The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic: A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology (French Politics, Society and Culture)

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

Gino G. Raymond

French Politics, Society and Culture Series General Editor: Robert Elgie, Paddy Moriarty Professor of Government and International Studies, Dublin City University France has always fascinated outside observers. Now, the country is undergoing a period of profound transformation. France is faced with a rapidly changing international and European environment and it is having to rethink some of its most basic social, political and economic orthodoxies. As elsewhere, there is pressure to conform. And yet, while France is responding in ways that are no doubt familiar to people in other European countries, it is also managing to maintain elements of its long-standing distinctiveness. Overall, it remains a place that is not exactly comme les autres. This new series examines all aspects of French politics, society and culture. In so doing it focuses on the changing nature of the French system as well as the established patterns of political, social and cultural life. Contributors to the series are encouraged to present new and innovative arguments so that the informed reader can learn and understand more about one of the most beguiling and compelling of all European countries. Titles include: Jean K. Chalaby THE DE GAULLE PRESIDENCY AND THE MEDIA Statism and Public Communications David Drake FRENCH INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS FROM THE DREYFUS AFFAIR TO THE OCCUPATION David Drake INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN POST-WAR FRANCE Graeme Hayes ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST AND THE STATE IN FRANCE David J. Howarth THE FRENCH ROAD TO EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION Andrew Knapp PARTIES AND THE PARTY SYSTEM IN FRANCE A Disconnected Democracy? Michael S. Lewis-Beck (editor) THE FRENCH VOTER Before and After the 2002 Elections Susan Milner and Nick Parsons (editors) REINVENTING FRANCE State and Society in the Twenty-first Century

Gino G. Raymond THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY DURING THE FIFTH REPUBLIC A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology Sarah Waters SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN FRANCE Towards a New Citizenship

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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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9612–1 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–9612–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raymond, Gino. The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic : a crisis of leadership 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 10 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A la mémoire d’Olga Marie Raymond Force tranquille et sagesse inépuisable

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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

65

The Seeds of Failure

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

vii

List of Tables 3.1 Results of second round of legislative elections, 30 November 1958 3.2 1974 Presidential election 4.1 Social composition of SFIO–PS membership (in percentages), 1951–73 4.2 Performances of PS and PCF in the constituencies 5.1 Electoral performance of PCF since 1969 7.1 PCF and FN election results in metropolitan France 1978–89 8.1 Performance of left-wing and ecology candidates in the first round of the presidential elections 2002 8.2 Performance of left-wing and ecology parties in the first round of the legislative elections 2002

viii

50 62 75 85 96 166 192 193

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 from Cambridge University. He is trained in both French studies and political science. His interest in the evolution of French society and culture was honed by periods of teaching in a number of French institutions, including the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Since returning to teach in England, he has continued to develop his research interests in the emanations of France’s political culture, both through political discourse and through strategies of literary commitment. This has so far resulted in five books: France during the Socialist Years (ed., 1994), André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth (1995), A Historical Dictionary of France (1998), Structures of Power in Modern France (ed., 1999) and Redefining the French Republic (ed. with A. Cole, 2005). His journal publications include articles in Patterns of Prejudice, French Cultural Studies and the Revue André Malraux. His work has also been translated into several languages. He is married, with two children.

ix

Acknowledgements This book developed over a period of years, drawing on a sustained period of interest in the Parti communiste français that gave rise to a number of journal articles and chapters in edited books on the subject of the Communists in France, both as a party and as a community. Chapters 5 and 6 are versions of contributions to other works, and I am grateful to the editors, John Gaffney and Helen Drake, for their permission to adapt them for the purposes of this book. I am indebted also to the PCF staff at place Colonel Fabien, who, while their building looked like a bunker, displayed anything but a bunker mentality. The completion of this project would not have been possible without the generous research leave afforded by the Department of French of the University of Bristol during 2003–2004, and the material support provided through the Arts Faculty Research Fund of the University of Bristol that sustained me during the indispensable periods of research in France. Last but not least, I wish to express my thanks to the staff of the French Department office, especially Christina Hollow, for their exceptional dedication in helping me to negotiate the technical hurdles involved in preparing the manuscript. Any flaws in the form or the content of the book are, of course, entirely attributable to me.

x

Introduction

A formidable body of research exists on the Parti communiste français (PCF), comprising distinguished narratives in English and French charting its highs and lows during most of the twentieth century.1 Other studies have traced the way its fortunes have been crucially tied to those of its ideological mentor,2 together with enduringly valuable studies exploring the culture that enabled it to survive for so long as a counter-community and assume the role of a tribune party.3 Objective analyses of the party in recent years have identified very clearly the impact on its credibility and electoral performance of the way its Leninist origins continued to shape its political choices up to the end of the twentieth century.4 From the 1970s onwards there has been no shortage of subjective accounts from former insiders of the effect on party members of its inability to change,5 while the failure of the party to defend the viability of its ideology has been illustrated by the disillusionment and desertion of its own intellectuals, fatally impoverishing its culture.6 The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union forced the pace of change and the leadership after Georges Marchais has tried to define a vision that might revive the party’s hopes for the future.7 Recent academic contributions to the field have moved beyond the familiar inventory of leadership failures to suggest that while the party has shrunk almost beyond recognition, it has provided France with a legacy that remains part of the fabric of its social and intellectual culture.8 The purpose of this study is to trace the way the destiny of the PCF is woven into the evolution of French society as a whole, especially during the life of the Fifth Republic: at times standing in opposition to it, at others embodying and exaggerating the changes within it, but in both cases reflecting on the state of French society at that particular time as 1

2 French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic

well as the state of its own existence. Departing from the now familiar evocations of the PCF’s recent history as a catalogue of missed opportunities and self-inflicted wounds, the study will situate the fortunes of the PCF into the wider context of the challenges faced by all parties in France today promoting a certain vision of society at a time when the institutions and agencies mediating change appear to be challenged as never before. Thus in Part I: The Premier Party of France, we begin with the turmoil on the Left in France during the 1920s, with the hardening of the demands for ideological conformity from Moscow that led to the emergence of the Communists as a party. From a position of weakness and isolation, by the middle of the next decade the Communists seized the initiative in rallying the Left in defence of democracy thanks to the emergence of the extreme Right and began the attempt at establishing a ménage with the Socialists that will be a constant process of rupture and reconciliation for the rest of its existence. Contingent factors will once more play in the party’s favour during the occupation of France when, following the invasion of Russia by Hitler’s troops, the formidable organisational talents and ideological commitment of the party’s members were invested in the French resistance. As evidence of the capital of credibility enjoyed by the PCF, the party was able to pursue a course of action during the power struggle that followed the liberation of France and the inception of the Fourth Republic that allowed it to force an end to its participation in the government of Socialist Paul Ramadier and even question the wisdom of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of the country, while preserving the electoral base that made it the premier party of France. A unique combination of objective and subjective factors made the PCF, even in isolation, an irreducible force. Its rivals had to concede that the charisma it had acquired during the occupation had enabled the PCF to fuse ideological conviction, acts of resistance and patriotic fervour in a manner that insulated it against the consequences, at the ballot box, that might have been expected to flow from accusations of harbouring divided loyalties in the climate of global ideological antagonism that characterised the 1940s and 1950s. The party’s resilience was, of course, underwritten by the strength of its culture as a self-sufficient community. With an organisational prise en charge or assimilation of its adherents that was without equal, a powerful presence among the labour battalions whose work was crucial in the primary industries that were vital to the renascent French economy, and an intellectual caste capable 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 being generally unquestioning in its obedience to the Moscow line abroad. However, as Part II: The Seeds of Failure demonstrates, a static party in an evolving polity is bound to atrophy. While, on the one hand, the facts of economic change that saw France shift from labour-intensive to capital-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 of poor decision-making. This failure was highlighted by the resurgence of the Socialists who, by the beginning of the 1970s, were reorganised, rechristened and revived by a leadership determined to subordinate ideological convictions to the dictates of a successful electoralist strategy. Pragmatically reaching out to the middle classes with one hand and reaching out to the new home-owning and consumerist workers of France with the other, by the end of the decade the silhouette of the Parti socialiste (PS) as an electoral force had come to overshadow that of the PCF. The effect, in terms of the dynamic of left-wing politics in France, was to sharpen the oscillations in the relationship between the two major sister parties of the Left and sometimes damage the perception of the PCF’s integrity as, now relegated to a subordinate role, it struggled on occasion to contain the ignoble preference to see the Right in power rather than the Socialist-led Left. More significantly in the context of the wider struggle for power, the PCF leadership had failed to adapt to the challenge of presidentialism. While François Mitterrand had also condemned the creation of a ‘republican monarch’ resulting from the prerogatives of executive power as defined by the constitution of the Fifth Republic, he adapted to the inescapable reality of it and under his leadership the PS in electoral mode became a formidable presidential vehicle. By contrast, the PCF leadership wedged itself in the impossible position of condemning the ultimate prize in French politics as being an obstacle to the flowering of a genuinely democratic society, while at the same time promoting its candidate as a credible contender for that office. The cost of being caught on the horns of this dilemma was illustrated by the way the party was ripped apart in the presidential elections of 1988. Not only was the credibility of its official candidate undermined by the all too obvious presence of the deus ex machina, the party general secretary, but by the alternative programme of an unofficial communist candidate representing those members determined to see the party break out of its ideological ghetto. Part II concludes with a discussion of the ‘(dis)course’ of the party’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 on course in terms of its ideological vocation, and the way this was blown off course both by events and the profound change in the expectations of the members he purported to represent. Part III: A Party Without a Role? addresses the wider intellectual and social context in which the decline of the PCF occurs, using the PCF as a weathervane for which the consequences of a buffeting by the winds of change are all the more exaggerated, given its unbending self-definition in ideological terms. The misreading of the student protests in Paris in May 1968 by the PCF leadership was indicative of a party that was already out of touch with the natural constituency of revolution – the young. The totalising world-view of Communists clouded their ability to grasp the myriad ways in which the notion of revolt was being interpreted and individualised. The decades that followed were marked by missed opportunities with regard to the way other communist parties in Europe were reforming and recasting their appeal in line with the changed expectations of their electorates, and the challenge of appealing to new constituencies which in principle were natural allies of the PCF as ‘frères dans la misère’ or brothers in poverty, namely the wave of new non-European immigrants to France. This study ends with an appraisal of the problematic that characterises the situation of a party with a revolutionary vocation in a postrevolutionary and post-modern age. It examines the way the crisis of representation affects all parties engaged in the processes of political participation and the way the grand narratives of modernity, so crucial to the self-understanding of the PCF, seem no longer able to mobilise the citizens of France. With the burgeoning growth of associations and social movements accompanied by new record highs in abstentionism at the polls, it is clear that disenchanted voters are not so much apolitical but increasingly determined to pursue political objectives by other means, through grassroots mobilisations usually around specific issues as opposed to ideologically driven priorities dispensed in a top-down manner. The way the post-Marchais leadership of the party has attempted to formulate a response to this challenge is scrutinised and an assessment is made of the way the PCF is now reaching out in the attempt to secure its survival as a credible component of the Left in France, through the opportunities that are available to it nationally and internationally.

Part I The Premier Party of France

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1 Political Credibility

Introduction: Riding the political see-saw The argument that modern French communism is a child of the Resistance1 encapsulates the source of much of the credibility which enabled it to become such a formidable political force during the three decades following World War II, but it is also reminiscent of the fact that contingent factors influenced the fortunes of the party, sometimes for the worst, before the war, and that contingent factors militated against its success at the end of the twentieth century (as they militated against the success of that other child of the Resistance, the Gaullist party). The French communists suffered a decade of decline during the 1920s when it lagged far behind the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), following the break-up in French socialist ranks at the Congress of Tours in 1920. The inception of the PCF, after its split with the more pluralist members of the SFIO and their refusal to accept the Leninist party blueprint which formed the essence of the demands by Moscow in the 21 conditions for adhesion to the Third International, was followed by a slide in the membership base from 118,000 in 1921 to 29,000 by 1931. The party’s fortunes were restored by the revival of republican solidarity against the rising threat of the far right in France and the formation of the Popular Front. The PCF was the first to seize on the disquiet created in the public mind by the riot on 6 February 1934 in Paris, 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 of violent 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 7

8 The Premier Party of France

two demonstrations organised separately by Socialists and Communists came together on the Place de la Nation. The ground was thus prepared for Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the PCF, on 9 October 1934, to propose the constitution of a ‘popular front’ against the threat from the far right. The revival in the party’s fortunes, which had allowed the membership to virtually double between 1933 and 1935, from 42,000 to 82,000, took off remarkably in 1936, when it reached 285,000, with the peak coming in 1937 at 340,000.2 In reality, the transition from ‘anathema to unity’3 on the Left was less miraculous and more self-interested than it appeared to be on the part of the PCF. Even as late as the spring of 1934 the policy of the PCF was centred on the capture of support from socialist ranks according to the post-Tours formula of ‘plucking the chicken’ in the campaign against social democracy, or ‘social fascism’ as it was called. The change in the PCF tune was called by the Communist International, and was confirmed by the telegram sent to Thorez during the party conference in Ivry, 21–26 June 1934, when his closing address was to be used to announce the new line of ‘left unity at all costs’ in the struggle against fascism. As the socialist leader Léon Blum remarked in Le Populaire of 8 July 1934, everything had changed in the wink of an eye, but as he also noted, it was impossible to ignore such an appeal for unity. And it was an appeal that brought the richest reward for the PCF in the legislative elections of 1936. In the campaign for the legislative elections of 1936, it was the PCF that expressed most directly the ideal of republican unity against fascism. Maurice Thorez was the most adept of the political leaders at using the airwaves to put his message across, such as in his broadcast of 17 April 1936, ‘Pour une France libre, forte et heureuse’ (‘for a free, strong and happy France’). In contrast to this message, the Right mounted a campaign based on a fear of Bolshevism fuelled by the evocation of catastrophic scenarios if the Left came to power. The parliamentary majority which emerged after the second round of the elections on 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, it was the PCF which enjoyed the most dramatic progression rising from 11 seats to 72. The depiction of the period of Popular Front government as essentially one glorious summer carnival when, for a brief but inspirational moment, the people of France were reconciled with themselves and the republican solidarity of the Revolution was realised has been graphically documented.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 an alliance designed to obtain electoral success which gave Léon Blum a mandate to manage the crisis of capitalism, but not one which extended to a maximalist transformation of the socio-economic system. The PCF had signalled its intention not to compromise its position by declaring its wholehearted support for the government on 6 May, while declining to participate in it. As the glorious summer of 1936 gave way to autumn, the gains enjoyed by the workers resulting from the Matignon Accords of June 1936 began to pall due to the government’s inability to reflate the economy in the face of worldwide deflationary policies. The PCF pledge to support the government was further stretched by the latter’s inability to define a more proactive role in support of their fellow Socialists in Spain after the fascist threat to the democratically elected government there became a reality in July. Blum’s announcement of the ‘pause’ in the programme of reform, in February 1937, was followed by the Senate’s refusal to vote for the powers he required to manage the economic crisis in the country. His resignation on 21 June in effect brought the Popular Front experiment to an end, although it has been argued that he chose this option rather than fighting on in order to maintain at least a semblance of a coalition.5 However, the way the PCF had distanced itself from government did not insulate it from the effects of a widespread sense of disillusionment. In fact, all the gains it made in terms of membership and credibility were soon to be more than washed away in the prelude to war. The isolation of the PCF worked to its detriment, for what was uppermost in an increasingly conservative public opinion was a fear of communism. But the hammer blow that shook the party came when fidelity to Moscow required it to defend the indefensible. When the world learned, on the evening of 21 August 1939, that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had decided to sign a treaty of non-aggression, the stupefaction was universal, including among the leadership of the PCF. There was no editorial by Thorez in the communist paper L’Humanité the following day, as might have been expected. On 24 August, a day after the treaty was signed in Moscow, L’Humanité was fully restored to its vocation and justified the Moscow line by arguing that the pact placed the Soviet Union at the heart of the search for peace and also underlined the limits of Hitler’s power. While the PCF could maintain a disciplined reaction to the Nazi–Soviet pact at the summit of the party hierarchy, at the base of the party there was widespread dismay.6 Federation secretaries charged with explaining the policy to members were shouted down, the administrative commission of

10 The Premier Party of France

the communist Confédération générale du travail (CGT) passed a motion condemning the pact, and two communist Deputies elected in 1936, Saussot and Loubradou, resigned from the party.7 By 1940 the PCF had fallen even below its 1932 low point when it could count on only 8.3 per cent of the popular vote, as all the gains of 1934–38 and more were wiped out. What the fortunes of the PCF between its inception and the commitment to the Resistance indicated was that in addition to the consequences of its own doctrinal orientation, contingent factors like the vagaries of the world economy – notably the inability of any one country to reflate in a global deflationary climate – have a fundamental role in determining its success. Furthermore, as the reactions of its own membership base illustrated in response to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, for all their ideological conditioning they too could follow the lead of the wider electorate and sanction the party for its mistakes, thereby undermining the archetypal notion of the party as an irreducible bloc comprised of unconditional adherents.

The heroic years The idea that the years of Resistance were a ‘serene combat’8 for the PCF is 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 pact that laid it open to vilification from its erstwhile partners on the Left and many of its own grassroots members. The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 transformed hitherto opposing interests into identical ones: the defence of the Soviet Union and the defence of France had converged and the PCF threw itself into the struggle with all its pent-up energy. The PCF rehabilitated the ‘national front’ proposal which had surfaced sporadically during the period 1937–39 and made this their rallying cry for the resistance to the Nazi regime and its Vichy puppet government in France. By July the party had fixed seven objectives for the population to adopt: preventing French resources serving the German war machine, stopping French factories working for Hitler by supporting French workers’ demands, preventing the railways from exporting French goods to Germany, organising the resistance of the peasants to the delivery of foodstuffs to the occupiers, organising the struggle against the repression by the Vichy regime, spreading the information prepared by the Front National in order to counter enemy propaganda, and encouraging citizens to believe and participate in the liberation of France.

Political Credibility 11

The anti-communist hysteria in collaborationist newspapers like Je suis partout proved counter-productive, as the Vichy regime rushed to prove 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 Vichy government and the German occupiers of equating the Resistance with the Communists and of blaming the latter for most acts of resistance, rather than discouraging prospective recruits simply served to enhance the popular legitimacy of the PCF and made propaganda on its behalf.9 The Communists were the first to cross the threshold of meticulously pre-meditated acts of war against the occupier, and were also exemplary in their sacrifices. When Pierre Georges, better known by the pseudonym Colonel Fabien, shot dead a German officer on the platform of BarbèsRochechouart metro station on 23 August, it pulled France into the inevitably tragic cycle of Resistance actions and German reprisals. But the Communists could not be accused of just burdening others with the consequences of their acts. The killings of two German officers in Nantes and Bordeaux on 20 and 21 October was attributed by the authorities to the Communists and followed by the execution of scores of hostages, comprised largely of the party members and associates who could be rounded up. The execution, however, which most shocked public opinion and which served as an inspiration to the youth of France was that of the seventeen-year-old Guy Môquet, whose sole crime was to be the son of a communist Deputy, detained in Algeria. In his broadcast from London on 25 October, Charles de Gaulle described those who had been executed as martyrs and asked for a national gesture of remembrance through 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 that would defeat them. The link between the Resistance, the communist movement and the love of France had been forged in the public mind by the rhetoric of de Gaulle. With Thorez in Moscow, the responsibility for the PCF in France was divided between Jacques Duclos for the press and propaganda effort, Benoît Frachon for union organisation and material resources, and Marcel Prenant as head of the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), the military wing of the political resistance effort headed by the Front National. The PCF decentralised its organisation, creating a delegation for the south of the country in Lyon, which became the capital of the Resistance. It also created ‘interrégions’ which each covered several départements, resulting in nine for the northern zone and five for the south. In one respect, however, the vertical lines of communication established by the classic

12 The Premier Party of France

organisational model for communist parties, that is, democratic centralism, proved an invaluable training for the work of the Resistance. At grassroots level the Communist résistants were organised in groups of three and absolutely forbidden from contacting other groups, but only allowed to communicate with the controllers in the echelons above them. In motivation, organisation and training, the Communists set the benchmark for the other Resistance groups and when, in 1943, the metropolitan Resistance forces were finally unified, the Communists gained a strong position in the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). The question that arises, therefore, is why the Communists did not try and assume the kind of dominant role in shaping the postResistance political settlement that would have been commensurate with the weight they deployed in the Resistance effort. The Communists and the Gaullists used each other. The first contacts between the two are believed to have taken place through the offices of a certain ‘Colonel Rémy’ in May 1942, but the first PCF representative to join de Gaulle in London, Fernand Grenier, did not arrive until 8 January 1943. The imperative for de Gaulle was clear: to use the Front National of the PCF to create as all-embracing a Gaullist movement as possible and thereby underlining to the Allies the legitimacy of his claim to represent all of France. As for the PCF, the alliance with de Gaulle provided an official stamp of approval for their patriotism. In reality, whatever the ambitions might have been in senior PCF ranks to pilot the Resistance, events in 1942 had determined things in a different way. The US landings in Morocco and the British success against the Afrika Korps at El Alamein showed that the tide had been turned and adumbrated the spheres of influence that would ultimately constitute the post-war world. Guiding the PCF was the international strategy of the Soviet Union, which would not be served by any line taken by western communist parties like the PCF that might antagonise the Allies and prejudice Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. Conversely, the importance of the Communists was recognised when they were given two places on the five-man executive committee of the CNR. When the Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN) was established in Algiers on 3 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 first actions was to declare the 1939 dissolution of the PCF null and void. What occurred subsequently was a process of give and take that allowed the Communists to participate at the highest level in the structures managing the Resistance and laying the foundations for the post-war political settlement, and which at the same time was designed to

Political Credibility 13

contain their influence. Thus when the Consultative Assembly was set up in Algiers on 17 September 1943 to debate in a quasi-parliamentary manner the shape of government in France post-Liberation, the Communists were allotted 27 out of the 102 seats. But the conditions of their participation in the more crucial CFLN were not agreed until 4 April 1944, shortly before the CFLN was itself transformed into the Gouvernement provisoire de la république française (GPRF), which swung into operation after the Liberation and governed France until the Fourth Republic was established. In military terms on the ground, the communist FTP, particularly active in the southwest of France, accepted the process of consolidation with the rest of the metropolitan Resistance forces when the Forces françaises de l’intérieur were created on 1 February 1944. To the disquiet of the Gaullists, however, in contrast to the unification of the Resistance movement the PCF established milices patriotiques, patriotic militias, with a parapolicing function who proved particularly zealous in pursuing collaborators. But this focus of insurrectionary potential, as the Gaullists and the Allies saw it, was quickly neutralised by Thorez himself on his return from Moscow in November 1944, when he made clear to the party that public security should be guaranteed by the regular police forces alone. Already at the end of 1943 the PCF had condemned the inclination of the very effective Resistance leader in the Limousin, Georges Gingouin, to interpret maquis activity as preparation for civil insurrection in pursuit of a new order. The party line was that it was committed to a return to the old order based on the primacy of parliament.10 As has been persuasively argued elsewhere, French and Soviet Communists recognised the irresistible weight of American military power on the Western front, and did not doubt its willingness to crush communist insurrection behind its lines.11 Moreover, the Communists had acquitted themselves well in the battle for the liberation of France, culminating in the temerity they showed in launching the liberation of Paris,12 and could bring to the political table a stock of credibility that would have been unimaginable during the dark days of the Nazi–Soviet pact.

From government to isolation: A stable clientele The strategy of the PCF in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation was the classic twin-track approach dictated by the ideological conviction of the need to transform society according to the tenets of the party, attenuated by the realpolitik of working within the constraints dictated by the disposition of forces around the party. This dual approach

14 The Premier Party of France

characterised the party’s attitude to the Socialists, to the interim Gaullist establishment and to the challenge of participation in government, until fidelity to the ideological line emanating from Moscow could no longer be reconciled with participation in the bourgeois party politics of the Fourth Republic. The PCF enthusiasm for unity with the SFIO, which re-emerged after the Liberation, sprang from the same ambitions as during the 1935–37 period and foundered for the same reasons. A Comité permanent d’entente had been set up between the two parties in December 1944 with the overall purpose of exploring the avenues to achieving the organic unity of the Left. However, the remit of the committee was not actively pursued before the first elections in liberated France took place, in the form of the municipal elections of April–May 1945. The elections proved a great success for the PCF, enabling it to take approximately 25 per cent of the vote and to triple its control of medium and large municipalities compared with its representation in 1935. Notwithstanding this show of its electoral strength as an individual force, on 12 June the PCF leadership made the unilateral proposal of a unity charter that would cement the organic unity of the Left. The strategic reason for this was manifest in the emergence of an alternative suitor for the SFIO, the Christian Democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP), which had sprung up around Georges Bidault to fill the void left by the decline of the Radicals and the Right in general, thus providing the third element in the nascent tripartite party system. For the Socialists, the fatal stumbling block to unity remained the PCF’s vocation as the embodiment of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, in spite of discursive strategies aimed at sweetening the pill by laying the emphasis on the fight against ‘the dictatorship of capital’. Rather than fostering the pro-unity movement within the ranks of the SFIO that had developed under Daniel Mayer during 1943–44, the sudden proposal of a unity charter by the PCF undermined it, especially in the light of the French communist refusal clearly to disavow the viability of the Soviet socialist model for France. Thus by the end of the summer of 1945 the Comité d’entente was marginalised by the SFIO and within twelve months the executive of the party voted formally to terminate its existence, confirming once more the depth of the schism that had split the Left at the Congress of Tours. This setback to the PCF strategy of acceding to power by uniting the Left and working through the institutions of civil society was matched by another, when the party tried to build on its success as a dominant player in the Resistance by attempting to persuade strands in the

Political Credibility 15

Mouvements de Libération Nationale to rally to its Front National after the Liberation, and thus project the unity ranging from Communists to Catholics into the peacetime political game. But by July 1945 and the onset of the campaign for the election of a Constituent Assembly, old ideological cleavages had begun to reappear among the former Resistance leaders and the popular perception of the Resistance as a possible keystone for a new regime began to wane. However, the PCF did enjoy one successful campaign of unification, even if more by stealth than by open negotiation. The CGTU was founded as the PCF’s trade union ancillary in 1922, but by 1936 there was a reconciliation with the CGT resulting in an executive which shared the power between the Socialists and the Communists, with the former in the majority. Although the communist leaders were expelled in 1939, the rehabilitation of the party after the collapse of the Nazi–Soviet pact had, by the spring of 1943, reopened the door to the reintegration of the Communists. When the decision was taken in March 1945 to reconstitute the federal executive of the CGT, the communist trade unionists were given official parity with their Socialist counterparts. And by the time of the national congress of the CGT in April 1946, communist success in spreading its influence through the organisation became clear. Most of the delegates had been elected by communist trade unionists and this enabled them to change the statutes of the organisation, by a four to one majority, so that a new voting system would guarantee the preponderant weight of the seven largest communist-controlled federations and thus deliver a regular majority sympathetic to the communist line.13 In spite of the success in the sphere of trade union activity, it remained nonetheless true that the stature given to the PCF by its Resistance activities could not allow it to absorb the socialist rival it needed in order to gain governmental credibility, or to deploy its weight among its former Resistance partners in order to transform that cooperation in wartime into an enduring vehicle for its political ambitions in peacetime. As for its attitude towards the interim arrangements covering the government of France until a new constitution was established for the Republic, the PCF reacted to the Gaullist presidentialisation of power with the pragmatism which reconciled the pursuit of communist goals with the means at its disposal, mindful, as ever, to position itself in such a way as to accommodate the interests of the Soviet Union, as articulated by Moscow. The timetable to fully-fledged parliamentary democracy after the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 envisaged that the provisional government and the consultative assembly would pursue their functions

16 The Premier Party of France

until 21 October 1945, at which point a constituent assembly would be voted into power to draw up a new constitution that would give rise to a new government. During that period France was governed by what has been described as a ‘consensual dictatorship’14 due to the executive power wielded by de Gaulle as the head of a de facto presidential government. De Gaulle acted with little to constrain him in terms of formal limitations on his powers, and chose his ministers knowing that his prestige could not be compromised by the countervailing strength of parties or factions. While there was disquiet among the PCF leadership that the principle of popular sovereignty might be placed in question the longer the practice of presidential government was pursued in France, they accepted the modest roles attributed to them by de Gaulle in a compliant manner, even after the success of the party in the municipal elections of April–May 1945. As Thorez made clear in speeches as he toured the country in the second half of 1945, and in keeping with the tone set at the tenth party congress in June, the line taken by the PCF was a productivist one. The appeal to class sentiment was couched in terms expressing the effort needed to secure France’s material independence, rather than in terms of class war.15 Instead of an appeal based on a specifically communist platform, the PCF cast its rhetoric in a way that identified it with the CNR and echoed the latter’s programme for the reconstruction of the country. The imperative for the party was clearly to portray itself in a moderate light and the party had determined to work within the system, for in so doing lay the greatest opportunity to influence the emerging relations between France and the Soviet Union in a positive manner. Within those limitations the PCF did attempt to pursue its principle of popular sovereignty in opposition to the concentration of power in the executive. Thus when it came to the prerogatives of the Constituent Assembly that were to be voted in on 21 October, the PCF campaigned for a fully sovereign body able to determine the length of its session and the form of interim government it would bring in. The campaign failed and two-thirds of the electorate voted to limit the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life and deprive it of the mandate to fix an interim regime. The fact that only one third of Socialists supported the PCF campaign reflected the reality borne out by the ballot boxes on 21 October: a tripolar system had emerged which left the PCF with 159 seats, the SFIO with 139 and the MRP with 150 in the new Assembly. Knowing that the SFIO would not support a PCF candidate as president of the new government, and in view of the SFIO’s disinclination to put

Political Credibility 17

forward their own candidate, there was little option for the party, short of provoking a political crisis, but to accept the MRP proposal of a renewed de Gaulle presidency. As Thorez himself observed, the impossibility of a governing coalition between the PCF and the SFIO forced the Communists to rally to the tripartite government formula.16 There was an inevitable attempt by the Communists to maximise the benefit to their party through their support for the government by demanding a key ministry such as defence. The compromise that eventually prevailed did not give them all they wanted, but nonetheless provided a significant degree of representation: the responsibility for defence was split between two ministers with Charles Tillon becoming Minister for Armaments (as opposed to the more sensitive Armed Forces Minister); Thorez became Minister of State with responsibility for civil service reform; other ministerial posts went to François Billoux for National Economy, Marcel Paul for Industrial Production and Ambroise Croizat for Labour. Of lesser importance were two undersecretaryships attributed to the Communists, but one of which covered the key area of coal production. The Communists used their presence on the constituent committee entrusted with the task of drafting the new constitution to pursue their goal of popular sovereignty while mindful of the need to avoid frightening the bourgeosie. The PCF preference for a unicameral legislature elicited a sympathetic response from the SFIO, in view of the shared memories of what a hostile Senate had done to Léon Blum’s Popular Front government. The PCF were careful, however, to present their preference as an advance on the Third Republic, as opposed to a revolutionary system.17 After months of negotiation the committee came forward with proposals that, to a significant degree, reflected the common ground between the Communists and Socialists on constitutional issues, in contrast to their differences over other matters, and left the MRP with very little of its original agenda (including a proposal for a second house). The draft constitution that emerged from the constituent committee proposed a unicameral legislature and reduced the role of the President of the Republic to largely ceremonial functions. Although de Gaulle had resigned as President of the provisional government at the height of the negotiations on the constitution on 20 January 1946, and been replaced as head of government by the much more modest figure of Félix Gouin, it was still assumed that the draft constitution would be accepted by the French people in the referendum of 5 May. The reality proved somewhat different, as the French electorate rejected the draft constitution by a margin of 53 to 47 per cent.

18 The Premier Party of France

What had occurred was a grafting of other popular grievances onto the referendum, such as dissatisfaction over shortages in certain foodstuffs and consumer goods. In addition to this negative factor, the opposition from the MRP and the Right had fostered the idea that what was being proposed in the referendum was a PCF–SFIO constitution.18 The defeat was a turning point in that the SFIO decided to maximise its advantage as a hinge party by articulating its efforts with the MRP, and gave evidence of this in the campaign for the election of a second Constituent Assembly on 2 June by distancing itself from the PCF. The result of the June election pushed the PCF into second place, with the MRP claiming 5.6 million votes against the PCF’s 5.12 million. Its room for manoeuvre circumscribed, on the one hand, by the loss of its former socialist ally, and on the other hand by its desire to portray itself as a party of government, the PCF gave passive assent to the candidature of the MRP leader, Georges Bidault, as head of the government to replace Gouin’s. In recompense, the PCF were accorded an additional ministerial portfolio in the tripartite division of posts under Bidault. But in spite of this increased representation in government, the PCF’s hand in the negotiations over the second draft constitution was severely weakened as the SFIO and MRP joined forces to push through proposals that were very different to those elaborated under the PCF–SFIO alliance. The unicameral system demanded by the PCF gave way to a bicameral system with a second chamber called the Council of the Republic. The prospect of the President being held accountable, or hostage, to a single-party majority in a single-house legislature was removed by the proposal that he should be elected by both houses. In spite of diminishing the prospects for the kind of popular sovereignty that the PCF wanted, the party found itself having to endorse the MRP–SFIO proposals for fear that its opposition would align it with the Gaullists and the Right, and precipitate the need to elect a third Constituent Assembly, engendering a general political climate increasingly hostile 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 brought into being, the first act confirming its operation was the election of a National Assembly scheduled for 10 November. The PCF based its electoral campaign on support for the continuance of the tripartite system in an effort to convince the electorate of its moderation, and in order not to push the SFIO further into the MRP camp. The PCF campaign was justified by the results, which saw the PCF emerge with an

Political Credibility 19

increased share of the votes and the biggest bloc of seats at 166, while the MRP lost over 500,000 voters and obtained 158 seats, with the SFIO continuing to decline, with its number of seats dropping below three figures 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 a two-party alliance with the SFIO, by proposing Thorez as a replacement for the outgoing Bidault in the role of President of the Provisional Government. In an attempt to enhance the image of the PCF as a party in earnest pursuit of other progressive partners, Thorez gave his famous interview to the Times which appeared on 17 November 1946 in which, for the first time, a French communist leader articulated the idea that the road to socialism followed by the Soviet Union was not the only one, and that a people like the French, rich in their own tradition of struggle for social justice, would find their own, national road to socialism. The promotion of Thorez was intensified in an effort to pressurise the Socialists, leading to a trade-off that was designed to allow the SFIO leaders to endorse Thorez as President of the Government in return for the PCF’s endorsement of the socialist Vincent Auriol as first President of the Fourth Republic. However, the SFIO were unable to deliver the support of all of their Deputies and Thorez failed to get the requisite number of votes in the ballots held in the Assembly. Determined to forestall manoeuvres by the MRP to bring conservative factions into the political game with a view to shutting the PCF out of government, the Communists proposed a single-party SFIO government under a figure acceptable to the majority, the now veteran parliamentarian Léon Blum, to run the nation’s affairs until the major institutions envisaged by the new constitution of the Republic were established. Consequently, Blum’s ministry took up the reins from 16 December 1946 and relinquished them a month later in January 1947, once the Council of the Republic and the President had been elected. Blum’s SFIO colleague Paul Ramadier formed a new tripartite government on 22 January, and of the 26 ministerial portfolios five went to the PCF, the same number to the MRP, nine to the SFIO and seven were distributed to the smaller parties, notably the Radicals. But in spite of the successful return of the PCF as a major player in tripartite government, the passage of time had exacerbated the contradictions in the communist position as part of the political mainstream and foreshortened the prospects of success. The Communists had applauded Ramadier’s speech to the Assembly on 21 January, when he affirmed the determination of France to avoid being sucked into a power bloc in pursuit of either

20 The Premier Party of France

hegemony or aggression, alluding in the first place to the United States and in the second to the Soviet Union. But it was precisely the kind of choice the PCF would be forced to back into and which would lead to the great schism with the rest of the political establishment in France. The difficulties began to manifest themselves clearly when, in the Assembly debate of 18 March, the Communist Deputies refused to stand up in response to Ramadier’s exhortation to honour the sacrifices made by French troops in attempting to preserve the unity of the French Union against the growing insurrectionary threat in Indochina. For the PCF, the fact that the movement for independence in Indochina was of communist inspiration meant that it could not be put down by the French authorities as simply a wave of civil disturbances. When incipient rebellion followed in Madagascar and resulted in the arrest of Malagasy parliamentarians, Communist Deputies protested that the arrests were in contravention of the constitution of the Fourth Republic. But what triggered the break with government was the strike that was called at the Renault auto works at Boulogne-Billancourt on 25 April, against the original advice of the CGT. The situation had been simmering since February and by the end of April it was clear to the CGT and the PCF that the workers would not be placated. On 30 April in cabinet, Thorez declared his support for the demands of the workers, notwithstanding Ramadier’s reminder that it had been agreed to defer the discussion of salary increases until the following July. At the ministerial meeting of 1 May, Thorez confirmed his party’s refusal to endorse the economic and social policy of the government, and because the communist 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 and incomes to a virulent criticism of government policy on these issues could be partly explained by the fear of no longer being able to control its left.19 It was also connected, however, with events occurring internationally and the adversarial positions that were becoming fixed. The doctrine articulated by President Truman of the United States on 12 March predicated on the belief that the independence of the countries of post-war Europe (most immediately Turkey and Greece but also France and Italy) was dependent on the provision of aid and the tacit understanding that they would purge themselves of communist influence, formed part of the backdrop to the conference in Moscow of the former allied nations later in the month. The conference, aimed at resolving the issues concerning German reparations and French rights over the Saar, ended on the eve of the strike at Renault and illustrated the

Political Credibility 21

inevitable separation of interests between East and West. The Soviet view on reparations was found unacceptably punitive by the Western allies and, more significantly, the agreement by the Western representatives, Marshall for the US, Bevin for Britain and Bidault for France, that the coal from the Saar should be attributed to France, underlined the fragile basis of the assumption by the PCF that French national selfinterest could be pursued without necessarily siding with the other Western allies. The PCF’s belief that the Ramadier government would not be able to carry on without them had been proved wrong, but at the party’s 11th Congress in Strasbourg, beginning on 25 June, there were still voices presenting the PCF as a party of government and wondering at the aberration of the Ramadier government in marginalising a man of state like Thorez. Beyond the domestic front, notwithstanding the denunciation in L’Humanité of the Marshall plan for the reconstruction of Europe as little more than a capitalist trap, leadership figures like Duclos were still affirming two days into the conference that they were still hopeful that the Marshall plan could serve to rebuild Europe, even though Stalin had committed himself to opposing it.20 The PCF was not unique among European communist parties in not being sure of the line Moscow would take or the timing of it, but the hostility of some other European parties towards the PCF when they all met at the Kominform congress in Poland from 22 to 27 September took the leadership by surprise. Jacques Duclos was forced on the back foot by accusations that the PCF had failed to denounce the American pressure that had led to their expulsion from government. This failure, it was alleged, reflected the opportunism of the PCF. There were even criticisms which revised the role of the French Communists in the Resistance, accusing them of having opened the door to de Gaulle’s seizure of power by not organising an insurrection to fill the vacuum left by the departing Germans. The chastening lessons of the summer had their effect on the direction taken by the PCF. In the central committee meeting of 29–30 October Maurice Thorez confessed the mistakes he and therefore the committee had made (in keeping with the responsibility demanded by democratic centralism), in persisting with the idea that the PCF could be a party of government and that the difficulties with the Ramadier government had occurred within the context of a domestic ministerial crisis, rather than being the reflection of a global crisis. Ramadier and Blum were vilified for having betrayed France’s national interest in favour of those of the United States. Thorez’s reassessment covered the Popular Front and the Resistance, and underlined what he argued was

22 The Premier Party of France

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

Conclusion In terms of its electoral spread of support and the sources of that support, the PCF did experience some notable fluctuations during the life of the Fourth Republic. In the aftermath of the war, for example, rural support for the party rose significantly in those areas where Resistance activity had been most marked. Party membership reached many times its pre-war levels in areas like Aude, Côtes-du-Nord, Loire-Atlantique, Haute-Marne and Morbihan, so that by 1948 peasants and agricultural workers represented the second largest constituency in the PCF, accounting for 28 per cent of members, ranking behind only the industrial workers who accounted for over 47 per cent.21 The proportion of peasants and agricultural workers was to slip to 14 per cent within a decade, as the PCF increased its members among the still expanding industrial working class. But in view of the way the PCF’s score in elections in October 1945, June 1946, 1951 and 1956 hovered more or less within a point of 25 per cent, it can very plausibly be argued that its clientele had assumed a consistent shape and mass, in short, had stabilised, as, on the Right, the Gaullist clientele had done.22 While the great schism therefore brought isolation, throughout the remaining life of the Fourth Republic, the PCF possessed an electoral weight that could not be denied, and deployed a presence on the political landscape that enabled it to foster its identity as a counter-community with a countervailing culture to capitalism.

2 Dynamics of the Counter-culture

Introduction: A charismatic party During the life of the Fifth Republic in France the discussion of charisma has been largely situated in a presidential context, and while its analysis has moved on from the Weberian notion of charisma as a seductive legitimation of the state’s monopoly of violence,1 it has tended to focus on the exceptional qualities of the charismatic leader rather than the given social structure that is conducive to the deployment of that charisma. When surveying the heyday of the PCF, it is possible to perceive a hierarchy of relations in which a charismatic general secretary, Thorez, exercised his influence over a party which itself deployed a charismatic influence over France. The Communist mobilisation in the Resistance tapped a collective sensibility among the French people to the charismatic profile of their nation internationally. The fight against Nazi barbarism was a fight for the kind of fundamental humanist values that the Revolution of 1789 had proclaimed universally, and by distinguishing themselves in that struggle the Communists were endowed with a charisma that was not so much a power in terms of what the party could impose, but the strength of an appeal to a sense of identity,2 or co-identity, between the PCF and France. The apparent irreducibility of the PCF vote and the fidelity of its core support, until what is generally perceived to be the crucial turning point in its fortunes when the legislative elections of 1978 showed it to have lost its position as the dominant party of the Left,3 gave other parties a perceptible sense of inferiority. In the closing stages of the war, as Soviet troops were sweeping across Eastern Europe, it was not unknown for MRP leaders to make complaisant noises regarding the intentions of the USSR, partly motivated by the fear of being tarred with the brush of 23

24 The Premier Party of France

bourgeois anti-communism, or even worse, having to defend themselves against the charge of collaboration. Maurice Schumann, for example, felt able to maintain that in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe what had replaced Nazism would not inevitably prove to be an exclusively Leninist or Stalinist brand of communism.4 In the immediate aftermath of the war and notwithstanding his own credentials as an enemy of Nazism, Charles de Gaulle had to acknowledge the countervailing credibility of the French Communists. There is a clear note of selfcongratulation in his recollection of the elections of 21 October 1945, when, by opting for an electoral system based on proportional representation, 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 and indirectly, devoted his post-war political career to supplanting the Communists with the Socialists as the dominant left-wing party in France expressed a keen awareness of their claim to a unique kind of credibility. Thus François Mitterrand, among other exhortations to the Socialists, warned against allowing the PCF to claim, unchallenged, a monopoly on authenticity.6 As we shall see, the objective factors which determined the PCF’s strength, allied to the subjective perception of it by its adversaries, made the party a feature on the political landscape that had to be negotiated with consideration, even after its dismissal from government in 1947. We shall begin by outlining the electoral success that allowed the PCF to continue casting an intimidating shadow over its erstwhile partners in government, situate that analysis in the context of the strong identification afforded by the Communist ‘ethno-culture’, and conclude by adducing the contrast with a wider political culture that was generally perceived as lacking in conviction and coherence.

Electoral roots As we have seen in Chapter 1, the relationship between the Communists and the Socialists following the Congress of Tours and until the Popular Front ranged from veiled antagonism to overt hostility, and the consequences of this were very soon in evidence in terms of the electoral performance of the PCF. The party’s fallacious belief that it would inherit the Socialist’s electoral patrimony was exposed in the legislative elections of 1924, when the vehicle for its ambitions, the Bloc Ouvrier et Paysan, obtained a 9.5 per cent share of the total poll and returned 26 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 of their Deputies returned. Analysis of the concentration of votes showed that one-third of the PCF votes came from the Paris region, but that the bulk of the rest could not be attributed to the fidelity of the proletariat. Out of the 15 provincial departments where more than 10 per cent of the registered voters opted for 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 the Komintern and ideologically convinced of the Communist cause; secondly, rural voters (notably small farmers) who were less convinced ideologically and who were susceptible to the pull of personalities among local leaders. The latter category were often resentful as a result of the hardships endured during the war and what they perceived as post-war neglect of their interests, and their tradition of republican extremism made them naturally sympathetic to a communist cause that appeared to have the rich and powerful in its sights. The asset represented by that rural tradition of support for the PCF was to become very clear after World War II. In contrast to the performances before World War II, the striking aspect of the Communist vote in the legislative election of 1945 was the way it was spread throughout the country. In the Paris suburbs over 35 per cent of registered voters supported the PCF, and across the country the Communist share of the vote fell below five per cent in only two departments, and it fell below ten per cent in only another nine.7 Predictably, the Paris region and the industrial north proved the most formidable bastion of the Communist vote in absolute terms, but the dividend provided by communist Resistance activity in rural areas was particularly 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 and Catholic reaction, showed some remarkable gains for the PCF. The Communist vote in the Morbihan, for example, multiplied fourteenfold in comparison to what it had been before the war. In the depths of some of these hitherto profoundly conservative communities, the arrival of Resistance activity during the war had undone the ties of deference to rich landowners that had often overlaid long-held resentments. Interestingly, in many rural departments, it was the Radical vote that switched to the Communist party, as for example in Aude and Haute-Marne, rather than the Socialist one. The eclipsing of local notables,

26 The Premier Party of France

whether by choice or force, and the arrival of résistants who were also party workers of humble origins, had tapped a desire for change that had deep roots. In spite of the doctrinal influence of Moscow, for many of the new voters for the PCF, what the party brought was not communism but the prospect of greater real democracy, in the vein of a historical tradition rooted in the Jacobinism of the Montagne and the later radical republicanism of Ledru-Rollin and his fellow combatants for universal male suffrage half a century later.8 Also significant was the decline of the local presses that had sustained Radical influence, whereas among the ex-Resistance publications vying for readership, the Communist press had obtained a very good start. By the autumn of 1945 the circulation for L’Humanité had reached 456,000 and its stablemate Ce Soir had reached 419,000, whereas the surviving centre-right dailies, Le Figaro and L’Aurore, were selling 382,000 and 101,000 respectively.9 Thus the party possessed the votes, rural and industrial, and the voice, in media terms, with which to project itself as the most powerful unified political formation in France. However, those electoral roots were anchored in a substratum of assumptions generated by communist self-identification as an ethnoclass. And it is difficult to avoid a pattern that shows that it is always in periods of rupture, either with allies in opposition or in government, that cultivation of the PCF’s distinctness serves to underwrite its endurance.

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

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 27

the political and economic context determined by its existence as a class in industrial society. Practice unification and generation provided the motive force for the majority of the delegates to the 18th National Congress of the SFIO, meeting in Tours in December 1920, to adopt the Leninist blueprint for structuring the party. At the 2nd Congress of the Third International in Moscow from July to August 1920, Lenin had expounded the very definite conditions of affiliation to the Communist International and those conditions effectively challenged the delegates at Tours to commit their party to a much more centralised structure,14 thereby sacrificing pluralism to a much more unified practice of socialism. Attempts to situate the emergence of the French communist movement in terms of deeper historical trends may vary. The PCF has been perceived as heir to a revolutionary tradition that was abandoned by the bourgeois parties.15 It has also been portrayed as the response that emerged to an antagonistic and inflexible ruling elite, disinclined to assimilate the working class into a more broadly based social structure (in contrast to comparable societies like Britain with a more conciliatory ruling class).16 What is beyond question, however, is the determination that was forged in the PCF to define itself through the operation of a hermetic habitus after the break with socialist pluralism that occurred at Tours. As the break with tripartite government in 1947 heralded a period when the PCF would invest its energy in the vibrancy of its existence as a self-sustaining community, so a generation earlier the PCF could be perceived as pursuing the incorporation of those values that would enable it to become, subsequently, self-sustaining. The division in socialist ranks which led to the formation of the Section française de l’internationale communiste (SFIC), as it was to be called until October 1921, was predicated on the Leninist assumption that the Communists should rally as many followers as possible to their flag, and that thereafter the task of homogenisation, or of creating a Bolshevised party, should begin. The initial success of the Communists, under Oscar Frossard, lay in their successful claim to the SFIO’s material and human resources, including the daily paper L’Humanité and ostensibly 140,000 of its 180,000 members. But as tensions among the party’s leaders were to show, there remained elements of competition between personalities and groups in the SFIC that hindered the generation of a unifying vision, of themselves and the role they had to play in the world to come. The view by the Komintern, or the Communist International, that Frossard was not committed to the strict application of the 21 conditions

28 The Premier Party of France

for membership of the Third International was not without justification. The majority within the SFIO that had voted for it was an amalgam of idealists, extreme leftists, pacifists, anarcho-syndicalists and others whose grasp of Leninist doctrine was often untutored. The need, perceived by the Komintern leadership, to school and discipline French communism was evinced by the instruction to Frossard to go to Moscow, but which he declined to obey during 1921–22.17 The scope of communist ambitions in Europe had to be rethought as the prospect of taking power receded with the hopes of revolution in Germany and the failed impact of the massive strikes in Italy and Czechoslovakia. The emphasis turned to the creation of much more cohesive national movements, making them like the members of a diaspora evermore faithful to their spiritual home, Moscow, as the isolation in their host societies increased. Growth would come, according to the Komintern, through the implementation of a ‘united front from below’, effectively a policy of infiltration in the unions and other bodies of the Left in order to win the membership over to the communist cause. In this instance also, Frossard showed little enthusiasm given that he was being asked to rebuild bridges with SFIO leaders who only a short time beforehand he had strenuously opposed. The tensions in a party which had yet to be ‘Bolshevised’ were apparent at the 1st Congress of the French Communists, held in Marseille in December 1921, when Frossard had to reconcile opposing factions on the left and the centre, against a backdrop of falling membership (notwithstanding the party’s claim to have 130,000 activists at its disposal). At the 2nd Congress of the French Communists in October 1922 Frossard came once more to embody the conflict between loyalty to the movement in France and loyalty to Moscow and expressed his resistance to Komintern interference. But the ground had begun to shift around him. Albert Treint, an erstwhile teacher and former army captain, was being groomed by the Komintern to organise the purge of the party and establish a Soviet-style Politburo leadership for French communists. With the disappearance or switch of loyalties of his supporters, Frossard’s isolation forced him to resign on 1 January 1923. Although the purge was actually conducted by Frossard’s former supporter Marcel Cachin, the post of General Secretary was attributed to Cachin’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 communist cause in France and loyalty to Moscow became neutralised as the interests of Moscow became the guiding interests of France. This change was

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 29

reflected by a process of structural incorporation of those mechanisms that generate the same dispositions. The replication of the Soviet party apparatus was, for example, extended in France with the creation of workplace cells in 1924. Just as in the Soviet Union, however, the growing organisational stability of the Communist party in France was concomitant with manoeuvrings at leadership level that reflected the power shifts in Moscow. Treint’s star waned and in 1925 the former railway worker Pierre Sémard, the Komitern’s candidate, was confirmed at the party’s 4th Congress as its next General Secretary. In the meantime, new figures were emerging through the Central Committee and the Directing Committee, such as Maurice Thorez and Jacques Doriot, who would be entrusted by Moscow with the task of eliminating the differences that could hinder the creation of unanimity as to the practiceunifying principles of the Communist ethno-class in France and its fidelity. Whereas Doriot had given himself a more individual profile in promoting the party’s opposition to the Rif war in 1925,18 when the French government launched a military offensive to crush the attempt by the Rif tribes of Morocco under Abd el-Krim to establish an independent republic, Thorez secured his progress through close cooperation with Moscow.19 The latter route to a leadership role was the more fruitful, particularly in the light of the party line determined by Moscow that would force the party in France to defend its position unanimously, or crumble in the face of the hostility it created, especially on the Left. The sectarianism of the French Communists was given a more bitter twist in 1928 when Stalin decided that the obstacle to revolution in Germany lay in the attitude of the Socialists. As a consequence, the line that came from Moscow led to the indictment of the Socialists as ‘social fascists’ and precluded the prospect of cooperation with them and other ‘bourgeois parties’.20 The result was marginalisation, recrimination and defeat. In the election of April 1928 the Communist party applied the Moscow line of ‘class against class’ by refusing to observe the practice of désistement, or standing down in favour of the best-placed left-wing candidate, in the prelude to the second ballot of the election over two rounds. By their refusal, the Communists split the left-wing vote and handed victory to the Right, according to some estimates,21 in approximately 67 seats which could have gone to representatives of the Left had their parties cooperated. The net result left the Communists with 14 deputies, in comparison with 26 before the election, and reduced the SFIO to 101 representatives in the Assembly. Nonetheless, the

30 The Premier Party of France

Communist party persevered with the ‘class against class’ line into the 1932 elections, when its share of the vote fell to 8.4 per cent and the number of Deputies it could return diminished to 12. It was not until 1934 that an appreciation of Nazism as a greater threat to communism than social democracy began to turn Moscow towards the kind of alliances that might be able to counteract that menace. In France, the ‘putsch manqué’ of 6 February 1934,22 when far-right groups led by colonel de La Rocque and his Croix de Feu threatened to march on the National Assembly, illustrated that the real danger lay not with Léon Blum and the SFIO but the vacuum created by a discredited parliamentary Right and a disunited Left. Within a decade and a half the French Communists had gone from divorce from the Socialists, to sectarianism and then a united front against fascism, but that circuitous development in relation to the rest of the Left had been accompanied by a linear development in the process of self-identification as a community, a culture and an ethnoclass. Thorez’s own progress through the ranks of the party could be seen as emblematic of the culture of unquestioning identification between the individual and the vocation proclaimed by the communist movement. As the Komintern toiled to lend credibility to the ‘class against class’ strategy, it had to find ways of deflecting responsibility for its failure. In France, Henri Barbé and Pierre Celor of the Young Communists, who together with Thorez and Benoît Frachon had been empowered to form a collective secretariat by the 6th Congress of the party in 1929, were found guilty of betraying the party. A campaign against factional work within the party eventually led to accusations against 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 were such that Thorez could switch from one line to an antithetical line and successfully make it his, as long as its identification with the interests of the ethno-class could be sanctioned by the discourse of the leadership. While Jacques Doriot challenged, individually, the slowness of the Kominform in recognising the need for cooperation with the SFIO, Thorez waited for the line to change in order for that cooperation to serve the consolidation of the party. By June 1934 Doriot had been expelled from the party, yet barely a month later the Communists and the Socialists signed an agreement for the defence of democracy, with Thorez prominent in his advocacy of the new line approved by Moscow. The new identification of the interests of the Communist ethno-class with the wider democratic constituency even allowed for the apparent

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 31

compromising of the structures that gave it its distinctness. Thus the communist sectarianism embodied in the union organisation of the CGTU was set aside as the CGTU was dissolved and its members were reintegrated into the CGT in March 1936. It was an intention that was signalled a year beforehand by the CGTU’s disapproval of nascent strike movements, and after the PCF’s success in the Popular Front elections of May 1936 when its representation in the National Assembly increased from 12 seats to 72 seats. It was then that Thorez made the memorable observation that it was necessary to know when to end strikes, in the face of the strike-happy euphoria that greeted the victory of the Popular Front. The Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 was undoubtedly an enormous blow to the cohesion of the party. There were numerous examples of the hostility of rank-and-file members to the pact, such as when party membership cards were pointedly torn up in front of Auguste Lecoeur, the federal secretary of the Pas-de-Calais, at a meeting he tried to address on 24 August. A generation later Lecoeur recalled how even in the café owned by Thorez’s uncle, swastikas had been drawn on the illustrious nephew’s portrait.23 The announcement of the pact on French radio on 23 August should not have come as a total surprise to the leadership of the PCF. L’Humanité had announced the signing of a trade agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union on 21 August, and the PCF leadership knew that negotiations between the two sides were continuing more intensely than ever. But when the news of the pact broke, the timing of it, at the height of the August vacation, caught everybody off-balance. For Charles Tillon, catching shrimps in the Haute-Vienne, for Thorez, touring in the southern Alps, and for the majority of the other leaders similarly absent from Paris, the auguries had been forgotten or ignored. Having returned hastily to Paris the leadership tried to tread the impossible line of both congratulating itself on the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact and rallying the nation against Nazi aggression. Thorez’s aggressively convoluted attempt to defend the line before the group of Communist Deputies in the Assembly prompted the resignation from the party of the Deputies Gustave Saussot and Paul Loubradou. But, precisely at the point when the practices of the party appeared unable to preserve its cohesion, it was thrown into the kind of isolation where its unifying practices would become most potent. The Daladier government seized on the disarray in communist ranks, especially following the majority that emerged from the meeting of the commission administrative of the CGT on 24 August to condemn the

32 The Premier Party of France

pact, to crack down on the PCF’s means of expression. On 25 and 26 August respectively, the presses of L’Humanité and Ce Soir were seized; on 28 August censorship was imposed on the press, the radio and the cinema; and on 29 August the PCF was banned from the meeting hall of la Mutualité. Nonetheless, the Communist Deputies continued to vote with the rest of the Assembly in support of the Daladier-Reynaud government, and voted for war credits to be passed the day after German troops entered Poland on 1 September. But a fortnight after France’s entry into the war on 3 September, the Red Army invaded Poland, revealing the truly cynical nature of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The PCF’s refusal to denounce this act of aggression gave Daladier the pretext he needed to outlaw the party and its affiliated organisations on 26 September, although the parliamentary group was rechristened Groupe ouvrier et paysan français on 29 September and survived. For Léon Blum, the forcible dissolution of the PCF was mistaken and a less powerful sanction than the universal condemnation of the French public.24 For Daladier and Reynaud, by identifying the PCF as the enemy in a war within France’s frontiers it distracted attention from the phoney war with Nazi Germany and the immobilism of their own government faced with that threat. However, whether those were the underlying motives of the government or not, by banning the PCF it succeeded in ending the debate within it. The dissolution of the party enabled it to rediscover the independence and integrity of its structures because the problematic relationship between the massed ranks and the party leadership was transformed into a struggle between the PCF and the State.25 Once the pact had been consigned to history by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was the discipline and practiceunifying principles inculcated into the Communists that allowed them to offer the most effective resistance to the German occupiers of France. The acceptance of information and instructions along a vertical axis conditioned by the practice of democratic centralism was the best training for action in such extreme circumstances. The fact that Thorez himself had deserted the French army in October 1939 and spent the duration of the war in the USSR was now no longer a liability, as the leadership of the Resistance, whether in London or Moscow, was working to the same end. The process of instant mythification is a familiar outcome of conflict in the post-modern world of constant soundbites and satellite images, but it was less commonplace and more performative in the immediate aftermath of the war. The PCF claim to be the party of the 75,000 shot in the defence of France certainly gave a dramatic edge to its profile, but even the much more realistic calculation of

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 33

10,00026 gave it a moral capital and self-sufficiency which no other party political formation could match. In contrast with other instances of rupture with the Socialist left or Socialist-led government during the three preceding decades, the PCF departure from the tripartite government of Paul Ramadier in 1947 provided uniquely propitious conditions for it to reinforce its identity as an ethno-class. The exit from participation in power came when the position of the party as the representative of the working class was at its most secure in electoral terms, before an unequivocal awareness at large of Moscow’s abuse of its position during the Cold War could damage it, and at a time when it could cultivate its distinctness as a community more vigorously than ever, under Thorez. Familiar analyses of Thorez’s influence are right to point to the reliance on Stalinist communism for the substance and style of his leadership of the PCF. The preparations to mark his fiftieth birthday in 1950 required the deployment of the kind of resources that could only be reminiscent of a Stalinist cult of personality: 40,000 posters, 200,000 invitations and 150,000 postcards depicting Thorez in various poses, not to mention the special stamps printed.27 Yet the mythification which, viewed from the outside, damns its subject, may, viewed from the inside, be what binds the subject to the group for which it is intended. In 1949 and 1950 the PCF had been thrown into reliance on its obdurately defensive qualities by the hostility of the political establishment. The departure from government had also resulted in the PCF being forced out of participation in the running of nationalised industries like the Charbonnages de France (coal) and new prestigious bodies such as the commission for atomic energy. As for its voice in the national media, the government was engaged in the removal of communist influence in state-owned sources of information like the radio and Agence France Presse. In such circumstances, the mythification 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 under siege, and most pregnant with meaning, underpinning the charisma of the leader and the cohesion of the group. The portrayal of Thorez as hero and martyr exploited the potential in the image of the leader who is distinguished ‘par le haut’,28 standing above his community, while at the same time assuming the sacrificial role that is testament to the humblest and most unconditional identification with that community. In his own discourse, Thorez deployed the charisma of the party through a referential chain of images that tied the party to the most illustrious aspects of France’s intellectual past, and projected it into the

34 The Premier Party of France

future pursuit of better tomorrows (‘les lendemains qui chantent’).29 The crucial contingent factor was that this came at a time when the theme of faith in the future was in step with the aspirations of French society at large. While the PCF was endowed with a solid structure and the prospect of an expanding mission, the society in which it operated was itself 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 coterminous with the ‘centralité française’ that expressed itself in the life of the communist movement in France. Thorez’s discourse was ‘en phase’ or in step with a society looking to re-emerge into a positive sense of identity and to rebuild after the trauma of war and occupation. This positive conjunction would, a generation later, stand in marked contrast with the dysjunct that characterised Georges Marchais’ discourse and distanced the party from French society, as we shall see. A sense of destiny was not an incongruous theme, in either party or national terms, and on the Right there was also a powerful evocation of the need to redefine a national identity and destiny as a means of finally overcoming the sense of collective defeat engendered by the occupation. It was the period when de Gaulle’s chief eulogist André Malraux was engaged in speeches and pronouncements that resonated with a cultish admiration for heroic leadership.30 If, on the Right, the answer to the existential néant, or nothingness, that was the legacy of France’s collapse in 1940, was dependent on faith in de Gaulle’s ability to restore France’s vocation to greatness, the choice between the experience of ‘being’ in the party and the experience of ‘nothingness’ outside it was even more acute for the members of a party with such a peculiar historic vocation as the PCF. Whereas the fear of a néant ethnique or ethnic non-identity was related to the nation in the first case, in the second case it was related to the party. For the PCF members, the more they participated in the practices of the party, the more confident they were of their identity. The PCF was far from omnicompetent in the management of those who were faithful to it. It can certainly be argued that PCF strategy vis-à-vis its support in the labour movement was costly and misguided. Its promotion of industrial action in the immediate aftermath of its expulsion from the tripartite government overestimated working-class combativeness.31 The failure of the strikes in the mining industry in 1948 not only created disillusion among workers generally but also set mining unions against each other. By 1951 the communist-dominated CGT was down to approximately half of its peak 1946 membership,

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 35

three million instead of six million.32 Similarly, the perception of the communist vote as an irreducible quotient needs to be attenuated by the fact that historic patterns indicate that long periods of decline were interspersed by short periods of growth, and that decline coincided with periods of isolation while growth coincided with periods of alliance 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 the November 1946 elections marked the high point from which the PCF declined in the 1951 election, winning 4.9 million votes and a 26.9 per cent share of the votes cast. Among the 600,000 votes lost could be counted the 8 per cent or so of the Communist electorate who had switched their allegiance to the the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF). Notwithstanding these considerations which balance the uncritical view of the then PCF as the premier party of France, as Annie Kriegel points out, the allegiance to the party was still an existential one, as the party was the milieu in which the member defined himself or herself,33 and ordering this milieu were structures that ensured the integration of the individual. From cradle to grave, the party offered an ideological état providence or welfare state that assumed that it could respond to the needs of all its members, provided they conformed to the policies emanating from the party’s central institutions. Thus the Jeunesses communistes had their independence in organisational terms, that is, the youth groups could organise themselves independently of the party cells at factory or neighbourhood level, but the party did not concede the point that they might constitute a separate community of interest with a distinct culture. At that particular juncture in France’s socio-economic development this did not diverge from the prevailing view that young people were simply more maladroit versions of their elders. A generation later, however, the party’s inability to recognise the decisive and singular influence of an emerging youth culture would cost it dear. The paternalism towards youth was part of a wider sense of benevolent patriarchy that worked also to convince women that the party could defend their interests with campaigns like ‘equal pay for equal work’, and which allowed the leadership to rejoice in the fact that between 1946 and 1954 the proportion of female party members doubled, rising from 11.1 per cent to 20.2 per cent.34 The operation of the communist milieu was crucially dependent on the internal apparatus, mechanisms and procedures that constituted party practices and defined it as an ethno-class.35 The preservation of the milieu was the vocation of the cadres. Tightly aligned on matters of

36 The Premier Party of France

party policy and thoroughly conditioned, they had originally been trained in Moscow until the PCF’s central school was set up in 1924. From 1930 onwards Thorez had begun to establish a practical control over the theoretically different functions of the three elements of central power: the secretariat, the political bureau and the central committee. And after the expulsion from government, the imperative of discipline sprang even more naturally from the central organs to the structures on the ground in the form of work sections, schools, press organs and so on. In opposition to the hierarchy of the State, the ethno-class had its own hierarchy, peopled by functionaries who communicated the vision of the leadership from one level of the hierarchy to the next, in a way designed to keep the community on course to meet its destiny. The interface between the different strata in the party operated so that those militants selected to serve from a particular echelon were oriented towards those from upper echelons endowed with ready-made decisions. It was a centralism that offered the possibility for the party to function as a closed society when the need arose and remain faithful to its fundamentally conservative preoccupation: preserving the party. But the mission to preserve the party was not then perceived as the manifest mark of a self-serving bureaucracy. The leadership discourse, and especially Thorez’s, focused on the notion of French Communism as neither pressed from the mould of marxism nor a tradition of ouvrierisme, but as an organic and original movement that was distinguished by three overriding characteristics. The first of these characteristics was that the existential identification with the party was the only authentic way of connecting with the life of France; secondly that only through the party could the survival of France be ensured; and finally that although the party was representative of an ideology and associated with a great power, this did not compromise the integrity of its existence as a unique and independent counter-society.36 The card played by the leadership tapped the emotive force that Marx identified when workers came together. Although what gathered communists together was a doctrinal aim, once the community was constituted the dominant experience was the fulfilment of a ‘besoin de société’, a social need, and the aim was superseded by the need for society from which was forged the sense of ‘ethnicité révolutionnaire’, of belonging to a revolutionary ethno-class.37 In contrast to subsequent chapters in the PCF’s history, especially during the Fifth Republic, under Thorez the party could successfully claim to give a sense of permanence and identity, in marked distinction to the sense of drift and uncertainty which characterised the operation of the other political constituencies in the Fourth Republic.

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 37

Conclusion: An island of certainty in a sea of indecision Though once more in the political wilderness after the exit from tripartite government, the PCF found itself operating in a general political climate notable for its inability to favour consensus, in contrast to the cohesion of the PCF. The raw facts show that during its short existence the life of the Fourth Republic was punctuated by the formation of 25 governments and the appointment of 15 prime ministers. This could be read as a testament to the conciliatory talents of the political class due to the processes to be negotiated in the perpetual remaking of governing coalitions, or it could be seen as indicative of the overriding desire by the participants to exclude the extremes of Left and Right. That the latter analysis is more plausible is underlined by the stabilising factors absent from the play of forces present in the political arena. Unlike countries like Britain or Germany, there was no party to dominate the centre ground and around which a consensus could be built. Furthermore, as there was a pole of attraction to the left of the Socialists represented by the PCF, so the Gaullists and more extreme tendencies constituted a pole of attraction to the right of the traditional representatives of the parliamentary centre-right. If one looks at the legislative elections between 1946 and 1958, it is clear that the electorate’s faith in the party regime of the Fourth Republic quickly dissipated. In the elections of June 1946, 60.9 per cent of the voters supported the regime, spreading their votes between the Socialists (21.1), the Radicals and their allies (11.6) and the Christian Democrats (28.2), as opposed to the 25.9 per cent represented by the PCF who opposed the regime. In the elections of 1951, the total of voters supporting the regime had fallen to 36.2 per cent, in contrast to the 48.5 per cent of voters who spread their votes between parties opposing the regime, notably the PCF (26.9) and the Gaullists and their allies (21.6). Although the parties supporting the regime increased their share of the votes again in the election of 1956 to 41.5 per cent, their performance was still eclipsed by the parties opposing the regime, who obtained a 42.6 per cent share of the vote. 38 The frailty of party formations other than the PCF was very clear in those elections of 1956. Whereas the PCF held a 26.7 per cent share of the vote, the Socialists polled 16.2, the Radicals 13.0, the MRP also 13.0 and the Conservatives 17.3.39 It was on the Right particularly that party fortunes were marked by transience and volatility. The Christian democratic MRP was born out of the Catholic Resistance and founded in 1944. The middle way it

38 The Premier Party of France

seemed to offer between the materialist assumptions of liberalism and communism 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 the traditional mould, obtained a 16.5 per cent share of the vote in the 1951 legislative elections, but by July 1955 its fate was sealed when a disillusioned de Gaulle severed his ties with it. But most transient of all was the movement led by Pierre Poujade, the shopkeeper from the Lot. The union founded by Poujade in 1953 to defend small business people and artisans against what they saw as the punitive tax regime of an authoritarian centralist government, peaked with the 52 Deputies returned to the National Assembly in the elections of 1956, but began to decline again in the following year and de Gaulle would acquire the support of Poujadist Deputies and supporters when he returned to power in 1958.40 The fractured nature of the centre-right could not fail to enhance the electoral standing of the PCF. As for the Socialists, in some respects their participation in government was bound to enhance the reputation of the PCF as the great party of the Left. Jules Moch’s decision to send in troops against striking miners in 1948 was not what many on the left might have expected from a Socialist Interior Minister. It was a more dramatic scenario still which saw a Socialist Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, in July 1956, conspire with the British and the Israelis to retake the Suez Canal by military means after it had been nationalised by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. One could argue that it was fortuitous for the PCF to be excluded from government during a period when those parties participating in government were buffeted by a succession of foreign policy crises, most dramatically those linked with the painful process of decolonisation. The conquest of North Vietnam by the nationalists under Ho Chi Minh in September 1944 had set the stage for the post-war débâcle that would culminate in the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and barely was this defeat digested in May 1954 before the Front de libération nationale (FLN) in Algeria launched their war of independence against France in the following November. In spite of the Cold War and the discredit attached to the PCF’s ideological obedience to Moscow, especially in the light of events like the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet troops in 1956,41 the PCF did not face the disadvantage of being compared with a governing elite distinguished by its ability to manage the convulsions of representative government either in the Hexagon or its territories overseas.

Dynamics of the Counter-culture 39

The foregoing factors all contributed to the unrivalled consistency of electoral support for the PCF during 1945–78, which averaged 23.4 per cent over 11 legislative elections, while all the other parties suffered far more dramatically fluctuating fortunes.42 However, the great mistake for the PCF was to miss the constitutional turning point in the political life of the Republic in the twentieth century, and to fail to readjust its attitudes, as a Third Republic blueprint for the exercise of power was superseded by the new model which defined the Fifth Republic.

3 The Anti-system Party

Introduction As suggested in the conclusion to Chapter 2, the appeal of the PCF to the French electorate was in no small measure due to the certainty it represented when all around it seemed characterised by uncertainty and drift. Indeed, the continuity represented by the PCF at the height of its popularity could be contrasted with the debate about the very inception of the Fourth Republic. Historically, it could have been 25 August 1944, since that was the date on which the capital was liberated. Politically, the departure of de Gaulle from the presidency of the Conseil des ministres on 20 January 1946 was a watershed in terms of the break this constituted with the whole period of the Resistance. Juridically, however, one would opt for the period from October 1946 to January 1947, the creation of Paul Ramadier’s government and the establishment of new institutions, to situate the birth of a new constitutional system. In this febrile atmosphere of rapid change, high expectations and reversals of fortune, an irony of circumstance had aligned the PCF with de Gaulle’s RPF in a common rejection of what is often called la politique politicienne, that is, the self-interested behaviour of the political class. But as has been cogently pointed out elsewhere,1 after de Gaulle rejected the atavistic nature of party politics under the Fourth Republic and the RPF was dissolved, there was only one refuge left for dissenting voters. With the Socialists behaving as a major prop of the system, the Communists were the sole anti-system party for an electorate weary of political immobilisme and social and economic instability. But while a fixed position of no compromise with the political system can be electorally profitable in a situation where all else is flux and drift, 40

The Anti-system Party 41

those dividends can only diminish as that situation settles and the institutions that govern it prove their efficacy. As the foundations of the Fifth Republic sank solidly into place, the PCF began to find itself isolated by its opposition and forced willy-nilly to compromise with the rules of a game that it had ostensibly rejected. Thus, as party politics assumed the new pattern of left- and right-wing allegiances described as a ‘quadrille bipolaire’, the party found itself pooling its resources, if not its ambitions, with its sister party of the Left, the Parti socialiste. And the ambiguity this created in terms of the authenticity of the PCF’s desire to share power in the management of the Fifth Republic’s affairs became more evident in the stop–go, in–out posture of the Communists, as the confident electorate of a successfully established republic edged closer to voting the Left into power.

An anti-system party resistant to change The ferment of the years immediately preceding the establishment of the Fifth Republic had left the PCF wrong-footed by events, both internally and externally. The year of the PCF’s 14th Congress, 1956, was to prove one where its inability to read the changes occurring around it would be all too obvious. The talented enfant terrible of the party, Pierre Hervé, was excluded on 14 February, with unintentional irony, on the day the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) opened in Moscow. Hervé’s opposition to Stalinist dogmatism had proved too much for a party which still proclaimed Stalin to be the great continuateur of Lenin’s work and which prided itself in having in Thorez a leader who was his faithful disciple. What an irony, therefore, when the heresies for which Hervé had been punished were those articulated by the Soviet leader, Nikita Kruschev. While Kruschev denounced Stalin’s management style and his theses on the inevitable withering away of capitalism, another prominent party figure, Anastas Mikoïan, attacked more directly the illegalities that were rife under Stalin and the cult of personality he encouraged. The message could not have been lost on Thorez, since he was present at the CPSU’s congress, along with Jacques Duclos and Marcel Servin. The public criticism of Stalin was glossed over in the pages of L’Humanité in its reporting in the days following the CPSU Congress. But the article which appeared first in the New York Times of 16 March 1956 on Kruschev’s secret report of 25 February indicting Stalin for his misdeeds had, eventually, to draw a response from Thorez. When it appeared in L’Humanité on 27 March, Thorez’s article did admit that,

42 The Premier Party of France

especially in the latter stage of his career, Stalin himself had forgotten some of the rules that he had taught to communist movements around the world. This, however, amounted to little more than a caveat in an overview that continued to situate Stalin at the heart of a process that had successfully constructed a socialist system covering a sixth of the world’s surface and defended Lenin’s legacy. In contrast to Thorez and his colleagues, communist leaders behind the iron curtain, such as Gomulka in Poland, were making tentative steps towards liberalisation within the parameters of a programme of destalinisation, while attempting to balance this with their continued support for the status quo through their fidelity to the Warsaw Pact. But Imre Nagy in Hungary embarked on a course of reform that was to assume a dramatic momentum of its own. What started as a rejection of the straitjacket of the Stalinist legacy which Hungary had had to endure turned into a repudiation of communism. Nagy’s proclamation of Hungary’s neutrality on 2 November 1956, and the decision to create a Western-style government, was condemned in the pages of L’Humanité as a compromise with anti-communist parties. Reporting on the deliberations of the PCF’s central committee, Etienne Fajon went further and accused Nagy of covering up a Saint Bartholomew’s day elimination of communists in which Hungarian fascists were engaged. The PCF leadership’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 for Nagy’s experiment in democracy and also from within its own ranks. At grassroots level, the CGT union was divided, with figures like Pierre Le Brun and Alain Le Léap openly hostile to the military intervention of the Soviet Union in Hungary. From the factory floor, incidents were reported of militants refusing to distribute tracts and even tearing up their membership cards. However, it was in the party’s coterie of intellectuals that the disillusionment drew the most attention. Four communist writers, Claude Roy, Roger Vailland, Claude Morgan and J.-F. Rolland, joined in the protest articulated, notably, by Jean-Paul Sartre against the Soviet government’s use of tanks and cannons to break the revolt of the Hungarian people. On 23 November a motion appeared in the pages of Le Figaro, endorsed by an iconic figure of modern art, Pablo Picasso, and nine other communist intellectuals, calling for an extraordinary Congress of the party to address the deep disquiet caused by the events in Hungary.3 But the PCF kept to its line and seemed justified in doing so, to judge by the election results of the period. Even its support for the Soviet repression in Hungary did not seem able seriously to undermine

The Anti-system Party 43

its apparently immovable presence on the French political landscape. In the 52 cantonal by-elections in 1956 its share of the vote slipped barely to 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 of the vote would dip noticeably to 17.2 per cent from the previous level of 21.4 per cent. But in the three elections of the same year for parliamentary 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 of 2 January 1956. Finally, the pattern was reinforced in municipal elections also, enabling it to take 32.1 per cent in 1957, in line with the 31.9 per cent in 1953. As well as holding the line against anti-communist counter-revolution in the east, the PCF was also mindful of the excesses of capitalist imperialism in the pursuit of France’s own interests. The Anglo-French ultimatum to President Nasser of Egypt on 30 October 1956 over his country’s nationalisation of the Suez canal was followed by the seizure of 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 was in a sense a tragic coincidence for the Hungarian insurrectionists. Not only did this final act of imperialist hauteur by two declining European powers furnish communists with a means of castigating the West for its vaunted democratic credentials, it could be exploited to attenuate the enormity of what the Soviet Union had sanctioned in Hungary. However, the insurrection that would have the greatest impact on the life of the Fourth Republic, and therefore the standing of the PCF as a national political force, had already been ignited across the water from France’s Mediterranean shore. The start of the insurrection in Algeria on 1 November 1954 was an event that the PCF was not alone in underestimating. Although it received well-informed briefings from the Parti communiste algérien, the leaders of the insurrection were first and foremost nationalist, not communist, and in a communiqué in L’Humanité on 9 November 1954, the party criticised the insurrectionists for individual acts that might play into the hands of the colonists. The theoretical reference for the PCF was still the position taken by Thorez in a speech delivered in Algiers in February 1939. What Thorez saw at that point was a melting pot of twenty races, in a process of transition towards nationhood, and which would depend, crucially, on the Parti communiste algérien, formed a mere three years beforehand, to guide it there.4 It was not until January 1958 that the PCF recognised the FLN as the sole interlocutors of Algerian nationalism.5

44 The Premier Party of France

During 1958 the scale of the crisis unfolding in Algeria impressed itself on everyone and Thorez campaigned across the country against French policy there. He made a cause célèbre of Alban Liechti, who refused the call-up, although the young party member had taken the initiative of refusing the draft without the support of the PCF. But, as certain chroniclers have argued, Thorez and the party leadership still did not appreciate the extent to which the Algerian crisis threatened the continued existence of the Fourth Republic.6 Nor did Thorez appear to appreciate the latent susceptibility of the French public to the appeal of the kind of Caesarism personified by de Gaulle. When, in May, Paris-Presse asked a number of leading political figures whether the events in Algeria justified the recall of General de Gaulle to the helm, Thorez condemned de Gaulle as an advocate of colonial wars, someone who had attempted to evict the PCF from the life of the nation, and an individual who aspired to exercise dictatorial powers.7 As was implied by the PCF’s posture following the fall of the Socialist Guy Mollet’s government in 1957, it was the fixed point around which the Left should revolve. The overtures that were made to the Socialists assumed, as ever, that compromise could be reached on matters of policy across a broad front, but that on the issue of the party’s structure and organisational identity, it would remain the bastion determined by the co-identification (in the leadership’s perception) of Stalinism and communism. While the fortunes of other parties and players waxed and waned, that of the PCF remained constant. In the light of the undeniable political advantage enjoyed by the party, it is perhaps not surprising that Thorez should also not appreciate the power of attraction of a figure like de Gaulle to both the army and civil society. To many eyes, de Gaulle represented the positive personalisation of power and seemed to possess the mystique of a historical destiny. But to Thorez he was, after all, the figure who had folded his tent and retreated into the political wilderness in 1946, whereas the PCF had become an inescapable feature of the political life of the Fourth Republic. The Algerian crisis served to prove once more the superiority the PCF enjoyed as a cohesive force, vis-à-vis the other parties of the political system. Mollet had tried a policy of increasing severity and failed, under the governor-general he appointed to Algeria, Robert Lacoste. The French government’s position was to negotiate only with elected representatives of the Algerian people, once the FLN had laid down its arms. The effect on the ground was to make the prospect of anything resembling capitulation even more unacceptable to both sides concerned. As the disregard for human rights grew among the parachutists of General

The Anti-system Party 45

Massu, so the terrorist bombings executed by the FLN escalated, reaching a peak during the ‘battle of Algiers’, between January and September 1957, when the systematic use of torture on suspected terrorists and street by street searches by French troops was countered by calculated bombing outrages. On the mainland, the enfeebled political parties were further divided by the way the conflict muddied the distinctions between them. Thus, the Algérie française camp could draw notable Radicals, Gaullists, Christian democrats and moderates, while the Republican front against government policy in Algeria had to contain tensions of the kind generated by the resignation of the liberal leftwinger Pierre Mendès-France in protest at Mollet’s management of the crisis. 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 Algiers as a man of compromise, a mass demonstration was organised with the complicity of the army which rapidly became an insurrection, leading to the formation of a ‘Comité du salut public de l’Algérie française’, led by generals Salan and Massu. In the perfervid atmosphere that reigned, the Gaullists found little difficulty in persuading the insurgents to make an appeal to General de Gaulle, and on 15 May Salan and Massu declared officially that de Gaulle’s was the only authority that they would recognise. The reaction of the PCF to the events of 13 May was for the political bureau to issue a call to the people during the night of the thirteenth, in which it condemned the events in Algiers as a fascist coup against the Republic and exhorted the workers in their factories and businesses to mobilise with the slogan, ‘the Fascists will not pass’.8 In spite of this appeal, Thorez himself decided that caution was the better part of valour and chose secretly to seek refuge in Switzerland, until he was persuaded to return by Marcel Servin.9 It is unlikely, however, that the physical presence of Thorez would have made the kind of anti-fascist mobilisation that the party had been capable of in 1934 any more probable. The PCF’s tacit support had enabled the Pflimlin government to be formed, and after the events of 13 May it supported the government further in the vote that accorded it special powers. But, essentially, the PCF was incapable of defining a positive position that could provide a dynamic for its own constituency or offer an alternative to de Gaulle. De Gaulle’s declaration, on 15 May, that he was willing to assume the powers of the Republic, elicited a critique of his ambitions by the PCF that warned of the prospective advent of a regime characterised by the

46 The Premier Party of France

personalisation of power. But the deepening of the crisis simply served to heighten the providential appeal of de Gaulle. The seizing of the prefecture of Ajaccio in Corsica, by paratroopers from Algeria on 26 May, seemed to bring the possibility of civil war in France a step closer. The call from the PCF on mainland France to Corsican communists to ‘hurl the fascists into the sea’10 fell on deaf ears, and this powerlessness in the face of events could only enhance the attraction of de Gaulle, given the discredit attached to political parties. Ironically for the anti-system party, it was the only formation to oppose the end of the Fourth Republic system of party politics, by declaring itself against the investiture of General de Gaulle. On the eve of his investiture the party warned that the personalisation of power was not reconcilable with the regular functioning of representative democracy. But these arguments could not resist the way de Gaulle had effectively played Algiers and Paris off against each other, using the threat of the events in Algiers to portray himself in Paris as the indispensable interlocutor for the insurrectionists, and using his growing importance in Paris to call for calm in Algiers. The pressure of events left President Coty with no choice but to call on de Gaulle to form a government, whose investiture by the Assembly took place on 1 June. On 2 June it was voted full powers, and on 3 June the Assembly voted to grant de Gaulle the right to revise the constitution of the Republic.

Stranded by the shift from fourth to fifth During the summer months following de Gaulle’s investiture, Thorez went onto the attack and the pages of L’Humanité chronicled his dramatic depictions of where the personalisation of power would lead. Before the central committee at Ivry on 10 June he described the formation of an administration under de Gaulle as a personal dictatorship that opened the way to fascism.11 The attack was renewed in greater detail before the national conference of the PCF at Montreuil on 17 July, when the party was exhorted to fight against Gaullism. On this occasion, Thorez identified the foundations supporting the Gaullist phenomenon as the most chauvinistic and the most pro-colonialist elements of the grande bourgeosie, reiterating the encouragement this gave to the rise of fascism.12 During the fête de l’Humanité that September, Thorez focused his criticism on the incompatibility of Caesarism and democracy.13 But this less strident tone was to have no more successful an impact.

The Anti-system Party 47

The content of the constitutional reforms that de Gaulle presented to the French people on 4 September was clearly aimed at reinforcing the authority of the French State by enhancing the powers of the President. Also implicit in de Gaulle’s decision to seek approval for the changes by a national referendum rather than a simple ratification in the Assembly was his desire to marginalise political parties. In a radio broadcast six days before the referendum, without citing de Gaulle, Thorez drew a comparison between the ambitions of the insurrectionists for an Algérie française and the ambitions espoused by some in metropolitan France: the suppression of political parties, the subordination of civil power to military power and the substitution of police powers for the rule of law.14 But the very nature of the campaign preceding the referendum illustrated why the parties had lost the confidence of the electorate. No less than 23 ‘recognised’ political formations or groupings were authorised to use the radio and billboards to make their arguments. Under the name Union des forces démocratiques the groupings allied with the PCF were the Radicals behind Mendès-France, François Mitterrand’s UDSR (Union démocratique et socialiste de la résistance), the left-wing Catholics of Jeune République and the Union de la Gauche socialiste. However, their right to be heard on the airwaves and voice their opposition to the new constitution did not diminish the perception of these groupings as weak and ‘satellisé’, that is, mere satellites of the PCF.15 Once the result of the referendum on 28 September was declared, it was clear that France had undergone a sea change, at least in terms of the expectations of the electorate. Whereas in October 1946 only 53 per cent of voters gave their approval for the constitution of the Fourth Republic, in September 1958 almost 80 per cent of them approved the text that was submitted to them, and with a turn-out of 85 per cent of those eligible to vote. All of the départements of France returned majorities in favour of the new constitution, and although the majorities were predictably greater in those regions where the Right was traditionally implanted, like the Gironde, Basses-Pyrénées and Haute-Loire, the vote against was significantly lower than might have been expected in those regions with a left-wing tradition like the Nord, Massif central and Mediterranean coast. Of the PCF electorate, the party itself would recognise that one in five had ignored the party line. An analysis of the figures, however, showed that only 60 per cent of members had voted ‘no’. Or, if one adds in the abstentionists, a third of party members ignored the party’s instructions.16 While on the one hand it could be argued that de Gaulle had benefited from the fact that the communist working-class electorate was far

48 The Premier Party of France

from unanimous in sharing the pro-independence position of the PCF regarding Algeria, on the other hand, their voting behaviour was less issue-led. Many of them also shared in the general expectation, even hunger, for change, which de Gaulle personified. The communist electorate was no more insulated than the rest of the population from what many saw as the decade of national failure that had preceded the return of de Gaulle. But the official party line was that the millions who had voted against the new constitution nonetheless represented a base on which the democratic forces of the country could build their offensive, most obviously in the legislative elections that were looming in November. Conversely, flushed with the success of the referendum, the new administration was determined to drive home its advantage at the cost of the political parties, especially the PCF. The new voting system to be adopted was not settled by the referendum of 28 September, and in the deliberations that followed, it was clear that de Gaulle was determined not to sanction a system that could either exaggerate party representation or lend itself to skilful manipulation by the parties. The system of proportional representation that had served the Fourth Republic was obviously no longer acceptable. The British-style, first-past-the-post system which Michel Debré was known to lean towards was also discounted, as the single round of voting could again favour a party like the PCF with a strong base and the ability to mobilise its voters. Ultimately, at their meeting on 7 October, de Gaulle and his ministers made a pragmatic choice and revived the first-past-the-post system used during the life of the Third Republic, but with a number of important caveats. This time, although there would be two rounds of voting as in the Third Republic, only a week would separate them (as opposed to a fortnight); no new candidate could present him or herself at the second round; and no new candidate could go forward to the second round who had polled less than 5 per cent of the votes in the first round. Two related reforms would further reduce the weight of the parties in the new Assembly. The decision to reduce the number of Deputies elected in metropolitan France from 544 to 465 necessitated the redrawing of constituency boundaries and resulted in a level of representation of approximately one Deputy per 93,000 inhabitants. While the exercise could be justified as a reasonably honest reflection of the demographic realities of the time, the effects were not entirely neutral. The fact that no Department should be allowed to return less than two Deputies favoured those that were the least populated and, not surprisingly, the PCF found itself to be the party the most systematically disadvantaged by the boundary changes.

The Anti-system Party 49

While the new regime’s determination to secure its advantage vis-à-vis the Left, and especially the PCF, was clear, the Left nonetheless played into its hands. We have already noted the cost to the PCF, in terms of the disaffection of its own voters, of its refusal to admit the importance of the other factors that made the presidentialisation of power acceptable to the French electorate. Other formations of the Left and Centre rendered themselves less credible in the eyes of the electorate through their increasing divisions. The Socialists of the SFIO could not be reconciled with the Socialists of the newer UDSR; the Radicals, already divided into three groupings, found themselves faced with a fourth due to the creation of the Union des forces démocratiques by Pierre Mendès-France and his friends; and the MRP found that the middle ground it hoped to occupy had become the territory of the Gaullist vehicle, the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR). The endorsement the new regime hoped to receive from the legislative elections of November 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 premier party of France was also unexpected. At the end of the first round of voting on 23 November, the PCF had suffered its biggest decline since 1932. It lost 1,600,000 votes compared to its performance in the elections of 1956, losing almost a third of its electorate, with 14.3 per cent of the vote in contrast to 20.5 per cent in 1956. The high level of abstentionism, at 22.9 per cent, offered little comfort, as it could be interpreted as further evidence of the electorate’s mistrust of the parties. Between the rounds of voting, additional damage was done by the disunity of the Left. The ‘discipline républicaine’ which should have characterised a transfer of votes from less wellplaced Socialists to better-placed Communist candidates in the second round was weak and unquestionably undermined by figures like Guy Mollet, who declared that there could be no compromise with the defenders of Bolshevism. By the time the results of the second round of voting on November 30 were established (Table 3.1), it was undeniable that the PCF, which had emerged with 150 Deputies in 1956, was the great loser. Again, however, contingent factors were to have a considerable effect on PCF fortunes, and this time in a positive sense. Though isolated during the Fourth Republic, the political actions of the non-communist left served, paradoxically, to undermine their own credibility and underline the PCF’s as a party of the Left. The alliances of the SFIO with centre-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,

50 The Premier Party of France Table 3.1 Results of second round of legislative elections, 30 November 1958 Number of deputies* PCF SFIO Radicals and allies MRP UNR Centre-Right moderates

10 44 23 57 198 133

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

had in fact pulled the SFIO towards the right. The reality of the disappearing middle ground became more manifest with the declining fortunes of the MRP. The aspirations of this ‘social Catholic’ party, born out of the Catholic Resistance, to break the left–right mould, faded with its electoral fortunes as the party dissolved into old squabbles about church-state relations and the attitude to take over the unravelling of colonial ties. As France passed from one Republic to the next, the Socialists found themselves isolated, and the polarisation that served so well to highlight the dominance of the PCF as the party of the Left, reasserted itself. The moot point, however, would be whether the ensuing periods of alliance with the Socialists could overcome the limits placed by the oppositional posture of an anti-system party and allow it to position itself convincingly vis-à-vis the electorate as a prospective part of an elected left-wing establishment.

Uneasy steps: Dancing in the ‘quadrille bipolaire’ The term ‘quadrille bipolaire’ neatly summarises the electoral alliances that were a precondition for success under the political system created for de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. The high point for the operation of these alliances was reached in the legislative elections of 1978, when four parties of comparable strength, the Gaullist RPR allied with the centreright UDF and the PCF allied with the PS, split the vote along a clear left–right axis. The bipolar nature of the system was most stark of course in the ultimate electoral contest, the presidential election, when prior to the second round the competitors who had lost out in the battle to

The Anti-system Party 51

be the best placed candidates would step down in order to facilitate a clear left–right battle.18 The ground for such an evolution was prepared by de Gaulle, and reinforced by him with the constitutional amendment of 1962 that allowed the President to be elected directly by the people. Although the amendment was approved by the electorate in a referendum, a general election was nonetheless called because of the vote of censure passed by a parliament hostile to the change. It was at this point that the Socialists, counting the cost to themselves of the new electoral system introduced in 1958, announced that they would desist in the second round of voting in favour of the best-placed opposition candidate in each constituency, including the Communist ones. The reaction of the PCF was rapid and generous. It announced that it would take the same line as the Socialists, and in the event, even withdrew some of its candidates who were marginally ahead in the first round, to the benefit of other opposition candidates with more hope of rallying moderate voters. The ‘désistement’ which was the fruit of this revival in ‘discipline républicaine’ on the Left allowed the partners to claw back in the elections of 1962 some of the losses suffered in 1958. The four-million votes polled by the PCF secured them a 21.8 per cent share of the turnout and 40 seats. The much more modest 12.65 per cent share of the vote taken by the SFIO, nonetheless, secured 65 seats for the Socialists in the new Assembly. The fact remained, however, that though polarisation made the PCF clearly incontournable or unavoidable on the left, its opposition to the system limited the party’s potential gains from it. Conversely, while the Socialists were forced to accept their junior status in the partnership with the Communists, it was precisely this unequal alliance that offered it the prospect of ultimately rivalling the PCF. On the noncommunist Left it was François Mitterrand who was the first to grasp this paradox fully and begin to exploit it.19 The retirement of Thorez in 1964 and his replacement by Waldeck Rochet had not greatly attenuated the suspicions of the Socialists vis-à-vis the PCF. With the prospect of a presidential election looming in 1965, the Socialists tried to construct a centre-left alliance around the candidature of Gaston Deferre as an alternative to Gaullism. The SFIO was forced to accept, however, that the potential for a common platform of that kind no longer existed with the centre parties, which included the remnants of the MRP. Mitterrand emerged as the compromise candidate of the Left essentially due to his profile as an outsider who, rather than being a powerfully identifiable standard-bearer for the SFIO or the PCF, was in fact rooted in the middle ground of Fourth Republic politics. He

52 The Premier Party of France

announced his candidature on 9 September 1965 without consulting his prospective allies, and although his ambition was to rally all the anti-Gaullist forces of the Left, his own political support was provided by the small and fragile Convention des institutions républicaines (CIR). Mitterrand’s isolated standing meant that the two main parties of the Left could distance themselves from him in the event of a crushing defeat and thus minimise the cost to their credibility. Moreover, for the PCF it was an additional step towards the alliance that they hoped would consolidate its dominance on the Left. On 23 September 1965 the PCF central committee decided officially to support the candidature of François Mitterrand. Furthermore, the PCF accepted the need to row back on its demands in order to give the candidate of the Left the impetus he needed in persuading the French electorate to trust him. It therefore renounced the requirement for a joint manifesto and allowed Mitterrand the freedom he wanted in terms of policy-making, while using its resources to support his campaign on the ground. When de Gaulle declared his candidature on 4 November, it was not without a degree of drama. As summarised by the media, de Gaulle offered the people of France a stark choice: ‘Moi ou le chaos’ (‘me or chaos’). Confident of his triumph, de Gaulle refused to beat the campaign trail and left the political stage to his adversaries. But contrary to expectation, Mitterrand pushed de Gaulle into a second-round confrontation when, in the first round on 5 December, he took more than a 32 per cent share of the vote against de Gaulle’s 44.65 per cent. Notwithstanding de Gaulle’s easy victory in the second round of voting on 19 December, when his share of the vote rose to 54.6 per cent, Mitterrand’s 45.4 per cent enabled him to score a moral victory and held significant lessons for the future. The lesson embodied in Mitterrand’s performance was the inescapable way in which the institution of the presidency dominated the political system of the Fifth Republic and shaped the electoral process. The fulfilment of de Gaulle’s ambition to create a strong presidency implied a corresponding diminution in the standing of the parties which meant that, in electoral terms, those parties which could put forward successful presidential candidates would expect to reap the benefits in parliamentary elections. The price to be paid for this success would be to transform themselves, to an important extent, into presidential vehicles. Conversely, as we shall see in a later chapter, the failure to take this lesson on board would cost the PCF dearly at the polling booth. Moreover, Mitterrand’s success adumbrated the possibility that the presidential mantle that appeared constitutionally tailor-made for

The Anti-system Party 53

de Gaulle could successfully pass on to someone else, even in the long-run to someone not of the centre-right. However, the challenge that would confront an anti-system party in the case of a genuine alternance was some way from materialising, and indeed seemed to recede in the light of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the 1969 presidential elections. The party vehicle for de Gaulle’s ambitions, the Union pour la défense de la République (UDR), had harvested votes in the legislative elections of 23 and 30 June 1968 that gave 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 the motivation of the electorate was the fear of social disorder and the desire to bring to a close the chapter of social upheaval that had peaked violently in ‘la nuit des barricades’ (the night of the barricades) in the Latin Quarter of Paris on 10–11 May. With the restoration of political normality came also the brooding resentment among the electorate of de Gaulle’s paternalistic presidency and in particular his government’s management of the country’s economic affairs. De Gaulle’s subsequent decision to invite the electorate to give their verdict on his programme to decentralise decision-making processes in France and to reform the Senate would inevitably, therefore, run the risk of allowing voters the opportunity to vent their frustration. The stakes were further raised by his decision to effect this consultation by means of a plebiscite, thereby placing his personal credibility on the line.20 In spite of the fact that the polls by mid-April 1969 indicated approximately 52 per cent of the voters in favour of the reforms proposed by de Gaulle, the swing that occurred from that point onwards until the day of the referendum on 27 April resulted in a 53.2 per cent vote against the reforms. Faced with this personal disavowal de Gaulle promptly issued a statement the following morning announcing his decision to renounce his presidential powers, effective from midday. Interestingly, as the candidates began to emerge for the presidential contest, Georges Pompidou, the prime minister de Gaulle had replaced once the crisis of May 1968 had subsided, appealed to the desire for change in France by declaring ‘Je ne suis pas le général de Gaulle’ (‘I am not General de Gaulle’). The fact that the Left could not capitalise on the mood swing among the French electorate, away from the benevolent authoritarianism of Gaullism resulted from the inability of the non-communist left and the PCF to dance in step in the pursuit of power. Ill feeling generated by the events of May 1968 had driven a wedge between the PCF and the other constituencies on the Left.21 As we shall see later in the chapter on

54 The Premier Party of France

clashing counter-cultures, in May 1968 the PCF had failed to understand the aspirations of the new youth culture that was emerging, and this incomprehension was summed up in Georges Marchais’ famous denunciation of student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, as a German anarchist. This isolation vis-à-vis the non-communist left was exacerbated by the events that followed on the international stage in the ensuing summer. When, on 21 August, Soviet forces rolled into the Czech capital to end the experiment in reform being pursued by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the figurehead for the Prague spring Alexander Dubcek, this was to the dismay of the Left in general and many Communists in Western Europe. The party intellectual Roger Gauraudy who was in Yalta with Italian and Spanish communist leaders when the news was broken to him of the Soviet action, took the lead in expressing opposition to it and initially at least found an echo in the pronouncements of Waldeck Rochet, who led the PCF politburo in framing a communiqué which criticised the Soviet intervention. Published on the evening of the intervention and endorsed by the central committee the day after, the communiqué marked a notable break with the usual policy of alignment with the Soviet Union and, as Waldeck Rochet admitted in a radio interview, was drawn up with ‘bitterness and heart-rending’.22 The PCF attitude, however, would not retain the ideological independence or express the unequivocal moral outrage that characterised the reactions of other sections of the Left. By the beginning of November, the party’s position had moved from criticism of the Soviet Union to criticism of Dubcek and the authors of the Prague spring, and finally to an emphasis on the values which united the international communist movement, implicitly, around the Soviet Union. It has been argued by some commentators that Waldeck Rochet, as party general secretary at the time of the crisis, had tried to establish a PCF line that was sympathetic to the aspirations behind the Prague spring and attempted to attenuate the conflict between Dubcek and Leonid Breznev in the Kremlin,23 but that he was ultimately caught on the back foot by adversaries within the party. For others, Waldeck Rochet’s apparent sympathy for Dubcek’s liberal interpretation of communism was a fig leaf to cover the temporising born of an absence of genuine faith in reform.24 But that temporising nonetheless allowed the 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 of the CPSU’s most faithful sister parties in the light of the impending world conference of communist parties destined to take place in June 1969.

The Anti-system Party 55

With regard to the impending presidential elections in France, however, the excellent personal relations that Waldeck Rochet was said to enjoy with François Mitterrand and his progress in developing the idea that the unity of the Left was the crucial means of challenging Gaullism were put on ice. The decision of the SFIO in May 1969, at its congress in the Paris suburb of Alfortville, to go it alone in the presidential elections with Gaston Deferre as its candidate was a kind of intellectual recidivism that divided an already fractured non-communist left even further. Deferre, mayor of the socialist bastion of Marseille, had narrowly outmanoeuvred the SFIO leader, Guy Mollet, by evoking the possibility of reviving a ‘third force’ that could acquire the means to challenge both the Gaullists and the Communists. For others on the non-communist left, the alliance of the SFIO, MRP, centre-left and centrist groups that ended in failure in 1952, would be even less likely to be emulated successfully under the less propitious circumstances that obtained in the Fifth Republic. Having attempted to position himself as the candidate for a united Left, François Mitterrand was ultimately obliged to relinquish this ambition and the CIR declined to support Deferre. But others on the non-communist Left were not averse to undermining its cohesion and also came forward as presidential candidates: Michel Rocard for the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) and the extreme left-winger who had been prominent in the turmoil of May 1968, Alain Krivine. It has also been argued that the SFIO gambled on the familiar assumption that, for all the popularity of communist candidates in municipal and mayoral elections, since only a socialist figurehead for the Left was acceptable to the electorate at national level, the PCF would not put one forward.25 But from the PCF perspective, whatever vague ideas Waldeck Rochet may have entertained of supporting the Deferre candidacy were soon dispensed with by the bureau politique of the party. The feasibility of supporting Deferre was made more remote by the fact that Guy Mollet himself appeared to have more enthusiasm for the candidacy of Alain Poher. Poher was the centrist President of the Senate who had taken over as acting President of the Republic after the General’s resignation, and Poher’s benign image in the public eye was one of the factors that inclined the SFIO leader to see him as the best way of defeating the Gaullist front runner, Georges Pompidou. The right-ward drift of the Socialists strengthened the hand of the members of a Thorézien persuasion in the bureau, and notwithstanding the opposition of liberals like Paul Laurent, when they put up one of their own in the shape of Jacques Duclos as the PCF candidate for the presidency,

56 The Premier Party of France

they were unstoppable. The unanimous decision of the central committee to endorse Duclos’ candidacy on 3 May 1969 marked the defeat of the line adopted by Waldeck Rochet in 1965.26 In a curious way, all the major players lost or scored hollow victories in the outcome of the 1969 presidential elections. The performances of Deferre and Rocard in the first ballot on 1 June were unequivocal failures, given their respective scores of 5.1 and 3.7 per cent. They had endured two inescapable and interconnected lessons: the socialist movement in France had to be overhauled and could not contemplate an electoral strategy that could carry it to power without accommodating the PCF. Georges Pompidou may have comfortably outdistanced his nearest rival, Poher, by 44 to 23.4 per cent in the first round, but the advice of the PCF and the PSU to their supporters not to turn out for the second round had weakened the credibility of the democratic process by effectively promoting a third option to Pompidou and Poher: abstention. The 30.9 per cent abstention rate in the second ballot meant that those 10.7 million electors who cast their vote for Pompidou on 15 June actually 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 and efficient party organisation to rely on, which was able to swing into operation on the ground behind his campaign. His 21.5 per cent share of the vote in the first round placed him third and less than 2 percentage points behind Poher. Had the PCF decided to mobilise its voters in order to stop the Gaullist candidate in the second round, Pompidou’s victory would have been by no means certain. The PCF’s preference, however, was politically partisan, if not indeed factional. By promoting abstentionism in the second round it was unquestionably successful in eliminating the possibility of finding itself marginalised by a resurgent and cohesive centre force, and it obliged the noncommunist left to confront the unpalatable reality of the electoral misfortunes it was destined to experience without an alliance with the PCF. But in so doing, the PCF had given its victory a hollow ring, since the Left as a whole was the loser. By assuming a fixed position that would force the rest of the Left to gravitate around it if they wanted to taste electoral success, the PCF gave its prospective allies a powerful incentive to become more fleet and sure-footed in the dance to constitute alliances. As we shall see in greater detail later, in the intervening period between the election of Pompidou to the presidency and his premature death, precipitating new presidential elections in 1974, the Socialists in particular made

The Anti-system Party 57

frantic efforts to reorganise themselves into a more cohesive vehicle and combined that with a dose of realism that enabled Mitterrand to put them back on track. The Fédération de la gauche démocrate et socialiste (FGDS) effectively lost its raison d’être after the presidential elections of 1969. Mitterrand had renounced his presidency of it at the end of the previous year and had invested his ambitions into pulling the noncommunist left together in the CIR. The rump of the FGDS reconstituted itself into the PS in 1969 and within two years the energetic action of Alain Savary began to attack the structural deficiencies that were in large measure responsible for the ongoing decline in the old SFIO membership base. What might have been perceived as the grip of the old gerontocracy of the party’s federal secretaries was prised away by Savary and there was a 20-year drop in the average age of office-holders in the party.27 Given this orientation, it is perhaps not surprising that Savary was suspicious of Mitterand. As Savary was later to underline when his position on the Left was undermined by Mitterrand, throughout his very long (even at that stage) political career, Mitterrand had never shown socialist conviction, let alone belief in a genuine partnership with the Communists. The truth remained, however, that amid the rubble of socialist aspirations, Mitterrand’s vision of an alliance with the PCF that would squeeze out the centre and mobilise the breadth of national support that could topple a Gaullist presidential succession remained the most cogent. The failure of the two parties to dance in step and its consequences in the presidential elections of 1969 were contrasted, in some socialist minds, with the success of the non-communist left during that period in 1965–67 when the Mitterrandist vision of the Left appeared to be in the ascendant. Moreover, by the time of the PS Congress at Epinay-sur-Seine in 1971, Mitterrand had managed to broaden his appeal to the left-wing of the PS, the Centre d’Etudes de Recherches et d’Education Socialistes (CERES). This dynamic socialist element, which wanted to turn the page on the discredited opportunism of the Socialists under Mollet and lay the foundations of a party based on socialist principle, found in Mitterrand someone who offered the prospect of negotiating a common programme with the PCF, while Savary had set his face against it.28 What occurred at Epinay could best be described (in the language of corporate competition) as a ‘reverse takeover’. Mitterrand had backed his CIR into the PS, with the former Secretary-General of the CIR taking up a place in the PS Secretariat. While Mitterrand could only directly influence the 14 per cent of the delegate vote largely represented by

58 The Premier Party of France

former Conventionnels, a deal with Gaston Deferre enabled him to secure Deferre’s bloc vote, which, as the largest in the party, was the most prized. These two elements, tallied with the support from the opposite wing of the party provided by CERES, enabled Mitterrand to win the election to be the new first secretary of the party – by a majority of 1 per cent. The fruits to be enjoyed from the willingness of the sister parties of the Left to move in step with each other had already become apparent to some in the PS even before the Epinay congress. In the March 1971 municipal elections, the de facto alliances between PCF and PS at city level illustrated the extent to which the tide was pulling in favour of a formal alliance. A large number of PS mayors, like Pierre Mauroy at Lille, had benefited crucially from the withdrawal of the communist candidate in the second ballot, and as the figures show, this coordinated movement occurred in two-thirds of large towns in 1971, in contrast to little more than one-third in 1965.29 But this success occurred against a background of tension within the PCF occasioned by a 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 international relations to the full and distinguished himself as one of the party figures most responsible for reconciling the PCF to the Soviet Union’s excuses for its actions. At the world conference of communist parties in Moscow in June 1969, Marchais had worked energetically to secure his position in the eyes of the CPSU as the natural heir to the leadership of the PCF. While Waldeck Rochet fell seriously ill at the beginning of the conference and was written out of the script, Marchais set about securing the kind of conference statement that, while not capable of ensuring unquestioning unanimity on the leadership of the CPSU in the worldwide struggle against imperialism, could nonetheless circumvent the reservations of important figures like the Italian communists concerning the events in Czechoslovakia. On his return to France, Marchais presented the report of the conference in Moscow to the central committee of the PCF. While Marchais was buoyed by the credit he had gained in Moscow, Waldeck Rochet suffered another relapse in his health (partially undermined, some believed, by his immense disappointment at the actions of the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia). As the evidence of Waldeck Rochet’s inability to resume his responsibilities became incontrovertible, the politburo of the party met to discuss the future leadership of the PCF. The atmosphere was muted when Gaston Plissonier put forward Marchais as the

The Anti-system Party 59

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 of Marchais’ high profile in the international communist movement. It was Plissonier again who put Marchais forward as the incumbent general secretary of the party at the 19th Congress of the PCF in February 1970. More tendentiously, he adduced Waldeck Rochet’s approval for Marchais’ designation. Whether the muted surprise and the lukewarm approbation of the Congress reflected for Marchais an uneasy appreciation of the turn the party was taking, away from Waldeck Rochet’s less pliant attitude to the USSR, is a matter for conjecture. But as has been pointed out, the significance of Marchais’ accession to power found a powerful metaphor in the contemporaneous move of the PCF into its new concrete and steel bunker-like seat at Place Colonel Fabien, which could not have been financed without the help of the comrades of the CPSU.30 Marchais pursued the policy of seeking a joint manifesto around which to forge an alliance with the PS, but the nature of his relationship with his future partner, Mitterrand, would be quite different to Waldeck Rochet’s. In October 1971 the PCF set the pace by publishing Changer de cap (‘Changing direction’), as the basis for a common platform. But it had to wait almost half a year for the PS to respond with its own document in March 1972 and thus prepare the ground for the horse-trading that would result in a common programme. A hiatus was created by President Pompidou’s spoiling tactic when he announced a referendum for the following month on British entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). Pompidou gambled on being able to pre-empt the formation of the PCF–PS alliance in light of the PCF’s well-known hostility to the EEC, and the PS’s attitude in favour of it. In the event, Mitterrand avoided being drawn into open conflict with the PCF by advocating abstention, in the face of the PCF’s resolute rejection of enlargement. While the referendum was carried by 67.7 per cent in favour of enlargement, this approval was undermined by a rate of abstentionism and spoilt ballot papers that hit 46.6 per cent, more than justifying the feeling that Pompidou’s strategy of exploiting the referendum had backfired.31 By the end of April the negotiations were back on track to establish the bases for a common programme. The principal planks to be assembled covered foreign, social and economic policy, and reform of the political institutions of the Republic. The PCF acknowledged that France could not renounce its Atlanticist orientation nor its independent nuclear deterrent or force de frappe. A wave of nationalisations

60 The Premier Party of France

was agreed covering nine major industrial groups and those banks that had avoided nationalisation after the World War II. On the institutional and constitutional front, the wish list included the introduction of proportional representation and a clipping of the powers of the president, notably by limiting his use of referenda, the emergency powers available to him under article 16 of the constitution and ultimately a reduction of his mandate down to five years. A number of liberalising social measures were agreed on, covering issues such as divorce and abortion rights, and in the important field of education the state sector was to extend its control to cover key aspects of church school provision. In the early hours of 27 June 1972 Marchais and Mitterrand signed the agreement that became the Common Programme, and on 12 July the Mouvement des radicaux de gauche (MRG) also put their name to the agreement. The challenge now was to what extent this Common Programme would live up to its billing as a platform for the general election of 1973. Both parties, especially the PCF since it had striven so hard for it, had to play the game of coalition politics, but the essentially competitive nature of their relationship could not be denied either, as they aspired to encroach on each other’s constituencies, as well as broadening their appeal beyond the Left. Thus the PCF campaigned unequivocally on the Common Programme and sought to anchor its left-wing constituency through its overt commitment to it, in contrast to Mitterrand’s PS which refused to align its campaign solely with it, for fear of being identified too closely with the PCF by the centrist voters it hoped to woo. In the event, the competitiveness between the two parties was largely contained within a dynamic tension that allowed both to draw satisfaction from the results of the election: the PCF obtained 21.40 per cent of the vote and emerged with 73 seats while the PS–MRG secured 20.71 per cent of the vote and took 102 seats.32 The PCF could derive satisfaction from the fact that it had regained ground since 1968 and tied the PS to its alliance strategy. More markedly, the PS–MRG could take heart from a performance that restored the credibility of the non-communist left. But a closer analysis of the second-ballot contests indicates that a competitive edge had not allowed the PCF and the PS to coordinate their steps quite so harmoniously. In contrast to 1967 and 1968, the overarching prospect of getting a left-wing candidate elected was not enough for the PCF to withdraw those of its candidates who had fared better than their PS rivals in the first ballot, and in the second ballot there were 68 instances where left-wing candidates faced off in triangular contests against a candidate of the Right.

The Anti-system Party 61

Ironically, however, one could argue that the Left was better-organised to meet the challenge thrown up by the bipolar nature of presidential contests under the Fifth Republic, than the Right, in the contest of 1974. Although the centre had in effect aligned itself with the governing coalition as they squared up to the alliance on the Left, this bipolar confrontation did not inevitably entail a bipartisan approach among the forces of the centre-right. While officially supporting Jacques Chaban-Delmas, there were nonetheless tensions within the Gaullist UDR provoked by those conservative Gaullist elements suspicious of Chaban-Delmas’ reformist tendencies, and others, like Jacques Chirac, who made no secret of their preference for the style of conservatism represented by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, supported by his Républicain Indépendants (RI). For his part, Giscard d’Estaing played the card of representing change but without disorder, by pursuing the prospect of a new alignment between traditional conservatism with the centrist formations represented by figures like Jean Lecanuet and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, in the bid to constitute a prospective presidential majority that would emancipate itself from the shadow of Gaullism. In contrast to these manoeuvrings, Mitterrand stood for the united Left with the endorsement of the PS, PCF, MRG and PSU. With a sound party base in a revitalised PS, Mitterrand slipped into a presidential campaigning mode, eschewing the constraints of the Common Programme and opting instead for his own platform, in a manner worthy of a prospective president of the Fifth Republic who stood above the fray of party politics. The reality for the PCF was that it was tied to the consequences of its own logic in pursuing an alliance with the PS. Backing Mitterrand as opposed to its own candidate was the only serious option if it hoped to maximise the appeal of the Left, as was intended by the alliance, since the possibilities of a communist being elected president were remote indeed. Moreover, the leadership recognised the possibility that the PCF electorate might, even if a party candidate were put up, vote according to the bipolar logic of the system anyway and throw their weight behind the left-wing candidate with the realistic chance of winning, Mitterrand, as opposed to a candidate with no 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 posture vis-à-vis its principal ally on the Left. His 43.4 per cent share of the first ballot was the highest left-wing vote in a national election under the Fifth Republic. His failure in the second ballot, by the narrowest of margins, pointed to the way the presidential system of the Fifth

62 The Premier Party of France Table 3.2

1974 Presidential election

Electorate Abstentions Spoilt papers

5 May

19 May

28.9 m 15.1% 0.8%

28.9 m 12.1% 1.2%

Million votes

%

Million votes

%

10.9 8.3 3.6

43.4 32.9 14.6

12.7 13.1

49.3 50.7

Mitterrand Giscard d’Estaing Chaban-Delmas Source: Frears (1991, p. 154).

Republic would reward candidates capable of harvesting the approbation of the centrist voters, as Giscard d’Estaing had done and Mitterrand would do. As the analysis of voting intentions revealed, the fact that Mitterrand fell at the last hurdle was significantly affected by reluctance of centrist voters to trust his alliance with the PCF. Were the PS to become the dominant partner on the Left, the fear of that alliance would recede and hasten the ensuing electoral benefit. With regard to the PCF electorate itself, 1965 and 1974 had proved that it would mobilise successfully behind the candidature of a socialist in a presidential contest. Furthermore, the inescapable fact that the PS candidate might attract votes from the centre while a PCF one would only frighten them, dictated the logic of the PCF twice accepting a socialist candidate of the Left in a tacit admission that a PCF one was unelectable. But the underlying significance of this could not have been more profound for the PCF’s self-understanding and the sense of its historic mission. As, by 1974, Mitterand and the PS could realistically look forward to the medium-term prospect of taking power and becoming the system, the invidious choice that would be left to the PCF would be of abandoning a core feature of its identity in order to join a winning left-wing establishment and putative system, or marginalising itself further in the eyes of the electorate.

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

The Anti-system Party 63

its steps with the rest of the Left, the overhaul of the PS was to provide more misgivings for the PCF. But this time the cause was the prospect that its sister party on the Left might be too successful. By forcing the PS to dance around it and find ways of pressing its suit in terms of electoral attractiveness, the PCF had overlooked the possibility that the virtues of its suitor might appeal to a much broader audience. Mitterrand might have lost the presidential contest in 1974, but the way he closed the gap on Valéry Giscard d’Estaing represented a moral victory and a quantum leap in the presidential credibility of the Socialist leader. 33 The year 1974 marked a veiled but nonetheless tectonic change in the psychology of the PCF because thereafter the subliminal anxiety in the party hierarchy turned into an ultimately fatal resentment at the fact that the changing perception of the PS among the electorate was reversing the roles between the parties and turning it, the PCF, into the suitor. The lessons that the PCF had wished to teach the rest of the Left concerning the need for alliance and a common electoral platform had been too well-digested by the PS, and would in return be vitiated by a fateful communist ambiguity in its attitude to the Left’s success. As Part II will illustrate, while for the PS the momentum of change that had brought success would be pursued further to revitalise the party and establish a broad constituency, the immobilism and ambiguity of the PCF vis-à-vis its principal partner of the Left would isolate it in the public eye and exacerbate its decline.

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Part II The Seeds of Failure

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4 The Rise of the Socialists

Introduction The rise of the Socialists was a portent of Communist failure because it hinged on lessons learned about the evolution of French politics and society under the Fifth Republic, which the PCF was slow to take on board. From three decades of contraction in its core membership and opportunistic attempts to survive, the PS of the 1970s launched into an expansion of its membership base and the definition of a credible winning strategy at the polls, while the PCF’s hold on its core support began to lose the invincibility that had once defined it. The ensuing shift in the way the constituencies of the two great parties of the Left were configured could also be mapped onto profound changes in French society that had inevitable consequences for the way voters perceived their interests and those who purported to represent them. The PS was notably successful in moving towards a politics based on the kind of elastic concepts and ambitions that appealed to voters less inclined to the more ideologically rooted perspectives of the PCF, and reaped the benefits in terms of the electoralism that defined its attempts to rally support for its bid for power. Moreover, in François Mitterrand, it had a leader who understood the primordial role of presidential appeal in unpicking the lock to power under the Fifth Republic, while the PCF, both institutionally and in terms of the personalities leading it, continued to register a crippling 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 were also the assumptions that paralysed it. Rather than being a party with 67

68 The Seeds of Failure

the ultimate ambition of taking power, the PCF’s raison d’être resided in its ability to articulate the frustrations and corresponding demands of those masses who felt excluded from the political system, and deprived of the economic and cultural benefits enjoyed by the rest of society. This function, like the right exercised by the tribunes of ancient Rome, operated ultimately as a prerogative from the ground up to block the operation of the political system because of the need to protect the interests of the weakest members of civil society. As has been analysed elsewhere, however, for a party to assume the destiny of a tribune it must be able to rely on a number of essential preconditions. The constituency it purports to represent must be both large and homogeneous, and suffer a permanent disadvantage, even a sense of alienation, vis-à-vis the socio-economic and political system. To counterbalance this disadvantage the system, in turn, affords a certain legitimacy to the role of the tribune due to the tacit acknowledgement of its (the system’s) failings. The corollary of this is that the tribune party has to strike a balance: it has to mobilise constantly in defence of its constituency for fear of appearing to capitulate to the system, but it cannot attempt a full-scale assault on a system which it knows is too strong to be overthrown.1 During the life of the Third Republic, the PCF was hampered in its ambitions to be the tribune party of French politics due to the success of the SFIO in appealing to the masses. The turnaround in fortunes of the two major parties of the Left after World War II, and the institutional deficiencies of the Fourth Republic made circumstances much more amenable to the ambitions of the PCF. The great party of the Resistance was able, much more effectively, to be the party of resistance to a system whose shortcomings were all too evident. The method of proportional representation gave the party the electoral weight at the ballot box and the seats in the institutions of representative government to make its threats to paralyse the system credible. Furthermore, the transparent inadequacies of the system conferred a moral legitimacy on the threats of the PCF. As was noted earlier, it was ironical that as the Fourth Republic reached its final paroxysms, the anti-system party was most loath to see its disappearance. But the very success of the Fifth Republic spelled trouble for the tribune party. Changes to the voting system, the ‘presidentialisation’ of the regime and, more importantly, the adaptation of the electorate to a system that not only appeared to work but in so doing validated their participation in it, undermined the operation 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 opposition had to take on a new meaning in order to be successful. The credibility of the Fifth Republic, and more specifically the stability which the electorate of the Fourth Republic had craved, placed the onus on the opposition to offer a credible alternance in the management of the system, as opposed to simply threatening to paralyse it. Understandably perhaps, the assumptions of the PCF were shaped by the battalions of workers at its disposal and which it had employed to powerful effect during the life of the Fourth Republic. In 1954, of the total number of people employed in industry, 87 per cent were actually engaged in industrial processes, while employers represented 5 per cent and clerical staff 8 per cent, and working-class consciousness can fairly be said to have been at its apogee. By 1985, clerical workers had come to represent 27 per cent of the industrial workforce, reflecting the immense technical changes that had occurred in the methods of production over that period. Few, including the PCF, could have imagined that the prominence of the proletariat would stretch to little more than two generations in France.2 During the period between the inception of the Fifth Republic and the installation of a Socialist President in the Elysée palace in 1981, the industrial map of France changed markedly, and the declining fortunes of those areas that had represented the bulk of French industrial output would be particularly costly to the PCF. At the beginning of this period heavy industry still weighed preponderantly in terms of national output, and was concentrated in the Nord and Lorraine. There was a concentration in the manufacture of consumer goods in the Paris region, notably newspapers and fashion items, and in the Rhône-Alpes region there were centres with long-established reputations for the production of traditional household goods and metalwork. In all, these areas could be seen as a broad sweep of manufacturing activity that linked up the north and the east of the country. In the three decades that followed, however, manufacturing activity shifted away from these areas, often to the regions that were erstwhile centres of decline because of their reliance on rural manufacturing and traditional methods, such as the south and west. Deconcentration and the irresistible rise of the service industries pushed manufacturing out of Paris, and after the production peak reached in 1960, heavy industry in the north and north-east began to lose its grip on the future as planning and investment priorities turned to new generation technologies, laying the foundation for new poles of high value-added manufacturing such as aerospace in the south-west of

70 The Seeds of Failure

the country, notably around Toulouse. Two good examples of the impact of this change can be highlighted in the coal and steel industries, not only in terms of the reduced number of workers in the cohorts available to the PCF but also in the impact this social and economic mutation was having on the mentality of those workers. The decline of the French coalfields offers an interesting contrast to the fate of ‘king coal’ in Britain. In spite of the peak in production of 60 million tons per year reached in the late 1950s, in contrast to the coalfields of Britain those of France suffered the structural weaknesses of fragmentation and, even then, potentially uneconomic extraction costs due to the depth of the reserves. The uneconomic nature of those costs had become evident a generation later when, notwithstanding the decline in demand from traditional clients such as rail, steel and power generators, almost twice as much coal was being imported to meet the demand that subsisted as opposed to the home-produced variety, 25 million against 15 million tonnes.3 Whereas in 1980s Britain the fate of the industry was sealed by the determination of a right-wing government to break with what it deemed to be emblematic of a refusal to adapt to economic change, in 1980s France the industry declined under a socialist regime that attempted to attenuate the consequences of this, particularly with regard to the ensuing unemployment. But in both cases the potential for political mobilisation represented by those industries was emasculated. Most dramatic in France was the fate of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield.4 From a pinnacle of activity in 1946 which boasted 110 fully operational mining centres, by the time of François Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988 the number had declined to nil, while the labour force nationally had declined from a peak of 200,000 in 1958 to 40,000 in 1990. The 1980s also marked a culmination in the painful restructuring of the French steel industry that had its origins in the 1950s. Even then, the production of steel in France, though booming, was occurring in scattered enterprises that did not have the critical mass of major European rivals. Thus began the series of amalgamations that by the end of the 1960s had resulted in two groups, Usinor and Sacilor, heavily dependent on government support, which by the end of the following decade were responsible for 80 per cent of steel-making on France. This dependence of the steel-making sector on the State was formalised and completed with the nationalisation programme of the Socialists when they came to power in 1981, with the ensuing state acquisition of the specialist steel makers Creusot-Loire and Péchiney-Ugine-Kuhlman. The umbrella of state ownership, however, could not protect the industry

The Rise of the Socialists 71

from the consequences of the decline in traditional manufacturing and the effect on the demand for steel, or the entrance of new low-cost suppliers into the market. State ownership also meant state-sponsored restructuring in the face of the inevitable. Ironically, Socialist administrations had to accommodate the reality of the 1977 Davignon plan for European steel production, predicated crucially on a gradual reduction of support from European Community (EC) member-state governments in the pursuit of an integrated and rational approach to steel production across the Community. The net effect for France was a shutting down of smaller and less efficient units that during the early 1980s cut the nation’s steel-making capacity by just over five million tonnes, thereby accounting for 20 per cent of the reduction in capacity planned for the EC as a whole. The consequences for employment in the steel-making regions were harsh and unavoidable. While the industry employed 156,000 workers in 1974, by the time the Socialist government of Pierre Mauroy had resorted to the economic austerity plan nicknamed ‘la ceinture 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 National Assembly in 1986, it had dropped to 60,000. The governments of the period made significant efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of steel restructuring. Apart from the obvious retraining schemes, there were more powerful examples of state intervention, such as the relocation of segments of nationalised industries and the go-ahead for infrastructure projects to be sited in areas suffering most from the loss of those industries.5 But the fact of state intervention, particularly on the part of Socialist-led governments paradoxically wedded to the reorganisation of state industries in line with market disciplines, was to have a profound effect on the assumptions that had hitherto guided organised labour in its relations with the holders of capital.6 New attitudes on the part of the state and its managers, new management methods and modes of negotiation, had altered the traditional postures characterising the encounter between labour, capital and the State. Ideology became a lesser consideration, as trade unions were forced to relinquish the priorities of the class struggle and accommodate a more realistic approach as to what their mission should be.7 The break-up of the communist ‘red belt’ around Paris, that erstwhile base of support for the party that had grown with the once vibrant manufacturing activity in the Île de France, was brought into stark relief by the time of the 1981 legislative elections when the PCF lost 11 of its 24 ‘red belt’ seats, and all of them to the Socialists. The long-term trend

72 The Seeds of Failure

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 for the PCF in the region of the North declined from 28 to 15 per cent, and in 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 a class-based ideology for the transformation of French society and had set about broadening its appeal to an electorate that had been very largely embourgeoisé.

The electoralism of the PS In Chapter 3, François Mitterrand’s accession to the leadership of the PS was described as a ‘reverse takeover’, implying that he was not averse to a pragmatic, even opportunistic exploitation of the possibilities for advancing the cause of the non-communist Left. Notwithstanding his own efforts, it can certainly be argued that there were benign, objective factors that helped fulfil Mitterrand’s ambitions: the departure of De Gaulle from the political scene had left a vacuum that needed to be filled; the increasing social integration of the working class could only broaden his appeal and that of his party at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum; and the electoral base bequeathed by the SFIO, while modest, nonetheless contained the seeds of the kind of diversified appeal that would give momentum to the socialist bandwagon. Furthermore, as was noted earlier, the strategy for rejuvenating the apparatus of the party had already been given a successful launch by Savary. While the foregoing factors undoubtedly worked in his favour, it is nonetheless the case that Mitterrand’s vision was instrumental in reversing the PS’ fortunes. The changes occurring under the Fifth Republic had reversed the benefits to be gained from the promotion of unity, or a dynamique unitaire on the Left. Whereas during the crisis years of the Third Republic, notably, the PCF had gained most credit from its push for Left unity, the way Mitterrand conducted his presidential campaign in 1965 and the balance he struck in the campaign of 1974, managing communist provocation and socialist ambition, suggested an appreciation of the prospect that the benefits of Left unity could now flow largely in the opposite direction. Mindful of the need to establish a break with the socialist politicians of the Fourth Republic who were remembered for contemplating allying themselves with the Communists, the better to switch to the centreright when the prospects on that side of the street improved, Mitterrand

The Rise of the Socialists 73

followed a conscious policy of consistency, and if necessary, concessions, vis-à-vis the PCF. If he was to seize the new opportunities of drawing Communist voters into a broad alliance with moderate socialism and the middle ground, the principled reformism he embodied had to be a credible alternative to the classic but fading ideological cohesion of the tribune party. Thus Mitterrand persevered with the policy of seeking a framework for Left unity that could persuade the electorate of its viability as a prospective government, namely a Common Programme, unlike other Socialist leaders who could not overcome their misgivings concerning the possibility of placing their movement under the overbearing influence of the Communists. Mitterrand worked vigorously within his own party also, to secure a platform for electoral success. Savary might have started the rejuvenation of the socialist movement, but its membership base when Mitterrand took over was still fragile. When it unravelled, the SFIO counted 70,000 members, but the PS which rose from the ashes at the Epinay Congress of 1971 would have had an even more modest membership base of 60,869, were it not for the 9,916 CIR supporters brought in by Mitterrand and 3,813 new members.8 By October 1974, however, this figure had doubled and the membership stood at 146,000.9 Under Mitterrand the process of rejuvenation was accelerated and expanded. What Savary had 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 over forty.10 There was notable progress by 1973 and those figures had come down to 23.9 per cent and 62.9 per cent respectively. More significantly, a successful merging of the generations had taken place with a new, young cohort of members who had come in over the ageing cohort of former SFIO members and whose presence, unencumbered by the complexes of the past, set the dominant and distinctive tone for the PS. A demographic snapshot of the delegates to the PS Grenoble Congress in 1973 revealed that 31 per cent were under thirty and 58 per cent under forty. The accent on youth at the cutting edge of the party was an ongoing process that, by 1978, meant that the PS was the youngest party in the National Assembly. The ongoing demographic renewal of the PS under Mitterrand was allied to a refashioned policy profile for the party that provided its pursuit of a greater share of the electorate with a new dynamic. The key to a successful break with the jaded past of the SFIO and an alliance with the PCF that would offer electoral opportunities for the PS rather than an ideological constraint lay in the way Mitterrand hollowed out

74 The Seeds of Failure

the concept of class and turned it into an electoralist tool. By making the creation of a front de classe its defining strategy, the PS was, on the one hand, retaining part of the discourse predicated on the mobilisation of the proletariat against the injustices inflicted by capital, but on the other it was stretching that front so widely as to evacuate any residual ideological obstacles that might prevent it from appealing to the wider French electorate. The front the PS now envisaged was an inclusive affair that included all waged labour, salary-earners, artisans and peasants who could consider themselves the victims of capitalism. In fact, the PS notion of this broad class united to combat the excesses of capitalism became so elastic as to be able to accommodate the middle and individualistic entrepreneurial class who could judge themselves to have been the victims of the concentration of capital into corporate hands.11 Mitterrand remained mindful, however, of the need not to allow the PS to be perceived as bereft of any doctrinal moorings because of the risk of leaving it open to accusations of opportunism. Allowing the PS to become a blatant electoral machine for scooping up votes from across as broad a front as possible risked alienating, on the one hand, the old SFIO constituency, and, on the other, the new generation of PS militants who were genuinely committed to strategies like the Union of the Left and who disdained what they saw as the self-serving compromises of the old SFIO. Mitterrand was therefore at pains to assert that though the PS had ambitions to be a great party of the people, it was not so devoid of political conviction or social roots as to be all things to all classes, in short, a catch-all party.12 These protestations were nonetheless contradicted by the inroads the PS made in the electorate during the 1970s. By 1978 the PS could accurately be described as having taken over the Gaullists’ mantle as the inter-class party, such was the spread of its support. More significantly for a party of the Left, during the two decades between the early 1950s and the early 1970s the Socialist movement had accommodated the embourgeoisement of French society by itself becoming preponderantly middle and lower middle class in its make-up, as Table 4.1 illustrates. In one respect, the PS had proved itself to be very atavistic and even trumped the old SFIO. Hardouin’s sociological scan of the party revealed a remarkable dependence on the traditional advocates of the republican civic faith, with teachers of every stripe making up 13 per cent of the membership of the party in 1973. The major difference in the modern PS being, however, that the traditional instituteur had been overtaken by those educationalists working in the tertiary sector. The

The Rise of the Socialists 75 Table 4.1 Social composition of SFIO–PS membership (in percentages), 1951–73

Business, Professional & Management Lower middle class Workers Total

SFIO (1951)

PS (1970)

PS (1973)

3 53 44

16 61 23

20 61 19

100

100

100

Source: Kesselman (1978).

numbers of the latter type of teacher, allied to the disproportionately high numbers of individuals with long years of post-18 education, such as technicians, engineers, and those belonging to the liberal professions, meant that the renascent socialist movement in France derived its dynamic and identity from the intellectual elites that had committed themselves to it. As well as attracting the new intellectual elites that had come through the post-war expansion in higher education, Mitterrand’s PS also knew that it had to attract and politicise a major constituency that was understandably not attracted by the way the political parties were structured and managed, namely women. The SFIO had bequeathed the PS with a powerfully masculine legacy, which was evident in the fact that while in 1951, 88 per cent of the SFIO membership was male, the figure for the PS in 1973 had only come down a fraction to 87 per cent. But by 1974, notable strides were made in bringing women into the expanding PS membership, and in such federations as Paris, the rate of female membership was pushed up to 25 per cent. Moreover, three-quarters of these new female recruits to the party were economically active, thereby accelerating the PS’s capture of the socio-economic middle ground.13 Whereas the success the PCF had enjoyed in recruiting female members was, to a significant extent, accounted for by the recruitment of working-class housewives. But in contrast to the old SFIO, the politics of gender 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 was decided to establish a minimum quota of 10 per cent for the representation of women through every level of the party’s structure. The force of this argument continued to gain momentum and by the time of the party’s Nantes Congress in 1977, this quota had been raised to 15 per cent. Where Mitterrand’s PS was less successful, in membership terms, was in its attempts to establish itself on the factory floor and thereby secure

76 The Seeds of Failure

a stronger working-class base. The strategy designated for achieving this was the setting up of sections d’entreprises, which numbered 94 by late 1971, rising to 253 by September 1973, and more rapidly still to 707 by April 1974. But on closer analysis this did not herald the breakthrough in the working-class vote that might have been hoped for. By 1974 over two-thirds of these sections were merely groups of party members who had found each other in the same workplace, as opposed to a dynamic cell with a mission to recruit. Moreover, as later analyses showed, in keeping with the sociological orientation of the PS, barely a fifth of the members of these sections could be classed as belonging to the proletariat, while the vast majority fell in the category of white-collar, professional or managerial employees. The most telling statistics showed that only 14 per cent of these section members had joined the PS before 1970 and only 34 per cent before 1973. In short, the majority were members who had been harvested in the great electoral wave of 1973–76, and who had taken their new political convictions to the workplace, rather than being workers who had been brought into the fold 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 electoralism exempted it from the need to put down firm roots among industrial workers. The fact that few such members were enrolled was more than compensated by the electoral strategy of the Left as a whole, which allowed the PS to benefit from the benign posture of the PCF. Thus, while the Socialist share of the working-class vote was as modest as 18 per cent in the legislative elections of 1967 and 1968, this rose significantly to 27 per cent in 1973.15 Conversely, the notion of ‘enracinement’, or rootedness, was caught in a process of change whose consequences would become manifest and irrefutable by the beginning of the following decade. The factor that had been the strength of the PCF would become a symptom of its decline as the process of a ‘repli’ or retreat would concentrate PCF support in those areas rich in an industrial heritage but with little future, such as the Nord region and the Rhône valley, or rural areas characterised by depopulation and economic decline, such as the Limousin.16 As discussed in Chapter 2, a defining characteristic of the PCF at the height of its post-war success electorally, was its identification with the cause of modernisation and the underlying desire for it among the French people. A generation later, however, the French economic miracle had left the party’s bastions wedded to sunset industries and rural areas relegated to the economic slow lane. Even in those traditional industries where France was to retain its national champions, such as the automobile industry, structural and

The Rise of the Socialists 77

demographic changes were to diminish the party’s influence on the workforce. Renault’s departure from Boulogne-Billancourt in 1993 marked the end of manufacturing in France’s largest plant that had operated since Louis Renault established his first factory on the Ile Séguin in 1898. In broad economic terms it signalled the end of a transformation of the Ile de France region into a predominantly servicebased economy. For the PCF, it marked the culmination of an economic mutation begun decades beforehand in the former ‘red belt’ of Paris, in the days when the political climate at Boulogne-Billancourt was one largely determined by the activities of PCF members on the shop floor. The immediate aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973 set in train a process of restructuring that was accelerated under the Socialists during the 1980s, when the state-dependent producer was subjected to the disciplines of the market, resulting in the inevitable ‘dégraissage’ or slimming down.17 The Common Programme with the PS was reached at a time when the French economy was poised to undergo a shift that would shrink the constituency of the PCF and swell that of the PS. In the ten years between 1975 and 1985, employment in industry would contract by 1.2 million jobs, and in the erstwhile bastion of communist trade unionism, the automobile industry, the workforce would shrink by 6 per cent. More significantly for the recruitment of PCF rank-and-file members in the car industry, their natural constituency of unskilled workers would see its numbers cut by 22 per cent. This transformation was exacerbated by the fact that within the manufacturing sector itself, the growing requirement for skills and education meant that the economically and socially upwardly mobile class of technicians and engineers grew dramatically as the need for low-skilled or unskilled workers declined. Thus those technicians and engineers, who numbered 270,000 in 1974, saw their numbers rise to 1.3 million by 1983, thereby enlarging the pool of socially aspirational members and voters for the PS to draw on. Opinion polls of the period by SOFRES (Société française d’études par sondages) provide support for this conclusion, showing that from 1975 to 1982 the percentage of French people claiming to be working class sank from 27 to 22, while during the same period the share of the working class in the active population dropped from 36 to 31.18 As noted earlier, the membership of the PS doubled under Mitterrand between 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 was drawing to a close.19 However, this was still a long way behind the PCF which during the life of the Common Programme saw its membership

78 The Seeds of Failure

rise significantly from just under 400,000 to over 500,000.20 However, whereas the PS had, in comparison, a modest membership base but a wide electoral outreach, with the PCF it was the opposite. The high water mark for the PCF membership, according to the party’s own claims, was reached when the take-up of membership cards for 1978 reached 702,864.21 As the estimates of commentators, both well-disposed and critical of the party illustrated, however, the PCF’s figures would have assumed a proportion of PCF voters being PCF members during the elections of the 1970s that was far too high to be credible. 22 This suspicion was strengthened by subsequent research into party funds which suggested that a practice of exaggerating membership numbers was ingrained in the leadership of the PCF, in the light of the disparity between the claims regarding the take-up of membership and what should 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 to preserve the party’s vocation. By any objective measure this was understandable, given the relative strengths of the parties and the overtures the PCF had had to make in order to persuade those Socialists, other than Mitterrand, of the virtues of an alliance. The retrospective revelation of the content of Georges Marchais’ report to the central committee of the party on 29 June 1972, so soon after the PCF had signed up to the Common Programme, unveiled the conviction that it was the PCF that carried the impetus for the Union of the Left, and that it felt justified in its determination to use the Programme as a means for rallying the masses to its objectives rather than the watered down compromises reached with the Socialists.24 However self-serving the context, Marchais had put his finger on the difference between the two parties that, while it might be papered over in the mutual expectation of benefits at the ballot box, would inevitably begin to open up as the accrual of advantages began to incline in one direction rather than to both. Compromise, reformism and an unthreatening embourgeoisement of the party were to be crucial to the success of the Socialists. But as Marchais had made clear to the central committee, the PCF’s battle against reformism would be a defining plank of its platform. The debates that occurred in the party thereafter underlined the conviction that while the PS was open to the penetration of bourgeois ideas, the PCF was not, and it was the mission of the Communists to radicalise the reformist party of its partner on the Left and thereby lead it ultimately to accept the vanguard role of the PCF as the only party of scientific socialism.25 Conversely, while Mitterrand argued that the suspicion of the PCF that

The Rise of the Socialists 79

had blocked the progress of the Left as a whole had to be overcome, he did not hide his belief that the fundamental purpose of an alliance between the Socialists and the Communists was to rebalance the Left by shrinking the PCF’s disproportionate share of its constituency.26 As Chapter 6 will illustrate in greater detail, however, with the political landscape changing around the PCF, the attempt to preserve the vocation of the party and to articulate its mission in contradistinction to the PS especially by Marchais would isolate him more and more from the French electorate as a whole and confirm the perception of him as a ‘langue de bois’, or being guilty of political cant. The PS’s imperviousness to the expectation that it could be weaned off its predilection for bourgeois reformism or, even less plausibly, tuck into the shadow behind the PCF as the vanguard party of scientific socialism, created a tension that manifested itself across a range of issues and gave a hollow ideological ring to the Union of the Left. Chapter 3 discussed the way in which the PCF was effectively trapped by the logic of its own advocacy of the Union and thereby found itself supporting the Mitterrand candidature in the presidential race of 1974, faute de mieux. But after Mitterrand’s surprisingly distinguished performance in the presidential contest, the interpretation given to the Union by the PCF made it clear that at the very best it was a yoke which chafed the party’s ambitions, and at worst a poor disguise for the competition between the two parties to find a way of repackaging socialism for popular consumption. While on the one hand, the PCF’s 22nd Congress in 1976 was historic for its decision to drop the ambition to achieve the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the concept of ‘union populaire’ which replaced it, predicated on rallying other social groups around the working class, was a line that was in more open competition with the Socialist’s ‘front de classe’. For their part, the Socialists had a very sharp sense of the implications of the change in communist discourse for the way they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the broader electorate. They were determined therefore that, in electoral terms, their notion of ‘classe’ would be the very opposite of a hermetic ideological one, but one which would draw in the broad swath of voters who could be categorised, or see themselves in some measure as the exploited ‘salariat’, or salary-earners. These competing attempts by the sister parties of the Left to stake out the constituency of the Left to the detriment of the other was indicative of the fault-lines running beneath the surface of Common Programme. Even after the collapse of the Common Programme, Mitterrand realised the need to preserve the PS’s formal radicalism in order to square the

80 The Seeds of Failure

circle of winning over PCF voters as well as appealing to swing groups in the electorate. Hence the reappearance of some of the key demands of the Common Programme in the PS’s manifestos even after its demise.27 It is not surprising, therefore, that while the Programme existed the PS chose to ignore or, more precisely, fudge some of the fundamental differences between the parties that remained essentially unresolved. The issue of party pluralism was one that had helped define the socialist movement in France and was a factor, in the 1905 socialist unity pact, which preserved its distinction from the monologic brand of socialism then being advanced by Jules Guesde and his colleagues. The fact that the PCF’s acceptance of the principle of party pluralism, for the purposes of the Common Programme, veiled a quite different understanding of what that meant was very soon made perfectly clear by Georges Marchais. In Le défi démocratique he argued that the perception of communist states as one-party regimes was wrong, and that countries like Poland and East Germany were in fact multi-party systems where non-communist parties such as peasant and Catholic ones worked with the communists in the endeavour to build socialism.28 On more concrete issues like the extent to which a left-wing government would nationalise the means of production, the formal agreement reached papered over disagreements on issues of principle that were not resolved. Ostensibly, the agreement to nationalise nine industrial groups (down from the original PCF proposal of 25 and up from the PS proposal of seven) settled the scope of the programme, but the understanding of the purpose of it remained a matter of dispute. For the Socialists, France should remain wedded to a mixed economy, and while it was the mission of their party to give workers more control over their working environment through the self-management initiatives implied in concepts such as autogestion, this was a bottom-up evolution as opposed to a top-down solution imposed by a bureaucratic and centralised state. For the Communists, however, the proposed nationalisations were to be a first tranche in a process designed to defeat the dominance of the market-place, and autogestion was synonymous with localised chaos. Even when the PCF conceded the principle of autogestion following the successful promotion of it by the Socialists, strategies for its implementation remained a serious source of tension. By 1977 the PCF agreed on the democratic instrument in the nationalised industries that would be embodied by the ‘conseils d’administration’ or administrative councils, but the old instincts of the PCF remained, as did the corresponding suspicions of the PS. Perhaps predictably playing

The Rise of the Socialists 81

to its strength, the PCF argued that the workers’ representatives on the councils in question should be drawn from the ranks of the work-place unions (which it dominated), while the PS, mindful of the prospect of being outflanked, attempted to attenuate the threat and the difference with its partner by sticking to the broader formulation that the members should be the representatives of the workers. On a wider stage, the biggest challenge to the PS was to ignore the natural foreign alliances of the PCF and the inevitable consequences for the defence policy of France. The Common Programme appeared to enshrine the Socialists’ concern that whatever compromise was reached with the PCF, no future Left government of France would turn its back on the EEC and its enhancement, or France’s fundamentally Atlanticist tradition in matters of global security. But as ever, the accords were a matter of interpretation. Whereas for the PCF leadership they represented a formality that could be respected, while the Communists pursued the historic task of moving France out of the zone of imperialism,29 for Mitterrand, France’s Atlanticism represented the best guarantee of freedom vis-à-vis the Soviet-dominated communist sphere to which the PCF was ideologically allied. The notion of partners belonging to two diametrically opposed spheres in their visions of the world was spelled out by Mitterrand in his writings of the period. He recalled that with the onset of the Cold War the PCF had chosen the Warsaw Pact while he had chosen the Atlantic Alliance, and that if he had done so it was due to the debt he owed the United States as the liberator of France and the guarantor of his freedom.30 By 1977 the PCF was turning this kind of argument astutely against the PS by assuming the posture of a party that was both for the independence of France and anti-American. In May of that year the central committee led a re-evaluation of the Common Programme’s call to renounce France’s nuclear deterrent, on the basis of a report by Jean Kanapa, in which he argued for the retention of a national deterrence as a key to the preservation of democracy in France and a bargaining counter in a wider process of balanced disarmament. The antiAmerican implications of the report were worked out in subsequent issues of L’Humanité, but what gave the PCF position an additionally and ironically (though unintended) patriotic tone was the adoption of the previously Gaullist articulation of a defence posture that was ‘tous azimuts’, thereby implying that the doctrine of nuclear preparedness should 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 a matter on which the PCF would continue to find fresh opportunities to needle the Socialists during the summer of 1977, especially as the

82 The Seeds of Failure

partners explored the need for an updated Common Programme. The refusal of the Socialists to countenance the argument that the United States could conceivably pose the same threat to France’s national security as the Soviet Union made them hostile to Kanapa’s suggestions. But at the same time, the reluctance to be seen to dismiss them out of hand led to a policy of delay and evasion by the PS that came to a head in September. Throughout the summer the PS had resisted PCF pressure for a clear commitment to the retention of an independent nuclear deterrent. Mitterrand’s guarded response was to suggest that a referendum could be held on the issue after the Left had come to power. When, during the summit to discuss the Common Programme in mid-September, Mitterrand responded to continuing pressure from the PCF by countering that the PCF wanted to leave the Atlantic Alliance, he left himself open to the shot made the following day in a televised interview given by Marchais. While Marchais affirmed that should the ‘absurd hypothesis’ of a Soviet aggression against France come to pass, the PCF would be in the first rank to defend the nation’s territory, he nailed Mitterrand’s equivocations over the national nuclear deterrent by asking whether Mitterrand could make such a commitment in the event of an American or German aggression. 32 But in spite of disagreements and, from the PS point of view, provocations from the PCF across the range of issues outlined above, the PS persevered with the Common Programme because it enabled the party to make the kind of electoral inroads that had been the fundamental ambition driving it into an alliance with the PCF. The margin that existed between the respective parties in the year after the signing of the Common Programme gave the PCF a clear superiority in its ability to appeal to the working-class vote, with a 37 per cent share of that electorate as opposed to the Socialists’ 27 per cent. But the paroxysms of the Union of the Left in 1977 prompted by the reservations of the PCF were not unrelated to the fact that the PS had succeeded in drawing level with the PCF in what it considered its electoral ‘domaine réservé’, as polls at the time indicated a 32 per cent share for each party of that working-class constituency. More dramatic still would be the turnaround in fortunes between 1978 and 1981, which would allow the Socialist candidate for the presidency to enjoy the support of 44 per cent of manual workers, as opposed to 24 per cent supporting the Communist candidate, and in terms of demographic advantage, allowing the PS to enjoy the support of 44 per cent of voters 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

The Rise of the Socialists 83

In contrast to the PS strategy of deferring choices implicit in the Common Programme and avoiding decisive confrontations with their PCF 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 senior partner on the Left forced it to engineer the collapse of the Common Programme.34 The definitive collapse of the attempts to update the programme, on 23 September 1977, was ostensibly due to the failure to agree over PCF demands for a broader programme of nationalisations, but it was the symptom of a profound communist malaise at the way the PS had colonised the constituency of the Left as a whole, in France, thereby cutting down the PCF’s room for manoeuvre. The apparent changes of tack by the PCF, especially over issues such as the primacy of the proletariat and its attitudes to France’s foreign and defence allegiances, had done little to enhance its own profile or attenuate the prospects of a major breakthrough for the PS in the 1978 legislative elections. Even if the PCF had contemplated the kind of eurocommunist transformation undergone by sister movements such as in Italy, that social democratic variant was already being offered by the PS. The posture of the PCF in the legislative elections of 1978 was a perverse testament to the success of the electoralism of the PS. The protestations in L’Humanité, on 21 March 1978, that the PCF was not responsible for the frustrated hopes of the Left, so evident after the votes were cast in the first round of the legislative elections on 12 March 1978, were disingenuous to say the least. The decision by the PCF leadership to test the Common Programme to breaking point was an essential step in a rearguard action to halt the advance of the PS on the Left, by forcing a rupture that would oblige its own voters to reassert their fundamental allegiance. The electoral bandwagon that had started rolling for the PS under Mitterrand in 1974 showed no signs of slowing down, and the success of the alliance in the 1976 local and 1977 municipal elections could be attributed to the appeal of the PS to the electorate as a whole. The scenario feared by the PCF was that many of its members might extend the logic of an alliance to their behaviour in the voting booth at the legislative election and opt for the tactical or ‘vote utile’, thus voting for the Socialist candidate in the first round rather than their own party’s, since the Socialist would rally more votes across the board anyway. The demise of the Common Programme was a way of pre-empting this and freed the PCF to fight for the defence of its natural constituency. The campaign of sniping at the PS and the mobilising of its formidable organisational resources were a reflection of the widespread expectation of a PS-led breakthrough for the Left,

84 The Seeds of Failure

with an IFOP (Institut français del’opinion publique) poll in March giving the Left a 53.5 per cent share of voting intentions.35 The result of the first ballot, when it came, was a reminder of the fallibility of pollsters and an unspoken relief for the PCF. Although calculations when the dust was settled would give the Left as a whole just over 50 per cent of the vote,36 its best performance under the Fifth Republic, the result fell short of Socialist expectations. They had certainly achieved the historic feat of overtaking the Communists with 24 per cent of the vote in mainland France as opposed to the PCF’s 18.1 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 achieving its most urgent priority, namely the restating of its primacy as the party of the working class. Notwithstanding the polling suggesting a neckand-neck race between the PS and the PCF for that constituency, when the actual votes cast by manual workers were tallied the PCF emerged with 36 per cent as opposed to the PS’s 27 per cent.39 Moreover the PCF has scored some notable successes by closing the gap on the Socialists in some of the seats held by their notables: Gaston Deferre, the stalwart socialist mayor of Marseille, found that his lead over the communist candidate was but a single point after the first ballot; as for Mitterrand himself, the strong PCF showing in his constituency of Nièvre had prevented him from enjoying his usual victory in the first ballot. More broadly, the PCF had overtaken the PS in nine constituencies that the latter could have considered to be safely bankable. The satisfaction of the PCF was translated by a surprisingly (to the Socialists anyway) magnanimous attitude to the meeting that began on 13 March, to thrash out the basis for an agreement to desist in favour or each others’ candidates, depending on which one was best placed for the second round. Such appeared to be the conciliatory nature of the PCF representatives when it came to agreeing the priorities for an eventual government of the Left that Pierre Mauroy wondered why the PCF had adopted a posture of ‘super-competition’ in the first place if agreement was to be reached subsequently so unproblematically – a jaundiced conclusion that some previously Left-inclined voters may well have drawn prior to the second ballot.40 In addition to the negative perception of the alliance of the Left as self-serving, the period leading up to the second round of voting was marked by an effective campaign by the majority, buoyed by its unexpectedly good showing in the first round, aimed at alarming the voters with the prospect of a Left government with Communist ministers. In the event, the governing majority secured a little over 50.5 per cent of

The Rise of the Socialists 85

the vote in the second round, but more tellingly returned a large majority to the new Assembly, with 291 seats as opposed to the Left’s 200. While the PCF might have saved the furniture, however, the trends underlying the results of the 1978 legislative elections showed unequivocally that the PS was taking over the house. As Table 4.2 illustrates, the disappointment of the PS in 1978 was tempered by the fact that they were continuing to pull ahead of the PCF on the first ballot performance in constituencies across the country – a fact that would become dramatically evident in the presidential elections of 1981. Moreover, although the geographical concentration of the PCF’s voters allowed it to win the battle against the PS for the support of what might be regarded as its natural constituency, there could be no way of disguising the watershed in the fortunes of these two parties in what was historically the country’s biggest concentration of working-class votes: the Paris region. It was here that the evolution of French society, and in particular the embourgeoisement of the lower socio-economic classes, had become most evident. Paris, both within the city limits and across the outlying suburbs, had become a white-collar and middleclass agglomeration. Given the further dilution of an indigenous working-class culture and consciousness by the influx of immigrant workers, of whom many had neither the right nor the inclination to vote, the reversal of fortune in this crucial region becomes more understandable. Nonetheless, the PS could still take credit for an exceptionally successful mobilisation in the region that demoted the PCF from its position as the premier party of the capital, ultimately leaving it in possession of only three of the capital’s 31 seats. In a sense, the 1978 legislative elections were a triumph deferred for the Socialists. At the next defining encounter with the French electorate, the presidential elections of 1981, they would demonstrate the extent to which they had adapted to the consequences of the presidentialisation of the political

Table 4.2

Performances of PS and PCF in the constituencies

Leading on the Left

1967

1968

1973

1978

1981

PS PCF

212 258

217 253

276 197

321 153

429 45

Total of metropolitan constituencies

470

470

473

474

474

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

86 The Seeds of Failure

system that had occurred under de Gaulle, and the contrast with the PCF 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 1971 as a conveyance for his presidential ambitions was an often cited one but, as has been convincingly argued elsewhere, was also erroneous.41 The PS brought together various strands of socialist conviction and their corresponding formations that took time to cohere into a political party. Mitterrand’s very creditable showing in the presidential contest of 1974 undoubtedly strengthened his hand and his will to act in a manner unencumbered by party constraints added to his presidential style. This was complemented by the organisational initiatives he took with regard to the management of the party’s affairs, notably, the creation of a network of delegates answerable to him and whose activities ran parallel to those of the PS’ principal and official executive organ, the national secretariat. But that did not mean that the party was subservient to Mitterrand’s ambitions, as the fall-out from the disappointments of 1978 illustrated. Michel Rocard’s decision to lead the Parti socialiste unifié into the fold of the Left led by the PS in 1974 was never unproblematic, given the hostility of most of its members at the time to the Common Programme. His disapproval of an alliance with the Communists, the key conviction in Mitterrand’s long-standing strategy for bringing the Socialists to government, was quick to surface during the television coverage of the legislative election results on 19 March 1978, when he asserted that the tactic was a cul-de-sac and simply discouraged moderate voters from supporting the party. Opinion polls at the time suggested strongly that Rocard was justified in his belief that centrist voters were averse to voting for the PS in the light of its alliance with the PCF, and that even a substantial majority of PS members had not been in favour of the Common Programme. Mitterrand’s response was that, notwithstanding the demise of the Common Programme, a Union of the Left electoral strategy was the best way of shifting the centre of gravity on the Left towards the PS, by pulling the PCF constituency in its direction. The support which rallied to the respective camps of Mitterrand the unifier of the Left, and Rocard the moderniser whose economic realism challenged the assumptions of socialist statism, looked set to confront each other at the Party’s Metz congress in April 1979. What the conference proved, however, was that while PS voters out in the country were more in tune with Rocard’s

The Rise of the Socialists 87

vision of the party’s future, the militants of the party belonged to Mitterrand. Apart from his astuteness in manoeuvring, both during and after the congress, a new generation of Mitterrandistes into positions of influence, Mitterrand deployed the charisma of a president in the making that would enable him, in the most important electoral contest of all, ultimately to secure the trust of an initially sceptical electorate. While Rocard discomfited delegates with stark oppositions such as the acceptance of markets or the acceptance of rationing, Mitterrand played the part of the benevolent patriarch and guardian of the faith in the sunny uplands towards which previous generations had striven and sacrificed. The Mitterrandiste camp carried the day resoundingly, and in the subsequent text that defined the party’s programme for the 1980s, Le projet socialiste, they came up with a programme that could wrong-foot both Rocard, the prospective presidential candidate, and the PCF. Incorporating ambitions spelled out in other documents such as the Suresnes programme of 1972, residual elements of the Common Programme hammered out with the Communists and the 15 theses on autogestion that had appeared in 1975, the new PS programme contained the kind of left-wing idealism that a presidential candidate like Rocard would find difficult to defend, and would steal at least some of the clothes from a Communist candidate like Georges Marchais. The stubborn fact remained, however, that all of the successful manoeuvres of the Mitterrandistes within the party and vis-à-vis their sister party on the Left could not alter the reality that at the beginning of 1980 Rocard’s approval rating in the polls was running at twice Mitterrand’s in the build-up to the launch of the campaign for the presidential elections, at 58 per cent compared to the latter’s 29 per cent. One could argue that the distinction between the two men, as présidentiables, was adumbrated by the way they played their hands in the announcement of their candidatures for the presidency. Playing for safety and the legitimacy that would come from a resounding endorsement by the party, Mitterrand deferred the presidential nomination procedure until January 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 decision two days beforehand only to be told by Mitterrand that such was the democratic game, but little else as to the latter’s own intentions. When Mitterrand declared his intentions three weeks later, Rocard withdrew his candidature arguing that it was never his intention to rival Mitterrand’s once it was declared. But with hindsight, Rocard

88 The Seeds of Failure

admitted that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a situation where he had overplayed his hand and, in the manner and tone of the declaration of his candidature, made a hash of his media presentation.42 Not for the first time, and as would become increasingly evident in the presidential campaign, Mitterrand would play the card of the candidate invested with the legitimacy conferred by the proper operation of the political system, but most crucially, bring to that the charisma and credibility of a présidentiable above the game of politics, which was very well served by his sphinx-like imperturbability and tacitly acknowledged quality of quiet strength. In contrast to Mitterrand, Marchais’ campaign was launched in recrimination and almost immediately mired in a damaging debate as to the personal integrity of the man himself. Although Marchais’ candidature was formally announced in October 1980, it had been clear from 1978 that the PCF would not give the PS a clear path to the presidency and further opportunity to make inroads into the Communists’ constituency. To the majority of the electorate of the Left, it was clearly a spoiling tactic since the most a Communist candidate could achieve would be to split the support for an acceptable, potentially winning, and therefore Socialist candidate. From the moment of his official designation as the Communist candidate, at the party’s national conference in Nanterre on 12 October 1980, Marchais declared that there would be no automatic désistement. The theme of Mitterrand’s veering to the Right was immediately taken up by other PCF leaders such as Charles Fiterman, and the pages of L’Humanité engaged in a personal vilification of Mitterrand as a loser. The PCF was in effect campaigning against its sister party of the Left and the low and bitter tone of much of it, according to some commentators, might have been due to the denigration Marchais had himself suffered. On 8 March 1980, the weekly news magazine L’Express had published an article entitled ‘Le mensonge’ (‘The lie’), in which it purported to have found German documents that proved that Marchais’ account of the time he spent as a forced labourer in war-time Germany was misleading. Objective readers could not ignore the underlying intentions of L’Express towards the leader of Moscow’s most faithful apologist among Western communist parties, especially in the year following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But through interviews with leading party figures, journalists at the time came to the conclusion that Marchais laid the blame for the orchestration of these attacks on his credibility at Mitterrand’s door, and allowed his spleen to be vented through the editorial columns of L’Humanité.43

The Rise of the Socialists 89

Mitterrand’s reactions to the attacks on him as a prospective three-time loser from his ostensible partners on the Left, like his reactions to the attacks from the Right that his candidature was a Trojan horse for communist ambitions to exercise the influence on government that they would otherwise be denied, were marked by a quasi-presidential dignity that refused to be provoked. But it was a presidential persona that stood firmly on an understanding of the political game that left nothing to chance. Following the Créteil Congress of January 1981 when the PS endorsed his candidature, Mitterrand put in place a team to manage his campaign that was comprised of individuals imbued with one overriding loyalty only, that is, to him. As well as the construction of the vehicle dedicated to the pursuit of his presidential hopes, Mitterrand was by far the most ruthless of all the candidates in re-inventing himself to meet the needs of the television age. While Giscard and Chirac failed to respond to the overtures of the advertising man, Jacques Séguéla, when he offered his services, Mitterrand did not. From May 1980 onwards, Mitterrand subjected himself to a meticulous process of re-invention that ranged from a retraining of his body language 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’s campaign was to be publicity rather than politically driven and, paradoxically, the whole thrust of this unrelenting attention to minute detail was to elevate Mitterrand above what the electorate might perceive as petty politics, in order to annex the public imagination and confer on him the credibility of an immortal.44 On the previous occasion that Mitterrand had presented himself as a candidate for the presidency, France had just been hit by the first oil crisis and the implications for the future development of the economy had yet to become clear. Seven years later, many of the certainties that had characterised the trente glorieuses, those post-war decades of uninterrupted growth and prosperity, had gone. Campaigning in 1981, Mitterrand realised he was talking to an electorate feeling its way through a time of anxiety, while the economy was poised on the cusp of a third industrial revolution, and the tone of his discourse reflected this.45 The ‘110 Propositions’ that he concocted with the secretary of the Socialist group in the National Assembly, Michel Charasse, constituted a platform for his campaign that was not circumscribed by the PS’s ‘Projet socialiste’ or the manifesto adopted by the party’s congress in January 1981. It was a platform that enabled him to convey a personalised vision of a better society, marrying notions of justice with inevitable

90 The Seeds of Failure

change and conveying it with presidential authority. Whereas (as we shall see more closely in Chapter 6), Marchais’ campaigning and general discourse illustrated that he was still thinking and talking in terms defined by the first industrial revolution, and was fatally weighed down by the ideological baggage that implied. Already haunted in the pages of the popular press by reflections on his war-time past, Marchais’ campaign seemed determined to dog the much more agile footsteps of Mitterrand, however unflattering the light cast on him and the PCF. All of the leading candidates for the presidency pledged to attack the scourge of unemployment, but Mitterrand appeared to possess the most plausible formula for linking economic growth with reductions in unemployment. While Marchais, on the one hand, proposed out-flanking Mitterrand on the Left by gambling on a wholly unrealistic projection of 4.5 per cent growth and a social housing programme of 500,000 homes a year, he was also willing to veer dramatically to the Right by aligning his arguments with the likes of Chirac by suggesting that tackling immigration was also a means of cutting the level of unemployment. It was, in short, a tactic of ‘surenchère’, or bidding up, as in the case of the scope of future nationalisations or, if necessary, dropping down to the lowest common denominator, as with the issue of immigration, as long as it might lead to the discomfiture of the Socialist candidate. The patent inadequacy of such a campaign was revealed after the first round of voting on Sunday, the 26 April, when the Communists dropped to their lowest level of support since before the war. The 19 per cent Marchais had hoped for had failed to materialise and his actual share of 15 per cent of the vote left him trailing almost 3 points behind the third-placed Chirac, way behind Mitterrand with his 25.5 per cent share of the vote. The fact that Giscard d’Estaing had only edged ahead on the first ballot with 28.3 per cent made the ultimate outcome clear. Not only would Mitterrand be able to count on the hostility of many of Chirac’s supporters towards Giscard d’Estaing in the second round, the numbers of PCF supporters who had opted for the ‘vote utile’ in the first round (approximately 1.5 million) would make it impossible for the PCF not to endorse Mitterrand in the second round. As interviews with leading figures in PCF headquarters at the Place du Colonel Fabien later revealed, Marchais read the result as a choice between a despairing and a catastrophic option; the catastrophic option of playing for the Right and the despairing option of endorsing a Mitterrand victory that would leave the PCF with nowhere to hide in a profoundly unequal power relationship with a triumphant Socialist regime.46 The despairing

The Rise of the Socialists 91

option came to pass when Mitterrand won the second ballot with 51.8 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 exceptional performance of the PS in the ensuing legislative elections of 14 and 21 June. By the time the results of the second ballot had been counted, it was clear that a landslide had occurred that gave the Left over two-thirds of the seats. On the one hand the widespread sense of euphoric regime-change released by the triumph of Mitterrand, and on the other a common-sense understanding of the need for a coherent parliamentary majority behind the president, led the electorate of mainland France to give the PS and its allies of the MRG 59.49 per cent of the votes resulting in 282 seats, and the PCF 9.07 per cent of the votes resulting in 43 seats. It is possible to argue that it was really after the legislative elections of 1981, rather than 1978, that the leadership of the PS on the Left was definitively established because from that point onwards the two-ballot system clearly worked to accelerate the PCF’s decline.47 The disposition of seats had created a coalition dominated by a centre-left PS, abetted by a marginal PCF, and the declining rump of constituencies the PCF could seriously contest in the second round would now place ever-increasing pressure on its supporters to opt for the ‘vote utile’ by supporting Socialist candidates in the first round. As the results in general illustrated, but more tellingly the performance of the PS in relation to that of the PCF, the PS had risen and triumphed on the 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 in isolating and undermining the electoral power base of the PCF. The authors of France’s plans, or national programmes for economic recovery after 1945, could not have envisaged how quickly France would 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 even the statist traditions of the French Republic could not resist the imperatives of lean or ‘delocalised’ production and the inevitably negative consequences for traditional manufacturing. As the party of the working class, the PCF was uniquely vulnerable to the damage caused by 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 than be broken by this wind of change. For its part the PS had become much

92 The Seeds of Failure

more alert to the fact that the electorate was changing, and notably the fact that appeals based on traditional notions of class would become less and less effective as the old class hierarchies were perceived by the voters to be withering into insignificance. By the time of Mitterrand’s successful presidential campaign in 1981 the PS had demonstrated that it was a party that had learned how to win, especially through its ability to manipulate the electorate’s sensibilities in a system dominated by the politics of presidentialism. The extent to which the Socialists had acquired the winning habit was to be shown in 1988, when in spite of the U-turns of his party on economic issues and the ‘cohabitation’ forced on Socialist administrations by the electorate, François Mitterrand managed to secure a second mandate. By both reducing the Olympian pretensions of the presidency that had been personified by de Gaulle and playing on his image of avuncular omniscience, Mitterrand allowed his supporters to generate a climate of tontonmania that placed him on a higher plane than his competitors and reinforced the indispensability of the presidential hand on the helm of the ship of state. In contrast to this, the campaign of the PCF candidate for the presidency illustrated the extent to which losing can also become a learned response, and was an object lesson in how to fail the challenge of presidentialism in the French Fifth Republic.

5 Failing the Presidential Challenge

Introduction The presidential elections of 1988 created a new situation for the communist movement in France. In addition to his traditional rightwing opponents, André Lajoinie, the candidate of the Parti communiste français, had to face a former high-ranking member of the PCF hierarchy, Pierre Juquin, who had decided to present himself as a presidential candidate on behalf of the Communist rénovateurs, those who had decided to break with the PCF in pursuit of what they advocated as a reconstructed form of communism. In the event, Juquin obtained only a modest 2.1 per cent share of the votes cast in the first round on 24 April 1988. His challenge, nevertheless, had been taken very seriously by the PCF leadership during the period of campaigning before the first ballot, and his decision to stand as a candidate reflected serious strands of discontent at grassroots level in the PCF. In another respect, however, André Lajoinie faced the same obstacles in his presidential campaign as other Communist candidates who had stood for the presidency during the life of the Fifth Republic: a constitutional obstacle in that his party disagreed with the definition of the office to which he hoped to be elected; and a party political one in that his Socialist rival was supported by a party that had shown itself more willing and more successful in adapting to the exigencies of presidentialism in the Fifth Republic. The extent of the powers which the constitution of the French Fifth Republic confers on the President was something with which the PCF had disagreed from the outset. The banner headline on the front page of L’Humanité on 29 September 1958 was ‘La Constitution monarchique adoptée’, and disapproval was voiced by the PCF inside and outside 93

94 The Seeds of Failure

parliament regarding what it saw as the arbitrary and quasi-monarchical powers of the French President under the new constitution. With the inclusion of four Communist ministers in the second government of Pierre Mauroy, the Socialist Prime Minister, in 1981, the PCF’s accommodation with the Fifth Republic became concrete as, for the first time in the existence of this Republic, it became a party of government. As the life of the government progressed, however, the PCF found it increasingly difficult to give its wholehearted support to the policies of the Socialists, especially the package of austerity measures, the ‘plan de rigueur’ of 1982. The European elections of June 1984 represented a serious setback for the Left, in spite of the record number of abstentions (43 per cent) which, rather than a switch to other parties, was almost the 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 to 11.3 per cent in 1984. This was interpreted by the party leadership as a serious warning. At the central committee meeting on 26 and 27 June the government was criticised for its failure to halt unemployment and increase the purchasing power of the people. For its part, the central committee decided that the future for the party lay in the restoration of its communist vigour and identity, in order to make it more attractive to the workers and the young. A few days after the election result President Mitterrand replaced Mauroy with the right-wing Socialist, Laurent Fabius. At a central committee meeting on 19 July the decision was taken to try and obtain a pledge from Fabius to boost investment and employment. This commitment not forthcoming, the Communist ministers were withdrawn from the government. The explicit criticism voiced by the PCF of the Socialist government after its withdrawal was supported by a return to Communist criticism of the constitution from which it derived its powers. The resolution adopted at the PCF’s 25th Congress in 1985 marked an end to the strategy that had characterised its attitude to governmental office for the preceding quarter century. Cooperation with the PS which had brought the Left to power had, according to the resolution, been a mistake and had resulted in too many compromises at the expense of the PCF. The party’s political activity would therefore be marked, after the congress, by autonomous action among the masses, with a view to creating a nouveau rassemblement populaire majoritaire.1 In his report to the Congress as General Secretary, Georges Marchais made explicit condemnation of the way he believed that the constitution of the Fifth Republic permitted the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. Calling for a democratisation of the institutions created by

Failing the Presidential Challenge 95

the constitution, Marchais outlined five objectives: a parliament with greater power over legislation, notably its inception; a more powerful Prime Minister, and therefore greater independence of the government from the President; a less direct role for the President in the exercise of power, and a greater definition of his role as a ceremonial guardian of the Republic’s institutions; real decentralisation; and effective ‘debureaucratisation’. These objectives were supported by nine specific proposals which included a non-renewable seven-year term for the President, a change in the voting system to allow any candidate with more than 10 per cent of the vote in the first round to stand in the second round, a more narrowly defined presidential right to dissolve parliament and more power for parliament to decide the order of business.2 Marchais’ proposals for the reform of the presidency notwithstanding, the 1988 presidential campaign would place the PCF in the perverse situation of promoting its candidate for an office which it believed to be ill-defined constitutionally, and against – apart from its traditional adversaries on the Right – a Socialist incumbent which it accused of adopting right-wing policies, and an erstwhile PCF member who, it claimed, was surreptitiously supported by the Socialists and by the 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 of the presidential elections on 24 April 1988 marked the weakest performance at the polls by the PCF since its formation in 1920. In the eyes of many political observers this result appeared to confirm a trend that had developed over the preceding two decades each time the PCF was faced with a major electoral challenge, a trend that suggested an ineluctable decline in the PCF’s ability to win the confidence of the French electorate. As the following figures in Table 5.1 show, the electoral fortunes of the Communists between 1969 and May 1988 had suffered a virtually continuous decline, and one that was particularly marked in the decade prior to the presidential elections of 1988. The result of the presidential contest of 1988 seemed to justify the view that the PCF was a party whose political prospects had been damaged because of its intellectual and organisational rigidity,3 and which could not be confident of retaining the fidelity of its own members unless its conception of change was broadened and adapted to include non-economic issues of concern to individuals and not only the economic issues that concerned the class it represented.4 This

96 The Seeds of Failure Table 5.1

Electoral performance of PCF since 1969

Type of election

Year

Vote*

Presidential Legislative Legislative European Presidential Legislative European Legislative

1969 1973 1978 1979 1981 1981 1984 1986

21.5 21.4 20.7 20.6 15.6 16.2 11.3 9.8

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

concentration by PCF critics on the factors inhibiting the reversal in the decline of the PCF’s fortunes as an electoral force, however, helped to create the misleading impression of a party that seemed indifferent to the need for change and disinclined to pursue electoral success. The unanimous decision of the political bureau on 18 May 1987 to propose André Lajoinie to the PCF central committee as the party’s candidate in the presidential elections, and the subsequent ratification of his candidacy, expressed in fact the willingness of the party to learn from previous experience and adapt its tactics to ways which it believed would bring greater electoral benefits. The view that prevailed among the PCF’s critics regarding the choice of Lajoinie was that he was the undistinguished but faithful party man who would enable Marchais to avoid shouldering the blame for the party’s defeat at the polls. As both General Secretary of the PCF and its candidate in the presidential elections in 1981, Georges Marchais was doubly vulnerable to criticism provoked by the PCF’s disappointing share of the vote in the first ballot. In fairness to the PCF leadership, however, the suggestion that the decision of the General Secretary not to put himself forward as a presidential candidate in 1988 was simply to protect the leadership from blame in case of failure, did not take into account that there had been signs, albeit belated, of an acceptance that the party had to renew its appeal. In the debates during and around the PCF’s 24th Congress in February 1982, there was a general acceptance of the criticism that the party had, from 1956 onwards, lagged behind the very considerable changes in French society, failing, for example, to adapt with sufficient speed and flexibility to the fact that the majority of French men and women had become salaried workers. Among the

Failing the Presidential Challenge 97

principal themes which Marchais developed in his address to the Congress was the need for the party to develop a new and broader dimension which would accommodate a new style of contact with the people at large, and to follow a path characterised by positive proposals rather 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 was building up on two fronts. On the one hand, the leadership had to project the party and its ideology into the political arena and in a way that convinced the electorate of the viability of its bid for power, especially presidential office. On the other hand, the PCF leadership had to manage the dissent and criticism that emanated from within the party about the way it managed the party’s affairs, and defined the party’s ideological orientation and political strategy. Success on one front could not be divorced from success on the other. The PCF leadership had, therefore, to take account of those who posed a challenge from inside as well as from outside the party.

Contestataires and rénovateurs The PCF leadership had had to face criticism from within party ranks during the years immediately preceding the presidential elections of 1981 as well as after. Considerable criticism followed the failure of the Common Programme which the PCF had signed with the Socialists in 1972 and which effectively had ended in September 1977. The legislative elections six months later, in March 1978, resulted in the defeat of the Left but, as already noted, were significant in that, for the first time in France’s post-war history, the Socialists had taken a larger share of the vote than the Communists. The consequent debate within the party concerning the leadership’s electoral strategy, and particularly its relationship with other left-wing parties, grew in scope to include the issue of democracy within the party. The desire by some party members to see these issues discussed in the party press as well as at branch level was frustrated, but the voices of those challenging the leadership’s handling of the party’s affairs, the contestataires, continued to be heard, most notably in the form of an open letter carrying a thousand or so signatures and emanating from the PCF university branch at Aix, criticising the way the leadership had handled the party’s relationship with the PS and the MRG. A significant number of critical books and articles appeared, written by communists who disagreed with the leadership but who affirmed their desire to remain within the

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party, aspiring to change it from within. Notable contributors to this literature were the communist intellectuals Louis Althusser and Jean Elleinstein. The PCF leadership demonstrated its recognition of the need for debate by organising, in a manner which had not been seen for a number of decades, a series of discussion meetings on 9 and 10 December 1978, at which four hundred intellectuals were invited, including some of the party’s liveliest critics. It was, in the judgement of Le Monde, a forum in which disagreements were aired but one where the PCF leadership was supported with regard to the essence of its policy. Some of the contestataires remained, nonetheless, unwilling to be placated, particularly those among the party intellectuals in the Paris area. Notably outspoken was Henri Fiszbin, the former Paris district secretary who had resigned from the central committee in 1979 and who, in May 1981, together with François Hincker, founded Rencontres communistes, a group comprised of PCF dissidents and some others. Both figures were expelled from the PCF in October of that year, the reason given by the party being that they had published their criticisms in the bourgeois press instead of the party press. Two other notable departures from the party in that year were Elleinstein and another prominent critic, Etienne Balibar. A further focus of discontent was established in the creation of Union dans les luttes, a body set up by socialist and communist intellectuals with the purpose of restoring the unity of the Left to the top of the agenda and of refuting the PCF’s claim that the PS had shifted to the Right. The criticism of the party that was expressed after the 24th Congress differed, however, from the kind that was expressed after the disappointment of the legislative elections of 1978 and which culminated in the debates in December of that year in that it contained a strand that could not be counted on to agree with the leadership on the essence of party policy. It was a critical element in the party that was not only reformist but also rénovateur, that is, that was prepared to advocate a renewal of the party’s appraisal of its aims through, if necessary, a radical overhaul 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 the way it was run, a debate which would not treat any subject relating to the party as taboo. Furthermore, Juquin added that the democratic centralism in the party could be modified for the better. This criticism became overt at the party’s 25th Congress in February 1985. It was in this forum that Juquin made his call for a ‘PC rénové’,

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a reconstructed Communist Party in which democratic centralism would be informed by the will to self-management. The reaction of the party leadership was to reach a pact with the rénovateurs, as a result of which Juquin was re-elected not to the political bureau of the party but to the central committee, together with two other members of it who sympathised with his viewpoint, Marcel Rigout and Félix Damette. There was a resurgence of criticism of the leadership by PCF members after the party’s poor result in the legislative elections of 1986, when it obtained 9.8 per cent of the votes cast. This criticism found focal points in the cercles marxistes, the communist discussion groups which were formed, according to one rénovateur, in at least ten towns to discuss the issues raised by rénovateur criticism of the leadership.6 The reaction of the party leadership to the growing strength of this criticism from within was to take the offensive. In an interview on the television channel, Antenne 2, on 14 January 1987, Georges Marchais accused the rénovateurs of being the liquidateurs of the party. In a written statement, Marcel Rigout declared that Marchais’ condemnation of the rénovateurs was a publicly delivered blow against the unity of the party and, on 27 January, Rigout resigned from the central committee of the PCF. On 31 January, rénovateurs from fifteen departments met in Paris and established themselves organisationally by forming a collectif de coordination. The basis now existed for an unprecedented challenge to the PCF leadership. Pierre Juquin had signalled his challenge to the leadership of the PCF in November 1986, when he declared the intention of the rénovateur group 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 as the presidential election drew closer Juquin marked an increasing distance between himself and the leadership. In May 1987, he was absent from the central committee meeting that approved unanimously the choice of Lajoinie as the party’s presidential candidate, and in June he announced his resignation from the central committee. On 12 October, he announced his decision to stand as a candidate in the presidential election and on 14 October, he was excluded from the party. The organisational backing for Juquin’s candidacy began to take concrete form on 24 October when the national coordinating committee of the Communist rénovateurs (COCORECO) met in Paris. It elected at its head Claude Llabrès, who was among the group of communists from Toulouse to be excluded from the PCF. Llabrès had been a member of the central committee but had resigned in September 1987, arguing in a newspaper interview and in terms made familiar by Juquin, that the

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PCF had lost touch with French society. This was a familiar argument in the early months of Juquin’s candidacy, which developed against a background of notable discontent within the PCF. The divisions in the PCF from which Juquin’s campaign might hope to profit were well illustrated by the problems that surfaced in Claude Llabrès’ home base of Toulouse, in October and November of 1987, and where the local communists came under the regional authority of the federation of Haute-Garonne. The exclusion of the local communist Serge Diaz for ‘factional activity’ elicited a reaction among PCF members in Toulouse which revealed not only that friction existed between rénovateur sympathisers like Diaz and officials like Emile Ochando, who defended the party orthodoxy, but that there was another disaffected group which wanted to remain within the party but which was highly critical of PCF management and strategy, led by Daniel Garipuy. These contestataires argued 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 the officials of the federation but which nonetheless suggested the potential for Juquin’s candidacy to rally more than the declared rénovateurs among the communist electorate. This was a potential underlined by the resignation, in early November, of Marcel Rigout and 18 other contestataires who were members of the party’s federal committee in Haute-Vienne and who cited the national leadership’s inability to tolerate differences as the principal factor forcing their decision to resign. The freedom to express individual differences was one of the values that featured in the book by Juquin which appeared in 1985 and which defined his understanding of the challenges facing the Communist movement and the changes it had to make.8 The way communists envisaged the purpose of their movement, according to Juquin, had become reliant on terms that had become ideologically frozen, such as ‘the masses’ and ‘the class struggle’, and which led to a conception of society in which the individual was indistinguishable from the mass. For Juquin, the class struggle led by the Communist movement should be perceived in a fresher light as aiming ultimately to allow the human person to assume its individuality. The way for the Communists to secure the liberation and fulfilment of this individuality would not be through an exclusive preoccupation with economic change, but through profound cultural change. In his book Fraternellement libre, published shortly before the start of his campaign, Juquin returned to this conception of communism as being, above all, a project to transform society’s values.9 And this concern would be translated in the way Juquin defined his electoral programme.

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The presidential challenge Georges Marchais’ decision, announced at a central committee meeting on 12 May 1986, to exclude himself from the choice of possible candidates to represent the PCF in the presidential elections of 1988, and his subsequent characterisation of André Lajoinie’s campaign, expressed his awareness of past mistakes and of the immediate challenges facing the party in the run-up to a crucial test of its continuing viability as an electoral force in the Fifth Republic. Marchais’ high-profile campaign had failed to bring the PCF the success hoped for in the presidential elections of 1981. This time, the party professed its refusal to compromise with the tactic it condemned in the other parties of concentrating on an American-style packaging of their candidates in order to achieve maximum impact in the media at the expense of a proper examination of the programmes they were supposed to be advocating. According to Marchais, the image of the party would not be portrayed in the person of one individual during the campaign, but in the collective identity of its members. The distinction between the nature of Lajoinie’s presidential campaign and that of the other candidates was of fundamental importance to the preservation of the PCF’s ideological integrity. It enabled the PCF to participate in the pursuit of presidential power while at the same time not relinquishing its condemnation of presidentialism in the Fifth Republic, which it believed to run contrary to the interests of democracy. The reasoning behind the decision to place the onus for the success of Lajoinie’s candidacy on the party as a whole was made explicit in Marchais’ report to the PCF’s 26th Congress in December 1987.10 He condemned the American-style focus of the media on politics as a form of showbusiness, regarding it as an attempt by bourgeois forces to stifle real debate and the spirit of critical analysis. According to Marchais, the PCF was laying the grounds for its success in the presidential election by genuine discussion with the people about the issues that mattered to them. Lajoinie alone could not succeed in making France receptive to the ideas and policy proposals of the Communist Party, Marchais affirmed. The success of the Communist candidate’s campaign would depend on the ability of every party member to convey the party’s ideas to the people around him or her in all aspects of everyday life and persuade them that the only way to make themselves heard would be to vote for Lajoinie in the first round. Such a dialogue, initiated by all party members, could not be stifled by the media. This, therefore, was the professed purpose behind the style of the campaign. But in addition

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to the need to renew the appeal of the PCF’s presidential candidate to the French electorate as a whole in 1988, there were additional and difficult considerations in the choice of candidate and the management of his campaign: the need for a candidate both acceptable to the party at large and one on whom the leadership could rely in the case of continuing criticism of it from within the party, and one who could be seen to maintain the delicate line which the PCF had to tread if it was to be considered as committed to the accession of the Left to power but not merely subordinate to the Socialists, that is, reverse the role of political bridesmaid destined always to help the PS into office and never to enjoy it herself. In contrast to his Socialist rival in the presidential campaign, Lajoinie was chosen to represent the qualities that were antithetical to those displayed by the kind of candidate whose personality and ideas could come to dominate the party he was supposed to represent. Rather than set up a pole of attraction that could compete with the party and relegate its leadership to a secondary role, Lajoinie’s appeal was to be an integral aspect of the appeal of the PCF as a whole and of its message. In the PCF’s portrayal of him, André Lajoinie was the type of candidate who would eschew the ego-building and political manoeuvrings of his rivals in order to project the policies determined by a political collectivity for the collective benefit of French society. Hence the prominent role played by Georges Marchais throughout the presidential campaign. In a very important respect, therefore, the PCF had effectively opted for a two-headed presidential candidature. Whereas André Lajoinie was the présidentiable who, if elected, would assume the office of President, Georges Marchais was the figure who defined the terms for the PCF’s participation in the elections. In his report to the PCF’s 26th Congress, Marchais referred directly to the institutional obstacles Lajoinie would face. In his opinion, the presidential election would reinforce the antidemocratic and monarchical nature of executive power. The presidency was beginning to resemble an elected monarchy not only because of the power concentrated in the hands of the President, but also because of the fact that since the President’s mandate is obtained directly from the people, Marchais argued that this had led to the widespread belief that the office of President conferred a legitimacy that could not be challenged by any other democratic institutions. Therefore, in deciding how to vote, the French electorate were guided above all by the choice of individual rather than policy. Furthermore, Marchais asserted, the logical consequence of the form of electoral choice with which the French people would be faced would put them under extreme pressure

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to make their votes count, the vote utile. The electors would be under pressure to cast their first-round votes, not for the candidate who expressed their views, but for the one most likely to obtain an absolute majority in the second round; they would be discouraged from voting for the candidate with whom they identified in favour of the possible winner least unacceptable to them. Such a system, Marchais concluded, was an obvious handicap to any candidate and party advocating radical change. Marchais rejected, however, the suggestion that the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion and defined in unequivocal terms what a vote for the Communist candidate could achieve, how his campaign could be justified and its success measured. In Marchais’ opinion, Lajoinie’s candidacy would rally all those wishing to register their disagreement with the policies of the government, and the weight of their votes for him in the first round would influence the final outcome and the subsequent decisions of the newly elected President. A good result for the PCF candidate in the first round would be a measure of the desire for change in French society, and, in Marchais’ view, would be the only new and significant event that would distinguish the election. Marchais’ representation of Lajoinie’s candidacy in the terms outlined above is what enabled the PCF to reconcile two conflicting terms in the equation expressing their participation in presidential elections. By portraying Lajoinie as the candidate who embodied the consultative and collectivist virtues that would check the drift to rightwing presidentialism, the PCF leadership could deny the legitimacy of presidential power and its manifestations while, without apparent contradiction, putting forward a candidate in the presidential elections.

André Lajoinie’s campaign André Lajoinie was chosen to run as the PCF candidate in the presidential election in preference to better-known Communist figures like Georges Séguy, the former General Secretary of the CGT trade union, and Anicet Le Pors, who had been one of the four Communist ministers in the Mauroy cabinet. Lajoinie’s progress in the party and his service to it, however, are an indication of the social and political qualities that made him appear an appropriate choice to the party leadership as the most reliable candidate in the attempt to balance the factors outlined above. Born of peasant stock in the Corrèze in 1929, Lajoinie reflected the simplicity and solidity that characterised the support on which the

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party could rely in certain agricultural areas, and it was through service to the party’s agricultural concerns that he rose in the organisation. Lajoinie first gave dramatic proof of his commitment to the party and its beliefs during the campaign against the French colonial war in Algeria, when he was seriously assaulted and injured in a demonstration in May 1958. Lajoinie progressed through the courses organised for party members, and in 1976 became responsible for the Communist weekly journal for farmers, La Terre. In 1978 he was elected as a Deputy to the National Assembly representing a constituency in the department of Allier, and joined the central committee of the party in February 1982 on the occasion of its 24th Congress. By his own description, one of Lajoinie’s chief qualities was his capacity for quiet diligence, and his preferred activity was to meet the people where they lived and worked and to discuss their problems with them in a way that eschewed hedging or rhetoric, using the straight talking (parler direct) which he believed was most effective in reaching people.11 The PCF leadership had shown its support for André Lajoinie when almost all the members of the party’s political bureau and three of the four former Communist ministers in the Socialist government were present in the studio for Lajoinie’s first major appearance on television, on 19 October 1987, to present himself and his programme as the Communist candidate in the forthcoming presidential election. During the course of the programme, L’Heure de Vérité, on Antenne 2, Lajoinie elaborated on the themes, political and personal, that would recur during his campaign.12 This broadcast, together with another keynote interview given to the media by Lajoinie in early November 1987, illustrated the nature of Lajoinie’s campaign and the policy concerns that characterised it. On the programme, Lajoinie began by outlining what his first three priorities would be should he be elected President. First, a raising of the minimum wage to 6000 francs, increases in low and average incomes and an amnesty for all union activists unfairly penalised by the law. Secondly, he would call a meeting of the captains of industry in the public and the private sector in order to find ways of creating employment and raising industrial output. Thirdly, he would find ways of taxing income from financial transactions and of reducing the military budget. In view of the febrile state of the Paris stock exchange at that juncture, Lajoinie argued that he was the only candidate to have a programme with specific provisions for resolving the problems being encountered there, including: the protection of France from the vagaries of the American-dominated world financial system through

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exchange control, taxes on the export of capital, and incentives to production instead of speculation; an end to privatisation and some nationalisations; and the withdrawal of France from the European Monetary System. Regarding relations between the PCF and the PS, Lajoinie argued that whereas in 1981 there was some common ground between the parties, the gap between the two parties towards the end of 1987 had become enormous. While refuting the likelihood of the PCF participating in another Socialist-dominated government, Lajoinie did not exclude permanently the possibility of cooperation with the Socialists with regard to the exercise of governmental power in the distant future. Describing himself as a revolutionary candidate in the deepest sense of the word, Lajoinie declared that his principal adversaries were the Right and the capitalist forces in French society. He affirmed his belief that the millions of communist votes cast in the first round would weigh more heavily on the outcome of the second round, and its aftermath, than they did in 1981. As for the support shown by some Communist mayors for Pierre Juquin, who had entered the presidential race and had been excluded from the party earlier in the month, Lajoinie dismissed the number of mayors as less than a handful and accused Juquin of dishonesty in his dealings with the PCF. Concerning the management and style of his campaign, Lajoinie revealed that this was entrusted to a commission headed by the political bureau member, Pierre Blotin. The image that best represented him as an individual candidate in human terms, Lajoinie believed, was one of a plain and simple man of the people, capable of appreciating popular tastes like pop music, while avoiding some of the more frivolous preoccupations to which it could give rise. Lajoinie’s television performance was a successful one judging by the audience reaction. He began with the lowest rating of any guest on the programme, scoring only 14 per cent in favour of him in a survey of viewers’ attitudes carried out during the broadcast. At the end of the broadcast, the number of viewers expressing a favourable opinion of Lajoinie had risen to 33 per cent, one of the most marked progressions registered by any guest on the programme. Outside of the television studio and vis-à-vis the French electorate as a whole, the percentage of electors inclined to cast their vote for Lajoinie in the first round was 5 per cent, the same as in July, according to a poll carried out by Paris Match-BVA in early October.13 Vis-à-vis the rank and file of his own party, however, Lajoinie’s campaign was unfolding against a background of increasing dissatisfaction. Juquin

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announced his decision to stand for the presidency on behalf of the rénovateurs communistes on 12 October and, with the exception of Félix Damette, the central committee voted to exclude him from the party on 14 October. Nationally, in places like Isère, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Hérault, Juquin’s departure from the party and his candidacy exacerbated the tensions between local rénovateurs and their more orthodox comrades, and the party’s central organisation. In November, Lajoinie returned to the fray in a major interview with a panel of journalists on the broadcasting platform provided by the Forum RMC-FR3.14 In response to a question referring to Juquin as the other communist candidate, Lajoinie argued that such a description of a candidate was impossible because he (Lajoinie) had been approved unanimously by the party as its candidate. Furthermore, he asserted that there was an orchestrated attempt by some sections of the press and those with an interest in preserving the economic and social status quo to use Juquin’s candidacy to damage the PCF. In his opinion, the Juquin candidacy would not have seen the light of day were it not for the support of the media, the other political parties and even the banks who had agreed to provide Juquin with a substantial advance in order to finance his candidacy. In contrast to what he implied was Juquin’s artificial candidacy, Lajoinie underlined his own progress in making the French electorate listen to him. A reference by a journalist to the willingness expressed by the Socialist, Jacques Delors, to serve as Prime Minister under Raymond Barre, should he be elected President, allowed Lajoinie to develop the PCF position regarding the posture of the PS. Lajoinie described Delors’ offer as the tip of the iceberg, arguing that it expressed the fundamental inclination of the PS to cooperate with the Right, which it called the centre. Delors had simply jumped the gun, as the policy of cohabitation between the Socialists and the Right, resulting from the majority that eluded them in the legislative elections of 1986, was the prospective basis for an alliance with the Right. As evidence of this, Lajoinie cited the agreement between the Socialists and the Right over economic austerity measures, defence expenditure and, as he put it, the integration and subjection of France to the interests of European and American capital. Resulting from his interviews with the media in October and November of 1987, Lajoinie’s campaign was defined by four principal themes: a certain notion of how presidential office should be perceived, embodied in his person as a type of presidential aspirant; his programme; what the candidacy of Pierre Juquin really represented; and the drift of the Socialists, led by François Mitterrand, towards compromise with the Right.

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According to the Paris Match-BVA poll published in mid-November, Lajoinie’s campaign was meeting with some sympathetic reaction among left-wing voters as a whole. Asked to decide who between Delors, Fabius, Lajoinie, Mauroy, Mitterrand and Rocard would be the best candidate to represent the left, 14 per cent of left-wing voters chose Lajoinie, as opposed to 9 per cent in response to the same question in September. The responses to questions regarding first round voting intentions, however, suggested that Lajoinie was making little progress in convincing the electorate of his genuine credibility as a presidential candidate. Asked who they would vote for in the first round of the presidential election were it to be held on the following Sunday, 5 per cent of the entire cross-section of voters surveyed chose Lajoinie, the same percentage as for September.15 By the end of November, Lajoinie was committed to a busy schedule of meetings and was drawing audiences of between 1200 (Castres) and 4000 (Toulon) on the departmental campaign trail. The PCF Congress in December allowed Lajoinie to define himself as the candidate who was legitimately chosen by the party (in contrast to Juquin who Lajoinie called ‘self-proclaimed’), and outline how his campaign fitted into the overall objectives of the party. During the open discussion on 4 December, Lajoinie dismissed any suggestion that Juquin could be regarded with any seriousness as the second communist candidate in the race for the presidency, referring to him instead as the second socialist candidate. Lajoinie underlined his support for the positions of the party leadership as had been expressed in Marchais’ report to the Congress, and reiterated the three key themes in the PCF programme: justice, liberty and peace. It was only through the Communist vote in the forthcoming election, Lajoinie asserted, that these objectives could be pursued successfully. And this point was made by Marchais in the opposite way, by affirming that a vote for any candidate other than Lajoinie in the first round would be a vote for the policies of austerity, authoritarianism and excessive arms spending that the party judged to be currently in place. In contrast to what could be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the leadership by the rénovateurs of Haute-Vienne in November, at the end of the PCF congress in December, Georges Marchais was returned to office for the fifth time as the party’s General Secretary. The rénovateur Felix Damette was not, however, re-elected to the central committee of the party. To what extent the PCF congress influenced the French electorate’s perception of the party and its presidential candidate would be very difficult to judge accurately. It would nonetheless be safe to say that it

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had little success in enhancing it, to judge by the opinion polls. When asked by the Paris Match-BVA survey of mid-December what their voting intentions were for the first round, the respondents gave Lajoinie the same score as in the previous month, 5 per cent. There was, however, a change in the percentage of left-wing voters willing to regard Lajoinie as the best candidate to represent the Left. This dropped from 14 to 11 per cent.16 The tone was set for the continuation of Lajoinie’s campaign in 1988 by the contents of the report presented to the central committee by Pierre Blotin of the political bureau, and which was unanimously adopted by it on 6 January 1988. Blotin outlined a programme of 50 meetings to be held by Lajoinie, 17 of which would be attended by Georges Marchais, in the 15 weeks that remained of the presidential campaign. The burden of the party’s hopes, however, would be carried equally by its membership and its candidate. The report called for a harnessing of resources at the level of party cells, through an effort to find and contact absent members and encourage them to participate in the success of the PCF’s campaign. This had to be achieved against what the report deemed to be a background of collusion between the rightwing and Socialist press aimed at creating, on the one hand, a feeling of anti-communism among the electorate at large and, on the other, a feeling among the potential voters for Lajoinie that the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion. The PS and the President were also the subjects of 38 denunciations for their betrayal of former commitments and their acceptance of right-wing policies. Whatever their preferences in the second round, the report maintained that those desiring changes in government policy had no option but to vote for Lajoinie in the first round. Pierre Juquin was dismissed as a candidate put up by the PS and the report also recorded the decision of the PCF not to ratify the election of the rénovateur, Martial Bourquin, to the post of secretary to the Communist federation in Doubs because, according to the report, the party could not ratify the election of someone who advocated policies that differed from those advocated by the party at national level. Lajoinie’s campaign faced a more serious obstacle posed by the rénovateurs as January wore on. In an interview to the daily newspaper Libération on 15 January, Juquin asserted that during the presidential campaign of 1981, Marchais had expressed a preference for seeing communists vote for the right-wing candidate in the second round rather than see them help install a Socialist President in office. Lajoinie counter-attacked in an interview on the radio station Europe I on 17 January, denying that there had been any preference shown by the

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leadership for a ‘revolutionary vote for the right’ (le vote revolutionnaire à droite) in 1981. He further accused Juquin of cowardly dishonesty since the latter, according to Lajoinie, had declined Georges Marchais’ challenge to justify the charge with explicit proof. In spite of the vigorous denials of the PCF leadership and Lajoinie’s attempt to portray Juquin as an individual lacking in integrity, Juquin’s claim did detract from the PCF’s attempt to build an image of itself as a party above unprincipled political machination. The credibility of Lajoinie as a présidentiable suffered as January progressed and in the Paris Match-BVA survey published at the end of the month, the number of respondents willing to cast their votes for Lajoinie in the first round had fallen from 6 per cent at the end of December 1987 to 4.5 per cent. The number of left-wing voters who considered him as the best candidate to represent the Left had also fallen to 10 per cent over the same period.17 During the course of a press interview dealing with the central committee meeting in early February to review the progress of Lajoinie’s campaign, Marchais revealed the organisational concerns of the party leadership. The central committee had become aware that a significant number of party members were not participating actively in the campaign.18 To counter the possibility of resignation and sectarianism within the party, Lajoinie and Marchais began the month by reiterating the idea that a vote for Lajoinie in the first round did not preclude the possibility of waging an effective fight against the Right in the second round. However, in order to placate those sectarian communists who might be inclined to obstruct the election of Mitterrand in the second round, the party leadership remained disinclined at this juncture to declare itself unequivocally in favour of a vote for Mitterrand in the second round. As the month of February progressed, Lajoinie’s candidature received the support of the contestataires who had remained within the party. In a declaration entitled ‘Malgré tout, mais avant tout, votons André Lajoinie’, signed by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre and other notable contestataires, the point was made that in spite of the failings of the party leadership, the PCF remained the best defence against capitalism and preserved the honour of the Left. In an indirect reference to Pierre Juquin’s campaign, the declaration stated that a communist tradition could not be established within the space of a few months, and could not rest on a basis of well-meaning but vague notions. The PCF leadership, criticised by the contestataires, was not unaware, however, of the need to inject the party’s image and its candidate’s campaign with more appeal and vigour. To this end, therefore, the leadership began to

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draw attention to the ‘meeting points’ (points de rencontre) set up by local party members outside factories, offices, supermarkets and so on, and which gave the public the opportunity to meet and discuss with party representatives. On 21 February, Lajoinie was the presidential candidate invited to discuss his views in a broadcast on the radio station RTL. During the course of the discussion he declared that the PCF was for the unity of the Left, as long as it resulted in a change of policies. Lajoinie described a vote for him in the first round as the only one possible for anyone wishing to see a brake applied to the slide to the Right in French politics. He expressed his belief that his share of the vote in the first round would exceed the result obtained by the PCF in the legislative election of 1986 (i.e., 9.8 per cent). As to which candidate the PCF would support in the second round, this would be formally declared on the Wednesday following the first round. Lajoinie was categorical in rejecting the prospect of communists once more accepting ministerial posts in order, as he put it, to implement the policies of the Right. On the question of exclusions from the party, Lajoinie denied that any had occurred for political reasons, arguing that they followed from the fact that some members had acted in ways that were irreconcilable with the party’s way of life. In dealing with the inevitable question of Juquin’s candidacy, Lajoinie’s criticism of the PS became very pointed. He described Juquin’s candidacy as an anti-communist one which would not have been viable without the support of the PS. Lajoinie hinted that the support given by the PS might cost it dearly, but did not go into detail. As for the viability of Lajoinie’s own candidacy, by the end of February he was polling 5.5 per cent of the first round voting intentions of those interviewed in the Paris Match-BVA survey.19 It is safe to assume that Lajoinie’s modest and generally unchanging performance in the polls was a consideration in the party leadership’s review of the campaign in early March and helped inject its conclusions with a measure of urgency. A central committee meeting that took place on 8 March was expanded to include all the leaders from the departments as well as the national leadership and lasted for two days (as opposed to one day at the equivalent juncture in the 1981 presidential campaign). By this point in the campaign, Lajoinie’s inability to poll more than 5 or 6 per cent of voting intentions was of grave concern to the party leadership, given the fact that François Mitterrand had not yet officially declared his intention to run for a second term of office. The possible scenario which most concerned the PCF leadership was the one in which Mitterrand’s long-awaited entry into the race released so

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much momentum for the Socialist candidate that it swept away all the other left-wing candidates. Georges Marchais’ contribution to the central committee meeting was marked by the assertion of his authority over the party and aimed at overcoming the two dangers which threatened to undermine Lajoinie’s campaign. The first danger was the insufficient mobilisation of party members in support of André Lajoinie’s campaign. The secretary responsible for party organisation, Jean-Claude Gayssot, had identified a 35 per cent deficit in the number of party members who should have been engaged in promoting Lajoinie’s campaign. Marchais stressed the need, beginning with central committee members and the secretaries of Communist federations across the country, to make a greater and more sustained commitment to working for the success of Lajoinie’s campaign and the realisation of the goals it represented. The second danger identified by Marchais was the threat posed by the resort by Communist voters to the vote utile in the first round. On this issue, Marchais had to resolve the misunderstanding, underlined by one central committee member, which had arisen in the party regarding the PCF’s position over the second ballot. Some members had concluded that désistement in favour of Mitterrand had already been decided. Marchais made clear what he believed could be the consequence of such a misunderstanding. The largest vote possible had to be mobilised for Lajoinie in the first round in order to prevent Mitterrand achieving what Marchais asserted had been his ambition since assuming the leadership of the PS in 1971: a presidential majority in the first round of elections for the presidency and thereby a crucial undermining of the PCF as a credible left-wing alternative to the PS. Marchais therefore reiterated the position of the PCF regarding the second round of voting, which had been determined at the party’s 26th Congress in December l987. The central committee, after consultation with the federal committees, would decide which candidate it would support in the second round at a meeting on the Wednesday following the first round. Lajoinie’s appearance on L’Heure de Vérité on 23 March came shortly after François Mitterrand had announced his decision to seek a second term as President, and reflected the concerns that had come to the fore in his (Lajoinie’s) campaign in the period before the final weeks leading up to the first ballot. Lajoinie outlined the principal policy objectives that 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 wellfunded and autogestionnaires, a determination to prevent the single

112 The Seeds of Failure

European market of 1992 operating against the interests of the workers, the fight against racism and the extension of voting rights to immigrants, and the protection and extension of the liberties of the citizen in general. In addition to these familiar objectives, however, Lajoinie showed his concern to distinguish his campaign from those of his left-wing rivals and the parties supporting them. Lajoinie criticised Mitterrand’s pronouncement in favour of the single European market envisaged for 1992 on the same grounds that he questioned Mitterrand’s declared pursuit of social harmony: both pronouncements masked the intention of the Socialists to facilitate the exploitation of the workers by right-wing economic interests. Regarding Mitterrand’s commitment to disarmament, Lajoinie reminded the viewers that the PCF was the only party that had refused to vote for increases in the defence budget. As for his rénovateur rival, Lajoinie stressed that Juquin’s was a candidacy inspired by the PS and designed to split the Communist vote. Lajoinie emphasised the importance of a first round vote for him as the only genuine 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 an autocratic presidential figure, Lajoinie reiterated the PCF’s commitment to a non-renewable mandate for the President. The telephone poll conducted immediately after the broadcast showed that 3 per cent more of the viewers had found Lajoinie convincing than had done so after his appearance on the programme in October 1987. The Paris Match-BVA survey published two days later showed Lajoinie polling 6.5 per cent of voting intentions in the first round.20

The final weeks The final weeks of the campaign began with some unwelcome news for André Lajoinie. At a meeting of the Communist Party in the French overseas department of La Réunion, on 4 April, the decision was taken to make their votes count from the first round by casting them for Mitterrand. This decision was clearly contrary to the warnings issued by the PCF leadership regarding the damage the vote utile could do to the party, and it was severely criticised in the final meeting of the PCF central committee on 7 April. In the report presented by Roland Leroy, the Parti Communiste Réunionnais was described as an undemocratic group dominated by a clan. As well as castigating the Reunionnais communists for acting against the interests of the PCF, Leroy’s report also identified the two factors outside the party that the leadership believed were operating against the success of Lajoinie’s candidacy: the

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institutional obstacle faced by the PCF, and a Socialist candidate inclined to ally himself with the Right against the Communists. Published in L’Humanité on 8 April, the report underlined the leadership’s belief that the presidential election was the most undemocratic envisaged by the country’s constitution, and, therefore, the most detrimental to the Communist Party. François Mitterrand, as the Socialist incumbent who had shown his ability to adapt to the constitution of the Fifth Republic and (as was shown by cohabitation with a right-wing Prime Minister) to use it to preserve Socialist interests, was the target of severe criticism. Leroy’s report condemned the statement of aims contained in Mitterrand’s recently publicised Lettre à tous les Français as constituting a platform for an alliance with the Right. The report condemned as a ‘vulgar trap’ what it deemed to be Mitterrand’s attempt to persuade the electorate to vote for him in order to prevent a Chirac presidency. It argued that the duel with Chirac was being used as a means of obscuring the issues really at stake, and marked a profound disrespect for democracy. Quoting from words Mitterrand himself had written in 1964, the report denounced him for resorting to the personalisation of power that he himself had once condemned. In a television interview on 11 April, Lajoinie underlined the importance of a first round vote for the PCF candidate as the only point at which voters would be able to express their objection to the alliances Mitterrand was planning with the Right. Notwithstanding the frequent repetitions of warnings of this kind, during the week beginning Monday 11 April, 41 current and former prominent members of the CGT trade union launched a written appeal against what they regarded as the unfair pressure placed on the members by the union leadership to vote for Lajoinie. In a major interview on the radio station France-Inter on 13 April, Lajoinie returned to the offensive by warning the voters against what he argued was the manipulation of the electoral process by those in power, and re-emphasised the importance of the first round vote for him as a way of halting the extension of right-wing policies and asserting the desire of the electorate for a left-wing alternative. For his part, as General Secretary of the PCF, Georges Marchais attempted to add to the credibility of the PCF candidate’s campaign by a systematic refutation of the contents of Mitterrand’s Lettre à tous les Français, in an interview on the Europe 1 radio station on 15 April. In addition to the familiar arguments concerning the Socialists’ compromises regarding economic and social policies, Marchais criticised the President’s failure to make concrete plans to extend voting rights for immigrants, something Mitterrand had declared himself to favour.

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While, on the one hand, Marchais sometimes clarified and generally helped facilitate the public understanding of the PCF policies expressed by Lajoinie, on the other, he added to the public’s perception of Lajoinie himself as not being a présidentiable. Marchais’ frequent appearances in the media and his scheduled presence at almost a third of the campaign meetings programmed for Lajoinie created a situation in which two figures appeared to be carrying the banner for the PCF into the presidential election, rather than the single figure who had been chosen as the PCF candidate. Lajoinie returned to the theme of racism at a meeting in Marseille on 16 April, where Georges Marchais was also present on the platform. Lajoinie condemned Mitterrand and Chirac for using and allowing themselves to be used by the leader of the racist Front National party, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marchais accused Le Pen of persistent dishonesty in describing the PCF’s commitment to justice for immigrants, condemning it as an attempt to discourage potential PCF voters. In spite of the increased and visible presence of a new generation of French young people born of immigrant parents, the turn-out at the meeting was small, and local party leaders suggested that the Communist candidate would be unlikely to obtain the 25 per cent share of the vote that he had obtained in 1981. An appeal by the political bureau of the PCF to the party to mobilise appeared in L’Humanité on 18 April. Seven days before the first round, the appeal maintained that the outcome was not a foregone conclusion and that there were still many voters to be won over to the Lajoinie candidacy, as the one representing the only genuine vote for the Left and for change. Speaking on RTL on 20 April, André Lajoinie expressed optimism about his candidacy. He believed that the PCF had regained much of the influence it had lost over recent years and expressed the wish to see the PCF share of the vote equal or exceed that obtained in the 1986 legislative elections. While expressing his hopes, Lajoinie did not forego the opportunity to give voice once more to PCF misgivings about the undemocratic nature of the election. Regarding Mitterrand, Lajoinie argued that his Lettre à tous les Francais could well have been signed by Raymond Barre or Jacques Chirac, for so clearly did it reflect Mitterrand’s adoption of right-wing policies. Nonetheless, Lajoinie insisted that the PCF remained favourable to the unity of the Left, particularly with regard to the municipal elections to come in 1989. Two days later, the Paris Match-BVA poll showed a small increase in the percentage of respondents 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

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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 communists were defining their distinctness organisationally from the PCF, so their candidate distanced himself from the PCF candidate. In November and December, Juquin had been on the campaign trail in regions like Finistère, where the rénovateur movement was strong, but had avoided overt attempts to undermine Lajoinie’s campaign. Assisted by David Assouline, the student leader, and Khaïssa Titous, the vice president of SOS-Racisme, Juquin’s message was simple and idealistic. He declared himself to be a feminist, for voting rights for immigrants, for selfmanagement (autogestion), and against the nuclear deterrent. Juquin called on his listeners not to relinquish their dreams and spoke of his own dream in which three million people expressed the will to marry morality with politics. In the daily newspaper, Libération, on 15 January, however, Juquin made an assertion that could not fail to be interpreted as purposely detrimental to the credibility of the PCF candidate. He maintained that, in 1981, a majority of the members in the political bureau of the PCF believed that Mitterrand would be beaten in the presidential elections, and that they should help ensure this result. Furthermore, he cited a statement made by Georges Marchais at the time, to the effect that success for Mitterrand would result in an experiment in social democracy that could damage the PCF, and that therefore it was better for the Right to obtain power. Notwithstanding the apparent damage to the PCF, the benefits of this episode for Juquin’s candidacy were not evident in the polls. The Paris Match-BVA opinion poll at the end of January 1988 gave him the same modest share of voting intentions as in the previous month: 2 per cent. Juquin’s opportunity to convince the electorate of his credibility would come with his first appearance on the television programme, L’Heure de Vérité, on 2 February. The constitutional barrier to the viability of Juquin’s candidacy had been overcome shortly before this major test, with the promise by 500 elected representatives in French local and regional government to sponsor his candidacy: a fact which Juquin used to underline his credibility. Presenting himself as the candidate who was ‘free’ of party ties, Juquin expressed his hope of rallying a very diverse electorate. He was, nonetheless, a man of the Left and stated clearly that he would advocate support for the Socialist candidate in the second round of the election. Juquin outlined the principal planks of

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his campaign with regard to social and economic policy: the reduction of the working week to 35 hours without any reduction in pay, an increase in the minimum wage to 6000 francs and much greater resources for education. The social changes advocated by Juquin expressed his belief in a more just and egalitarian society, racially and sexually. He argued on the one hand for the right to self-determination for the Kanaks, the indigenous people of France’s troubled overseas territory of New Caledonia, and on the other for the extension of voting rights to immigrants in France and the creation of a more integrated society. In keeping with his declared sympathy for feminism, Juquin argued that measures needed to be taken to ensure that half the representatives in France’s elected assemblies were women. Juquin’s was a programme for a new kind of society and he wanted to build it with what he declared was a new movement comprised of new people, and not a pale 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 une alternative communiste (PAC) and the Fédération de la gauche alternative (FGA).22 The left-wing votes that Juquin could hope to win over would be from the Communist contestataires who wanted to change the party but had opted to do so from within, and from Socialists who were marginalised and dissatisfied by the ‘tontonmania’ which the PS had given itself over to. As he had suggested on L’Heure de Vérité, Juquin’s aspirations went further. Much impressed by the Green movement in West Germany and its fusion of ecological issues with radical politics, Juquin, as the campaign progressed, injected his speeches with expressions of strong concern for environmental issues. The new movement for a new society of which Juquin had spoken would, to judge by his campaign, be one that could pursue sexual and racial equality, and ensure employment and fair conditions of employment for the workers, while at the same time safeguarding their natural environment. In the weeks following his first major appearance on television and prior to the first ballot in the elections, the polls suggested that Juquin’s project to transform society was failing to convince the electorate. His share of voting intentions in the Paris Match-BVA polls during that period remained stubbornly between 2 and 3 per cent. The accuracy of the projections was proven when the results of the first ballot on 24 April became available.

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Conclusion: The lessons of the first round results Judged by the hopes he had expressed before the first ballot, of seeing the party equal its performance in the 1986 legislative elections, André Lajoinie’s 6.7 per cent share of the vote was disappointing.23 A comparison with the performance of the PCF in 1981 made its performance in 1988 seem more modest still. The 2,055,995 votes cast for André Lajoinie represented less than half the total cast for Marchais in 1981. In only one department, Allier, which he represented as a Deputy, did Lajoinie poll more than 15 per cent. He polled between 10 and 15 per cent in 14 departments, between 5 and 10 per cent in 51 departments and less than 5 per cent in twenty eight. The decline of the Communist vote was also 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 against 20.3 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 cent against 21.3 per cent), Bouches-du-Rhône (11.1 per cent against 25.5 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 Communist candidate was beaten in 145 by François Mitterrand and in 79 by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Parisian ‘red belt’ also failed to contain the slide in the Communist vote. Lajoinie was beaten into second place by Le Pen in many of the constituencies of the red belt, and the share of the Communist vote in Paris dropped to less than 4 per cent; barely a point more than Juquin’s. This last fact, however, added to Juquin’s modest performance nationally, showed that the PCF did not suffer a massive transfer of loyalties to the rénovateur candidate. The performance of the PCF candidate was a disappointment compared to 1981. On the other hand, it was a source of considerable relief that it was substantially better than Juquin’s. The PCF leadership was aware of how fatal the implications would have been for the future viability of the party if Juquin’s share of the vote had approached or exceeded Lajoinie’s. The failure of Juquin’s experiment was more important to the preservation of the PCF’s position as the only party offering a genuine and credible left-wing alternative in French politics, than the defeat of François Mitterrand. In the event, Juquin had failed to create a new movement and the PCF had survived to contest future elections. Further comfort could be derived from the fact that although the level of abstentions nationally was similar to that in 1981, the proportion of abstentions among Communist voters had increased significantly

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compared to 1981, particularly in areas of the Parisian red belt, where the increase in Communist abstentions reached, in some cases, 8 per cent. This, however, did not explain entirely the decline in the Communist vote compared to 1981. During the week after the first round results became known, Georges Marchais argued that André Lajoinie’s share of the vote was so modest because many PCF voters had exercised what they had been persuaded was the vote utile, contrary to the advice of the PCF leadership. Looking ahead to the second and decisive round of voting, Marchais advocated a vote for François Mitterrand, but this in order to stop the right-wing candidate rather than out of any enthusiasm for what the Socialist candidate represented. Marchais expressed confidence, however, that Communist voters who had opted for the vote utile in the first round of the presidential elections of 1988 would revert to their Communist loyalties in the municipal elections that would take place in 1989. The rejection of Marchais’ explanation of Lajoinie’s low score by some observers and the announcement of the PCF’s death as an electoral force was indeed shown to be premature by the PCF’s performance in the unscheduled legislative elections of June, when it polled 11.3 per cent of the votes cast.24 Marchais’ argument that many PCF members had chosen to vote usefully from the first round of the presidential ballot was, in fact, shown to have some substance by the fact that the PCF bastions which appeared to have failed to support Lajoinie were the ones responsible for the revival in the party’s fortunes in the legislative elections. The vote utile was one factor among several behind Lajoinie’s modest showing. The mobilisation at the grassroots which the PCF had called for was not successful, and the campaign waged by committed members in their everyday lives to make the electorate aware of the real Communist programme did not properly materialise. For his part, André Lajoinie failed to emerge as a candidate who was truly présidentiable. From the moment of his choice as the PCF candidate for the presidential elections, some observers chose to portray Lajoinie as the figure who would pursue the strategy determined by Marchais, and over whose campaign the shadow of Marchais would always loom.25 As the presidential campaign developed, it became clear that Marchais, as well as Lajoinie, would assume the responsibility for articulating the PCF position on major issues. The ability of the electorate to focus positively on one presidential figure from the PCF was made more difficult by the high profile assumed by the General Secretary of the party. During the month of February, it was noted in Le Monde that Georges Marchais made five major appearances on television whereas André Lajoinie made only

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two. This tendency for Marchais to eclipse Lajoinie was of fundamental importance in creating the impression, which persisted throughout the campaign, that the choice of Lajoinie as the PCF’s presidential candidate had not diminished Marchais’ role as the real guiding force within the party. This duality underscored the fundamental difficulty a party such as the PCF faces when confronted with an institution like the French presidency. Ultimately, André Lajoinie’s challenge for the presidency had rested on a paradox. On the one hand, the PCF had made clear its belief that the nature of the presidential election was undemocratic, but on the other it saw no alternative to putting up a candidate to contest it. Once committed to the presidential campaign, the PCF found itself faced with a left-wing rival, the PS, which had adapted well to the electoral system and seemed prepared to sacrifice the shibboleths of the Left in order to respond to the changing attitudes of the electorate. Unlike the PCF, the PS was not averse to adapting its message and presenting its candidate in a way that enabled it to enjoy the benefits of a successful media campaign. Instead of negotiating these obstacles through compromise, the PCF attempted to distinguish itself from the other parties fielding candidates by attempting to overturn these obstacles through an explicit, or even ostentatious adherence to its principles. The undemocratic nature of the election and the way it discriminated against the Communist candidate remained a theme that surfaced throughout Lajoinie’s campaign. His candidacy was presented by the PCF leadership, not as a compromise, but as the only way of halting the extension of right-wing policies, which it accused the PS of assisting. Juquin’s candidacy was depicted 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 of sabotaging debate through an American-style focus on personalities rather than issues, and its candidate of planning to collude with the Right in the event of his re-election. Whatever grains of truth these accusations might have contained, they were clearly not a recipe for success in a presidential contest. Furthermore, the fact that so much of the criticism of the presidential campaign process was articulated by Georges Marchais may well have been counter-productive since, as the reaction of the contestataires from within his own party indicated, there was a widespread perception of his leadership discourse as one that was ossified by dogma and disconnected from the people it was meant to serve by its ideologically blinkered nature.

6 Marchais: The (Dis)course of Leadership

Introduction Traditionally, communist discourse has been underpinned by three convictions: a belief in the pursuit of revolutionary change; that the change would be achieved through the action of the working class; and that the successful achievement of this aim necessitated organisational imperatives. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the way in which the questioning of those convictions affected communist discourse and in particular that of the General Secretary of the PCF, Georges Marchais (1972–94). As has been argued elsewhere,1 one of the defining characteristics of the political culture of the Fifth Republic is the way presidentialism has permeated France’s parties and institutions, stimulating the development of personalisation in leadership discourses across the political spectrum.2 Crucial to the understanding of leadership is the rapport between leader and followers, the relational dimension of leadership, embodied essentially in the leader’s discourse. Moreover, what we term the discourse of declining authority begins to appear when the homology of interest – those beliefs and ambitions shared by the leader and the led – begins to break down, thereby undermining the belief that the leader speaks in the interest of those he or she represents; the political effects of this can be consequential. And in the case of Georges Marchais, the more this phenomenon developed, the more Marchais’ discourse was 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 embodied the relationship between Georges Marchais and the PCF exceptional in terms of the sharpness of the definition it gave to the constituency it 120

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addressed. Georges Marchais could guide, cajole, reprove and censure while successfully refuting accusations of personalising the discursive prerogative delegated to him – as long as the membership believed that the leader’s utterances emanated from the same community of convictions and objectives as their own. As Annie Kriegel describes in her classic study of the Communists in France, the decision to join the PCF was an ‘existential’ one.3 It was not like joining any other political party and acquiring a set of beliefs; it was an act which defined one’s being. The PCF’s ideological commitment to revolutionary change was effectively renounced long before Marchais became General Secretary, in a famous interview given to The Times in November 1946 (and subsequently reprinted in L’Humanité) by the then General Secretary of the PCF, Maurice Thorez. In it, Thorez argued that the road to socialism chosen by the Russian communists was not the only one, and that the people of France would find their own road to socialism through democratic and parliamentary means. As the Fourth Republic gave way to the Fifth Republic in 1958, the key questions for the party became increasingly concerned with how to define the kind of change needed to achieve the PCF’s ambitions in a France where the emerging social realities no longer fitted the rhetoric of class conflict and what organisational constraints should be guiding this endeavour. In some respects, Georges Marchais was a communist archetype, in terms of his social origins and his education by, and progress through, the party. He was born into a lower middle-class family in Normandy on 7 June 1920, joined the PCF in 1946, rising first through the party’s union activities and eventually through its political bureau and central committee to become the party’s General Secretary in 1972. The main section of this chapter will examine examples of discourse taken from the period spanning the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, during which Georges Marchais articulated a reaction to independent voices within the PCF challenging the party’s assumptions about the basis of its support. In the subsequent section we will analyse how Marchais articulated the PCF’s responses to two events which may be seen as questioning the traditional communist party’s raison d’être: the failed coup attempt staged by old guard communists in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 and the referendum on greater European union which took place in France on 20 September 1992. Proceeding from the assumption that the act of speaking, especially in the context of leadership discourse, expresses a set of power relations, we will illustrate how even in a tightly organised counter-culture like the PCF, the growing disinclination to accept the ideology of disinterested

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representation sustaining the symbolic power of Marchais’ discourse rendered his utterances less performative,4 and therefore less effective and led them to be viewed increasingly as those of an apparatchik seeking to sustain his personal position.

The voice of the party? For the major part of the twentieth century the principal myth that has conditioned the discourse of the communist left has been that of the saviour-class, the proletariat, and the historical mission on which it was embarked. This myth was sustained by the principle of democratic centralism, which enabled the leader to enunciate the reality of the party and to articulate its existence, his authority to do so being derived from his place at the top of a hierarchy whose legitimate voice he embodied. Given the importance of the myth of the saviour-class in the communist constituency, it is hard to see how an attempt to redefine that myth could fail to undermine it, and with it the authority of the leader’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 22nd Congress from 4 to 8 February 1976 that the decision was announced by Marchais to drop the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as the ultimate objective of the PCF’s mission; the 1976 congress was a classic example of what has been termed the ‘oracle’ effect which leads to the monopolisation of collective truth by the delegate authorised to speak.5 Our guiding concern will be to examine whether dissolving the crowning ambition which defines the PCF also dissolves the unique authority of its General Secretary to speak, and to assess the discursive strategies employed by Marchais to defend this symbolic capital. Furthermore, we shall adduce those voices that challenged Marchais’. This challenge came, first, from those individuals who, though communist, derived their linguistic credit or capital from their intellectual activities (in academia, the media, the arts) rather than from the role assigned to them by the party; second, from those party functionaries who rejected the principle that their authority to speak was merely a provisional transfer of the symbolic capital held by party alone.6 In his presentation of the report of the central committee to the Congress, Marchais explains the reappraisal of what we have termed the myth 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 [. . .].

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Le pouvoir qui conduira la transformation socialiste de la société sera le pouvoir de la classe ouvrière et des autres catégories de travailleurs [. . .]. Quant au prolétariat, il évoque aujourd’hui le noyau, le coeur de la classe ouvrière. Si son rôle est essentiel, il ne représente pas la totalité de celle-ci [. . .]. Il est donc évident que l’on ne peut qualifier de ‘dictature du prolétariat’ ce que nous proposons aux travailleurs, à notre peuple. (If the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has been dropped [. . .] this is because it does not convey the full reality of our policy [. . .]. The power that will lead the socialist transformation of society will be the power of the working class and of all the other categories of workers [. . .]. As for the proletariat, it evokes today the core, the heart of the working class. Though its role is essential, it does not represent the working class in total [. . .]. It is therefore clear that what we propose 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 the working class was a minority of the active population in France. The make-up of French society had become pluralistic and diverse and it was therefore up to the PCF to benefit from this diversity by offering the new social strata comprising it a new kind of unity in pursuit of their common interests. Marchais stresses the importance of the class struggle and of organisation if the working class is to win: [. . .] seule comme classe, la classe ouvrière peut conduire au succès la lutte révolutionnaire. Ses intérêts vitaux, sa puissance numérique, sa grande concentration, son expérience de la lutte des classes et son organisation en font pour aujourd’hui et pour demain la force dirigeante du combat pour une société nouvelle. ([. . .] only the working class can successfully pursue the class struggle. Its vital interests, its strength in numbers, the way this is powerfully concentrated, its experience of the class struggle and its organisation make it, today and in the future, the driving force in the struggle for a new society.)8 ‘Working class’, ‘class struggle’ and ‘organisation’ remain crucial terms in Marchais’ leadership discourse on this occasion. As we noted earlier, Marchais could be considered a communist archetype: the kind of member who had little economic or social capital

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before joining the party, who was empowered to speak with authority by it, and the authority of whose discourse was dependent on it. By way of contrast, communist intellectuals possess, in their own right, a certain capital, that is, benefit from a certain credence and recognition as academics, writers, artists and so on. Therefore, in the struggle for the political capital of a party like the PCF, the latter group are edged out by the former, composed of those in whom the party has invested and who in turn have invested in it not only their career prospects but also their social and psychological identity. When Marchais says ‘we’ in his appeal to the intellectuals critical of the party’s bunker mentality vis-à-vis other left-wing parties, he speaks as the moral voice which serves only the party, appealing to those whose discourse is implicitly portrayed as self-serving: Nous disons aux intellectuels des différentes disciplines: votre activité crée pour la nation des richesses, des valeurs irremplaçables. Vous contribuez, dans des domaines où personne ne peut le faire à votre place, à frayer les chemins de l’avenir. Mais vous êtes aujourd’hui frappés dans votre situation, dans votre travail créateur, dans votre espérance. Rejoignez l’Union du peuple de France pour ouvrir la voie au renouveau du pays. (We say this to intellectuals of different disciplines: your activity creates wealth for the nation and irreplaceable values. You blaze a trail towards the future by working in fields where no one can take your place. But you have suffered in your endeavours, in your creative work and in your hopes. Join the union of the French people in order to pave the way for the renewal of the country.)9 The criticisms articulated by the intellectuals were revived and amplified by the chorus of dissenting voices following the legislative elections of March 1978. The elections had seemed to promise much to the Communist and Socialist partners in the Common Programme, but their failure on 21–22 September 1977 to reach an agreement on the implementation of their blueprint for government was to damage the credibility of the Left in the period leading up to the election and the parties of the Right squeezed into power with 50.5 per cent of the votes. The issue that provoked outrage among communist intellectuals was the interpretation of the result by the political bureau of the PCF, which denied that the party had any responsibility for the Left’s defeat. Breaking a key principle of democratic centralism – that dissenting

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views should not be aired outside of party structures or the party press – a declaration appeared in Le Monde on 6 April 1978 denouncing the authoritarian pronouncement of the political bureau and its parody of a discussion. It was signed by some of the party’s leading intellectual figures: Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Guy Bois, Georges Labica, JeanPierre Lefebvre and Maurice Moissonnier. Equally indicative of the change in the attitudes shaping the shared beliefs that sustain the symbolic power of leadership discourse in the PCF was the reaction of Henri Fiszbin to the defeat of March 1978. Though one of a younger generation of activists born just before the war, Fiszbin was nonetheless a ‘militant’. He was a man shaped by the party apparatus. However, ignoring that the authority delegated to him to speak as first secretary of the Paris federation could only be used to serve the institution of the PCF, he and a number of colleagues presumed to speak openly in their own right, with the consequence that the authority delegated to them was subsequently withdrawn. When they criticised the report Marchais presented to the central committee in the aftermath of the elections, which amounted essentially to a lengthy self-justification at the expense of the PS, plus approval for the ‘Finlandisation’ of Europe by the USSR, Fiszbin in particular came under pressure which led ultimately to his resignation from his post in January 1979, ostensibly on the grounds of ill-health. In the account that he finally published of the affair, Fiszbin produced a letter from Georges Marchais that illustrated in written form the kind of discursive strategy increasingly characteristic of Marchais’ attempts to monopolise the political capital of the PCF and to give his discourse its symbolic power. Marchais writes: ‘Permets-moi d’ajouter un mot en mon nom personnel. Tu dis dans ta lettre que tu n’as jamais “hésité à [t’] exprimer avec [moi] ou d’autres camarades de la direction”, et tu ajoutes avoir le sentiment d’être un “militant responsable et discipliné”. Eh bien! C’est précisément des qualités non seulement que j’apprécie mais que j’estime indispensables pour tout membre du Comité central’. (‘Let me add a word or two in my own name. You say in your letter that you have never “hesitated to express [yourself] to [me] or other comrades in the leadership”, and you add that you consider yourself a “responsible and disciplined activist”. Well! Those are precisely the qualities which I not only value but regard as indispensable in any member of the central committee’.)

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The switch to ‘we’ marks the symbolic takeover of the power which allows Marchais to pronounce censure. Marchais enjoins Fiszbin to admit his failures and those of the Paris federation, just as the party leadership was prepared to admit its lapses when necessary: ‘Et lorsque cela s’avère nécessaire nous n’hésitons pas à dire publiquement, pour les corriger, nos défauts et insuffisances’ [. . .].10 (And when it is necessary in order to correct them, we don’t hesitate to declare our faults and failings publicly.) The voices of the intellectuals could not be stilled in the same way as that of a party professional like Fiszbin. Faced by the criticism articulated by communist intellectuals, the PCF leadership organised a great debate at the Jean Vilar theatre in Vitry on 9–10 December 1978, between the political bureau and almost 400 communist intellectuals. It was the kind of heated debate not seen in the party since the 1920s and was marked by Marchais’ pugnacious defence of the leadership’s analysis of the reasons for the failure of the Left in the legislative elections of the previous March. The experience of Vitry was referred to in a significant manner in Marchais’ presentation of the central committee report to the delegates at the PCF’s 23rd Congress in Saint-Ouen, 9–13 May 1979. Positioning himself at the centre of the debate, Marchais frames his reference to the conclusions reached then, in such a way as to reassert his monopoly of the authority to speak: A la fin de la rencontre de Vitry, j’ai indiqué notamment: ‘Je souhaite que, ni d’un côté ni de l’autre, les positions restent figées [. . .]. Autrement dit, que l’on réfléchisse pour avancer.’ (As I indicated notably at the end of the meeting in Vitry: ‘I hope that 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 the conduit for the authority delegated to him, and distinguishes him from the 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 les engagements seront tenus.

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(The political bureau, on behalf of the central committee, has made commitments: they won’t be accomplished in a day and they will only be accomplished in cooperation with you, but the commitments will be honoured.)11 The implication that he is disinterested, whereas the intellectuals are self-interested, emerges in the section entitled, ‘Unité du parti ne signifie pas uniformité’: Je le dis avec force: [. . .] Il n’y a pas plusieurs espèces de communistes. L’unité du parti, c’est l’unité de tous les membres du parti sur la base des objectifs fondamentaux qu’ils définissent ensemble et pour lesquels ils luttent ensemble. (Let me say this emphatically: [. . .] there are not several species of communists. Unity of the party means unity of all the members of the party on the basis of fundamental objectives which they define together and for which they struggle together.)12 Having alluded to the organisational principle which defines the institutional reality of the PCF, Marchais evokes the myth it sustains (the progress of the saviour-class), and uses the traditional vocabulary which alone possesses the appropriate totemic resonance: the vocabulary of ‘struggle’. Thus when he articulates his final injunction to the intellectuals, Marchais, as the moral voice of the party, is vested with full power and authority: ‘Nous les convions à lutter’ (We invite the intellectuals to 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 communist discourse from the inherited doctrinal control of party discourse and direct it towards that of a personalised populism. 14 But as our references to the 22nd Congress suggest, the success of such a strategy was bound to be limited. An attempt at the 23rd Congress to foster a personalised populism, sustained by the endeavour at the preceding Congress to redefine the party’s foundation myth with Marchais as the helmsman, did not possess the mobilising quality which distinguished the foundation myth of the saviour-class. The debate at Vitry which preceded the 23rd Congress showed, not for the first time in the history of the PCF, what occurs when intellectuals confront the fundamental contradiction of Bolshevik-type revolutionary organisations in a hostile society: the resort to authoritarianism

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by that organisation. Although Marchais successfully asserts the unique legitimacy of his voice at the 23rd Congress, the future effectiveness of that voice is not secured. In the report to the 22nd and 23rd Congresses what we see pre-figured is a discourse that is trapped and ultimately self-defeating. Marchais himself identifies some of the changes affecting the constituency to which his discourse is addressed (greater pluralism, social diversity, the shrinking size of the working class in proportion to the rest of the population and so on). What is set in train therefore is the circular movement or, more aptly, the circumlocution of the speaker who, knowing that the framework of shared beliefs and collective values that sustains his discourse is breaking down, is nonetheless obliged to refer to them. By the time of the PCF’s 24th Congress at Saint-Ouen, from 4 to 7 February 1982, the monopoly of collective truth in Marchais’ discourse is unchallengeable by the voices of the intellectuals, not because the party has revoked their membership, but because Marchais’ position as the ‘oracle’ of the party has enabled him to exercise the constraint or symbolic violence necessary to defeat these voices. Building on the change articulated at the 23rd Congress, Marchais opens out the appeal to the intellectuals to include groups like engineers and managers. In this way, by dissolving them in a larger group of ‘intellectual workers’ Marchais turns the focus away from those creative activities which make intellectuals independent producers of political capital; secondly, he can now stigmatise their grievances about differentials, professional status, and so on. [. . .] nous n’ignorons pas que l’origine sociale, la formation, le mode de vie des travailleurs intellectuels de toutes catégories les conduisent à sous-estimer la dimension de classe des problèmes qui les touchent, à concevoir souvent le rassemblement avec la classe ouvrière comme un marché de dupes où ils perdraient leur identité, leur spécificité professionnelle et leur responsabilité sociale. [. . .] nous nous efforçons et nous efforcerons de dissiper ces malentendus. Car il nous faut gagner les intellectuels au combat pour le socialisme. ([. ..] we are quite aware of the fact that the social origin, the education and the lifestyle of intellectual workers of all categories lead them to underestimate the class-based element in the problems that affect them and often to perceive the rally to the working class as a fool’s bargain which would lead them to lose their identity, their professional status and their social responsibility. [. . .] we will continue to

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endeavour to dispel these misunderstandings. Because we must win the intellectuals over to the struggle for socialism.) 15 Significantly, Marchais’ report to the PCF’s 25th Congress at L’Ile Saint-Denis from 6 to 10 February 1985 was without the usual section evoking the PCF’s alliance with the intellectuals. Instead, he now faced a 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 the authority of his own voice – could not erase the wider social changes impacting on the party’s accepted legitimacy. Worse, the call to ‘party discipline’ in pursuit of the goal of the saviour-class was diminishing in effectiveness vis-à-vis a membership now more accustomed to the individualism and other attractions of the system they were supposed to overcome. The symbolic power of leadership discourse in the context of the PCF exists, we have seen, because those persons submitting to it believe that it embodies the disinterested defence and advancement of their interests. By the mid-1980s, therefore, the authority of Marchais’ discourse faced the challenge not only of the intellectuals but also from those members delegated to speak in the lower levels of the apparatus. This development had been clearly signalled in Limoges in June 1984 by the central committee member Pierre Juquin who made a speech calling for a reappraisal of all the party’s fundamental assumptions. This reappraisal would respect no taboos and even turn the spotlight on the party’s organisational core: democratic centralism. In his report to the 25th Congress, Marchais refers to Pierre Juquin’s accusation that the leadership has ducked the challenge of critical selfappraisal, and reacts with a vigorous self-justification: Bien sûr que la direction du Parti – j’ai envie de dire: toutes les directions, à tous les niveaux – ne prétend pas que son action à été, en tout point de vue et en toutes circonstances, sans défauts et sans insuffisances! 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 the leadership of all kinds at all levels – doesn’t pretend that its actions have been, in every respect and in all circumstances, faultless and unfailing! The draft resolution recognises this. And in any case, who could claim to be any different?)16

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A compromise was reached at the 25th Congress in which Juquin was re-elected not to the political bureau of the party but to its central committee, together with two other members sympathetic to his views, Marcel Rigout and Félix Damette. By the time of the party’s 26th Congress at Saint-Ouen from 2 to 6 December 1987, the compromise had proved to be a dramatic failure. Having absented himself from the central committee meeting which the previous May had unanimously endorsed André Lajoinie as the PCF’s presidential candidate for the contest in 1988, in June, Pierre Juquin resigned from the central committee and, as we have described in the preceding chapter, on 12 October made an unprecedented challenge to Marchais and the party leadership by announcing his decision to stand as a communist presidential candidate in opposition to Lajoinie. As a consequence of placing himself in such unequivocal competition with the party, Juquin precipitated his own expulsion two days later. In his report to the 26th Congress, Marchais is dismissive when referring to Juquin, because the authority he has usurped has been restored to the party. Unlike Marchais, Juquin has no mandate, therefore he has no voice: [. . .] au parti communiste, Juquin ne représente rien. [. . .] Dans une interview récente, Juquin avait par exemple expliqué qu’il avait passé ‘des années à essayer de faire bouger les choses de l’intérieur’ et qu’il avait ‘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 a recent interview Juquin explained how he had spent ‘years trying to change things from within’ and that he had ‘decided to appeal to the grassroots after 1980’. [. . .] Those who defended these positions at the time have been defeated.)17 The dismissal of Juquin’s charges that the party is being crippled by its organisational constraints and as a consequence is failing the challenge of facing up to change is followed by an attempt to dress the old mobilising myth of the PCF in the apparel of modernity: ‘Le Parti communiste est le seul parti vraiment moderne’, affirme notre projet de résolution. [...] Moderne, notre parti l’est parce que sa réflexion s’appuie sur une théorie révolutionnaire, le marxisme, le socialisme scientifique; parce qu’il agit avec une pratique politique nouvelle; parce qu’il possède un mode de fonctionnement réellement démocratique.

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(Our draft resolution affirms that ‘the Communist Party is the only truly modern party’. [. . .] Our party is modern because its ideas rest on a revolutionary theory, Marxism, scientific socialism; because it operates through a new political practice; because it possesses a mode of functioning which is really democratic.)18 After a traditional analysis of the economic and social exploitation in French society which, he argues, makes the imperatives of Marxism more appropriate than ever, Marchais then goes on to encapsulate what the 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’est d’être eux-mêmes. C’est-à-dire des lutteurs, des combattants qui sont toujours là lorsqu’il faut se dresser contre l’injustice, l’oppression, le malheur des faibles. (As I have said, what we expect of communists is simple: it’s for them to be themselves. It’s for them to be fighters, combatants who are always there when there is a need to rise up against injustice, oppression and 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 by the French presidential election of 1988, which came in the spring following the PCF’s 26th Congress. Their official candidate, André Lajoinie, took only a 6.7 per cent share of the vote in the first round on 24 April 1988, suggesting that a substantial number of PCF members had opted straightaway for the vote utile and cast their vote for the best placed left-wing candidate, Socialist François Mitterrand. As with the aftermath of the PCF’s disappointing performance in the legislative elections a decade earlier, the period following the presidential election of 1988 gave rise to voices which criticised the PCF leadership and which showed little regard for the constraints of a democratic centralism designed to ensure that the PCF was a party united in purpose and in the expression of that purpose. But in contrast to the period 1978–80, the voices raised in criticism of the party leadership after 1988 suggested that if Marchais was not abusing the mandate that authorised him to speak for the party, he certainly misunderstood it.

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In October 1989, Charles Fiterman, a central committee member and one of the four Communist ministers in the Socialist government between 1981 and 1984, began a long and sustained criticism of Marchais’ leadership which continued until the latter’s decision not to stand again as a candidate for the post of General Secretary of the party in 1994. In 1989, in a letter to the central committee, Fiterman criticised the PCF’s tendency under Marchais to constantly raise the stakes politically on all manner of issues simply for the sake of distinguishing itself 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 communist parties authoritarian: Certes, il fut un temps, dont j’ai parlé, où notre principe de fonctionnement, le centralisme démocratique, fut dévoyé sous l’influence de ce qui se pratiquait en Union Soviétique. La direction du parti exerçait alors sur celui-ci un pouvoir qui ne lui revient pas; le culte de la personnalité des dirigeants était encouragé; l’appel à la discipline se substituait souvent à l’effort réel de conviction. (There was certainly a time, of which I have spoken, when the principle governing the way we function, democratic centralism, went off course under the influence of what was being practised in the Soviet Union. The party leadership interpreted it in a way to which it was not entitled; the cult of personality was encouraged; the demand for discipline was often a substitute for the genuine effort born of conviction.)21 It soon becomes clear, however, that in the absence of an alternative organising principle, Marchais is forced to reinterpret the principle of democratic centralism, which he admits had been exploited by the leadership, now portraying it to the Congress as the dynamic for the future democratisation and modernisation of the party: La discussion préparatoire a permis de vérifier l’attachement de la très grande majorité des communistes à ce principe, et notamment leur rejet d’une organisation en ‘courants’ ou en fractions. En même temps, l’idée se dégage clairement que nous n’avons pas épuisé toutes les possibilités démocratiques que ce principe recèle. (The preliminary discussion has demonstrated the attachment of the great majority of communists to this principle, and notably their

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rejection of a party organised into ‘tendencies’ or factions. At the same time what is clearly emerging is that we have not exhausted all the democratic potential inherent in this principle.)22 The way in which democratic centralism evolved, particularly in communist parties within representative democracies, meant that it became the essential means of justifying the ‘universal’ voice of the Party. As we have seen from our analysis, it also became essential to the specific form of leadership the PCF had taken during the Fifth Republic. Much of the period of Marchais’ leadership of the PCF throughout the 1970s and 1980s is characterised by his attempt to maintain this form of leadership and protect it from challenges. Let us conclude by citing two events which challenged, in the first case, the PCF’s traditional fidelity to the communist establishment in Moscow and, in the second case, the PCF’s traditional interpretation of its position vis-à-vis the wider capitalist world. The purpose of these examples is to illustrate how the discursive strategies employed by Marchais to articulate a response to these events were strategies of failure, trapped by the inability to rebuild the homology of interest between himself and the party members or to appeal to a new basis of shared belief. As a result of this failure Marchais’ discourse declined in symbolic power and was perceived as 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 communist hardliners in August 1991 elicited a response from the PCF leadership that was, paradoxically, both surprising and predictable. The most striking aspect of the formal PCF response to the coup attempt is its circumspectness, if not indeed its reluctance to condemn forthrightly the hardline communist conspirators. The statement put out by the political bureau on 19 August 1991 mentions neither ‘coup’ nor ‘putsch’, and expresses its disquiet at the apparent ousting of Gorbachev in the following manner: ‘Nous estimons que les conditions d’éviction de Mikhail Gorbatchev de ses responsabilités sont inacceptables’ (We believe the conditions in which Mikhail Gorbatchev has been relieved of his duties are not acceptable).23

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When, on the same day, Georges Marchais was asked for his response to the events in Moscow, his reaction was the same. His feelings, he said, were those of: Regret et inquiétude. Regret de la méthode employée pour renverser Mikhail Gorbatchev; le Bureau politique de notre parti, qui vient de se réunir, l’a qualifiée ‘d’inacceptable’ – c’est le mot qui convient. [. . .] Et inquiétude, bien sûr, pour ce qui va se passer maintenant. [. . .] En tout cas, j’ai, pour ma part, une conviction, qui est aussi celle de mon parti: pour répondre aux exigences contemporaines, une société socialiste ne peut être que l’œuvre créatrice du peuple, est c’est à lui qu’il appartient, en toute indépendance, de trouver ses solutions aux problèmes qui lui sont posés. En Union soviétique comme partout ailleurs, toute autre voie que celle de la modernisation, donc de la démocratisation, ne peut que condamner le socialisme à l’échec, comme l’expérience en a été faite avant 1985. [. . .] Telle est, je le répète, ma conviction. (Regret and anxiety. Regret at the method employed for bringing down Mikhail Gorbachev – the political bureau of our party, which has just met, has called it ‘unacceptable’, which is appropriate. [. ..] And anxiety, of course, about what will happen now. [. ..] In any case, for my part, I have a conviction which is also shared by my party: in order to respond to the demands of today, a socialist society can only be created by 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 everywhere else, the choice of any road other than modernisation, and therefore democratisation, can only condemn socialism to failure, as experience showed before 1985. [.. .] That, I repeat, is my conviction.)24 Affirmations like ‘for my part’, ‘I repeat’, ‘my conviction’ are highly significant here; yet instead of signalling an aggressive discursive takeover of authority by the speaker, they are indicative rather of a discursive repli or retreat. By passing between himself and the party as it were, and thus shifting the focus of attention from himself as party spokesperson and himself as an observer of events, Marchais’ discourse is an apt example of personalised damage-limitation. The decline in the unique authority of Marchais’ discourse as the moral voice of the PCF was underlined by what occurred in the press conference given by Charles Fiterman ten days later. Fiterman roundly condemned the ‘quartet of nostalgic Stalinists’ chiefly responsible for the coup attempt and expressed his regret that the PCF leadership had not been forthcoming in its reaction:

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As a member of the political bureau of the French Communist Party, I suffered from not hearing its leadership say the things it should have said and take the initiatives it should have taken. The coup d’état should have been condemned immediately, by calling things by their proper name.25 Fiterman’s final sentence implied criticism of Marchais as a closet Stalinist who sympathised with the coup leaders, and yet whose real sin was one of language: the refusal to speak honestly and say courageously what one felt. When the PCF central committee met on 20–21 May 1992 to debate the Maastricht referendum and its implications, the report presented by Francis Wurtz, a Communist Party Member of European Parliament (MEP), explained the basis for the PCF’s campaign for a ‘no’ vote. In essence, the treaty was designed to serve the Europe of the financiers and multinationals, to the detriment of social benefits and those in need of them; it would lead to an attempt to undermine the rights of workers; it would generally undermine democracy in France.26 The ensuing debate was marked by the emergence of three positions on the Maastricht issue that remained irreconcilable and appeared to elicit the greatest passion from Marchais on the matter of procedure rather than on substance. For Philippe Herzog, the PCF should have been steering its efforts in the direction of a renegotiation of the terms of the treaty in order to build a European Union that was orientated leftwards. For Charles Fiterman, the ‘all or nothing’ approach being adopted by the PCF was not an adequate way to progress towards a united states of Europe. Marchais, however, appeared to reserve his suspicion for any discourse that had not been properly conditioned by the party’s institutional procedures. While affirming his support for the creation of a ‘pluridisciplinary group’ to study the points raised by Francis Wurtz’s report and the reactions to them, Marchais expressed his principal concern as being the need to ‘work together’ and he reserved his most pointed comments for those who, he argued, had attempted to abuse the procedure governing the kind of discussion in which they were engaged and then pretended that they had been deprived of a voice. Referring to Charles Fiterman’s attempt to introduce his own document for discussion on the eve of the meeting and his rejection of the compromise offered, Marchais says: [. . .] la bonne méthode, c’est la discussion, la confrontation des idées, la participation critique et constructive de chacun à la

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réflexion et à la décision communes. [. . .] Eh bien, moi, je persiste, avec les communistes, à vouloir ‘travailler ensemble’. Et ça, ce n’est pas de la procédure, ce n’est pas: ‘article 1, article 2, etc.’ Non, le ‘travailler ensemble’, cela suppose un effort de chacun, un effort mutuel, une volonté. ([. . .] the right method is discussion, the confrontation of ideas, the critical and constructive participation of everyone in collective debate and decision-making. [. . .] As for me, I’ll stick with the Communists in 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 effort from 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 determining homology of interest is between the leadership and the party apparatus which supports it, a discourse aimed at securing the leadership’s dominant position. However, the party of tendencies he had argued against had become a reality, and the challenge to the authority of his discourse begun by the intellectuals was, in the closing years of his tenure as PCF General Secretary, being carried by some of his most talented colleagues on the party’s most powerful bodies. Even some dominant members of the apparatus now failed to unite behind his voice. In what would have once been severely sanctioned as evidence of factionalism, Philippe Herzog, a leading party economist, continued his campaign for a qualified ‘no’ aimed at the creation of a better European Union, and this in the pages of the non-party press.28 Charles Fiterman, as the recognised leader of the refondateur tendency in the PCF, and Marcel Rigout, as the recognised leader of the reconstructeur29 tendency, campaigned together with personalities from other parties in highly publicised meetings like the one held at la Mutualité in Paris on 9 September 1992, in favour of a ‘creative no’ aimed at uniting and mobilising the forces for social change in France.30

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

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communist mayor of the commune of Arcueil, Marcel Trigon, who was in open and vociferous rebellion against the PCF leadership.31 At the central committee meeting of 16 June 1993, convened to prepare the ground for the PCF’s 28th Congress scheduled for 25–29 January 1994, Marchais introduced a report calling for the abandonment of the principle of democratic centralism and its replacement with the principle of ‘democracy’. In response to suggestions that this was simply the belated acceptance of a reality that had already existed for some time, Marchais affirmed that there was no contradiction or absurdity about being communist and having profound disagreements over party policy but denied that this marked a fundamental transformation 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’il a été abondamment démontré qu’un tel fonctionnement n’est pas démocratique. (Perhaps some people will ask: what then is being proposed? Organised factions and tendencies? I will answer ‘no’, because it has been amply demonstrated that a party which functions in this way is not democratic.)32 Thus, six months before the party’s 28th Congress, Marchais appeared to relinquish his attachment to a principle whose democratic potential he had praised at the 27th Congress. He also signalled his intention to relinquish his post as General Secretary at the 28th Congress (later confirmed by letter to the central committee on 28 September 1993). How, in practice, a simple commitment to ‘democracy’ could provide a new organisational principle for a party whose identity had been so powerfully conditioned by the myth of the saviour-class and the pursuit of its end was something on which Marchais did not elaborate. The other key question left unanswered, unless this amounted to a de facto acceptance of the ‘social-democratisation’ of the party, concerned the specificity 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 the party’s 28th Congress on 29 January 1994, although enthusiastically acclaimed by the bulk of the activists present, was condemned by the refondateurs as further illustration of the leadership’s autoreproduction,33 and the final session was marked by Fiterman’s public announcement of his departure from the central committee. Hue’s leadership was both

138 The Seeds of Failure

an indication of how the party had come to realise the bankruptcy of Marchais’ leadership, and of how the old guard still clung to power. Marchais’ attempt finally to distance himself from the principle of democratic centralism ultimately exemplified a discourse that was underwritten by little credit or credibility. This marked the end of the process begun in the 1970s when Marchais became the oracle of the saviour-class, largely to counter the challenge posed by François Mitterrand; continued during the 1980s when his discourse portrayed him as the personification of the oracle party, in response to the growing chorus of dissenting voices within the PCF; and concluded in the l990s, as Marchais’ floundering efforts to embody the party discursively led to an increasing reliance on the authority of the party’s institutions to compensate for the declining authority of his own voice. The question posed by the departing Fiterman at the time, as to whether the PCF had not already ceased to exist, was undoubtedly coloured by the personal despair of a communist who had lost his faith. But it did presage the broader question that we will address in Part III: is there still a role for the PCF?

Part III A Party Without a Role?

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7 A Tale of Clashing Counter-cultures

Introduction In the previous chapter we analysed the way in which Marchais’ leadership discourse became introverted to the point of no longer being able to convince his own party members of its pertinence. In the current chapter we shall open up this theme to look more broadly at the relationship between the party and the national community whose belief in the mission of the PCF was in manifest decline. Whether it was the open challenge to the PCF of an erstwhile party functionary like Pierre Juquin, or the forlorn attempts to reform the party from the inside by distinguished but disenchanted members like Charles Fiterman (especially when faced with what they believed to be the failures of Georges Marchais’ leadership), their actions added to the evidence of a lack of synchronicity between the PCF and the society it aspired to change, and even between the party and the members it purported to serve. But the actions of Juquin and Fiterman marked the ultimate phase in a long-term process of change that pointed to the need for a reappraisal of the sense of 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 understood itself, had been as a refuge from the exploitation characteristic of capitalist society and the superstructure of oppressive values it generated. As a consequence, apart from the overthrow of that system, the defining mission of the party was to offer an alternative set of values around which to organise the collective existence of its members: a counter-culture. By the 1980s, the calls for change by rénovateurs and contestataires like the ones mentioned above suggested that not only had the party failed in its counter-cultural mission, but that in a sense that mission had 141

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been turned on it head, in that the attitudes that defined the party had themselves become fixed and oppressive. A change had occurred whereby the counter-culture had hardened into a set of positions that, instead of offering a dynamic alternative to the legacy of velvet authoritarianism bequeathed to the Republic by de Gaulle, provided, rather, another facet of the dogmatism that the new generation which grew up during the Fifth Republic perceived as the major obstacle to a new and liberated experience of life. The contradictions in the PCF attitude to the student uprisings in May 1968 were indicative of a generational dysjunct with a new cohort of young people animated by a much more diffuse and much less ideologically regimented understanding of revolutionary change than the PCF. But that dysjunct became both generalised outside the party and internalised, as the intellectual credibility or even relevance of its positions came under scrutiny. This perception of an erstwhile counter-cultural force that was failing its rendezvous with the changes in French society inevitably begs the question as to whether these failures were punctual, in the French sense, that is, purely due to bad timing, or profound in that the challenges posed by change were being addressed by plural countercultures that were not underpinned by the totalising vision underlying that of the PCF. What was incontrovertible, however, was that the failure of the PCF to promote its values and win the intellectual arguments had a detrimental effect on its material survival as an organisation, and left it at the end of the twentieth century pondering what strategies to employ to ensure its continued existence.

May 1968: A generational dysjunct In fairness to the PCF, all the major political parties were caught off-balance when the pent-up frustrations of a materially privileged generation of young people exploded onto the public consciousness in May 1968. The remarkable period of dynamic modernisation in the economy following World War II had resulted in an economic miracle that had left growth rates in Britain far behind and allowed France to overtake even West Germany in the year on year rate of growth. The economic boom, coupled with the baby boom, had led to unprecedented expansion in tertiary education, with the numbers of students rising from 215,000 to 508,000 between 1960 and 1968. In hindsight, it is easy to see that such growth carried the seeds of inevitable crisis, given the failure in infrastructure investment that should have allowed the universities to cope with such a rapid increase in student numbers.1

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Less tangible but no less real was the general inability in the political mainstream to read the depth of dismay among young people at what they felt was the ambient sense of asphyxiation created by the benevolent authoritarianism of the de Gaulle regime, and it was this dismay which spilled violently onto the streets following the afternoon of 3 May, when the police entered the Sorbonne to arrest the student protesters who had barricaded themselves inside. Unlike many other parties, however, the PCF was, in theory, better placed to pick up the rumblings of discontent before they exploded. Party activists were well established among university teaching staff and the Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) provided a vehicle for the party to reach out to the student body. In fact, 1968 had been marked by good intentions when in the February of that year the PCF started a series of forums for students in support of the right to higher education and a more democratic university structure. But in reality the PCF had lost influence when control of the main university teachers’ union, Syndicat national de l’enseignement supérieur (SNESup), slipped from its grasp, and its ability to attract students through the UEC was diminished as a result of the purges and internal wrangling that the union had had to endure. In ideological terms, the 1960s were marked by a doctrinal effervescence that had led to the PCF being outflanked on the Left in its potential to appeal to young people looking for radical solutions for society’s problems. Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists and libertarians of every stripe 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 and orientation, and had compromised the progress of worldwide revolution because of its accommodations with state power and the privileged relationships with bureaucracies inside and outside the communist movement. For the Maoists, the PCF had renounced its hard-edged Stalinist inheritance by renouncing violence as a means of effecting revolutionary change. From diverse quarters on the extreme left, there was a perception of the PCF as reformist or revisionist to the point of having fatally betrayed the notion of revolution. The apparent success of an anti-capitalist, anti-American revolution in Cuba, and the war in Vietnam had led to an uncritical cult of admiration for Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and a corresponding contempt for the non-violent campaign of solidarity organised by the PCF in sympathy with those struggles. It is noteworthy that at one of the flashpoints for the student uprising in May, the campus at the university of Nanterre, on 26 April the Maoist faction

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among the student body had forcibly prevented Pierre Juquin from holding a meeting with university lecturers, in his capacity as the central committee member with responsibility for those relations. It was not surprising therefore that when the student discontent erupted into violence the official line of the PCF leadership should be one of severe criticism with regard to the student leaders from the extreme left. Georges Marchais was in no doubt, when he spoke for the party in the columns of L’Humanité on 3 May, that the most high profile of the agitators, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was a German anarchist from a privileged bourgeois background who, with his band of pseudo-revolutionaries, was simply providing ammunition for the Gaullist regime and the monopoly capitalism that was supporting it. The effect of the party line emanating from L’Humanité was to drive the wedge between the PCF and the student body even deeper, and Marchais’ comments were particularly ill-timed since their publication coincided with the day on which the police entered the precinct of the Sorbonne, in what was seen by the majority of students, as a manifest injustice aimed at curtailing their freedom of expression. On the one hand, there was an understandable frustration on the part of the PCF that the action of the students had undermined their own approach to the challenge of changing French society. The heady rhetoric of the students and the willingness of the more extreme elements to resort to violence could legitimately be seen as counter-productive, by a party that had invested its legendary discipline and patience in a strategy of unifying the Left in a pacific pursuit of power that would validate its claims to be an acceptable party of government. By allowing the Right to tar all elements 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’s legitimate accession to power. On the other hand, there was a deeper, more ideological, and in the eyes of its critics, less forgivable dimension to the PCF’s reticence vis-à-vis the student revolutionaries. The students had, in a sense, usurped the role of the working class, led by the party, in its struggle to overcome the forces of capitalism. This was a major grievance for a party steeped in the traditions and myths of proletarian struggle, to the extent that those traditions and myths structured both the organisation of the party and the superstructure of values that defined it. And this sense of grievance was exacerbated by the view the PCF formed of the social origins of the student agitators: offspring of a petty bourgeosie who had profited from the advent of mass higher education and who would eventually enter professional life in the service of bourgeois interests.

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The difficulty for the PCF lay in the fact that the criticisms of the system voiced by the students in Paris resonated across French society, eliciting demonstrations of solidarity from fellow-students in the provinces. Moreover, while middle-class or aspiring to be so, the parents of the students in question saw them neither as rogue elements troubling the progress of the Left as the PCF might see them, or as purveyors of an anarchic threat to the foundations of civilised society, as the Right might portray them. Furthermore, in their clashes with the students the actions of the forces of law and order showed that when the velvet glove was removed from the authoritarian hand of the de Gaulle regime, the consequences could be very brutal. All political considerations aside, the students benefited from the widespread feeling that the violence sometimes exercised by the police was out of proportion to the real threat posed by the students.2 In the first battle with the police, following the ejection of the students from the Sorbonne, the indiscriminate blows inflicted by the forces of law and order on passers-by as well as students could have been explained by the panic in the police ranks at the feeling of being overwhelmed numerically, and by a situation most of them had never faced before. By the end of the rioting that took place three days later in the Latin Quarter, during the night of the sixth, the authorities appeared to have lost the media battle. Having spent most of that encounter with the students on the back foot and sustaining a high number of casualties in the face of organised violence by the leading agitators, after the police finally outmanoeuvred the students they hunted down the fleeing stragglers with the brutality born of pent-up frustration. When the minister responsible, Alain Peyrefitte, appeared on the news that evening, the validity of the legal basis for the actions of the authorities did little to assuage the ruffled sensibilities of many viewers.3 The general public, not yet alarmed by what the wider consequences of these challenges to public order might be, seemed to have given way to a natural sympathy for the wayward idealism of youth against the dour face of authority. The PCF therefore found itself out of step with not only the natural constituency of rebellion, the young, but also the older constituency represented by many of their parents. When the realisation dawned that it was being left behind by the changing mood of French society, the party began to adjust its aim. On 7 May the party leadership acknowledged that the students had a legitimate grievance and turned its fire on the government. Following the rioting that had reached its height over the barricades in the Latin Quarter during the early hours, on 11 May an official PCF communiqué condemned the repressive

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measures employed by the police and for the first time appealed to workers 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 solidarity by resorting to a general strike on the thirteenth. The party’s political bureau even made a virtue of the new unity between the students and the working class, as a means of establishing a democratic front that paved the way to the realisation of socialism. The 24-hour general strike of 13 May was a powerful demonstration of solidarity, with hundreds of thousands of trade unionists crossing the Seine from the Gare de l’Est to the student heartland of Denfert-Rochereau, with the students themselves continuing the march up to the Champs-de-Mars. Solidarity was forthcoming from the provinces too, with parallel demonstrations in support of the movement in Paris. It was in the light of this success that the PCF opted for a strategy of dynamic engagement with the movement for change, and did so on two fronts. On the social and economic front, the CGT union provided the party with a formidable tool for assuming a leading role at the grassroots, and its approval for the widening of strike action with the occupation of business premises found ready implementation through the CGT representation on the shop floor. On the political front, the PCF’s commitment to the cause, though belated, nonetheless allowed it to give renewed impetus to its strategy for a union of the Left on the basis of a common programme. From that point onwards until the end of the month, the PCF tried to balance its objectives of both appearing to sympathise with the demonstrators while attempting to steer the Left’s response to the crisis. The weekend beginning Saturday, the 18 May when between three to six million workers opted for strike action marked a high point in the convergence of the PCF–CGT line with the wishes of the student movement. But it was also clear that the PCF was trying to establish the basis of a unified action that it was attempting to lead, evidenced by the pressure it was putting on the Fédération de la gauche démocratique et socialiste (FDGS) to create unified structures at departmental level that might serve the plan promoted by the Communists as an antidote to the 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 actions that fell outside the structures it envisaged for pursuing the agenda for change. Thus the actions of the extreme left agitators during the night of the 24–25 May when a student demonstration at the Gare de Lyon led to another night of the barricades in the Latin Quarter drew fire

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from the pages of L’Humanité that in its own way was just as ferocious as the Interior Minister’s castigation of the agitators as a criminal underclass. The ambitions of the more moderate sections of Left that fell outside of the PCF agenda were also criticised. Through the pages of L’Humanité and the declarations of the political bureau, it was made clear that alternative strategies to those of the party were nothing less than efforts to dupe the working class and frustrate their ambitions, such as François Mitterrand’s press conference on 28 May when he announced his willingness to stand as a presidential candidate should the post become vacant, and his idea of a provisional government that might be led by Pierre Mendès-France. That same afternoon, Waldeck Rochet declared the PCF’s willingness to participate in government, but dismissed any attempt to turn to a providential leader. What the PCF perceived as its window of opportunity closed even more suddenly than it appeared to be opened. On 29 May the paroxysm that seemed to convulse the Gaullist state reached its peak when, midmorning, de Gaulle disappeared to Issy-les-Moulineaux and then by helicopter to Baden-Baden. There was an understandable triumphalism in L’Humanité on 30 May when it reported the success of the CGT mobilisation that coincided with de Gaulle’s departure and seemed to fill the void left behind by it. Between 15.00 and 20.00 hours the CGT-led demonstration filled the streets of Paris from the place de la Bastille to Saint-Lazare and prompted the following day’s banner headline in L’Humanité, ‘Une seule volonté: Gouvernement populaire!’ (With one voice: popular government). However, the political vacuum was of very short duration since de Gaulle had returned to his home at Colombey on the very evening of 29 May. The crisis of confidence soon passed as the Gaullist state set about reclaiming its legitimacy. L’Humanité’s triumphal headline the following morning was followed by de Gaulle’s decision to dissolve parliament in the afternoon in preparation for new legislative elections, and to follow that act with a radio address to the French people. By 18.00 hours the demonstration organised by the Gaullist UDR and the Républicains indépendants had brought massive numbers onto the Champs Elysées in support of the General. Similar demonstrations in the provinces on the following day confirmed that the PCF’s hopes of exploiting the crisis in pursuit of a popular government conducive to the pursuit of its interests had passed. It was no longer feasible, even in terms of political discourse, for the PCF to offer the country the dramatically antithetical choice between the dictatorship personified by de Gaulle and the democracy it purported to embody. Once the paroxysm of anxiety in the political system was

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passed, the party had to be seen to be a responsible participant in the interplay of institutional forces, and signalled as much when it reached agreement with the FGDS to respect republican discipline and desist where logic dictated in favour of each others’ candidates in the second round of the impending legislative elections. As the result of the elections on 23 and 30 June indicated, however, the electorate was not inclined to gamble on the Left and showed as much at the ballot box. While the PCF could still emerge, predictably, as the single biggest party of the Left with 20 per cent of the votes cast, it had nonetheless lost 600,000 voters and 39 seats compared to the previous legislative election. The immediate assessment of the significance of May 1968 in communist circles was itself indicative of the dysjunct between the party leadership and the intellectual processes operating in French society at large, reflected even in its own ranks among members whose vocation was one of engagement. Central committee meetings in early July and later in December had to address the challenge of formulating an interpretation of May 1968, not least because intellectual elements within the party had already begun to do so. Even during the events, the doyen of communist letters, Louis Aragon, steered an editorial line in the pages of Les Lettres Françaises that refused to vilify the students as some of the columns of L’Humanité did, notwithstanding the vituperative accusations of Stalinism that were aimed at Aragon by some of the students. Also in May, Roger Garaudy did not allow his membership of the political bureau of the party to prevent him from publishing, in the pages of the communist periodical, Démocratie nouvelle, an article that attempted to open up new perspectives on the alliances the PCF had to forge if it was to be in a position to address the new challenges facing French society. More strikingly still, while the mainstream communist press was condemning the extremist student agitators for having provoked the violence of the night of 24–25 May, 36 party members, mostly intellectuals (including the notable historian Albert Soboul) but also including former high-ranking functionaries like Charles Tillon, were presenting a letter to the leadership affirming their solidarity with the protest movement. The letter went so far as to criticise the party for trying to slow this extraordinary impetus for change and for having isolated 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 the familiar ideological position of the party with regard to its constituency and its vocation. The reflections that were the fruit of the July meetings of the central committee acknowledged the battle of ideas represented

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by May 1968 and conceded that the PCF had not engaged with the students and the youth in general as well as it might have. The legislative election results, the central committee believed, were due to the anti-communist paranoia whipped up by de Gaulle and his supporters and the widespread anxiety among voters concerning the consequences of further unrest. But the general conclusion concerning the actions of the party during the crisis was that it was justified and that the working class had acquitted itself well during the weeks of struggle. The December deliberations of the committee revolved around key ideological considerations that attempted to give a historical dimension and justification for the party position. In the first place, the central committee was clear that the situation in May was not propitious to revolution: there was not the power vacuum that some had imagined, the working class was not prepared to launch itself into a struggle according to the terms defined by the students, and the preconditions that would have facilitated a thoroughgoing alliance of the forces of the Left were not in place. While it was possible to sympathise with the underlying motives of the students, the central committee’s view was hostile to any suggestion that the central role of the working class in the pursuit of profound social change had in any way been diminished. In its opinion, the student uprisings had followed in the footsteps of the battles waged by the working class, but unlike the latter their campaign played ultimately into the hands of bourgeois interests. The PCF was adamant, and confident, that its strategy for power, namely the forging of a common platform for government by the Left, was correct, and that its role in this process was unambiguous: the avantgarde party of the Left leading the working class and promoting the class consciousness that would be instrumental in the defeat of capitalism, thus paving the way for the advent of socialism. The difficulty not envisaged by the PCF was that the totalising consciousness it promoted could not compete with the revolution in people’s minds that the events of May 1968 bore witness to and accelerated.5 The plurality of consciousnesses and the diversity of constructs through which to view society that were stimulated by the events of May possessed a transgressive potential that could not be reconciled to the regimentation demanded by the communist world view. The students had lost the battle of the barricades, but they had set in train a re-evaluation of assumptions and aspirations that had only just begun.6 The demise of ideology that would be so evident a generation later and find a symbolic apogee in the literal dismantling of the Berlin wall had already been announced. As some commentators have observed, May 1968 was

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midwife to the birth of another ‘counter-culture’. 7 The concept of a counter-culture was decoupled from the conventional understanding of revolution in the socio-economic sense and opened to a much more pluralistic interpretation, and this was done essentially by jettisoning belief in the working class as the primary instrument for the conquest of power. The notion of power itself was rethought as the focus for change shifted from the economic to the cultural and, in temporal terms, from a hypothesised and collective end-state to an everyday and ongoing redefinition of the self, such as in the individual relationship to one’s gender or one’s consumption of the resources in the environment. The kernel of the feminist movement in France had existed before May 1968, but the events of that month had given it a platform that it had not enjoyed beforehand, enabling it to fill amphitheatres at the Sorbonne with a new public motivated by the desire to understand its agenda. While the movement affirmed its solidarity with the worldwide struggle against exploitation, it also signalled that its own struggle could not be contained in the classic antitheses postulated in the ideology of parties like the PCF, since women were a community that transcended distinctions of class.8 Similarly, for the environmentalists who were to come to the fore in the succeeding decades, May 1968 had been a rendezvous with history. Many of the movement’s future leaders cut their teeth through the organisation of protests in the heady atmosphere of the time, but their challenge to society was one that refused to be corralled ideologically.9 The environmentalist movements that evolved were, in any case, intrinsically averse to the hierarchical structures of classic political parties, which in their eyes replicated the structures of the State. Moreover, their articles of faith prevented them from compromising with the productivist economic assumptions that were shared by the parties of both Left and Right, whereas the environmental revolution they pursued was fundamentally predicated on the opposite.10 But if the PCF had failed to engage with the battle of ideas on the wider front that had given birth to a new generation of young people determined to change society according to their lights, it faced the even more 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 in mentalities represented by the events of May 1968, it was not wholly unaware of the need to reposition itself, both domestically and internationally, in order to counteract the perception of its culture as one of

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ideologically conditioned conservatism and to restore its credibility as a genuine force of opposition to the status quo. Following hard on the heels of the events that convulsed intellectual consciences in France came the crisis in Czechoslovakia, which convulsed left-wing intellectual consciences internationally. The attempts of Alexander Dubcek and his colleagues to reconcile socialism and liberty had made the political spring in Eastern Europe pregnant with expectation and anxiety. Dubcek had discussed his ambitions with communist leaders in Western Europe, notably from Italy in May and France in July. Dubcek was significantly warmer in his exchanges with the Italian, Luigi Longo, than with Waldeck Rochet from France, yet nonetheless, when the Soviet Union and its allies (Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria) decided to put an end to Dubcek’s experiment by sending in the tanks, for once the PCF broke with its traditional and unconditional defence of the USSR’s actions on the international stage.11 The fall-out on 21 August 1968 was almost immediate. The political bureau of the PCF drafted a communiqué regarding the Soviet-led military intervention in Czechoslovakia that expressed its surprise and ‘réprobation’, and appeared in the following day’s edition of L’Humanité. Although during the weeks that followed the PCF would attenuate this criticism, and through the exchanges with Moscow during the autumn ultimately endorse the ‘normalisation’ of the Czech communist party’s affairs,12 there was evidence of a sensibility to the argument that the PCF needed to demonstrate greater freedom of movement on the international scene. Subsequent accounts from actors in other West European communist parties, notably in Italy, evoke a scenario in which the PCF had joined its Italian sister party in drafting a damning response to the military solution 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 of deeper democratic reform was not unattractive to the PCF, but the tentative steps towards a eurocommunist reformist vision was always constrained by the umbilical cord of ideological fidelity to Moscow, and complicated by the strategy developed to secure the party’s future at home. In a sense, the Czech crisis set a precedent, in that faced with an increasingly individualised Western culture that was repelled by totalitarianism, the PCF could not refuse to find ways of censuring the repressive practices that continued to be employed by the Soviet Union. The signature of the Common Programme with the PS in 1972 did not mean that the PCF would support what it considered the PS’ anti-Soviet

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line over the ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia, but the political bureau of the party nonetheless formulated a line that was critical of the political trials organised there.14 As the decade progressed, the party became more overt in expressing its sympathy with the prevailing mood of concern regarding the abuse of individual human rights in the Soviet Union. While maintaining a general discourse that affirmed its belief in the social and economic progress represented by the Soviet model, the PCF allowed itself to dissent on specific cases. For example, the editorial by René Andrieu which appeared in L’Humanité on 25 October 1975 sided with the general consensus that the Soviet policy of incarcerating high profile dissenters in psychiatric hospitals, in this case the mathematician Leonid Plioutch was worthy of condemnation. A year later, following Plioutch’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, he was greeted with ostentatious warmth by Pierre Juquin at a meeting organised in Paris to express solidarity with prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union. As the consciousness of the need for greater human rights in the Soviet Union grew, and the public conscience in the West was pricked by a rising number of examples of Soviet intellectuals fallen under the juggernaut of state repression there, the PCF’s own intellectuals offered an analysis of how the general virtues of the Soviet experience might have come to accommodate these specific vices. In two particularly noticeable studies,15 Jean Elleinstein made the case that the Stalinist phenomenon, and especially its legacy of failure with regard to human rights, was a deformation rather than an invalidation of socialism. Its causes lay in the very specific conditions that shaped the struggle for socialism in the Soviet Union and its consequences were largely circumscribed by the Stalinist epoch itself. Mindful of the need to insulate the PCF from the suggestions by its Socialist partner on the Left that the communists in France had not conquered their own Stalinist demons, in the central committee meetings of late May 1975 George Marchais sacrificed the taboo on the discussion of Stalinism in the party by condemning what was happening in the Soviet Union on the human rights front and distanced the PCF from it. The high point in this movement towards the PCF’s affirmation of an independent intellectual culture of its own came in the autumn of 1978, with the appearance of a collective work entitled L’URSS et nous, off the party’s own presses.16 The authors did not accept that socialism in the Soviet Union had lost its way, but did acknowledge that crimes had been committed under Stalin and situated them in a historical context that recognised the inevitable contradictions of the pursuit of socialism in that country. A parallel development to this apparent measure of

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emancipation of the French party from the tutelage of the mother party in Moscow was the impetus given to the PCF’s collaboration with sister parties in the countries of the capitalist West. Beginning with a conference in Brussels in 1974, the PCF was an active participant in a regular series of meetings with its sister parties during the 1970s that addressed familiar economic and political preoccupations, such as the role of multinationals and reformism, but also attempted to respond to the concerns of new constituencies such as women and the challenge posed by the definition of new cultures such as that presented by the young. Within that multilateral context, the PCF also endeavoured to engage individually with the two other major parties of Western Europe, Italy and Spain. Notwithstanding the inevitable tension with its transalpine sibling, given the latter’s overtly greater emancipation vis-à-vis Moscow, there was a clear willingness on the part of the PCF to develop its relationship with the Parti communiste italien (PCI), underlined by the headline coverage given to the meeting between George Marchais and his opposite number Enrico Berlinguer, on 12 May 1973. The meeting between the two which occurred in November 1975 was deemed by Marchais to be historic and was followed by one much publicised by the PCF in Paris in June 1976. In March 1977 the two leaders opened up the forum to include their Spanish counterpart, Santiago Carillo, in Madrid. The message emanating from these meetings was essentially that the parties involved were engaged in a mission that was still historically relevant and that they were determined to find a way of reconciling communism with genuine democracy. Nevertheless, the gulf in ambition between the PCI and the PCF with regard to the gains to be enjoyed through the positioning of their respective parties on the international communist stage had not disappeared. The appetite of the Italian communists for the new legitimacy that might be derived from its action internationally, and particularly of course vis-à-vis Moscow, was much less ambiguous and guarded than the PCF’s when confronted by the temptations of eurocommunism, and this was illustrated by the events leading up to the Berlin conference at the end of June 1976 which was destined to bring together the communist parties of Europe, East and West. The discussions as to what would be the declared objectives of the conference split along predictable lines. For the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European counterparts in power (supported by the Greek and Danish parties), the Berlin conference was to provide an opportunity for reaffirming the unity of the global communist movement and the foreign policy postures of the communist parties in power. In opposition to this

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stood the communist parties of the West, led by the PCI, who wanted a remit for the Berlin conference that would not bind them to such an unequivocal degree of support for the CPSU and its international policies, preferring instead to propose a more anodyne emphasis on international solidarity and social progress. The choice for the French communists was much more problematic than for their Italian counterparts, but after initial misgivings they sided with them and at the Berlin conference proper, Marchais went so far as to reject a uniform strategy for the world communist movement and argued that the independence of individual parties should be respected. What made the action of the PCF leadership more noteworthy was that their apparent rapprochement with the eurocommunist position of the Italians was not without cost, in terms of the disapproval emanating from Moscow. In February 1976, for example, the CPSU leaders Suslov and Ponamarev signalled that they would not be repeating their involvement of previous years in the PCF’s forthcoming Congress. Later that year in May, the displeasure of the CPSU at the emancipated and increasingly eurocommunist posture of the PCF was expressed in a letter sent to its sister party in Paris, in what in essence amounted to a call to order. 17 The prospect of a renewal of the party’s political credibility by going down the eurocommunist road would not, however, lead to the kind of evolution that would be witnessed among the communists in Italy. A form of ideological atavism would reassert itself that would cause the PCF to draw in again on the umbilical link with Moscow due partly to the contingencies that attend party political alliances and due also to what has been starkly observed elsewhere as the chronic intellectual deficiencies of the PCF leadership.18 The prospects for the PCF within France and its prospects on the international stage were interdependent in that the apparent success of the former gave the party the kind of self-confidence in the later sphere that accompanied its profile as a likely future party of government. Consequently, the cracks that appeared in September 1977 in the Common Programme signed with the Socialists placed a major question mark over the coherence of the policy the PCF had pursued in order to secure its position as the leading party of the Left at home and a modernising communist party abroad which had taken control of its own destiny. The bitter fruit resulting from the failure of the long and patient strategy of constructing an alliance on the Left, brought a sense of closure on a number of fronts. While some in the party still yearned for the new horizons being explored by sister parties like the PCI, others fell back on the false sense of security offered by a return to the former pattern of relations with Moscow and the

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CPSU. The opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global countercultural movement opposed to exploitation and injustice retreated, as the attention of the PCF focused once more on what it deemed to be the security of its own organisational and doctrinal carapace. The disappointment generated by the failure to renew the agreement on the Common Programme and the timorous retreat from the exploration of a eurocommunist future was exacerbated by the frustration of the party’s expectations in the legislative elections of March 1978. As we saw in the preceding chapter, this polarised the discontent in party ranks, leading ultimately to the high profile expulsion of the Parisian militant Henri Fiszbin for his criticism of the way the leadership interpreted the failure at the polls. But more worryingly, a gulf in understanding was growing which signalled the way in which the leadership was losing hold of the constituency within its ranks whose mission it was to promote the intellectual promise of the PCF counter-culture. Crises in the relationship between the party leadership and its intellectuals were nothing new. The Nazi–Soviet pact in the pre-war era and tensions that followed 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 of the PCF when its identification with the CPSU and its attempts to justify the Soviet Union’s actions on the international stage (often to the detriment of fellow-communists) spawned bitter ironies that successive generations of communist intellectuals could not tolerate. The crucial difference with regard to the crisis that began to shake the party in 1978 was that the catalyst was not the familiar external source found in one aspect or other of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, but a growing sense of exasperation at the way the party’s own affairs were managed and the manner in which the members were led. As we saw in Chapter 5, this moved certain members of the hierarchy down the road to an attempted rénovation of the party, but for those in the forefront of the battle of ideas, the intellectuals, it placed a question mark as to their very ‘raison d’être’ in the party. As with the decline of the PCF as a whole, there was a conjunction of factors, some of which lay outside of its sphere of influence, and a number of which lay within that sphere of influence and might have been less detrimental to its interests if the leadership had reacted differently. The ambitions stimulated by the events of May 1968 were indicative of the change in the scale and nature of intellectual visions that could engage the post-war generation, and especially their children. Certainly, a new currency had been given to the extreme left and notoriety to their interpretations of Marxist-inspired revolution. But the very number

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of movements and the antagonisms between them were proof of a rejection of universal and uniform modes of interpretation. While these political extremisms were to remain marginal, other movements were to go from strength to strength. Feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation and in later years anti-racism were all predicated on the assumption that socio-economic models which entailed the compromise of individual identity and the rejection of particular needs were to be combated, draining the reservoir of rebellion whose resources might have flowed into the PCF in previous generations. Strewn among the debris of May 1968 were the old certainties about the nature of oppression, and what emerged was a sense that sweeping narratives of change, including the utopian visions of the Left, were at the very best objects of suspicion if they operated at the expense of individual need. In a punctual and short-lived period of prominence, a generation of ‘nouveaux philosophes’ or new thinkers marked the intellectual mood of the post-68 hangover and felt the pulse of public reaction to the writings of Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn by asking whether Marxist revolution did not in its very nature carry the seeds of totalitarianism,19 as opposed to being sometimes deformed in practice, according to its apologists. Notable for their youth and their physical resemblance to the reckless types profiled on the platforms of the erstwhile student revolutionaries, figures like André Glucksmann and Bernard–Henri Lévy published essays, in the classic French sense, with dramatic titles and powerfully polemical attacks on the Marxist intellectual prism that had governed the interpretation of the world for so many of their contemporaries and predecessors, and occluded the devastating effects of its own inadequacies.20 Subsequently criticised for their tendency to create a self-serving amalgam of ideas and to feed a reflex introversion that is characteristic of the French intellectual elite, 21 the intervention of these figures revived and reshaped the debate regarding what the role of the intellectual should be. Lévy, in particular, became the archetype of what has been termed the ‘télé-clergé’,22 the philosophical purveyor of ideas for an age in thrall to the atomising influence of small screens, in which values have been individualised and relativised to the point where, as one commentator suggested, there is nothing to choose between Shakespeare and a pair of old boots. 23 This change in the intellectual climate deepened the sense of inadequacy of a PCF caught in a double bind. Once more, the conjunction of contingent factors and punctual, policy-driven events combined to magnify the marginalising effect of change for the party. The justifiable investment in the Common Programme with the Socialists was an

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attempt to rebuild its credibility vis-à-vis the electorate at home by promoting an endogenous social and political project,24 but the disappointment of those hopes simply placed into starker relief the questionable relevance of the exogenous nature of the PCF’s official Marxist orientation. With this background of subsidence in their perceived credibility, it could have been argued that the best response from the PCF leadership might have been to foreground the role of their intellectuals in providing a counterweight to the relativism that was undercutting the plausibility of ideological positions, principally their own. The reality was that the response forthcoming from the leadership made the vocation of being a communist intellectual even more difficult, by adding internal pressures to the mounting pressures already operating externally. As we saw in Chapter 6, Georges Marchais’ discursive strategy in dealing with the contestataires among the party’s intellectuals was, on the one hand, to dilute their demands in anodyne representations of what they amounted to and, on the other, to dilute the understanding of the term ‘intellectual’ to undermine their cohesion and therefore their ability to make their voices heard. The truth was that the party’s intellectuals were divided anyway. Of the group who were broadly sympathetic to the need to democratise the party and open it up to a more pluralist perspective on what its constituency should be, figures like Jean Elleinstein, Antoine Spire, Jean Rony, Maurice Goldring and Raymond Jean, were very susceptible to a PSI-type eurocommunist reformism and favoured the policy of alliance with the PS. Another group, gravitating around the journal Dialectiques and counting notably Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Yves Roucaute, promoted a revolutionary problematic that owed much to the theoretical insights of Antonio Gramsci. While these two groups were distinguished by their differences, they stood in direct opposition to ideological hardliners such as Etienne Balibar, Georges Labica and Guy Bois, who took their cue from the resident Marxist philosopher of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Louis Althusser. Althusser was the easiest of the intellectuals to deal with in that like many others he condemned the PCF’s leadership for its refusal to accept its share of responsibility for the failure of the Left at the polls in the legislative elections of March 1978, but for quite different, even opposite reasons to the majority of intellectual critics. In a series of four articles in Le Monde from 24–27 April, Althusser argued that the leadership had become divorced from the membership of the party and was not responding to the worldwide crisis of Marxism.25 But in Althusser’s view, the problems for the PCF stemmed from its fear of arguing the

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real need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the leadership’s tactic of attempting to slide into the position of getting its hands on the apparatus of state by appealing to the middle classes. By compromising its class independence, the leadership was simply emulating the practice of bourgeois politics and turning itself into an instrument of the establishment through its separation from the militants. Althusser’s extreme ideological conservatism made it easy for the leadership to marginalise him in the eyes of the general membership for being a Stalinist backwoodsman. But the criticism from figures like Elleinstein and those around him was much more difficult to dismiss, given their direct and distinguished contributions to the intellectual life of the party. The two principal structures in which communist intellectuals were supposed to pursue their vocation on behalf of the party were the Institut Maurice Thorez (IMT), focusing on historical issues, and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes (CERM), engaged on much more broadly based and varied research in the social sciences. As a research body the IMT was characterised by a certain intellectual homogeneity, given the nature of the discipline that dominated there. The fact that the historical school of researchers in France was one in which communists played such a major part, shaping, for example (at least until the 1980s), the dominant interpretation of the Revolution of 1789, meant that there was a less palpable sense of frustration in the IMT flowing from the feeling of not being heard. By contrast, the mood at CERM was quite different. As assistant director, Jean Elleinstein collaborated with a broad range of party intellectuals based in the Paris region, and it was the very heterogeneity of CERM which made it much more sensitive to the convictions emanating from the various sectors of intellectual activity in the party. It was inevitable that the multiplicity of challenges to the leadership’s interpretation of the March 1978 election result would find a sounding board at the CERM, and it rendered more acute the speculation as to what the role of the party’s in-house intellectuals was in reality. For intellectuals like Elleinstein there was a double sense of redundancy: the party leadership was only interested in the kind of research that served the strategic orientations of the party; and even in the fields approved by the leadership the work produced by the party’s intellectuals had little impact on the conduct of the policy-makers. With regard to the lessons to be learned from March 1978, Elleinstein struck out on his own, airing his views in the pages of the non-party press. In articles in Le Monde from 13 to 15 April 1978, Elleinstein questioned the leadership’s refusal to publish the research done by the CERM on the modern state. Fundamental notions shaping attitudes

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towards the state and revolution had to be rethought, given the undeniable transformation undergone by modern France. The party’s traditional attitude towards its working-class constituency was costing it the support of the most-educated and skilled workers, more concerned with quality of life issues than the quantitative demands that characterised the ouvrieriste mind-set of the policy-makers. Elleinstein underlined the need for intellectual modernisation by questioning whether Lenin had anything to offer the increasingly well-off workers of the Paris region, many of whom were property owners. Notwithstanding the failures of the past, the future had to be shaped in partnership with the PS, as the Left entered an open reappraisal of what was meant by socialism and how this could be made relevant to the lives of people in an affluent society. Elleinstein’s condemnation in the party press was swift, but more importantly the leadership opted for a policy of administrative normalisation that cut the structural support away from Elleinstein and his fellow intellectual sympathisers. At its session in June 1979, the central committee chose to address what it perceived to be the fragmented nature of the research being carried out on behalf of the party. The historians and social scientists not only worked separately, but even within those centres there were compartmentalised activities. Furthermore, research in economics was conducted in a different unit at the Place Colonel Fabien. In all, there were too many pieces to the jigsaw and too many layers of managers for those researching to grasp how the intellectual efforts on behalf of the party were meant to fit into the bigger picture of the PCF’s priorities. Thus in early December 1979 the IMT and the CERM were merged to form the Institut de recherches marxistes, whose future was to be entrusted to Francette Lazard, an academic who had just been promoted to the Politiburo at the party’s 23rd Congress. For the majority of the party’s intellectuals, this turn of events provided further evidence of the party’s determination to deprive them of an independent tribune. The feeling of despondency at the irony of the ‘tribune’ party locking itself into a reactionary cult of silence was sharpened by the party’s exclusion of Henri Fiszbin and François Hincker, founders of the forum for PCF dissident, Rencontres communistes, and it is significant that the same year of 1981 was also marked by the departure of Elleinstein and Etienne Balibar from the party. The PCF had entered the 1980s burdened by a sense of intellectual closure, quite out of step with the culture of a society marked by a growing variety of counter-cultures tailoring themselves to the individualist sensibilities of the age. The passion for unfettered intellectual enquiry

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outside the party found its opposite image within the party. For a communist intellectual to survive he or she had to load their enquiry with the traditional and systematic anathemas directed at capitalist society, thereby serving the no less comprehensive pretension of scientific socialism to provide the answers. But as Maurice Goldring observed, the rejection of totalising concepts in politics would inevitably entail the redundancy of the intellectual who had a question for every answer and the party that had an answer for every question.26 One of the dangers for a party thus isolated and bereft of fresh ideas was to isolate itself further through misguided attempts to regain some cohesion and credibility, even if that meant following a reactionary reflex.

The reactionary reflex The years between the disappointment of the legislative elections of 1978 and the election of a Socialist president in 1981 constituted a watershed in terms of the stubborn ideological repli or recidivism of the leadership. Marchais seemed determined to offer unflinching support to the Soviet Union, just as the latter’s foreign policy became most obviously threadbare. Thus from prudent support at the end of 1979 for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in January 1980 following a meeting with Soviet leaders in Moscow, this was turned into outright approval for Soviet policy in that country. The same reactionary interpretation of the vocation of the party was manifested by the support the leadership gave to General Jaruzelski’s coup in Poland, echoing his argument that the arrest of the opposition Solidarity movement was necessary to avert the prospect of civil war. A further indicator of the way the party’s unquestioning alignment with Soviet foreign policy was eroding its ability to project itself as an agent for change was provided by the storm provoked by the NATO decision in December 1979 to plan the deployment of Cruise missiles in its member-states in response to the deployment of Soviet SS20s. While the popular mobilisation against the NATO missile deployments in countries like Holland and Germany demonstrated that fertile ground existed for effective involvement in an anti-missile campaign, the determination of the PCF policy-makers to portray the Soviet Union’s policy as one of peace, and to demonise the USA, merely reversed any progress the PCF might have made during the preceding decade in asserting its independence from Moscow. The attempt made by the PCF in Paris in April 1980, in collaboration with its Polish sister party, to coordinate a move involving other European communist parties to support the

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peaceful pretensions of the Soviet policy was a failure and drove a deeper wedge, notably, between it and the PCI. As a domestic counterpoint to these blunders on the foreign policy stage, the PCF’s hostility to the suggestion that one could be communist while being critical of the Soviet Union was embodied in its treatment of Jean Kehayan. As editor of the PCF paper in Marseilles, La Vie Mutualiste, Kehayan had already made himself noticed in 1978 by calling Elleinstein too prudent, and openly anticipating the day when the party in France would have the courage to call the USSR the antithesis of socialism. In that year, he and his wife produced a critical survey of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, which was followed up in 1980 by a book in which they made no secret of the conviction that their understanding of communism forced them to adopt an antiSoviet position.27 Both texts were the focus of debate in the party and were inevitably construed as an indictment of the leadership. Consequently, in October 1980 the decision was taken to expel Kehayan from the party. What the writings of Kehayan and the misgivings of those before him regarding the PCF’s relationship with the CPSU expressed was the feeling that the rotten core of the Soviet system had been exposed and that it was no longer possible for the PCF to veil its gaze from it. But as we saw in Chapter 6, the way the leadership articulated the party’s response to the collapse of communism in the old Eastern bloc, and especially the failed putsch against the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in 1991, merely served to further disconnect the leadership’s reading of world events from the opinion of the French people. The reactionary aversion to the appetite for individual freedoms that would bring down its sister parties like dominoes as the decade progressed found a subtle parallel in the way the PCF adjusted its priorities organisationally at home. While the party’s 23rd Congress in 1979 had taken the forward step of confirming the end of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as its defining ambition, other moves marked steps backward into an ouvrieriste bunker mentality. The policy announced at the 23rd Congress of ‘l’union à la base’ or a harnessing of grassroots unity aligned it and the CGT in an attitude to industrial relations very much shaped by archetypal postures towards capital. The gap between policy and reality was evident in the structure of the PCF itself, and would be translated in the workplace. The composition of the 24th Congress in 1982 highlighted the fact that the party could not isolate itself from the wider changes in French society. The socio-professional profile of the delegates was unquestionably on an upward curve, with middle

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managers, engineers and technicians accounting for 15.6 per cent, while those delegates with a working-class background had dipped below 40 per cent. On the other hand, those delegates who had come into the party during the time of the Union of the Left had declined from 42.5 to 37.8 per cent since the previous Congress, while those who had joined during the more sectarian climate since then had an increased representation. Most telling, however, was the difference between the general change in the socio-economic profile of the delegates as a whole, and the concentration of a certain type occupying the positions of power in the party’s organisational structure. The PCF’s own figures demonstrated that in the federations, 59.2 per cent of the first secretaries were working class.28 The accentuation of the PCF’s orientation as a party of working-class struggle would inevitably lead to impossible tension with its role as a party of government, in a Socialist-led administration that, much sooner than expected after its victory in 1981, would find itself presiding over the painful restructuring of the French economy and, in spite of the initially triumphant wave of nationalisations, do so in a way that was not fundamentally dissimilar to what was happening in Conservative Britain. The presence of four ministers in government29 could not attenuate the shrinkage forced on heavy industry, especially mining and metals, or ease the bewilderment for the remaining party members in those regions with whose interests the party had identified itself with renewed vigour after 1979. Neither converted to the disciplines of the market like the PS, nor able to fight the good fight for the proletariat due to its presence in government, the PCF’s credibility could only decline, as the elections during that period indicated. In the municipal elections of March 1983 the percentage of communist municipalities dropped from 4 to 3.4 per cent of the total, entailing the loss of control in 191 town halls, 19 of which served populations of 30,000, leaving it in control of only three towns of more than 100,000 in comparison with seven in 1977. The European elections of June 1984 confirmed the loss of credibility when the list headed by Marchais could not rally more than 11.2 per cent of the votes cast. When, during the month that followed, Laurent Fabius replaced Pierre Mauroy as Prime Minister and confirmed that the government would maintain its policy of economic austerity, the PCF leadership took the opportunity to bring its participation in government to a close. But although it was no longer impossibly stretched across the horns of the dilemma that came from being in government while fundamentally opposed to its economic policy, the tactic adopted by the PCF

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once out of government was reminiscent of old industrial conflicts rather than the search for future solutions in place of strife. The most emblematic instance of this was the party’s attitude to the changes at Renault, notably the demise of the fabled bastion of CGT-dominated communist syndicalism, the works at Boulogne-Billancourt. The plant there had been a symbol of victorious ouvrierisme with the CGT as the organisational spearhead. The union had become a force that could not be circumvented in what was the biggest plant devoted to the mass manufacture of vehicles in the country. The union operated in partnership with the management and had secured exceptional gains for the workers, such as a fourth week of paid holiday in 1962 and the reduction of the working week from 48 to 40 hours in 1968. Moreover, through the comité d’entreprise, or works council, the union had control of a network subsidised through salary costs that governed the workers’ lives away from the production line, from the operation of the staff canteen to travel and holiday arrangements.30 But in spite of these gains for the workers, the incipient crisis that would undermine this mainstay of communist support had already taken root by 1973, and when the plans were revealed by the management in the mid-1980s that would end the reign of Boulogne-Billancourt in Renault’s profile as a manufacturer, this was, in market terms, somewhat overdue in the light of what had already occurred globally in the car market. The reaction of the PCF and the CGT to this restructuring was a desperate and brutally unimaginative one. On 1 August 1986 a group of their members raided the offices of the personnel department in order to seize some of the documentation held there, and manhandled some of the staff in the process. Although the votes cast in the legislative election of 16 March 1986 had ushered in the first cohabitation of a Gaullist-led government with a Socialist President, the policy implemented at Renault was a continuation of the Socialist determination to rescue state-owned enterprises by making them submit to the disciplines of the market. In contrast to previous eras therefore, the management at Renault pursued those responsible for the attack on the personnel department through the courts, and the production lines on 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 were unionised. This was part of a general trend of decline in membership support for the CGT: declining from 1,800,000 in 1975/6, to 1,070,000

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in 1983, and striking a modest 600,000 in 1990. An analysis of the reasons for this has suggested that there were factors that lay clearly beyond the union’s control: arguably 20 per cent of the decline in numbers could be attributed to the technological changes that led to the demise of whole sectors of the economy’s manufacturing base; 20 per cent could result from the transformation of the behemoths where the CGT was able to cultivate big battalions into smaller and leaner enterprises, as well as the tendency for enterprises in the newest technology centres to concentrate rare skills in flexible units as opposed to labour in fixed plants; and a further 10 per cent of the decline could be due to the broad transformation of the economy which was marked by the decline in the numbers of workers relative to the irresistible rise of those engaged in white-collar and managerial posts. But responsibility for half of the loss in membership could be laid at the door of the CGT itself, resulting from the unwillingness of the membership in the 1980s to identify with the aims of the union and participate in recruitment activities both in the new economy where worker representation was increasingly non-unionised and in the old economy where it was locked in decline. The result for the PCF was to exacerbate the decline of 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 ability of the PCF leadership to articulate the needs of its constituency to the satisfaction of that very constituency, it alienated the wider community by sometimes succumbing to a temptation that placed it firmly in the camp of right-wing reaction when it came to the issues of immigration and race. In fairness to the PCF, the entire Left was to display a failure of nerve on the immigration issue. Before sweeping into power the Socialists had emphasised their desire to switch the focus from improving purely the economic, to the social, cultural and political dimension of possibilities available to France’s immigrant community and thereby changing the perception of it from being a problematic adjunct to an integral and valued part of the fabric of French society.32 Once the Mauroy government was formed, it had to strike a balance between improving the situation of France’s immigrant community and reassuring the host community by controlling new arrivals. The anxiety of the immigrant population was allayed by a series of measures brought in during the latter half of 1981, which included the suspension of deportations pending under the previous government, the transformation of the process of expulsion into a judicial one as opposed to simply an administrative one and the creation of a smoother path to family reunification.

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The most generous aspect of this change in government attitude was the régularisation exceptionnelle, or amnesty granted to clandestine immigrants who had arrived before 1 January 1981 and who could offer proof of stable employment. But this was also the most contentious of the government’s liberalising measures, and thereafter it began to row back as it sensed the dubious reaction of the population at large.33 The idea once floated by Mitterrand that citizenship might be determined by residence rather than nationality was quietly marginalised by the Mauroy government as,34 between 1981 and 1984, generosity gave way to the imperative of control: the identity checks targeting immigrants which had marred the end of the Giscard d’Estaing regime made a comeback; the conditions for family reunification were stiffened; and legislation in June 1983 facilitated the deportation of clandestine immigrants by court order thereby depriving them of an appeal process that might delay their expulsion. The PCF, however, had begun the attempt to mine the vein of antiimmigrant sentiment underlying French society as a whole, before the realities of power had started to blunt the idealism of the new Socialist administration over this issue. On 24 December 1980, PCF activists and councillors in Vitry, in the Val-de-Marne, decided to take the law into their own hands and, led by the mayor, used a bulldozer in order to destroy a hostel for immigrant workers. The authorities in the communist municipality of Ivry attempted to bring in their own punitive measures for limiting the numbers of immigrants in their community once a certain threshold was reached. And in February 1981, in the community of Montigny-les-Cormeilles in the Val-d’Oise, the communist mayor and future leader of the PCF, Robert Hue, led the organisation of demonstrations against a family of Moroccans suspected of drug trafficking. Unable to find a positive discourse to appeal to the working class as the protector of its interests, the temptation was to find a negative one. The misfortune for the PCF was that the emergence of a far right party to compete for those votes made its position appear more nakedly and ironically reactionary. By the time the Front National caught up with the PCF in electoral terms, the Communists had already been evicted from what might be called modern France. Those bastions where it could still poll in double figures were areas with an industrial past (such as the Nord and Pas-de-Calais in the north and the Gard or Bouches-du-Rhône in the south), or those rural areas characterised by the small-scale or even subsistence farming that had been left behind by the investment and economies of scale of capital-intensive agriculture (such as Aude, Ariège and the departments of the Massif Central). This was matched by a demographic

166 A Party Without a Role? Table 7.1 PCF and FN election results in metropolitan France 1978–89 (percentage of votes cast)

1978 legislative 1981 presidential 1981 legislative 1984 European 1986 legislative 1988 presidential 1988 legislative 1989 European

PCF

FN

20.6 15.5 16.1 11.2 9.7 6.9 11.2 7.8

0.8 No FN candidate 0.3 11.1 9.9 14.6 9.9 11.8

Source: Ysmal (1991, pp. 52–3).

contraction which showed that whereas in the legislative elections of 1978 some 28 per cent of 18–24 year-olds and 26 per cent of 25–34 year-olds had voted communist, by the presidential elections of 1988 only some 6 per cent of both age ranges voted for the communist candidate. This could only feed the growth in the surviving communist heartlands of a membership corralled by anxiety about its value-system, exacerbated by the changing face of France. As Table 7.1 illustrates, it was the decade when the seesaw of political fortunes appeared to favour the FN as it disadvantaged the PCF. Ironically, by sometimes allowing itself to become a tribune party focused on the representation of parochial fears as opposed to global aspirations, the PCF prepared the ground for a party which had overtly denounced universalist narratives of change in order to exploit the emerging neo-conservatism of certain segments of the population such as the unemployed young and non-salaried workers fearful for the future.35 The most telling effect on the PCF during the watershed years of the 1980s was not so much the direct transfer of votes from communist voters to the FN, but the potential voters drawn by the far right who might, in times when the communist vision for the transformation of society was more potent, have voted for the PCF.36 The ambiguity of the party’s position over race and immigration was the most striking aspect of a general response to a society in the throes of profound change, that was slow and reactionary. The party was approaching the threshold of the new millennium suspended in an intellectual vacuum, the ideological nexus with its constituency dissolved because ideology itself had lost its mobilising power.

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Conclusion In a process that accelerated during the final two decades of the twentieth century, the PCF found itself left behind by a process of social change that was too complex, differentiated and diffuse to submit to the dialectic that blinkered its view of society and the increasingly selfassertive constituencies that comprised it. The tribune party had in effect become the rearguard party, defending a cause that rhymed with what was perceived by most voters in France as a period of socioeconomic development that was fixed in history. For individuals in a post-industrial society, the points of conflict were to be found in other fields of actual and prospective alienation rather than the old battleground between the proprietor of capital and the worker. In some instances, therefore, there was an undeniable temptation to side with the party’s traditional class constituency on issues where its voice appeared to be ignored by the established parties, even if that constituency’s concerns were clearly reactionary. It was an atavistic reflex on the part of the party that was exacerbated by the emergence of a new pole of attraction represented by the extreme right, especially in some of those constituencies where the economic consequences of de-industrialisation combined with the social changes prompted by immigration to form a kind of alienation with a dangerously combustible potential. Succumbing to the temptation to ride the wave of reaction was a measure of the desperation in some parts of the party and could not disguise the growing material obstacles to its survival. But while material obstacles might be surmountable, or even accommodated by a party living in reduced circumstances, the influence of contingent factors is far harder to counterbalance. The growing phenomenon of dépolitisation, for example, is one that has affected the entire spectrum of mainstream political parties but is something that is bound to have a greater effect on a party possessed of such a clear ideological self-definition as the PCF. As we shall see in the following and final chapter, the biggest challenge facing the PCF in the twenty-first century is the extent to which it can re-position itself in order to secure an enduring presence as a significant political entity on the national stage, and articulate a new vision capable of convincing the French electorate in an age marked by the end of ideology.

8 The End of Ideology

Introduction In the classic sense articulated by Karl Marx, the very purpose of the struggle against the status quo was to break the hold of ideology. Its social origin was clear and its purpose was unmistakeable: to hide the real nature of human relations in a bourgeois society and in so doing keep the wage-labourer bound to his owner by invisible threads. Ideology was the key component in the attempt to prevent the workers from grasping the real nature of their condition and it operated in order to serve the survival and self-interest of the bourgeoisie.1 But a broader understanding of ideology, more focused on human psychology, can put it in a context where proletarian class-consciousness offers no protection from falling into a delusional sphere of errors to which all groups and parties are susceptible.2 The Marxist attack on the enslavement that results from the dominance of bourgeois ideology in capitalist society does not negate the argument that those making the assault share, along with everyone else, a need for contact with sources of legitimacy and creativity and that underlying overtly rational political actions are determinations characterised by undeniable psychological facts or even fictions.3 Taken to its logical conclusion, this perspective on ideology means that any group with a mission, sharing the same psychological dispositions and collective beliefs may be regarded as being imbued with an ideology,4 and it is something that is woven into its sense of identity and purpose. Given its close self-definition in class terms and the discourse expressing the totalising nature of its ambitions with regard to its action on society, no group other than the PCF could suffer more from the dissolution of ideology, in terms of a personal sense of justification and 168

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fulfilment.5 In the communist community of beliefs, as articulated by the leadership of the PCF, historical reality was pressed into a structure of confrontation that polarised issues in such a way as to reduce them often to simple dichotomies. Such a process obviated the need for balanced, rational justifications, and privileged instead the certainties derived from partisan interpretations of reality. As Lévi-Strauss suggested, such ideologically motivated political thinking was perfectly aligned with the processes of mythification.6 The misfortune for the PCF was that by the end of the twentieth century the myths sustaining its rationalisations had been undermined: the proletariat in France no longer saw itself as such; the pretensions of the Soviet Union to lead the global struggle against capitalism had been exposed and its sphere of influence had collapsed; and even the notion of revolution had been called into question, as the collective values defining the republican culture of France fractured into myriad individualised concerns that expected society to adapt to them rather than endeavouring to transform it. In this chapter we shall examine the sea change in French society that has made it so difficult for political value-systems to sustain their roots in the electoral landscape, especially for a party defined by such an all-encompassing ideology as the PCF. We shall ask whether the very model of revolution in the modern age, the French revolution, has not in fact resulted in assumptions that are fundamentally at variance with the aspirations of the people it purports to serve, what those consequences are for those institutions mediating between the people and the State, and we shall attempt to gauge where the PCF stands in the light of that challenge.

The end of revolution In the conclusion to the preceding chapter, an allusion was made to the phenomenon of dépolitisation or disengagement from mainstream politics that was one of the wider factors detrimental to the PCF’s fortunes and beyond its control. While the PCF’s message might continue to advance a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system, its mission as a tribune party had become too familiar and its project intellectually jaded. Its oppositional stance had become too perennial a part of the political status quo to become a rallying point, in contrast to the 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

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unrepresented by the system. As the opinion polls at the time indicated, the sense of civic obligation felt by French citizens with regard to the ballot box was locked in a downward trend. In the definition offered to a representative cross-section of the electorate of what constituted a good citizen, the characteristic of being a ‘regular voter’ had, in 1976, been cited by 51 per cent of the respondents, in 1983 this figure had dropped to 43 per cent, and in 1989 it was down to 38 per cent.7 In a sense, the disengagement of the electorate from mainstream politics in France had been noted a generation beforehand, and attributed to the peculiarities of the French party system. The argument that the présidentialisation of the French political system is a defining characteristic of the Fifth Republic due to de Gaulle’s mistrust of political parties is a familiar one, but overlooks the longer historical perspective evoked by other commentators. It has been argued that the opposition of Right and Left in France has, since the immediate aftermath of the revolution of 1789, offered the French people an illusory rather than a real choice. As the Girondins displaced the Jacobins at the centre of power, they were themselves replaced at the centre of the political system by the plaine 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 this dominant centrist culture. The Fifth Republic, while in one sense appearing to represent a radical break with the political culture of the Fourth Republic, in another sense embodied a profound continuity going even further back to the Third Republic. The cohabitations of presidents of the Republic from the Left or Right with governments drawn from majorities from the other side of the spectrum became a familiar feature of French politics in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and appear to justify the argument that whatever alternance there might be in fact occurs within a broad centrist consensus. Like the ‘pause’ on the road to genuine left-wing reforms announced by Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in February 1937, the austerity plan hatched by Pierre Mauroy’s Socialist government in 1982 marked the limits of left–right alternance in French politics and the ultimately irresistible pressure to operate within a centrist consensus. The waltz of leftand right-wing governments that followed was precisely that, as they turned around each other defining the variations in the inevitable accommodations with the pressure to privatise, rationalise and liberalise the operations of the French state, whether as an economic shareholder or as a provider of services to civil society. While the obligation to respect a centrist consensus may not differentiate France fundamentally from the liberal democracies of

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other developed countries, the hold exercised by a de facto hypercentre that whatever the labelling the constituent parts may display, essentially recycles the same policies exacerbates the frustration provoked by the specificity of the French party system. As Duverger argued, the fundamental mediating role that should be played by political parties in translating the preferences of civil society into the choices of the State is weaker in France than in other comparable democracies such as Britain or Germany. Whereas the mass party memberships in those democracies provided a form of leverage that allowed considerable direct pressure to be brought on the leaderships in question, the weak membership bases of mainstream French political parties (with the historical exception of the PCF), and the reliance on tendencies and factions as the conduit for changes in party policy, have resulted in what has been perceived as the rise of a class of party notables who have come to dominate public life. Furthermore, by operating through a form of centrisme that perpetuates itself precisely by occluding the fundamental oppositions that should separate the adversaries, the parties deprive the voters of a genuine choice and preside over a system that could be termed, ‘la démocratie sans le peuple’, or democracy minus the people.8 On one hand, Duverger’s pessimism regarding the ability of the French party system to assume an effective and central role in the operation of representative democracy may be regarded as inevitable, given the shadow cast at the time by the figure of de Gaulle. On the other hand, by the end of the twentieth century and with de Gaulle a distant memory, the perception of the political class as a stratum of notables disconnected from the democratic grassroots was widespread. For example, the debate over the enduringly thorny issue of the ‘cumul des mandats’, that is the possibility for politicians to accumulate representative functions at local, regional and national levels, highlighted the anxiety that a systemic failure was allowing those individuals to operate according to an agenda that was essentially self-interested. Moreover, it was a telling paradox that the two presidential figures who steered the French Republic’s transition from the twentieth to the twenty-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 by the time he left presidential office in 1995 had had a career spanning six decades. By the time Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, was elected to his second mandate as President of the Republic in 2002, his career had spanned five decades. At the opposite end of the political

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system, the validity of Duverger’s judgements about the failure of French parties to recruit members is borne out by recent surveys showing France to have the lowest levels of party membership in comparison with European neighbours such as Britain, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway.9 The criticism of the party system for its failure to foster genuine competition in the programmes for government and for offering only hollow ideological alternatives might seem to provide an exemption for the PCF. But following its participation in government after the watershed victory for the French Left in the presidential and legislative elections of 1981, the Communists faced the double disadvantage of proclaiming an ideology that had become threadbare with generations of overuse by the party, and having been tainted by their part in a majority Socialist government that had been forced to capitulate to market forces by accepting the monetarist squeeze on the French economy, with all that entailed for employment and the funding of social reform. Moreover, the perception of the intellectual and moral integrity of the PCF was much diminished by the critical autopsy carried out on communist ideology subsequent to the collapse of its historical mentor, the Soviet Union. According to one of the central indictments in the famous Livre noir du comunisme, terror was a fundamental, inescapable and defining characteristic of communism.10 In the animated debate following the publication of the book, there was no quarter given to the countervailing arguments about the evils of capitalism. The collapse of the iron curtain meant that access to the catalogues of state-sponsored oppression, such as the Stasi files in the former East Germany, sharpened the focus on the charge that a cancer of criminality resided at the core of the communist enterprise.11 In fact, the mainstream parties as well as the PCF were caught in a growing indictment of the modern ideology of revolution itself. Whether it was the critique of the redundancy of political discourses predicated on such defunct antitheses as Left and Right, leading to the atomisation of the body politic,12 or the critique of France’s elites for their abstentionism faced with the challenge of anticipating and shaping social change,13 these challenges were symptomatic of a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction pushing against the founding assumptions regarding the way the great vision of 1789 for the transformation of French society was translated into political reality. In historical terms, there was no shortage of precedent for contesting the implementation of that vision. The nineteenth century was punctuated by criticism voiced by figures like Alexis de Tocqueville, Edgar Quinet and

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Jules Michelet of the authors of the Revolution for having replaced the royalist absolutism they were supposed to defeat with a statist variety of their own making, or condemnation of their successors for reneging on the fraternal and egalitarian ideals they were supposed to promote. It was not until the triumph of the Third Republic over royalist and Catholic reaction that the ascendancy of republican ideology, assimilating equal citizens into the one and indivisible body politic articulated by the collective adherence to civic and secular values, was finally established. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the initial concern prompted by the Revolution that the authority delegated by the people might be manipulated by a self-interested oligarchy14 had found new form, together with anxiety about the responsiveness of the democratic model engendered by the triumph of republicanism in France, to the needs of individual citizens. For some commentators, the ideology of the Republic had set inflexibly due to certain assumptions as to the way it would operate, notably, through the national state as the overarching means for mediating and regulating social and political issues, even if that extended to issues that might properly fall within the sphere of decision-making by the private individual. A defining characteristic of the ideology of the Republic had developed which assumed that change could only be pursued through the prerogatives for the exercise of power offered by the institutions of the Republic. The ensuing conflation of the civil and the civic led to a process of ‘uniformisation’, in which the Republic adopted uniform measures in the management of the 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 reform the Republic,16 and was marked by a variety of responses to the failure of traditional republican ideology and its institutional emanations, to engage the citizens of France. At one end of the spectrum there was a perceptible and essentially conservative frustration at the inability of citizens to see beyond an ever-narrowing horizon due to the pervasive influence of l’idolâtrie démocratique, or an obsessive kind of democracy that results in the adulation of the individual, who is viewed as unencumbered of those ties or repères which provide a framework of orientation.17 Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of perspective could posit the dissolution of the ideological legacy settled on the French Republic by the Revolution, and a change in the nation’s mindset that would mirror a return, in intellectual terms, to the status quo ante. The networks of family, locality, region, and belief become once more the loci of fidelities defining the individual as opposed to the fidelity

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to the civic value-system of the one and indivisible Republic bequeathed by 1789.18 At the other end of the spectrum, there was a sanguine perception of the declining participation in the traditional, mediating institutions of the Republic as indicative of a development in the understanding of democracy that should not be feared. The decline in traditional forms of political militancy did not signal the end of militantisme per se, but an evolution in the relationship of the individual to society, and in particular his or her relationship to the public sphere in which the individual actor, empowered by his or her needs, talents and preferences, takes the lead in coordinating a collective endeavour.19 What was occurring was not a terminal dépolitisation, but the redefinition of politics by other means resulting from an evolutionary process marked by the emergence of new forms of participation as older ones wither.20 The balance was tipping not just against the traditional political formations, but also against the classic structures of union-led militancy that saw their numbers halve between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, and their authority challenged by the emergence of new networks of unionised labour, often with radical agendas for social transformation.21 As the movement of the balance implies, however, there was a corresponding rise in a new type of participation springing from the base of civil society and resistant to the ideological typologies of the past: associations. Up to 1970 the number of new associations created annually was less than 20,000, but by the 1990s the figure was nudging up to 70,000. While in an obvious respect comprised of individuals committed to interacting collectively, the typical association is nonetheless task-driven rather than ideologically driven, whether responding to changing social needs, humanitarian or cultural imperatives, eschewing the assumptions that would characterise an enveloping political project. Such has been the rise in the popularity of these vehicles for action that, by some estimates, France entered the new millennium with up to 800,000 officially registered associations. 22 Marked by its participation in government as a party of the establishment, isolated by the collapse of international communism and harried by new empirical evidence of its ethical failure, the challenge facing the PCF to reposition itself successfully vis-à-vis the French electorate was formidable. In an era witnessing the end of ideology, no other party had been as reliant for its survival on a membership that was so ideologically encadré, or organised. In a climate where the most striking dynamic for change seemed to be a bottom-up process driven by individuals impervious to the traditional notions of hierarchical leadership,

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the PCF remained stamped with the character of a centralised organisation with a profoundly bureaucratised system of delegated authority. The regeneration of the party and the renewal of its appeal implied, inevitably, the regeneration of the leadership.

Regenerating the leadership Notwithstanding the polemical nature of much of the discussion regarding Georges Marchais’ legacy, it is fair to argue that he represented a regression in terms of the breadth of qualities, or the lack of them, that he brought to the principal leadership role of the PCF. Whereas Maurice Thorez possessed a cultural dimension that impressed some of the intellectuals of his time, and Waldeck Rochet expressed a certain sensibility to genuinely democratising ambitions (as evidenced by his ambiguity towards the Soviet repression of the Prague spring), Marchais was pressed from an altogether different mould. He was a throwback to a proletarian prototype, schooled purely in the ways of the party and without equal in his ability to use the mechanisms of the party to establish his dominance over it, to such an extent that he was nicknamed by some ‘the red king’.23 The task facing his successor was therefore monumental, as Robert Hue had to redefine not only the substance of the PCF project for French society in terms that would constitute a revitalising break with the past, but in a manner that would establish a redemptive distance between himself and his predecessor and thus rehabilitate the understanding of leadership. Moreover, all this had to occur in the aftermath of a historic landslide in the legislative elections of 1993 that had resulted in a chastening defeat for the Left as a whole: with a share of the vote in the first round that left the Left in total with 32.2 per cent, the PCF saw its final number 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. As was remarked at the time, the largest lesson to be learned was the extent of the disillusionment of the ‘peuple de gauche’ with ‘their’ government, resulting in a reversal of fortune for the Left that made it introuvable, or absent from the Assembly in a way reminiscent of the disappearing liberals all the way back in 1815.24 The party’s 28th Congress, from 25 to 29 January 1994, was marked of course by the handover from Marchais to the then little-known Hue. But although the ostensible thematic content of the Congress steered away from an agenda explicitly aimed at addressing thorny issues such as the implications of the collapse of the USSR and international

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communism for the PCF, leading refondateurs left the party in no doubt as to what the stakes really were. During the course of the debates, Philippe Herzog, for example, insisted on reminding the party of its disconnection from the rest of French society, and Guy Hermier warned it not to risk enduring marginalisation by attempting simply to patch up a century-old communist project for society that had failed. If not in substance, then certainly in style, Hue opted for an approach that marked a clear difference with the previous mode of leadership, by being notably more open to debate. As the evolution of the party organisation was to be signalled by the change of the political bureau into the national bureau, so the turn taken by the leadership was to be marked by Hue becoming the National Secretary, rather than taking on the mantle of General Secretary worn by Marchais. And the desire to embody conciliation and change soon manifested itself with the articulation of initiatives such as the one in April of that year, when Hue floated the prospect of a Pacte Unitaire pour le Progrès (PUP), aiming to draw together movements ranging from the centre to the far left.25 However, the European elections of June 1994 reinforced the lesson that the PCF had to find a new way of soliciting the endorsement of the French electorate. The PCF list, led by Francis Wurtz, attracted only 6.9 per cent of the votes cast and the performance boded ill for the supreme electoral contest, the presidential elections of 1995. More mindful than his predecessors of the leadership skills required by such a contest, Hue personalised his appeal. Genial in appearance and manner, approachable and media-friendly, Hue succeeded in conveying the attractive aspects of his persona and matched this with a discursive style that was much more open than that of his predecessors. In a way that was indicative of the social changes to which the PS had been reconciled long beforehand, Hue also appealed more openly to the middle classes. But the substance of his presidential campaign remained focused on very familiar PCF themes: boosting economic activity through the salary increases that would enhance the purchasing power of workers, protecting the social security system from the market-oriented reforms that would undermine it, and criticism of the Maastricht Treaty and the associated prominence given to the imperative of profit. Having deferred, in a sense, the challenge of defining a new project for the PCF placed even greater significance on the strategic objective of the leadership to repair the damage done to its electoral weight as a party by the contests of the two previous years, and restore it to a better bargaining position on the Left vis-à-vis the PS. Notwithstanding Lionel Jospin’s relatively good showing in the first round of the presidential

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elections of 1995, scoring 23.3 per cent of the votes cast (against 18.6 and 20.8 for his right-wing rivals Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chirac respectively), and the surprising way he narrowed the gap on Chirac in the second round (scoring 47.36 against the latter’s 52.64), the result was a serious defeat for the Left as a whole. The global score for the Left in the first round at 37.24 per cent of the votes cast was well down on the elections of 1988 when it scored 45.23 per cent. The performance of Robert Hue told a tale of both apparent success and veiled disappointment. While his first round score of 8.6 per cent was clearly up on André Lajoinie’s 6.8 in the previous presidential contest, it failed to eclipse the total communist vote when the 2 per cent polled by the dissident communist candidature of Pierre Juquin was added to Lajoinie’s. To the left of the PCF, Arlette Laguiller, as the Lutte Ouvrière candidate, had made an unexpectedly good bid for the support of workers and white-collar employees, and more than doubled her first round score to 5.3 per cent, in comparison to 2 per cent in 1988.26 But it was on the far right that the inroads on what might have been a natural reservoir of votes for the PCF was most telling. While Jean-Marie Le Pen’s share of the votes cast was up undramatically from 14.4 per cent in the first round in 1988 to 15 per cent in 1995, the telling facts for Robert Hue were those which underlined the way tendencies in the two opposite poles of the political spectrum represented by the FN and PCF appeared to cross. Whereas during the legislative elections of 1978 the PCF was able to count on 28 per cent support 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 had declined in the two age groups to 7/6 per cent (male/female) and 9/10 per cent respectively. In marked contrast to Hue, the FN’s Jean-Marie Le Pen was considerably over-represented in the foregoing demographic categories, 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 of this evolution made the gap even wider among first-time voters, with 7 per cent voting for the PCF candidate and 21 per cent voting for the FN candidate. Of the socio-economic strata on whom the PCF candidate should expect to depend, namely workers and employees, Hue held the line or improved: 15 per cent of votes cast among workers and 10 per cent among employees (in contrast to Lajoinie’s 6 per cent score among the latter category in 1988). But here again Le Pen’s score in those respective categories of 27 and 19 per cent illustrated the drift towards right-wing populism among those sections of society where the PCF

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should have hoped to re-establish its fortunes. A more general comparison of the performances of Hue and Le Pen in those regions where the national PCF vote was concentrated highlights the way Hue was outdistanced by his far right adversary in his own backyard: in the north-west Le 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 was only in the rural Centre region that the tendency was reversed with the voters giving Hue a 14.1 per cent share as opposed to Le Pen’s 9 per cent. 27 Looking more closely at the voting pattern for the PCF in terms of an internal comparator, that is, its candidate’s performance compared to 1988, ostensible progress was counterbalanced by its sobering implications. The four regional bastions of the PCF mentioned above are 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, Pyrénées orientales, Var). In this set of constituencies, which provides the bedrock of support for the PCF, in 1988 Lajoinie had garnered 1,153,103 votes representing a 56.4 per cent share of the total turnout for the communist candidate, but whereas Hue gathered 1,310,000 votes in 1995 this represented only 50.4 per cent of the total turnout for the communist candidate. In the second set of some 67 departments where the PCF candidates had had the best showing outside of the four regional bastions, that was where Lajoinie had concentrated 43.6 per cent of the communist vote 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 of departments taken together over that period was confirmed by the results in 1995: Hue outperformed Lajoinie in his ability to mobilise the communist constituency in those departments where the communist presence was traditionally weaker anyway, but was least successful in those departments which should have been the most reliable source of electoral strength. In short, the worrying lesson of 1995 for the new leader of the PCF regarding his performance in the presidential elections was that his candidature had made the party a little less marginal in those departments where its chances of exercising local power were slim anyway, but had failed to rebuild the party’s credibility in those bastions where power was once a realistic prospect.28

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In theory, under Hue, the municipal elections of June 1995 should have allowed the PCF to repair some of the credibility lost in the presidential elections that, by their very nature, operate to the detriment of the collectivist ethos of the PCF. The municipalities represented the grassroots strength of the party, through the concentration of party personnel in local bureaucracies and the exercise of local competencies, such as housing policy, which allowed the local authorities to cultivate a natural clientele. As a result of the previous elections in 1989, the PCF had been left with a little more than 1400 communes out of the 35,000 for the whole of France. Out of those under communist control, one had more than 100,000 inhabitants (Le Havre); 45 (out of 277) had more than 30,000; 94 (out of 658) had between 10,000 and 30,000; and 157 had between 3500 and 10,000. The results in 1995 were marked by the loss of its biggest municipality, Le Havre, and of seven towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants. Although it gained four more comparable municipalities this was due to unusual local specificities such as divisions among the right-wing parties, allowing the FN into the second round and thereby polarising opposition to it to the benefit of the PCF. The general tendency in the evolution of the PCF vote at municipal level followed the curve first discernible in 1977. In some cases (such as Le Havre notably), the decline was exaggerated by the departure from the political scene of powerful mayoral figures who had been in local politics for decades and for whom there was no obvious successor from the ranks of local comrades. Elsewhere, surprise gains, apart from the disunity of the Right mentioned above, flowed from the opportunities to play the traditional tribune role of the party in the face of clearly discredited local government administrations. But the final balance sheet confirmed that the party’s failure to convince, even at local level, continued to undermine its existence. In total, the PCF was left with 6426 municipal councillors, having won control of 18 towns of more than 30,000 inhabitants in the first round, but having lost 49 municipalities of more than 3500 inhabitants in contrast to the 24 it had captured.29 Rather than succumbing to an atavistic reflex to deal with defeat by denying it, and appearing to pull the party together by depriving its members of the opportunity to speak, Hue decided to proclaim his faith in the possibility of transforming the party through the licence he gave to the expression of pluralism. In the preparations for the party’s 29th Congress, Hue invited individual members to express their opinions of what were considered the most pressing issues challenging the PCF: what its orientation should be, the contradictions thrown up by the

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evolution of French society, the ensuing impact on the political life of the party, the relationship between civilisation and communism and how to define a politics of change. On one hand, it was a high-risk strategy that could not fail to reveal the deep division in the party that might be exacerbated by the Congress. On the other hand, the divisions were already in evidence as different sensibilities or tendencies vocalised their opposition to each other’s proposals for rescuing the party. The most peripheral of these five major tendencies was led by the MEP and national bureau member, Philippe Herzog. An association called Confrontations had formed around him to express its frustration with the party’s immobilism and its criticism of the PCF’s hostility to the construction of Europe. Less marginalised than Herzog and his followers on the reformist wing of the party were the refondateurs, led by Guy Hermier and convinced that Hue was not going far enough in the attempt to transform the party. For the refondateurs there was an obvious constituency out there waiting to be harnessed, which was expressed by their suggestion at a national committee meeting in October 1996 that the PCF should take the lead in shaping a new ‘pôle de radicalité’. This radical focus or alliance should bring together the PCF, the Mouvement des Citoyens (MDC), the ecologist Verts and far left, tapping the reservoir of discontent that had been dramatically uncovered by the grassroots mobilisation against the social and economic policies of Chirac’s prime minister, Alain Juppé, during the autumn of discontent in 1995. According to the refondateurs, the popular mobilisation against the loi Debré in 1996 and its attempt to ‘regularise’ certain aspects of the rights of immigrants in France simply provided further proof of the potential for the creation of a radical force to the left of the PS, drawing on the support of the 15–20 per cent of voters whose voices were dispersed among the movements and parties unable to break through because of the voting system in France. In the middle of the party sat the team of reformers gathered around Robert Hue, comprised of some notable figures who had rallied to his cause after service to the former leader, notably Pierre Blotin, Jean-Claude Gayssot, Bernard Vasseur and Jean-François Gau. Facing them on the orthodox or anti-reformist wing of the party there subsisted a group of Marchais loyalists, but their influence was in steep decline largely due to the rapidly declining health of Marchais himself, which would prompt his absence from the 29th Congress. The extreme end of the anti-reformist wing of the party was occupied by a faction that had created its own coordination communiste, working for a Leninist renaissance and revolutionary continuity. By 1995 they had created

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their own organ, Intervention communiste, in which their leaders, notably the Deputy Rémy Auchedé, the deputy mayor of Aubervilliers Jean-Jacques Karman and Henri Alleg (tellingly the leading light of the Cercles Erich Honecker), could castigate Hue’s leadership for having betrayed the old Soviet and Leninist values of international proletarianism and democratic centralism. In language reminiscent of the acrimonious tirades that split the socialist camp in France and Europe during the 1920s, this tendency produced the most bitter criticism of Hue’s leadership, accusing him of using the apparent logic of inevitable transformation to pursue a policy of ‘reformism’ in the old and pejorative sense, 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 21 December 1996. The desire for change under Hue had already made a significant 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 resort to the old venue in the communist suburb of Saint-Ouen. Also significant was the new configuration given to the disposition of the seats in the new venue, with the decision to dispense with the traditional platform from which the leadership could direct a downward and dominating gaze on the delegates. In a sense the sting was drawn from the Congress before it took place with figures like Guy Hermier predicting that it would be a non-event. When the Congress got underway, Philippe Herzog and his supporters effectively renounced their ambition to win the party over to their convictions, arguing that it was incapable of transforming itself. As for the PCF’s principal ally in the interface with the workers in their concrete economic sphere, the CGT, its general secretary Louis Viannet declared his belief that there should not be an organic link between the leadership of the union and that of the party, and that consequently he was giving up his seat on the national bureau. But while on the one hand there seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm from within the party to engage with the process of mutation or transformation announced by Hue, on the other hand there was a greater willingness from outside the party to engage in dialogue with it post-Marchais. This was borne out by the notable non-communists invited to the Congress representing a broad range of political sensibilities: Francine de la Gorce, the vice president of ATD Quart Monde (the organisation set up by Father Joseph Wrezinski to combat poverty and human rights abuse around the world); the former maoist soixantehuitard, Roland Castro, whose political odyssey had seen his loyalties

182 A Party Without a Role?

move across through Mitterrand to Charles Pasqua; the writer and analyst Julia Kristeva; the sociologist Emmanuel Todd, some of whose ideas would be taken up by Jacques Chirac; and the political commentator and pollster Stéphane Rozès. Whether or not convinced by the discourse of Hue, these guests would have noticed the change in the vocabulary one might have expected traditionally from the General Secretary, now the National Secretary, of the party. The ideological catechism of old that would have required frequent references to socialism, the working class and class struggle had given way to the articulation of belief in the dynamic emerging from within society, and notably through the involvement of the citizen, which it was the mission of the party to promote. The party was inspired by a tradition of collective, revolutionary action in pursuit of the common good that sprang from within the frontiers of France, embodied by the idealism of 1789. The communist values that the PCF was promoting as it prepared for the future had replaced class with community, underlined the imperative to share the fruits of prosperity and recognised the widespread need for a greater sense of security. The revolutionary vocation that shaped the identity of the PCF now had as its aim the creation of a more humane society, supported by the values of citizenship and solidarity.30 Whether unwittingly or not, Hue was already preparing the party to take advantage of Jacques Chirac’s gamble in dissolving parliament and calling legislative elections a year earlier than required by the electoral calendar. The themes enunciated by the National Secretary at the 29th Congress were picked up again in the PCF programme for the legislative elections of 1997. The call for reflationary economic policies in order to combat unemployment was couched in terms of the broad need for government to commit to ‘démocratie citoyenne’, that is, the imperative of participation expressed by social movements in France, and the inevitable challenge of renewing France was addressed in terms of the inspiration to be found in the country’s own traditions of radical reform so that this could be accomplished ‘à la française’.31 The theme of endogenous sources of a dynamic for change was used recurrently as a counterpoint exploiting the discontent generated by the government’s economic policy aligned with the convergence criteria preparing the country for entry to the single currency. Instead of ‘turning the screw’ by implementing the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, the PCF called for an end to the policy of bending France to the demands of an ultraliberal austerity package that merely increased insecurity and the domination of financial interests. The way forward, it argued, was for

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France to be restored to herself through a genuine sovereignty of the people that allowed them to take control of their own destinies. Chirac’s tactic in calling the legislative elections early was not difficult to understand: the pain involved in cutting the budget deficits prior to the adoption of the Euro would increase as the mandate for the National Assembly drew to its natural close and going early would meet the ostensible goal of ‘relegitimising’ the government’s actions and avert a more likely scenario of defeat. The polls of February and March still put the government ahead of the opposition in the approval ratings, and the President’s advisers supported his strategy. Equally clear, however, once the President announced the dissolution of the Assembly on the evening of 21 April and set the campaigning process in train, was the way in which the principal motivations for his actions would also be the most conspicuous by their absence from the debates of the leaders of the majority in the run-up to the first round of voting on 25 May. The campaign was a timid one, with the major players showing little real enthusiasm for revealing their cards on the most important underlying issue, namely the pursuit of the European project and its economic consequences, particularly for employment. Although Chirac and Prime Minister Juppé might have been perceived as playing into the hands of their critics by their aversion to engaging with the issues that most exercised the electorate, the PCF did not react with alacrity. The national committee met on 25 April to determine the party’s strategy and four days later the PCF put its name to a joint declaration with the PS, which was the fruit of months of discussions predating the dissolution of the Assembly. While stating certain shared objectives, it was not meant to be a common programme for government (a point underlined by PS leader Lionel Jospin on 12 May), and the PCF campaign proper was launched by Hue at a meeting in Marseille on 6 May. The behaviour of the electorate was indicative of the changeability that would, in this instance, favour the Left, but also represent too shifting a constituency to be relied upon as a platform for the future. Opinion polls indicated that although support for the Right was declining during the fortnight leading up to the first round, the mobilisation in favour of the Left did not begin to materialise until a few days before voters were due to go to the ballot box. The 36.2 per cent of votes obtained by the Right on 25 May was a clear rebuff, leaving them 7.9 per cent down on 1993, while at 42.1 per cent, the Left was up 7.1 points on 1993, with the PCF seemingly restored to a solid platform with a 9.9 per cent share of the vote.32 It was noteworthy that the

184 A Party Without a Role?

young, in particular, appeared to come back to the Left. Furthermore, the gains made among employees, workers and the professional classes seemed to revive the alliance that had been the strength of the Left after 1971 and had seemed to unravel in 1993, namely its ability to appeal to both the small man at the bottom of the social ladder, and the middle classes who might otherwise be tempted by the overtures of economic liberalism.33 When the dust settled after the second round on 1 June, the most dramatic gain in seats in the new Assembly was obviously for the non-communist Left (PS, PRS, DVG), up from 70 in the outgoing Assembly to 263 in the new one. But the PCF also enjoyed a noteworthy increase in Deputies, up from 23 to 39. The enhanced profile in the Assembly mirrored the party’s enhanced profile in its four bastions in the country, most impressively in the Centre, where it regained the two Deputies for the Allier and the one for the Cher that had been lost in 1993, also picking up a Deputy to represent the Dordogne. The new government to which the new Assembly gave rise reflected both the stabilisation in the electoral fortunes suggested by the election results, and the way the PCF had changed as a party of the Left. While remaining an important partner for the dominant Socialists, it was no longer quite the ‘force incontournable’ it once was, that is, that sometimes infuriatingly obdurate partner that was nonetheless too important to be circumvented. Pursuing the electoral logic of a gauche plurielle or plural Left in order to defeat the outgoing majority, Lionel Jospin offered cabinet posts to the MDC and the ecologist Verts, as well as the PCF. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevènement of the MDC took the portfolio for the Ministry of the Interior and Dominique Voynet of the Verts took, appropriately, Environment and Planning. In contrast to their first participation in a Socialist-led government at the beginning of the Mitterrand years, the Communists now found themselves with a smaller and a feminised input. While Jean-Claude Gayssot took the ministerial portfolio for Transport and Housing, Marie-Georges Buffet became Minister for Youth and Sport and Michèle Demessine was appointed junior minister responsible for Tourism. The challenge for Robert Hue, in terms of his relationship vis-à-vis his own party and vis-à-vis the government, was, in the former case, to continue the process of mutation or transformation in a way that did not alienate those who thought he was too slow and those who believed he was burning the bridges with the party’s past; and in the latter case he had to show the PCF’s independence in its relationship with 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

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National Secretary’s carefully modulated response to the death of Georges Marchais on 16 November 1997. Emerging from the hospital where Marchais died, Hue expressed a strong sense of personal loss and the appreciation he had for Marchais’ qualities as an individual. In terms of Marchais’ contribution to the evolution of the PCF, however, Hue was more circumspect. As commentators had noted of Hue’s book on la mutation of French communism, the 350-page essay deferred only three times to the ideas of Marchais. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of Marchais’ passing, Hue remarked on the positive changes that his predecessor has set in train, and that were now (in other words, under Hue’s stewardship of the party’s fortunes), bearing fruit through the mutation of the party. Although Hue could not proclaim, as did Alain Krivine of the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), that Marchais’ death was the symbolic end to the generations of PCF leaders who confused communism with Stalinism, Hue’s response was a tacit acknowledgement that a chapter had closed in the history of the PCF and that this would not be detrimental to the process of change.34 A few weeks beforehand, Hue had expounded on what he thought the 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 supporting the government of Romano Prodi but without a voice in government, Hue stressed the positive participation of the three communists in Jospin’s cabinet. The general thrust of Hue’s declarations was to underline the notion that the PCF was a party with a positive programme that would use its role in government to positive ends. On the thorny issue of Europe, in spite of its hostility to the Maastricht Treaty, Hue declared that the PCF was ‘euroconstructif’, and that its mission was to give a new and much needed meaning to Europe. The key to this, he argued, was to determine the priorities of European construction in line with social need. The ‘social’ emerged as the theme connecting the diverse issues addressed by the National Secretary of the party, and when asked to 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’intervention citoyenne’, a situation where ordinary citizens felt enabled to exercise a genuine influence on the management of the issues affecting their lives. In a language unburdened by the old clichés, Hue talked of the PCF’s new ‘discours de radicalité’, a discourse of radical change that would only convince if the party adopted a visible posture of constructiveness.35 In reality, Hue’s discourse was not convincing enough either to disguise the weak bargaining position of the PCF vis-à-vis the Socialists

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in government, or to persuade the disillusioned members in its own ranks that it was forging ahead on a path that would generate a new future for the party. The leadership had been conspicuously muted, for example, in its reaction to the plans of the Jospin government to open up certain state enterprises to private capital. As Guy Hermier, speaking for the refondateurs observed, the leadership had failed to imagine and articulate a new concept for the democratisation of the public sector that might offer a credible alternative to the privatisation route. Hermier implied that Hue might have jettisoned the old baggage, but had failed to define a ‘radicalité’ or pole of radical thought or action that could take the party forward, and warned of the headlong rush towards a ‘satellisation’ of the PCF in its relationship with the PS, with the Communists held in an irresistible orbit around their much more powerful ally in the gauche plurielle.36 It was, nonetheless, an indication of how far the party had come since Marchais’ day that a leading Communist Deputy and a member of the national bureau could make such confident criticism of the leadership, so soon after it had led the party into government again, and in the pages of a leading paper. For their part, Hue and the members of the national committee pursued their goal of creating an ‘open’ party, and to this end the national committee meeting of 16/17 November 1998 voted to annul all sanctions that the PCF had taken against its members for flouting the ideological or organisational principles which the party, now committed to the process of mutation, had resolved to transform. Moreover, the documentation relating to those punitive measures would be made available for consultation, in line with the regulations governing access to public archives. As Alain Krivine remarked wryly, it was a curious kind of honour to be rehabilitated after 33 years, but that he had no wish to rejoin a fold that had lost its way. And when asked for his opinion, Pierre Juquin wondered presciently, whether such a media-conscious act did not reflect the fear in the PCF leadership that, in the competition to define a new kind of radicalism, it was being overtaken by others.37 Juquin’s observation underlined the inevitable risk the party had to take under Hue’s leadership, of finding itself outflanked because it had shed the dogmas of the past without producing an intellectually cohesive project that might restore it to a dominant role as a vanguard for change. Hue’s ambition of creating an open party, his desire to offer proof of the party’s ‘euroconstructive’ attitude, and to illustrate the mutation that had occurred and was ongoing in the party would soon be put to the test in the European elections of 13 May 1999. He would

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spell out the gamble to the national committee of the party on 28 January, by proposing to lead a list characterised by a double-dose of parité. Picking up the theme that had gained so much momentum in civil society at large, the list led by Hue would have equal numbers of men and women and, more innovatively still, equal numbers of communists and non-communists. Thus three weeks later when the list was made public, the desire for openness and a new vital connection with civil society was personified by the presence on the list of non-PCF members like the philosopher Geneviève Fraisse and the architect Roland Castro, and the outgoing president of SOS-racisme, Fodé Sylla. Old loyalties were not forgotten, with the inclusion of union leaders like Michel Deschamps and Denis Cohen, and old differences were reconciled vis-à-vis PCF members who had left or been excluded by the party with names like Philippe Herzog and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont on the list. Symbolic of the transformation of the party, and even though it was spending four times more on the campaign than it did in 1994, the PCF set about making its case to the electorate under the banner of its Bouge l’Europe list, rather than its own colours. As Hue proclaimed to the press, the list he led was engaged in a campaign that was ‘positive, constructive, young, joyful and confident in the future’.38 But there was evidence, however, that Hue’s conviction had not entirely won over the party’s members. The militants were slow to mobilise on the ground in support of the list, and this lack of enthusiasm was complicated by the divisions that occurred among candidates on the list over France’s position concerning the war in former Yugoslavia. The PCF condemned the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia that was aimed at securing its retreat from Kosovo. However, figures on the Bouge l’Europe list it promoted were unequivocal in their support for the NATO strategy, such as Philippe Herzog, Fodé Sylla and especially Geneviève Fraisse. With the early polls suggesting little joy for the departure he had initiated from the traditional electoral strategies of the PCF, Hue returned to the more familiar posture of a PCF leader for what was left of the campaign, adopting a more party-minded discourse that was critical of the government and hostile to the left factionalism represented by the Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the Ligue Communiste révolutionaire (LCR).39 When the results of the election on 13 June were counted, there was little comfort to be had from the fact that the 6.8 per cent share of the votes cast for the communist vehicle had not fallen below the share obtained by the PCF list led by Francis Wurtz in 1994. The reality was that in 1994 the PCF had secured 1,342,222 votes, whereas in 1999 this

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had fallen to 1,192,155. The voting patterns showed that compared to the previous European election, the PCF vote had become more homogenised geographically, with the party losing ground in its former bastions. In Seine-Saint-Denis for example, its share of the vote dropped by one per cent. But the pro-European conversion of the leadership seemed 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 Gard and 2.7 per cent in the Corrèze. More disappointing was the way the PCF 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 of LO–LCR snapping at its heels with a remarkable 5.2 per cent share of the 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 its score in relation to 1994 and enjoyed notable successes in those constituencies where the left-wing vote had once been unequivocally communist. Thus in the Pas-de-Calais the LO–LCR ticket almost doubled the far left vote to 7.2 per cent, compared to 1994, and in Aubervilliers it almost trebled to a 9.6 per cent share of the vote. What tended to be overlooked was the fragile nature of the LO–LCR alliance and the rivalries that militated against enduring success, or the ambiguous responses of those who had voted for them when polled on their future voting intentions. The lessons for the PCF and its leadership were, however, clear. Notwithstanding the repeated evocations by Hue of the mutation in which the party was engaged, this had not yet resulted in a clear or convincing perception of the party’s renewal, in terms of strategy, ideals or identity, either by the wider electorate or a substantial number of its own members. In leadership terms, Hue continued to distance himself from the traditional dominance associated with the role of the party head. At the end of his book on la mutation, Hue had expressed the conviction that the time had come for the party to cease confusing unity with uniformity. The antidote to the charge of being a ‘monolithic’ party, he believed, was not simply to tolerate opposing views within the party but to enable those holding such views to retain their posts of responsibility within it.41 When reflecting on how far this process of change had taken the party, Hue began his book on the new communist project by tying the issue of renewal with the understanding of the leadership post itself. Implying that the destiny of the party should not be dependent

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on the destiny of the leader, Hue portrayed the prospect of his vacating the post as an opening or opportunity for the party, and a decision that would be taken in consultation with other figures in the party, particularly, as he underlined, female ones.42 A sense of collegial accommodation and gender equality was discernible in the run-up to the European election. The scenario originally envisaged by Hue of Marie-George Buffet heading the communist list was soon dispensed with when he took note of her lack of enthusiasm for the idea and her attachment to ministerial office in the Jospin government, where she was perceived to have performed very creditably. As one commentator observed, the PCF seemed determined to mark its progress by the ‘double incarnation’ of its leadership through the male National Secretary and the female government minister.43 Hue’s mistrust of authoritarian leadership took on a note of outright hostility when it came to articulating the party’s response to the reform of the presidential mandate. The ball that had been somewhat mischievously set rolling by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with the proposal to reduce the length of the presidential mandate was caught by Jacques Chirac and drew him, notwithstanding his clear reservations at the outset, into the camp of the reformers. With a referendum set for 24 September 2000 aimed at soliciting the approval of French voters for a reduction in the length of the mandate from seven to five years, on 4 September Robert Hue gave a major press conference explaining the resources the PCF would mobilise in pursuit of an ‘active abstention’ and why. For Hue, the system would still remain old-fashioned and authoritarian because a simple reduction in the length of the mandate would not fundamentally alter the concentration of power in the hands of one individual, therefore leaving the French political system as presidential as ever. Moreover, by making legislative and presidential elections run in tandem the former would be reduced in significance by serving to confirm the result of the latter, thereby reducing the importance of parliament even further. According to Hue, all mandates needed to be shortened and revised, and the PCF would be campaigning against the proposed reform on the grounds that what was needed was less ‘presidentialisation’ not more, and genuine modernisation that would facilitate more meaningful participation by citizens not less.44 In spite of the criticism from some quarters of the paradoxical situation the PCF found itself in by campaigning actively over a choice of options when it had condemned them both as hollow, the results of the referendum proved Hue’s comments on the need to encourage genuine participation to have merit. When the votes cast on 24 September 2000

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were counted, the results translated what some commentators interpreted as an ‘effrondrement structurel’ or structural collapse of the political system created by de Gaulle.45 Of the nine referendums that had taken place since 1958, none had testified to such voter indifference: in metropolitan France 18.75 per cent voted for the quinquennat, 6.97 voted against and 69.28 abstained. In effect, less than one in five registered voters mandated the reform of the institution of the presidency, beating the previous record for abstentionism set in November 1988, of 62.64 per cent, when the referendum on the status of New Caledonia was carried with the approval of just one in four of registered voters.46 It was the culmination of more than a decade of political disengagement that was both cultural and non-partisan. The advocates of the change had failed to convince the voters that it would result in a more evenly balanced relationship between the legislature and the executive, perhaps, as some hoped, in the mould set across the Atlantic. But given the absence of a political culture comparable to that of the United States, their adversaries had evoked the possibility of a French system locked in permanent conflict. Ironically, the U-turns of Gaullist President Jacques Chirac may have done the most to damage the relationship of trust and legitimacy directly conferred on the President by the French people, by exposing choices so clearly driven by the desire for political survival. While his tactics may have been questionable, in terms of his sensibility Hue was more honest than other party leaders in registering the deep current of resentment against the political system, and the emergence of what less partisan observers have called a process of abstention-sanction in which voting has become a relativised process aimed at punishing a process of alternance which is in fact répétition, and sending a message to successive governments that they have been disavowed by the people.47 The disastrous turnout for the referendum on the presidential mandate may well have marked the terminal phase in the operation of the Fifth Republic as envisaged by de Gaulle, but the presidency remained the keystone of the constitutional architecture sustaining it, and within little more than a year Hue and the PCF would have to face the challenge of preparing for another French presidential election. The designation of Hue as the party’s candidate was meant to testify to the leadership’s desire to prove its democratic and modernising credentials. Opting for a procedure not envisaged in the party’s statutes, the leadership organised a consultation that solicited the views of all the sections and federations on the best of the eight candidates standing to become the party’s presidential candidate. When the ballot, which took place

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between 1 and 6 October 2001, was finished, Hue won comfortably with 78 per cent of the votes, well ahead of his nearest rival, the refondateur Maxime Gremetz, with 15 per cent of the vote. However, Gremetz and four other defeated candidates criticised the leadership for its refusal to engage in a real battle of ideas, and for exaggerating the level of 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 line made little concession to the criticisms of Gremetz and others, focusing instead on the figures that confirmed their view that Hue’s endorsement was another milestone in the party’s democratisation. In his report to the Congress calling upon it to ratify Hue’s candidature, Jean-François Gau trumpeted the figure of 64,000 party members who had taken part in the consultative process, the biggest organised by the party in years and 17,000 more than the figure for those who had endorsed the participation of communist ministers in government in 1997.49 In his own closing speech to the Congress, Hue expounded on the opportunities for the party that built upon his vision for its transformation. He conceded that presidential elections were always particularly difficult for communist candidates, but argued that there was an opening for the PCF that it could exploit. Millenarist visions were a thing of the past, as were sweeping condemnations of developments like globalisation. What the party had to supply was options for individuals attempting to fashion their own happiness. Instead of positing an end-state, the party had to offer new beginnings and possibilities for the many disenchanted groups in society. In an attempt to link the party’s past to its future, Hue cited the party’s emergence in the nineteenth century as a means of channelling disparate and sometimes terrorist challenges to injustice. Tacitly acknowledging the heavy price the party had paid in the generalised backlash against mainstream politics, Hue argued that the party had to find a way of rehabilitating politics, in order to persuade men and women that it offered them a means of taking control of their individual destinies.50 Hue’s appearances in the media in the build-up to the presidential election were marked by the same determination to believe that there was a space for the PCF to occupy and exploit on the political landscape, and that the discourse defining it had to eschew the ideological generalisations of the past in favour of concrete proposals for concrete situations. But as some commentators identified, this more modest and honest discourse also accommodated a sense of reality concerning the PCF’s position that inevitably place Hue on the back foot. While rejecting the pollsters’ assertions that the election would chronicle a death foretold,

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Hue’s arguments implied the recognition that the PCF’s role was to complement the action of the Socialists or moderate some of their initiatives, but that of itself it could initiate very little. In the space of one interview on France 2 on 25 January 2002, Hue’s defence of his prospects was notable for the progressively downward revision of his party’s contribution to the contest, from being ‘essential’, to being ‘original’, ‘efficient’ and finally ‘useful’.51 In the months that followed, Hue staked out a position based on the defence of ordinary working people, whether that was to resist increasing the rights of employers to lay off workers, championing the cause of retirement before the age of 60, or arguing against the creation of a European constitution that weakened France’s own and paved the way for the excesses of economic liberalisation to operate in France.52 But as the forecasts continued to paint diminishing prospects for the PCF candidate, Hue was essentially reduced to arguing that Lionel Jospin, as the Socialist candidate, could not expect to win the second round without taking account of the sensibilities expressed by PCF voters. More worryingly still for Hue, the prospective success in the first round of other candidates to the left of the PCF like Arlette Laguiller was condemned by him as simply splitting the vote and playing into the hands of the Right.53 When the results of the first round of the presidential elections, on 21 April 2002, had been counted (Table 8.1), the catastrophe predicted by some commentators for the PCF appeared to have come about. The decline in votes for Hue in comparison to 1995, from 8.7 per cent to 3.37 per cent meant that the PCF had lost three-fifths of its electoral capital within the space of that presidential mandate. Looked at more closely, Hue did not significantly exceed half of the number of votes cast for him in 1995, in any of the 96 departments or 555 constituencies

Table 8.1 Performance of left-wing and ecology candidates in the first round of the presidential elections 2002 Candidate Arlette Laguiller Olivier Besancenot Robert Hue Lionel Jospin Noël Mamère Jean-Pierre Chevènement Source: www.elections2002.sciences-po.fr.

% of votes cast 5.72 4.25 3.37 16.18 5.25 5.33

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of metropolitan France.54 The results of the first round of the legislative elections (Table 8.2), which took place on 9 June 2002, seemed to confirm that Hue’s failure of leadership in the presidential election was emblematic of the party’s lack of credibility as a whole. The 4.82 per cent share of the votes cast was the worst ever result obtained by PCF candidates in legislative elections. The result had to be nuanced by the fact that the lesson inflicted on the gauche plurielle by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s presence in the second round of the presidential election at the expense of Jospin had strengthened the republican discipline among the parties of the Left in order to enhance the survival prospects of left-wing candidates into the second round of the legislative elections. Thus the PS, Verts and Radicaux de gauche in 13 constituencies mobilised behind the PCF candidate from the first round, while the PCF reciprocated in a larger number of constituencies elsewhere, and ultimately emerged with 21 seats. In spite of this, when calculated across the 484 constituencies where the PCF was represented, the result obtained by its candidates still represented a historic low (5.6 per cent of the votes cast). And while it could be argued that the party had raised its 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 the second round of the presidential elections, and especially the fate of Hue, was inevitably and immediately seized on as the final epitaph for the 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 Party

% of votes cast

Lutte Ouvrière Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire Extrême gauche Parti communiste français Parti socialiste Parti radical de gauche Divers gauche Verts Pôle républicain Autres ecologistes Source: www.assemblee-nat.fr/elections/resultats.asp.

1.20 1.27 0.32 4.82 24.11 1.54 1.09 4.51 1.19 1.17

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were not difficult to identify, even in its traditional heartlands. In the communist municipality of Calais, Le Pen took the biggest share of the votes cast in the first round with 18.48 per cent, while Hue was pushed down into fifth place with 8.62 per cent. In a grassroots survey of voter sentiment after the first round, the reasons for switching to Le Pen were clear: concerns over the breakdown of law and order, clandestine immigration (especially the problems over the refugee centre at Sangatte) and job insecurity. In spite of Hue’s frequent visits to the constituency and his conspicuous support for the workers facing redundancy at the LU biscuit factory, it was clear that the PCF had become tarred with the same brush as a Socialist-led government perceived as indifferent to the problems faced by ordinary French voters in such constituencies.56 But with more objective distance, one could argue that the fate endured by Hue in the presidential elections was part of a wider and stinging rebuke handed out to the political establishment as a whole by the French electorate. If Hue’s vote collapsed in the first round, so did Jospin’s, leading to a first round elimination for the Left that was unprecedented since 1969. The score totalled by the Trotskyist candidates, which at 10.4 per cent of the votes cast was way ahead of the 5.3 they achieved in 1995, was certainly a humiliation for the PCF, but looking across the political spectrum as a whole, parallel lessons could be drawn on the Right. Added together, the score achieved by Le Pen and his erstwhile colleague in the FN, Bruno Mégret, totalled 19.2 per cent of the vote and was 4.2 per cent up on the far right score in 1995. Conversely, the moderate right, represented by the candidatures of Jacques Chirac, François Bayrou, Christine Boutin and Alain Madelin, suffered its own collapse with a total share of 31.8 per cent of the vote compared to the 44.2 per cent share of the vote obtained by its standard-bearers in 1995 (Chirac, Balladur and Villiers). The mobilisation of voters in the second round of the presidential elections bore out the view that while prepared to punish the parties that work the political system, the voters are not prepared to break it. The hitherto unheard of majority for Chirac of 82.2 per cent justified the characterisation of Le Pen and his party as an ‘impotent force’: on the one hand an object with which to beat the mainstream parties and on the other the party which the vast majority of French voters love to hate the most.57 The results of the legislative elections of June illustrated that while the outcome of the first round of the presidential contest had amounted to a profound shock, the pattern of allegiances had not altered fundamentally. The success of the moderate right confirmed the

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ascendancy it had achieved in the final outcome of the presidential contest, with the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) and the other parties of the mainstream right emerging from the second round with 365 out of 577 seats. On the Left, the breakthrough promised by the far left in the presidential elections did not materialise. The PS bounced back as by far the dominant force on the Left, securing a 56.4 per cent share of the votes cast for the Left and the ecologists (compared to 49 per cent in 1997), and representing a much more credible opposition to the moderate right than might have been envisaged only weeks beforehand. More pertinently still for the PCF, it had proved that the announcements of its demise were premature. Although it had unquestionably taken a further step downward, it had nonetheless proved its viability in maintaining the electoral credibility of the Left. The fact that less than one-third of its Deputies had been elected as the result of a first-round agreement with the PS showed that it was still the only other left-wing party capable of surviving as an electoral force in a manner that was independent of the PS.58 Notwithstanding this more sober assessment of the PCF’s performance injected with the benefit of hindsight, in the immediate aftermath of the two great electoral contests of 2002, the burden of responsibility fell heavily on Robert Hue’s shoulders. The final electoral defeat for Hue came on 2 February 2003, when his attempt to regain a seat as a Deputy in the by-election at Argenteuil in the Val d’Oise failed. Criticised within the party for the way he had managed his presidential campaign and over a longer period for his attitude to participation in Jospin’s government, Hue’s farewell at the party’s 32nd Congress in April in Saint-Denis was not marked by gratitude on the part of the members or satisfaction on his part. In veiled criticism of different sections of the party, Hue blamed the orthodox tendency for wanting to revive a revolutionary discourse that had no relevance to the situation in which the party found itself, while he accused the refondateurs of opting for a leftwing populism that promoted a type of communism that was bereft of concrete proposals. The mutation that he was committed to, he argued, was more than ever necessary. The muted response was summed up by the refondateur Deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, François Asensi, when he observed, ‘a page has been turned’.59 But if Hue’s leadership had failed to restore the party’s credibility vis-à-vis a wider electorate that was anyway inclined, as noted above, to punish established parties at the polls, was the party now possessed of the internal dynamic that would enable it to regenerate itself and survive autonomously on the French political landscape?

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Regenerating the party In an edition of the journal Communisme dedicated to analysing the fate of the PCF membership, all the evidence pointed to the fact that under Hue’s leadership, the aspiration that the much proclaimed mutation would give party members something firmer to hold on to was clearly unfulfilled. A pattern was repeated from 1994 onwards which showed that any marginal electoral gain in those areas where the PCF vote was frail was counterbalanced by decline in those areas which were supposed to be its bastions. Sociologically, the PCF might have been making very slight gains in the professional and managerial classes, but its traditional base among the working class was shrinking. The mutation advocated by Hue left the party in a double bind: if it wished to broaden its membership base it had no option but to renew a discourse and intellectual vision that were already being elucidated in some form or other by forces such as the Socialists, the ecologists and the far left, but in taking this option it was pushing a section of its traditional workingclass support into the arm of the far right.60 According to the party’s own figures, membership declined between 1994 and 2001 from 590,000 to 138,000, effectively dropping by three-quarters. But judging by more objective external calculations, the real drop was from approximately 250,000 to 100,000.61 However much the figures might be contested, the symptoms of a declining membership base made itself felt undeniably by the money, or lack of it, that the membership could bring to the party and its institutions. The problems of L’Humanité’s declining circulation were not unrelated, according to Hue, to the paper’s insufficiently clear understanding 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 a communist 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 at the newspaper. Although the paper’s financial deficit had been eliminated by the sale of an office building on the boulevard Poissonnière in 1999, Le Hyaric’s mission was to restructure the finances of the paper so that its survival was not solely conditional on an increase in sales.62 The solution adopted during the course of the following year was revolutionary in the way it accommodated the inevitable reality of market forces. A group representing the readers and friends of L’Humanité agreed at a meeting on 19 May 2001 to open up the newspaper to an injection of capital from the private sector. The broadcaster TF1 and the publisher Hachette would provide the funds that would leave them

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with 20 per cent of the newly capitalised daily, while the PCF would remain the leading shareholder with 40 per cent and occupy 8 of the 14 seats on the shareholders’ watchdog body. As Patrick Le Hyaric explained, L’Humanité had not sold its soul since sound measures were in place to safeguard the paper’s editorial independence, but the new financial arrangements were necessary in order not to add to the 58 redundancies already envisaged among its employees. 63 The year 2001 marked the culmination of years of pressure on the party, and particularly its leader, with regard to the management of the party’s finances. By the beginning of that year the party’s executive college, created after the 30th Congress, reached an agreement with the PCF’s elected representatives in the National Assembly that effectively recognised the freedom of its parliamentarians to determine themselves the way they wanted to vote, with due respect to the strategies and objectives agreed with the executive college. The freedom of action accorded to the party’s elected representatives deferred to the reality of the party’s finances, particularly the fact that the indemnities paid into the PCF’s coffers by its representatives had become its principal source of income, ahead of the various subscriptions raised for it, the membership fees paid by its members and its share of the public funds allocated to political parties. According to Roland Jacquet, the treasurer for the party nationally, the PCF’s monthly outgoings in 2000 had exceeded its monthly income by one and a half million francs. Consequently, he announced cuts to the overall annual budget of almost 12 per cent, including a drop of 49 per cent in the funds allocated to organisations subsidised by the party such as the monthly journal Regards and the associations Espace Marx and Mouvement de la jeunesse communiste. Only the financial support for L’Humanité and the federations would enjoy any increase.64 The party’s financial problems had made Robert Hue personally vulnerable to accusations that he had presided over illicit attempts to keep the PCF afloat through the use of fraudulent corporate transfers. Hue’s acquittal, by a court in Paris on 14 November 2001, on charges of fraudulently receiving funds from a consultancy called Gifco, came at the end of five years of legal procedure. The nub of the case against him and the party’s former treasurer, Pierre Sotura, was that they had colluded with executives at Gifco to channel undeclared funds into the PCF coffers that had originally been paid in fees by the water company CGE to Gifco, for services that were alleged to be fictitious. Curiously, although the court found no evidence of illegal transfers and acquitted Hue, it still handed out suspended sentences to a number of executives

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associated with Gifco for fraudulently managing the company’s assets.65 This lengthy episode, added to the repeated calls by Hue for greater public funding for political parties, sharpened the perception of the PCF’s future viability as questionable, and added impetus to the leadership’s desire to restructure the party’s foundations financially and organisationally in order to regenerate the party. As mentioned earlier, the executive college emerged from the organisational changes endorsed by the 30th Congress and reflected the desire to modernise the party, containing equal numbers of men and women among its 46 members. This body, together with a new national council of 265 members, whose recruitment was more significantly slanted towards secretaries from the federations and elected representatives, constituted the new structure for managing the party’s affairs at national level. This leadership structure was refined further as a result of the 31st Congress, when the executive college was replaced by an executive committee headed by the bicéphal team of a national secretary and a president. The resort to a presidential function had occurred before and had been bestowed honorifically on Maurice Thorez in 1964 and Waldeck Rochet in 1972. But during the 31st Congress this was driven by the desire for a pragmatic accommodation with the need to position Hue as a credible candidate in the forthcoming contest to elect the President of the Republic, by attributing the role of chief party apparatchik to Marie-Georges Buffet. And it was pragmatism also which led Hue to give up on this experiment in dual leadership functions in the aftermath 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 acceptance that if there were to be regeneration, the organisation of the party would have to be reconfigured in a way that adapted to the pressures from within and from outside the party, rather than trying to frustrate them. A major outcome of the 31st Congress was the autonomy given to members of the ‘force communiste’ on the ground. In tacit recognition of the decline of the traditional ‘cell’, and all that that implied in terms of ideological conditioning and control from the centre, members of communist sections (whether paid-up members of the party or not) were acknowledged to have the right to determine which line they wished to follow as long as they informed the centre of their decisions. In fact, the notion of party membership was itself rethought in such a way as to make the old debates about the real numerical strength 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

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was a member of the party on 31 December did not simply cease to be a member on 1 January just because he or she did not have their new membership card. A better principle for determining membership would be that an individual remains a member of the party until he or she chooses actively to cease being so.67 By the following year the party leadership was justifying the embodiment of this principle in the creation of the ‘carte d’adhérent pluriannuelle’, obviating the need for the annual renewal of the membership card because the individual member was now in charge of his or her membership and the conditions in which he or she wished to enjoy it.68 The reform of organisational rigidities was an overdue concession to the changes in French society in general and the corresponding impact on the attitudes of party members. But in diluting its partisan structures the party may also be allowing itself to be shaped by forces in postmodern and post-industrial France that will hasten the end of its existence as a counter-community while not necessarily enabling it to occupy leading positions in the new struggles against injustice. For all its faults, the centralised system of the old party had a formidable potential for the encadrement or training of members, often recruited from modest backgrounds with little formal educational qualifications and pushed through the system of summer schools and courses that gave them the intellectual baggage needed to defend the party’s ambitions. By conceding the initiative to pursue change to the sections, groups and tendencies within the party, the party may make itself a host to the reproduction of the more subtle forms of inequality that now shape society as a whole. Even superficial scrutiny of the PCF’s website reveals the extent to which the mutation of the party has made it much more like other mainstream formations on the political landscape than the exceptional and uniform party entity that it once was. There is a formal recognition that the PCF is comprised of courants or tendencies, comprised of a majority behind Marie-Georges Buffet, and minorities with their own support structures within the party. The latter are designated as belonging to the right-wing of the party (represented by the refondateurs), or on the left-wing comprised of conservateurs and orthodoxes (with the orthodoxes themselves composed of the Gauche communiste and the Pôle de Renaissance Communiste en France which was formed in January 2004). Reforming the structure in line with the more pluralist organisation found in mainstream parties, however, also gives the initiative to those elements most confident in their ability to engage in debate and push forward their own agenda. Without the old structures that would

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have promoted them, could there now be a level playing field between those of modest socio-economic background and those gifted by socio-economic and academic advantage with the cultural capital needed to pursue their ambitions? As we noted in Chapter 7, the party did not explore successfully the opportunity that arose during the 1980s to represent those communities that, because of their ethnic origins, possessed the least cultural capital to facilitate their integration into French society. Even sometimes doing quite the contrary. As the 1980s progressed, the realisation dawned on the leadership that the children of immigrants represented a potential source of electoral capital, and Marchais appealed to them to join the PCF as a means of combating for their rights and their dignity.69 But this could not quite expunge the recollection of what had been happening at the beginning of the decade, in communist municipalities like Ivry-sur-Seine, where the authorities had refused to allow new immigrant families access to council housing, suspended the recruitment of foreigners to council jobs and prioritised French families in the queue for material support from the council. It must be said that by the 1990s the party was quick to denounce notions such as the ‘threshold of tolerance’ with regard to the numbers of immigrants in France,70 and to promote actively their rights.71 As surveys at the time indicated, rather than rallying those new members of the national community, the most that the PCF could boast was that its membership was among the section of the general population that was the least hostile to immigrants.72 Recent research illustrates that in the communist municipalities around the periphery of Paris, young people of immigrant origin envisage the construction of an identity that more accurately represents who they wish to be, in a way that renders the political structures of the party of little significance in the pursuit of that aspiration.73 Where there has been a rebound in the traditional forms of political engagement on the part of the ‘beur’ generation, it has sometimes taken a very surprising form. The victory of Jacques Chirac over Jean-Marie Le Pen in the presidential election of 5 May 2002 marked a fundamental change in the way the presidential majority (UMP) perceived that constituency. This was confirmed by the invitation in October 2003 of some 300 local and community leaders of immigrant origin to the Senate, to discuss their future prospects as candidates for the UMP in forthcoming electoral contests. As some of those attending argued, the government had finally realised that they were an electorate whose participation was worth cultivating. And even those whose support once went automatically to the Left argued that

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they had grown tired of being treated as ‘victims’ or ‘patients’ by governments 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 the wayside, and the chance to regenerate the party with an infusion from a new, growing and increasingly significant section of contemporary French society has been missed. It might be argued, however, that rather than failure being simply situated in the inability to convince a prospective constituency of the value of the PCF ideal or vision, the very notion of a party communicating a vision to the people reflects assumptions about the relationship of power between citizens and their representatives that may be in serious need of revision.

Conclusion: The redundancy of vision? As some commentators have suggested of post-modern France, what lies at the root of much of the anxiety regarding the rejection of the received republican wisdom about the creation of a cohesive society is the increasing redundancy of the universalist Enlightenment vision of humanity wedded to an all-inclusive notion of progress.75 It is certainly clear that the great narratives of progress are under challenge as never before, whether the classic ones based on the possibilities offered by the ever expanding frontiers of knowledge, or the more modern political ones based on the liberation from historical determinisms offered by the construction of a common European home. As others have argued, any analysis of the decline of the PCF must be circumspect enough to acknowledge the social evolutions through which the relationship of activists to any political enterprise are mediated.76 The notion of a vocation, sustained by a vision and serving a vision, whether that of the priest, the teacher or the communist militant, has lost the determining influence 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 be argued, has the challenge of leadership. The contrast Marie-Georges Buffet 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 quietly in the organisation. Whereas Hue was imbued with a culture of municipal politics, becoming an elected mayor at the age of 31, Buffet was shaped by her training in the party organisation. Her post in the gauche plurielle government of Jospin enabled her to enjoy the esteem of party

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members for the ethical campaign she led against the influence of drugs and money in sport, while it was Hue and the other ministers who endured the brickbats from members for having paid too high a price in return for participation in government. Her role of managerial foil to Hue’s attempt to sell a new vision to the party enabled her to support la mutation while avoiding recrimination for the reversals it encountered. In contrast to Hue the presidential candidate, Buffet built her credibility among members, with a reputation for listening to troubled party workers. Even though refondateurs like Patrick Braouezec have suggested that she may not have a clear idea of where she wants to lead the party, and former members like Anicet le Pors have argued that the party’s policy of ‘openness’ under her is merely a succession of question marks,78 her position may be the only viable one in the absence of definitive answers. In contrast to Hue, Buffet has not authored visionary roadmaps for the future of the PCF. As some observers noted at the PCF’s 32nd Congress at Plaine-Saint-Denis, in April 2003, one of the most striking aspects of the proceedings was the extraordinary anonymity of Buffet and her team during the four days of debate. For refondateurs like Roger Martelli, it amounted to an abdication of responsibility that opened the way to the rise of warlords in the party. In the end, the text laying out the future steps for the party was adopted, broadly maintaining the pursuit of la mutation. But it was tempered in such a way as to appease as many sections of the party as possible: offering an olive branch to the opponents of la mutation by acceding to their request for national conferences to debate the issues of Europe and employment, and pacifying the refondateurs by affirming the party’s openness to all ‘communistes de coeur’, that is, those who were communist by conviction whether they were paid-up members of the party of not. Buffet’s closing speech to the conference was notable for its modesty and sobriety. The party, she admitted, was weakened and had difficult choices to make. It would not, she asserted (implicitly referring to future alliances), be providing any blank cheques to anyone.79 And, to judge by her attitude during the Congress, nor would her leadership rush into declarations or commitments that would make any hostages to fortune. The approval by the delegates of the list put forward for the new membership of the party’s parliament, the conseil national, was, by traditional PCF standards, a modest majority of 76.2 per cent. In her closing address to the Congress, Buffet’s transparent attempts at managing divisions through a policy of differentiated concessions were a far cry from the confident party self-affirmation that was characteristic of

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Congresses of old. Conversely, it could be argued that the end of the hollow optimism of the official discourse of the past was more effective in reconciling the party with the reality of post-modern France, where division and competing constituencies are a way of life. The PCF entered the elections of 2004 looking more like any other French mainstream party than it had ever done, with officially recognised tendencies and their leaders, and a lack of the confident, unitary discourse that used to flow from its totalising vision of the future. Interestingly, its fortunes were revived in the cantonal and regional election of March. As a whole, the Left appeared to have overcome the disaster of the presidential elections, taking 44.9 per cent of the votes cast in metropolitan France in the first round of the regionals on 21 March, and topping 50 per cent in the second round on 28 March. In the cantonal elections the Left secured 48.3 per cent in the first round and 51 per cent in the second. The regional elections in particular scotched the predictions of the PCF being outflanked by the LO–LCR alliance, whose lists had secured only 4.4 per cent of the votes cast in the first round and were therefore down on their previous performance in such elections in 1998. As for the PCF itself, its success in the regional elections was unquestionable and measurable, with the sum total of its seats in the regions rising from 161 to 175 in the final outcome.80 Among the more striking revivals of support for the PCF in those places where its decline had seemed inexorable were the first-round scores for the lists led by Marie-Georges Buffet in the Ile-de-France (7.2 per cent), Maxime Gremetz in 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, the Left as a whole confirmed its comeback, with a 42.4 per cent share of the vote, in what most commentators agreed was a severe vote-sanction against the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. As for the PCF, although at 5.8 per cent its share of the votes cast was down on the previous European elections in 1999, it was still more than twice the share taken by the LO–LCR alliance.82 What was proved by the fluctuating fortunes of other parties that had been touted after the presidential elections of 2002 as supplanting the PCF’s appeal to the vote protestataire, notably the LO, the LCR and also the Verts, was that the vision of the future was not one that could be handed down by a party and used as a bankable electoral asset, but rather that it could be used by a sophisticated electorate manipulating the range of possibilities offered by the political system. With only a 43 per 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

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process. But as was presciently observed in the 1990s, the rising level of abstentions could itself signal political engagement by other means. Studies have shown that there are very few permanent abstentionists in France, and that they are difficult to categorise in fixed terms demographically and socio-economically. The refusal to vote, particularly clear in the case of communist voters but also to a lesser extent in the case of supporters of mainstream parties, can express a desire not to ‘betray’ the party to which one is most closely aligned, but which one also reproaches for not fulfilling one’s expectations. On a broader and related level, abstentionism can be a deliberate choice in response to what is perceived as the absence of genuine alternatives. The new voter may therefore opt to abstain, but this is not a blanket response, being instead one that is modulated according to a possible host of variables, resulting in multiple modes of behaviour and constituting an eloquent reflection on what is on offer politically.83 A vote for the PCF will remain an option for a significant section of French voters, to use positively and negatively, and to modulate according to the message they wish to communicate to the political class. Although the sweeping historical vision of the PCF may have gone, its intellectual legacy as a tribune party has ramified into five forms of opposition to the status quo, open to numerous interpretations, that have become increasingly visible and popular across the political spectrum: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, anti-racism and anti-reformism.84 In terms of its ability to influence the practice of politics, Buffet’s method of managing the tendencies within the party may presage a more subtle approach to managing the survival of the party in the political system. Nationally, Buffet declared her belief that there should be no barriers between social movements and the PCF’s desire to elucidate an alternative politics.85 Identifying the need to engage the militant young and especially those committed to altermondialiste or anti-globalisation movements, she disarmed the residual resistance in her party and laid the foundation for the alliances that would bear fruit in the elections of 2004. As demonstrated by Francis Wurtz, who successfully headed the list L’Europe, oui. Mais pas celle-là! in the Ile-de-France, the exercise of communist influence may also come through the politics of consensus at transnational level. By 2004, Wurtz, a former personal secretary to Marchais and later the architect of Lajoinie’s 1988 presidential campaign, had become one of the longestserving Deputies in the European parliament and head of the heterogeneous GUE grouping (Gauche unitaire européenne). As he put it himself, the European forum gave him a sensibility and skill that was not available

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through his domestic political loyalties, and offered him a more effective means of mobilising forces against l’Europe libérale, or the pressures of liberal economics on Europe, than he would otherwise have had at his disposal.86 For Roger Martelli and Clémentine Autain, writing in the communist periodical for the debate of cultural and intellectual issues, Regards, 2004 marks a turning point in the history of the party. The years leading up to the next presidential election will determine where or whether the PCF will find secure roots for its continued existence on the Left. The dominance of the PS, with its capacity to garner roughly 30 per cent of the votes, is incontestable on the Left, and this enabled it to pigeon-hole its partners in the gauche plurielle government with remits (social issues for the Communists and environmental ones for the ecologists) that essentially left the Socialists with a free hand. The challenge facing the Communists, according to Martelli and Autain, is whether to allow the Socialists total command over the destiny of the Left faced with the imperative of securing the election of a left-wing candidate in 2007, or whether the PCF can pursue a path of convergence with the other partners and sympathisers on the Left in such a way that their collective weight might make a genuine impact on the agenda of the Socialists.87

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: A Critical History, 1920–1984 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 2. See F. Fejtö, The French Communist Party and the Crisis of International Communism (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 within the 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 party cards placed with members rather than the larger numbers conveyed to party secretaries. 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. 206

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 of Chicago 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 Sciences Politiques, 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: ‘Aux yeux de la majorité, le pacte représentait une trahison des intérêts nationaux en 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 of the PCF in the Nord, the Paris region and Brittany, where the tone was set by 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 exaggeration, 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 definition 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’approprient par là un besoin nouveau, le besoin de la société, et ce qui semble être le moyen 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 the desire for emancipation from Moscow, Imre Nagy, and in the November 2

Notes 209 edition of L’Humanité Etienne Fajon, the former PCF representative on the Komintern, accused the party in Hungary of no longer being a ‘marxist workers’ 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 intellectuals who mobilised in order to criticise the PCF’s supine endorsement of the Soviet line over Hungary, were generally those who were not deeply involved in the apparatus of the party. See also S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and 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’s speech, 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 socialist chiefly responsible for digging the PCF’s grave. 20. De Gaulle himself had made it clear to the media that the verdict on his proposals would be a verdict on him personally. 21. N. Nugent, ‘The Strategies of the French Left’, in D. S. Bell (ed.), Contemporary French 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 socialism than 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 that aim. 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’, Parliamentary 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’, in Le Communisme en France (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1969). 2. H. Mendras with A. Cole, Social Change in Modern France. Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 25. 3. Charbonnages de France, Statistique annuelle édition 1991 (Paris: Charbonnages de 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, State Politics and Localities (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 126–8. 6. As Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy commented, when explaining the Socialist government’s new austerity policy in 1982: socialism made little sense if it generated 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 the Problems of Success’, Political Quarterly, 46:1 (1975), 36–52, p. 42. 10. P. Hardouin, ‘Les Caractéristiques Sociologiques du Parti Socialiste’, Revue Française 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 Socialiste’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 28:2 (1978), 257–76. 14. See R. Cayrol, ‘Le Parti Socialiste à l’Entreprise’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 28:2 (1978), 201–19. 15. J. Charlot, ‘Votes des Français: Qui, Comment, Pourquoi?’, Le Point, 23 January 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 was completed under a Socialist-led government in 1999, when it sealed its alliance with Nissan of Japan. Although ostensibly a partnership, there was little doubt left by the French press as to who the senior partner was and to whom the victory belonged in national terms. By March 2002 the crossownership of shares left Renault with 44.4 per cent of Nissan, while Nissan had 15 per cent of Renault, but without any voting rights. 18. Figures quoted in M. Waller and M. Fennema, Communist Parties in Western Europe. 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’, Communisme, 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 Communisme, 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’actualisation 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 that throughout the broadcast he had fixed his gaze on the wrong camera, thereby giving the French electorate the uninspiring prospect of placing their faith in a leader who addressed them sideways. In Favier and MartinRolland, 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 et parlementaire, 914, January–February (1985), 6–15. 2. P. Bauby, ‘Le révisionnisme institutionnel du PCF’, Revue politique et parlementaire, 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 parlementaire, 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. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Reported in L’Humanité, 16 November 1987. Paris Match, 13 November 1987. Paris Match, 11 December 1987. Paris Match, 21 January 1988. M. Samson, ‘Marchais: Communistes, encore un effort pour être mobilisés’, Libération, 11 February 1988. Paris Match, 26 February 1988. Paris Match, 25 March 1988. Paris Match, 22 April 1988. Small left-wing groups existing outside the two major left-wing parties. All statistics taken from Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents: L’élection présidentielle, May 1988 (Paris, 1988). Le Monde, Dossiers et Documents: Les élections législatives, June 1988 (Paris, 1988), p. 33. 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 Secretary is so strong, it is not possible to gauge comprehensively the effect of presidentialism on the discourse of the leadership without comparing it with the discourse of the leadership under a regime that was not presidential, for example 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 Bourdieu as a key to the ‘social magic’ which empowers the discourse of speakers such as political leaders, by sustaining the illusion that they speak in pursuit of nothing 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 representation in the following way: ‘Political capital is a form of symbolic capital, credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or on an 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 du Communisme, 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. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Cahiers du Communisme, February–March (1982). Cahiers du Communisme, March–April (1985). L’Humanité, 3 December 1987. Ibid. Ibid. Le Monde, 15–16 October 1989. Cahiers du Communisme, January–February (1991). Ibid. L’Humanité, 20 August 1991. Ibid. L’Humanité, 30 August 199l (my translation). Wurtz’s report and the ensuing discussion were printed over three days in L’Humanité, 21–23 May 1992. L’Humanité, 23 May 1992. See, for example, his interview with Alain Rollat in Le Monde, 19 September 1992. The refondateur and reconstructeur tendencies had already formed a grassroots organisation in November 1991 called Alternative pour la démocratie et le socialisme (ADS) which was to deliver a remarkable challenge to the authority of the party by putting up independent communist candidates in the regional and cantonal elections of March 1992, with notable success in Marcel Rigout’s base of Haute-Vienne. Le Monde, 11 September 1992. H. Algalarrondo, ‘Qui veut sauver Georges Marchais?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 March 1993. Le Monde, 18 June 1993. 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 agitators 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 to do so. See R. Backmann and L. Rioux, Mai 1968 (Paris: Laffont, 1968). Thereafter, contingent factors led to the point where an initially awkward situation degenerated into violence. Unable to make identity checks on the spot because the students were judged to be too numerous, the police decided to take the students away in waiting vehicles, thus igniting the rumour that spread like wildfire in the Latin Quarter that the students were being victimised 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

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

from an underlying process of profound change, creating a ‘cultural blockage’ between itself, French society and even a new wave of its own party members, that would result in a time-bomb set to explode in the 1980s. M. Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italiens de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), p. 130. H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Génération, 2 vols, vol. 2, Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 10. J.-P. Le Goff, Mai 68: L’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), Part III. F. Picq, Libération des femmes. Les années mouvement (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 14. R. Pronier and V.-J. Le Seigneur, Génération verte. Les ecologistes en politique (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992), p. 26. Ibid., p. 330. Lazar, Maisons rouges, p. 145. See Parti Communiste Français, Kremlin PCF: Conversation secrètes (Paris: O. Orban, 1984). Lazar, Maisons rouges, p. 364, note 67. Interestingly, archival evidence shows that in exchanges between the Czech embassy and Prague in the spring of 1968, their ambassador in Paris had come to the conviction that Waldeck Rochet was caught between the sympathies he shared with those in favour of the reasons for the experiment in Prague, and those who shared his (Rochet’s) instinctive fear of doing anything that might jeopardise the PCF’s relationship with the CPSU. See K. Bartosek, Les aveux des archives. Prague-Paris-Prague, 1948–1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 187. J. Elleinstein, L’Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972–5); J. Elleinstein, L’Histoire du phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset, 1975). A. Adler et al., L’URSS et nous (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978). See F. Hincker, ‘Le groupe dirigeant du PCF dans les années 70’, Communisme, 10 (1986). Courtois and Lazar, p. 385. The French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1974 to great success and confirmed what many had felt about the wholesale and brutal betrayal of the ideals of the revolution in the Soviet Union. 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). T. Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 198. A term coined by S. Daney in Libération, 25–26 April 1987. See A. Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 286. Articles subsequently reprinted in English in New Left Review, 109, May–June (1978). M. Goldring, ‘A quoi sert un intellectuel communiste en 1986’, in A. Spire (ed.), La Culture des camarades (Paris: Autrement, 1992), p. 94. Goldring situates this observation in the context of a broader evolution in which the public is no longer interested in the clash of intellectual titans defending one system of thought against another, since systems of thought themselves have 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 responsibility for vocational training. 30. See D. Labbé and F. Périn, Que reste-t-il de Billancourt? Enquête sur la culture d’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 that saw a growth in the number of communists entering the CGT, but a declining number of CGT members present in the party, just as the presence of CGT members declined throughout the working population. See Y. Santamaria, ‘Difficult Times for the French Communist Party and the CGT’, The Journal of Communist Studies, 6:4 (1990), 58–79. 32. See the PS’ undertakings vis-à-vis immigrants in Parti socialiste: 89 réponses aux questions économiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 43. 33. By March 1983, 46 per cent of respondents to a SOFRES poll agreed with the proposition that the Left had done too much for immigrants, and 34 per cent disagreed. Among the Left’s own supporters, 38 per cent agreed with the proposition that government policy had been too liberal regarding immigrants. See J. Julliard, ‘L’Alerte’, in SOFRES, Opinion publique. Enquêtes et commentaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 125. 34. For the government’s attitude to this potentially revolutionary understanding of citizenship, see P. Weil, La France et ses étrangers. L’aventure d’une politique 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 profile during the 1980s is the youth of its members and elected representatives. In C. 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 Sociologie, 33 (1962), 97–113, p. 99. The personal sense of justification that ideology imparts is enhanced by the self-referential nature of ideological discourse, which makes the arguments of its proponents irresistible. In D. 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 électoral’, 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 identifies the peculiar distortions that occur in the management and representation of party membership figures in France: the lack of a legal obligation to report accurate membership figures, which encourages the parties to exaggerate them in order to bolster their image; the historically occult nature of party financing which meant that inflated reported membership figures made for more 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 absolutist mindset that arises from the certainty that one is in possession of the truth makes terror the inescapable flip side of ideological conviction. Moreover, unlike the religious terror represented by the Inquisition, the step is that much shorter in a secular, revolutionary worldview because the enjoyment of grace is not to be found in an otherworldly dimension but is achieved in one leap in the here and now. In L. Kolakowski, L’Esprit révolutionnaire (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1978), p. 22. In short, as Todorov argues, the shadow that can hang over an atheist society is not the mythical hell to which rebels were condemned in the past under religious regimes, but the prospect of a real hell being created, in which those who refuse to submit to an absolutist state can be concentrated and crushed, and whose crushing can be used as an 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 ‘Le livre noir du communisme’ (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), p. 219. 12. See, for example, N. Tenzer, La société dépolitisée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de 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 make the point that the end of ideology has made what were once Left and Right in terms of political elites, adopt a libertarian individualism that does not allow them to assume a leading responsibility for determining the evolution of collective values, since underlying these are moral choices that are commonly perceived as belonging to the individual alone. Consequently, political elites in particular, find refuge in a quasi-managerial discourse focused on rational organisation and efficiency gains, comforted in their abdication 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 mondialisation (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 mean sticking with the Soviet model, but that it referred to much older national traditions of communal action according to shared values. And during the year that followed he used numerous media opportunities to underline that point, such as during the major interview given to France-Culture on 12 May 1996, and published in Le Monde, ‘Les communistes français ont définitivement écarté toute idée de modèle’, 14 May 1996. 31. See the extracts from the PCF programme in Modern and Contemporary France, 5:4 (1997), 473–4. 32. See P. Buffotot and D. Hanley, ‘Chronique d’une défaite annoncée: Les élections législatives des 25 mai et 1er juin 1997’, Modern and Contemporary France, 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, 23–29 October 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 politique, 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, 4–10 February 1999. 44. www.pcf.fr/documents/RH/000904ConfPresQuinq.htm. 45. R. Ponceyri, ‘La fin de la République gaullienne’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, 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 politiques des Français (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po., 2000). 48. E. Barth, ‘Robert Hue obtient l’investiture des militants du PCF pour la présidentielle’, 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 de L’Humanité’, Le Monde, 21 November 2000. 63. M. Delberghe, ‘A L’Humanité, sociétés des amis et des lecteurs approuvent l’ouverture du capital’, Le Monde, 22 May 2001. 64. A. Beuve Méry, ‘Confronté à de graves difficultés financières, le PCF réduit son train de vie’, Le Monde, 2 February 2001. 65. G. Alexandre and J. Franck, ‘Des charges “aucunement établies” contre le président 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 contre l’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 et les 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 North African Origin in France: Discourses and Experiences, unpublished PhD thesis/ Doctorat de 3ème cycle, University of Bristol/EHESS, 2003, especially Chapters 4 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 of part of that community, represented little more than a ripple in the tide of general disaffection with the governing majority and the political class as a whole, as evidenced by the elections that occurred in 2004. 75. M. Silverman, Facing Postmodernity. Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 160. 76. B. Pudal, ‘La beauté de la mort communiste’, Revue française de science politique, 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 électoral’, 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 Découverte, 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).

Bibliography

Archives, journals and documentary sources on the PCF and its influence Les Cahiers du communisme, L’Humanité, Rencontres communistes hebdo, Révolution, Revue M.

Web sources on the PCF and its influence www.pcf.fr. www.pcf.fr/Eco-po. www.elunet.org. www.bouge-leurope.org. www.lavantgarde.org. www.mouv.org. www.laterre.fr. www.futurs.com. www.membres.lycos.fr/gauchecommuniste. www.chez.com/initiativecommuniste. www.perso.wanadoo.fr/echanges. www.membres.lycos.fr/communistes. www.regards.fr.

Books on the PCF and its influence Adereth, M. The French Communist Party: A Critical History, 1920–1984 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Adler, A., Cohen, F., Decaillet, M., Frioux, C. and Robel, L. L’URSS et nous (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978). Amar, C. Les nouveaux communistes: voyage au cœur du PCF (Paris: Denoël Impact, 1999). Barak, M. Fractures au PCF, des communistes parlent (Paris: Edisud-Kartala, 1980). Bartosek, K. Les aveux des archives. Prague-Paris-Prague, 1948–1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996). Bell, B. S. and Criddle, B. The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Bon, F. Le Communisme en France (Paris: Armand Colin/Cahiers de la FNSP, 175 (1969). Boursier, J.-Y. La Politique du PCF, 1939–1945 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). Cardoze, M. Nouveau voyage à l’intérieur du parti communiste français (Paris: Fayard, 1986). Caute, D. Communism and the French Intellectuals (London: André Deutsch, 1964). 221

222 Bibliography Courtois, S. Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Courtois, S. and Lazar, M. Histoire du Parti communiste français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Dreyfus, M. PCF, Crises et dissidences (Brussels: Complexe, 1990). Dreyfus, M., Groppo, B. and Ingelfrom, C. Le Siècle des communismes (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2000). Fabien, J. Les nouveaux secrets des communistes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990). Fajon, E. L’Union est un combat (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1975). Fauvet, J. Histoire du parti communiste français (Paris: Fayard, 1964–65). Fejtö, F. The French Communist Party and the Crisis of International Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). Figuères, L. 70 ans de communisme français (Montreuil: Le Temps des Cerises, 1996). Fiszbin, H. Les bouches s’ouvrent (Paris: Grasset, 1980). Girault, J. Sur l’implantation du PCF dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977). Gremetz, M. Et pourtant elle tourne (Paris: Messidor, 1987). Harris, A. and de Sedouy, A. Voyage à l’intérieur du Parti communiste (Paris: Seuil, 1974). Hazareesingh, S. Intellectuals and the French Communist Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hincker, F. Le Parti communiste au carrefour. Essai sur quinze ans de son histoire, 1965–1981 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981). Hue, R. Communisme: La mutation (Paris: Stock, 1995). ——. Communisme: Un nouveau projet (Paris: Stock, 1999). Johnson, R. W. The Long March of the French Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981). Judt, T. Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Juquin, P. Programme commun, l’actualisation à dossiers ouverts (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977). ——. Autocritiques (Paris: Grasset, 1985). ——. Fraternellement libre (Paris: Grasset, 1988). Kemp, T. Stalinism in France (London: New Park, 1984). Kriegel, A. The French Communists. Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Lajoinie, A. and Passevent, R. A cœur ouvert (Paris: Messidor, 1987). Lavabre, M.-C. Le Fil rouge: Sociologie de la mémoire communiste (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1994). Lavabre, M.-C. and Platone, F. Que reste-t-il du PCF? (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2003). Lavau, G. A quoi sert le Parti communiste français? (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Lazar, M. Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italiens de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992). ——. Le Communisme: Une passion française (Paris: Perrin, 2002). Lazard, F. La révolution inattendue (Paris: Messidor, 1991). Lecoeur, A. Le Partisan (Paris: Flammarion, 1963). Lefait, P. Quatre ministres et puis s’en vont (Paris: Editions de L’Atelier, 1995). Le Pors, A. Pendant la mue le serpent est aveugle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). Llabrès, C. Les tribulations d’un iconoclaste sur la planète rouge (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993). Marchais, G. Le défi démocratique (Paris: Grasset, 1973). Martelli, R. Communisme français: Histoire sincère du PCF, 1920–1984 (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1984).

Bibliography 223 ——. Le communisme autrement (Paris: Syllepse, 1998). ——. Communisme: Pour une nouvelle fondation (Paris: Syllepse, 1999). Mer, J. Le parti de Maurice Thorez ou le bonheur communiste français (Paris: Payot, 1977). Michelat, G. and Simon, M. Classe, religion et comportement politique (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1977). Molinari, J.-P. Les Ouvriers communistes: Sociologie de l’adhésion ouvrière au PCF (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). Mortimer, E. The Rise of the French Communist Party, 1920–1947 (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Naudy, M. PCF le suicide (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986). Parti Communiste Français. Kremlin PCF: Conversation Secretes (Paris: O. Orban, 1984). Pronier, R. Les municipalités communistes: Bilan de trente ans de gestion (Paris: Balland, 1983). Pudal, B. Prendre parti: Pour une sociologie historique du PCF (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1989). Rieber, Alfred J. Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). Robrieux, P. Maurice Thorez, vie secrète et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975). ——. Histoire intérieure du parti communiste (Paris: Fayard, 1980–4). Spire, A. (ed.) La Culture des camarades (Paris: Autrement, 1992). Ross, G. Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Terrail, J. P. Destins ouvriers. La fin d’une classe? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). Thorez, M. Fils du peuple, in Oeuvres Choisies, vol. II (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1966). Tiersky, R. French Communism, 1920–1972 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

Journal and newspaper publications on the PCF and its influence Alexandre, G. and Franck, J. ‘Des charges “aucunement établies” contre le président du PCF’, Le Monde, 16 November 2001. Algalarrondo, H. ‘Qui veut sauver Georges Marchais?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 March 1993. Andolfatto, D. ‘Le parti de Robert Hue, chronique du PCF, 1994–2001’, Communisme, 67–68 (2002). Autain, C. and Martelli, R. ‘1944–1984–2004 – Les tournants de la Gauche’, Regards, 7/8 (2004). Barth, E. ‘Robert Hue obtient l’investiture des militants du PCF pour la présidentielle’, Le Monde, 9 October 2001. Bauby, P. ‘Le révisionnisme institutionnel du PCF’, Revue politique et parlementaire, September–October (1985). Bazin, F. ‘Ces femmes dans la vie de Robert Hue’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 4 February 1999. Beuve Méry, A. ‘Patrick Le Hyaric devient le nouveau directeur de L’Humanité’, Le Monde, 21 November 2000.

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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, 157 230

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