership andopportunistic attempts to survive, the PS of the 1970s launched into anexpansion of its membership base and the definition of a crediblewinning strategy at the polls, while the PCF’s hold on its core supportbegan to lose the invincibility that had once defined it. The ensuing shiftin the way the constituencies of the two great parties of the Left wereconfigured could also be mapped onto profound changes in Frenchsociety that had inevitable consequences for the way voters perceivedtheir interests and those who purported to represent them. The PS wasnotably successful in moving towards a politics based on the kind ofelastic concepts and ambitions that appealed to voters less inclined to themore ideologically rooted perspectives of the PCF, and reaped the benefitsin terms of the electoralism that defined its attempts to rally support forits bid for power. Moreover, in François Mitterrand, it had a leader whounderstood the primordial role of presidential appeal in unpicking thelock to power under the Fifth Republic, while the PCF, both institution-ally and in terms of the personalities leading it, continued to register acrippling deficit in its understanding of the challenge of presidentialism.

A static party in an evolving polity

The assumptions that gave the PCF its strength as a ‘tribune’ party werealso the assumptions that paralysed it. Rather than being a party with


68 The Seeds of Failure

the ultimate ambition of taking power, the PCF’s raison d’être residedin its ability to articulate the frustrations and corresponding demandsof those masses who felt excluded from the political system, anddeprived of the economic and cultural benefits enjoyed by the rest ofsociety. This function, like the right exercised by the tribunes of ancientRome, operated ultimately as a prerogative from the ground up to blockthe operation of the political system because of the need to protect theinterests of the weakest members of civil society.

As has been analysed elsewhere, however, for a party to assume thedestiny of a tribune it must be able to rely on a number of essentialpreconditions. The constituency it purports to represent must be bothlarge and homogeneous, and suffer a permanent disadvantage, even asense of alienation, vis-à-vis the socio-economic and political system.To counterbalance this disadvantage the system, in turn, affords acertain legitimacy to the role of the tribune due to the tacit acknow-ledgement of its (the system’s) failings. The corollary of this is that thetribune party has to strike a balance: it has to mobilise constantly indefence of its constituency for fear of appearing to capitulate to thesystem, but it cannot attempt a full-scale assault on a system which itknows is too strong to be overthrown.1

During the life of the Third Republic, the PCF was hampered in itsambitions to be the tribune party of French politics due to the successof the SFIO in appealing to the masses. The turnaround in fortunes ofthe two major parties of the Left after World War II, and the institu-tional deficiencies of the Fourth Republic made circumstances muchmore amenable to the ambitions of the PCF. The great party of theResistance was able, much more effectively, to be the party of resistanceto a system whose shortcomings were all too evident. The method ofproportional representation gave the party the electoral weight at theballot box and the seats in the institutions of representative governmentto make its threats to paralyse the system credible. Furthermore, thetransparent inadequacies of the system conferred a moral legitimacy onthe threats of the PCF. As was noted earlier, it was ironical that as theFourth Republic reached its final paroxysms, the anti-system party wasmost loath to see its disappearance. But the very success of the FifthRepublic spelled trouble for the tribune party. Changes to the votingsystem, the ‘presidentialisation’ of the regime and, more importantly,the adaptation of the electorate to a system that not only appeared towork but in so doing validated their participation in it, undermined theoperation of a tribune party. The absence of a system in permanent crisis,which the Fourth Republic appeared to be, and the rapid diffusion of


The Rise of the Socialists 69

the material fruits of France’s economic success meant that oppositionhad to take on a new meaning in order to be successful. The credibilityof the Fifth Republic, and more specifically the stability which the elect-orate of the Fourth Republic had craved, placed the onus on theopposition to offer a credible alternance in the management of thesystem, as opposed to simply threatening to paralyse it.

Understandably perhaps, the assumptions of the PCF were shaped bythe battalions of workers at its disposal and which it had employed topowerful effect during the life of the Fourth Republic. In 1954, of thetotal number of people employed in industry, 87 per cent were actuallyengaged in industrial processes, while employers represented 5 per centand clerical staff 8 per cent, and working-class consciousness can fairlybe said to have been at its apogee. By 1985, clerical workers had cometo represent 27 per cent of the industrial workforce, reflecting theimmense technical changes that had occurred in the methods ofproduction over that period. Few, including the PCF, could haveimagined that the prominence of the proletariat would stretch to littlemore than two generations in France.2

During the period between the inception of the Fifth Republic andthe installation of a Socialist President in the Elysée palace in 1981, theindustrial map of France changed markedly, and the declining fortunesof those areas that had represented the bulk of French industrial outputwould be particularly costly to the PCF. At the beginning of this periodheavy industry still weighed preponderantly in terms of nationaloutput, and was concentrated in the Nord and Lorraine. There was aconcentration in the manufacture of consumer goods in the Parisregion, notably newspapers and fashion items, and in the Rhône-Alpesregion there were centres with long-established reputations for theproduction of traditional household goods and metalwork. In all, theseareas could be seen as a broad sweep of manufacturing activity thatlinked up the north and the east of the country. In the three decadesthat followed, however, manufacturing activity shifted away from theseareas, often to the regions that were erstwhile centres of decline becauseof their reliance on rural manufacturing and traditional methods, suchas the south and west.

Deconcentration and the irresistible rise of the service industriespushed manufacturing out of Paris, and after the production peakreached in 1960, heavy industry in the north and north-east began tolose its grip on the future as planning and investment priorities turnedto new generation technologies, laying the foundation for new poles ofhigh value-added manufacturing such as aerospace in the south-west of



the country, notably around Toulouse. Two good examples of theimpact of this change can be highlighted in the coal and steel indus-tries, not only in terms of the reduced number of workers in the cohortsavailable to the PCF but also in the impact this social and economicmutation was having on the mentality of those workers.

The decline of the French coalfields offers an interesting contrast tothe fate of ‘king coal’ in Britain. In spite of the peak in production of 60million tons per year reached in the late 1950s, in contrast to the coal-fields of Britain those of France suffered the structural weaknesses offragmentation and, even then, potentially uneconomic extraction costsdue to the depth of the reserves. The uneconomic nature of those costshad become evident a generation later when, notwithstanding thedecline in demand from traditional clients such as rail, steel and powergenerators, almost twice as much coal was being imported to meet thedemand that subsisted as opposed to the home-produced variety,25 million against 15 million tonnes.3 Whereas in 1980s Britain thefate of the industry was sealed by the determination of a right-winggovernment to break with what it deemed to be emblematic of a refusalto adapt to economic change, in 1980s France the industry declinedunder a socialist regime that attempted to attenuate the consequencesof this, particularly with regard to the ensuing unemployment. But inboth cases the potential for political mobilisation represented by thoseindustries was emasculated. Most dramatic in France was the fate of theNord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield.4 From a pinnacle of activity in 1946 whichboasted 110 fully operational mining centres, by the time of FrançoisMitterrand’s re-election in 1988 the number had declined to nil, whilethe labour force nationally had declined from a peak of 200,000 in 1958to 40,000 in 1990.

The 1980s also marked a culmination in the painful restructuring ofthe French steel industry that had its origins in the 1950s. Even then,the production of steel in France, though booming, was occurring inscattered enterprises that did not have the critical mass of major Europeanrivals. Thus began the series of amalgamations that by the end of the1960s had resulted in two groups, Usinor and Sacilor, heavilydependent on government support, which by the end of the followingdecade were responsible for 80 per cent of steel-making on France. Thisdependence of the steel-making sector on the State was formalised andcompleted with the nationalisation programme of the Socialists whenthey came to power in 1981, with the ensuing state acquisition of thespecialist steel makers Creusot-Loire and Péchiney-Ugine-Kuhlman. Theumbrella of state ownership, however, could not protect the industry



from the consequences of the decline in traditional manufacturing andthe effect on the demand for steel, or the entrance of new low-costsuppliers into the market. State ownership also meant state-sponsoredrestructuring in the face of the inevitable. Ironically, Socialist adminis-trations had to accommodate the reality of the 1977 Davignon plan forEuropean steel production, predicated crucially on a gradual reductionof support from European Community (EC) member-state governmentsin the pursuit of an integrated and rational approach to steel productionacross the Community. The net effect for France was a shutting down ofsmaller and less efficient units that during the early 1980s cut thenation’s steel-making capacity by just over five million tonnes, therebyaccounting for 20 per cent of the reduction in capacity planned for theEC as a whole. The consequences for employment in the steel-makingregions were harsh and unavoidable. While the industry employed156,000 workers in 1974, by the time the Socialist government of PierreMauroy had resorted to the economic austerity plan nicknamed ‘laceinture rose’ (the pink belt) in 1982, this figure was down to 96,000,and a year after the Socialists had lost their majority in the NationalAssembly in 1986, it had dropped to 60,000.

The governments of the period made significant efforts to mitigatethe negative consequences of steel restructuring. Apart from theobvious retraining schemes, there were more powerful examples of stateintervention, such as the relocation of segments of nationalised indus-tries and the go-ahead for infrastructure projects to be sited in areassuffering most from the loss of those industries.5 But the fact of stateintervention, particularly on the part of Socialist-led governments para-doxically wedded to the reorganisation of state industries in line withmarket disciplines, was to have a profound effect on the assumptionsthat had hitherto guided organised labour in its relations with theholders of capital.6 New attitudes on the part of the state and itsmanagers, new management methods and modes of negotiation, hadaltered the traditional postures characterising the encounter betweenlabour, capital and the State. Ideology became a lesser consideration, astrade unions were forced to relinquish the priorities of the class struggleand accommodate a more realistic approach as to what their missionshould be.7

The break-up of the communist ‘red belt’ around Paris, that erstwhilebase of support for the party that had grown with the once vibrantmanufacturing activity in the Île de France, was brought into stark reliefby the time of the 1981 legislative elections when the PCF lost 11 of its24 ‘red belt’ seats, and all of them to the Socialists. The long-term trend



was also evident in those coal and steel former fiefdoms of the PCF,over the period of contraction and restructuring in those industries.Between the legislative elections of 1978 and 1986, voter support forthe PCF in the region of the North declined from 28 to 15 per cent, andin Lorraine the share of the vote went down from 17 to 7 per cent.Meanwhile, its sister party on the Left had emancipated itself from aclass-based ideology for the transformation of French society and hadset about broadening its appeal to an electorate that had been verylargely embourgeoisé.

The electoralism of the PS

In Chapter 3, François Mitterrand’s accession to the leadership of the PSwas described as a ‘reverse takeover’, implying that he was not averse toa pragmatic, even opportunistic exploitation of the possibilities foradvancing the cause of the non-communist Left. Notwithstanding hisown efforts, it can certainly be argued that there were benign, objectivefactors that helped fulfil Mitterrand’s ambitions: the departure ofDe Gaulle from the political scene had left a vacuum that needed to befilled; the increasing social integration of the working class could onlybroaden his appeal and that of his party at the bottom end of the socio-economic spectrum; and the electoral base bequeathed by the SFIO,while modest, nonetheless contained the seeds of the kind of diversifiedappeal that would give momentum to the socialist bandwagon. Further-more, as was noted earlier, the strategy for rejuvenating the apparatusof the party had already been given a successful launch by Savary.While the foregoing factors undoubtedly worked in his favour, it isnonetheless the case that Mitterrand’s vision was instrumental inreversing the PS’ fortunes. The changes occurring under the FifthRepublic had reversed the benefits to be gained from the promotion ofunity, or a dynamique unitaire on the Left. Whereas during the crisisyears of the Third Republic, notably, the PCF had gained most creditfrom its push for Left unity, the way Mitterrand conducted his presi-dential campaign in 1965 and the balance he struck in the campaign of1974, managing communist provocation and socialist ambition,suggested an appreciation of the prospect that the benefits of Left unitycould now flow largely in the opposite direction.

Mindful of the need to establish a break with the socialist politiciansof the Fourth Republic who were remembered for contemplating allyingthemselves with the Communists, the better to switch to the centre-right when the prospects on that side of the street improved, Mitterrand



followed a conscious policy of consistency, and if necessary, concessions,vis-à-vis the PCF. If he was to seize the new opportunities of drawingCommunist voters into a broad alliance with moderate socialism andthe middle ground, the principled reformism he embodied had to be acredible alternative to the classic but fading ideological cohesion of thetribune party. Thus Mitterrand persevered with the policy of seeking aframework for Left unity that could persuade the electorate of itsviability as a prospective government, namely a Common Programme,unlike other Socialist leaders who could not overcome their misgivingsconcerning the possibility of placing their movement under theoverbearing influence of the Communists.

Mitterrand worked vigorously within his own party also, to secure aplatform for electoral success. Savary might have started the rejuven-ation of the socialist movement, but its membership base when Mitterrandtook over was still fragile. When it unravelled, the SFIO counted 70,000members, but the PS which rose from the ashes at the Epinay Congressof 1971 would have had an even more modest membership base of60,869, were it not for the 9,916 CIR supporters brought in by Mitterrandand 3,813 new members.8 By October 1974, however, this figure haddoubled and the membership stood at 146,000.9 Under Mitterrand theprocess of rejuvenation was accelerated and expanded. What Savaryhad done had been to bring in younger men to run the party apparatus,but the demographic profile of the party had remained grey. In 1970,40 per cent of the members were aged over sixty and 77 per cent overforty.10 There was notable progress by 1973 and those figures had comedown to 23.9 per cent and 62.9 per cent respectively. More signifi-cantly, a successful merging of the generations had taken place with anew, young cohort of members who had come in over the ageingcohort of former SFIO members and whose presence, unencumbered bythe complexes of the past, set the dominant and distinctive tone for thePS. A demographic snapshot of the delegates to the PS Grenoble Congressin 1973 revealed that 31 per cent were under thirty and 58 per centunder forty. The accent on youth at the cutting edge of the party was anongoing process that, by 1978, meant that the PS was the youngestparty in the National Assembly.

The ongoing demographic renewal of the PS under Mitterrand wasallied to a refashioned policy profile for the party that provided itspursuit of a greater share of the electorate with a new dynamic. The keyto a successful break with the jaded past of the SFIO and an alliancewith the PCF that would offer electoral opportunities for the PS ratherthan an ideological constraint lay in the way Mitterrand hollowed out



the concept of class and turned it into an electoralist tool. By makingthe creation of a front de classe its defining strategy, the PS was, on theone hand, retaining part of the discourse predicated on the mobilisa-tion of the proletariat against the injustices inflicted by capital, but onthe other it was stretching that front so widely as to evacuate anyresidual ideological obstacles that might prevent it from appealing tothe wider French electorate. The front the PS now envisaged was aninclusive affair that included all waged labour, salary-earners, artisansand peasants who could consider themselves the victims of capitalism.In fact, the PS notion of this broad class united to combat the excessesof capitalism became so elastic as to be able to accommodate the middleand individualistic entrepreneurial class who could judge themselvesto have been the victims of the concentration of capital intocorporate hands.11

Mitterrand remained mindful, however, of the need not to allow thePS to be perceived as bereft of any doctrinal moorings because of therisk of leaving it open to accusations of opportunism. Allowing the PSto become a blatant electoral machine for scooping up votes fromacross as broad a front as possible risked alienating, on the one hand,the old SFIO constituency, and, on the other, the new generation of PSmilitants who were genuinely committed to strategies like the Union ofthe Left and who disdained what they saw as the self-serving comprom-ises of the old SFIO. Mitterrand was therefore at pains to assert thatthough the PS had ambitions to be a great party of the people, it wasnot so devoid of political conviction or social roots as to be all things toall classes, in short, a catch-all party.12 These protestations were none-theless contradicted by the inroads the PS made in the electorate duringthe 1970s. By 1978 the PS could accurately be described as having takenover the Gaullists’ mantle as the inter-class party, such was the spreadof its support. More significantly for a party of the Left, during the twodecades between the early 1950s and the early 1970s the Socialist move-ment had accommodated the embourgeoisement of French society byitself becoming preponderantly middle and lower middle class in itsmake-up, as Table 4.1 illustrates.

In one respect, the PS had proved itself to be very atavistic and eventrumped the old SFIO. Hardouin’s sociological scan of the partyrevealed a remarkable dependence on the traditional advocates of therepublican civic faith, with teachers of every stripe making up 13 per centof the membership of the party in 1973. The major difference in themodern PS being, however, that the traditional instituteur had beenovertaken by those educationalists working in the tertiary sector. The



numbers of the latter type of teacher, allied to the disproportionatelyhigh numbers of individuals with long years of post-18 education, suchas technicians, engineers, and those belonging to the liberal profes-sions, meant that the renascent socialist movement in France derivedits dynamic and identity from the intellectual elites that hadcommitted themselves to it.

As well as attracting the new intellectual elites that had come throughthe post-war expansion in higher education, Mitterrand’s PS also knewthat it had to attract and politicise a major constituency that was under-standably not attracted by the way the political parties were structuredand managed, namely women. The SFIO had bequeathed the PS witha powerfully masculine legacy, which was evident in the fact that whilein 1951, 88 per cent of the SFIO membership was male, the figure forthe PS in 1973 had only come down a fraction to 87 per cent. But by1974, notable strides were made in bringing women into the expandingPS membership, and in such federations as Paris, the rate of femalemembership was pushed up to 25 per cent. Moreover, three-quartersof these new female recruits to the party were economically active,thereby accelerating the PS’s capture of the socio-economic middleground.13 Whereas the success the PCF had enjoyed in recruiting femalemembers was, to a significant extent, accounted for by the recruitment ofworking-class housewives. But in contrast to the old SFIO, the politics ofgender was a challenge that the PS set a conscious course to address,evidenced by the fact that at the party’s Suresnes Congress in 1974, it wasdecided to establish a minimum quota of 10 per cent for the representationof women through every level of the party’s structure. The force of thisargument continued to gain momentum and by the time of the party’sNantes Congress in 1977, this quota had been raised to 15 per cent.

Where Mitterrand’s PS was less successful, in membership terms, wasin its attempts to establish itself on the factory floor and thereby secure

Table 4.1 Social composition of SFIO–PS membership (in percentages), 1951–73

Source: Kesselman (1978).

SFIO (1951) PS (1970) PS (1973)

Business, Professional & Management 3 16 20Lower middle class 53 61 61Workers 44 23 19

Total 100 100 100



a stronger working-class base. The strategy designated for achievingthis was the setting up of sections d’entreprises, which numbered 94 bylate 1971, rising to 253 by September 1973, and more rapidly still to707 by April 1974. But on closer analysis this did not herald the break-through in the working-class vote that might have been hoped for. By1974 over two-thirds of these sections were merely groups of partymembers who had found each other in the same workplace, asopposed to a dynamic cell with a mission to recruit. Moreover, as lateranalyses showed, in keeping with the sociological orientation of thePS, barely a fifth of the members of these sections could be classed asbelonging to the proletariat, while the vast majority fell in the categoryof white-collar, professional or managerial employees. The most tellingstatistics showed that only 14 per cent of these section members hadjoined the PS before 1970 and only 34 per cent before 1973. In short,the majority were members who had been harvested in the great electoralwave of 1973–76, and who had taken their new political convictions tothe workplace, rather than being workers who had been brought into thefold as a result of the mobilisation of PS activists on the shop floor.14

It could be argued, however, that the nature of the PS’s electoralismexempted it from the need to put down firm roots among industrialworkers. The fact that few such members were enrolled was more thancompensated by the electoral strategy of the Left as a whole, whichallowed the PS to benefit from the benign posture of the PCF. Thus,while the Socialist share of the working-class vote was as modest as18 per cent in the legislative elections of 1967 and 1968, this rose signifi-cantly to 27 per cent in 1973.15 Conversely, the notion of ‘enracinement’,or rootedness, was caught in a process of change whose consequenceswould become manifest and irrefutable by the beginning of thefollowing decade. The factor that had been the strength of the PCFwould become a symptom of its decline as the process of a ‘repli’ orretreat would concentrate PCF support in those areas rich in an indus-trial heritage but with little future, such as the Nord region and the Rhônevalley, or rural areas characterised by depopulation and economicdecline, such as the Limousin.16 As discussed in Chapter 2, a definingcharacteristic of the PCF at the height of its post-war success electorally,was its identification with the cause of modernisation and the underlyingdesire for it among the French people. A generation later, however, theFrench economic miracle had left the party’s bastions wedded to sunsetindustries and rural areas relegated to the economic slow lane.

Even in those traditional industries where France was to retain itsnational champions, such as the automobile industry, structural and



demographic changes were to diminish the party’s influence on theworkforce. Renault’s departure from Boulogne-Billancourt in 1993marked the end of manufacturing in France’s largest plant that hadoperated since Louis Renault established his first factory on the IleSéguin in 1898. In broad economic terms it signalled the end of a trans-formation of the Ile de France region into a predominantly service-based economy. For the PCF, it marked the culmination of an economicmutation begun decades beforehand in the former ‘red belt’ of Paris, inthe days when the political climate at Boulogne-Billancourt was onelargely determined by the activities of PCF members on the shop floor.The immediate aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973 set in train a processof restructuring that was accelerated under the Socialists during the 1980s,when the state-dependent producer was subjected to the disciplinesof the market, resulting in the inevitable ‘dégraissage’ or slimmingdown.17 The Common Programme with the PS was reached at a timewhen the French economy was poised to undergo a shift that wouldshrink the constituency of the PCF and swell that of the PS. In the tenyears between 1975 and 1985, employment in industry would contractby 1.2 million jobs, and in the erstwhile bastion of communist tradeunionism, the automobile industry, the workforce would shrink by6 per cent. More significantly for the recruitment of PCF rank-and-filemembers in the car industry, their natural constituency of unskilledworkers would see its numbers cut by 22 per cent. This transformationwas exacerbated by the fact that within the manufacturing sector itself,the growing requirement for skills and education meant that theeconomically and socially upwardly mobile class of technicians andengineers grew dramatically as the need for low-skilled or unskilledworkers declined. Thus those technicians and engineers, whonumbered 270,000 in 1974, saw their numbers rise to 1.3 million by1983, thereby enlarging the pool of socially aspirational members andvoters for the PS to draw on. Opinion polls of the period by SOFRES(Société française d’études par sondages) provide support for thisconclusion, showing that from 1975 to 1982 the percentage of Frenchpeople claiming to be working class sank from 27 to 22, while duringthe same period the share of the working class in the active populationdropped from 36 to 31.18

As noted earlier, the membership of the PS doubled under Mitterrandbetween 1971 and 1974, to reach some 146,000. It continued to climb,hitting 164,000 in 1977 and 170,000 two years later as the decade wasdrawing to a close.19 However, this was still a long way behind the PCFwhich during the life of the Common Programme saw its membership



rise significantly from just under 400,000 to over 500,000.20 However,whereas the PS had, in comparison, a modest membership base but awide electoral outreach, with the PCF it was the opposite. The highwater mark for the PCF membership, according to the party’s own claims,was reached when the take-up of membership cards for 1978 reached702,864.21 As the estimates of commentators, both well-disposed andcritical of the party illustrated, however, the PCF’s figures would haveassumed a proportion of PCF voters being PCF members during theelections of the 1970s that was far too high to be credible.22 Thissuspicion was strengthened by subsequent research into party fundswhich suggested that a practice of exaggerating membership numberswas ingrained in the leadership of the PCF, in the light of the disparitybetween the claims regarding the take-up of membership and whatshould have been the corresponding funds available to the party.23

In the aftermath of the agreement on the Common Programme,there was still a powerful desire on the part of the PCF’s leadership topreserve the party’s vocation. By any objective measure this was under-standable, given the relative strengths of the parties and the overturesthe PCF had had to make in order to persuade those Socialists, other thanMitterrand, of the virtues of an alliance. The retrospective revelation ofthe content of Georges Marchais’ report to the central committee of theparty on 29 June 1972, so soon after the PCF had signed up to theCommon Programme, unveiled the conviction that it was the PCF thatcarried the impetus for the Union of the Left, and that it felt justified inits determination to use the Programme as a means for rallying themasses to its objectives rather than the watered down compromisesreached with the Socialists.24 However self-serving the context,Marchais had put his finger on the difference between the two partiesthat, while it might be papered over in the mutual expectation of bene-fits at the ballot box, would inevitably begin to open up as the accrualof advantages began to incline in one direction rather than to both.Compromise, reformism and an unthreatening embourgeoisement of theparty were to be crucial to the success of the Socialists. But as Marchaishad made clear to the central committee, the PCF’s battle againstreformism would be a defining plank of its platform. The debates thatoccurred in the party thereafter underlined the conviction that whilethe PS was open to the penetration of bourgeois ideas, the PCF was not,and it was the mission of the Communists to radicalise the reformistparty of its partner on the Left and thereby lead it ultimately to acceptthe vanguard role of the PCF as the only party of scientific socialism.25

Conversely, while Mitterrand argued that the suspicion of the PCF that



had blocked the progress of the Left as a whole had to be overcome, hedid not hide his belief that the fundamental purpose of an alliancebetween the Socialists and the Communists was to rebalance the Left byshrinking the PCF’s disproportionate share of its constituency.26

As Chapter 6 will illustrate in greater detail, however, with the politicallandscape changing around the PCF, the attempt to preserve the voca-tion of the party and to articulate its mission in contradistinction to thePS especially by Marchais would isolate him more and more from theFrench electorate as a whole and confirm the perception of him as a‘langue de bois’, or being guilty of political cant. The PS’s impervious-ness to the expectation that it could be weaned off its predilection forbourgeois reformism or, even less plausibly, tuck into the shadowbehind the PCF as the vanguard party of scientific socialism, created atension that manifested itself across a range of issues and gave a hollowideological ring to the Union of the Left. Chapter 3 discussed the way inwhich the PCF was effectively trapped by the logic of its own advocacyof the Union and thereby found itself supporting the Mitterrand candida-ture in the presidential race of 1974, faute de mieux. But after Mitterrand’ssurprisingly distinguished performance in the presidential contest, theinterpretation given to the Union by the PCF made it clear that at thevery best it was a yoke which chafed the party’s ambitions, and at worsta poor disguise for the competition between the two parties to find away of repackaging socialism for popular consumption. While on theone hand, the PCF’s 22nd Congress in 1976 was historic for itsdecision to drop the ambition to achieve the ‘dictatorship of theproletariat’, the concept of ‘union populaire’ which replaced it, predi-cated on rallying other social groups around the working class, was aline that was in more open competition with the Socialist’s ‘front declasse’. For their part, the Socialists had a very sharp sense of theimplications of the change in communist discourse for the way theypositioned themselves vis-à-vis the broader electorate. They weredetermined therefore that, in electoral terms, their notion of ‘classe’would be the very opposite of a hermetic ideological one, but onewhich would draw in the broad swath of voters who could be categor-ised, or see themselves in some measure as the exploited ‘salariat’, orsalary-earners.

These competing attempts by the sister parties of the Left to stake outthe constituency of the Left to the detriment of the other was indicativeof the fault-lines running beneath the surface of Common Programme.Even after the collapse of the Common Programme, Mitterrand realisedthe need to preserve the PS’s formal radicalism in order to square the



circle of winning over PCF voters as well as appealing to swing groupsin the electorate. Hence the reappearance of some of the key demandsof the Common Programme in the PS’s manifestos even after itsdemise.27 It is not surprising, therefore, that while the Programmeexisted the PS chose to ignore or, more precisely, fudge some of thefundamental differences between the parties that remained essentiallyunresolved. The issue of party pluralism was one that had helped definethe socialist movement in France and was a factor, in the 1905 socialistunity pact, which preserved its distinction from the monologic brand ofsocialism then being advanced by Jules Guesde and his colleagues. Thefact that the PCF’s acceptance of the principle of party pluralism, forthe purposes of the Common Programme, veiled a quite differentunderstanding of what that meant was very soon made perfectly clearby Georges Marchais. In Le défi démocratique he argued that the percep-tion of communist states as one-party regimes was wrong, and thatcountries like Poland and East Germany were in fact multi-partysystems where non-communist parties such as peasant and Catholicones worked with the communists in the endeavour to buildsocialism.28

On more concrete issues like the extent to which a left-wing govern-ment would nationalise the means of production, the formal agreementreached papered over disagreements on issues of principle that were notresolved. Ostensibly, the agreement to nationalise nine industrialgroups (down from the original PCF proposal of 25 and up from the PSproposal of seven) settled the scope of the programme, but the under-standing of the purpose of it remained a matter of dispute. For theSocialists, France should remain wedded to a mixed economy, andwhile it was the mission of their party to give workers more control overtheir working environment through the self-management initiativesimplied in concepts such as autogestion, this was a bottom-up evolutionas opposed to a top-down solution imposed by a bureaucratic andcentralised state. For the Communists, however, the proposed national-isations were to be a first tranche in a process designed to defeat thedominance of the market-place, and autogestion was synonymous withlocalised chaos. Even when the PCF conceded the principle of autoges-tion following the successful promotion of it by the Socialists, strategiesfor its implementation remained a serious source of tension. By 1977the PCF agreed on the democratic instrument in the nationalised indus-tries that would be embodied by the ‘conseils d’administration’ oradministrative councils, but the old instincts of the PCF remained, asdid the corresponding suspicions of the PS. Perhaps predictably playing



to its strength, the PCF argued that the workers’ representatives on thecouncils in question should be drawn from the ranks of the work-placeunions (which it dominated), while the PS, mindful of the prospect ofbeing outflanked, attempted to attenuate the threat and the differencewith its partner by sticking to the broader formulation that themembers should be the representatives of the workers.

On a wider stage, the biggest challenge to the PS was to ignore thenatural foreign alliances of the PCF and the inevitable consequences forthe defence policy of France. The Common Programme appeared toenshrine the Socialists’ concern that whatever compromise was reachedwith the PCF, no future Left government of France would turn its backon the EEC and its enhancement, or France’s fundamentally Atlanticisttradition in matters of global security. But as ever, the accords were amatter of interpretation. Whereas for the PCF leadership they representeda formality that could be respected, while the Communists pursuedthe historic task of moving France out of the zone of imperialism,29 forMitterrand, France’s Atlanticism represented the best guarantee offreedom vis-à-vis the Soviet-dominated communist sphere to which thePCF was ideologically allied. The notion of partners belonging to twodiametrically opposed spheres in their visions of the world was spelled outby Mitterrand in his writings of the period. He recalled that with the onsetof the Cold War the PCF had chosen the Warsaw Pact while he hadchosen the Atlantic Alliance, and that if he had done so it was due tothe debt he owed the United States as the liberator of France and theguarantor of his freedom.30 By 1977 the PCF was turning this kindof argument astutely against the PS by assuming the posture of a partythat was both for the independence of France and anti-American. In Mayof that year the central committee led a re-evaluation of the CommonProgramme’s call to renounce France’s nuclear deterrent, on the basis of areport by Jean Kanapa, in which he argued for the retention of a nationaldeterrence as a key to the preservation of democracy in France and abargaining counter in a wider process of balanced disarmament. The anti-American implications of the report were worked out in subsequentissues of L’Humanité, but what gave the PCF position an additionallyand ironically (though unintended) patriotic tone was the adoption of thepreviously Gaullist articulation of a defence posture that was ‘tousazimuts’, thereby implying that the doctrine of nuclear preparednessshould envisage the possibility of a threat from the West as well as the East.31

The issue of France’s independent nuclear deterrent would be amatter on which the PCF would continue to find fresh opportunitiesto needle the Socialists during the summer of 1977, especially as the



partners explored the need for an updated Common Programme.The refusal of the Socialists to countenance the argument that theUnited States could conceivably pose the same threat to France’snational security as the Soviet Union made them hostile to Kanapa’ssuggestions. But at the same time, the reluctance to be seen todismiss them out of hand led to a policy of delay and evasion by thePS that came to a head in September. Throughout the summer the PShad resisted PCF pressure for a clear commitment to the retention ofan independent nuclear deterrent. Mitterrand’s guarded responsewas to suggest that a referendum could be held on the issue after theLeft had come to power. When, during the summit to discuss theCommon Programme in mid-September, Mitterrand responded tocontinuing pressure from the PCF by countering that the PCFwanted to leave the Atlantic Alliance, he left himself open to theshot made the following day in a televised interview given byMarchais. While Marchais affirmed that should the ‘absurd hypoth-esis’ of a Soviet aggression against France come to pass, the PCFwould be in the first rank to defend the nation’s territory, he nailedMitterrand’s equivocations over the national nuclear deterrent byasking whether Mitterrand could make such a commitment in theevent of an American or German aggression.32

But in spite of disagreements and, from the PS point of view, provo-cations from the PCF across the range of issues outlined above, the PSpersevered with the Common Programme because it enabled the party tomake the kind of electoral inroads that had been the fundamentalambition driving it into an alliance with the PCF. The margin that existedbetween the respective parties in the year after the signing of the CommonProgramme gave the PCF a clear superiority in its ability to appeal to theworking-class vote, with a 37 per cent share of that electorate as opposedto the Socialists’ 27 per cent. But the paroxysms of the Union of the Left in1977 prompted by the reservations of the PCF were not unrelated to thefact that the PS had succeeded in drawing level with the PCF in whatit considered its electoral ‘domaine réservé’, as polls at the time indicateda 32 per cent share for each party of that working-class constituency. Moredramatic still would be the turnaround in fortunes between 1978 and1981, which would allow the Socialist candidate for the presidencyto enjoy the support of 44 per cent of manual workers, as opposed to24 per cent supporting the Communist candidate, and in terms of demo-graphic advantage, allowing the PS to enjoy the support of 44 per cent ofvoters in the 18–24 age bracket and 46 per cent in the 25–34 age bracket,while for the PCF support was down to 18 and 17 per cent respectively.33



In contrast to the PS strategy of deferring choices implicit in theCommon Programme and avoiding decisive confrontations with theirPCF partners as long as there were gains to be made from the alliance,the palpable failure of the PCF to advance its claims as the seniorpartner on the Left forced it to engineer the collapse of the CommonProgramme.34 The definitive collapse of the attempts to update theprogramme, on 23 September 1977, was ostensibly due to the failure toagree over PCF demands for a broader programme of nationalisations,but it was the symptom of a profound communist malaise at the waythe PS had colonised the constituency of the Left as a whole, in France,thereby cutting down the PCF’s room for manoeuvre. The apparentchanges of tack by the PCF, especially over issues such as the primacy ofthe proletariat and its attitudes to France’s foreign and defence alle-giances, had done little to enhance its own profile or attenuate theprospects of a major breakthrough for the PS in the 1978 legislativeelections. Even if the PCF had contemplated the kind of eurocom-munist transformation undergone by sister movements such as in Italy,that social democratic variant was already being offered by the PS. Theposture of the PCF in the legislative elections of 1978 was a perversetestament to the success of the electoralism of the PS.

The protestations in L’Humanité, on 21 March 1978, that the PCF wasnot responsible for the frustrated hopes of the Left, so evident after thevotes were cast in the first round of the legislative elections on12 March 1978, were disingenuous to say the least. The decision by thePCF leadership to test the Common Programme to breaking point wasan essential step in a rearguard action to halt the advance of the PSon the Left, by forcing a rupture that would oblige its own voters toreassert their fundamental allegiance. The electoral bandwagon thathad started rolling for the PS under Mitterrand in 1974 showed no signsof slowing down, and the success of the alliance in the 1976 local and1977 municipal elections could be attributed to the appeal of the PS tothe electorate as a whole. The scenario feared by the PCF was that manyof its members might extend the logic of an alliance to their behaviourin the voting booth at the legislative election and opt for the tactical or‘vote utile’, thus voting for the Socialist candidate in the first roundrather than their own party’s, since the Socialist would rally more votesacross the board anyway. The demise of the Common Programme was away of pre-empting this and freed the PCF to fight for the defence ofits natural constituency. The campaign of sniping at the PS and themobilising of its formidable organisational resources were a reflectionof the widespread expectation of a PS-led breakthrough for the Left,



with an IFOP (Institut français del’opinion publique) poll in March givingthe Left a 53.5 per cent share of voting intentions.35

The result of the first ballot, when it came, was a reminder of thefallibility of pollsters and an unspoken relief for the PCF. Althoughcalculations when the dust was settled would give the Left as a wholejust over 50 per cent of the vote,36 its best performance under the FifthRepublic, the result fell short of Socialist expectations. They hadcertainly achieved the historic feat of overtaking the Communists with24 per cent of the vote in mainland France as opposed to the PCF’s18.1 per cent,37 but it did not match the margin they had hoped for.38

In contrast to this the PCF could take heart from its success in achievingits most urgent priority, namely the restating of its primacy as the partyof the working class. Notwithstanding the polling suggesting a neck-and-neck race between the PS and the PCF for that constituency, whenthe actual votes cast by manual workers were tallied the PCF emergedwith 36 per cent as opposed to the PS’s 27 per cent.39 Moreover the PCFhas scored some notable successes by closing the gap on the Socialists insome of the seats held by their notables: Gaston Deferre, the stalwartsocialist mayor of Marseille, found that his lead over the communistcandidate was but a single point after the first ballot; as for Mitterrandhimself, the strong PCF showing in his constituency of Nièvre hadprevented him from enjoying his usual victory in the first ballot. Morebroadly, the PCF had overtaken the PS in nine constituencies that thelatter could have considered to be safely bankable. The satisfaction ofthe PCF was translated by a surprisingly (to the Socialists anyway)magnanimous attitude to the meeting that began on 13 March, tothrash out the basis for an agreement to desist in favour or each others’candidates, depending on which one was best placed for the secondround. Such appeared to be the conciliatory nature of the PCF repre-sentatives when it came to agreeing the priorities for an eventualgovernment of the Left that Pierre Mauroy wondered why the PCF hadadopted a posture of ‘super-competition’ in the first place if agreementwas to be reached subsequently so unproblematically – a jaundicedconclusion that some previously Left-inclined voters may well havedrawn prior to the second ballot.40

In addition to the negative perception of the alliance of the Left asself-serving, the period leading up to the second round of voting wasmarked by an effective campaign by the majority, buoyed by its unex-pectedly good showing in the first round, aimed at alarming the voterswith the prospect of a Left government with Communist ministers. Inthe event, the governing majority secured a little over 50.5 per cent of



the vote in the second round, but more tellingly returned a largemajority to the new Assembly, with 291 seats as opposed to the Left’s200. While the PCF might have saved the furniture, however, the trendsunderlying the results of the 1978 legislative elections showed unequivo-cally that the PS was taking over the house. As Table 4.2 illustrates, thedisappointment of the PS in 1978 was tempered by the fact that theywere continuing to pull ahead of the PCF on the first ballot perform-ance in constituencies across the country – a fact that would becomedramatically evident in the presidential elections of 1981.

Moreover, although the geographical concentration of the PCF’svoters allowed it to win the battle against the PS for the support of whatmight be regarded as its natural constituency, there could be no way ofdisguising the watershed in the fortunes of these two parties in whatwas historically the country’s biggest concentration of working-classvotes: the Paris region. It was here that the evolution of French society,and in particular the embourgeoisement of the lower socio-economicclasses, had become most evident. Paris, both within the city limits andacross the outlying suburbs, had become a white-collar and middle-class agglomeration. Given the further dilution of an indigenousworking-class culture and consciousness by the influx of immigrantworkers, of whom many had neither the right nor the inclination tovote, the reversal of fortune in this crucial region becomes more under-standable. Nonetheless, the PS could still take credit for an exception-ally successful mobilisation in the region that demoted the PCF from itsposition as the premier party of the capital, ultimately leaving it inpossession of only three of the capital’s 31 seats. In a sense, the 1978legislative elections were a triumph deferred for the Socialists. At thenext defining encounter with the French electorate, the presidentialelections of 1981, they would demonstrate the extent to which theyhad adapted to the consequences of the presidentialisation of the political

Table 4.2 Performances of PS and PCF in the constituencies

Source: Le Gall (1981, p. 17).

Leading on the Left 1967 1968 1973 1978 1981

PS 212 217 276 321 429PCF 258 253 197 153 45

Total of metropolitan constituencies 470 470 473 474 474



system that had occurred under de Gaulle, and the contrast with thePCF would illustrate the extent to which the latter had not.

Grasping the challenge of presidentialism

The notion that François Mitterrand simply annexed the PS after 1971as a conveyance for his presidential ambitions was an often cited onebut, as has been convincingly argued elsewhere, was also erroneous.41

The PS brought together various strands of socialist conviction andtheir corresponding formations that took time to cohere into a politicalparty. Mitterrand’s very creditable showing in the presidential contestof 1974 undoubtedly strengthened his hand and his will to act in amanner unencumbered by party constraints added to his presidentialstyle. This was complemented by the organisational initiatives he tookwith regard to the management of the party’s affairs, notably, the creationof a network of delegates answerable to him and whose activities ranparallel to those of the PS’ principal and official executive organ, thenational secretariat. But that did not mean that the party was subser-vient to Mitterrand’s ambitions, as the fall-out from the disappointmentsof 1978 illustrated. Michel Rocard’s decision to lead the Parti socialisteunifié into the fold of the Left led by the PS in 1974 was neverunproblematic, given the hostility of most of its members at the time tothe Common Programme. His disapproval of an alliance with theCommunists, the key conviction in Mitterrand’s long-standing strategyfor bringing the Socialists to government, was quick to surface duringthe television coverage of the legislative election results on 19 March1978, when he asserted that the tactic was a cul-de-sac and simplydiscouraged moderate voters from supporting the party.

Opinion polls at the time suggested strongly that Rocard was justifiedin his belief that centrist voters were averse to voting for the PS in thelight of its alliance with the PCF, and that even a substantial majority ofPS members had not been in favour of the Common Programme.Mitterrand’s response was that, notwithstanding the demise of theCommon Programme, a Union of the Left electoral strategy was thebest way of shifting the centre of gravity on the Left towards the PS, bypulling the PCF constituency in its direction. The support which ralliedto the respective camps of Mitterrand the unifier of the Left, and Rocardthe moderniser whose economic realism challenged the assumptions ofsocialist statism, looked set to confront each other at the Party’s Metzcongress in April 1979. What the conference proved, however, was thatwhile PS voters out in the country were more in tune with Rocard’s



vision of the party’s future, the militants of the party belonged toMitterrand. Apart from his astuteness in manoeuvring, both during andafter the congress, a new generation of Mitterrandistes into positions ofinfluence, Mitterrand deployed the charisma of a president in themaking that would enable him, in the most important electoral contestof all, ultimately to secure the trust of an initially sceptical electorate.While Rocard discomfited delegates with stark oppositions such as theacceptance of markets or the acceptance of rationing, Mitterrand playedthe part of the benevolent patriarch and guardian of the faith in the sunnyuplands towards which previous generations had striven and sacrificed.

The Mitterrandiste camp carried the day resoundingly, and in thesubsequent text that defined the party’s programme for the 1980s, Leprojet socialiste, they came up with a programme that could wrong-footboth Rocard, the prospective presidential candidate, and the PCF. Incorp-orating ambitions spelled out in other documents such as the Suresnesprogramme of 1972, residual elements of the Common Programmehammered out with the Communists and the 15 theses on autogestionthat had appeared in 1975, the new PS programme contained the kindof left-wing idealism that a presidential candidate like Rocard wouldfind difficult to defend, and would steal at least some of the clothesfrom a Communist candidate like Georges Marchais. The stubbornfact remained, however, that all of the successful manoeuvres of theMitterrandistes within the party and vis-à-vis their sister party on theLeft could not alter the reality that at the beginning of 1980 Rocard’sapproval rating in the polls was running at twice Mitterrand’s in thebuild-up to the launch of the campaign for the presidential elections, at58 per cent compared to the latter’s 29 per cent.

One could argue that the distinction between the two men, as prési-dentiables, was adumbrated by the way they played their hands in theannouncement of their candidatures for the presidency. Playing for safetyand the legitimacy that would come from a resounding endorsement bythe party, Mitterrand deferred the presidential nomination procedure untilJanuary 1981 and a special congress that would take place in Créteil.Rocard, however, launched his candidature on Sunday 19 October 1980,from the town hall where he was also mayor at Conflans-Saint-Honorine.As he was to reveal later, he had informed Mitterrand of his decisiontwo days beforehand only to be told by Mitterrand that such wasthe democratic game, but little else as to the latter’s own intentions.When Mitterrand declared his intentions three weeks later, Rocardwithdrew his candidature arguing that it was never his intention torival Mitterrand’s once it was declared. But with hindsight, Rocard



admitted that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a situationwhere he had overplayed his hand and, in the manner and tone of thedeclaration of his candidature, made a hash of his media presentation.42

Not for the first time, and as would become increasingly evident in thepresidential campaign, Mitterrand would play the card of the candidateinvested with the legitimacy conferred by the proper operation ofthe political system, but most crucially, bring to that the charisma andcredibility of a présidentiable above the game of politics, which was verywell served by his sphinx-like imperturbability and tacitly acknowledgedquality of quiet strength.

In contrast to Mitterrand, Marchais’ campaign was launched inrecrimination and almost immediately mired in a damaging debate asto the personal integrity of the man himself. Although Marchais’ candi-dature was formally announced in October 1980, it had been clear from1978 that the PCF would not give the PS a clear path to the presidencyand further opportunity to make inroads into the Communists’ constitu-ency. To the majority of the electorate of the Left, it was clearly aspoiling tactic since the most a Communist candidate could achievewould be to split the support for an acceptable, potentially winning,and therefore Socialist candidate. From the moment of his officialdesignation as the Communist candidate, at the party’s national confer-ence in Nanterre on 12 October 1980, Marchais declared that therewould be no automatic désistement. The theme of Mitterrand’s veeringto the Right was immediately taken up by other PCF leaders such asCharles Fiterman, and the pages of L’Humanité engaged in a personalvilification of Mitterrand as a loser. The PCF was in effect campaigningagainst its sister party of the Left and the low and bitter tone of much ofit, according to some commentators, might have been due to thedenigration Marchais had himself suffered. On 8 March 1980, theweekly news magazine L’Express had published an article entitled ‘Lemensonge’ (‘The lie’), in which it purported to have found Germandocuments that proved that Marchais’ account of the time he spent as aforced labourer in war-time Germany was misleading. Objective readerscould not ignore the underlying intentions of L’Express towards theleader of Moscow’s most faithful apologist among Western communistparties, especially in the year following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.But through interviews with leading party figures, journalists at thetime came to the conclusion that Marchais laid the blame for theorchestration of these attacks on his credibility at Mitterrand’s door,and allowed his spleen to be vented through the editorial columns ofL’Humanité.43



Mitterrand’s reactions to the attacks on him as a prospective three-timeloser from his ostensible partners on the Left, like his reactions to theattacks from the Right that his candidature was a Trojan horse forcommunist ambitions to exercise the influence on government thatthey would otherwise be denied, were marked by a quasi-presidentialdignity that refused to be provoked. But it was a presidential personathat stood firmly on an understanding of the political game that leftnothing to chance. Following the Créteil Congress of January 1981when the PS endorsed his candidature, Mitterrand put in place a teamto manage his campaign that was comprised of individuals imbuedwith one overriding loyalty only, that is, to him. As well as theconstruction of the vehicle dedicated to the pursuit of his presidentialhopes, Mitterrand was by far the most ruthless of all the candidates inre-inventing himself to meet the needs of the television age. WhileGiscard and Chirac failed to respond to the overtures of the advertisingman, Jacques Séguéla, when he offered his services, Mitterrand did not.From May 1980 onwards, Mitterrand subjected himself to a meticulousprocess of re-invention that ranged from a retraining of his bodylanguage in front of the camera, and the replacement of his wardrobe,to the alteration of his smile through the filing down of his front teeth.As Séguéla later explained, the mode of communication in Mitterrand’scampaign was to be publicity rather than politically driven and, para-doxically, the whole thrust of this unrelenting attention to minutedetail was to elevate Mitterrand above what the electorate mightperceive as petty politics, in order to annex the public imagination andconfer on him the credibility of an immortal.44

On the previous occasion that Mitterrand had presented himself as acandidate for the presidency, France had just been hit by the first oilcrisis and the implications for the future development of the economyhad yet to become clear. Seven years later, many of the certainties thathad characterised the trente glorieuses, those post-war decades of uninter-rupted growth and prosperity, had gone. Campaigning in 1981,Mitterrand realised he was talking to an electorate feeling its waythrough a time of anxiety, while the economy was poised on the cuspof a third industrial revolution, and the tone of his discourse reflectedthis.45 The ‘110 Propositions’ that he concocted with the secretary ofthe Socialist group in the National Assembly, Michel Charasse, constituteda platform for his campaign that was not circumscribed by the PS’s‘Projet socialiste’ or the manifesto adopted by the party’s congress inJanuary 1981. It was a platform that enabled him to convey a personalisedvision of a better society, marrying notions of justice with inevitable



change and conveying it with presidential authority. Whereas (as weshall see more closely in Chapter 6), Marchais’ campaigning andgeneral discourse illustrated that he was still thinking and talking interms defined by the first industrial revolution, and was fatally weigheddown by the ideological baggage that implied.

Already haunted in the pages of the popular press by reflectionson his war-time past, Marchais’ campaign seemed determined to dogthe much more agile footsteps of Mitterrand, however unflatteringthe light cast on him and the PCF. All of the leading candidates for thepresidency pledged to attack the scourge of unemployment, butMitterrand appeared to possess the most plausible formula for linkingeconomic growth with reductions in unemployment. While Marchais,on the one hand, proposed out-flanking Mitterrand on the Left bygambling on a wholly unrealistic projection of 4.5 per cent growth anda social housing programme of 500,000 homes a year, he was alsowilling to veer dramatically to the Right by aligning his arguments withthe likes of Chirac by suggesting that tackling immigration was also ameans of cutting the level of unemployment. It was, in short, a tacticof ‘surenchère’, or bidding up, as in the case of the scope of futurenationalisations or, if necessary, dropping down to the lowest commondenominator, as with the issue of immigration, as long as it might leadto the discomfiture of the Socialist candidate. The patent inadequacy ofsuch a campaign was revealed after the first round of voting on Sunday,the 26 April, when the Communists dropped to their lowest level ofsupport since before the war. The 19 per cent Marchais had hoped forhad failed to materialise and his actual share of 15 per cent of the voteleft him trailing almost 3 points behind the third-placed Chirac, waybehind Mitterrand with his 25.5 per cent share of the vote. The factthat Giscard d’Estaing had only edged ahead on the first ballot with28.3 per cent made the ultimate outcome clear. Not only would Mitterrandbe able to count on the hostility of many of Chirac’s supporters towardsGiscard d’Estaing in the second round, the numbers of PCF supporterswho had opted for the ‘vote utile’ in the first round (approximately1.5 million) would make it impossible for the PCF not to endorseMitterrand in the second round. As interviews with leading figures inPCF headquarters at the Place du Colonel Fabien later revealed,Marchais read the result as a choice between a despairing and a cata-strophic option; the catastrophic option of playing for the Right andthe despairing option of endorsing a Mitterrand victory that wouldleave the PCF with nowhere to hide in a profoundly unequal powerrelationship with a triumphant Socialist regime.46 The despairing



option came to pass when Mitterrand won the second ballot with51.8 per cent of the vote as opposed to Giscard d’Estaing’s 48.2 per cent.

Mitterrand’s victory on 10 May prepared the ground for the excep-tional performance of the PS in the ensuing legislative elections of 14and 21 June. By the time the results of the second ballot had beencounted, it was clear that a landslide had occurred that gave the Leftover two-thirds of the seats. On the one hand the widespread sense ofeuphoric regime-change released by the triumph of Mitterrand, and onthe other a common-sense understanding of the need for a coherentparliamentary majority behind the president, led the electorate ofmainland France to give the PS and its allies of the MRG 59.49 per centof the votes resulting in 282 seats, and the PCF 9.07 per cent of thevotes resulting in 43 seats. It is possible to argue that it was really afterthe legislative elections of 1981, rather than 1978, that the leadership ofthe PS on the Left was definitively established because from that pointonwards the two-ballot system clearly worked to accelerate the PCF’sdecline.47 The disposition of seats had created a coalition dominated bya centre-left PS, abetted by a marginal PCF, and the declining rump ofconstituencies the PCF could seriously contest in the second roundwould now place ever-increasing pressure on its supporters to opt for the‘vote utile’ by supporting Socialist candidates in the first round. As theresults in general illustrated, but more tellingly the performance ofthe PS in relation to that of the PCF, the PS had risen and triumphed onthe Left as well as in the nation.

Conclusion: Learning to win and learning to lose

There is no question that contingent factors played a significant part inisolating and undermining the electoral power base of the PCF. Theauthors of France’s plans, or national programmes for economicrecovery after 1945, could not have envisaged how quickly Francewould progress past the phases when the watchwords were first‘produire plus’ (produce more) then ‘produire mieux’ (produce better),into the period of ‘post-industrial’ economic development when eventhe statist traditions of the French Republic could not resist the impera-tives of lean or ‘delocalised’ production and the inevitably negativeconsequences for traditional manufacturing. As the party of theworking class, the PCF was uniquely vulnerable to the damage causedby the chill wind of such a change. But as the leading party of the Left,it was also culpable of being the least willing to bend with, rather thanbe broken by this wind of change. For its part the PS had become much



more alert to the fact that the electorate was changing, and notably thefact that appeals based on traditional notions of class would becomeless and less effective as the old class hierarchies were perceived bythe voters to be withering into insignificance.

By the time of Mitterrand’s successful presidential campaign in 1981the PS had demonstrated that it was a party that had learned how towin, especially through its ability to manipulate the electorate’s sens-ibilities in a system dominated by the politics of presidentialism. Theextent to which the Socialists had acquired the winning habit was to beshown in 1988, when in spite of the U-turns of his party on economicissues and the ‘cohabitation’ forced on Socialist administrations by theelectorate, François Mitterrand managed to secure a second mandate.By both reducing the Olympian pretensions of the presidency that hadbeen personified by de Gaulle and playing on his image of avuncularomniscience, Mitterrand allowed his supporters to generate a climate oftontonmania that placed him on a higher plane than his competitorsand reinforced the indispensability of the presidential hand on thehelm of the ship of state. In contrast to this, the campaign of the PCFcandidate for the presidency illustrated the extent to which losing canalso become a learned response, and was an object lesson in how to failthe challenge of presidentialism in the French Fifth Republic.


93

5 Failing the Presidential Challenge

Introduction

The presidential elections of 1988 created a new situation for thecommunist movement in France. In addition to his traditional right-wing opponents, André Lajoinie, the candidate of the Parti communistefrançais, had to face a former high-ranking member of the PCF hier-archy, Pierre Juquin, who had decided to present himself as a presidentialcandidate on behalf of the Communist rénovateurs, those who haddecided to break with the PCF in pursuit of what they advocated as areconstructed form of communism. In the event, Juquin obtained onlya modest 2.1 per cent share of the votes cast in the first round on24 April 1988. His challenge, nevertheless, had been taken very seriouslyby the PCF leadership during the period of campaigning before the firstballot, and his decision to stand as a candidate reflected serious strandsof discontent at grassroots level in the PCF.

In another respect, however, André Lajoinie faced the same obstaclesin his presidential campaign as other Communist candidates who hadstood for the presidency during the life of the Fifth Republic: a constitu-tional obstacle in that his party disagreed with the definition of theoffice to which he hoped to be elected; and a party political one in thathis Socialist rival was supported by a party that had shown itself morewilling and more successful in adapting to the exigencies of presiden-tialism in the Fifth Republic.

The extent of the powers which the constitution of the French FifthRepublic confers on the President was something with which the PCFhad disagreed from the outset. The banner headline on the front pageof L’Humanité on 29 September 1958 was ‘La Constitution monarchiqueadoptée’, and disapproval was voiced by the PCF inside and outside



parliament regarding what it saw as the arbitrary and quasi-monarchicalpowers of the French President under the new constitution. With theinclusion of four Communist ministers in the second government ofPierre Mauroy, the Socialist Prime Minister, in 1981, the PCF’s accom-modation with the Fifth Republic became concrete as, for the first timein the existence of this Republic, it became a party of government. Asthe life of the government progressed, however, the PCF found itincreasingly difficult to give its wholehearted support to the policies ofthe Socialists, especially the package of austerity measures, the ‘plan derigueur’ of 1982. The European elections of June 1984 represented aserious setback for the Left, in spite of the record number of abstentions(43 per cent) which, rather than a switch to other parties, was almostthe exclusive cause for the drop in the number of votes cast for the PCF.The PCF’s score of 20.5 per cent in the 1979 European elections fell to11.3 per cent in 1984. This was interpreted by the party leadership as aserious warning. At the central committee meeting on 26 and 27 Junethe government was criticised for its failure to halt unemployment andincrease the purchasing power of the people. For its part, the centralcommittee decided that the future for the party lay in the restoration ofits communist vigour and identity, in order to make it more attractiveto the workers and the young. A few days after the election resultPresident Mitterrand replaced Mauroy with the right-wing Socialist,Laurent Fabius. At a central committee meeting on 19 July the decisionwas taken to try and obtain a pledge from Fabius to boost investmentand employment. This commitment not forthcoming, the Communistministers were withdrawn from the government.

The explicit criticism voiced by the PCF of the Socialist governmentafter its withdrawal was supported by a return to Communist criticismof the constitution from which it derived its powers. The resolutionadopted at the PCF’s 25th Congress in 1985 marked an end to thestrategy that had characterised its attitude to governmental office forthe preceding quarter century. Cooperation with the PS which hadbrought the Left to power had, according to the resolution, been amistake and had resulted in too many compromises at the expense ofthe PCF. The party’s political activity would therefore be marked, afterthe congress, by autonomous action among the masses, with a view tocreating a nouveau rassemblement populaire majoritaire.1 In his report tothe Congress as General Secretary, Georges Marchais made explicitcondemnation of the way he believed that the constitution of the FifthRepublic permitted the concentration of power in the hands of oneindividual. Calling for a democratisation of the institutions created by


Failing the Presidential Challenge 95

the constitution, Marchais outlined five objectives: a parliament withgreater power over legislation, notably its inception; a more powerfulPrime Minister, and therefore greater independence of the governmentfrom the President; a less direct role for the President in the exercise ofpower, and a greater definition of his role as a ceremonial guardian ofthe Republic’s institutions; real decentralisation; and effective ‘debu-reaucratisation’. These objectives were supported by nine specificproposals which included a non-renewable seven-year term for thePresident, a change in the voting system to allow any candidate withmore than 10 per cent of the vote in the first round to stand in the secondround, a more narrowly defined presidential right to dissolve parliamentand more power for parliament to decide the order of business.2

Marchais’ proposals for the reform of the presidency notwith-standing, the 1988 presidential campaign would place the PCF in theperverse situation of promoting its candidate for an office which itbelieved to be ill-defined constitutionally, and against – apart fromits traditional adversaries on the Right – a Socialist incumbent which itaccused of adopting right-wing policies, and an erstwhile PCF memberwho, it claimed, was surreptitiously supported by the Socialists and bythe media in an effort to damage the credibility of the PCF.

External and internal challenges

The 6.7 per cent of the votes cast for André Lajoinie in the first round ofthe presidential elections on 24 April 1988 marked the weakestperformance at the polls by the PCF since its formation in 1920. In theeyes of many political observers this result appeared to confirm a trendthat had developed over the preceding two decades each time the PCFwas faced with a major electoral challenge, a trend that suggested anineluctable decline in the PCF’s ability to win the confidence of theFrench electorate. As the following figures in Table 5.1 show, the elect-oral fortunes of the Communists between 1969 and May 1988 hadsuffered a virtually continuous decline, and one that was particularlymarked in the decade prior to the presidential elections of 1988.

The result of the presidential contest of 1988 seemed to justify theview that the PCF was a party whose political prospects had beendamaged because of its intellectual and organisational rigidity,3 andwhich could not be confident of retaining the fidelity of its ownmembers unless its conception of change was broadened and adaptedto include non-economic issues of concern to individuals and not onlythe economic issues that concerned the class it represented.4 This



concentration by PCF critics on the factors inhibiting the reversal in thedecline of the PCF’s fortunes as an electoral force, however, helped tocreate the misleading impression of a party that seemed indifferent tothe need for change and disinclined to pursue electoral success. Theunanimous decision of the political bureau on 18 May 1987 to proposeAndré Lajoinie to the PCF central committee as the party’s candidate inthe presidential elections, and the subsequent ratification of his candi-dacy, expressed in fact the willingness of the party to learn fromprevious experience and adapt its tactics to ways which it believedwould bring greater electoral benefits.

The view that prevailed among the PCF’s critics regarding the choiceof Lajoinie was that he was the undistinguished but faithful party manwho would enable Marchais to avoid shouldering the blame for theparty’s defeat at the polls. As both General Secretary of the PCF and itscandidate in the presidential elections in 1981, Georges Marchais wasdoubly vulnerable to criticism provoked by the PCF’s disappointingshare of the vote in the first ballot. In fairness to the PCF leadership,however, the suggestion that the decision of the General Secretary notto put himself forward as a presidential candidate in 1988 was simply toprotect the leadership from blame in case of failure, did not take intoaccount that there had been signs, albeit belated, of an acceptance thatthe party had to renew its appeal. In the debates during and around thePCF’s 24th Congress in February 1982, there was a general acceptanceof the criticism that the party had, from 1956 onwards, lagged behindthe very considerable changes in French society, failing, for example, toadapt with sufficient speed and flexibility to the fact that the majorityof French men and women had become salaried workers. Among the

Table 5.1 Electoral performance of PCF since 1969

* Percentage of PCF vote at first ballot. Source: Dainov (1987, p. 375).

Type of election Year Vote*

Presidential 1969 21.5Legislative 1973 21.4 Legislative 1978 20.7 European 1979 20.6 Presidential 1981 15.6 Legislative 1981 16.2 European 1984 11.3 Legislative 1986 9.8



principal themes which Marchais developed in his address to theCongress was the need for the party to develop a new and broaderdimension which would accommodate a new style of contact with thepeople at large, and to follow a path characterised by positive proposalsrather than just criticism.5

Marchais’ address to the PCF’s 24th Congress expressed an awareness,on the part of the leadership, of the pressure to succeed that wasbuilding up on two fronts. On the one hand, the leadership had toproject the party and its ideology into the political arena and in a waythat convinced the electorate of the viability of its bid for power, especiallypresidential office. On the other hand, the PCF leadership had tomanage the dissent and criticism that emanated from within the partyabout the way it managed the party’s affairs, and defined the party’sideological orientation and political strategy. Success on one frontcould not be divorced from success on the other. The PCF leadershiphad, therefore, to take account of those who posed a challenge frominside as well as from outside the party.

Contestataires and rénovateurs

The PCF leadership had had to face criticism from within party ranksduring the years immediately preceding the presidential elections of 1981as well as after. Considerable criticism followed the failure of the CommonProgramme which the PCF had signed with the Socialists in 1972 andwhich effectively had ended in September 1977. The legislative elec-tions six months later, in March 1978, resulted in the defeat of the Leftbut, as already noted, were significant in that, for the first time inFrance’s post-war history, the Socialists had taken a larger share of thevote than the Communists. The consequent debate within the partyconcerning the leadership’s electoral strategy, and particularly its rela-tionship with other left-wing parties, grew in scope to include the issueof democracy within the party.

The desire by some party members to see these issues discussed in theparty press as well as at branch level was frustrated, but the voices of thosechallenging the leadership’s handling of the party’s affairs, the contest-ataires, continued to be heard, most notably in the form of an open lettercarrying a thousand or so signatures and emanating from the PCF univer-sity branch at Aix, criticising the way the leadership had handled theparty’s relationship with the PS and the MRG. A significant number ofcritical books and articles appeared, written by communists who disagreedwith the leadership but who affirmed their desire to remain within the



party, aspiring to change it from within. Notable contributors to this litera-ture were the communist intellectuals Louis Althusser and Jean Elleinstein.

The PCF leadership demonstrated its recognition of the need fordebate by organising, in a manner which had not been seen for a numberof decades, a series of discussion meetings on 9 and 10 December 1978,at which four hundred intellectuals were invited, including some of theparty’s liveliest critics. It was, in the judgement of Le Monde, a forum inwhich disagreements were aired but one where the PCF leadership wassupported with regard to the essence of its policy.

Some of the contestataires remained, nonetheless, unwilling to beplacated, particularly those among the party intellectuals in the Parisarea. Notably outspoken was Henri Fiszbin, the former Paris districtsecretary who had resigned from the central committee in 1979 andwho, in May 1981, together with François Hincker, founded Rencontrescommunistes, a group comprised of PCF dissidents and some others.Both figures were expelled from the PCF in October of that year, thereason given by the party being that they had published their criticismsin the bourgeois press instead of the party press. Two other notabledepartures from the party in that year were Elleinstein and anotherprominent critic, Etienne Balibar. A further focus of discontent wasestablished in the creation of Union dans les luttes, a body set up bysocialist and communist intellectuals with the purpose of restoring theunity of the Left to the top of the agenda and of refuting the PCF’sclaim that the PS had shifted to the Right.

The criticism of the party that was expressed after the 24th Congressdiffered, however, from the kind that was expressed after the disap-pointment of the legislative elections of 1978 and which culminated inthe debates in December of that year in that it contained a strand thatcould not be counted on to agree with the leadership on the essence ofparty policy. It was a critical element in the party that was not onlyreformist but also rénovateur, that is, that was prepared to advocate arenewal of the party’s appraisal of its aims through, if necessary, a radicaloverhaul of some of its fundamental assumptions, for example,regarding democratic centralism. In a speech in Limoges in June 1984,Pierre Juquin, then still a member of the PCF central committee,expressed his belief in the need for a debate within the party about theway it was run, a debate which would not treat any subject relating tothe party as taboo. Furthermore, Juquin added that the democraticcentralism in the party could be modified for the better.

This criticism became overt at the party’s 25th Congress in February1985. It was in this forum that Juquin made his call for a ‘PC rénové’,



a reconstructed Communist Party in which democratic centralismwould be informed by the will to self-management. The reaction of theparty leadership was to reach a pact with the rénovateurs, as a result ofwhich Juquin was re-elected not to the political bureau of the party butto the central committee, together with two other members of it whosympathised with his viewpoint, Marcel Rigout and Félix Damette.

There was a resurgence of criticism of the leadership by PCF membersafter the party’s poor result in the legislative elections of 1986, when itobtained 9.8 per cent of the votes cast. This criticism found focal pointsin the cercles marxistes, the communist discussion groups which wereformed, according to one rénovateur, in at least ten towns to discuss theissues raised by rénovateur criticism of the leadership.6 The reaction ofthe party leadership to the growing strength of this criticism fromwithin was to take the offensive. In an interview on the televisionchannel, Antenne 2, on 14 January 1987, Georges Marchais accused therénovateurs of being the liquidateurs of the party. In a written statement,Marcel Rigout declared that Marchais’ condemnation of the rénovateurswas a publicly delivered blow against the unity of the party and, on27 January, Rigout resigned from the central committee of the PCF.On 31 January, rénovateurs from fifteen departments met in Paris andestablished themselves organisationally by forming a collectif de coord-ination. The basis now existed for an unprecedented challenge to thePCF leadership.

Pierre Juquin had signalled his challenge to the leadership of the PCFin November 1986, when he declared the intention of the rénovateurgroup within the PCF to change the party from within and from below.This ambition was to prove harder to fulfil than they had imagined, and asthe presidential election drew closer Juquin marked an increasingdistance between himself and the leadership. In May 1987, he wasabsent from the central committee meeting that approved unanimouslythe choice of Lajoinie as the party’s presidential candidate, and in Junehe announced his resignation from the central committee. On 12 October,he announced his decision to stand as a candidate in the presidentialelection and on 14 October, he was excluded from the party.

The organisational backing for Juquin’s candidacy began to takeconcrete form on 24 October when the national coordinating committeeof the Communist rénovateurs (COCORECO) met in Paris. It elected at itshead Claude Llabrès, who was among the group of communists fromToulouse to be excluded from the PCF. Llabrès had been a member ofthe central committee but had resigned in September 1987, arguing in anewspaper interview and in terms made familiar by Juquin, that the



PCF had lost touch with French society. This was a familiar argument inthe early months of Juquin’s candidacy, which developed against abackground of notable discontent within the PCF. The divisions in thePCF from which Juquin’s campaign might hope to profit were well illus-trated by the problems that surfaced in Claude Llabrès’ home base ofToulouse, in October and November of 1987, and where the localcommunists came under the regional authority of the federation ofHaute-Garonne. The exclusion of the local communist Serge Diaz for‘factional activity’ elicited a reaction among PCF members in Toulousewhich revealed not only that friction existed between rénovateur sympa-thisers like Diaz and officials like Emile Ochando, who defended theparty orthodoxy, but that there was another disaffected group whichwanted to remain within the party but which was highly critical of PCFmanagement and strategy, led by Daniel Garipuy. These contestatairesargued that from being a federation with 11,000 members in 1979,Haute-Garonne now had no more than 3,500,7 a figure disputed by theofficials of the federation but which nonetheless suggested the poten-tial for Juquin’s candidacy to rally more than the declared rénovateursamong the communist electorate. This was a potential underlined bythe resignation, in early November, of Marcel Rigout and 18 othercontestataires who were members of the party’s federal committee inHaute-Vienne and who cited the national leadership’s inability totolerate differences as the principal factor forcing their decision to resign.

The freedom to express individual differences was one of the valuesthat featured in the book by Juquin which appeared in 1985 and whichdefined his understanding of the challenges facing the Communistmovement and the changes it had to make.8 The way communistsenvisaged the purpose of their movement, according to Juquin, hadbecome reliant on terms that had become ideologically frozen, such as‘the masses’ and ‘the class struggle’, and which led to a conception ofsociety in which the individual was indistinguishable from the mass.For Juquin, the class struggle led by the Communist movement shouldbe perceived in a fresher light as aiming ultimately to allow the humanperson to assume its individuality. The way for the Communists tosecure the liberation and fulfilment of this individuality would not bethrough an exclusive preoccupation with economic change, butthrough profound cultural change. In his book Fraternellement libre,published shortly before the start of his campaign, Juquin returned tothis conception of communism as being, above all, a project to trans-form society’s values.9 And this concern would be translated in the wayJuquin defined his electoral programme.



The presidential challenge

Georges Marchais’ decision, announced at a central committee meetingon 12 May 1986, to exclude himself from the choice of possible candi-dates to represent the PCF in the presidential elections of 1988, and hissubsequent characterisation of André Lajoinie’s campaign, expressed hisawareness of past mistakes and of the immediate challenges facing theparty in the run-up to a crucial test of its continuing viability as an elect-oral force in the Fifth Republic. Marchais’ high-profile campaign hadfailed to bring the PCF the success hoped for in the presidential electionsof 1981. This time, the party professed its refusal to compromise withthe tactic it condemned in the other parties of concentrating on anAmerican-style packaging of their candidates in order to achievemaximum impact in the media at the expense of a proper examinationof the programmes they were supposed to be advocating. According toMarchais, the image of the party would not be portrayed in the personof one individual during the campaign, but in the collective identity ofits members. The distinction between the nature of Lajoinie’s presidentialcampaign and that of the other candidates was of fundamental import-ance to the preservation of the PCF’s ideological integrity. It enabledthe PCF to participate in the pursuit of presidential power while at thesame time not relinquishing its condemnation of presidentialism in theFifth Republic, which it believed to run contrary to the interests ofdemocracy.

The reasoning behind the decision to place the onus for the success ofLajoinie’s candidacy on the party as a whole was made explicit inMarchais’ report to the PCF’s 26th Congress in December 1987.10 Hecondemned the American-style focus of the media on politics as a formof showbusiness, regarding it as an attempt by bourgeois forces to stiflereal debate and the spirit of critical analysis. According to Marchais, thePCF was laying the grounds for its success in the presidential electionby genuine discussion with the people about the issues that matteredto them. Lajoinie alone could not succeed in making France receptive tothe ideas and policy proposals of the Communist Party, Marchaisaffirmed. The success of the Communist candidate’s campaign woulddepend on the ability of every party member to convey the party’s ideasto the people around him or her in all aspects of everyday life andpersuade them that the only way to make themselves heard would be tovote for Lajoinie in the first round. Such a dialogue, initiated by allparty members, could not be stifled by the media. This, therefore, wasthe professed purpose behind the style of the campaign. But in addition



to the need to renew the appeal of the PCF’s presidential candidate tothe French electorate as a whole in 1988, there were additional anddifficult considerations in the choice of candidate and the managementof his campaign: the need for a candidate both acceptable to the partyat large and one on whom the leadership could rely in the case ofcontinuing criticism of it from within the party, and one who could beseen to maintain the delicate line which the PCF had to tread if it wasto be considered as committed to the accession of the Left to power butnot merely subordinate to the Socialists, that is, reverse the role of polit-ical bridesmaid destined always to help the PS into office and never toenjoy it herself.

In contrast to his Socialist rival in the presidential campaign, Lajoiniewas chosen to represent the qualities that were antithetical to thosedisplayed by the kind of candidate whose personality and ideas couldcome to dominate the party he was supposed to represent. Rather thanset up a pole of attraction that could compete with the party and rele-gate its leadership to a secondary role, Lajoinie’s appeal was to be anintegral aspect of the appeal of the PCF as a whole and of its message. Inthe PCF’s portrayal of him, André Lajoinie was the type of candidatewho would eschew the ego-building and political manoeuvrings of hisrivals in order to project the policies determined by a political collect-ivity for the collective benefit of French society. Hence the prominentrole played by Georges Marchais throughout the presidential campaign.

In a very important respect, therefore, the PCF had effectively optedfor a two-headed presidential candidature. Whereas André Lajoinie wasthe présidentiable who, if elected, would assume the office of President,Georges Marchais was the figure who defined the terms for the PCF’sparticipation in the elections. In his report to the PCF’s 26th Congress,Marchais referred directly to the institutional obstacles Lajoinie wouldface. In his opinion, the presidential election would reinforce the anti-democratic and monarchical nature of executive power. The presidencywas beginning to resemble an elected monarchy not only because ofthe power concentrated in the hands of the President, but also becauseof the fact that since the President’s mandate is obtained directly fromthe people, Marchais argued that this had led to the widespread beliefthat the office of President conferred a legitimacy that could not bechallenged by any other democratic institutions. Therefore, in decidinghow to vote, the French electorate were guided above all by the choiceof individual rather than policy. Furthermore, Marchais asserted, thelogical consequence of the form of electoral choice with which theFrench people would be faced would put them under extreme pressure



to make their votes count, the vote utile. The electors would be underpressure to cast their first-round votes, not for the candidate whoexpressed their views, but for the one most likely to obtain an absolutemajority in the second round; they would be discouraged from votingfor the candidate with whom they identified in favour of the possiblewinner least unacceptable to them. Such a system, Marchais concluded,was an obvious handicap to any candidate and party advocating radicalchange.

Marchais rejected, however, the suggestion that the outcome of theelection was a foregone conclusion and defined in unequivocal termswhat a vote for the Communist candidate could achieve, how hiscampaign could be justified and its success measured. In Marchais’opinion, Lajoinie’s candidacy would rally all those wishing to registertheir disagreement with the policies of the government, and the weightof their votes for him in the first round would influence the finaloutcome and the subsequent decisions of the newly elected President.A good result for the PCF candidate in the first round would be ameasure of the desire for change in French society, and, in Marchais’ view,would be the only new and significant event that would distinguish theelection.

Marchais’ representation of Lajoinie’s candidacy in the termsoutlined above is what enabled the PCF to reconcile two conflictingterms in the equation expressing their participation in presidentialelections. By portraying Lajoinie as the candidate who embodied theconsultative and collectivist virtues that would check the drift to right-wing presidentialism, the PCF leadership could deny the legitimacy ofpresidential power and its manifestations while, without apparentcontradiction, putting forward a candidate in the presidential elections.

André Lajoinie’s campaign

André Lajoinie was chosen to run as the PCF candidate in the presidentialelection in preference to better-known Communist figures like GeorgesSéguy, the former General Secretary of the CGT trade union, and AnicetLe Pors, who had been one of the four Communist ministers in theMauroy cabinet. Lajoinie’s progress in the party and his service to it,however, are an indication of the social and political qualities thatmade him appear an appropriate choice to the party leadership as themost reliable candidate in the attempt to balance the factors outlinedabove. Born of peasant stock in the Corrèze in 1929, Lajoinie reflectedthe simplicity and solidity that characterised the support on which the



party could rely in certain agricultural areas, and it was through serviceto the party’s agricultural concerns that he rose in the organisation.Lajoinie first gave dramatic proof of his commitment to the party andits beliefs during the campaign against the French colonial war inAlgeria, when he was seriously assaulted and injured in a demonstra-tion in May 1958. Lajoinie progressed through the courses organised forparty members, and in 1976 became responsible for the Communistweekly journal for farmers, La Terre. In 1978 he was elected as a Deputyto the National Assembly representing a constituency in the departmentof Allier, and joined the central committee of the party in February 1982on the occasion of its 24th Congress. By his own description, one ofLajoinie’s chief qualities was his capacity for quiet diligence, and hispreferred activity was to meet the people where they lived and workedand to discuss their problems with them in a way that eschewedhedging or rhetoric, using the straight talking (parler direct) which hebelieved was most effective in reaching people.11

The PCF leadership had shown its support for André Lajoinie whenalmost all the members of the party’s political bureau and three of thefour former Communist ministers in the Socialist government werepresent in the studio for Lajoinie’s first major appearance on television,on 19 October 1987, to present himself and his programme as theCommunist candidate in the forthcoming presidential election. Duringthe course of the programme, L’Heure de Vérité, on Antenne 2, Lajoinieelaborated on the themes, political and personal, that would recurduring his campaign.12 This broadcast, together with another keynoteinterview given to the media by Lajoinie in early November 1987, illus-trated the nature of Lajoinie’s campaign and the policy concerns thatcharacterised it.

On the programme, Lajoinie began by outlining what his first threepriorities would be should he be elected President. First, a raising of theminimum wage to 6000 francs, increases in low and average incomesand an amnesty for all union activists unfairly penalised by the law.Secondly, he would call a meeting of the captains of industry in thepublic and the private sector in order to find ways of creating employ-ment and raising industrial output. Thirdly, he would find ways oftaxing income from financial transactions and of reducing the militarybudget. In view of the febrile state of the Paris stock exchange at thatjuncture, Lajoinie argued that he was the only candidate to have aprogramme with specific provisions for resolving the problems beingencountered there, including: the protection of France from thevagaries of the American-dominated world financial system through



exchange control, taxes on the export of capital, and incentives toproduction instead of speculation; an end to privatisation and somenationalisations; and the withdrawal of France from the EuropeanMonetary System.

Regarding relations between the PCF and the PS, Lajoinie argued thatwhereas in 1981 there was some common ground between the parties,the gap between the two parties towards the end of 1987 had becomeenormous. While refuting the likelihood of the PCF participating inanother Socialist-dominated government, Lajoinie did not excludepermanently the possibility of cooperation with the Socialists withregard to the exercise of governmental power in the distant future.Describing himself as a revolutionary candidate in the deepest sense ofthe word, Lajoinie declared that his principal adversaries were the Rightand the capitalist forces in French society. He affirmed his belief thatthe millions of communist votes cast in the first round would weighmore heavily on the outcome of the second round, and its aftermath,than they did in 1981. As for the support shown by some Communistmayors for Pierre Juquin, who had entered the presidential race and hadbeen excluded from the party earlier in the month, Lajoinie dismissedthe number of mayors as less than a handful and accused Juquin ofdishonesty in his dealings with the PCF.

Concerning the management and style of his campaign, Lajoinierevealed that this was entrusted to a commission headed by the politicalbureau member, Pierre Blotin. The image that best represented him asan individual candidate in human terms, Lajoinie believed, was one ofa plain and simple man of the people, capable of appreciating populartastes like pop music, while avoiding some of the more frivolous preoccu-pations to which it could give rise.

Lajoinie’s television performance was a successful one judging by theaudience reaction. He began with the lowest rating of any guest on theprogramme, scoring only 14 per cent in favour of him in a survey ofviewers’ attitudes carried out during the broadcast. At the end of thebroadcast, the number of viewers expressing a favourable opinion ofLajoinie had risen to 33 per cent, one of the most marked progressionsregistered by any guest on the programme.

Outside of the television studio and vis-à-vis the French electorate asa whole, the percentage of electors inclined to cast their vote forLajoinie in the first round was 5 per cent, the same as in July, accordingto a poll carried out by Paris Match-BVA in early October.13 Vis-à-vis therank and file of his own party, however, Lajoinie’s campaign wasunfolding against a background of increasing dissatisfaction. Juquin



announced his decision to stand for the presidency on behalf of therénovateurs communistes on 12 October and, with the exception of FélixDamette, the central committee voted to exclude him from the partyon 14 October. Nationally, in places like Isère, Meurthe-et-Moselle andHérault, Juquin’s departure from the party and his candidacy exacer-bated the tensions between local rénovateurs and their more orthodoxcomrades, and the party’s central organisation.

In November, Lajoinie returned to the fray in a major interview witha panel of journalists on the broadcasting platform provided by theForum RMC-FR3.14 In response to a question referring to Juquin as theother communist candidate, Lajoinie argued that such a description ofa candidate was impossible because he (Lajoinie) had been approvedunanimously by the party as its candidate. Furthermore, he assertedthat there was an orchestrated attempt by some sections of the pressand those with an interest in preserving the economic and social statusquo to use Juquin’s candidacy to damage the PCF. In his opinion, theJuquin candidacy would not have seen the light of day were it not forthe support of the media, the other political parties and even the bankswho had agreed to provide Juquin with a substantial advance in orderto finance his candidacy. In contrast to what he implied was Juquin’sartificial candidacy, Lajoinie underlined his own progress in making theFrench electorate listen to him.

A reference by a journalist to the willingness expressed by theSocialist, Jacques Delors, to serve as Prime Minister under RaymondBarre, should he be elected President, allowed Lajoinie to develop thePCF position regarding the posture of the PS. Lajoinie described Delors’offer as the tip of the iceberg, arguing that it expressed the fundamentalinclination of the PS to cooperate with the Right, which it called thecentre. Delors had simply jumped the gun, as the policy of cohabitationbetween the Socialists and the Right, resulting from the majority thateluded them in the legislative elections of 1986, was the prospectivebasis for an alliance with the Right. As evidence of this, Lajoinie citedthe agreement between the Socialists and the Right over economicausterity measures, defence expenditure and, as he put it, the integrationand subjection of France to the interests of European and American capital.

Resulting from his interviews with the media in October and Novemberof 1987, Lajoinie’s campaign was defined by four principal themes: acertain notion of how presidential office should be perceived, embodied inhis person as a type of presidential aspirant; his programme; what thecandidacy of Pierre Juquin really represented; and the drift of the Socialists,led by François Mitterrand, towards compromise with the Right.



According to the Paris Match-BVA poll published in mid-November,Lajoinie’s campaign was meeting with some sympathetic reactionamong left-wing voters as a whole. Asked to decide who betweenDelors, Fabius, Lajoinie, Mauroy, Mitterrand and Rocard would be thebest candidate to represent the left, 14 per cent of left-wing voters choseLajoinie, as opposed to 9 per cent in response to the same question inSeptember. The responses to questions regarding first round votingintentions, however, suggested that Lajoinie was making little progressin convincing the electorate of his genuine credibility as a presidentialcandidate. Asked who they would vote for in the first round of the presi-dential election were it to be held on the following Sunday, 5 per centof the entire cross-section of voters surveyed chose Lajoinie, the samepercentage as for September.15

By the end of November, Lajoinie was committed to a busy scheduleof meetings and was drawing audiences of between 1200 (Castres) and4000 (Toulon) on the departmental campaign trail. The PCF Congressin December allowed Lajoinie to define himself as the candidate whowas legitimately chosen by the party (in contrast to Juquin whoLajoinie called ‘self-proclaimed’), and outline how his campaign fittedinto the overall objectives of the party. During the open discussion on4 December, Lajoinie dismissed any suggestion that Juquin could beregarded with any seriousness as the second communist candidate inthe race for the presidency, referring to him instead as the secondsocialist candidate. Lajoinie underlined his support for the positions ofthe party leadership as had been expressed in Marchais’ report to theCongress, and reiterated the three key themes in the PCF programme:justice, liberty and peace. It was only through the Communist vote inthe forthcoming election, Lajoinie asserted, that these objectives couldbe pursued successfully. And this point was made by Marchais in theopposite way, by affirming that a vote for any candidate other thanLajoinie in the first round would be a vote for the policies of austerity,authoritarianism and excessive arms spending that the party judged tobe currently in place. In contrast to what could be interpreted as a voteof no confidence in the leadership by the rénovateurs of Haute-Viennein November, at the end of the PCF congress in December, GeorgesMarchais was returned to office for the fifth time as the party’s GeneralSecretary. The rénovateur Felix Damette was not, however, re-elected tothe central committee of the party.

To what extent the PCF congress influenced the French electorate’sperception of the party and its presidential candidate would be verydifficult to judge accurately. It would nonetheless be safe to say that it



had little success in enhancing it, to judge by the opinion polls. Whenasked by the Paris Match-BVA survey of mid-December what theirvoting intentions were for the first round, the respondents gaveLajoinie the same score as in the previous month, 5 per cent. There was,however, a change in the percentage of left-wing voters willing toregard Lajoinie as the best candidate to represent the Left. This droppedfrom 14 to 11 per cent.16

The tone was set for the continuation of Lajoinie’s campaign in 1988by the contents of the report presented to the central committee byPierre Blotin of the political bureau, and which was unanimouslyadopted by it on 6 January 1988. Blotin outlined a programme of 50meetings to be held by Lajoinie, 17 of which would be attended byGeorges Marchais, in the 15 weeks that remained of the presidentialcampaign. The burden of the party’s hopes, however, would be carriedequally by its membership and its candidate. The report called for aharnessing of resources at the level of party cells, through an effort tofind and contact absent members and encourage them to participate inthe success of the PCF’s campaign. This had to be achieved against whatthe report deemed to be a background of collusion between the right-wing and Socialist press aimed at creating, on the one hand, a feeling ofanti-communism among the electorate at large and, on the other, afeeling among the potential voters for Lajoinie that the outcome of theelection was a foregone conclusion. The PS and the President were alsothe subjects of 38 denunciations for their betrayal of former commitmentsand their acceptance of right-wing policies. Whatever their preferencesin the second round, the report maintained that those desiring changesin government policy had no option but to vote for Lajoinie in the firstround. Pierre Juquin was dismissed as a candidate put up by the PS andthe report also recorded the decision of the PCF not to ratify the elec-tion of the rénovateur, Martial Bourquin, to the post of secretary to theCommunist federation in Doubs because, according to the report, theparty could not ratify the election of someone who advocated policiesthat differed from those advocated by the party at national level.

Lajoinie’s campaign faced a more serious obstacle posed by therénovateurs as January wore on. In an interview to the daily newspaperLibération on 15 January, Juquin asserted that during the presidentialcampaign of 1981, Marchais had expressed a preference for seeingcommunists vote for the right-wing candidate in the second roundrather than see them help install a Socialist President in office. Lajoiniecounter-attacked in an interview on the radio station Europe I on17 January, denying that there had been any preference shown by the



leadership for a ‘revolutionary vote for the right’ (le vote revolutionnaireà droite) in 1981. He further accused Juquin of cowardly dishonestysince the latter, according to Lajoinie, had declined Georges Marchais’challenge to justify the charge with explicit proof. In spite of thevigorous denials of the PCF leadership and Lajoinie’s attempt to portrayJuquin as an individual lacking in integrity, Juquin’s claim did detractfrom the PCF’s attempt to build an image of itself as a party aboveunprincipled political machination. The credibility of Lajoinie as aprésidentiable suffered as January progressed and in the Paris Match-BVAsurvey published at the end of the month, the number of respondentswilling to cast their votes for Lajoinie in the first round had fallen from6 per cent at the end of December 1987 to 4.5 per cent. The number ofleft-wing voters who considered him as the best candidate to representthe Left had also fallen to 10 per cent over the same period.17

During the course of a press interview dealing with the centralcommittee meeting in early February to review the progress of Lajoinie’scampaign, Marchais revealed the organisational concerns of the partyleadership. The central committee had become aware that a significantnumber of party members were not participating actively in thecampaign.18 To counter the possibility of resignation and sectarianismwithin the party, Lajoinie and Marchais began the month by reiteratingthe idea that a vote for Lajoinie in the first round did not preclude thepossibility of waging an effective fight against the Right in the secondround. However, in order to placate those sectarian communists whomight be inclined to obstruct the election of Mitterrand in the secondround, the party leadership remained disinclined at this juncture todeclare itself unequivocally in favour of a vote for Mitterrand in thesecond round.

As the month of February progressed, Lajoinie’s candidature receivedthe support of the contestataires who had remained within the party. Ina declaration entitled ‘Malgré tout, mais avant tout, votons AndréLajoinie’, signed by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre and other notablecontestataires, the point was made that in spite of the failings of theparty leadership, the PCF remained the best defence against capitalismand preserved the honour of the Left. In an indirect reference to PierreJuquin’s campaign, the declaration stated that a communist traditioncould not be established within the space of a few months, and couldnot rest on a basis of well-meaning but vague notions. The PCF leader-ship, criticised by the contestataires, was not unaware, however, ofthe need to inject the party’s image and its candidate’s campaign withmore appeal and vigour. To this end, therefore, the leadership began to



draw attention to the ‘meeting points’ (points de rencontre) set up by localparty members outside factories, offices, supermarkets and so on, andwhich gave the public the opportunity to meet and discuss with partyrepresentatives.

On 21 February, Lajoinie was the presidential candidate invited todiscuss his views in a broadcast on the radio station RTL. During thecourse of the discussion he declared that the PCF was for the unity ofthe Left, as long as it resulted in a change of policies. Lajoinie describeda vote for him in the first round as the only one possible for anyonewishing to see a brake applied to the slide to the Right in Frenchpolitics. He expressed his belief that his share of the vote in the firstround would exceed the result obtained by the PCF in the legislativeelection of 1986 (i.e., 9.8 per cent). As to which candidate the PCFwould support in the second round, this would be formally declared onthe Wednesday following the first round. Lajoinie was categorical inrejecting the prospect of communists once more accepting ministerialposts in order, as he put it, to implement the policies of the Right. Onthe question of exclusions from the party, Lajoinie denied that any hadoccurred for political reasons, arguing that they followed from the factthat some members had acted in ways that were irreconcilable with theparty’s way of life. In dealing with the inevitable question of Juquin’scandidacy, Lajoinie’s criticism of the PS became very pointed. Hedescribed Juquin’s candidacy as an anti-communist one which wouldnot have been viable without the support of the PS. Lajoinie hinted thatthe support given by the PS might cost it dearly, but did not go intodetail. As for the viability of Lajoinie’s own candidacy, by the end ofFebruary he was polling 5.5 per cent of the first round voting intentionsof those interviewed in the Paris Match-BVA survey.19

It is safe to assume that Lajoinie’s modest and generally unchangingperformance in the polls was a consideration in the party leadership’sreview of the campaign in early March and helped inject its conclusionswith a measure of urgency. A central committee meeting that tookplace on 8 March was expanded to include all the leaders from thedepartments as well as the national leadership and lasted for two days(as opposed to one day at the equivalent juncture in the 1981 presiden-tial campaign). By this point in the campaign, Lajoinie’s inability topoll more than 5 or 6 per cent of voting intentions was of grave concernto the party leadership, given the fact that François Mitterrand had notyet officially declared his intention to run for a second term of office.The possible scenario which most concerned the PCF leadership was theone in which Mitterrand’s long-awaited entry into the race released so



much momentum for the Socialist candidate that it swept away all theother left-wing candidates.

Georges Marchais’ contribution to the central committee meetingwas marked by the assertion of his authority over the party and aimedat overcoming the two dangers which threatened to undermineLajoinie’s campaign. The first danger was the insufficient mobilisationof party members in support of André Lajoinie’s campaign. Thesecretary responsible for party organisation, Jean-Claude Gayssot, hadidentified a 35 per cent deficit in the number of party members whoshould have been engaged in promoting Lajoinie’s campaign. Marchaisstressed the need, beginning with central committee members and thesecretaries of Communist federations across the country, to make agreater and more sustained commitment to working for the success ofLajoinie’s campaign and the realisation of the goals it represented. Thesecond danger identified by Marchais was the threat posed by the resortby Communist voters to the vote utile in the first round. On this issue,Marchais had to resolve the misunderstanding, underlined by onecentral committee member, which had arisen in the party regarding thePCF’s position over the second ballot. Some members had concludedthat désistement in favour of Mitterrand had already been decided.Marchais made clear what he believed could be the consequence ofsuch a misunderstanding. The largest vote possible had to be mobilisedfor Lajoinie in the first round in order to prevent Mitterrand achievingwhat Marchais asserted had been his ambition since assuming the lead-ership of the PS in 1971: a presidential majority in the first round ofelections for the presidency and thereby a crucial undermining of thePCF as a credible left-wing alternative to the PS. Marchais therefore reiter-ated the position of the PCF regarding the second round of voting, whichhad been determined at the party’s 26th Congress in December l987. Thecentral committee, after consultation with the federal committees, woulddecide which candidate it would support in the second round at ameeting on the Wednesday following the first round.

Lajoinie’s appearance on L’Heure de Vérité on 23 March came shortlyafter François Mitterrand had announced his decision to seek a secondterm as President, and reflected the concerns that had come to the forein his (Lajoinie’s) campaign in the period before the final weeks leadingup to the first ballot. Lajoinie outlined the principal policy objectivesthat defined his campaign: the minimum wage raised to 6000 francs,the transfer of 40 billion francs from the defence budget to education,the commitment to public sector industries which would be well-funded and autogestionnaires, a determination to prevent the single



European market of 1992 operating against the interests of the workers,the fight against racism and the extension of voting rights to immi-grants, and the protection and extension of the liberties of the citizenin general. In addition to these familiar objectives, however, Lajoinieshowed his concern to distinguish his campaign from those of hisleft-wing rivals and the parties supporting them. Lajoinie criticisedMitterrand’s pronouncement in favour of the single European marketenvisaged for 1992 on the same grounds that he questioned Mitterrand’sdeclared pursuit of social harmony: both pronouncements masked theintention of the Socialists to facilitate the exploitation of the workers byright-wing economic interests. Regarding Mitterrand’s commitment todisarmament, Lajoinie reminded the viewers that the PCF was the onlyparty that had refused to vote for increases in the defence budget. As forhis rénovateur rival, Lajoinie stressed that Juquin’s was a candidacyinspired by the PS and designed to split the Communist vote. Lajoinieemphasised the importance of a first round vote for him as the onlygenuine vote for a left-wing alternative to the policies of the Right and,in keeping with the PCF’s attempt to portray him as the antithesis of anautocratic presidential figure, Lajoinie reiterated the PCF’s commitmentto a non-renewable mandate for the President. The telephone pollconducted immediately after the broadcast showed that 3 per cent moreof the viewers had found Lajoinie convincing than had done so after hisappearance on the programme in October 1987. The Paris Match-BVAsurvey published two days later showed Lajoinie polling 6.5 per cent ofvoting intentions in the first round.20

The final weeks

The final weeks of the campaign began with some unwelcome news forAndré Lajoinie. At a meeting of the Communist Party in the Frenchoverseas department of La Réunion, on 4 April, the decision was takento make their votes count from the first round by casting them forMitterrand. This decision was clearly contrary to the warnings issued bythe PCF leadership regarding the damage the vote utile could do to theparty, and it was severely criticised in the final meeting of the PCFcentral committee on 7 April. In the report presented by Roland Leroy,the Parti Communiste Réunionnais was described as an undemocraticgroup dominated by a clan. As well as castigating the Reunionnaiscommunists for acting against the interests of the PCF, Leroy’s reportalso identified the two factors outside the party that the leadershipbelieved were operating against the success of Lajoinie’s candidacy: the



institutional obstacle faced by the PCF, and a Socialist candidateinclined to ally himself with the Right against the Communists.

Published in L’Humanité on 8 April, the report underlined the lead-ership’s belief that the presidential election was the most undemocraticenvisaged by the country’s constitution, and, therefore, the most detri-mental to the Communist Party. François Mitterrand, as the Socialistincumbent who had shown his ability to adapt to the constitution ofthe Fifth Republic and (as was shown by cohabitation with a right-wingPrime Minister) to use it to preserve Socialist interests, was the target ofsevere criticism. Leroy’s report condemned the statement of aimscontained in Mitterrand’s recently publicised Lettre à tous les Français asconstituting a platform for an alliance with the Right. The reportcondemned as a ‘vulgar trap’ what it deemed to be Mitterrand’s attemptto persuade the electorate to vote for him in order to prevent a Chiracpresidency. It argued that the duel with Chirac was being used as ameans of obscuring the issues really at stake, and marked a profounddisrespect for democracy. Quoting from words Mitterrand himselfhad written in 1964, the report denounced him for resorting to thepersonalisation of power that he himself had once condemned.

In a television interview on 11 April, Lajoinie underlined the import-ance of a first round vote for the PCF candidate as the only point atwhich voters would be able to express their objection to the alliancesMitterrand was planning with the Right. Notwithstanding the frequentrepetitions of warnings of this kind, during the week beginning Monday11 April, 41 current and former prominent members of the CGT tradeunion launched a written appeal against what they regarded as theunfair pressure placed on the members by the union leadership to votefor Lajoinie. In a major interview on the radio station France-Inter on13 April, Lajoinie returned to the offensive by warning the votersagainst what he argued was the manipulation of the electoral process bythose in power, and re-emphasised the importance of the first roundvote for him as a way of halting the extension of right-wing policiesand asserting the desire of the electorate for a left-wing alternative.

For his part, as General Secretary of the PCF, Georges Marchaisattempted to add to the credibility of the PCF candidate’s campaign bya systematic refutation of the contents of Mitterrand’s Lettre à tous lesFrançais, in an interview on the Europe 1 radio station on 15 April. Inaddition to the familiar arguments concerning the Socialists’ comprom-ises regarding economic and social policies, Marchais criticised thePresident’s failure to make concrete plans to extend voting rights forimmigrants, something Mitterrand had declared himself to favour.



While, on the one hand, Marchais sometimes clarified and generallyhelped facilitate the public understanding of the PCF policies expressedby Lajoinie, on the other, he added to the public’s perception ofLajoinie himself as not being a présidentiable. Marchais’ frequent appear-ances in the media and his scheduled presence at almost a third of thecampaign meetings programmed for Lajoinie created a situation inwhich two figures appeared to be carrying the banner for the PCF intothe presidential election, rather than the single figure who had beenchosen as the PCF candidate.

Lajoinie returned to the theme of racism at a meeting in Marseille on16 April, where Georges Marchais was also present on the platform.Lajoinie condemned Mitterrand and Chirac for using and allowingthemselves to be used by the leader of the racist Front National party,Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marchais accused Le Pen of persistent dishonesty indescribing the PCF’s commitment to justice for immigrants,condemning it as an attempt to discourage potential PCF voters. In spiteof the increased and visible presence of a new generation of Frenchyoung people born of immigrant parents, the turn-out at the meetingwas small, and local party leaders suggested that the Communistcandidate would be unlikely to obtain the 25 per cent share of the votethat he had obtained in 1981.

An appeal by the political bureau of the PCF to the party to mobiliseappeared in L’Humanité on 18 April. Seven days before the first round,the appeal maintained that the outcome was not a foregone conclusionand that there were still many voters to be won over to the Lajoiniecandidacy, as the one representing the only genuine vote for the Leftand for change. Speaking on RTL on 20 April, André Lajoinie expressedoptimism about his candidacy. He believed that the PCF had regainedmuch of the influence it had lost over recent years and expressed thewish to see the PCF share of the vote equal or exceed that obtained in the1986 legislative elections. While expressing his hopes, Lajoinie did notforego the opportunity to give voice once more to PCF misgivings aboutthe undemocratic nature of the election. Regarding Mitterrand, Lajoinieargued that his Lettre à tous les Francais could well have been signed byRaymond Barre or Jacques Chirac, for so clearly did it reflect Mitterrand’sadoption of right-wing policies. Nonetheless, Lajoinie insisted thatthe PCF remained favourable to the unity of the Left, particularly withregard to the municipal elections to come in 1989. Two days later, theParis Match-BVA poll showed a small increase in the percentage of respond-ents expressing an inclination to vote for Lajoinie in the first round:7.5 per cent as opposed to 6 per cent at the beginning of the month.21



The ‘other’ communist candidate: Pierre Juquin’s campaign

On 9 January, the rénovateurs held their first conference, at Villeurbanne,in the Rhône, attended by several hundred delegates. As these commun-ists were defining their distinctness organisationally from the PCF, sotheir candidate distanced himself from the PCF candidate. In Novemberand December, Juquin had been on the campaign trail in regions likeFinistère, where the rénovateur movement was strong, but had avoidedovert attempts to undermine Lajoinie’s campaign. Assisted by DavidAssouline, the student leader, and Khaïssa Titous, the vice president ofSOS-Racisme, Juquin’s message was simple and idealistic. He declaredhimself to be a feminist, for voting rights for immigrants, for self-management (autogestion), and against the nuclear deterrent. Juquincalled on his listeners not to relinquish their dreams and spoke of hisown dream in which three million people expressed the will to marrymorality with politics.

In the daily newspaper, Libération, on 15 January, however, Juquinmade an assertion that could not fail to be interpreted as purposelydetrimental to the credibility of the PCF candidate. He maintained that,in 1981, a majority of the members in the political bureau of the PCFbelieved that Mitterrand would be beaten in the presidential elections,and that they should help ensure this result. Furthermore, he cited astatement made by Georges Marchais at the time, to the effect thatsuccess for Mitterrand would result in an experiment in social democ-racy that could damage the PCF, and that therefore it was better for theRight to obtain power.

Notwithstanding the apparent damage to the PCF, the benefits of thisepisode for Juquin’s candidacy were not evident in the polls. The ParisMatch-BVA opinion poll at the end of January 1988 gave him the samemodest share of voting intentions as in the previous month: 2 per cent.Juquin’s opportunity to convince the electorate of his credibility wouldcome with his first appearance on the television programme, L’Heure deVérité, on 2 February. The constitutional barrier to the viability ofJuquin’s candidacy had been overcome shortly before this major test,with the promise by 500 elected representatives in French local andregional government to sponsor his candidacy: a fact which Juquinused to underline his credibility. Presenting himself as the candidatewho was ‘free’ of party ties, Juquin expressed his hope of rallying a verydiverse electorate. He was, nonetheless, a man of the Left and statedclearly that he would advocate support for the Socialist candidate in thesecond round of the election. Juquin outlined the principal planks of



his campaign with regard to social and economic policy: the reductionof the working week to 35 hours without any reduction in pay, anincrease in the minimum wage to 6000 francs and much greaterresources for education.

The social changes advocated by Juquin expressed his belief in amore just and egalitarian society, racially and sexually. He arguedon the one hand for the right to self-determination for the Kanaks,the indigenous people of France’s troubled overseas territory ofNew Caledonia, and on the other for the extension of voting rights toimmigrants in France and the creation of a more integrated society. Inkeeping with his declared sympathy for feminism, Juquin argued thatmeasures needed to be taken to ensure that half the representatives inFrance’s elected assemblies were women. Juquin’s was a programmefor a new kind of society and he wanted to build it with what hedeclared was a new movement comprised of new people, and not apale imitation of the PCF.

As the first round approached, and in addition to the rénovateurs,Juquin could rely on support provided by Alain Krivine and his group,the Ligue Communiste, the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), the Parti pour unealternative communiste (PAC) and the Fédération de la gauche alternative(FGA).22 The left-wing votes that Juquin could hope to win over wouldbe from the Communist contestataires who wanted to change the partybut had opted to do so from within, and from Socialists who weremarginalised and dissatisfied by the ‘tontonmania’ which the PS hadgiven itself over to.

As he had suggested on L’Heure de Vérité, Juquin’s aspirations wentfurther. Much impressed by the Green movement in West Germanyand its fusion of ecological issues with radical politics, Juquin, as thecampaign progressed, injected his speeches with expressions of strongconcern for environmental issues. The new movement for a newsociety of which Juquin had spoken would, to judge by his campaign,be one that could pursue sexual and racial equality, and ensureemployment and fair conditions of employment for the workers,while at the same time safeguarding their natural environment. In theweeks following his first major appearance on television and prior tothe first ballot in the elections, the polls suggested that Juquin’sproject to transform society was failing to convince the electorate. Hisshare of voting intentions in the Paris Match-BVA polls during thatperiod remained stubbornly between 2 and 3 per cent. The accuracy ofthe projections was proven when the results of the first ballot on24 April became available.



Conclusion: The lessons of the first round results

Judged by the hopes he had expressed before the first ballot, of seeingthe party equal its performance in the 1986 legislative elections, AndréLajoinie’s 6.7 per cent share of the vote was disappointing.23 A comparisonwith the performance of the PCF in 1981 made its performance in 1988seem more modest still. The 2,055,995 votes cast for André Lajoinierepresented less than half the total cast for Marchais in 1981. In onlyone department, Allier, which he represented as a Deputy, did Lajoiniepoll more than 15 per cent. He polled between 10 and 15 per cent in14 departments, between 5 and 10 per cent in 51 departments and lessthan 5 per cent in twenty eight. The decline of the Communist vote wasalso marked in the communist heartland of the ‘terres rouges’: Corrèze(13.6 per cent against 21.8 per cent in 1981), Creuse (11.1 per cent against20.3 per cent), Haute-Vienne (11.3 per cent against 24.2 per cent), Cher(11.7 per cent against 20.2 per cent), Val-de-Marne (11 per centagainst 21.3 per cent), Bouches-du-Rhône (11.1 per cent against25.5 per cent) and Seine-Saint-Denis (13.5 per cent against 27.2 per cent).Out of the 151 Communist municipalities of significant size, the Commu-nist candidate was beaten in 145 by François Mitterrand and in 79by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Parisian ‘red belt’ also failed to contain theslide in the Communist vote. Lajoinie was beaten into second placeby Le Pen in many of the constituencies of the red belt, and the share ofthe Communist vote in Paris dropped to less than 4 per cent; barely apoint more than Juquin’s.

This last fact, however, added to Juquin’s modest performancenationally, showed that the PCF did not suffer a massive transfer ofloyalties to the rénovateur candidate. The performance of the PCFcandidate was a disappointment compared to 1981. On the other hand,it was a source of considerable relief that it was substantially better thanJuquin’s. The PCF leadership was aware of how fatal the implicationswould have been for the future viability of the party if Juquin’s share ofthe vote had approached or exceeded Lajoinie’s. The failure of Juquin’sexperiment was more important to the preservation of the PCF’s positionas the only party offering a genuine and credible left-wing alternative inFrench politics, than the defeat of François Mitterrand. In the event,Juquin had failed to create a new movement and the PCF had survivedto contest future elections.

Further comfort could be derived from the fact that although thelevel of abstentions nationally was similar to that in 1981, the proportionof abstentions among Communist voters had increased significantly



compared to 1981, particularly in areas of the Parisian red belt, wherethe increase in Communist abstentions reached, in some cases, 8 per cent.This, however, did not explain entirely the decline in the Communistvote compared to 1981. During the week after the first round resultsbecame known, Georges Marchais argued that André Lajoinie’s share ofthe vote was so modest because many PCF voters had exercised whatthey had been persuaded was the vote utile, contrary to the advice of thePCF leadership. Looking ahead to the second and decisive round ofvoting, Marchais advocated a vote for François Mitterrand, but this inorder to stop the right-wing candidate rather than out of any enthu-siasm for what the Socialist candidate represented. Marchais expressedconfidence, however, that Communist voters who had opted for thevote utile in the first round of the presidential elections of 1988 wouldrevert to their Communist loyalties in the municipal elections thatwould take place in 1989. The rejection of Marchais’ explanation ofLajoinie’s low score by some observers and the announcement of thePCF’s death as an electoral force was indeed shown to be premature bythe PCF’s performance in the unscheduled legislative elections of June,when it polled 11.3 per cent of the votes cast.24 Marchais’ argument thatmany PCF members had chosen to vote usefully from the first round ofthe presidential ballot was, in fact, shown to have some substance bythe fact that the PCF bastions which appeared to have failed to supportLajoinie were the ones responsible for the revival in the party’s fortunesin the legislative elections.

The vote utile was one factor among several behind Lajoinie’s modestshowing. The mobilisation at the grassroots which the PCF had calledfor was not successful, and the campaign waged by committedmembers in their everyday lives to make the electorate aware of the realCommunist programme did not properly materialise. For his part, AndréLajoinie failed to emerge as a candidate who was truly présidentiable. Fromthe moment of his choice as the PCF candidate for the presidential elec-tions, some observers chose to portray Lajoinie as the figure who wouldpursue the strategy determined by Marchais, and over whose campaignthe shadow of Marchais would always loom.25 As the presidentialcampaign developed, it became clear that Marchais, as well as Lajoinie,would assume the responsibility for articulating the PCF position on majorissues. The ability of the electorate to focus positively on one presidentialfigure from the PCF was made more difficult by the high profileassumed by the General Secretary of the party. During the month ofFebruary, it was noted in Le Monde that Georges Marchais made fivemajor appearances on television whereas André Lajoinie made only



two. This tendency for Marchais to eclipse Lajoinie was of fundamentalimportance in creating the impression, which persisted throughout thecampaign, that the choice of Lajoinie as the PCF’s presidentialcandidate had not diminished Marchais’ role as the real guiding forcewithin the party. This duality underscored the fundamental difficulty aparty such as the PCF faces when confronted with an institution likethe French presidency.

Ultimately, André Lajoinie’s challenge for the presidency had restedon a paradox. On the one hand, the PCF had made clear its belief thatthe nature of the presidential election was undemocratic, but on theother it saw no alternative to putting up a candidate to contest it. Oncecommitted to the presidential campaign, the PCF found itself facedwith a left-wing rival, the PS, which had adapted well to the electoralsystem and seemed prepared to sacrifice the shibboleths of the Left inorder to respond to the changing attitudes of the electorate. Unlike thePCF, the PS was not averse to adapting its message and presenting itscandidate in a way that enabled it to enjoy the benefits of a successfulmedia campaign.

Instead of negotiating these obstacles through compromise, the PCFattempted to distinguish itself from the other parties fielding candidatesby attempting to overturn these obstacles through an explicit, or evenostentatious adherence to its principles. The undemocratic nature ofthe election and the way it discriminated against the Communistcandidate remained a theme that surfaced throughout Lajoinie’scampaign. His candidacy was presented by the PCF leadership, not as acompromise, but as the only way of halting the extension of right-wingpolicies, which it accused the PS of assisting. Juquin’s candidacy wasdepicted as a spoiling tactic devised by the PS, and abetted by the press,in an attempt to split the Communist vote. The PS itself was accused ofsabotaging debate through an American-style focus on personalitiesrather than issues, and its candidate of planning to collude with theRight in the event of his re-election. Whatever grains of truth theseaccusations might have contained, they were clearly not a recipe forsuccess in a presidential contest. Furthermore, the fact that so much ofthe criticism of the presidential campaign process was articulated byGeorges Marchais may well have been counter-productive since, as thereaction of the contestataires from within his own party indicated, therewas a widespread perception of his leadership discourse as one that wasossified by dogma and disconnected from the people it was meant toserve by its ideologically blinkered nature.


120

6Marchais: The (Dis)course of Leadership

Introduction

Traditionally, communist discourse has been underpinned by threeconvictions: a belief in the pursuit of revolutionary change; that thechange would be achieved through the action of the working class; andthat the successful achievement of this aim necessitated organisationalimperatives. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the way in whichthe questioning of those convictions affected communist discourse andin particular that of the General Secretary of the PCF, Georges Marchais(1972–94).

As has been argued elsewhere,1 one of the defining characteristics ofthe political culture of the Fifth Republic is the way presidentialism haspermeated France’s parties and institutions, stimulating the develop-ment of personalisation in leadership discourses across the politicalspectrum.2 Crucial to the understanding of leadership is the rapportbetween leader and followers, the relational dimension of leadership,embodied essentially in the leader’s discourse. Moreover, what we termthe discourse of declining authority begins to appear when thehomology of interest – those beliefs and ambitions shared by the leaderand the led – begins to break down, thereby undermining the belief thatthe leader speaks in the interest of those he or she represents; the politicaleffects of this can be consequential. And in the case of Georges Marchais,the more this phenomenon developed, the more Marchais’ discoursewas perceived as personalised and protective of a personal interest.

The vertical integration of party structures (‘centralised’ but ‘democratic’,according to the Bolshevik paradigm) made the discourse that embodiedthe relationship between Georges Marchais and the PCF exceptional interms of the sharpness of the definition it gave to the constituency it


Marchais: The (Dis)course of Leadership 121

addressed. Georges Marchais could guide, cajole, reprove and censurewhile successfully refuting accusations of personalising the discursiveprerogative delegated to him – as long as the membership believed thatthe leader’s utterances emanated from the same community of convic-tions and objectives as their own. As Annie Kriegel describes in herclassic study of the Communists in France, the decision to join the PCFwas an ‘existential’ one.3 It was not like joining any other political partyand acquiring a set of beliefs; it was an act which defined one’s being.

The PCF’s ideological commitment to revolutionary change was effect-ively renounced long before Marchais became General Secretary, in afamous interview given to The Times in November 1946 (and subse-quently reprinted in L’Humanité) by the then General Secretary of thePCF, Maurice Thorez. In it, Thorez argued that the road to socialismchosen by the Russian communists was not the only one, and thatthe people of France would find their own road to socialism throughdemocratic and parliamentary means. As the Fourth Republic gaveway to the Fifth Republic in 1958, the key questions for the partybecame increasingly concerned with how to define the kind of changeneeded to achieve the PCF’s ambitions in a France where the emergingsocial realities no longer fitted the rhetoric of class conflict and whatorganisational constraints should be guiding this endeavour.

In some respects, Georges Marchais was a communist archetype, interms of his social origins and his education by, and progress through,the party. He was born into a lower middle-class family in Normandyon 7 June 1920, joined the PCF in 1946, rising first through the party’sunion activities and eventually through its political bureau and centralcommittee to become the party’s General Secretary in 1972.

The main section of this chapter will examine examples of discoursetaken from the period spanning the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, duringwhich Georges Marchais articulated a reaction to independent voiceswithin the PCF challenging the party’s assumptions about the basis ofits support. In the subsequent section we will analyse how Marchaisarticulated the PCF’s responses to two events which may be seen asquestioning the traditional communist party’s raison d’être: the failedcoup attempt staged by old guard communists in Moscow againstMikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 and the referendum on greaterEuropean union which took place in France on 20 September 1992.Proceeding from the assumption that the act of speaking, especially inthe context of leadership discourse, expresses a set of power relations,we will illustrate how even in a tightly organised counter-culture likethe PCF, the growing disinclination to accept the ideology of disinterested



representation sustaining the symbolic power of Marchais’ discourserendered his utterances less performative,4 and therefore less effectiveand led them to be viewed increasingly as those of an apparatchikseeking to sustain his personal position.

The voice of the party?

For the major part of the twentieth century the principal myth that hasconditioned the discourse of the communist left has been that of thesaviour-class, the proletariat, and the historical mission on which it wasembarked. This myth was sustained by the principle of democraticcentralism, which enabled the leader to enunciate the reality of theparty and to articulate its existence, his authority to do so being derivedfrom his place at the top of a hierarchy whose legitimate voice heembodied. Given the importance of the myth of the saviour-class inthe communist constituency, it is hard to see how an attempt to redefinethat myth could fail to undermine it, and with it the authority of theleader’s voice. It is precisely this process that we now propose to illustrate.

We begin in 1976, and this for two reasons: it was at the PCF’s 22ndCongress from 4 to 8 February 1976 that the decision was announcedby Marchais to drop the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the ultimateobjective of the PCF’s mission; the 1976 congress was a classic exampleof what has been termed the ‘oracle’ effect which leads to the monop-olisation of collective truth by the delegate authorised to speak.5 Ourguiding concern will be to examine whether dissolving the crowningambition which defines the PCF also dissolves the unique authority ofits General Secretary to speak, and to assess the discursive strategiesemployed by Marchais to defend this symbolic capital. Furthermore, weshall adduce those voices that challenged Marchais’. This challengecame, first, from those individuals who, though communist, derivedtheir linguistic credit or capital from their intellectual activities (inacademia, the media, the arts) rather than from the role assigned tothem by the party; second, from those party functionaries who rejectedthe principle that their authority to speak was merely a provisionaltransfer of the symbolic capital held by party alone.6

In his presentation of the report of the central committee to theCongress, Marchais explains the reappraisal of what we have termed themyth of the saviour-class:

Si la ‘dictature du prolétariat’ ne figure pas dans le projet de document[. . .] c’est parce qu’elle ne recouvre pas la réalité de notre politique [. . .].



Le pouvoir qui conduira la transformation socialiste de la sociétésera le pouvoir de la classe ouvrière et des autres catégories detravailleurs [. . .]. Quant au prolétariat, il évoque aujourd’hui le noyau,le coeur de la classe ouvrière. Si son rôle est essentiel, il ne représentepas la totalité de celle-ci [. . .]. Il est donc évident que l’on ne peutqualifier de ‘dictature du prolétariat’ ce que nous proposons auxtravailleurs, à notre peuple.

(If the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has been dropped [. . .] this isbecause it does not convey the full reality of our policy [. . .]. Thepower that will lead the socialist transformation of society will be thepower of the working class and of all the other categories of workers[. . .]. As for the proletariat, it evokes today the core, the heart of theworking class. Though its role is essential, it does not representthe working class in total [. . .]. It is therefore clear that what wepropose to the workers and to our people cannot be called the‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’)7

Marchais evokes the economic changes that meant that by 1976 theworking class was a minority of the active population in France. Themake-up of French society had become pluralistic and diverse and itwas therefore up to the PCF to benefit from this diversity by offeringthe new social strata comprising it a new kind of unity in pursuit oftheir common interests. Marchais stresses the importance of the classstruggle and of organisation if the working class is to win:

[. . .] seule comme classe, la classe ouvrière peut conduire au succès lalutte révolutionnaire. Ses intérêts vitaux, sa puissance numérique, sagrande concentration, son expérience de la lutte des classes et sonorganisation en font pour aujourd’hui et pour demain la forcedirigeante du combat pour une société nouvelle.

([. . .] only the working class can successfully pursue the classstruggle. Its vital interests, its strength in numbers, the way this ispowerfully concentrated, its experience of the class struggle and itsorganisation make it, today and in the future, the driving force inthe struggle for a new society.)8

‘Working class’, ‘class struggle’ and ‘organisation’ remain crucial termsin Marchais’ leadership discourse on this occasion.

As we noted earlier, Marchais could be considered a communistarchetype: the kind of member who had little economic or social capital



before joining the party, who was empowered to speak with authorityby it, and the authority of whose discourse was dependent on it.

By way of contrast, communist intellectuals possess, in their ownright, a certain capital, that is, benefit from a certain credence andrecognition as academics, writers, artists and so on. Therefore, in thestruggle for the political capital of a party like the PCF, the latter groupare edged out by the former, composed of those in whom the party hasinvested and who in turn have invested in it not only their careerprospects but also their social and psychological identity. When Marchaissays ‘we’ in his appeal to the intellectuals critical of the party’s bunkermentality vis-à-vis other left-wing parties, he speaks as the moral voicewhich serves only the party, appealing to those whose discourse isimplicitly portrayed as self-serving:

Nous disons aux intellectuels des différentes disciplines: votreactivité crée pour la nation des richesses, des valeurs irremplaçables.Vous contribuez, dans des domaines où personne ne peut le faire àvotre place, à frayer les chemins de l’avenir. Mais vous êtesaujourd’hui frappés dans votre situation, dans votre travail créateur,dans votre espérance. Rejoignez l’Union du peuple de France pourouvrir la voie au renouveau du pays.

(We say this to intellectuals of different disciplines: your activitycreates wealth for the nation and irreplaceable values. You blaze atrail towards the future by working in fields where no one can takeyour place. But you have suffered in your endeavours, in your creativework and in your hopes. Join the union of the French people inorder to pave the way for the renewal of the country.)9

The criticisms articulated by the intellectuals were revived and ampli-fied by the chorus of dissenting voices following the legislative elec-tions of March 1978. The elections had seemed to promise much to theCommunist and Socialist partners in the Common Programme, but theirfailure on 21–22 September 1977 to reach an agreement on the imple-mentation of their blueprint for government was to damage the credibilityof the Left in the period leading up to the election and the parties of theRight squeezed into power with 50.5 per cent of the votes.

The issue that provoked outrage among communist intellectuals wasthe interpretation of the result by the political bureau of the PCF, whichdenied that the party had any responsibility for the Left’s defeat.Breaking a key principle of democratic centralism – that dissenting



views should not be aired outside of party structures or the party press –a declaration appeared in Le Monde on 6 April 1978 denouncing theauthoritarian pronouncement of the political bureau and its parody of adiscussion. It was signed by some of the party’s leading intellectualfigures: Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Guy Bois, Georges Labica, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Maurice Moissonnier. Equally indicative of thechange in the attitudes shaping the shared beliefs that sustain thesymbolic power of leadership discourse in the PCF was the reaction ofHenri Fiszbin to the defeat of March 1978. Though one of a youngergeneration of activists born just before the war, Fiszbin was nonethelessa ‘militant’. He was a man shaped by the party apparatus. However,ignoring that the authority delegated to him to speak as first secretaryof the Paris federation could only be used to serve the institution of thePCF, he and a number of colleagues presumed to speak openly in theirown right, with the consequence that the authority delegated to themwas subsequently withdrawn. When they criticised the report Marchaispresented to the central committee in the aftermath of the elections,which amounted essentially to a lengthy self-justification at the expenseof the PS, plus approval for the ‘Finlandisation’ of Europe by the USSR,Fiszbin in particular came under pressure which led ultimately to hisresignation from his post in January 1979, ostensibly on the grounds ofill-health.

In the account that he finally published of the affair, Fiszbinproduced a letter from Georges Marchais that illustrated in written formthe kind of discursive strategy increasingly characteristic of Marchais’attempts to monopolise the political capital of the PCF and to give hisdiscourse its symbolic power. Marchais writes:

‘Permets-moi d’ajouter un mot en mon nom personnel. Tu dis dansta lettre que tu n’as jamais “hésité à [t’] exprimer avec [moi] oud’autres camarades de la direction”, et tu ajoutes avoir le sentimentd’être un “militant responsable et discipliné”. Eh bien! C’est précisé-ment des qualités non seulement que j’apprécie mais que j’estimeindispensables pour tout membre du Comité central’.

(‘Let me add a word or two in my own name. You say in your letterthat you have never “hesitated to express [yourself] to [me] or othercomrades in the leadership”, and you add that you consider yourselfa “responsible and disciplined activist”. Well! Those are precisely thequalities which I not only value but regard as indispensable in anymember of the central committee’.)



The switch to ‘we’ marks the symbolic takeover of the power whichallows Marchais to pronounce censure. Marchais enjoins Fiszbin toadmit his failures and those of the Paris federation, just as the partyleadership was prepared to admit its lapses when necessary: ‘Et lorsquecela s’avère nécessaire nous n’hésitons pas à dire publiquement, pour lescorriger, nos défauts et insuffisances’ [. . .].10 (And when it is necessaryin order to correct them, we don’t hesitate to declare our faults andfailings publicly.)

The voices of the intellectuals could not be stilled in the same way asthat of a party professional like Fiszbin. Faced by the criticism articu-lated by communist intellectuals, the PCF leadership organised a greatdebate at the Jean Vilar theatre in Vitry on 9–10 December 1978,between the political bureau and almost 400 communist intellectuals. Itwas the kind of heated debate not seen in the party since the 1920s andwas marked by Marchais’ pugnacious defence of the leadership’sanalysis of the reasons for the failure of the Left in the legislativeelections of the previous March.

The experience of Vitry was referred to in a significant manner inMarchais’ presentation of the central committee report to the delegatesat the PCF’s 23rd Congress in Saint-Ouen, 9–13 May 1979. Positioninghimself at the centre of the debate, Marchais frames his reference to theconclusions reached then, in such a way as to reassert his monopoly ofthe authority to speak:

A la fin de la rencontre de Vitry, j’ai indiqué notamment: ‘Je souhaiteque, ni d’un côté ni de l’autre, les positions restent figées [. . .]. Autre-ment dit, que l’on réfléchisse pour avancer.’

(As I indicated notably at the end of the meeting in Vitry: ‘I hopethat the positions adopted will not become fixed, on either side [. . .].[in other words, that we reflect in order to go forward.’)

The following reference to the institutions which give Marchais’discourse its credit and recognition is important because it identifies theconduit for the authority delegated to him, and distinguishes him fromthe intellectuals:

Le Bureau politique, an nom du comité central a pris des engagements:cela ne se fera pas en un jour, cela ne se fera qu’avec vous, mais lesengagements seront tenus.



(The political bureau, on behalf of the central committee, has madecommitments: they won’t be accomplished in a day and they willonly be accomplished in cooperation with you, but the commitmentswill be honoured.)11

The implication that he is disinterested, whereas the intellectuals areself-interested, emerges in the section entitled, ‘Unité du parti nesignifie pas uniformité’:

Je le dis avec force: [. . .] Il n’y a pas plusieurs espèces de commu-nistes. L’unité du parti, c’est l’unité de tous les membres du parti surla base des objectifs fondamentaux qu’ils définissent ensemble etpour lesquels ils luttent ensemble.

(Let me say this emphatically: [. . .] there are not several species ofcommunists. Unity of the party means unity of all the members ofthe party on the basis of fundamental objectives which they definetogether and for which they struggle together.)12

Having alluded to the organisational principle which defines theinstitutional reality of the PCF, Marchais evokes the myth it sustains(the progress of the saviour-class), and uses the traditional vocabularywhich alone possesses the appropriate totemic resonance: the vocabularyof ‘struggle’. Thus when he articulates his final injunction to the intel-lectuals, Marchais, as the moral voice of the party, is vested with fullpower and authority: ‘Nous les convions à lutter’ (We invite the intellectualsto take up the struggle).13

It has been argued elsewhere that one of the main effects of Marchais’report to the 23rd Congress of the PCF was to deflect communistdiscourse from the inherited doctrinal control of party discourse anddirect it towards that of a personalised populism.14 But as our referencesto the 22nd Congress suggest, the success of such a strategy was boundto be limited. An attempt at the 23rd Congress to foster a personalisedpopulism, sustained by the endeavour at the preceding Congress toredefine the party’s foundation myth with Marchais as the helmsman,did not possess the mobilising quality which distinguished the foundationmyth of the saviour-class.

The debate at Vitry which preceded the 23rd Congress showed, notfor the first time in the history of the PCF, what occurs when intellectualsconfront the fundamental contradiction of Bolshevik-type revolu-tionary organisations in a hostile society: the resort to authoritarianism



by that organisation. Although Marchais successfully asserts the uniquelegitimacy of his voice at the 23rd Congress, the future effectiveness ofthat voice is not secured. In the report to the 22nd and 23rd Congresseswhat we see pre-figured is a discourse that is trapped and ultimatelyself-defeating. Marchais himself identifies some of the changes affectingthe constituency to which his discourse is addressed (greater pluralism,social diversity, the shrinking size of the working class in proportion tothe rest of the population and so on). What is set in train therefore isthe circular movement or, more aptly, the circumlocution of thespeaker who, knowing that the framework of shared beliefs and collectivevalues that sustains his discourse is breaking down, is nonethelessobliged to refer to them.

By the time of the PCF’s 24th Congress at Saint-Ouen, from 4 to 7February 1982, the monopoly of collective truth in Marchais’ discourseis unchallengeable by the voices of the intellectuals, not because theparty has revoked their membership, but because Marchais’ position asthe ‘oracle’ of the party has enabled him to exercise the constraint orsymbolic violence necessary to defeat these voices. Building on thechange articulated at the 23rd Congress, Marchais opens out the appealto the intellectuals to include groups like engineers and managers. Inthis way, by dissolving them in a larger group of ‘intellectual workers’Marchais turns the focus away from those creative activities whichmake intellectuals independent producers of political capital; secondly,he can now stigmatise their grievances about differentials, professionalstatus, and so on.

[. . .] nous n’ignorons pas que l’origine sociale, la formation, le modede vie des travailleurs intellectuels de toutes catégories les conduisentà sous-estimer la dimension de classe des problèmes qui les touchent,à concevoir souvent le rassemblement avec la classe ouvrière commeun marché de dupes où ils perdraient leur identité, leur spécificitéprofessionnelle et leur responsabilité sociale. [. . .] nous nousefforçons et nous efforcerons de dissiper ces malentendus. Car ilnous faut gagner les intellectuels au combat pour le socialisme.

([. . .] we are quite aware of the fact that the social origin, the educationand the lifestyle of intellectual workers of all categories lead them tounderestimate the class-based element in the problems that affectthem and often to perceive the rally to the working class as a fool’sbargain which would lead them to lose their identity, their profes-sional status and their social responsibility. [. . .] we will continue to



endeavour to dispel these misunderstandings. Because we must winthe intellectuals over to the struggle for socialism.)15

Significantly, Marchais’ report to the PCF’s 25th Congress at L’IleSaint-Denis from 6 to 10 February 1985 was without the usual sectionevoking the PCF’s alliance with the intellectuals. Instead, he now faceda challenge which had been prefigured by l’affaire Fiszbin. Marchais’ability to enunciate a new existence for communist intellectuals –effectively ‘renaming’ them out of existence as voices challenging theauthority of his own voice – could not erase the wider social changesimpacting on the party’s accepted legitimacy. Worse, the call to ‘partydiscipline’ in pursuit of the goal of the saviour-class was diminishingin effectiveness vis-à-vis a membership now more accustomed to theindividualism and other attractions of the system they were supposedto overcome. The symbolic power of leadership discourse in thecontext of the PCF exists, we have seen, because those persons submittingto it believe that it embodies the disinterested defence and advance-ment of their interests. By the mid-1980s, therefore, the authority ofMarchais’ discourse faced the challenge not only of the intellectualsbut also from those members delegated to speak in the lower levels ofthe apparatus.

This development had been clearly signalled in Limoges in June 1984by the central committee member Pierre Juquin who made a speechcalling for a reappraisal of all the party’s fundamental assumptions.This reappraisal would respect no taboos and even turn the spotlight onthe party’s organisational core: democratic centralism.

In his report to the 25th Congress, Marchais refers to Pierre Juquin’saccusation that the leadership has ducked the challenge of critical self-appraisal, and reacts with a vigorous self-justification:

Bien sûr que la direction du Parti – j’ai envie de dire: toutes les direc-tions, à tous les niveaux – ne prétend pas que son action à été, entout point de vue et en toutes circonstances, sans défauts et sansinsuffisances! Le projet de résolution le reconnaît. Qui pourrait,d’ailleurs, dire autrement pour lui-même?

(Of course the leadership of the party – and I would like to say theleadership of all kinds at all levels – doesn’t pretend that its actionshave been, in every respect and in all circumstances, faultless andunfailing! The draft resolution recognises this. And in any case, whocould claim to be any different?)16



A compromise was reached at the 25th Congress in which Juquin wasre-elected not to the political bureau of the party but to its centralcommittee, together with two other members sympathetic to his views,Marcel Rigout and Félix Damette. By the time of the party’s 26thCongress at Saint-Ouen from 2 to 6 December 1987, the compromisehad proved to be a dramatic failure. Having absented himself from thecentral committee meeting which the previous May had unanimouslyendorsed André Lajoinie as the PCF’s presidential candidate for thecontest in 1988, in June, Pierre Juquin resigned from the centralcommittee and, as we have described in the preceding chapter, on12 October made an unprecedented challenge to Marchais and theparty leadership by announcing his decision to stand as a communistpresidential candidate in opposition to Lajoinie. As a consequence ofplacing himself in such unequivocal competition with the party, Juquinprecipitated his own expulsion two days later. In his report to the 26thCongress, Marchais is dismissive when referring to Juquin, because theauthority he has usurped has been restored to the party. UnlikeMarchais, Juquin has no mandate, therefore he has no voice:

[. . .] au parti communiste, Juquin ne représente rien. [. . .] Dans uneinterview récente, Juquin avait par exemple expliqué qu’il avait passé‘des années à essayer de faire bouger les choses de l’intérieur’ et qu’ilavait ‘pris la décision d’en appeler à la base à partir de 1980’. [. . .]Ceux qui ont défendu ces positions à l’époque ont été battus.

([. . .] Juquin represents nothing in the Communist Party. [. . .] In arecent interview Juquin explained how he had spent ‘years trying tochange things from within’ and that he had ‘decided to appeal to thegrassroots after 1980’. [. . .] Those who defended these positions atthe time have been defeated.)17

The dismissal of Juquin’s charges that the party is being crippled by itsorganisational constraints and as a consequence is failing the challengeof facing up to change is followed by an attempt to dress the old mobil-ising myth of the PCF in the apparel of modernity:

‘Le Parti communiste est le seul parti vraiment moderne’, affirme notreprojet de résolution. [.. .] Moderne, notre parti l’est parce que sa réflexions’appuie sur une théorie révolutionnaire, le marxisme, le socialismescientifique; parce qu’il agit avec une pratique politique nouvelle; parcequ’il possède un mode de fonctionnement réellement démocratique.



(Our draft resolution affirms that ‘the Communist Party is the onlytruly modern party’. [. . .] Our party is modern because its ideas reston a revolutionary theory, Marxism, scientific socialism; because itoperates through a new political practice; because it possesses amode of functioning which is really democratic.)18

After a traditional analysis of the economic and social exploitation inFrench society which, he argues, makes the imperatives of Marxismmore appropriate than ever, Marchais then goes on to encapsulate whatthe party’s new strategy for rallying a new majority to its cause means,and what he expects of the membership. In keeping with the old myth,he uses the mythified vocabulary of the ‘struggle’:

Ce que nous demandons aux communistes est simple. Je l’ai dit: c’estd’être eux-mêmes. C’est-à-dire des lutteurs, des combattants qui sonttoujours là lorsqu’il faut se dresser contre l’injustice, l’oppression, lemalheur des faibles.

(As I have said, what we expect of communists is simple: it’s for themto be themselves. It’s for them to be fighters, combatants who arealways there when there is a need to rise up against injustice, oppressionand the suffering of the weak.)19

But the decline in the system of shared values to which Marchais’discourse could appeal, and thus remain performative, was implied bythe French presidential election of 1988, which came in the springfollowing the PCF’s 26th Congress. Their official candidate, AndréLajoinie, took only a 6.7 per cent share of the vote in the first roundon 24 April 1988, suggesting that a substantial number of PCFmembers had opted straightaway for the vote utile and cast their votefor the best placed left-wing candidate, Socialist François Mitterrand.As with the aftermath of the PCF’s disappointing performance in thelegislative elections a decade earlier, the period following the presi-dential election of 1988 gave rise to voices which criticised the PCFleadership and which showed little regard for the constraints of ademocratic centralism designed to ensure that the PCF was a partyunited in purpose and in the expression of that purpose. But incontrast to the period 1978–80, the voices raised in criticism of theparty leadership after 1988 suggested that if Marchais was not abusingthe mandate that authorised him to speak for the party, he certainlymisunderstood it.



In October 1989, Charles Fiterman, a central committee member andone of the four Communist ministers in the Socialist governmentbetween 1981 and 1984, began a long and sustained criticism ofMarchais’ leadership which continued until the latter’s decision not tostand again as a candidate for the post of General Secretary of the partyin 1994. In 1989, in a letter to the central committee, Fiterman criti-cised the PCF’s tendency under Marchais to constantly raise the stakespolitically on all manner of issues simply for the sake of distinguishingitself from other parties (chiefly, of course, the PS).20

Quoting at length from his book, Démocratie, Marchais analyses the‘Stalinist deviation’ which had rendered relations within communistparties authoritarian:

Certes, il fut un temps, dont j’ai parlé, où notre principe de fonction-nement, le centralisme démocratique, fut dévoyé sous l’influence dece qui se pratiquait en Union Soviétique. La direction du partiexerçait alors sur celui-ci un pouvoir qui ne lui revient pas; le culte dela personnalité des dirigeants était encouragé; l’appel à la disciplinese substituait souvent à l’effort réel de conviction.

(There was certainly a time, of which I have spoken, when the principlegoverning the way we function, democratic centralism, went offcourse under the influence of what was being practised in the SovietUnion. The party leadership interpreted it in a way to which it was notentitled; the cult of personality was encouraged; the demand for discip-line was often a substitute for the genuine effort born of conviction.)21

It soon becomes clear, however, that in the absence of an alternativeorganising principle, Marchais is forced to reinterpret the principle ofdemocratic centralism, which he admits had been exploited by theleadership, now portraying it to the Congress as the dynamic for thefuture democratisation and modernisation of the party:

La discussion préparatoire a permis de vérifier l’attachement de latrès grande majorité des communistes à ce principe, et notammentleur rejet d’une organisation en ‘courants’ ou en fractions. En mêmetemps, l’idée se dégage clairement que nous n’avons pas épuisétoutes les possibilités démocratiques que ce principe recèle.

(The preliminary discussion has demonstrated the attachment of thegreat majority of communists to this principle, and notably their



rejection of a party organised into ‘tendencies’ or factions. At thesame time what is clearly emerging is that we have not exhausted allthe democratic potential inherent in this principle.)22

The way in which democratic centralism evolved, particularly incommunist parties within representative democracies, meant that itbecame the essential means of justifying the ‘universal’ voice of theParty. As we have seen from our analysis, it also became essential to thespecific form of leadership the PCF had taken during the Fifth Republic.Much of the period of Marchais’ leadership of the PCF throughout the1970s and 1980s is characterised by his attempt to maintain this formof leadership and protect it from challenges.

Let us conclude by citing two events which challenged, in the firstcase, the PCF’s traditional fidelity to the communist establishmentin Moscow and, in the second case, the PCF’s traditional interpret-ation of its position vis-à-vis the wider capitalist world. The purposeof these examples is to illustrate how the discursive strategiesemployed by Marchais to articulate a response to these events werestrategies of failure, trapped by the inability to rebuild thehomology of interest between himself and the party members or toappeal to a new basis of shared belief. As a result of this failureMarchais’ discourse declined in symbolic power and was perceivedas serving the self-interested aims of the PCF apparatus: its simple‘reproduction’.

The challenge of events

The coup attempt in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev by communisthardliners in August 1991 elicited a response from the PCF leadershipthat was, paradoxically, both surprising and predictable.

The most striking aspect of the formal PCF response to the coupattempt is its circumspectness, if not indeed its reluctance to condemnforthrightly the hardline communist conspirators. The statement putout by the political bureau on 19 August 1991 mentions neither ‘coup’nor ‘putsch’, and expresses its disquiet at the apparent ousting ofGorbachev in the following manner: ‘Nous estimons que les conditionsd’éviction de Mikhail Gorbatchev de ses responsabilités sont inacceptables’(We believe the conditions in which Mikhail Gorbatchev has beenrelieved of his duties are not acceptable).23



When, on the same day, Georges Marchais was asked for his responseto the events in Moscow, his reaction was the same. His feelings, hesaid, were those of:

Regret et inquiétude. Regret de la méthode employée pour renverserMikhail Gorbatchev; le Bureau politique de notre parti, qui vient de seréunir, l’a qualifiée ‘d’inacceptable’ – c’est le mot qui convient. [. . .] Etinquiétude, bien sûr, pour ce qui va se passer maintenant. [. . .] En toutcas, j’ai, pour ma part, une conviction, qui est aussi celle de mon parti:pour répondre aux exigences contemporaines, une société socialiste nepeut être que l’œuvre créatrice du peuple, est c’est à lui qu’il appar-tient, en toute indépendance, de trouver ses solutions aux problèmesqui lui sont posés. En Union soviétique comme partout ailleurs, touteautre voie que celle de la modernisation, donc de la démocratisation,ne peut que condamner le socialisme à l’échec, comme l’expérience ena été faite avant 1985. [. . .] Telle est, je le répète, ma conviction.

(Regret and anxiety. Regret at the method employed for bringingdown Mikhail Gorbachev – the political bureau of our party, which hasjust met, has called it ‘unacceptable’, which is appropriate. [. . .] Andanxiety, of course, about what will happen now. [. . .] In any case, for mypart, I have a conviction which is also shared by my party: in order torespond to the demands of today, a socialist society can only be createdby the people and it’s up to the people to find, quite independently,solutions to the problems which they face. In the Soviet Union as every-where else, the choice of any road other than modernisation, andtherefore democratisation, can only condemn socialism to failure, asexperience showed before 1985. [. . .] That, I repeat, is my conviction.)24

Affirmations like ‘for my part’, ‘I repeat’, ‘my conviction’ are highlysignificant here; yet instead of signalling an aggressive discursive takeoverof authority by the speaker, they are indicative rather of a discursiverepli or retreat. By passing between himself and the party as it were, andthus shifting the focus of attention from himself as party spokespersonand himself as an observer of events, Marchais’ discourse is an aptexample of personalised damage-limitation.

The decline in the unique authority of Marchais’ discourse as themoral voice of the PCF was underlined by what occurred in the pressconference given by Charles Fiterman ten days later. Fiterman roundlycondemned the ‘quartet of nostalgic Stalinists’ chiefly responsible forthe coup attempt and expressed his regret that the PCF leadership hadnot been forthcoming in its reaction:



As a member of the political bureau of the French Communist Party,I suffered from not hearing its leadership say the things it shouldhave said and take the initiatives it should have taken. The coupd’état should have been condemned immediately, by calling thingsby their proper name.25

Fiterman’s final sentence implied criticism of Marchais as a closetStalinist who sympathised with the coup leaders, and yet whose real sinwas one of language: the refusal to speak honestly and say courageouslywhat one felt.

When the PCF central committee met on 20–21 May 1992 to debatethe Maastricht referendum and its implications, the report presentedby Francis Wurtz, a Communist Party Member of European Parliament(MEP), explained the basis for the PCF’s campaign for a ‘no’ vote. Inessence, the treaty was designed to serve the Europe of the financiersand multinationals, to the detriment of social benefits and those inneed of them; it would lead to an attempt to undermine the rights ofworkers; it would generally undermine democracy in France.26 Theensuing debate was marked by the emergence of three positions onthe Maastricht issue that remained irreconcilable and appeared toelicit the greatest passion from Marchais on the matter of procedurerather than on substance. For Philippe Herzog, the PCF should havebeen steering its efforts in the direction of a renegotiation of the termsof the treaty in order to build a European Union that was orientatedleftwards. For Charles Fiterman, the ‘all or nothing’ approach beingadopted by the PCF was not an adequate way to progress towards aunited states of Europe. Marchais, however, appeared to reserve hissuspicion for any discourse that had not been properly conditioned bythe party’s institutional procedures. While affirming his support forthe creation of a ‘pluridisciplinary group’ to study the points raised byFrancis Wurtz’s report and the reactions to them, Marchais expressedhis principal concern as being the need to ‘work together’ and hereserved his most pointed comments for those who, he argued, hadattempted to abuse the procedure governing the kind of discussion inwhich they were engaged and then pretended that they had beendeprived of a voice.

Referring to Charles Fiterman’s attempt to introduce his own documentfor discussion on the eve of the meeting and his rejection of thecompromise offered, Marchais says:

[. . .] la bonne méthode, c’est la discussion, la confrontation desidées, la participation critique et constructive de chacun à la



réflexion et à la décision communes. [. . .] Eh bien, moi, je persiste,avec les communistes, à vouloir ‘travailler ensemble’. Et ça, ce n’estpas de la procédure, ce n’est pas: ‘article 1, article 2, etc.’ Non, le‘travailler ensemble’, cela suppose un effort de chacun, un effortmutuel, une volonté.

([. . .] the right method is discussion, the confrontation of ideas, thecritical and constructive participation of everyone in collective debateand decision-making. [. . .] As for me, I’ll stick with the Communistsin an effort to ‘work together’. And that’s not a matter of procedure,it’s not ‘article 1, article 2, etc.’. ‘Working together’ means an effortfrom everyone, a mutual effort, a will.)27

Marchais’ decision to stick with the Communists and the accent on‘method’ and ‘procedure’, together define a discourse where the deter-mining homology of interest is between the leadership and the partyapparatus which supports it, a discourse aimed at securing the leader-ship’s dominant position. However, the party of tendencies he hadargued against had become a reality, and the challenge to the authorityof his discourse begun by the intellectuals was, in the closing years ofhis tenure as PCF General Secretary, being carried by some of his mosttalented colleagues on the party’s most powerful bodies. Even somedominant members of the apparatus now failed to unite behind hisvoice. In what would have once been severely sanctioned as evidence offactionalism, Philippe Herzog, a leading party economist, continued hiscampaign for a qualified ‘no’ aimed at the creation of a better EuropeanUnion, and this in the pages of the non-party press.28 Charles Fiterman,as the recognised leader of the refondateur tendency in the PCF, andMarcel Rigout, as the recognised leader of the reconstructeur29 tendency,campaigned together with personalities from other parties in highlypublicised meetings like the one held at la Mutualité in Paris on9 September 1992, in favour of a ‘creative no’ aimed at uniting andmobilising the forces for social change in France.30

Conclusion

After the referendum on Maastricht, the challenges to Marchais as thevoice of the party continued and from far humbler figures than partynotables like Herzog, Fiterman and Rigout. In his own constituency inthe Val-de-Marne, during the immediate run-up to the legislative elec-tions of March 1993, Georges Marchais had to contend with the



communist mayor of the commune of Arcueil, Marcel Trigon, who wasin open and vociferous rebellion against the PCF leadership.31

At the central committee meeting of 16 June 1993, convened toprepare the ground for the PCF’s 28th Congress scheduled for 25–29January 1994, Marchais introduced a report calling for the abandonmentof the principle of democratic centralism and its replacement with theprinciple of ‘democracy’. In response to suggestions that this wassimply the belated acceptance of a reality that had already existed forsome time, Marchais affirmed that there was no contradiction orabsurdity about being communist and having profound disagreementsover party policy but denied that this marked a fundamental transform-ation of the party:

Peut-être certains s’interrogeront-ils: mais que propose-t-on alors?Les courants et les tendances organisées? Je répondrai ‘non’, puisqu’ila été abondamment démontré qu’un tel fonctionnement n’est pasdémocratique.

(Perhaps some people will ask: what then is being proposed? Organisedfactions and tendencies? I will answer ‘no’, because it has beenamply demonstrated that a party which functions in this way is notdemocratic.)32

Thus, six months before the party’s 28th Congress, Marchais appearedto relinquish his attachment to a principle whose democratic potentialhe had praised at the 27th Congress. He also signalled his intention torelinquish his post as General Secretary at the 28th Congress (laterconfirmed by letter to the central committee on 28 September 1993).How, in practice, a simple commitment to ‘democracy’ could provide anew organisational principle for a party whose identity had been sopowerfully conditioned by the myth of the saviour-class and the pursuitof its end was something on which Marchais did not elaborate. Theother key question left unanswered, unless this amounted to a de factoacceptance of the ‘social-democratisation’ of the party, concerned thespecificity of the PCF vis-à-vis the other progressive forces of the Left.The election of Robert Hue to the post of PCF General Secretary at theparty’s 28th Congress on 29 January 1994, although enthusiasticallyacclaimed by the bulk of the activists present, was condemned by therefondateurs as further illustration of the leadership’s autoreproduction,33

and the final session was marked by Fiterman’s public announcementof his departure from the central committee. Hue’s leadership was both



an indication of how the party had come to realise the bankruptcy ofMarchais’ leadership, and of how the old guard still clung to power.Marchais’ attempt finally to distance himself from the principle ofdemocratic centralism ultimately exemplified a discourse that wasunderwritten by little credit or credibility. This marked the end of theprocess begun in the 1970s when Marchais became the oracle of thesaviour-class, largely to counter the challenge posed by FrançoisMitterrand; continued during the 1980s when his discourse portrayedhim as the personification of the oracle party, in response to the growingchorus of dissenting voices within the PCF; and concluded in the l990s, asMarchais’ floundering efforts to embody the party discursively led to anincreasing reliance on the authority of the party’s institutions tocompensate for the declining authority of his own voice. The questionposed by the departing Fiterman at the time, as to whether the PCF hadnot already ceased to exist, was undoubtedly coloured by the personaldespair of a communist who had lost his faith. But it did presage thebroader question that we will address in Part III: is there still a role forthe PCF?


Part III

A Party Without a Role?




141

7 A Tale of Clashing Counter-cultures

Introduction

In the previous chapter we analysed the way in which Marchais’ leader-ship discourse became introverted to the point of no longer being ableto convince his own party members of its pertinence. In the currentchapter we shall open up this theme to look more broadly at the relation-ship between the party and the national community whose belief in themission of the PCF was in manifest decline. Whether it was the openchallenge to the PCF of an erstwhile party functionary like Pierre Juquin,or the forlorn attempts to reform the party from the inside by distin-guished but disenchanted members like Charles Fiterman (especially whenfaced with what they believed to be the failures of Georges Marchais’leadership), their actions added to the evidence of a lack of synchron-icity between the PCF and the society it aspired to change, and evenbetween the party and the members it purported to serve. But the actionsof Juquin and Fiterman marked the ultimate phase in a long-termprocess of change that pointed to the need for a reappraisal of the senseof identity and mission that lay at the heart of the PCF’s raison d’être.One of the original strengths of the party, certainly in the way it under-stood itself, had been as a refuge from the exploitation characteristic ofcapitalist society and the superstructure of oppressive values it generated.As a consequence, apart from the overthrow of that system, the definingmission of the party was to offer an alternative set of values around whichto organise the collective existence of its members: a counter-culture.By the 1980s, the calls for change by rénovateurs and contestataires likethe ones mentioned above suggested that not only had the party failedin its counter-cultural mission, but that in a sense that mission had


142 A Party Without a Role?

been turned on it head, in that the attitudes that defined the party hadthemselves become fixed and oppressive.

A change had occurred whereby the counter-culture had hardenedinto a set of positions that, instead of offering a dynamic alternative tothe legacy of velvet authoritarianism bequeathed to the Republic by deGaulle, provided, rather, another facet of the dogmatism that the newgeneration which grew up during the Fifth Republic perceived as themajor obstacle to a new and liberated experience of life. The contradic-tions in the PCF attitude to the student uprisings in May 1968 wereindicative of a generational dysjunct with a new cohort of young peopleanimated by a much more diffuse and much less ideologically regi-mented understanding of revolutionary change than the PCF. But thatdysjunct became both generalised outside the party and internalised, asthe intellectual credibility or even relevance of its positions came underscrutiny. This perception of an erstwhile counter-cultural force that wasfailing its rendezvous with the changes in French society inevitablybegs the question as to whether these failures were punctual, in theFrench sense, that is, purely due to bad timing, or profound in that thechallenges posed by change were being addressed by plural counter-cultures that were not underpinned by the totalising vision underlyingthat of the PCF. What was incontrovertible, however, was that the failureof the PCF to promote its values and win the intellectual arguments hada detrimental effect on its material survival as an organisation, and leftit at the end of the twentieth century pondering what strategies toemploy to ensure its continued existence.

May 1968: A generational dysjunct

In fairness to the PCF, all the major political parties were caughtoff-balance when the pent-up frustrations of a materially privilegedgeneration of young people exploded onto the public consciousness inMay 1968. The remarkable period of dynamic modernisation in theeconomy following World War II had resulted in an economic miraclethat had left growth rates in Britain far behind and allowed France toovertake even West Germany in the year on year rate of growth. Theeconomic boom, coupled with the baby boom, had led to unpreced-ented expansion in tertiary education, with the numbers of studentsrising from 215,000 to 508,000 between 1960 and 1968. In hindsight, itis easy to see that such growth carried the seeds of inevitable crisis,given the failure in infrastructure investment that should have allowedthe universities to cope with such a rapid increase in student numbers.1


A Tale of Clashing Counter-cultures 143

Less tangible but no less real was the general inability in the politicalmainstream to read the depth of dismay among young people at whatthey felt was the ambient sense of asphyxiation created by the benevo-lent authoritarianism of the de Gaulle regime, and it was this dismaywhich spilled violently onto the streets following the afternoon of 3 May,when the police entered the Sorbonne to arrest the student protesterswho had barricaded themselves inside.

Unlike many other parties, however, the PCF was, in theory, betterplaced to pick up the rumblings of discontent before they exploded.Party activists were well established among university teaching staff andthe Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) provided a vehicle for theparty to reach out to the student body. In fact, 1968 had been markedby good intentions when in the February of that year the PCF started aseries of forums for students in support of the right to higher educationand a more democratic university structure. But in reality the PCF hadlost influence when control of the main university teachers’ union,Syndicat national de l’enseignement supérieur (SNESup), slipped from itsgrasp, and its ability to attract students through the UEC was diminishedas a result of the purges and internal wrangling that the union had hadto endure.

In ideological terms, the 1960s were marked by a doctrinal efferves-cence that had led to the PCF being outflanked on the Left in its potentialto appeal to young people looking for radical solutions for society’sproblems. Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists and libertarians of everystripe had emerged and all of them, from one perspective or another,had recriminations to make with regard to the PCF. For the Trotskyists,the PCF had remained fundamentally Stalinist in its organisation andorientation, and had compromised the progress of worldwide revolutionbecause of its accommodations with state power and the privileged relation-ships with bureaucracies inside and outside the communist movement.For the Maoists, the PCF had renounced its hard-edged Stalinist inherit-ance by renouncing violence as a means of effecting revolutionary change.From diverse quarters on the extreme left, there was a perception of thePCF as reformist or revisionist to the point of having fatally betrayedthe notion of revolution. The apparent success of an anti-capitalist,anti-American revolution in Cuba, and the war in Vietnam had led toan uncritical cult of admiration for Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, anda corresponding contempt for the non-violent campaign of solidarityorganised by the PCF in sympathy with those struggles. It is noteworthythat at one of the flashpoints for the student uprising in May, thecampus at the university of Nanterre, on 26 April the Maoist faction



among the student body had forcibly prevented Pierre Juquin fromholding a meeting with university lecturers, in his capacity as thecentral committee member with responsibility for those relations.

It was not surprising therefore that when the student discontent eruptedinto violence the official line of the PCF leadership should be one ofsevere criticism with regard to the student leaders from the extreme left.Georges Marchais was in no doubt, when he spoke for the party in thecolumns of L’Humanité on 3 May, that the most high profile of theagitators, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was a German anarchist from a privilegedbourgeois background who, with his band of pseudo-revolutionaries,was simply providing ammunition for the Gaullist regime and themonopoly capitalism that was supporting it. The effect of the party lineemanating from L’Humanité was to drive the wedge between the PCFand the student body even deeper, and Marchais’ comments wereparticularly ill-timed since their publication coincided with the day onwhich the police entered the precinct of the Sorbonne, in what wasseen by the majority of students, as a manifest injustice aimed atcurtailing their freedom of expression. On the one hand, there was anunderstandable frustration on the part of the PCF that the action of thestudents had undermined their own approach to the challenge ofchanging French society. The heady rhetoric of the students and thewillingness of the more extreme elements to resort to violence couldlegitimately be seen as counter-productive, by a party that had investedits legendary discipline and patience in a strategy of unifying the Leftin a pacific pursuit of power that would validate its claims to be anacceptable party of government. By allowing the Right to tar allelements of the Left with the same brush in the eyes of the electorate,Cohn-Bendit and his friends were not serving the cause of the Left’slegitimate accession to power. On the other hand, there was a deeper,more ideological, and in the eyes of its critics, less forgivable dimensionto the PCF’s reticence vis-à-vis the student revolutionaries. The studentshad, in a sense, usurped the role of the working class, led by theparty, in its struggle to overcome the forces of capitalism. This wasa major grievance for a party steeped in the traditions and myths ofproletarian struggle, to the extent that those traditions and mythsstructured both the organisation of the party and the superstructureof values that defined it. And this sense of grievance was exacerbatedby the view the PCF formed of the social origins of the student agitators:offspring of a petty bourgeosie who had profited from the advent ofmass higher education and who would eventually enter professional lifein the service of bourgeois interests.



The difficulty for the PCF lay in the fact that the criticisms of thesystem voiced by the students in Paris resonated across French society,eliciting demonstrations of solidarity from fellow-students in the prov-inces. Moreover, while middle-class or aspiring to be so, the parents of thestudents in question saw them neither as rogue elements troublingthe progress of the Left as the PCF might see them, or as purveyors ofan anarchic threat to the foundations of civilised society, as the Rightmight portray them. Furthermore, in their clashes with the students theactions of the forces of law and order showed that when the velvetglove was removed from the authoritarian hand of the de Gaulle regime,the consequences could be very brutal. All political considerationsaside, the students benefited from the widespread feeling that the violencesometimes exercised by the police was out of proportion to the realthreat posed by the students.2 In the first battle with the police, followingthe ejection of the students from the Sorbonne, the indiscriminateblows inflicted by the forces of law and order on passers-by as well asstudents could have been explained by the panic in the police ranks atthe feeling of being overwhelmed numerically, and by a situation mostof them had never faced before. By the end of the rioting that tookplace three days later in the Latin Quarter, during the night of the sixth,the authorities appeared to have lost the media battle. Having spent mostof that encounter with the students on the back foot and sustaininga high number of casualties in the face of organised violence by theleading agitators, after the police finally outmanoeuvred the students theyhunted down the fleeing stragglers with the brutality born of pent-upfrustration. When the minister responsible, Alain Peyrefitte, appearedon the news that evening, the validity of the legal basis for the actionsof the authorities did little to assuage the ruffled sensibilities of manyviewers.3 The general public, not yet alarmed by what the wider conse-quences of these challenges to public order might be, seemed to havegiven way to a natural sympathy for the wayward idealism of youthagainst the dour face of authority.

The PCF therefore found itself out of step with not only the naturalconstituency of rebellion, the young, but also the older constituencyrepresented by many of their parents. When the realisation dawnedthat it was being left behind by the changing mood of French society,the party began to adjust its aim. On 7 May the party leadershipacknowledged that the students had a legitimate grievance and turnedits fire on the government. Following the rioting that had reached itsheight over the barricades in the Latin Quarter during the early hours,on 11 May an official PCF communiqué condemned the repressive



measures employed by the police and for the first time appealed toworkers to support the protest in favour of greater political freedom.The following day the PCF added its voice to the call by the unions(notably the CGT, CFDT, FEN, UNEF and SNESup) for a show of solidarityby resorting to a general strike on the thirteenth. The party’s politicalbureau even made a virtue of the new unity between the students andthe working class, as a means of establishing a democratic front thatpaved the way to the realisation of socialism.

The 24-hour general strike of 13 May was a powerful demonstration ofsolidarity, with hundreds of thousands of trade unionists crossing the Seinefrom the Gare de l’Est to the student heartland of Denfert-Rochereau, withthe students themselves continuing the march up to the Champs-de-Mars.Solidarity was forthcoming from the provinces too, with paralleldemonstrations in support of the movement in Paris. It was in the lightof this success that the PCF opted for a strategy of dynamic engagementwith the movement for change, and did so on two fronts. On the socialand economic front, the CGT union provided the party with a formid-able tool for assuming a leading role at the grassroots, and its approvalfor the widening of strike action with the occupation of businesspremises found ready implementation through the CGT representationon the shop floor. On the political front, the PCF’s commitment to thecause, though belated, nonetheless allowed it to give renewed impetusto its strategy for a union of the Left on the basis of a commonprogramme. From that point onwards until the end of the month, thePCF tried to balance its objectives of both appearing to sympathise withthe demonstrators while attempting to steer the Left’s response to thecrisis. The weekend beginning Saturday, the 18 May when betweenthree to six million workers opted for strike action marked a high pointin the convergence of the PCF–CGT line with the wishes of the studentmovement. But it was also clear that the PCF was trying to establish thebasis of a unified action that it was attempting to lead, evidenced by thepressure it was putting on the Fédération de la gauche démocratique etsocialiste (FDGS) to create unified structures at departmental level thatmight serve the plan promoted by the Communists as an antidote tothe Gaullist regime’s endeavour to rescue the personalisation of power:a government of popular democratic union.

The logic of the PCF’s position meant that it had to censure those actionsthat fell outside the structures it envisaged for pursuing the agenda forchange. Thus the actions of the extreme left agitators during the nightof the 24–25 May when a student demonstration at the Gare de Lyonled to another night of the barricades in the Latin Quarter drew fire



from the pages of L’Humanité that in its own way was just as ferociousas the Interior Minister’s castigation of the agitators as a criminal under-class. The ambitions of the more moderate sections of Left that felloutside of the PCF agenda were also criticised. Through the pages ofL’Humanité and the declarations of the political bureau, it was madeclear that alternative strategies to those of the party were nothing lessthan efforts to dupe the working class and frustrate their ambitions, suchas François Mitterrand’s press conference on 28 May when he announcedhis willingness to stand as a presidential candidate should the post becomevacant, and his idea of a provisional government that might be led byPierre Mendès-France. That same afternoon, Waldeck Rochet declaredthe PCF’s willingness to participate in government, but dismissed anyattempt to turn to a providential leader.

What the PCF perceived as its window of opportunity closed evenmore suddenly than it appeared to be opened. On 29 May the paroxysmthat seemed to convulse the Gaullist state reached its peak when, mid-morning, de Gaulle disappeared to Issy-les-Moulineaux and then byhelicopter to Baden-Baden. There was an understandable triumphalismin L’Humanité on 30 May when it reported the success of the CGTmobilisation that coincided with de Gaulle’s departure and seemed to fillthe void left behind by it. Between 15.00 and 20.00 hours the CGT-leddemonstration filled the streets of Paris from the place de la Bastilleto Saint-Lazare and prompted the following day’s banner headline inL’Humanité, ‘Une seule volonté: Gouvernement populaire!’ (With onevoice: popular government). However, the political vacuum was of veryshort duration since de Gaulle had returned to his home at Colombeyon the very evening of 29 May. The crisis of confidence soon passedas the Gaullist state set about reclaiming its legitimacy. L’Humanité’striumphal headline the following morning was followed by de Gaulle’sdecision to dissolve parliament in the afternoon in preparation for newlegislative elections, and to follow that act with a radio address to theFrench people. By 18.00 hours the demonstration organised by the GaullistUDR and the Républicains indépendants had brought massive numbersonto the Champs Elysées in support of the General. Similar demonstra-tions in the provinces on the following day confirmed that the PCF’shopes of exploiting the crisis in pursuit of a popular governmentconducive to the pursuit of its interests had passed.

It was no longer feasible, even in terms of political discourse, for thePCF to offer the country the dramatically antithetical choice betweenthe dictatorship personified by de Gaulle and the democracy it purportedto embody. Once the paroxysm of anxiety in the political system was



passed, the party had to be seen to be a responsible participant in theinterplay of institutional forces, and signalled as much when it reachedagreement with the FGDS to respect republican discipline and desistwhere logic dictated in favour of each others’ candidates in the secondround of the impending legislative elections. As the result of the electionson 23 and 30 June indicated, however, the electorate was not inclinedto gamble on the Left and showed as much at the ballot box. While thePCF could still emerge, predictably, as the single biggest party of theLeft with 20 per cent of the votes cast, it had nonetheless lost 600,000voters and 39 seats compared to the previous legislative election.

The immediate assessment of the significance of May 1968 incommunist circles was itself indicative of the dysjunct between theparty leadership and the intellectual processes operating in Frenchsociety at large, reflected even in its own ranks among members whosevocation was one of engagement. Central committee meetings in earlyJuly and later in December had to address the challenge of formulatingan interpretation of May 1968, not least because intellectual elementswithin the party had already begun to do so. Even during the events,the doyen of communist letters, Louis Aragon, steered an editorial linein the pages of Les Lettres Françaises that refused to vilify the students assome of the columns of L’Humanité did, notwithstanding the vitupera-tive accusations of Stalinism that were aimed at Aragon by some of thestudents. Also in May, Roger Garaudy did not allow his membership ofthe political bureau of the party to prevent him from publishing, in thepages of the communist periodical, Démocratie nouvelle, an article thatattempted to open up new perspectives on the alliances the PCF had toforge if it was to be in a position to address the new challenges facingFrench society. More strikingly still, while the mainstream communistpress was condemning the extremist student agitators for havingprovoked the violence of the night of 24–25 May, 36 party members,mostly intellectuals (including the notable historian Albert Soboul) butalso including former high-ranking functionaries like Charles Tillon, werepresenting a letter to the leadership affirming their solidarity with theprotest movement. The letter went so far as to criticise the party fortrying to slow this extraordinary impetus for change and for havingisolated itself from this great force for socialist renewal.4

When the analysis of May 1968 emerged from the central committee,it made some concessions but was in essence a predictable defence of thefamiliar ideological position of the party with regard to its constituencyand its vocation. The reflections that were the fruit of the July meetingsof the central committee acknowledged the battle of ideas represented



by May 1968 and conceded that the PCF had not engaged with thestudents and the youth in general as well as it might have. The legisla-tive election results, the central committee believed, were due to theanti-communist paranoia whipped up by de Gaulle and his supportersand the widespread anxiety among voters concerning the consequencesof further unrest. But the general conclusion concerning the actions ofthe party during the crisis was that it was justified and that the workingclass had acquitted itself well during the weeks of struggle.

The December deliberations of the committee revolved around keyideological considerations that attempted to give a historical dimensionand justification for the party position. In the first place, the centralcommittee was clear that the situation in May was not propitious torevolution: there was not the power vacuum that some had imagined,the working class was not prepared to launch itself into a struggleaccording to the terms defined by the students, and the preconditionsthat would have facilitated a thoroughgoing alliance of the forces of theLeft were not in place. While it was possible to sympathise with theunderlying motives of the students, the central committee’s view washostile to any suggestion that the central role of the working class inthe pursuit of profound social change had in any way been diminished.In its opinion, the student uprisings had followed in the footsteps ofthe battles waged by the working class, but unlike the latter theircampaign played ultimately into the hands of bourgeois interests. ThePCF was adamant, and confident, that its strategy for power, namelythe forging of a common platform for government by the Left, wascorrect, and that its role in this process was unambiguous: the avant-garde party of the Left leading the working class and promoting theclass consciousness that would be instrumental in the defeat of cap-italism, thus paving the way for the advent of socialism.

The difficulty not envisaged by the PCF was that the totalising con-sciousness it promoted could not compete with the revolution in people’sminds that the events of May 1968 bore witness to and accelerated.5

The plurality of consciousnesses and the diversity of constructs throughwhich to view society that were stimulated by the events of May possesseda transgressive potential that could not be reconciled to the regimenta-tion demanded by the communist world view. The students had lostthe battle of the barricades, but they had set in train a re-evaluationof assumptions and aspirations that had only just begun.6 The demise ofideology that would be so evident a generation later and find a symbolicapogee in the literal dismantling of the Berlin wall had already beenannounced. As some commentators have observed, May 1968 was



midwife to the birth of another ‘counter-culture’.7 The concept ofa counter-culture was decoupled from the conventional understandingof revolution in the socio-economic sense and opened to a much morepluralistic interpretation, and this was done essentially by jettisoningbelief in the working class as the primary instrument for the conquestof power. The notion of power itself was rethought as the focus forchange shifted from the economic to the cultural and, in temporalterms, from a hypothesised and collective end-state to an everyday andongoing redefinition of the self, such as in the individual relationshipto one’s gender or one’s consumption of the resources in the environ-ment. The kernel of the feminist movement in France had existedbefore May 1968, but the events of that month had given it a platformthat it had not enjoyed beforehand, enabling it to fill amphitheatres atthe Sorbonne with a new public motivated by the desire to understandits agenda. While the movement affirmed its solidarity with the world-wide struggle against exploitation, it also signalled that its own strugglecould not be contained in the classic antitheses postulated in theideology of parties like the PCF, since women were a community thattranscended distinctions of class.8 Similarly, for the environmentalistswho were to come to the fore in the succeeding decades, May 1968 hadbeen a rendezvous with history. Many of the movement’s future leaderscut their teeth through the organisation of protests in the heady atmos-phere of the time, but their challenge to society was one that refused tobe corralled ideologically.9 The environmentalist movements that evolvedwere, in any case, intrinsically averse to the hierarchical structures ofclassic political parties, which in their eyes replicated the structuresof the State. Moreover, their articles of faith prevented them fromcompromising with the productivist economic assumptions that wereshared by the parties of both Left and Right, whereas the environmentalrevolution they pursued was fundamentally predicated on the opposite.10

But if the PCF had failed to engage with the battle of ideas on the widerfront that had given birth to a new generation of young people deter-mined to change society according to their lights, it faced the evenmore serious prospect of losing the battle of ideas in its own ranks.

Losing the battle of ideas

While the PCF had clearly failed to grasp the scale of the revolution inmentalities represented by the events of May 1968, it was not whollyunaware of the need to reposition itself, both domestically and inter-nationally, in order to counteract the perception of its culture as one of



ideologically conditioned conservatism and to restore its credibility asa genuine force of opposition to the status quo. Following hard on theheels of the events that convulsed intellectual consciences in Francecame the crisis in Czechoslovakia, which convulsed left-wing intellec-tual consciences internationally. The attempts of Alexander Dubcek andhis colleagues to reconcile socialism and liberty had made the politicalspring in Eastern Europe pregnant with expectation and anxiety.Dubcek had discussed his ambitions with communist leaders inWestern Europe, notably from Italy in May and France in July. Dubcekwas significantly warmer in his exchanges with the Italian, Luigi Longo,than with Waldeck Rochet from France, yet nonetheless, when theSoviet Union and its allies (Poland, East Germany, Hungary andBulgaria) decided to put an end to Dubcek’s experiment by sending inthe tanks, for once the PCF broke with its traditional and unconditionaldefence of the USSR’s actions on the international stage.11 The fall-outon 21 August 1968 was almost immediate. The political bureau of thePCF drafted a communiqué regarding the Soviet-led military interven-tion in Czechoslovakia that expressed its surprise and ‘réprobation’, andappeared in the following day’s edition of L’Humanité. Although duringthe weeks that followed the PCF would attenuate this criticism, andthrough the exchanges with Moscow during the autumn ultimatelyendorse the ‘normalisation’ of the Czech communist party’s affairs,12

there was evidence of a sensibility to the argument that the PCF neededto demonstrate greater freedom of movement on the internationalscene.

Subsequent accounts from actors in other West European communistparties, notably in Italy, evoke a scenario in which the PCF had joinedits Italian sister party in drafting a damning response to the militarysolution imposed by the Soviet Union to the challenge from Prague,only to draw back from publishing it.13 The theme of ‘unity in diversity’which was to lead the Italian Communist Party down the road ofdeeper democratic reform was not unattractive to the PCF, but thetentative steps towards a eurocommunist reformist vision was alwaysconstrained by the umbilical cord of ideological fidelity to Moscow, andcomplicated by the strategy developed to secure the party’s future athome. In a sense, the Czech crisis set a precedent, in that faced with anincreasingly individualised Western culture that was repelled by totali-tarianism, the PCF could not refuse to find ways of censuring the repres-sive practices that continued to be employed by the Soviet Union. Thesignature of the Common Programme with the PS in 1972 did notmean that the PCF would support what it considered the PS’ anti-Soviet



line over the ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, but the political bureauof the party nonetheless formulated a line that was critical of thepolitical trials organised there.14

As the decade progressed, the party became more overt in expressingits sympathy with the prevailing mood of concern regarding the abuseof individual human rights in the Soviet Union. While maintaininga general discourse that affirmed its belief in the social and economicprogress represented by the Soviet model, the PCF allowed itself to dissenton specific cases. For example, the editorial by René Andrieu whichappeared in L’Humanité on 25 October 1975 sided with the generalconsensus that the Soviet policy of incarcerating high profile dissentersin psychiatric hospitals, in this case the mathematician Leonid Plioutchwas worthy of condemnation. A year later, following Plioutch’s expul-sion from the Soviet Union, he was greeted with ostentatious warmthby Pierre Juquin at a meeting organised in Paris to express solidaritywith prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union. As the consciousnessof the need for greater human rights in the Soviet Union grew, andthe public conscience in the West was pricked by a rising number ofexamples of Soviet intellectuals fallen under the juggernaut of state repressionthere, the PCF’s own intellectuals offered an analysis of how the generalvirtues of the Soviet experience might have come to accommodate thesespecific vices. In two particularly noticeable studies,15 Jean Elleinsteinmade the case that the Stalinist phenomenon, and especially its legacyof failure with regard to human rights, was a deformation rather thanan invalidation of socialism. Its causes lay in the very specific conditionsthat shaped the struggle for socialism in the Soviet Union and its conse-quences were largely circumscribed by the Stalinist epoch itself. Mindfulof the need to insulate the PCF from the suggestions by its Socialistpartner on the Left that the communists in France had not conqueredtheir own Stalinist demons, in the central committee meetings of lateMay 1975 George Marchais sacrificed the taboo on the discussion ofStalinism in the party by condemning what was happening in theSoviet Union on the human rights front and distanced the PCF from it.

The high point in this movement towards the PCF’s affirmation of anindependent intellectual culture of its own came in the autumn of 1978,with the appearance of a collective work entitled L’URSS et nous, off theparty’s own presses.16 The authors did not accept that socialism in theSoviet Union had lost its way, but did acknowledge that crimes hadbeen committed under Stalin and situated them in a historical contextthat recognised the inevitable contradictions of the pursuit of socialismin that country. A parallel development to this apparent measure of



emancipation of the French party from the tutelage of the mother partyin Moscow was the impetus given to the PCF’s collaboration with sisterparties in the countries of the capitalist West. Beginning with a confer-ence in Brussels in 1974, the PCF was an active participant in a regularseries of meetings with its sister parties during the 1970s that addressedfamiliar economic and political preoccupations, such as the role ofmultinationals and reformism, but also attempted to respond to theconcerns of new constituencies such as women and the challenge posedby the definition of new cultures such as that presented by the young.Within that multilateral context, the PCF also endeavoured to engageindividually with the two other major parties of Western Europe, Italyand Spain. Notwithstanding the inevitable tension with its transalpinesibling, given the latter’s overtly greater emancipation vis-à-visMoscow, there was a clear willingness on the part of the PCF to developits relationship with the Parti communiste italien (PCI), underlined bythe headline coverage given to the meeting between George Marchaisand his opposite number Enrico Berlinguer, on 12 May 1973. The meetingbetween the two which occurred in November 1975 was deemed byMarchais to be historic and was followed by one much publicisedby the PCF in Paris in June 1976. In March 1977 the two leaders openedup the forum to include their Spanish counterpart, Santiago Carillo, inMadrid. The message emanating from these meetings was essentiallythat the parties involved were engaged in a mission that was stillhistorically relevant and that they were determined to find a way ofreconciling communism with genuine democracy.

Nevertheless, the gulf in ambition between the PCI and the PCF withregard to the gains to be enjoyed through the positioning of theirrespective parties on the international communist stage had not disap-peared. The appetite of the Italian communists for the new legitimacythat might be derived from its action internationally, and particularlyof course vis-à-vis Moscow, was much less ambiguous and guarded thanthe PCF’s when confronted by the temptations of eurocommunism,and this was illustrated by the events leading up to the Berlin conferenceat the end of June 1976 which was destined to bring together thecommunist parties of Europe, East and West. The discussions as to whatwould be the declared objectives of the conference split along predict-able lines. For the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its EasternEuropean counterparts in power (supported by the Greek and Danishparties), the Berlin conference was to provide an opportunity for reaf-firming the unity of the global communist movement and the foreignpolicy postures of the communist parties in power. In opposition to this



stood the communist parties of the West, led by the PCI, who wanteda remit for the Berlin conference that would not bind them to such anunequivocal degree of support for the CPSU and its international policies,preferring instead to propose a more anodyne emphasis on internationalsolidarity and social progress. The choice for the French communistswas much more problematic than for their Italian counterparts, butafter initial misgivings they sided with them and at the Berlin confer-ence proper, Marchais went so far as to reject a uniform strategy for theworld communist movement and argued that the independence ofindividual parties should be respected. What made the action of thePCF leadership more noteworthy was that their apparent rapproche-ment with the eurocommunist position of the Italians was not withoutcost, in terms of the disapproval emanating from Moscow. In February1976, for example, the CPSU leaders Suslov and Ponamarev signalledthat they would not be repeating their involvement of previous years inthe PCF’s forthcoming Congress. Later that year in May, the displeasureof the CPSU at the emancipated and increasingly eurocommunistposture of the PCF was expressed in a letter sent to its sister party inParis, in what in essence amounted to a call to order.17

The prospect of a renewal of the party’s political credibility by goingdown the eurocommunist road would not, however, lead to the kindof evolution that would be witnessed among the communists in Italy.A form of ideological atavism would reassert itself that would cause thePCF to draw in again on the umbilical link with Moscow due partlyto the contingencies that attend party political alliances and due also towhat has been starkly observed elsewhere as the chronic intellectualdeficiencies of the PCF leadership.18 The prospects for the PCF withinFrance and its prospects on the international stage were interdependentin that the apparent success of the former gave the party the kind ofself-confidence in the later sphere that accompanied its profile as alikely future party of government. Consequently, the cracks that appearedin September 1977 in the Common Programme signed with the Social-ists placed a major question mark over the coherence of the policy thePCF had pursued in order to secure its position as the leading party ofthe Left at home and a modernising communist party abroad whichhad taken control of its own destiny. The bitter fruit resulting from thefailure of the long and patient strategy of constructing an alliance onthe Left, brought a sense of closure on a number of fronts. While somein the party still yearned for the new horizons being explored by sisterparties like the PCI, others fell back on the false sense of security offeredby a return to the former pattern of relations with Moscow and the



CPSU. The opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global counter-cultural movement opposed to exploitation and injustice retreated, asthe attention of the PCF focused once more on what it deemed to bethe security of its own organisational and doctrinal carapace.

The disappointment generated by the failure to renew the agreementon the Common Programme and the timorous retreat from the explor-ation of a eurocommunist future was exacerbated by the frustration ofthe party’s expectations in the legislative elections of March 1978. As wesaw in the preceding chapter, this polarised the discontent in party ranks,leading ultimately to the high profile expulsion of the Parisian militantHenri Fiszbin for his criticism of the way the leadership interpreted thefailure at the polls. But more worryingly, a gulf in understanding wasgrowing which signalled the way in which the leadership was losinghold of the constituency within its ranks whose mission it was topromote the intellectual promise of the PCF counter-culture. Crises inthe relationship between the party leadership and its intellectuals werenothing new. The Nazi–Soviet pact in the pre-war era and tensions thatfollowed in the post-war era, notably during the periods 1948–49,1956–57 and 1968–70, can all be identified with the stages in the life ofthe PCF when its identification with the CPSU and its attempts to justifythe Soviet Union’s actions on the international stage (often to thedetriment of fellow-communists) spawned bitter ironies that successivegenerations of communist intellectuals could not tolerate. The crucialdifference with regard to the crisis that began to shake the party in 1978was that the catalyst was not the familiar external source found in oneaspect or other of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, but a growingsense of exasperation at the way the party’s own affairs were managed andthe manner in which the members were led. As we saw in Chapter 5,this moved certain members of the hierarchy down the road to anattempted rénovation of the party, but for those in the forefront of thebattle of ideas, the intellectuals, it placed a question mark as to theirvery ‘raison d’être’ in the party.

As with the decline of the PCF as a whole, there was a conjunctionof factors, some of which lay outside of its sphere of influence, anda number of which lay within that sphere of influence and might havebeen less detrimental to its interests if the leadership had reacted differ-ently. The ambitions stimulated by the events of May 1968 were indica-tive of the change in the scale and nature of intellectual visions that couldengage the post-war generation, and especially their children. Certainly,a new currency had been given to the extreme left and notoriety totheir interpretations of Marxist-inspired revolution. But the very number



of movements and the antagonisms between them were proof of arejection of universal and uniform modes of interpretation. While thesepolitical extremisms were to remain marginal, other movements wereto go from strength to strength. Feminism, environmentalism, gayliberation and in later years anti-racism were all predicated on theassumption that socio-economic models which entailed the compromiseof individual identity and the rejection of particular needs were to becombated, draining the reservoir of rebellion whose resources mighthave flowed into the PCF in previous generations.

Strewn among the debris of May 1968 were the old certainties aboutthe nature of oppression, and what emerged was a sense that sweepingnarratives of change, including the utopian visions of the Left, were atthe very best objects of suspicion if they operated at the expense ofindividual need. In a punctual and short-lived period of prominence, ageneration of ‘nouveaux philosophes’ or new thinkers marked the intel-lectual mood of the post-68 hangover and felt the pulse of public reac-tion to the writings of Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn by askingwhether Marxist revolution did not in its very nature carry the seeds oftotalitarianism,19 as opposed to being sometimes deformed in practice,according to its apologists. Notable for their youth and their physicalresemblance to the reckless types profiled on the platforms of theerstwhile student revolutionaries, figures like André Glucksmann andBernard–Henri Lévy published essays, in the classic French sense, withdramatic titles and powerfully polemical attacks on the Marxist intellec-tual prism that had governed the interpretation of the world for somany of their contemporaries and predecessors, and occluded the devas-tating effects of its own inadequacies.20 Subsequently criticised for theirtendency to create a self-serving amalgam of ideas and to feed a reflexintroversion that is characteristic of the French intellectual elite,21

the intervention of these figures revived and reshaped the debate regardingwhat the role of the intellectual should be. Lévy, in particular, becamethe archetype of what has been termed the ‘télé-clergé’,22 the philo-sophical purveyor of ideas for an age in thrall to the atomising influenceof small screens, in which values have been individualised and relativ-ised to the point where, as one commentator suggested, there is nothingto choose between Shakespeare and a pair of old boots.23

This change in the intellectual climate deepened the sense of inad-equacy of a PCF caught in a double bind. Once more, the conjunctionof contingent factors and punctual, policy-driven events combined tomagnify the marginalising effect of change for the party. The justifiableinvestment in the Common Programme with the Socialists was an



attempt to rebuild its credibility vis-à-vis the electorate at home bypromoting an endogenous social and political project,24 but the disappoint-ment of those hopes simply placed into starker relief the questionablerelevance of the exogenous nature of the PCF’s official Marxist orienta-tion. With this background of subsidence in their perceived credibility,it could have been argued that the best response from the PCF leader-ship might have been to foreground the role of their intellectuals inproviding a counterweight to the relativism that was undercuttingthe plausibility of ideological positions, principally their own. The realitywas that the response forthcoming from the leadership made the voca-tion of being a communist intellectual even more difficult, by addinginternal pressures to the mounting pressures already operating externally.

As we saw in Chapter 6, Georges Marchais’ discursive strategy indealing with the contestataires among the party’s intellectuals was, onthe one hand, to dilute their demands in anodyne representations ofwhat they amounted to and, on the other, to dilute the understandingof the term ‘intellectual’ to undermine their cohesion and thereforetheir ability to make their voices heard. The truth was that the party’sintellectuals were divided anyway. Of the group who were broadlysympathetic to the need to democratise the party and open it up to amore pluralist perspective on what its constituency should be, figureslike Jean Elleinstein, Antoine Spire, Jean Rony, Maurice Goldring andRaymond Jean, were very susceptible to a PSI-type eurocommunistreformism and favoured the policy of alliance with the PS. Anothergroup, gravitating around the journal Dialectiques and counting notablyChristine Buci-Glucksmann and Yves Roucaute, promoted a revolu-tionary problematic that owed much to the theoretical insights ofAntonio Gramsci. While these two groups were distinguished by theirdifferences, they stood in direct opposition to ideological hardlinerssuch as Etienne Balibar, Georges Labica and Guy Bois, who took theircue from the resident Marxist philosopher of the Ecole NormaleSupérieure, Louis Althusser.

Althusser was the easiest of the intellectuals to deal with in that likemany others he condemned the PCF’s leadership for its refusal to acceptits share of responsibility for the failure of the Left at the polls in thelegislative elections of March 1978, but for quite different, even oppos-ite reasons to the majority of intellectual critics. In a series of four articlesin Le Monde from 24–27 April, Althusser argued that the leadership hadbecome divorced from the membership of the party and was notresponding to the worldwide crisis of Marxism.25 But in Althusser’sview, the problems for the PCF stemmed from its fear of arguing the



real need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the leadership’stactic of attempting to slide into the position of getting its hands on theapparatus of state by appealing to the middle classes. By compromisingits class independence, the leadership was simply emulating the practiceof bourgeois politics and turning itself into an instrument of the estab-lishment through its separation from the militants. Althusser’s extremeideological conservatism made it easy for the leadership to marginalisehim in the eyes of the general membership for being a Stalinist back-woodsman. But the criticism from figures like Elleinstein and thosearound him was much more difficult to dismiss, given their direct anddistinguished contributions to the intellectual life of the party.

The two principal structures in which communist intellectuals weresupposed to pursue their vocation on behalf of the party were the InstitutMaurice Thorez (IMT), focusing on historical issues, and the Centred’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes (CERM), engaged on much morebroadly based and varied research in the social sciences. As a researchbody the IMT was characterised by a certain intellectual homogeneity,given the nature of the discipline that dominated there. The fact thatthe historical school of researchers in France was one in which commu-nists played such a major part, shaping, for example (at least until the1980s), the dominant interpretation of the Revolution of 1789, meantthat there was a less palpable sense of frustration in the IMT flowingfrom the feeling of not being heard. By contrast, the mood at CERM wasquite different. As assistant director, Jean Elleinstein collaborated witha broad range of party intellectuals based in the Paris region, and it wasthe very heterogeneity of CERM which made it much more sensitiveto the convictions emanating from the various sectors of intellectualactivity in the party. It was inevitable that the multiplicity of challengesto the leadership’s interpretation of the March 1978 election resultwould find a sounding board at the CERM, and it rendered more acutethe speculation as to what the role of the party’s in-house intellectualswas in reality. For intellectuals like Elleinstein there was a double senseof redundancy: the party leadership was only interested in the kind ofresearch that served the strategic orientations of the party; and even inthe fields approved by the leadership the work produced by the party’sintellectuals had little impact on the conduct of the policy-makers.

With regard to the lessons to be learned from March 1978, Elleinsteinstruck out on his own, airing his views in the pages of the non-partypress. In articles in Le Monde from 13 to 15 April 1978, Elleinstein ques-tioned the leadership’s refusal to publish the research done by theCERM on the modern state. Fundamental notions shaping attitudes



towards the state and revolution had to be rethought, given the undeni-able transformation undergone by modern France. The party’s traditionalattitude towards its working-class constituency was costing it thesupport of the most-educated and skilled workers, more concerned withquality of life issues than the quantitative demands that characterisedthe ouvrieriste mind-set of the policy-makers. Elleinstein underlined theneed for intellectual modernisation by questioning whether Lenin hadanything to offer the increasingly well-off workers of the Paris region,many of whom were property owners. Notwithstanding the failures ofthe past, the future had to be shaped in partnership with the PS, as theLeft entered an open reappraisal of what was meant by socialism andhow this could be made relevant to the lives of people in an affluentsociety.

Elleinstein’s condemnation in the party press was swift, but moreimportantly the leadership opted for a policy of administrative normal-isation that cut the structural support away from Elleinstein and hisfellow intellectual sympathisers. At its session in June 1979, the centralcommittee chose to address what it perceived to be the fragmentednature of the research being carried out on behalf of the party. The histor-ians and social scientists not only worked separately, but even withinthose centres there were compartmentalised activities. Furthermore,research in economics was conducted in a different unit at the PlaceColonel Fabien. In all, there were too many pieces to the jigsaw and toomany layers of managers for those researching to grasp how the intel-lectual efforts on behalf of the party were meant to fit into the biggerpicture of the PCF’s priorities. Thus in early December 1979 the IMTand the CERM were merged to form the Institut de recherches marx-istes, whose future was to be entrusted to Francette Lazard, an academicwho had just been promoted to the Politiburo at the party’s 23rdCongress. For the majority of the party’s intellectuals, this turn of eventsprovided further evidence of the party’s determination to deprive themof an independent tribune. The feeling of despondency at the irony ofthe ‘tribune’ party locking itself into a reactionary cult of silence wassharpened by the party’s exclusion of Henri Fiszbin and François Hincker,founders of the forum for PCF dissident, Rencontres communistes, andit is significant that the same year of 1981 was also marked by thedeparture of Elleinstein and Etienne Balibar from the party.

The PCF had entered the 1980s burdened by a sense of intellectualclosure, quite out of step with the culture of a society marked by a growingvariety of counter-cultures tailoring themselves to the individualistsensibilities of the age. The passion for unfettered intellectual enquiry



outside the party found its opposite image within the party. For acommunist intellectual to survive he or she had to load their enquirywith the traditional and systematic anathemas directed at capitalistsociety, thereby serving the no less comprehensive pretension of scien-tific socialism to provide the answers. But as Maurice Goldring observed,the rejection of totalising concepts in politics would inevitably entail theredundancy of the intellectual who had a question for every answer andthe party that had an answer for every question.26 One of the dangersfor a party thus isolated and bereft of fresh ideas was to isolate itselffurther through misguided attempts to regain some cohesion and cred-ibility, even if that meant following a reactionary reflex.

The reactionary reflex

The years between the disappointment of the legislative elections of1978 and the election of a Socialist president in 1981 constituted awatershed in terms of the stubborn ideological repli or recidivism of theleadership. Marchais seemed determined to offer unflinching support tothe Soviet Union, just as the latter’s foreign policy became most obvi-ously threadbare. Thus from prudent support at the end of 1979 for theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan, in January 1980 following a meetingwith Soviet leaders in Moscow, this was turned into outright approvalfor Soviet policy in that country. The same reactionary interpretation ofthe vocation of the party was manifested by the support the leadershipgave to General Jaruzelski’s coup in Poland, echoing his argument thatthe arrest of the opposition Solidarity movement was necessary to avertthe prospect of civil war.

A further indicator of the way the party’s unquestioning alignmentwith Soviet foreign policy was eroding its ability to project itself as anagent for change was provided by the storm provoked by the NATOdecision in December 1979 to plan the deployment of Cruise missiles inits member-states in response to the deployment of Soviet SS20s. Whilethe popular mobilisation against the NATO missile deployments incountries like Holland and Germany demonstrated that fertile groundexisted for effective involvement in an anti-missile campaign, the deter-mination of the PCF policy-makers to portray the Soviet Union’s policyas one of peace, and to demonise the USA, merely reversed any progressthe PCF might have made during the preceding decade in asserting itsindependence from Moscow. The attempt made by the PCF in Parisin April 1980, in collaboration with its Polish sister party, to coordinatea move involving other European communist parties to support the



peaceful pretensions of the Soviet policy was a failure and drove adeeper wedge, notably, between it and the PCI.

As a domestic counterpoint to these blunders on the foreign policystage, the PCF’s hostility to the suggestion that one could becommunist while being critical of the Soviet Union was embodied inits treatment of Jean Kehayan. As editor of the PCF paper in Marseilles,La Vie Mutualiste, Kehayan had already made himself noticed in 1978by calling Elleinstein too prudent, and openly anticipating the daywhen the party in France would have the courage to call the USSR theantithesis of socialism. In that year, he and his wife produced a criticalsurvey of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, which was followed up in1980 by a book in which they made no secret of the conviction thattheir understanding of communism forced them to adopt an anti-Soviet position.27 Both texts were the focus of debate in the party andwere inevitably construed as an indictment of the leadership. Conse-quently, in October 1980 the decision was taken to expel Kehayanfrom the party. What the writings of Kehayan and the misgivings ofthose before him regarding the PCF’s relationship with the CPSUexpressed was the feeling that the rotten core of the Soviet system hadbeen exposed and that it was no longer possible for the PCF to veil itsgaze from it. But as we saw in Chapter 6, the way the leadership articu-lated the party’s response to the collapse of communism in the oldEastern bloc, and especially the failed putsch against the reformistMikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in 1991, merely served tofurther disconnect the leadership’s reading of world events from theopinion of the French people.

The reactionary aversion to the appetite for individual freedoms thatwould bring down its sister parties like dominoes as the decadeprogressed found a subtle parallel in the way the PCF adjusted its prior-ities organisationally at home. While the party’s 23rd Congress in 1979had taken the forward step of confirming the end of the ‘dictatorship ofthe proletariat’ as its defining ambition, other moves marked stepsbackward into an ouvrieriste bunker mentality. The policy announced atthe 23rd Congress of ‘l’union à la base’ or a harnessing of grassrootsunity aligned it and the CGT in an attitude to industrial relations verymuch shaped by archetypal postures towards capital. The gap betweenpolicy and reality was evident in the structure of the PCF itself, and wouldbe translated in the workplace. The composition of the 24th Congressin 1982 highlighted the fact that the party could not isolate itself fromthe wider changes in French society. The socio-professional profile ofthe delegates was unquestionably on an upward curve, with middle



managers, engineers and technicians accounting for 15.6 per cent,while those delegates with a working-class background had dippedbelow 40 per cent. On the other hand, those delegates who had comeinto the party during the time of the Union of the Left had declinedfrom 42.5 to 37.8 per cent since the previous Congress, while those whohad joined during the more sectarian climate since then had anincreased representation. Most telling, however, was the differencebetween the general change in the socio-economic profile of the dele-gates as a whole, and the concentration of a certain type occupying thepositions of power in the party’s organisational structure. The PCF’sown figures demonstrated that in the federations, 59.2 per cent of thefirst secretaries were working class.28

The accentuation of the PCF’s orientation as a party of working-classstruggle would inevitably lead to impossible tension with its role as aparty of government, in a Socialist-led administration that, much soonerthan expected after its victory in 1981, would find itself presiding overthe painful restructuring of the French economy and, in spite of theinitially triumphant wave of nationalisations, do so in a way that wasnot fundamentally dissimilar to what was happening in ConservativeBritain. The presence of four ministers in government29 could not attenu-ate the shrinkage forced on heavy industry, especially mining andmetals, or ease the bewilderment for the remaining party members inthose regions with whose interests the party had identified itself withrenewed vigour after 1979. Neither converted to the disciplines of themarket like the PS, nor able to fight the good fight for the proletariatdue to its presence in government, the PCF’s credibility could onlydecline, as the elections during that period indicated. In the municipalelections of March 1983 the percentage of communist municipalitiesdropped from 4 to 3.4 per cent of the total, entailing the loss of controlin 191 town halls, 19 of which served populations of 30,000, leaving itin control of only three towns of more than 100,000 in comparisonwith seven in 1977. The European elections of June 1984 confirmed theloss of credibility when the list headed by Marchais could not rallymore than 11.2 per cent of the votes cast. When, during the month thatfollowed, Laurent Fabius replaced Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister andconfirmed that the government would maintain its policy of economicausterity, the PCF leadership took the opportunity to bring its participa-tion in government to a close.

But although it was no longer impossibly stretched across the hornsof the dilemma that came from being in government while fundamen-tally opposed to its economic policy, the tactic adopted by the PCF



once out of government was reminiscent of old industrial conflictsrather than the search for future solutions in place of strife. The mostemblematic instance of this was the party’s attitude to the changes atRenault, notably the demise of the fabled bastion of CGT-dominatedcommunist syndicalism, the works at Boulogne-Billancourt. The plantthere had been a symbol of victorious ouvrierisme with the CGT as theorganisational spearhead. The union had become a force that could notbe circumvented in what was the biggest plant devoted to the massmanufacture of vehicles in the country. The union operated in partner-ship with the management and had secured exceptional gains for theworkers, such as a fourth week of paid holiday in 1962 and the reduc-tion of the working week from 48 to 40 hours in 1968. Moreover,through the comité d’entreprise, or works council, the union had controlof a network subsidised through salary costs that governed the workers’lives away from the production line, from the operation of the staffcanteen to travel and holiday arrangements.30 But in spite of these gainsfor the workers, the incipient crisis that would undermine this mainstayof communist support had already taken root by 1973, and when theplans were revealed by the management in the mid-1980s that wouldend the reign of Boulogne-Billancourt in Renault’s profile as a manufac-turer, this was, in market terms, somewhat overdue in the light of whathad already occurred globally in the car market.

The reaction of the PCF and the CGT to this restructuring was adesperate and brutally unimaginative one. On 1 August 1986 a group oftheir members raided the offices of the personnel department in orderto seize some of the documentation held there, and manhandled someof the staff in the process. Although the votes cast in the legislativeelection of 16 March 1986 had ushered in the first cohabitation of aGaullist-led government with a Socialist President, the policy imple-mented at Renault was a continuation of the Socialist determination torescue state-owned enterprises by making them submit to the discip-lines of the market. In contrast to previous eras therefore, the manage-ment at Renault pursued those responsible for the attack on thepersonnel department through the courts, and the production lineson the fabled Ile Séguin were switched off for good on 2 March 1987,in anticipation of the ultimate cessation of all activity at the plant,envisaged by the management for 1992.

In a sense, the workers had already adjusted to the inevitable. By 1989,only 5 per cent of the residual workforce at Boulogne-Billancourt wereunionised. This was part of a general trend of decline in membershipsupport for the CGT: declining from 1,800,000 in 1975/6, to 1,070,000



in 1983, and striking a modest 600,000 in 1990. An analysis of thereasons for this has suggested that there were factors that lay clearlybeyond the union’s control: arguably 20 per cent of the decline innumbers could be attributed to the technological changes that led tothe demise of whole sectors of the economy’s manufacturing base;20 per cent could result from the transformation of the behemothswhere the CGT was able to cultivate big battalions into smaller andleaner enterprises, as well as the tendency for enterprises in the newesttechnology centres to concentrate rare skills in flexible units as opposedto labour in fixed plants; and a further 10 per cent of the decline couldbe due to the broad transformation of the economy which was markedby the decline in the numbers of workers relative to the irresistible riseof those engaged in white-collar and managerial posts. But responsi-bility for half of the loss in membership could be laid at the door of theCGT itself, resulting from the unwillingness of the membership in the1980s to identify with the aims of the union and participate in recruit-ment activities both in the new economy where worker representationwas increasingly non-unionised and in the old economy where it waslocked in decline. The result for the PCF was to exacerbate the declineof the basis of its support, as a major conduit for the influx of members,and especially activists, began to fracture.31

While reactionary attitudes to economic change hindered the abilityof the PCF leadership to articulate the needs of its constituency to thesatisfaction of that very constituency, it alienated the wider communityby sometimes succumbing to a temptation that placed it firmly in thecamp of right-wing reaction when it came to the issues of immigrationand race. In fairness to the PCF, the entire Left was to display a failure ofnerve on the immigration issue. Before sweeping into power the Social-ists had emphasised their desire to switch the focus from improvingpurely the economic, to the social, cultural and political dimension ofpossibilities available to France’s immigrant community and therebychanging the perception of it from being a problematic adjunct to anintegral and valued part of the fabric of French society.32 Once the Mauroygovernment was formed, it had to strike a balance between improvingthe situation of France’s immigrant community and reassuring the hostcommunity by controlling new arrivals. The anxiety of the immigrantpopulation was allayed by a series of measures brought in during thelatter half of 1981, which included the suspension of deportationspending under the previous government, the transformation of theprocess of expulsion into a judicial one as opposed to simply an admin-istrative one and the creation of a smoother path to family reunification.



The most generous aspect of this change in government attitude was therégularisation exceptionnelle, or amnesty granted to clandestine immigrantswho had arrived before 1 January 1981 and who could offer proof ofstable employment. But this was also the most contentious of thegovernment’s liberalising measures, and thereafter it began to row backas it sensed the dubious reaction of the population at large.33 The ideaonce floated by Mitterrand that citizenship might be determined byresidence rather than nationality was quietly marginalised by theMauroy government as,34 between 1981 and 1984, generosity gave wayto the imperative of control: the identity checks targeting immigrantswhich had marred the end of the Giscard d’Estaing regime made acomeback; the conditions for family reunification were stiffened; andlegislation in June 1983 facilitated the deportation of clandestine immi-grants by court order thereby depriving them of an appeal process thatmight delay their expulsion.

The PCF, however, had begun the attempt to mine the vein of anti-immigrant sentiment underlying French society as a whole, before therealities of power had started to blunt the idealism of the new Socialistadministration over this issue. On 24 December 1980, PCF activists andcouncillors in Vitry, in the Val-de-Marne, decided to take the law into theirown hands and, led by the mayor, used a bulldozer in order to destroya hostel for immigrant workers. The authorities in the communist munici-pality of Ivry attempted to bring in their own punitive measures forlimiting the numbers of immigrants in their community once a certainthreshold was reached. And in February 1981, in the community ofMontigny-les-Cormeilles in the Val-d’Oise, the communist mayor andfuture leader of the PCF, Robert Hue, led the organisation of demonstra-tions against a family of Moroccans suspected of drug trafficking. Unableto find a positive discourse to appeal to the working class as the protectorof its interests, the temptation was to find a negative one. The misfortunefor the PCF was that the emergence of a far right party to compete for thosevotes made its position appear more nakedly and ironically reactionary.

By the time the Front National caught up with the PCF in electoralterms, the Communists had already been evicted from what mightbe called modern France. Those bastions where it could still poll indouble figures were areas with an industrial past (such as the Nord andPas-de-Calais in the north and the Gard or Bouches-du-Rhône in thesouth), or those rural areas characterised by the small-scale or even subsist-ence farming that had been left behind by the investment and economiesof scale of capital-intensive agriculture (such as Aude, Ariège and thedepartments of the Massif Central). This was matched by a demographic



contraction which showed that whereas in the legislative elections of1978 some 28 per cent of 18–24 year-olds and 26 per cent of 25–34year-olds had voted communist, by the presidential elections of 1988only some 6 per cent of both age ranges voted for the communistcandidate. This could only feed the growth in the surviving communistheartlands of a membership corralled by anxiety about its value-system,exacerbated by the changing face of France. As Table 7.1 illustrates, itwas the decade when the seesaw of political fortunes appeared to favourthe FN as it disadvantaged the PCF.

Ironically, by sometimes allowing itself to become a tribune partyfocused on the representation of parochial fears as opposed to globalaspirations, the PCF prepared the ground for a party which had overtlydenounced universalist narratives of change in order to exploit theemerging neo-conservatism of certain segments of the population suchas the unemployed young and non-salaried workers fearful for thefuture.35 The most telling effect on the PCF during the watershed yearsof the 1980s was not so much the direct transfer of votes from communistvoters to the FN, but the potential voters drawn by the far right whomight, in times when the communist vision for the transformation ofsociety was more potent, have voted for the PCF.36 The ambiguity of theparty’s position over race and immigration was the most striking aspectof a general response to a society in the throes of profound change, thatwas slow and reactionary. The party was approaching the threshold ofthe new millennium suspended in an intellectual vacuum, the ideo-logical nexus with its constituency dissolved because ideology itself hadlost its mobilising power.

Table 7.1 PCF and FN election results in metropolitan France1978–89 (percentage of votes cast)

Source: Ysmal (1991, pp. 52–3).

PCF FN

1978 legislative 20.6 0.8 1981 presidential 15.5 No FN candidate1981 legislative 16.1 0.3 1984 European 11.2 11.1 1986 legislative 9.7 9.9 1988 presidential 6.9 14.6 1988 legislative 11.2 9.9 1989 European 7.8 11.8



Conclusion

In a process that accelerated during the final two decades of the twen-tieth century, the PCF found itself left behind by a process of socialchange that was too complex, differentiated and diffuse to submit tothe dialectic that blinkered its view of society and the increasingly self-assertive constituencies that comprised it. The tribune party had ineffect become the rearguard party, defending a cause that rhymedwith what was perceived by most voters in France as a period of socio-economic development that was fixed in history. For individuals ina post-industrial society, the points of conflict were to be found inother fields of actual and prospective alienation rather than the oldbattleground between the proprietor of capital and the worker. In someinstances, therefore, there was an undeniable temptation to side withthe party’s traditional class constituency on issues where its voiceappeared to be ignored by the established parties, even if that constitu-ency’s concerns were clearly reactionary. It was an atavistic reflex on thepart of the party that was exacerbated by the emergence of a new poleof attraction represented by the extreme right, especially in some of thoseconstituencies where the economic consequences of de-industrialisationcombined with the social changes prompted by immigration to forma kind of alienation with a dangerously combustible potential.

Succumbing to the temptation to ride the wave of reaction was a measureof the desperation in some parts of the party and could not disguise thegrowing material obstacles to its survival. But while material obstaclesmight be surmountable, or even accommodated by a party living inreduced circumstances, the influence of contingent factors is far harderto counterbalance. The growing phenomenon of dépolitisation, forexample, is one that has affected the entire spectrum of mainstreampolitical parties but is something that is bound to have a greater effecton a party possessed of such a clear ideological self-definition as thePCF. As we shall see in the following and final chapter, the biggestchallenge facing the PCF in the twenty-first century is the extent towhich it can re-position itself in order to secure an enduring presenceas a significant political entity on the national stage, and articulate a newvision capable of convincing the French electorate in an age marked bythe end of ideology.


168

8 The End of Ideology

Introduction

In the classic sense articulated by Karl Marx, the very purpose of thestruggle against the status quo was to break the hold of ideology. Itssocial origin was clear and its purpose was unmistakeable: to hide thereal nature of human relations in a bourgeois society and in so doingkeep the wage-labourer bound to his owner by invisible threads.Ideology was the key component in the attempt to prevent the workersfrom grasping the real nature of their condition and it operated in orderto serve the survival and self-interest of the bourgeoisie.1 But a broaderunderstanding of ideology, more focused on human psychology, canput it in a context where proletarian class-consciousness offers noprotection from falling into a delusional sphere of errors to which allgroups and parties are susceptible.2 The Marxist attack on the enslave-ment that results from the dominance of bourgeois ideology in capit-alist society does not negate the argument that those making theassault share, along with everyone else, a need for contact with sourcesof legitimacy and creativity and that underlying overtly rational politicalactions are determinations characterised by undeniable psychologicalfacts or even fictions.3 Taken to its logical conclusion, this perspectiveon ideology means that any group with a mission, sharing the samepsychological dispositions and collective beliefs may be regarded asbeing imbued with an ideology,4 and it is something that is woven intoits sense of identity and purpose.

Given its close self-definition in class terms and the discourseexpressing the totalising nature of its ambitions with regard to its actionon society, no group other than the PCF could suffer more from thedissolution of ideology, in terms of a personal sense of justification and


The End of Ideology 169

fulfilment.5 In the communist community of beliefs, as articulated bythe leadership of the PCF, historical reality was pressed into a structureof confrontation that polarised issues in such a way as to reduce themoften to simple dichotomies. Such a process obviated the need forbalanced, rational justifications, and privileged instead the certaintiesderived from partisan interpretations of reality. As Lévi-Strausssuggested, such ideologically motivated political thinking was perfectlyaligned with the processes of mythification.6 The misfortune for thePCF was that by the end of the twentieth century the myths sustainingits rationalisations had been undermined: the proletariat in France nolonger saw itself as such; the pretensions of the Soviet Union to lead theglobal struggle against capitalism had been exposed and its sphere ofinfluence had collapsed; and even the notion of revolution had beencalled into question, as the collective values defining the republicanculture of France fractured into myriad individualised concerns thatexpected society to adapt to them rather than endeavouring to trans-form it.

In this chapter we shall examine the sea change in French societythat has made it so difficult for political value-systems to sustain theirroots in the electoral landscape, especially for a party defined by suchan all-encompassing ideology as the PCF. We shall ask whether the verymodel of revolution in the modern age, the French revolution, has notin fact resulted in assumptions that are fundamentally at variance withthe aspirations of the people it purports to serve, what those conse-quences are for those institutions mediating between the people andthe State, and we shall attempt to gauge where the PCF stands in thelight of that challenge.

The end of revolution

In the conclusion to the preceding chapter, an allusion was made to thephenomenon of dépolitisation or disengagement from mainstreampolitics that was one of the wider factors detrimental to the PCF’sfortunes and beyond its control. While the PCF’s message mightcontinue to advance a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system,its mission as a tribune party had become too familiar and its projectintellectually jaded. Its oppositional stance had become too perennial apart of the political status quo to become a rallying point, in contrast tothe breakthrough at the polls of the FN in the 1980s led by a figure,Jean-Marie Le Pen, who revelled in his self-proclaimed persona as an‘outsider’ with a mission to articulate the wishes of those who felt



unrepresented by the system. As the opinion polls at the time indicated,the sense of civic obligation felt by French citizens with regard to theballot box was locked in a downward trend. In the definition offered toa representative cross-section of the electorate of what constituted agood citizen, the characteristic of being a ‘regular voter’ had, in 1976,been cited by 51 per cent of the respondents, in 1983 this figure haddropped to 43 per cent, and in 1989 it was down to 38 per cent.7

In a sense, the disengagement of the electorate from mainstreampolitics in France had been noted a generation beforehand, and attributedto the peculiarities of the French party system. The argument that theprésidentialisation of the French political system is a defining character-istic of the Fifth Republic due to de Gaulle’s mistrust of political partiesis a familiar one, but overlooks the longer historical perspective evokedby other commentators. It has been argued that the opposition of Rightand Left in France has, since the immediate aftermath of the revolutionof 1789, offered the French people an illusory rather than a real choice.As the Girondins displaced the Jacobins at the centre of power, theywere themselves replaced at the centre of the political system by theplaine or marais, and for most of the life of modern France thereafter,the exercise of political power has had to draw on the support of thisdominant centrist culture. The Fifth Republic, while in one senseappearing to represent a radical break with the political culture of theFourth Republic, in another sense embodied a profound continuitygoing even further back to the Third Republic. The cohabitations of presi-dents of the Republic from the Left or Right with governments drawnfrom majorities from the other side of the spectrum became a familiarfeature of French politics in the last two decades of the twentiethcentury, and appear to justify the argument that whatever alternancethere might be in fact occurs within a broad centrist consensus. Like the‘pause’ on the road to genuine left-wing reforms announced by LéonBlum’s Popular Front government in February 1937, the austerity planhatched by Pierre Mauroy’s Socialist government in 1982 marked thelimits of left–right alternance in French politics and the ultimately irre-sistible pressure to operate within a centrist consensus. The waltz of left-and right-wing governments that followed was precisely that, as theyturned around each other defining the variations in the inevitableaccommodations with the pressure to privatise, rationalise and liber-alise the operations of the French state, whether as an economicshareholder or as a provider of services to civil society.

While the obligation to respect a centrist consensus may notdifferentiate France fundamentally from the liberal democracies of



other developed countries, the hold exercised by a de facto hypercentrethat whatever the labelling the constituent parts may display, essen-tially recycles the same policies exacerbates the frustration provoked bythe specificity of the French party system. As Duverger argued, thefundamental mediating role that should be played by political parties intranslating the preferences of civil society into the choices of the State isweaker in France than in other comparable democracies such as Britainor Germany. Whereas the mass party memberships in those democra-cies provided a form of leverage that allowed considerable direct pres-sure to be brought on the leaderships in question, the weakmembership bases of mainstream French political parties (with thehistorical exception of the PCF), and the reliance on tendencies andfactions as the conduit for changes in party policy, have resulted inwhat has been perceived as the rise of a class of party notables who havecome to dominate public life. Furthermore, by operating through aform of centrisme that perpetuates itself precisely by occluding thefundamental oppositions that should separate the adversaries, theparties deprive the voters of a genuine choice and preside over a systemthat could be termed, ‘la démocratie sans le peuple’, or democracyminus the people.8

On one hand, Duverger’s pessimism regarding the ability of theFrench party system to assume an effective and central role in theoperation of representative democracy may be regarded as inevitable,given the shadow cast at the time by the figure of de Gaulle. On theother hand, by the end of the twentieth century and with de Gaulle adistant memory, the perception of the political class as a stratum ofnotables disconnected from the democratic grassroots was widespread.For example, the debate over the enduringly thorny issue of the ‘cumuldes mandats’, that is the possibility for politicians to accumulate repre-sentative functions at local, regional and national levels, highlightedthe anxiety that a systemic failure was allowing those individuals tooperate according to an agenda that was essentially self-interested.Moreover, it was a telling paradox that the two presidential figures whosteered the French Republic’s transition from the twentieth to thetwenty-first century were archetypal career politicians. Adolphe Thiers,the politician whose career straddled much of the nineteenth century,would have recognised a kindred spirit in François Mitterrand, who bythe time he left presidential office in 1995 had had a career spanningsix decades. By the time Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, waselected to his second mandate as President of the Republic in 2002, hiscareer had spanned five decades. At the opposite end of the political



system, the validity of Duverger’s judgements about the failure ofFrench parties to recruit members is borne out by recent surveys showingFrance to have the lowest levels of party membership in comparisonwith European neighbours such as Britain, Denmark, Germany,Netherlands, Sweden and Norway.9

The criticism of the party system for its failure to foster genuinecompetition in the programmes for government and for offering onlyhollow ideological alternatives might seem to provide an exemption forthe PCF. But following its participation in government after the water-shed victory for the French Left in the presidential and legislative elec-tions of 1981, the Communists faced the double disadvantage ofproclaiming an ideology that had become threadbare with generationsof overuse by the party, and having been tainted by their part in amajority Socialist government that had been forced to capitulate tomarket forces by accepting the monetarist squeeze on the Frencheconomy, with all that entailed for employment and the funding ofsocial reform. Moreover, the perception of the intellectual and moralintegrity of the PCF was much diminished by the critical autopsycarried out on communist ideology subsequent to the collapse of itshistorical mentor, the Soviet Union. According to one of the centralindictments in the famous Livre noir du comunisme, terror was a funda-mental, inescapable and defining characteristic of communism.10 In theanimated debate following the publication of the book, there was noquarter given to the countervailing arguments about the evils of capit-alism. The collapse of the iron curtain meant that access to the cata-logues of state-sponsored oppression, such as the Stasi files in theformer East Germany, sharpened the focus on the charge that a cancerof criminality resided at the core of the communist enterprise.11

In fact, the mainstream parties as well as the PCF were caught in agrowing indictment of the modern ideology of revolution itself.Whether it was the critique of the redundancy of political discoursespredicated on such defunct antitheses as Left and Right, leading to theatomisation of the body politic,12 or the critique of France’s elites fortheir abstentionism faced with the challenge of anticipating andshaping social change,13 these challenges were symptomatic of a deepundercurrent of dissatisfaction pushing against the founding assump-tions regarding the way the great vision of 1789 for the transformationof French society was translated into political reality. In historicalterms, there was no shortage of precedent for contesting the implemen-tation of that vision. The nineteenth century was punctuated bycriticism voiced by figures like Alexis de Tocqueville, Edgar Quinet and



Jules Michelet of the authors of the Revolution for having replaced theroyalist absolutism they were supposed to defeat with a statist variety oftheir own making, or condemnation of their successors for reneging onthe fraternal and egalitarian ideals they were supposed to promote. Itwas not until the triumph of the Third Republic over royalist andCatholic reaction that the ascendancy of republican ideology, assimi-lating equal citizens into the one and indivisible body politic articulatedby the collective adherence to civic and secular values, was finallyestablished.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the initial concernprompted by the Revolution that the authority delegated by the peoplemight be manipulated by a self-interested oligarchy14 had found newform, together with anxiety about the responsiveness of the democraticmodel engendered by the triumph of republicanism in France, to theneeds of individual citizens. For some commentators, the ideology ofthe Republic had set inflexibly due to certain assumptions as to the wayit would operate, notably, through the national state as the overarchingmeans for mediating and regulating social and political issues, even ifthat extended to issues that might properly fall within the sphere ofdecision-making by the private individual. A defining characteristic ofthe ideology of the Republic had developed which assumed that changecould only be pursued through the prerogatives for the exercise ofpower offered by the institutions of the Republic. The ensuing confla-tion of the civil and the civic led to a process of ‘uniformisation’, inwhich the Republic adopted uniform measures in the management ofthe polity’s affairs on behalf of a citizenry imagined in uniform terms.15

The last decade of the century echoed with calls to rethink and reformthe Republic,16 and was marked by a variety of responses to the failureof traditional republican ideology and its institutional emanations, toengage the citizens of France. At one end of the spectrum there was aperceptible and essentially conservative frustration at the inability ofcitizens to see beyond an ever-narrowing horizon due to the pervasiveinfluence of l’idolâtrie démocratique, or an obsessive kind of democracythat results in the adulation of the individual, who is viewed as unen-cumbered of those ties or repères which provide a framework of orienta-tion.17 Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of perspective couldposit the dissolution of the ideological legacy settled on the FrenchRepublic by the Revolution, and a change in the nation’s mindset thatwould mirror a return, in intellectual terms, to the status quo ante.The networks of family, locality, region, and belief become once morethe loci of fidelities defining the individual as opposed to the fidelity



to the civic value-system of the one and indivisible Republicbequeathed by 1789.18 At the other end of the spectrum, there was asanguine perception of the declining participation in the traditional,mediating institutions of the Republic as indicative of a development inthe understanding of democracy that should not be feared. The declinein traditional forms of political militancy did not signal the end ofmilitantisme per se, but an evolution in the relationship of the indi-vidual to society, and in particular his or her relationship to the publicsphere in which the individual actor, empowered by his or her needs,talents and preferences, takes the lead in coordinating a collectiveendeavour.19 What was occurring was not a terminal dépolitisation, butthe redefinition of politics by other means resulting from an evolu-tionary process marked by the emergence of new forms of participationas older ones wither.20

The balance was tipping not just against the traditional politicalformations, but also against the classic structures of union-led militancythat saw their numbers halve between the mid-1970s and the early1990s, and their authority challenged by the emergence of newnetworks of unionised labour, often with radical agendas for socialtransformation.21 As the movement of the balance implies, however,there was a corresponding rise in a new type of participation springingfrom the base of civil society and resistant to the ideological typologiesof the past: associations. Up to 1970 the number of new associationscreated annually was less than 20,000, but by the 1990s the figure wasnudging up to 70,000. While in an obvious respect comprised of indi-viduals committed to interacting collectively, the typical association isnonetheless task-driven rather than ideologically driven, whetherresponding to changing social needs, humanitarian or cultural impera-tives, eschewing the assumptions that would characterise an envelopingpolitical project. Such has been the rise in the popularity of thesevehicles for action that, by some estimates, France entered the newmillennium with up to 800,000 officially registered associations.22

Marked by its participation in government as a party of the establish-ment, isolated by the collapse of international communism and harriedby new empirical evidence of its ethical failure, the challenge facing thePCF to reposition itself successfully vis-à-vis the French electorate wasformidable. In an era witnessing the end of ideology, no other partyhad been as reliant for its survival on a membership that was so ideo-logically encadré, or organised. In a climate where the most strikingdynamic for change seemed to be a bottom-up process driven by indi-viduals impervious to the traditional notions of hierarchical leadership,



the PCF remained stamped with the character of a centralised organisationwith a profoundly bureaucratised system of delegated authority. Theregeneration of the party and the renewal of its appeal implied, inev-itably, the regeneration of the leadership.

Regenerating the leadership

Notwithstanding the polemical nature of much of the discussionregarding Georges Marchais’ legacy, it is fair to argue that he repre-sented a regression in terms of the breadth of qualities, or the lack ofthem, that he brought to the principal leadership role of the PCF.Whereas Maurice Thorez possessed a cultural dimension that impressedsome of the intellectuals of his time, and Waldeck Rochet expressed acertain sensibility to genuinely democratising ambitions (as evidencedby his ambiguity towards the Soviet repression of the Prague spring),Marchais was pressed from an altogether different mould. He was athrowback to a proletarian prototype, schooled purely in the ways ofthe party and without equal in his ability to use the mechanisms of theparty to establish his dominance over it, to such an extent that he wasnicknamed by some ‘the red king’.23 The task facing his successorwas therefore monumental, as Robert Hue had to redefine not onlythe substance of the PCF project for French society in terms thatwould constitute a revitalising break with the past, but in a mannerthat would establish a redemptive distance between himself and hispredecessor and thus rehabilitate the understanding of leadership.Moreover, all this had to occur in the aftermath of a historic landslidein the legislative elections of 1993 that had resulted in a chasteningdefeat for the Left as a whole: with a share of the vote in the first roundthat left the Left in total with 32.2 per cent, the PCF saw its finalnumber of seats in the new Assembly decline to 24 from 27 in 1988,and the Socialists and their allies reduced to a rump of 67 from 275. Aswas remarked at the time, the largest lesson to be learned was the extentof the disillusionment of the ‘peuple de gauche’ with ‘their’ government,resulting in a reversal of fortune for the Left that made it introuvable, orabsent from the Assembly in a way reminiscent of the disappearingliberals all the way back in 1815.24

The party’s 28th Congress, from 25 to 29 January 1994, was markedof course by the handover from Marchais to the then little-known Hue.But although the ostensible thematic content of the Congress steeredaway from an agenda explicitly aimed at addressing thorny issues suchas the implications of the collapse of the USSR and international



communism for the PCF, leading refondateurs left the party in no doubtas to what the stakes really were. During the course of the debates,Philippe Herzog, for example, insisted on reminding the party of itsdisconnection from the rest of French society, and Guy Hermier warnedit not to risk enduring marginalisation by attempting simply to patchup a century-old communist project for society that had failed. If not insubstance, then certainly in style, Hue opted for an approach thatmarked a clear difference with the previous mode of leadership, bybeing notably more open to debate. As the evolution of the party organ-isation was to be signalled by the change of the political bureau into thenational bureau, so the turn taken by the leadership was to be markedby Hue becoming the National Secretary, rather than taking on themantle of General Secretary worn by Marchais. And the desire toembody conciliation and change soon manifested itself with the articu-lation of initiatives such as the one in April of that year, when Huefloated the prospect of a Pacte Unitaire pour le Progrès (PUP), aiming todraw together movements ranging from the centre to the far left.25

However, the European elections of June 1994 reinforced the lessonthat the PCF had to find a new way of soliciting the endorsement of theFrench electorate. The PCF list, led by Francis Wurtz, attracted only 6.9per cent of the votes cast and the performance boded ill for the supremeelectoral contest, the presidential elections of 1995. More mindful thanhis predecessors of the leadership skills required by such a contest, Huepersonalised his appeal. Genial in appearance and manner, approach-able and media-friendly, Hue succeeded in conveying the attractiveaspects of his persona and matched this with a discursive style that wasmuch more open than that of his predecessors. In a way that was indica-tive of the social changes to which the PS had been reconciled longbeforehand, Hue also appealed more openly to the middle classes. Butthe substance of his presidential campaign remained focused on veryfamiliar PCF themes: boosting economic activity through the salaryincreases that would enhance the purchasing power of workers,protecting the social security system from the market-oriented reformsthat would undermine it, and criticism of the Maastricht Treaty and theassociated prominence given to the imperative of profit.

Having deferred, in a sense, the challenge of defining a new projectfor the PCF placed even greater significance on the strategic objective ofthe leadership to repair the damage done to its electoral weight as aparty by the contests of the two previous years, and restore it to a betterbargaining position on the Left vis-à-vis the PS. Notwithstanding LionelJospin’s relatively good showing in the first round of the presidential



elections of 1995, scoring 23.3 per cent of the votes cast (against 18.6and 20.8 for his right-wing rivals Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chiracrespectively), and the surprising way he narrowed the gap on Chirac inthe second round (scoring 47.36 against the latter’s 52.64), the resultwas a serious defeat for the Left as a whole. The global score for the Leftin the first round at 37.24 per cent of the votes cast was well down onthe elections of 1988 when it scored 45.23 per cent. The performance ofRobert Hue told a tale of both apparent success and veiled disappoint-ment. While his first round score of 8.6 per cent was clearly up onAndré Lajoinie’s 6.8 in the previous presidential contest, it failed toeclipse the total communist vote when the 2 per cent polled by thedissident communist candidature of Pierre Juquin was added toLajoinie’s. To the left of the PCF, Arlette Laguiller, as the Lutte Ouvrièrecandidate, had made an unexpectedly good bid for the support ofworkers and white-collar employees, and more than doubled her firstround score to 5.3 per cent, in comparison to 2 per cent in 1988.26 But itwas on the far right that the inroads on what might have been a naturalreservoir of votes for the PCF was most telling.

While Jean-Marie Le Pen’s share of the votes cast was up undramat-ically from 14.4 per cent in the first round in 1988 to 15 per cent in1995, the telling facts for Robert Hue were those which underlined theway tendencies in the two opposite poles of the political spectrumrepresented by the FN and PCF appeared to cross. Whereas during thelegislative elections of 1978 the PCF was able to count on 28 per centsupport from 18 to 24 year-olds and 26 per cent from 25 to 34 year-olds,by the time of Hue’s presidential candidature in 1995, that support haddeclined in the two age groups to 7/6 per cent (male/female) and 9/10per cent respectively. In marked contrast to Hue, the FN’s Jean-MarieLe Pen was considerably over-represented in the foregoing demographiccategories, taking 19 per cent of the vote among male 18–24 year-olds(10 per cent among the corresponding females), and 17/16 per cent(male/female) among the 25–34 year-olds. The demographic logic ofthis evolution made the gap even wider among first-time voters, with7 per cent voting for the PCF candidate and 21 per cent voting for theFN candidate. Of the socio-economic strata on whom the PCF candidateshould expect to depend, namely workers and employees, Hue held theline or improved: 15 per cent of votes cast among workers and 10 per centamong employees (in contrast to Lajoinie’s 6 per cent score among thelatter category in 1988). But here again Le Pen’s score in thoserespective categories of 27 and 19 per cent illustrated the drift towardsright-wing populism among those sections of society where the PCF



should have hoped to re-establish its fortunes. A more general compari-son of the performances of Hue and Le Pen in those regions where thenational PCF vote was concentrated highlights the way Hue was outdis-tanced by his far right adversary in his own backyard: in the north-westLe Pen took 19 per cent of the votes cast as opposed to 12.1 for Hue;along the Mediterranean coast it was 20.6 per cent against 10.1 per cent;in the Paris region it was 14 per cent against 8.7 per cent; and it wasonly in the rural Centre region that the tendency was reversed withthe voters giving Hue a 14.1 per cent share as opposed to Le Pen’s9 per cent.27

Looking more closely at the voting pattern for the PCF in terms ofan internal comparator, that is, its candidate’s performance comparedto 1988, ostensible progress was counterbalanced by its soberingimplications. The four regional bastions of the PCF mentioned aboveare comprised of 28 departments, more specifically: the Paris region(Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, Essonne,Seine-et-Marne, Val-d’Oise, Yvelines); the north-west (Aisne, Ardennes,Nord, Oise, Pas-de-Calais, Seine-Maritime, Somme); the Centre (Allier,Cher, Corrèze, Creuse, Dordogne, Haute-Vienne); and the Mediterranean(Alpes-Maritimes, Aude, Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard, Hérault, Pyrénéesorientales, Var). In this set of constituencies, which provides the bedrock ofsupport for the PCF, in 1988 Lajoinie had garnered 1,153,103 votesrepresenting a 56.4 per cent share of the total turnout for the communistcandidate, but whereas Hue gathered 1,310,000 votes in 1995 thisrepresented only 50.4 per cent of the total turnout for the communistcandidate. In the second set of some 67 departments where the PCFcandidates had had the best showing outside of the four regional bastions,that was where Lajoinie had concentrated 43.6 per cent of the communistvote in 1988, whereas Hue managed to raise this to 49.6 per cent in 1995.The lesson in the evolution of the communist vote in both sets ofdepartments taken together over that period was confirmed by theresults in 1995: Hue outperformed Lajoinie in his ability to mobilise thecommunist constituency in those departments where the communistpresence was traditionally weaker anyway, but was least successful inthose departments which should have been the most reliable sourceof electoral strength. In short, the worrying lesson of 1995 for thenew leader of the PCF regarding his performance in the presidentialelections was that his candidature had made the party a little lessmarginal in those departments where its chances of exercising localpower were slim anyway, but had failed to rebuild the party’s credibilityin those bastions where power was once a realistic prospect.28



In theory, under Hue, the municipal elections of June 1995 shouldhave allowed the PCF to repair some of the credibility lost in the presi-dential elections that, by their very nature, operate to the detriment ofthe collectivist ethos of the PCF. The municipalities represented thegrassroots strength of the party, through the concentration of partypersonnel in local bureaucracies and the exercise of local competencies,such as housing policy, which allowed the local authorities to cultivatea natural clientele. As a result of the previous elections in 1989, the PCFhad been left with a little more than 1400 communes out of the 35,000for the whole of France. Out of those under communist control, onehad more than 100,000 inhabitants (Le Havre); 45 (out of 277) hadmore than 30,000; 94 (out of 658) had between 10,000 and 30,000; and157 had between 3500 and 10,000. The results in 1995 were marked bythe loss of its biggest municipality, Le Havre, and of seven towns withmore than 30,000 inhabitants. Although it gained four more compar-able municipalities this was due to unusual local specificities such asdivisions among the right-wing parties, allowing the FN into the secondround and thereby polarising opposition to it to the benefit of the PCF.The general tendency in the evolution of the PCF vote at municipallevel followed the curve first discernible in 1977. In some cases (such asLe Havre notably), the decline was exaggerated by the departure fromthe political scene of powerful mayoral figures who had been in localpolitics for decades and for whom there was no obvious successor fromthe ranks of local comrades. Elsewhere, surprise gains, apart from thedisunity of the Right mentioned above, flowed from the opportunitiesto play the traditional tribune role of the party in the face of clearlydiscredited local government administrations. But the final balancesheet confirmed that the party’s failure to convince, even at local level,continued to undermine its existence. In total, the PCF was left with6426 municipal councillors, having won control of 18 towns of morethan 30,000 inhabitants in the first round, but having lost 49 munici-palities of more than 3500 inhabitants in contrast to the 24 it hadcaptured.29

Rather than succumbing to an atavistic reflex to deal with defeat bydenying it, and appearing to pull the party together by depriving itsmembers of the opportunity to speak, Hue decided to proclaim his faithin the possibility of transforming the party through the licence he gaveto the expression of pluralism. In the preparations for the party’s 29thCongress, Hue invited individual members to express their opinions ofwhat were considered the most pressing issues challenging the PCF:what its orientation should be, the contradictions thrown up by the



evolution of French society, the ensuing impact on the political life ofthe party, the relationship between civilisation and communism andhow to define a politics of change. On one hand, it was a high-riskstrategy that could not fail to reveal the deep division in the party thatmight be exacerbated by the Congress. On the other hand, the divisionswere already in evidence as different sensibilities or tendencies vocal-ised their opposition to each other’s proposals for rescuing the party.The most peripheral of these five major tendencies was led by the MEPand national bureau member, Philippe Herzog. An association calledConfrontations had formed around him to express its frustration withthe party’s immobilism and its criticism of the PCF’s hostility to theconstruction of Europe. Less marginalised than Herzog and hisfollowers on the reformist wing of the party were the refondateurs, ledby Guy Hermier and convinced that Hue was not going far enough inthe attempt to transform the party. For the refondateurs there was anobvious constituency out there waiting to be harnessed, which wasexpressed by their suggestion at a national committee meeting inOctober 1996 that the PCF should take the lead in shaping a new ‘pôlede radicalité’. This radical focus or alliance should bring together thePCF, the Mouvement des Citoyens (MDC), the ecologist Verts and far left,tapping the reservoir of discontent that had been dramatically uncoveredby the grassroots mobilisation against the social and economic policiesof Chirac’s prime minister, Alain Juppé, during the autumn of discontentin 1995. According to the refondateurs, the popular mobilisation againstthe loi Debré in 1996 and its attempt to ‘regularise’ certain aspects ofthe rights of immigrants in France simply provided further proof of thepotential for the creation of a radical force to the left of the PS, drawingon the support of the 15–20 per cent of voters whose voices weredispersed among the movements and parties unable to break throughbecause of the voting system in France.

In the middle of the party sat the team of reformers gathered aroundRobert Hue, comprised of some notable figures who had rallied to hiscause after service to the former leader, notably Pierre Blotin,Jean-Claude Gayssot, Bernard Vasseur and Jean-François Gau. Facingthem on the orthodox or anti-reformist wing of the party theresubsisted a group of Marchais loyalists, but their influence was in steepdecline largely due to the rapidly declining health of Marchais himself,which would prompt his absence from the 29th Congress. The extremeend of the anti-reformist wing of the party was occupied by a factionthat had created its own coordination communiste, working for a Leninistrenaissance and revolutionary continuity. By 1995 they had created



their own organ, Intervention communiste, in which their leaders,notably the Deputy Rémy Auchedé, the deputy mayor of AubervilliersJean-Jacques Karman and Henri Alleg (tellingly the leading light of theCercles Erich Honecker), could castigate Hue’s leadership for havingbetrayed the old Soviet and Leninist values of international proletar-ianism and democratic centralism. In language reminiscent of the acri-monious tirades that split the socialist camp in France and Europeduring the 1920s, this tendency produced the most bitter criticism ofHue’s leadership, accusing him of using the apparent logic of inevitabletransformation to pursue a policy of ‘reformism’ in the old and pejorativesense, that is, fatal compromise with the forces of bourgeois capitalism.

The combustible potential represented by these tendencies did not,however, ignite when the 29th Congress took place, from 18 to 21December 1996. The desire for change under Hue had already made asignificant symbolic advance with the venue chosen for the Congress.By choosing the high-rise and high-tech business quarter of La Défense,a break was signalled with the ouvrierisme implicit in the habitual resortto the old venue in the communist suburb of Saint-Ouen. Also signifi-cant was the new configuration given to the disposition of the seats inthe new venue, with the decision to dispense with the traditional plat-form from which the leadership could direct a downward and dom-inating gaze on the delegates. In a sense the sting was drawn from theCongress before it took place with figures like Guy Hermier predictingthat it would be a non-event. When the Congress got underway,Philippe Herzog and his supporters effectively renounced their ambitionto win the party over to their convictions, arguing that it was incapableof transforming itself. As for the PCF’s principal ally in the interfacewith the workers in their concrete economic sphere, the CGT, itsgeneral secretary Louis Viannet declared his belief that there should notbe an organic link between the leadership of the union and that of theparty, and that consequently he was giving up his seat on the nationalbureau. But while on the one hand there seemed to be a lack of enthu-siasm from within the party to engage with the process of mutation ortransformation announced by Hue, on the other hand there was agreater willingness from outside the party to engage in dialogue with itpost-Marchais. This was borne out by the notable non-communistsinvited to the Congress representing a broad range of political sensibilities:Francine de la Gorce, the vice president of ATD Quart Monde (the organ-isation set up by Father Joseph Wrezinski to combat poverty andhuman rights abuse around the world); the former maoist soixante-huitard, Roland Castro, whose political odyssey had seen his loyalties



move across through Mitterrand to Charles Pasqua; the writer andanalyst Julia Kristeva; the sociologist Emmanuel Todd, some of whoseideas would be taken up by Jacques Chirac; and the political commen-tator and pollster Stéphane Rozès.

Whether or not convinced by the discourse of Hue, these guestswould have noticed the change in the vocabulary one might haveexpected traditionally from the General Secretary, now the NationalSecretary, of the party. The ideological catechism of old that wouldhave required frequent references to socialism, the working class andclass struggle had given way to the articulation of belief in the dynamicemerging from within society, and notably through the involvement ofthe citizen, which it was the mission of the party to promote. The partywas inspired by a tradition of collective, revolutionary action in pursuitof the common good that sprang from within the frontiers of France,embodied by the idealism of 1789. The communist values that the PCFwas promoting as it prepared for the future had replaced class withcommunity, underlined the imperative to share the fruits of prosperityand recognised the widespread need for a greater sense of security. Therevolutionary vocation that shaped the identity of the PCF now had asits aim the creation of a more humane society, supported by the valuesof citizenship and solidarity.30

Whether unwittingly or not, Hue was already preparing the party totake advantage of Jacques Chirac’s gamble in dissolving parliament andcalling legislative elections a year earlier than required by the electoralcalendar. The themes enunciated by the National Secretary at the 29thCongress were picked up again in the PCF programme for the legislativeelections of 1997. The call for reflationary economic policies in order tocombat unemployment was couched in terms of the broad need forgovernment to commit to ‘démocratie citoyenne’, that is, the imperativeof participation expressed by social movements in France, and the inev-itable challenge of renewing France was addressed in terms of theinspiration to be found in the country’s own traditions of radicalreform so that this could be accomplished ‘à la française’.31 The themeof endogenous sources of a dynamic for change was used recurrently asa counterpoint exploiting the discontent generated by the government’seconomic policy aligned with the convergence criteria preparing thecountry for entry to the single currency. Instead of ‘turning the screw’by implementing the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, the PCFcalled for an end to the policy of bending France to the demands of anultraliberal austerity package that merely increased insecurity and thedomination of financial interests. The way forward, it argued, was for



France to be restored to herself through a genuine sovereignty of thepeople that allowed them to take control of their own destinies.

Chirac’s tactic in calling the legislative elections early was not difficultto understand: the pain involved in cutting the budget deficits prior tothe adoption of the Euro would increase as the mandate for theNational Assembly drew to its natural close and going early would meetthe ostensible goal of ‘relegitimising’ the government’s actions andavert a more likely scenario of defeat. The polls of February and Marchstill put the government ahead of the opposition in the approvalratings, and the President’s advisers supported his strategy. Equallyclear, however, once the President announced the dissolution of theAssembly on the evening of 21 April and set the campaigning process intrain, was the way in which the principal motivations for his actionswould also be the most conspicuous by their absence from the debatesof the leaders of the majority in the run-up to the first round of votingon 25 May. The campaign was a timid one, with the major playersshowing little real enthusiasm for revealing their cards on the mostimportant underlying issue, namely the pursuit of the European projectand its economic consequences, particularly for employment. AlthoughChirac and Prime Minister Juppé might have been perceived as playinginto the hands of their critics by their aversion to engaging with theissues that most exercised the electorate, the PCF did not react withalacrity. The national committee met on 25 April to determine theparty’s strategy and four days later the PCF put its name to a joint declar-ation with the PS, which was the fruit of months of discussionspredating the dissolution of the Assembly. While stating certain sharedobjectives, it was not meant to be a common programme for govern-ment (a point underlined by PS leader Lionel Jospin on 12 May), andthe PCF campaign proper was launched by Hue at a meeting inMarseille on 6 May.

The behaviour of the electorate was indicative of the changeabilitythat would, in this instance, favour the Left, but also represent tooshifting a constituency to be relied upon as a platform for the future.Opinion polls indicated that although support for the Right wasdeclining during the fortnight leading up to the first round, the mobil-isation in favour of the Left did not begin to materialise until a few daysbefore voters were due to go to the ballot box. The 36.2 per cent ofvotes obtained by the Right on 25 May was a clear rebuff, leaving them7.9 per cent down on 1993, while at 42.1 per cent, the Left was up 7.1points on 1993, with the PCF seemingly restored to a solid platformwith a 9.9 per cent share of the vote.32 It was noteworthy that the



young, in particular, appeared to come back to the Left. Furthermore,the gains made among employees, workers and the professional classesseemed to revive the alliance that had been the strength of the Left after1971 and had seemed to unravel in 1993, namely its ability to appeal toboth the small man at the bottom of the social ladder, and the middleclasses who might otherwise be tempted by the overtures of economicliberalism.33 When the dust settled after the second round on 1 June,the most dramatic gain in seats in the new Assembly was obviously forthe non-communist Left (PS, PRS, DVG), up from 70 in the outgoingAssembly to 263 in the new one. But the PCF also enjoyed a noteworthyincrease in Deputies, up from 23 to 39. The enhanced profile in theAssembly mirrored the party’s enhanced profile in its four bastions inthe country, most impressively in the Centre, where it regained the twoDeputies for the Allier and the one for the Cher that had been lost in1993, also picking up a Deputy to represent the Dordogne.

The new government to which the new Assembly gave rise reflectedboth the stabilisation in the electoral fortunes suggested by the electionresults, and the way the PCF had changed as a party of the Left. Whileremaining an important partner for the dominant Socialists, it was nolonger quite the ‘force incontournable’ it once was, that is, thatsometimes infuriatingly obdurate partner that was nonetheless tooimportant to be circumvented. Pursuing the electoral logic of a gaucheplurielle or plural Left in order to defeat the outgoing majority, LionelJospin offered cabinet posts to the MDC and the ecologist Verts, as wellas the PCF. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevènement of the MDC took the port-folio for the Ministry of the Interior and Dominique Voynet of the Vertstook, appropriately, Environment and Planning. In contrast to theirfirst participation in a Socialist-led government at the beginning of theMitterrand years, the Communists now found themselves with asmaller and a feminised input. While Jean-Claude Gayssot took theministerial portfolio for Transport and Housing, Marie-Georges Buffetbecame Minister for Youth and Sport and Michèle Demessine wasappointed junior minister responsible for Tourism.

The challenge for Robert Hue, in terms of his relationship vis-à-vis hisown party and vis-à-vis the government, was, in the former case, tocontinue the process of mutation or transformation in a way that didnot alienate those who thought he was too slow and those whobelieved he was burning the bridges with the party’s past; and in thelatter case he had to show the PCF’s independence in its relationshipwith the PS while not exposing the modest hand his party had to play.An illustration of the first aspect of that challenge came with the



National Secretary’s carefully modulated response to the death ofGeorges Marchais on 16 November 1997. Emerging from the hospitalwhere Marchais died, Hue expressed a strong sense of personal loss andthe appreciation he had for Marchais’ qualities as an individual. Interms of Marchais’ contribution to the evolution of the PCF, however,Hue was more circumspect. As commentators had noted of Hue’s bookon la mutation of French communism, the 350-page essay deferred onlythree times to the ideas of Marchais. Thus, in the immediate aftermathof Marchais’ passing, Hue remarked on the positive changes that hispredecessor has set in train, and that were now (in other words, underHue’s stewardship of the party’s fortunes), bearing fruit through themutation of the party. Although Hue could not proclaim, as didAlain Krivine of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR),that Marchais’ death was the symbolic end to the generations of PCFleaders who confused communism with Stalinism, Hue’s response was atacit acknowledgement that a chapter had closed in the history of thePCF and that this would not be detrimental to the process of change.34

A few weeks beforehand, Hue had expounded on what he thoughtthe role of the PCF should be, as part of a governing gauche plurielle.Mindful of comparisons with the Communists of Rifondazione in Italy,who had boxed themselves into a coalition that left them supportingthe government of Romano Prodi but without a voice in government,Hue stressed the positive participation of the three communists inJospin’s cabinet. The general thrust of Hue’s declarations was to under-line the notion that the PCF was a party with a positive programme thatwould use its role in government to positive ends. On the thorny issueof Europe, in spite of its hostility to the Maastricht Treaty, Hue declaredthat the PCF was ‘euroconstructif’, and that its mission was to give anew and much needed meaning to Europe. The key to this, he argued,was to determine the priorities of European construction in line withsocial need. The ‘social’ emerged as the theme connecting the diverseissues addressed by the National Secretary of the party, and when askedto state what the specific role of the PCF was to be in the gauche plurielle,Hue answered that it was to lay the foundations for ‘l’interventioncitoyenne’, a situation where ordinary citizens felt enabled to exercise agenuine influence on the management of the issues affecting their lives.In a language unburdened by the old clichés, Hue talked of the PCF’snew ‘discours de radicalité’, a discourse of radical change that wouldonly convince if the party adopted a visible posture of constructiveness.35

In reality, Hue’s discourse was not convincing enough either todisguise the weak bargaining position of the PCF vis-à-vis the Socialists



in government, or to persuade the disillusioned members in its ownranks that it was forging ahead on a path that would generate a newfuture for the party. The leadership had been conspicuously muted, forexample, in its reaction to the plans of the Jospin government to openup certain state enterprises to private capital. As Guy Hermier, speakingfor the refondateurs observed, the leadership had failed to imagine andarticulate a new concept for the democratisation of the public sectorthat might offer a credible alternative to the privatisation route.Hermier implied that Hue might have jettisoned the old baggage, buthad failed to define a ‘radicalité’ or pole of radical thought or actionthat could take the party forward, and warned of the headlong rushtowards a ‘satellisation’ of the PCF in its relationship with the PS, withthe Communists held in an irresistible orbit around their much morepowerful ally in the gauche plurielle.36 It was, nonetheless, an indicationof how far the party had come since Marchais’ day that a leadingCommunist Deputy and a member of the national bureau could makesuch confident criticism of the leadership, so soon after it had led theparty into government again, and in the pages of a leading paper. Fortheir part, Hue and the members of the national committee pursuedtheir goal of creating an ‘open’ party, and to this end the nationalcommittee meeting of 16/17 November 1998 voted to annul allsanctions that the PCF had taken against its members for flouting theideological or organisational principles which the party, nowcommitted to the process of mutation, had resolved to transform.Moreover, the documentation relating to those punitive measureswould be made available for consultation, in line with the regulationsgoverning access to public archives. As Alain Krivine remarked wryly, itwas a curious kind of honour to be rehabilitated after 33 years, but thathe had no wish to rejoin a fold that had lost its way. And when askedfor his opinion, Pierre Juquin wondered presciently, whether such amedia-conscious act did not reflect the fear in the PCF leadership that,in the competition to define a new kind of radicalism, it was beingovertaken by others.37

Juquin’s observation underlined the inevitable risk the party had totake under Hue’s leadership, of finding itself outflanked because it hadshed the dogmas of the past without producing an intellectually cohe-sive project that might restore it to a dominant role as a vanguard forchange. Hue’s ambition of creating an open party, his desire to offerproof of the party’s ‘euroconstructive’ attitude, and to illustrate themutation that had occurred and was ongoing in the party would soon beput to the test in the European elections of 13 May 1999. He would



spell out the gamble to the national committee of the party on28 January, by proposing to lead a list characterised by a double-doseof parité. Picking up the theme that had gained so much momentumin civil society at large, the list led by Hue would have equal numbersof men and women and, more innovatively still, equal numbers ofcommunists and non-communists. Thus three weeks later when the listwas made public, the desire for openness and a new vital connectionwith civil society was personified by the presence on the list of non-PCFmembers like the philosopher Geneviève Fraisse and the architectRoland Castro, and the outgoing president of SOS-racisme, Fodé Sylla.Old loyalties were not forgotten, with the inclusion of union leaderslike Michel Deschamps and Denis Cohen, and old differences werereconciled vis-à-vis PCF members who had left or been excluded by theparty with names like Philippe Herzog and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimonton the list. Symbolic of the transformation of the party, and eventhough it was spending four times more on the campaign than it did in1994, the PCF set about making its case to the electorate under thebanner of its Bouge l’Europe list, rather than its own colours.

As Hue proclaimed to the press, the list he led was engaged in acampaign that was ‘positive, constructive, young, joyful and confidentin the future’.38 But there was evidence, however, that Hue’s convictionhad not entirely won over the party’s members. The militants were slowto mobilise on the ground in support of the list, and this lack of enthu-siasm was complicated by the divisions that occurred among candidateson the list over France’s position concerning the war in former Yugoslavia.The PCF condemned the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia thatwas aimed at securing its retreat from Kosovo. However, figures on theBouge l’Europe list it promoted were unequivocal in their support for theNATO strategy, such as Philippe Herzog, Fodé Sylla and especiallyGeneviève Fraisse. With the early polls suggesting little joy for thedeparture he had initiated from the traditional electoral strategies of thePCF, Hue returned to the more familiar posture of a PCF leader for whatwas left of the campaign, adopting a more party-minded discourse thatwas critical of the government and hostile to the left factionalismrepresented by the Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Ligue Communisterévolutionaire (LCR).39

When the results of the election on 13 June were counted, there waslittle comfort to be had from the fact that the 6.8 per cent share of thevotes cast for the communist vehicle had not fallen below the shareobtained by the PCF list led by Francis Wurtz in 1994. The reality wasthat in 1994 the PCF had secured 1,342,222 votes, whereas in 1999 this



had fallen to 1,192,155. The voting patterns showed that compared tothe previous European election, the PCF vote had become more hom-ogenised geographically, with the party losing ground in its formerbastions. In Seine-Saint-Denis for example, its share of the vote droppedby one per cent. But the pro-European conversion of the leadershipseemed to have confused its electorate most in the rural heartlands,with the share of the votes cast dropping by 2.1 per cent in the Gardand 2.7 per cent in the Corrèze. More disappointing was the way thePCF was well beaten by the Verts, who returned nine Eurodeputies:caught up by the countryside lobby represented by Chasse, pêche, tradition,nature (who returned the same number of Eurodeputies as the PCF, six,since the communists had lost one); and found the Trotskyists ofLO–LCR snapping at its heels with a remarkable 5.2 per cent share ofthe votes cast and five Eurodeputies.40

The analyses that followed immediately after the election focused,inevitably, on the stunning success of the far left, which doubled itsscore in relation to 1994 and enjoyed notable successes in those constitu-encies where the left-wing vote had once been unequivocallycommunist. Thus in the Pas-de-Calais the LO–LCR ticket almostdoubled the far left vote to 7.2 per cent, compared to 1994, and inAubervilliers it almost trebled to a 9.6 per cent share of the vote. Whattended to be overlooked was the fragile nature of the LO–LCR allianceand the rivalries that militated against enduring success, or the ambiguousresponses of those who had voted for them when polled on their futurevoting intentions. The lessons for the PCF and its leadership were,however, clear. Notwithstanding the repeated evocations by Hue of themutation in which the party was engaged, this had not yet resulted in aclear or convincing perception of the party’s renewal, in terms ofstrategy, ideals or identity, either by the wider electorate or a substantialnumber of its own members.

In leadership terms, Hue continued to distance himself from thetraditional dominance associated with the role of the party head. At theend of his book on la mutation, Hue had expressed the convictionthat the time had come for the party to cease confusing unity withuniformity. The antidote to the charge of being a ‘monolithic’ party, hebelieved, was not simply to tolerate opposing views within the partybut to enable those holding such views to retain their posts of responsi-bility within it.41 When reflecting on how far this process of change hadtaken the party, Hue began his book on the new communist project bytying the issue of renewal with the understanding of the leadership postitself. Implying that the destiny of the party should not be dependent



on the destiny of the leader, Hue portrayed the prospect of his vacatingthe post as an opening or opportunity for the party, and a decision thatwould be taken in consultation with other figures in the party, particu-larly, as he underlined, female ones.42 A sense of collegial accommoda-tion and gender equality was discernible in the run-up to the Europeanelection. The scenario originally envisaged by Hue of Marie-GeorgeBuffet heading the communist list was soon dispensed with when hetook note of her lack of enthusiasm for the idea and her attachment toministerial office in the Jospin government, where she was perceived tohave performed very creditably. As one commentator observed, the PCFseemed determined to mark its progress by the ‘double incarnation’ ofits leadership through the male National Secretary and the femalegovernment minister.43

Hue’s mistrust of authoritarian leadership took on a note of outrighthostility when it came to articulating the party’s response to the reformof the presidential mandate. The ball that had been somewhat mischiev-ously set rolling by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with theproposal to reduce the length of the presidential mandate was caughtby Jacques Chirac and drew him, notwithstanding his clear reservationsat the outset, into the camp of the reformers. With a referendum set for24 September 2000 aimed at soliciting the approval of French voters fora reduction in the length of the mandate from seven to five years, on4 September Robert Hue gave a major press conference explaining theresources the PCF would mobilise in pursuit of an ‘active abstention’and why. For Hue, the system would still remain old-fashioned andauthoritarian because a simple reduction in the length of the mandatewould not fundamentally alter the concentration of power in the handsof one individual, therefore leaving the French political system as presi-dential as ever. Moreover, by making legislative and presidentialelections run in tandem the former would be reduced in significance byserving to confirm the result of the latter, thereby reducing the importanceof parliament even further. According to Hue, all mandates needed tobe shortened and revised, and the PCF would be campaigning againstthe proposed reform on the grounds that what was needed was less‘presidentialisation’ not more, and genuine modernisation that wouldfacilitate more meaningful participation by citizens not less.44

In spite of the criticism from some quarters of the paradoxical situationthe PCF found itself in by campaigning actively over a choice of optionswhen it had condemned them both as hollow, the results of the refer-endum proved Hue’s comments on the need to encourage genuineparticipation to have merit. When the votes cast on 24 September 2000



were counted, the results translated what some commentators inter-preted as an ‘effrondrement structurel’ or structural collapse of thepolitical system created by de Gaulle.45 Of the nine referendums thathad taken place since 1958, none had testified to such voter indifference:in metropolitan France 18.75 per cent voted for the quinquennat, 6.97voted against and 69.28 abstained. In effect, less than one in five regis-tered voters mandated the reform of the institution of the presidency,beating the previous record for abstentionism set in November 1988, of62.64 per cent, when the referendum on the status of New Caledoniawas carried with the approval of just one in four of registered voters.46 Itwas the culmination of more than a decade of political disengagementthat was both cultural and non-partisan. The advocates of the changehad failed to convince the voters that it would result in a more evenlybalanced relationship between the legislature and the executive,perhaps, as some hoped, in the mould set across the Atlantic. But giventhe absence of a political culture comparable to that of the UnitedStates, their adversaries had evoked the possibility of a French systemlocked in permanent conflict. Ironically, the U-turns of Gaullist PresidentJacques Chirac may have done the most to damage the relationship oftrust and legitimacy directly conferred on the President by the Frenchpeople, by exposing choices so clearly driven by the desire for politicalsurvival. While his tactics may have been questionable, in terms of hissensibility Hue was more honest than other party leaders in registeringthe deep current of resentment against the political system, and theemergence of what less partisan observers have called a process ofabstention-sanction in which voting has become a relativised processaimed at punishing a process of alternance which is in fact répétition, andsending a message to successive governments that they have beendisavowed by the people.47

The disastrous turnout for the referendum on the presidentialmandate may well have marked the terminal phase in the operation ofthe Fifth Republic as envisaged by de Gaulle, but the presidencyremained the keystone of the constitutional architecture sustaining it,and within little more than a year Hue and the PCF would have to facethe challenge of preparing for another French presidential election. Thedesignation of Hue as the party’s candidate was meant to testify to theleadership’s desire to prove its democratic and modernising credentials.Opting for a procedure not envisaged in the party’s statutes, the leader-ship organised a consultation that solicited the views of all the sectionsand federations on the best of the eight candidates standing to becomethe party’s presidential candidate. When the ballot, which took place



between 1 and 6 October 2001, was finished, Hue won comfortablywith 78 per cent of the votes, well ahead of his nearest rival, the refonda-teur Maxime Gremetz, with 15 per cent of the vote. However, Gremetzand four other defeated candidates criticised the leadership for itsrefusal to engage in a real battle of ideas, and for exaggerating the levelof participation in the ballot in a way worthy of a Soviet-style plebiscite.48

At the party’s 31st Congress at the end of that month, the official linemade little concession to the criticisms of Gremetz and others, focusinginstead on the figures that confirmed their view that Hue’s endorse-ment was another milestone in the party’s democratisation. In his reportto the Congress calling upon it to ratify Hue’s candidature, Jean-FrançoisGau trumpeted the figure of 64,000 party members who had taken partin the consultative process, the biggest organised by the party in yearsand 17,000 more than the figure for those who had endorsed the par-ticipation of communist ministers in government in 1997.49 In his ownclosing speech to the Congress, Hue expounded on the opportunitiesfor the party that built upon his vision for its transformation. Heconceded that presidential elections were always particularly difficultfor communist candidates, but argued that there was an opening for thePCF that it could exploit. Millenarist visions were a thing of the past, aswere sweeping condemnations of developments like globalisation.What the party had to supply was options for individuals attempting tofashion their own happiness. Instead of positing an end-state, the partyhad to offer new beginnings and possibilities for the many disen-chanted groups in society. In an attempt to link the party’s past to itsfuture, Hue cited the party’s emergence in the nineteenth century as ameans of channelling disparate and sometimes terrorist challenges toinjustice. Tacitly acknowledging the heavy price the party had paid inthe generalised backlash against mainstream politics, Hue argued thatthe party had to find a way of rehabilitating politics, in order topersuade men and women that it offered them a means of takingcontrol of their individual destinies.50

Hue’s appearances in the media in the build-up to the presidentialelection were marked by the same determination to believe that therewas a space for the PCF to occupy and exploit on the political landscape,and that the discourse defining it had to eschew the ideological general-isations of the past in favour of concrete proposals for concrete situations.But as some commentators identified, this more modest and honestdiscourse also accommodated a sense of reality concerning the PCF’sposition that inevitably place Hue on the back foot. While rejecting thepollsters’ assertions that the election would chronicle a death foretold,



Hue’s arguments implied the recognition that the PCF’s role was tocomplement the action of the Socialists or moderate some of their initia-tives, but that of itself it could initiate very little. In the space of oneinterview on France 2 on 25 January 2002, Hue’s defence of his prospectswas notable for the progressively downward revision of his party’scontribution to the contest, from being ‘essential’, to being ‘original’,‘efficient’ and finally ‘useful’.51 In the months that followed, Hue stakedout a position based on the defence of ordinary working people,whether that was to resist increasing the rights of employers to lay offworkers, championing the cause of retirement before the age of 60, orarguing against the creation of a European constitution that weakenedFrance’s own and paved the way for the excesses of economic liberalisationto operate in France.52 But as the forecasts continued to paint dimin-ishing prospects for the PCF candidate, Hue was essentially reduced toarguing that Lionel Jospin, as the Socialist candidate, could not expectto win the second round without taking account of the sensibilitiesexpressed by PCF voters. More worryingly still for Hue, the prospectivesuccess in the first round of other candidates to the left of the PCF likeArlette Laguiller was condemned by him as simply splitting the voteand playing into the hands of the Right.53

When the results of the first round of the presidential elections, on 21April 2002, had been counted (Table 8.1), the catastrophe predicted bysome commentators for the PCF appeared to have come about.

The decline in votes for Hue in comparison to 1995, from 8.7 per centto 3.37 per cent meant that the PCF had lost three-fifths of its electoralcapital within the space of that presidential mandate. Looked at moreclosely, Hue did not significantly exceed half of the number of votescast for him in 1995, in any of the 96 departments or 555 constituencies

Table 8.1 Performance of left-wing and ecology candidatesin the first round of the presidential elections 2002

Source: www.elections2002.sciences-po.fr.

Candidate % of votes cast

Arlette Laguiller 5.72 Olivier Besancenot 4.25 Robert Hue 3.37 Lionel Jospin 16.18 Noël Mamère 5.25 Jean-Pierre Chevènement 5.33



of metropolitan France.54 The results of the first round of the legislativeelections (Table 8.2), which took place on 9 June 2002, seemed toconfirm that Hue’s failure of leadership in the presidential election wasemblematic of the party’s lack of credibility as a whole.

The 4.82 per cent share of the votes cast was the worst ever resultobtained by PCF candidates in legislative elections. The result had to benuanced by the fact that the lesson inflicted on the gauche plurielle byJean-Marie Le Pen’s presence in the second round of the presidentialelection at the expense of Jospin had strengthened the republicandiscipline among the parties of the Left in order to enhance the survivalprospects of left-wing candidates into the second round of the legislativeelections. Thus the PS, Verts and Radicaux de gauche in 13 constituenciesmobilised behind the PCF candidate from the first round, while the PCFreciprocated in a larger number of constituencies elsewhere, and ultim-ately emerged with 21 seats. In spite of this, when calculated acrossthe 484 constituencies where the PCF was represented, the resultobtained by its candidates still represented a historic low (5.6 per centof the votes cast). And while it could be argued that the party had raisedits score in relation to Hue’s performance in the presidential elections,the reality was that the increase was still very marginal.55

The catastrophe for the Left of no candidate going forward to thesecond round of the presidential elections, and especially the fate ofHue, was inevitably and immediately seized on as the final epitaph forthe PCF. Indeed, the causes for the collapse of the communist vote

Table 8.2 Performance of left-wing and ecology parties in the first round of the legislative elections 2002

Source: www.assemblee-nat.fr/elections/resultats.asp.

Party % of votes cast

Lutte Ouvrière 1.20 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire

1.27

Extrême gauche 0.32 Parti communiste français 4.82 Parti socialiste 24.11 Parti radical de gauche 1.54 Divers gauche 1.09 Verts 4.51 Pôle républicain 1.19 Autres ecologistes 1.17



were not difficult to identify, even in its traditional heartlands. In thecommunist municipality of Calais, Le Pen took the biggest share ofthe votes cast in the first round with 18.48 per cent, while Hue waspushed down into fifth place with 8.62 per cent. In a grassroots surveyof voter sentiment after the first round, the reasons for switching toLe Pen were clear: concerns over the breakdown of law and order,clandestine immigration (especially the problems over the refugeecentre at Sangatte) and job insecurity. In spite of Hue’s frequent visitsto the constituency and his conspicuous support for the workersfacing redundancy at the LU biscuit factory, it was clear that the PCFhad become tarred with the same brush as a Socialist-led governmentperceived as indifferent to the problems faced by ordinary Frenchvoters in such constituencies.56

But with more objective distance, one could argue that the fateendured by Hue in the presidential elections was part of a wider andstinging rebuke handed out to the political establishment as a whole bythe French electorate. If Hue’s vote collapsed in the first round, so didJospin’s, leading to a first round elimination for the Left that wasunprecedented since 1969. The score totalled by the Trotskyist candi-dates, which at 10.4 per cent of the votes cast was way ahead of the 5.3they achieved in 1995, was certainly a humiliation for the PCF, butlooking across the political spectrum as a whole, parallel lessons couldbe drawn on the Right. Added together, the score achieved by Le Penand his erstwhile colleague in the FN, Bruno Mégret, totalled 19.2 per centof the vote and was 4.2 per cent up on the far right score in 1995.Conversely, the moderate right, represented by the candidatures ofJacques Chirac, François Bayrou, Christine Boutin and Alain Madelin,suffered its own collapse with a total share of 31.8 per cent of the votecompared to the 44.2 per cent share of the vote obtained by itsstandard-bearers in 1995 (Chirac, Balladur and Villiers). The mobilisa-tion of voters in the second round of the presidential elections bore outthe view that while prepared to punish the parties that work the polit-ical system, the voters are not prepared to break it. The hithertounheard of majority for Chirac of 82.2 per cent justified the character-isation of Le Pen and his party as an ‘impotent force’: on the one handan object with which to beat the mainstream parties and on the otherthe party which the vast majority of French voters love to hate the most.57

The results of the legislative elections of June illustrated that whilethe outcome of the first round of the presidential contest hadamounted to a profound shock, the pattern of allegiances had notaltered fundamentally. The success of the moderate right confirmed the



ascendancy it had achieved in the final outcome of the presidentialcontest, with the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) and theother parties of the mainstream right emerging from the second roundwith 365 out of 577 seats. On the Left, the breakthrough promised bythe far left in the presidential elections did not materialise. The PSbounced back as by far the dominant force on the Left, securing a 56.4per cent share of the votes cast for the Left and the ecologists (comparedto 49 per cent in 1997), and representing a much more credible oppos-ition to the moderate right than might have been envisaged only weeksbeforehand. More pertinently still for the PCF, it had proved that theannouncements of its demise were premature. Although it had unques-tionably taken a further step downward, it had nonetheless proved itsviability in maintaining the electoral credibility of the Left. The factthat less than one-third of its Deputies had been elected as the result ofa first-round agreement with the PS showed that it was still the onlyother left-wing party capable of surviving as an electoral force in a mannerthat was independent of the PS.58

Notwithstanding this more sober assessment of the PCF’s perform-ance injected with the benefit of hindsight, in the immediate aftermathof the two great electoral contests of 2002, the burden of responsibilityfell heavily on Robert Hue’s shoulders. The final electoral defeat for Huecame on 2 February 2003, when his attempt to regain a seat as a Deputyin the by-election at Argenteuil in the Val d’Oise failed. Criticisedwithin the party for the way he had managed his presidential campaignand over a longer period for his attitude to participation in Jospin’sgovernment, Hue’s farewell at the party’s 32nd Congress in April inSaint-Denis was not marked by gratitude on the part of the members orsatisfaction on his part. In veiled criticism of different sections of theparty, Hue blamed the orthodox tendency for wanting to revive a revo-lutionary discourse that had no relevance to the situation in which theparty found itself, while he accused the refondateurs of opting for a left-wing populism that promoted a type of communism that was bereft ofconcrete proposals. The mutation that he was committed to, he argued,was more than ever necessary. The muted response was summed up bythe refondateur Deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, François Asensi, when heobserved, ‘a page has been turned’.59 But if Hue’s leadership had failedto restore the party’s credibility vis-à-vis a wider electorate that wasanyway inclined, as noted above, to punish established parties at thepolls, was the party now possessed of the internal dynamic that wouldenable it to regenerate itself and survive autonomously on the Frenchpolitical landscape?



Regenerating the party

In an edition of the journal Communisme dedicated to analysing the fateof the PCF membership, all the evidence pointed to the fact that underHue’s leadership, the aspiration that the much proclaimed mutationwould give party members something firmer to hold on to was clearlyunfulfilled. A pattern was repeated from 1994 onwards which showedthat any marginal electoral gain in those areas where the PCF vote wasfrail was counterbalanced by decline in those areas which weresupposed to be its bastions. Sociologically, the PCF might have beenmaking very slight gains in the professional and managerial classes, butits traditional base among the working class was shrinking. The mutationadvocated by Hue left the party in a double bind: if it wished to broadenits membership base it had no option but to renew a discourse andintellectual vision that were already being elucidated in some form orother by forces such as the Socialists, the ecologists and the far left, butin taking this option it was pushing a section of its traditional working-class support into the arm of the far right.60 According to the party’sown figures, membership declined between 1994 and 2001 from590,000 to 138,000, effectively dropping by three-quarters. But judgingby more objective external calculations, the real drop was from approxi-mately 250,000 to 100,000.61

However much the figures might be contested, the symptoms of adeclining membership base made itself felt undeniably by the money,or lack of it, that the membership could bring to the party and its insti-tutions. The problems of L’Humanité’s declining circulation were notunrelated, according to Hue, to the paper’s insufficiently clear under-standing of its mission. Arguing for a paper that was open and incisive,Hue underlined that it should at the same time remember that it was acommunist paper, and in the face of some opposition within the party,in 2000 he supported the accession of Patrick Le Hyaric to the top job atthe newspaper. Although the paper’s financial deficit had been elim-inated by the sale of an office building on the boulevard Poissonnière in1999, Le Hyaric’s mission was to restructure the finances of the paper sothat its survival was not solely conditional on an increase in sales.62 Thesolution adopted during the course of the following year was revolu-tionary in the way it accommodated the inevitable reality of marketforces. A group representing the readers and friends of L’Humanitéagreed at a meeting on 19 May 2001 to open up the newspaper to aninjection of capital from the private sector. The broadcaster TF1 and thepublisher Hachette would provide the funds that would leave them



with 20 per cent of the newly capitalised daily, while the PCF wouldremain the leading shareholder with 40 per cent and occupy 8 of the 14seats on the shareholders’ watchdog body. As Patrick Le Hyaricexplained, L’Humanité had not sold its soul since sound measures werein place to safeguard the paper’s editorial independence, but the newfinancial arrangements were necessary in order not to add to the 58redundancies already envisaged among its employees.63

The year 2001 marked the culmination of years of pressure on theparty, and particularly its leader, with regard to the management of theparty’s finances. By the beginning of that year the party’s executivecollege, created after the 30th Congress, reached an agreement with thePCF’s elected representatives in the National Assembly that effectivelyrecognised the freedom of its parliamentarians to determine themselvesthe way they wanted to vote, with due respect to the strategies andobjectives agreed with the executive college. The freedom of actionaccorded to the party’s elected representatives deferred to the reality ofthe party’s finances, particularly the fact that the indemnities paid intothe PCF’s coffers by its representatives had become its principal sourceof income, ahead of the various subscriptions raised for it, the member-ship fees paid by its members and its share of the public funds allocatedto political parties. According to Roland Jacquet, the treasurer for theparty nationally, the PCF’s monthly outgoings in 2000 had exceeded itsmonthly income by one and a half million francs. Consequently, heannounced cuts to the overall annual budget of almost 12 per cent,including a drop of 49 per cent in the funds allocated to organisationssubsidised by the party such as the monthly journal Regards and theassociations Espace Marx and Mouvement de la jeunesse communiste. Onlythe financial support for L’Humanité and the federations would enjoyany increase.64

The party’s financial problems had made Robert Hue personallyvulnerable to accusations that he had presided over illicit attempts tokeep the PCF afloat through the use of fraudulent corporate transfers.Hue’s acquittal, by a court in Paris on 14 November 2001, on charges offraudulently receiving funds from a consultancy called Gifco, came atthe end of five years of legal procedure. The nub of the case against himand the party’s former treasurer, Pierre Sotura, was that they hadcolluded with executives at Gifco to channel undeclared funds into thePCF coffers that had originally been paid in fees by the water companyCGE to Gifco, for services that were alleged to be fictitious. Curiously,although the court found no evidence of illegal transfers and acquittedHue, it still handed out suspended sentences to a number of executives



associated with Gifco for fraudulently managing the company’s assets.65

This lengthy episode, added to the repeated calls by Hue for greaterpublic funding for political parties, sharpened the perception of thePCF’s future viability as questionable, and added impetus to the leader-ship’s desire to restructure the party’s foundations financially andorganisationally in order to regenerate the party.

As mentioned earlier, the executive college emerged from the organ-isational changes endorsed by the 30th Congress and reflected the desire tomodernise the party, containing equal numbers of men and womenamong its 46 members. This body, together with a new national councilof 265 members, whose recruitment was more significantly slantedtowards secretaries from the federations and elected representatives,constituted the new structure for managing the party’s affairs atnational level. This leadership structure was refined further as a result ofthe 31st Congress, when the executive college was replaced by an execu-tive committee headed by the bicéphal team of a national secretary anda president. The resort to a presidential function had occurred beforeand had been bestowed honorifically on Maurice Thorez in 1964 andWaldeck Rochet in 1972. But during the 31st Congress this was drivenby the desire for a pragmatic accommodation with the need to positionHue as a credible candidate in the forthcoming contest to elect thePresident of the Republic, by attributing the role of chief party appar-atchik to Marie-Georges Buffet. And it was pragmatism also which ledHue to give up on this experiment in dual leadership functions in theaftermath of his failure in the presidential contest, admitting that‘communists can’t make sense of it’.66

The restructuring at the base of the party also reflected the acceptancethat if there were to be regeneration, the organisation of the partywould have to be reconfigured in a way that adapted to the pressuresfrom within and from outside the party, rather than trying to frustratethem. A major outcome of the 31st Congress was the autonomy givento members of the ‘force communiste’ on the ground. In tacit recogni-tion of the decline of the traditional ‘cell’, and all that that implied interms of ideological conditioning and control from the centre,members of communist sections (whether paid-up members of theparty or not) were acknowledged to have the right to determine whichline they wished to follow as long as they informed the centre of theirdecisions. In fact, the notion of party membership was itself rethoughtin such a way as to make the old debates about the real numericalstrength of the party base immaterial. Even before the 31st Congress,the idea had been evoked in the pages of L’Humanité that a person who



was a member of the party on 31 December did not simply cease to be amember on 1 January just because he or she did not have their newmembership card. A better principle for determining membershipwould be that an individual remains a member of the party until he orshe chooses actively to cease being so.67 By the following year the partyleadership was justifying the embodiment of this principle in the cre-ation of the ‘carte d’adhérent pluriannuelle’, obviating the need for theannual renewal of the membership card because the individual memberwas now in charge of his or her membership and the conditions inwhich he or she wished to enjoy it.68

The reform of organisational rigidities was an overdue concession tothe changes in French society in general and the corresponding impacton the attitudes of party members. But in diluting its partisan structuresthe party may also be allowing itself to be shaped by forces in post-modern and post-industrial France that will hasten the end of itsexistence as a counter-community while not necessarily enabling it tooccupy leading positions in the new struggles against injustice. For allits faults, the centralised system of the old party had a formidablepotential for the encadrement or training of members, often recruitedfrom modest backgrounds with little formal educational qualificationsand pushed through the system of summer schools and courses thatgave them the intellectual baggage needed to defend the party’s ambi-tions. By conceding the initiative to pursue change to the sections,groups and tendencies within the party, the party may make itself ahost to the reproduction of the more subtle forms of inequality thatnow shape society as a whole. Even superficial scrutiny of the PCF’swebsite reveals the extent to which the mutation of the party has made itmuch more like other mainstream formations on the political landscapethan the exceptional and uniform party entity that it once was. There isa formal recognition that the PCF is comprised of courants or tendencies,comprised of a majority behind Marie-Georges Buffet, and minoritieswith their own support structures within the party. The latter are desig-nated as belonging to the right-wing of the party (represented by therefondateurs), or on the left-wing comprised of conservateurs and orthodoxes(with the orthodoxes themselves composed of the Gauche communisteand the Pôle de Renaissance Communiste en France which was formed inJanuary 2004).

Reforming the structure in line with the more pluralist organisationfound in mainstream parties, however, also gives the initiative tothose elements most confident in their ability to engage in debate andpush forward their own agenda. Without the old structures that would



have promoted them, could there now be a level playing field betweenthose of modest socio-economic background and those gifted bysocio-economic and academic advantage with the cultural capitalneeded to pursue their ambitions? As we noted in Chapter 7, the partydid not explore successfully the opportunity that arose during the1980s to represent those communities that, because of their ethnicorigins, possessed the least cultural capital to facilitate their integra-tion into French society. Even sometimes doing quite the contrary. Asthe 1980s progressed, the realisation dawned on the leadership thatthe children of immigrants represented a potential source of electoralcapital, and Marchais appealed to them to join the PCF as a means ofcombating for their rights and their dignity.69 But this could not quiteexpunge the recollection of what had been happening at the begin-ning of the decade, in communist municipalities like Ivry-sur-Seine,where the authorities had refused to allow new immigrant familiesaccess to council housing, suspended the recruitment of foreigners tocouncil jobs and prioritised French families in the queue for materialsupport from the council.

It must be said that by the 1990s the party was quick to denouncenotions such as the ‘threshold of tolerance’ with regard to the numbersof immigrants in France,70 and to promote actively their rights.71 Assurveys at the time indicated, rather than rallying those new membersof the national community, the most that the PCF could boast was thatits membership was among the section of the general population thatwas the least hostile to immigrants.72 Recent research illustrates that inthe communist municipalities around the periphery of Paris, youngpeople of immigrant origin envisage the construction of an identitythat more accurately represents who they wish to be, in a way thatrenders the political structures of the party of little significance in thepursuit of that aspiration.73 Where there has been a rebound in thetraditional forms of political engagement on the part of the ‘beur’generation, it has sometimes taken a very surprising form. The victoryof Jacques Chirac over Jean-Marie Le Pen in the presidential election of5 May 2002 marked a fundamental change in the way the presidentialmajority (UMP) perceived that constituency. This was confirmed by theinvitation in October 2003 of some 300 local and community leaders ofimmigrant origin to the Senate, to discuss their future prospects ascandidates for the UMP in forthcoming electoral contests. As some ofthose attending argued, the government had finally realised that theywere an electorate whose participation was worth cultivating. And eventhose whose support once went automatically to the Left argued that



they had grown tired of being treated as ‘victims’ or ‘patients’ bygovernments of the Left.74

The traditional communist ideal that immigrants were workers too,and that they and the French working class were ‘frères dans la misère’or brothers in poverty was another ideal that was destined to fall by thewayside, and the chance to regenerate the party with an infusion from anew, growing and increasingly significant section of contemporaryFrench society has been missed. It might be argued, however, thatrather than failure being simply situated in the inability to convince aprospective constituency of the value of the PCF ideal or vision, thevery notion of a party communicating a vision to the people reflectsassumptions about the relationship of power between citizens and theirrepresentatives that may be in serious need of revision.

Conclusion: The redundancy of vision?

As some commentators have suggested of post-modern France, whatlies at the root of much of the anxiety regarding the rejection of thereceived republican wisdom about the creation of a cohesive society isthe increasing redundancy of the universalist Enlightenment vision ofhumanity wedded to an all-inclusive notion of progress.75 It is certainlyclear that the great narratives of progress are under challenge as neverbefore, whether the classic ones based on the possibilities offered by theever expanding frontiers of knowledge, or the more modern politicalones based on the liberation from historical determinisms offered bythe construction of a common European home. As others have argued,any analysis of the decline of the PCF must be circumspect enough toacknowledge the social evolutions through which the relationship ofactivists to any political enterprise are mediated.76 The notion of avocation, sustained by a vision and serving a vision, whether that of thepriest, the teacher or the communist militant, has lost the determininginfluence it once exercised in shaping the predisposition to politics,through the decline of the social structures that once sustained it.77

If the need for a great defining vision has changed, so, it may beargued, has the challenge of leadership. The contrast Marie-GeorgesBuffet makes with her predecessor, Robert Hue, is an illuminating one.She joined the party at the age of 20 in 1969 and made her way quietlyin the organisation. Whereas Hue was imbued with a culture of municipalpolitics, becoming an elected mayor at the age of 31, Buffet was shapedby her training in the party organisation. Her post in the gauche pluriellegovernment of Jospin enabled her to enjoy the esteem of party



members for the ethical campaign she led against the influence of drugsand money in sport, while it was Hue and the other ministers whoendured the brickbats from members for having paid too high a price inreturn for participation in government. Her role of managerial foil toHue’s attempt to sell a new vision to the party enabled her to support lamutation while avoiding recrimination for the reversals it encountered.In contrast to Hue the presidential candidate, Buffet built her credibilityamong members, with a reputation for listening to troubled partyworkers. Even though refondateurs like Patrick Braouezec have suggestedthat she may not have a clear idea of where she wants to lead theparty, and former members like Anicet le Pors have argued that theparty’s policy of ‘openness’ under her is merely a succession of questionmarks,78 her position may be the only viable one in the absence ofdefinitive answers.

In contrast to Hue, Buffet has not authored visionary roadmaps forthe future of the PCF. As some observers noted at the PCF’s 32ndCongress at Plaine-Saint-Denis, in April 2003, one of the most strikingaspects of the proceedings was the extraordinary anonymity of Buffetand her team during the four days of debate. For refondateurs like RogerMartelli, it amounted to an abdication of responsibility that opened theway to the rise of warlords in the party. In the end, the text laying outthe future steps for the party was adopted, broadly maintaining thepursuit of la mutation. But it was tempered in such a way as to appeaseas many sections of the party as possible: offering an olive branch to theopponents of la mutation by acceding to their request for nationalconferences to debate the issues of Europe and employment, and paci-fying the refondateurs by affirming the party’s openness to all ‘communistesde coeur’, that is, those who were communist by conviction whetherthey were paid-up members of the party of not. Buffet’s closing speechto the conference was notable for its modesty and sobriety. The party,she admitted, was weakened and had difficult choices to make. It wouldnot, she asserted (implicitly referring to future alliances), be providingany blank cheques to anyone.79 And, to judge by her attitude during theCongress, nor would her leadership rush into declarations or commit-ments that would make any hostages to fortune.

The approval by the delegates of the list put forward for the newmembership of the party’s parliament, the conseil national, was, bytraditional PCF standards, a modest majority of 76.2 per cent. In herclosing address to the Congress, Buffet’s transparent attempts atmanaging divisions through a policy of differentiated concessions werea far cry from the confident party self-affirmation that was characteristic of



Congresses of old. Conversely, it could be argued that the end of thehollow optimism of the official discourse of the past was more effectivein reconciling the party with the reality of post-modern France, wheredivision and competing constituencies are a way of life. The PCFentered the elections of 2004 looking more like any other French main-stream party than it had ever done, with officially recognised tendenciesand their leaders, and a lack of the confident, unitary discourse thatused to flow from its totalising vision of the future. Interestingly, itsfortunes were revived in the cantonal and regional election of March.As a whole, the Left appeared to have overcome the disaster of the presi-dential elections, taking 44.9 per cent of the votes cast in metropolitanFrance in the first round of the regionals on 21 March, and topping 50per cent in the second round on 28 March. In the cantonal electionsthe Left secured 48.3 per cent in the first round and 51 per cent in thesecond. The regional elections in particular scotched the predictions ofthe PCF being outflanked by the LO–LCR alliance, whose lists hadsecured only 4.4 per cent of the votes cast in the first round and weretherefore down on their previous performance in such elections in1998. As for the PCF itself, its success in the regional elections wasunquestionable and measurable, with the sum total of its seats in theregions rising from 161 to 175 in the final outcome.80 Among the morestriking revivals of support for the PCF in those places where its declinehad seemed inexorable were the first-round scores for the lists led byMarie-Georges Buffet in the Ile-de-France (7.2 per cent), Maxime Gremetzin Picardy (10.87 per cent) and Alain Bocquet in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais(10.68 per cent).81 In the European elections that followed in June, theLeft as a whole confirmed its comeback, with a 42.4 per cent share ofthe vote, in what most commentators agreed was a severe vote-sanctionagainst the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. As for the PCF, althoughat 5.8 per cent its share of the votes cast was down on the previousEuropean elections in 1999, it was still more than twice the share takenby the LO–LCR alliance.82

What was proved by the fluctuating fortunes of other parties that hadbeen touted after the presidential elections of 2002 as supplanting thePCF’s appeal to the vote protestataire, notably the LO, the LCR and alsothe Verts, was that the vision of the future was not one that could behanded down by a party and used as a bankable electoral asset, butrather that it could be used by a sophisticated electorate manipulatingthe range of possibilities offered by the political system. With only a 43per cent participation rate in the European elections of June 2004,much was made of the need to revive the faith of the voters in the political



process. But as was presciently observed in the 1990s, the rising level ofabstentions could itself signal political engagement by other means.Studies have shown that there are very few permanent abstentionists inFrance, and that they are difficult to categorise in fixed terms demo-graphically and socio-economically. The refusal to vote, particularlyclear in the case of communist voters but also to a lesser extent in thecase of supporters of mainstream parties, can express a desire not to‘betray’ the party to which one is most closely aligned, but which onealso reproaches for not fulfilling one’s expectations. On a broader andrelated level, abstentionism can be a deliberate choice in response towhat is perceived as the absence of genuine alternatives. The new votermay therefore opt to abstain, but this is not a blanket response, beinginstead one that is modulated according to a possible host of variables,resulting in multiple modes of behaviour and constituting an eloquentreflection on what is on offer politically.83

A vote for the PCF will remain an option for a significant section ofFrench voters, to use positively and negatively, and to modulateaccording to the message they wish to communicate to the politicalclass. Although the sweeping historical vision of the PCF may havegone, its intellectual legacy as a tribune party has ramified into fiveforms of opposition to the status quo, open to numerous interpretations,that have become increasingly visible and popular across the politicalspectrum: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, anti-racismand anti-reformism.84 In terms of its ability to influence the practice ofpolitics, Buffet’s method of managing the tendencies within the partymay presage a more subtle approach to managing the survival of theparty in the political system. Nationally, Buffet declared her belief thatthere should be no barriers between social movements and the PCF’sdesire to elucidate an alternative politics.85 Identifying the need toengage the militant young and especially those committed to alter-mondialiste or anti-globalisation movements, she disarmed the residualresistance in her party and laid the foundation for the alliances thatwould bear fruit in the elections of 2004. As demonstrated by FrancisWurtz, who successfully headed the list L’Europe, oui. Mais pas celle-là!in the Ile-de-France, the exercise of communist influence may alsocome through the politics of consensus at transnational level. By 2004,Wurtz, a former personal secretary to Marchais and later the architect ofLajoinie’s 1988 presidential campaign, had become one of the longest-serving Deputies in the European parliament and head of the heterogen-eous GUE grouping (Gauche unitaire européenne). As he put it himself,the European forum gave him a sensibility and skill that was not available



through his domestic political loyalties, and offered him a moreeffective means of mobilising forces against l’Europe libérale, or thepressures of liberal economics on Europe, than he would otherwisehave had at his disposal.86

For Roger Martelli and Clémentine Autain, writing in the communistperiodical for the debate of cultural and intellectual issues, Regards,2004 marks a turning point in the history of the party. The yearsleading up to the next presidential election will determine where orwhether the PCF will find secure roots for its continued existence onthe Left. The dominance of the PS, with its capacity to garner roughly30 per cent of the votes, is incontestable on the Left, and this enabled itto pigeon-hole its partners in the gauche plurielle government withremits (social issues for the Communists and environmental ones forthe ecologists) that essentially left the Socialists with a free hand. Thechallenge facing the Communists, according to Martelli and Autain, iswhether to allow the Socialists total command over the destiny of theLeft faced with the imperative of securing the election of a left-wingcandidate in 2007, or whether the PCF can pursue a path of conver-gence with the other partners and sympathisers on the Left in such away that their collective weight might make a genuine impact on theagenda of the Socialists.87


206

Notes

Introduction

1. In French, for example, J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français (Paris:Fayard, 1964–65) and P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste (Paris:Fayard, 1980–84). In English, M. Adereth, The French Communist Party: ACritical History, 1920–1984 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

2. See F. Fejtö, The French Communist Party and the Crisis of International Commu-nism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

3. Most notably A. Kriegel, The French Communists. Profile of a People (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1972).

4. D. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

5. From the decade when the leadership began to lose control of dissent withinthe party, see H. Fizsbin, Les bouches s’ouvrent (Paris: Grasset, 1980), P. Juquin,Fraternellement libre (Paris: Grasset, 1988).

6. A. Spire (ed.), La Culture des camarades (Paris: Autrement, 1992). 7. Robert Hue has been painstaking in his attempts to do this in, for example,

Communisme: La mutation and Communisme: le nouveau projet (Paris: Stock,1995 and 1999).

8. M. Lazar, Le Communisme: Une passion française (Paris: Perrin, 2002).

1 Political credibility

1. R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1981), p. 136.

2. These figures are from J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. I,De la Guerre à la Guerre: 1917–1939 (Paris: Fayard, 1964) and refer to partycards placed with members rather than the larger numbers conveyed to partysecretaries.

3. The very apt expression used by D. Borne and H. Dubeif, La Crise des années 30(Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 127.

4. See, for example, R. Bordier, ’36, la fête (Paris: Messidor, 1985). 5. J. Jackson, The Popular Front in France Defending Democracy, 1934–38

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 277. 6. F. Fejtö, The French Communist Party and the Crisis of International Communism

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 18. 7. Fauvet, vol. I, p. 254. 8. J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. II: Vingt-cinq ans de drame

(Paris: Fayard, 1965), p. 86. 9. R. Tiersky, French Communism, 1920–1972 (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1974), p. 114.


Notes 207

10. J.-Y. Boursier, La Politique du PCF 1939–1945 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992),pp. 209–10.

11. See A. J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party 1941–1947 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1962).

12. See A. Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris (Paris: Plon, 1994). 13. D. Pickles, French Politics: The First Years of the Fourth Republic (London: Royal

Institute of International Affairs, 1953), p. 270. 14. Tiersky, p. 135. 15. M. Thorez, Fils du peuple, in Oeuvres Choisies, vol. II (Paris: Editions Sociales,

1966), pp. 488–9. 16. Ibid., p. 491. 17. G. Wright, The Reshaping of French Democracy (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,

1948), pp. 38–40. 18. Wright, pp. 178–9. 19. Fauvet, vol. II, p. 196. 20. W. Bedell Smith, Trois années à Moscou (Paris: Plon, 1950), p. 198. 21. J. Ranger, ‘L’Evolution du vote Communiste en France Depuis 1945’, Le

Communisme en France (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,1969), p. 243.

22. Johnson, p. 138.

2 Dynamics of the counter-culture

1. See M. Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1968).

2. J. Mer, Le parti de Maurice Thorez ou le bonheur communiste français (Paris:Payot, 1977), p. 36.

3. B. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 195.

4. E. Mortimer, The Rise of the French Communist Party 1920–1947 (London:Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 339.

5. See C. de Gaulle, Mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 6. See F. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité (Paris: Fayard, 1969). 7. See J. Ranger, ‘L’Evolution du vote communiste en France depuis 1945’, Le

Communisme en France (Paris: Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des SciencesPolitiques, 1969), pp. 211–53.

8. J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. II (Paris: Fayard, 1965),p. 167.

9. G. Elgey, La République des Illusions (Paris: Fayard, 1965), p. 17. 10. H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States. An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations

and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 5. 11. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. 12. A. Kriegel, The French Communists. Profile of a People (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1972). 13. P. Bourdieu, Distinction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 101. 14. J. Degras, The Communist International 1919–1943, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1956), pp. 166–72. 15. See D. Thomson, Democracy in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).


208 Notes

16. See Gallie, Social Inequality and Class Radicalism in France and Britain(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

17. T. Kemp, Stalinism in France (London: New Park, 1984), p. 98. 18. See J.-P. Brunet, Jacques Doriot (Paris: Balland, 1986). 19. See P. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, vie secrète et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975). 20. See F. Claudin, From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 21. A. Cole and P. Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections since 1789

(Aldershot: Gower, 1989), p. 68. 22. R. Rémond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1982), pp. 208–11. 23. A. Lecoeur, Le Partisan (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), pp. 105–7. Describing the

general mood of the miners in the Pas de Calais, Lecoeur observed: ‘Auxyeux de la majorité, le pacte représentait une trahison des intérêts nationauxen laissant à Hitler les mains libres pour attaquer la France’ (ibid., p. 106).And the same sense of betrayal was expressed in the municipal bastions ofthe PCF in the Nord, the Paris region and Brittany, where the tone was setby the resignation of the mayor of Concarneau, Pierre Guéguin.

24. Le Populaire, 27 September 1939. 25. J.-Y. Boursier, La Politique du PCF 1939–1945 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), p. 42. 26. See S. Courtois, Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 27. P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste, 1945–1972 (Paris: Fayard,

1981), p. 271. 28. R. Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972), p. 28. 29. See the analysis of his discourse in Mer, Chapter 2. 30. G. G. Raymond, André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth (Aldershot:

Avebury, 1995), p. 195. 31. G. Ross, Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1982), p. 54. 32. The CGT’s own figures, which must therefore allow for a degree of exaggera-

tion, quoted by Ross, p. 64. 33. Kriegel, The French Communists, p. 173. 34. M. Servin, ‘Report to the 15th Congress’, Cahiers du communisme, July–August

(1959). 35. Kriegel, The French Communists, Chapter 6, still remains the classic defini-

tion of party practices during the PCF’s reign as France’s premier party. 36. A. Kriegel, Le Pain et les roses, Jalons pour l’histoire des socialismes, collection

‘10/18’ (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1968), p. 405. 37. ‘Lorsque les ouvriers communistes se réunissent, c’est d’abord la doctrine, la

propagande, etc., qui sont leur but. Mais, en même temps, ils s’approprientpar là un besoin nouveau, le besoin de la société, et ce qui semble être lemoyen est devenu le but’. In J. Bruhat, Marx/Engels, collection ‘10/18’ (Paris:Union Générale d’Editions, 1971), p. 71.

38. A. Stevens, The Government and Politics of France (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1992), p. 257.

39. Cole and Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections, p. 86. 40. For concise overviews of all these movements, see G. G. Raymond, Historical

Dictionary of France (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1998). 41. A few days before the Soviet intervention on 4 November 1956, the PCF

leadership had been fiercely critical of the Hungarian leader symbolising thedesire for emancipation from Moscow, Imre Nagy, and in the November 2


Notes 209

edition of L’Humanité Etienne Fajon, the former PCF representative on theKomintern, accused the party in Hungary of no longer being a ‘marxistworkers’ party’.

42. Bell and Criddle, The French Communist Party, p. 206.

3 The anti-system party

1. D. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 80.

2. J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. II (Paris: Fayard, 1965),p. 293.

3. D. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (London: André Deutsch,1964), p. 228. It is also fair to note, however, that the communist intellec-tuals who mobilised in order to criticise the PCF’s supine endorsement ofthe Soviet line over Hungary, were generally those who were not deeplyinvolved in the apparatus of the party. See also S. Hazareesingh, Intellectualsand the French Communist Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 146.

4. M. Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War(1954–1962) (Oxford: Berg, 1997), p. 214. For key extracts of Thorez’sspeech, see B. Khedda, Les Origines du premier novembre 1954 (Algiers:Editions Dahlab, 1989), p. 292.

5. See the editorial by E. Fajon, L’Humanité, 27 April 1960. 6. P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste, vol. IV (Paris: Fayard,

1984), p. 488. 7. Ibid. 8. Fauvet, p. 300. 9. Although this version of events was disputed, unconvincingly by Georges

Marchais, who claimed to have taken Thorez to an anonymous sympathiser. 10. Published in L’Humanité on 27 May 1958. 11. L’Humanité, 11 June 1958. 12. L’Humanité, 18 July 1958. 13. L’Humanité, 8 September 1958. 14. Robrieux, p. 494. 15. S. Berstein, La France de l’expansion: La République gaullienne 1958–1969

(Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 27. 16. ‘Le référendum et les élections de 1958’, Cahiers de la Fondation nationale des

sciences politiques, 109 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1958), p. 138. 17. De Gaulle himself described how the result far surpassed his expectations.

See C. De Gaulle, L’Esprit de la Ve République: mémoire d’espoir (Paris: Plon,1994).

18. For a clear and concise account of how this developed, see A. Cole (ed.),French Political Parties in Transition (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1990), Chapter 1.

19. Thus starting his career as ‘le fossoyeur du Parti communiste’, the socialistchiefly responsible for digging the PCF’s grave.

20. De Gaulle himself had made it clear to the media that the verdict on hisproposals would be a verdict on him personally.

21. N. Nugent, ‘The Strategies of the French Left’, in D. S. Bell (ed.), ContemporaryFrench Political Parties (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 71–88, p. 74.


210 Notes

22. M. Adereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History, 1920–1984(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 237.

23. See P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste, vol. II, 1945–1972(Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 644.

24. Bell and Criddle, p. 17. 25. J. R. Frears, Political Parties and Elections in the French Fifth Republic (London:

Hurst, 1977), p. 199. 26. Robrieux, vol. 2, p. 647. 27. V. Wright and H. Machin, ‘The French Socialist Party in 1973: Performance

and Prospects’, Government and Opposition, 9:2 (1974), 127–8. 28. While, superficially at least, it might seem improbable that a fraction like

CERES, which saw itself as standing for a more complete type of socialismthan all the others, would make common cause with a pragmatist like Mitterrand,in reality they had had to confront the same question as all the others:by what means can one help the Left to power without joining the PCF?Mitterrand appeared to offer the most viable compromise in pursuit of thataim. See D. Hanley, Keeping Left? CERES and the French Socialist Party(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 54.

29. D. Goldey and D. Bell, ‘The French Municipal Election of 1977’, Parliamen-tary Affairs, XXX:4 (1977), 408.

30. Robrieux, vol. 2, p. 653. 31. A. Cole and P. Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections since 1789

(Aldershot: Gower, 1989), p. 109. 32. D. Goldey and R. W. Johnson, ‘The French General Election of March 1973’,

Political Studies, XXI:3 (1973), 336. 33. It was, as Alistair Cole has observed, a ‘triumphant defeat’ which thereafter

enabled Mitterrand to govern the PS in a more presidential manner.See A. Cole, François Mitterrand: A Study in Political Leadership (London:Routledge, 1994), p. 74.

4 The rise of the Socialists

1. See G. Lavau, ‘Le Parti communiste dans le système politique français’, inLe Communisme en France (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,1969).

2. H. Mendras with A. Cole, Social Change in Modern France. Towards a CulturalAnthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), p. 25.

3. Charbonnages de France, Statistique annuelle édition 1991 (Paris: Charbonnagesde France, 1991).

4. See D. I. Scargill, ‘French energy: The end of an era for coal’, Geography, 76(1990), 172–5.

5. R. Hudson and D. Sadler, The International Steel Industry: Restructuring, StatePolitics and Localities (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 126–8.

6. As Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy commented, when explaining the Socialistgovernment’s new austerity policy in 1982: socialism made little sense if itgenerated penury. See P. Favier and M. Martin-Roland, La Décennie Mitterrand,vol. I (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 419.


Notes 211

7. C. Piganiol, ‘Industrial relations and enterprise restructuring in France’,International Labour Review, 128 (1989), pp. 621–38.

8. Le Monde, Les Forces Politiques et les Elections de Mars 1973 (Paris: Le Monde,1973), p. 13.

9. V. Wright and H. Machin, ‘The French Socialist Party: Success and theProblems of Success’, Political Quarterly, 46:1 (1975), 36–52, p. 42.

10. P. Hardouin, ‘Les Caractéristiques Sociologiques du Parti Socialiste’, RevueFrançaise de Science Politique, 28:2 (1978), 222–5.

11. P. Bacot, ‘Le Front de Classe’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 28:2 (1978),277–95, p. 283.

12. Ibid. 13. M. Kesselman, ‘The Recruitment of Party Activists in France’, quoted in

P. Garraud, ‘Discours, Pratique et Idéologie dans l’Evolution du Parti Social-iste’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 28:2 (1978), 257–76.

14. See R. Cayrol, ‘Le Parti Socialiste à l’Entreprise’, Revue Française de SciencePolitique, 28:2 (1978), 201–19.

15. J. Charlot, ‘Votes des Français: Qui, Comment, Pourquoi?’, Le Point, 23January 1978.

16. D. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 209.

17. The transformation of Renault into a market-driven state champion wascompleted under a Socialist-led government in 1999, when it sealed its alli-ance with Nissan of Japan. Although ostensibly a partnership, there waslittle doubt left by the French press as to who the senior partner was and towhom the victory belonged in national terms. By March 2002 the cross-ownership of shares left Renault with 44.4 per cent of Nissan, while Nissanhad 15 per cent of Renault, but without any voting rights.

18. Figures quoted in M. Waller and M. Fennema, Communist Parties in WesternEurope. Decline or Adaptation? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 58–60.

19. D. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Socialist Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1988), p. 200.

20. P. Buton, ‘Les effectifs du parti communiste français, 1920–84’, Commu-nisme, 7 (1985), 9.

21. L’Humanité, 9 January 1979. 22. Bell and Criddle, The French Communist Party, p. 212. 23. R. Milon, ‘Le PCF est toujours un parti passoire’, Est et Ouest, 50 (1988), 29. 24. See E. Fajon, L’Union est un combat (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1975), pp. 75–127,

for the first publicly available account of Marchais’ report. 25. E. Fajon, ‘Stratégie et politique: L’Union et la différence’, Cahiers du Commu-

nisme, July–August (1976). 26. F. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité (Paris: Fayard, 1969), pp. 90–1. 27. A. Cole, François Mitterrand: A Study in Political Leadership (London:

Routledge, 1994), p. 73. 28. G. Marchais, Le défi démocratique (Paris: Grasset, 1973), pp. 117–30. 29. See Fajon, L’Union est un combat, pp. 95–100, 114–27. 30. F. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité, pp. 202–8; and F. Mitterand, La rose au poing

(Paris: Flammarion, 1973), p. 24. 31. For the key passages of Kanapa’s report see P. Juquin, Programme commun, l’actu-

alisation à dossiers ouverts (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), pp. 19–20, 148–50.


212 Notes

32. Ibid., pp. 147–55. 33. G. Le Gall, ‘Le nouvel ordre électoral’, Revue politique et parlementaire,

July–August (1981), 17. 34. Bell and Criddle, The French Communist Party, p. 105. 35. J.-L. Parodi, ‘L’Echec des gauches’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, April–May

(1978), 16–17. 36. P. Bezbakh, Histoire de la France contemporaine (Paris: Bordas, 1990), p. 217. 37. A. Cole and P. Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections since 1789

(Aldershot: Gower, 1989), p. 118. 38. Bell and Criddle, The French Socialist Party, p. 136. 39. J. Julliard, ‘Comment les Français ont changé de cap le dernier jour’, Le

Nouvel Observateur, 24 April 1978. 40. R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (London: Macmillan, 1981),

p. 206. 41. Cole, François Mitterrand, p. 74. 42. In an interview given in 1989, Rocard admitted that his message that night

had been too complicated, the setting he had chosen was wrong, and thatthroughout the broadcast he had fixed his gaze on the wrong camera,thereby giving the French electorate the uninspiring prospect of placingtheir faith in a leader who addressed them sideways. In Favier and Martin-Rolland, p. 21.

43. Ibid., p. 20. 44. See J. Séguéla, Hollywood lave plus blanc (Paris: Flammarion, 1982). 45. C. Nay, Les sept Mitterrand: Ou les métamorphoses d’un septennat (Paris:

Grasset, 1988), p. 28. 46. Favier and Martin-Rolland, p. 28. 47. Cole and Campbell, French Electoral Systems, p. 130.

5 Failing the presidential challenge

1. G. Lavau, ‘Le parti communiste: Un congrès de survie’, Revue politique etparlementaire, 914, January–February (1985), 6–15.

2. P. Bauby, ‘Le révisionnisme institutionnel du PCF’, Revue politique et parle-mentaire, 919, September–October (1985), 97.

3. M. Naudy, PCF le suicide (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), p. 171. 4. M. Cardoze, Nouveau voyage à l’intérieur du parti communiste français (Paris:

Fayard, 1986), p. 324. 5. Marchais’ report was published in L’Humanité, 4 February 1982. 6. M. Cardoze, ‘PCF: Le destin du courant critique’, Revue politique et parlemen-

taire, 927, January–February (1987), 48. 7. M. Samson, ‘PC: Divorces à la toulousaine’, Libération, 31 October 1987. 8. P. Juquin, Autocritiques (Paris: Grasset, 1985), Chapter 9. 9. P. Juquin, Fraternellement libre (Paris: Grasset, 1988), p. 28.

10. Published in L’Humanité, 3 December 1987. 11. A. Lajoinie and R. Passevent, A cœur ouvert (Paris: Messidor, 1987), p. 170. 12. O. Biffaud, ‘M. Lajoinie se définit comme un candidat révoutionnaire’, Le

Monde, 21 October 1987. 13. Paris Match, 9 October 1987.


Notes 213

14. Reported in L’Humanité, 16 November 1987. 15. Paris Match, 13 November 1987. 16. Paris Match, 11 December 1987. 17. Paris Match, 21 January 1988. 18. M. Samson, ‘Marchais: Communistes, encore un effort pour être mobilisés’,

Libération, 11 February 1988. 19. Paris Match, 26 February 1988. 20. Paris Match, 25 March 1988. 21. Paris Match, 22 April 1988. 22. Small left-wing groups existing outside the two major left-wing parties. 23. All statistics taken from Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents: L’élection présiden-

tielle, May 1988 (Paris, 1988). 24. Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents: Les élections législatives, June 1988 (Paris,

1988), p. 33. 25. D. Jeambar, ‘Présidentielle: L’ombre de Marchais’, Le Point, 25 May 1987.

6 Marchais: The (dis)course of leadership

1. J. Gaffney, The French Left and the Fifth Republic (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1989), p. 31.

2. It may be argued, however, that in the case of communist discourse, where,paradoxically, the authority delegated by the party to the General Secretaryis so strong, it is not possible to gauge comprehensively the effect of presi-dentialism on the discourse of the leadership without comparing it with thediscourse of the leadership under a regime that was not presidential, forexample the Fourth Republic.

3. A. Kriegel, The French Communists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1972), p. 173.

4. This ideology of disinterested representation is identified by Pierre Bourdieuas a key to the ‘social magic’ which empowers the discourse of speakers suchas political leaders, by sustaining the illusion that they speak in pursuit ofnothing other than the interests of those whom they represent. P. Bourdieu,Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 215.

5. Ibid., p. 212. 6. Bourdieu explains his notion of ‘capital’ with regard to political representa-

tion in the following way: ‘Political capital is a form of symbolic capital,credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on theinnumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or onan object) the very powers which they recognise in him (or it)’. Ibid., p. 192.

7. All translations from the French are mine. Report reproduced in Cahiers duCommunisme, February–March (1976).

8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.

10. H. Fiszbin, Les bouches s’ouvrent (Paris: Grasset, 1980), pp. 230–1. 11. Cahiers du Communisme, June–July (1979). 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Gaffney, p. 87.


214 Notes

15. Cahiers du Communisme, February–March (1982). 16. Cahiers du Communisme, March–April (1985). 17. L’Humanité, 3 December 1987. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Le Monde, 15–16 October 1989. 21. Cahiers du Communisme, January–February (1991). 22. Ibid. 23. L’Humanité, 20 August 1991. 24. Ibid. 25. L’Humanité, 30 August 199l (my translation). 26. Wurtz’s report and the ensuing discussion were printed over three days in

L’Humanité, 21–23 May 1992. 27. L’Humanité, 23 May 1992. 28. See, for example, his interview with Alain Rollat in Le Monde, 19 September

1992. 29. The refondateur and reconstructeur tendencies had already formed a grassroots

organisation in November 1991 called Alternative pour la démocratie et lesocialisme (ADS) which was to deliver a remarkable challenge to theauthority of the party by putting up independent communist candidates inthe regional and cantonal elections of March 1992, with notable success inMarcel Rigout’s base of Haute-Vienne.

30. Le Monde, 11 September 1992. 31. H. Algalarrondo, ‘Qui veut sauver Georges Marchais?’, Le Nouvel Observateur,

18 March 1993. 32. Le Monde, 18 June 1993. 33. Le Monde, 1 February 1994.

7 A tale of clashing counter-cultures

1. A. Prost, Education, société et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 123. 2. In reality, the police were initially disinclined to intervene when the agita-

tors began to congregate in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on May 3.According to some commentators, it was the rector of the university, Roche,who was keenest to see the perturbateurs expelled and invited the police todo so. See R. Backmann and L. Rioux, Mai 1968 (Paris: Laffont, 1968). There-after, contingent factors led to the point where an initially awkward situ-ation degenerated into violence. Unable to make identity checks on the spotbecause the students were judged to be too numerous, the police decided totake the students away in waiting vehicles, thus igniting the rumour thatspread like wildfire in the Latin Quarter that the students were being victim-ised in a repressive police raid. L. Jofrin, Mai 68. Histoire des événements(Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 23.

3. Ibid., p. 87. 4. S. Courtois and M. Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 350. 5. It has been forcefully argued elsewhere that by cutting itself off from the

anti-totalitarian sentiment that emerged in May 1968, the PCF cut itself off


Notes 215

from an underlying process of profound change, creating a ‘culturalblockage’ between itself, French society and even a new wave of its ownparty members, that would result in a time-bomb set to explode in the1980s. M. Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italiens de laLibération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), p. 130.

6. H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Génération, 2 vols, vol. 2, Les années de poudre(Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 10.

7. J.-P. Le Goff, Mai 68: L’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), Part III. 8. F. Picq, Libération des femmes. Les années mouvement (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 14. 9. R. Pronier and V.-J. Le Seigneur, Génération verte. Les ecologistes en politique

(Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992), p. 26. 10. Ibid., p. 330. 11. Lazar, Maisons rouges, p. 145. 12. See Parti Communiste Français, Kremlin PCF: Conversation secrètes (Paris:

O. Orban, 1984). 13. Lazar, Maisons rouges, p. 364, note 67. 14. Interestingly, archival evidence shows that in exchanges between the Czech

embassy and Prague in the spring of 1968, their ambassador in Paris hadcome to the conviction that Waldeck Rochet was caught between thesympathies he shared with those in favour of the reasons for the experimentin Prague, and those who shared his (Rochet’s) instinctive fear of doinganything that might jeopardise the PCF’s relationship with the CPSU. SeeK. Bartosek, Les aveux des archives. Prague-Paris-Prague, 1948–1968 (Paris:Seuil, 1996), p. 187.

15. J. Elleinstein, L’Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972–5); J. Elleinstein,L’Histoire du phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset, 1975).

16. A. Adler et al., L’URSS et nous (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978). 17. See F. Hincker, ‘Le groupe dirigeant du PCF dans les années 70’, Commu-

nisme, 10 (1986). 18. Courtois and Lazar, p. 385. 19. The French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1974

to great success and confirmed what many had felt about the wholesale andbrutal betrayal of the ideals of the revolution in the Soviet Union.

20. See A. Glucksmann, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Paris: Seuil, 1975),and B.-H. Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977).

21. T. Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986),p. 198.

22. A term coined by S. Daney in Libération, 25–26 April 1987. 23. See A. Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 24. S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 286. 25. Articles subsequently reprinted in English in New Left Review, 109, May–June

(1978). 26. M. Goldring, ‘A quoi sert un intellectuel communiste en 1986’, in A. Spire

(ed.), La Culture des camarades (Paris: Autrement, 1992), p. 94. Goldring situ-ates this observation in the context of a broader evolution in which thepublic is no longer interested in the clash of intellectual titans defendingone system of thought against another, since systems of thought themselveshave no purchase on the public imagination.


216 Notes

27. J. Kehayan and N. Kehayan, Rue du prolétaire rouge (Paris: Seuil, 1978);J. Kehayan, Le tabouret de Piotr (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

28. Figures quoted in Courtois and Lazar, p. 409. 29. Charles Fiterman at Transport, Anicet Le Pors with a portfolio for Public

Administration, Jack Ralite at Health and Marcel Rigout with responsibilityfor vocational training.

30. See D. Labbé and F. Périn, Que reste-t-il de Billancourt? Enquête sur la cultured’entreprise (Paris: Hachette, 1990).

31. See A. Bevort, ‘Les effectifs syndiqués à la CGT et la CFDT’, Communisme, 35–37(1994); and D. Labbé, ‘Le déclin electoral de la CGT’, Communisme, 35–37(1994). There was in fact a nuanced process of osmosis during the 1980s thatsaw a growth in the number of communists entering the CGT, but adeclining number of CGT members present in the party, just as the presenceof CGT members declined throughout the working population. SeeY. Santamaria, ‘Difficult Times for the French Communist Party and theCGT’, The Journal of Communist Studies, 6:4 (1990), 58–79.

32. See the PS’ undertakings vis-à-vis immigrants in Parti socialiste: 89 réponsesaux questions économiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 43.

33. By March 1983, 46 per cent of respondents to a SOFRES poll agreed with theproposition that the Left had done too much for immigrants, and 34 per centdisagreed. Among the Left’s own supporters, 38 per cent agreed with theproposition that government policy had been too liberal regarding immi-grants. See J. Julliard, ‘L’Alerte’, in SOFRES, Opinion publique. Enquêtes etcommentaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 125.

34. For the government’s attitude to this potentially revolutionary under-standing of citizenship, see P. Weil, La France et ses étrangers. L’aventure d’unepolitique de l’immigration 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991), pp. 157–62.

35. One of the salient characteristics of the FN in terms of its sociological profileduring the 1980s is the youth of its members and elected representatives. InC. Ysmal, Les partis politiques sous la Ve République (Paris: Montchrestien,1989), p. 226.

36. Ysmal, ‘Communistes et Lepénistes’, p. 53.

8 The end of ideology

1. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (London:Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), p. 65.

2. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 54.

3. H. J. Eysenck and G. D. Wilson, The Psychological Basis of Ideology (Lancaster:MTP Press, 1978), p. 303.

4. R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 5.

5. M. Rodinson, ‘Mouvements Socio-Politiques’, Cahiers Internationaux de Soci-ologie, 33 (1962), 97–113, p. 99. The personal sense of justification thatideology imparts is enhanced by the self-referential nature of ideologicaldiscourse, which makes the arguments of its proponents irresistible. InD. J. Manning, The Form of Ideology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 78.


Notes 217

6. C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 231. 7. In J. Jaffré, ‘Après les municipales et les européennes. Le nouveau décor élec-

toral’, Pouvoirs, 55 (1990), 147–62. 8. See M. Duverger, La démocratie sans le peuple (Paris: Seuil, 1967). 9. Figures quoted in L. Billordo, ‘Party Membership in France: Measures and

Data-Collection’, French Politics, 1:1 (2003), 137–51. Billordo also identifiesthe peculiar distortions that occur in the management and representation ofparty membership figures in France: the lack of a legal obligation to reportaccurate membership figures, which encourages the parties to exaggeratethem in order to bolster their image; the historically occult nature of partyfinancing which meant that inflated reported membership figures made formore plausible explanations concerning the provenance of party funds.Ibid., p. 138.

10. S. Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997),p. 13. The authors revived Kolakowski’s argument that the absolutistmindset that arises from the certainty that one is in possession of the truthmakes terror the inescapable flip side of ideological conviction. Moreover,unlike the religious terror represented by the Inquisition, the step is thatmuch shorter in a secular, revolutionary worldview because the enjoymentof grace is not to be found in an otherworldly dimension but is achieved inone leap in the here and now. In L. Kolakowski, L’Esprit révolutionnaire (Paris:Editions Complexe, 1978), p. 22. In short, as Todorov argues, the shadowthat can hang over an atheist society is not the mythical hell to which rebelswere condemned in the past under religious regimes, but the prospect of areal hell being created, in which those who refuse to submit to an absolutiststate can be concentrated and crushed, and whose crushing can be used asan example to intimidate others. In T. Todorov, Nous et les autres (Paris:Seuil, 1989), pp. 226–7.

11. P. Rigoulot and I. Yannakakis, Un pavé dans l’histoire. Le débat français sur ‘Lelivre noir du communisme’ (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), p. 219.

12. See, for example, N. Tenzer, La société dépolitisée (Paris: Presses Universitairesde France, 1990).

13. See R. Delacroix and N. Tenzer, Les élites et la fin de la démocratie française(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). Delacroix and Tenzer makethe point that the end of ideology has made what were once Left and Rightin terms of political elites, adopt a libertarian individualism that does notallow them to assume a leading responsibility for determining the evolutionof collective values, since underlying these are moral choices that arecommonly perceived as belonging to the individual alone. Consequently,political elites in particular, find refuge in a quasi-managerial discoursefocused on rational organisation and efficiency gains, comforted in theirabdication of responsibility by what the authors refer to as ‘libérale-libertaire’assumptions that function as a default ideology. Ibid., p. 140.

14. See F. Furet and R. Halévi, La Monarchie républicaine: La constitution de 1791(Paris: Fayard, 1996).

15. M. Wieviorka, ‘L’Etat et ses sujets’, Projet, 233 (1993), 17–25. 16. For example, B. Boccara, L’Insurrection démocratique: Manifeste pour la Sixième

Republique (Paris: Democratica, 1993). 17. For example, A. Finkielkraut, Ingratitude (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).


218 Notes

18. See A. Minc, Le nouveau moyen âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 19. J. Ion, La Fin des militants? (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 1997), p. 80. 20. P. Perrineau, L’Engagement politique. Déclin ou mutation? (Paris: Presses de la

FNSP, 1994), p. 19. 21. See I. Sommier, Les Nouveaux mouvements contestataires à l’heure de la mondi-

alisation (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). 22. S. Waters, Social Movements in France. Towards a New Citizenship (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 22–3. 23. J. Fabien, Les nouveaux secrets des communistes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), p. 123. 24. J. Julliard, ‘Le sixième raz de marée’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 25–31 March

1993. 25. S. Griggs, ‘Candidates and Parties of the Left’, in R. Elgie (ed.), Electing the

French President. The 1995 Presidential Election (Basingstoke, Macmillan,1996), pp. 96–122, p. 99.

26. www.elections2002.sciences-po.fr/Enjeux/respres.html. 27. S. Courtois and M. Lazar, Histoire du parti communiste français (Paris: PUF,

2000), pp. 436–7. 28. Ibid., p. 435. 29. See S. Ronai, ‘Evolution de la géographie des municipalités communistes,

1977–1995’, Communisme, 47–8 (1996). 30. In his book, Communisme: La mutation (Paris: Stock, 1995), Hue had already

made the point that sticking with the name ‘communist’ did not meansticking with the Soviet model, but that it referred to much older nationaltraditions of communal action according to shared values. And during theyear that followed he used numerous media opportunities to underline thatpoint, such as during the major interview given to France-Culture on 12May 1996, and published in Le Monde, ‘Les communistes français ont défini-tivement écarté toute idée de modèle’, 14 May 1996.

31. See the extracts from the PCF programme in Modern and ContemporaryFrance, 5:4 (1997), 473–4.

32. See P. Buffotot and D. Hanley, ‘Chronique d’une défaite annoncée: Les élec-tions législatives des 25 mai et 1er juin 1997’, Modern and ContemporaryFrance, 6:1 (1998), 5–19.

33. G. Grunberg, ‘Que reste-t-il du parti d’Epinay?’, in C. Ysmal and P. Perrineau(eds), Le Vote sanction: Les élections législatives de 1993 (Paris: Figaro/FNSP,1993), pp. 208–9.

34. A. Chemin, ‘Le Parti communiste rend hommage à Georges Marchais’,Le Monde, 18 November 1997.

35. ‘Le serment de Robert Hue’, interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, 23–29October 1997.

36. G. Hermier, ‘La mutation du PCF reste à faire’, Le Monde, 24 September 1997. 37. A. Chemin, ‘Les anciens “exclus” du PCF déclinent l’invitation à réintégrer

le parti’, Le Monde, 20 November 1998. 38. My translation, Libération, 31 March 1999. 39. M. Lazar, ‘La gauche communiste plurielle’, Revue française de science poli-

tique, 49:4–5 (1999), 695–705, p. 697. 40. Ibid. 41. R. Hue, Communisme: La Mutation (Paris: Stock, 1995), p. 339. 42. R. Hue, Communisme: Un nouveau projet (Paris: Stock, 1999), p. 9.


Notes 219

43. F. Bazin, ‘Ces femmes dans la vie de Robert Hue’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 4–10February 1999.

44. www.pcf.fr/documents/RH/000904ConfPresQuinq.htm. 45. R. Ponceyri, ‘La fin de la République gaullienne’, Revue Politique et Parlemen-

taire, September–October (2000), 9–34, p. 9. 46. Ibid., p. 10. 47. See J. Jaffré and A. Muxel, S’abstenir: Hors du jeu politique? Les cultures poli-

tiques des Français (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po., 2000). 48. E. Barth, ‘Robert Hue obtient l’investiture des militants du PCF pour la prési-

dentielle’, Le Monde, 9 October 2001. 49. www.pcf.fr/w2/?iddoc = 38. 50. www.pcf.fr/w2/?iddoc = 340. 51. D. Dhombres, ‘Robert Hue judoka’, Le Monde, 26 January 2002. 52. ‘Robert Hue et Charles Pasqua au Grand Débat RTL-Le Monde’, Le Monde,

6 March 2002. 53. ‘Robert Hue, candidat du PCF, au Grand jury RTL-Le Monde-LCI’, Le Monde,

3 April 2002. 54. M.-C. Lavabre and F. Platone, Que reste-t-il du PCF? (Paris: Editions Autrement,

2003), p. 69. 55. Lavabre and Platone, p. 71. 56. J.-P. Dufour, ‘Les enfants perdus de la classe ouvrière’, Le Monde, 25 April

2002. 57. P. Martin, ‘Le vote Le Pen, l’électorat du Front National’, Notes de la Fondation

Saint-Simon, 94 (1996), 43. 58. P. Martin, ‘Les élections de 2002 constituent-elles un moment de rupture

dans la vie politique française?’, Revue française de science politique, 52:5–6(2002), 593–606, p. 598.

59. E. Freyssenet, ‘Robert Hue fait ses adieux dans l’indifférence’, Le Figaro,4 April 2003.

60. See F. Greffet, ‘L’évolution électorale du PCF de Robert Hue 1994–2001’,Communisme, 67–8 (2002), 157–79.

61. See D. Andolfatto, ‘Le parti de Robert Hue, chronique du PCF 1994–2001’,Communisme, 67–8 (2002), 207–64.

62. A. Beuve Méry, ‘Patrick Le Hyaric devient le nouveau directeur deL’Humanité’, Le Monde, 21 November 2000.

63. M. Delberghe, ‘A L’Humanité, sociétés des amis et des lecteurs approuventl’ouverture du capital’, Le Monde, 22 May 2001.

64. A. Beuve Méry, ‘Confronté à de graves difficultés financières, le PCF réduitson train de vie’, Le Monde, 2 February 2001.

65. G. Alexandre and J. Franck, ‘Des charges “aucunement établies” contre leprésident du PCF’, Le Monde, 16 November 2001.

66. Interview in Le Parisien, 6 November 2002. 67. L’Humanité, 12 February 2001. 68. See the report of the Commission nationale Renforcement du Parti, in Info

Hebdo, the electronic journal of the PCF, 110, 20 November 2002. 69. G. Marchais, ‘Justice, liberté, paix. Le chemin de l’avenir pour la France’,

Report to the 26th Congress of the PCF, 2–6 December 1987, pp. 49–50. 70. See, for example, F. Wurtz, ‘Construire ensemble la contre-offensive raciste’,

Cahiers du communisme, 65, October (1990).


220 Notes

71. See, for example, G. Poussy, ‘Quotas d’immigrés: une politique contrel’emploi, les pays de l’Est et le tiers monde’, Cahiers du communisme, 67,November (1991).

72. F. Platone, ‘ “Prolétaires de tous les pays . . .”, Le Parti communiste français etles immigrés’, in O. Le Cour Grandmaison and C. Withol de Wenden (eds),Les étrangers dans la cite. Expériences européennes (Paris: Editions La Découverte,1993), pp. 64–80, p. 80.

73. See N. Kiwan, The Construction of Identity Amongst Young People of NorthAfrican Origin in France: Discourses and Experiences, unpublished PhD thesis/Doctorat de 3ème cycle, University of Bristol/EHESS, 2003, especially Chapters4 and 7.

74. See ‘Les beurs séduits par la droite’, in lemonde.fr, 2 December 2003.However, such a change, while significant in terms of the politicisation ofpart of that community, represented little more than a ripple in the tide ofgeneral disaffection with the governing majority and the political class as awhole, as evidenced by the elections that occurred in 2004.

75. M. Silverman, Facing Postmodernity. Contemporary French Thought on Cultureand Society (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 160.

76. B. Pudal, ‘La beauté de la mort communiste’, Revue française de science poli-tique, 52:5–6 (2002), 545–59, p. 546.

77. P. Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris: Minuit, 1997), p. 221. 78. E. Freyssenet, ‘Marie-Georges Buffet, l’apparatchik à visage humain’,

Lefigaro.fr, 4 April 2003. 79. C. Monnot, ‘Le PCF découvre la démocratie interne en étalant ses divisions’,

Lemonde.fr, 7 April 2003. 80. G. Le Gall, ‘Régionales et cantonales: Le retour de la gauche deux ans après

le 21 avril’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, 1029–1030 (2004), 8–24. 81. C. Monnot, ‘Le Parti communiste met un coup d’arrêt à son déclin élec-

toral’, Lemonde.fr, 22 March 2004. 82. P. Christian and P. Chriqui, ‘Le PS capitalise à gauche et l’UDF perce à

droite’, Lemonde.fr, 14 June 2004. 83. See F. Subileau and M.-F. Toinet, Les chemins de l’abstention (Paris: La Décou-

verte, 1993), pp. 193–7. 84. M. Lazar, Le Communisme: Une passion française (Paris: Perrin, 2002), p. 218. 85. L’Humanité, 6 October 2003. 86. Libération.fr, 3 June 2004. 87. C. Autain and R. Martelli, ‘1944–1984–2004 – Les tournants de la Gauche’,

Regards, 7/8 (2004).


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230

Index

Afghanistan, 160 Algeria, 38, 43, 44, 45, 104 Alleg, Henri, 181 alternance, 69 Althusser, Louis, 98, 125, 157 ’American party’, 22 Andrieu, René, 152 Aragon, Louis, 148 Auchedé, Rémy, 181 Auriol, Vincent, 19 autogestion, 80, 87, 115

Balibar, Etienne, 98, 125, 157, 159 Balladur, Edouard, 177 Barbé, Henri, 30 Barre, Raymond, 106, 114 Berlinguer, Enrico, 153 Bidault, Georges, 14, 18, 19, 21 Billoux, François, 17 Blotin, Pierre, 105, 108, 180 Blum, Léon, 8, 17, 19, 21, 30, 32, 170 Bois, Guy, 157 Boulogne-Billancourt, 20, 77, 163 Braouezec, Patrick, 202 Breznev, Leonid, 54, 161 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 157 Buffet, Marie-Georges, 184, 189, 198,

199, 201–4

Cachin, Marcel, 28 cantonal elections, 203 Carillo, Santiago, 153 Celor, Pierre, 30 Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches

Marxistes (CERM), 158 Chirac, Jacques, 61, 89, 90, 113,

114, 171, 177, 182, 183, 189, 190, 194, 200

coal and steel, decline of, 70, 71 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 54, 144 Cold War, 33, 38 Colonel Fabien, Place du, 11, 59,

90, 159

Colonel Rémy, 12 Comité français de libération

nationale, 12, 13 Common Programme, 59–61, 73,

77–83, 86, 97, 124, 146, 151, 154–6, 183, 189, 190, 194, 200

Confédération generale du travail (CGT), 10, 15, 20, 31, 34, 113, 146, 147, 161, 163, 164, 181

Confédération generale du travail unitaire (CGTU), 7, 15, 31

Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), 12

Constitution Fifth Republic, 47, 93, 94, 113 Fourth Republic, 18

contestataires, 97, 98, 100, 109, 116, 119, 141, 157

Croix de Feu, 30 Croizat, Ambroise, 17 Cruise missiles, 160

Daladier, Edouard, 31, 32 Damette, Félix, 99, 106, 107, 130 de Gaulle, Charles, 11, 12, 16,

17, 21, 24, 34, 38, 40, 44–8, 51–3, 72, 86, 92, 142, 147, 149, 171, 190

Debré, Michel, 48 Deferre, Gaston, 51, 55, 56,

58, 84 Delors, Jacques, 106, 107 Demessine, Michèle, 184 Dien Bien Phu, 38 Doriot, Jacques, 29, 30 Dubcek, Alexander, 54, 151 Duclos, Jacques, 11, 21, 41, 55, 56

Elleinstein, Jean, 98, 152, 157–9, 161 Epinay, socialist congress of, 57, 58, 73 eurocommunism, 151, 153,154, 157


Index 231

European elections 1979, 94 1984, 94, 162 1994, 176 1999, 186–8 2004, 203

Fabius, Laurent, 94, 107, 162 Fiszbin, Henri, 98, 125, 126, 155, 159 Fiterman, Charles, 88, 132, 134, 135,

137, 138, 141 Frachon, Benoît, 11, 30 Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), 11 front de classe strategy of Socialists, 74, 79 Front National, competition with PCF,

165, 166, 177, 178 Frossard, Oscar, 27, 28

Gau, Jean-François, 180 gauche plurielle, 184–6, 193, 201, 204 Gauraudy, Roger, 54, 148 Gayssot, Jean-Claude, 111, 180, 184 Gifco affair, 197, 198 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 61–3, 89–91,

165, 189 Glucksmann, André, 156 Goldring, Maurice, 157, 160 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 121, 133, 161 Gouin, Félix, 17, 18 great schism, 22 Gremetz, Maxime, 191, 203 Grenier, Fernand, 12 Guesde, Jules, 80

Hermier, Guy, 176, 180, 181 Hervé, Pierre, 41 Herzog, Philippe, 135, 136, 176,

180, 181 Hincker, François, 98, 161 Hue, Robert, 137, 175–98, 201, 202

Indochina, 20 Institut Maurice Thorez (IMT), 158

Jacquet, Roland, 197 Jean, Raymond, 157 Jeunesses communistes, 35 Jospin, Lionel, 176, 183–5, 189,

192–4, 201

Juppé, Alain, 180, 183 Juquin, Pierre, 93, 98–100, 105,

107–10, 112, 115–17, 119, 129, 141, 152, 177, 186

Kanapa, Jean, 81, 82 Karman, Jean-Jacques, 181 Kehayan, Jean, 161 Krivine, Alain, 55, 116, 185, 186 Kruschev, Nikita, 41

Labica, Georges, 157 Laguiller, Arlette, 177, 192 Lajoinie, André, 93, 95, 96, 99,

101–19, 130, 131, 177, 178 Laurent, Paul, 55 Le Hyaric, Patrick, 196, 197 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 114, 117, 169,

177, 178, 193, 194, 200 Le Pors, Anicet, 103, 202 Lecoeur, Auguste, 31 Lefebvre, Henri, 109 legislative elections

1924, 24 1928, 29 1932, 30 1945, 25 1946, 35, 37 1951, 35, 37 1956, 37 1958, 49, 51 1962, 51 1968, 148 1973, 70 1978, 23, 50, 83–6, 97, 155,

157, 160, 166 1981, 71, 91, 172 1986, 99, 114, 117, 163 1988, 118 1993, 175 1997, 182–4 2002, 193–5

Lenin, V. I., 27, 41, 42, 159 Leroy, Roland, 112 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 169 Lévy, Bernard–Henri, 156 L’Humanité, finances of, 196, 197 Liberation, 13, 14 ligues, 7


232 Index

Llabrès, Claude, 99, 100 Lyon, congress of, 28

Maastricht, 135, 136, 176, 182, 185 Marchais, Georges, 34, 35, 58–60,

78–80, 82, 87–9, 94–7, 99, 101–15, 117–19, 120–38, 141, 144, 152–4, 157, 160, 162, 175, 176, 180, 185, 186, 200

Marseille, congress of, 28 Marshall plan, 21 Martelli, Roger, 202, 204 Marx, Karl, 36, 168 Mauroy, Pierre, 58, 71, 84, 94, 103,

162, 164, 165, 170 May 1968, 53, 54, 142–50, 156 Mayer, Daniel, 14 Mendès-France, Pierre, 45, 47, 49, 147 Mitterrand, François, 24, 47, 51,

52, 55, 57–63, 67, 70, 72–4, 77–9, 81–4, 86–92, 94, 107, 110–15, 117, 118, 131, 137, 147, 165, 171

Moch, Jules, 38 Mollet, Guy, 38, 44, 45, 49, 55, 57 Môquet, Guy, 11 Morgan, Claude, 42 municipal elections

1945, 14 1953, 43 1957, 43 1971, 58 1977, 83 1983, 162 1989, 114, 118 1995, 179

Nagy, Imre, 42 Nazi–Soviet pact, 9, 10, 12, 15, 31,

32, 155

Paul, Marcel, 17 Peyrefitte, Alain, 145 Pflimlin, Pierre, 45 Picasso, Pablo, 42 Plioutch, Leonid, 152 Plissonier, Gaston, 58, 59 Poher, Alain, 55, 56 Pompidou, Georges, 53, 55, 56, 59

Popular Front, 7–9, 21, 24, 31 Poujade, Pierre, 38 Prenant, Marcel, 11 presidential elections

1965, 51, 52 1969, 53, 56 1974, 61 1981, 85–91, 96, 172 1988, 92, 93, 95, 101–19,

131, 166 1995, 176, 177 2002, 192–5, 200

quadrille bipolaire, 41, 50

Ramadier, Paul, 19–21, 33, 40 reconstructeur tendency, 136 ‘red belt’ constituencies, 71, 77, 117 refondateur tendency, 136, 137,

176, 180, 186, 195, 199, 202 regional elections, 203 rénovateurs, 93, 97–9, 100, 106, 107,

115, 116, 141 Resistance, 10–12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 25,

32, 40, 68 Rif war, 29 Rigout, Marcel, 99, 100, 130 Rocard, Michel, 55, 56, 86, 87, 107 Rochet, Waldeck, 51, 54–6, 58, 59,

147, 151, 175, 198 Rolland, J.-F., 42 Rony, Jean, 157 Roucaute, Yves, 157 Roy, Claude, 42

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 42 Savary, Alain, 57, 72, 73 Schumann, Maurice, 24 Section française de l’internationale

communiste (SFIC), 27 Séguéla, Jacques, 89 Séguy, Georges, 103 Sellier, Louis, 28 Sémard, Pierre, 29 Servin, Marcel, 41, 45 Soboul, Albert, 148 Solidarity movement, 160 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 156 SOS-Racisme, 115, 187


Index 233

Spire, Antoine, 157 Stalin, Joseph, 21, 29, 41, 42

terres rouges, 117 Thorez, Maurice, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17,

19–21, 23, 29–34, 36, 41–7, 121, 175, 198

Tillon, Charles, 17, 31, 148 Tours, congress of, 7, 14, 24, 27 Treint, Albert, 28, 29

Vailland, Roger, 42 Vasseur, Bernard, 180 Viannet, Louis, 181 Vitry, 165

World War II, 25, 68, 142 Wurtz, Francis, 135, 176,

187, 204

Yugoslavia, bombing of, 187
