Socialism and Communism

Socialism and Communism (in 20th-c. France). French Socialism as it emerged in the early 20th c. was heir to several traditions: the revolutionary tradition of 1789, 1793, and 1871; the Utopian socialism of Fourier and Saint-Simon; the syndicalism of the trade-union movement; the ouvriérisme of skilled workers inspired by Proudhon; the gas-and-water socialism of the Possibilistes; and the class-based analysis of Marx and Engels, whose shorter texts were translated and popularized by the Guesdists [see Marxism]. After the storms of the Dreyfus Affair, it was chiefly through the efforts of Jaurès that the various groupings formed the unified Socialist Party, the SFIO (Section Française de l'Internationale Socialiste) in 1905. Under Jaurès, the SFIO, with its daily paper L'Humanité and a growing clientele in industrial areas, steadily increased its parliamentary numbers until the war. In 1914 the Socialist International failed to prevent the war, and Jaurès, ardent advocate of unity and internationalism, was assassinated in the last days of peace. The party, still in shock, joined the national government and the war effort.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 faced all Socialists with the choice of supporting it or not. At the SFIO congress at Tours in December 1920 the French party split. The majority of delegates accepted Lenin's conditions for a new Communist Party (essentially iron discipline and suppression of dissidence) and formed the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF). The minority remained with Léon Blum in the SFIO—although within a few years the position was reversed, as early turmoil within the PCF sent many members back to la vieille maison.

The infant Communist Party went through some lean years, isolated, engaged in bitter rivalry with its ‘brother party’, and riven by internal disputes. Losing ground electorally, it was nevertheless building a solid organization, rooted in the industrial towns and in the ‘red belt’ of suburbs round Paris. With Thorez as leader, it came in from the cold to join the anti-fascist alliance of the Popular Front, and in the 1936 elections won a record 70 seats. In the imagery of the day, ‘the outstretched hand’ had replaced ‘the knife between the teeth’. After the Front's collapse the PCF campaigned for resistance to Hitler, but faced with the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact the party, although shaken, accepted the new line and was outlawed in France as a result. Some individuals, such as Nizan, left in protest, others lay low. But following Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941 the party wholeheartedly joined the Resistance, in which it became a major force [see Occupation and Resistance]. Its organization lent itself to clandestinity and it could legitimately claim a roll-call of heroic wartime martyrs (the ‘75, 000 fusillés’).

At the Liberation, a revitalized PCF cooperated with other parties in the new Fourth Republic, to the extent of participating in de Gaulle's and later governments. It was now at its peak in terms of members and voters, regularly receiving 25 per cent of the vote. The Cold War sent it into parliamentary opposition and Stalinist isolation after 1947, prompting Guy Mollet's jibe that the PCF was not on the left but ‘in the east’. It retained electoral support, however, partly due to its championing of the working class and its opposition to the damaging colonial wars of the period. At this time many French intellectuals, teachers, and artists were members of the party (some of the best-known being Aragon, Althusser, and Picasso), while others like Sartre devoted much effort to defining their position in relation to it.

The Fifth Republic's new institutions damaged the PCF electorally after 1958, since the presidency was not attainable by a Communist and the two-ballot voting system reduced its numbers in parliament. Soviet repression in Eastern Europe had alienated sections of the membership, and the party was further damaged by the events of May 1968 which showed that the younger generation rejected its monolithic structures, Stalinist identity, and defence of the USSR. Attempts to liberalize the party during the ‘Eurocommunist’ years of the late 1970s were half-hearted and failed to overcome the ‘Solzhenitsyn factor’, which led to a further exodus of members. Electoral alliance with the Socialist Party in these years (the Programme Commun) was to prove advantageous only to the Socialists. When the Socialist François Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, the Communists were invited into government, but left again in 1984, by which time it was already clear that the party was in a state of historic decline and inner turmoil. By the 1990s, following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, its vote had fallen to about 10 per cent, its membership was greatly reduced, and few intellectuals were to be found defending it.

The Socialist Party's fortunes followed a different curve, reaching an unexpected peak in the 1980s. The collapse of the Popular Front had brought great disappointment, and during the war and Occupation the SFIO became fragmented. Many of its members were in the Resistance, but its hopes of a large post-war Socialist Party were dashed. Drawn into coalition governments after 1945, it had often reluctantly acquiesced in policies not to its taste. The most painful period for many was the Socialistled Mollet government of 1956-7, which pursued an uneasy policy of continuing the Algerian War. By the early 1960s the party seemed to many to be ageing, out of touch, and dominated by the old demons of anticlericalism and windy Marxism. It had never had the same attraction for intellectuals as the PCF. However, a series of regrouping initiatives, given urgency by the events of May 1968, enabled the party to be rejuvenated, as the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1969, largely thanks to Mitterrand, who aimed to win the presidency for the Left. The Programme Commun, while not without risks, brought Communist voters into electoral alliances, and the new PS, unlike the old, appealed to the 1968 generation, whose concerns included workers' control, the Third World, regionalism, feminism, cultural renovation, and the environment, as well as social reform.

1981 saw the Left returned to power, with Mitterrand at the Élysée, and Socialist-dominated governments in 1981-6 and 1988-93. The Left had proved that it could rule within the framework of the Fifth Republic. But after a euphoric état de grâce, which saw a wave of judicial reforms, several nationalizations, and a deliberate attempt to expand the economy on Keynesian lines, the PS was forced to bow to the international recession and apply policies of economic rigour—for which the price was rising unemployment. It now seemed to be moving towards a new pragmatism, with an acceptance of modernization and the market. Reform was, however, pursued in other areas: decentralization, women's rights, and educational expansion, while in the cultural sphere many initiatives were taken under the energetic (though not universally appreciated) minister of culture, Jack Lang, with increased subsidies for the creative arts (cinema, theatre, music) and the endowment of sometimes controversial national monuments, such as the Bastille Opera. But in the face of a dispiriting economic situation, support for the Socialists dwindled. By the 1993 elections the entire Left was in retreat and some disarray. Despite its high cultural profile, its organic intellectuals were not much in evidence. Its ideological commitment had been considerably modified over the decade, and the support it had hitherto received from academics, teachers, trade unionists, and the young had waned, in an age seen as less heroic than the confrontational 1930s or the immediate post-war period.

[Sian Reynolds]

Bibliography

• J. Touchard, La Gauche en France depuis 1900 (1977)
• R. W. Johnson, The Long March of the French Left (1981)
• P. Hall et al., Developments in French Politics (1990)