By David Broder
At a recent conference in France I spoke to a young man who was a member of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party). When I asked him why any young activist would join an ossified party now in terminal decline, he replied that “I intervene in the PCF because I am a Luxemburgist. I can see the difference between the leadership of an organisation and its membership.”
A strange time to see it. But the PCF was indeed a mass Communist Party, largely composed of genuine working-class militants, whose political and trade union experience was skewed by an ideology of French chauvinism, cross-class reformism and, worst, unflinching subservience to the interests of the USSR’s ruling class. And it has always been hard for alternatives to the PCF to establish themselves, even after the collapse of Stalinism.
The PCF is now a festering corpse, with less than a tenth of the million-strong membership it held 50 years ago, and winning under 2% of votes in this April’s presidential election. But the PCF’s continuing influence — and legacy — still represent a severe handicap to the French, and by extension, European, labour movement.
It was not always so. The Parti Communiste Français was born out of opposition to the imperialist slaughter of World War One. In most countries, the greater part of the left had supported their “own” side, whilst a small minority remained committed to workers’ revolution rather than lending confidence to “progressive” Great Powers’ armies, and strove with Lenin, to “turn the imperialist war into the civil war”.
As in every party other than those of Russia and Serbia, a majority of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), as the Socialist Party was then called, supported their country’s government against Germany in 1914-18. By the time of the 1920 Tours congress, the party’s social composition had changed.
With a membership rising from 36,000 in 1918 to 178,000 by 1920, off the back of a militant and growing trade union movement, the class’s industrial confidence — counterposed to the left’s electoral weakness — pushed its centre of gravity towards the left. The Bolsheviks were keen to avoid a situation in France similar to that of Germany, where the Social Democrat Party had been able to isolate revolutionary elements such as the Spartakists. In France the radical left, led by Boris Souvarine, tried to bring the centre with it in a split from the SFIO. By doing so, they could retain the majority of working-class support and so split from a position of strength.
And they suceeded. At Tours the revolutionaries had the majority, and it was the reformists who split away.
But this left the PCF with severe internal contradictions, a large party representing many different prejudices. While imbued with confidence after 1920’s strike wave, and so willing to orientate towards the Russian Party, much of the centre was never identifiably to the left of the SFIO. This tendency would forever shape the Parti Communiste Français. Souvarine and the revolutionary elements were from the start in a minority, and as industrial militancy slumped and demoralisation set in, the centre took over.
At the 1922 PCF congress, the left, centre and right of the PCF split 1516-1698-814 respectively,. The centre around Cachin and Frossard took control of all of the leading positions in the party, refusing to make any deals with the left. The Third International was not impressed. When it censured the new leadership, Frossard split in protest at the so-called “Bolshevisation” of the party, returning to the SFIO.
THE real clampdown on party democracy was yet to come. The party was from 1923 onwards riven by disputes which were essentially ciphers for the conflict within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Indeed, the Zinoviev-Stalin faction took full control in France before it was possible in the USSR.
Boris Souvarine was expelled in July 1924 after having attacked the “mechanical, bureaucratic and irresponsible centralism” of the organisation. The pretext was his publication of Trotsky’s New Course, a pamphlet which criticised the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union. He was the victim of a rotten bloc composed of open sympathisers of Zinoviev-Stalin and that same right wing of the party which had a decade previously supported France’s war effort against Germany. Soon the Zinovievites, like Albert Treint, would themselves be purged.
Despite all of this, the Parti Communiste Français retained at least some of the characteristics of a sincere class-struggle organisation. The reformists split the largest union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail, too, forcing the Communists and revolutionary syndicalists out into a new federation, the CGT-U. The CGTU-U organised significantly more strikes than its reformist social-democrat rival, and had non-PCF working-class revolutionaries prominent in the union as late as 1931. Militants of all political colours could recognise the CGT-U’s genuine will to action. The party could also attract intellectuals such as Louis Aragon, Henri Lefebvre, and the surrealist artist André Breton.
A first big political test for the PCF came in May 1924, when the SFIO entered government in alliance with the middle-class liberal Parti Radical, led by Édouard Herriot, and wartime prime minister Paul Painlevé. Refusing to participate, the PCF sat in opposition, insisting that - on principle — a working class party could not serve as a junior partner in a bourgeois governmental coalition. The so-called Cartel des Gauches (Coalition of the Left Parties) was by 1926 grounded by a flight of capital and its failure to secure reparations payments from Weimar Germany. However, the PCF membership declined as the centre-left established itself as a serious political force, constituting itself as a mirror-image of the right-wing Bloc National, creating its own newspapers and local committees to organise coalition parties’ members jointly.
Unfortunately, in line with developments in Moscow, the party soon developed an utterly ultra-left attitude. Stalin, having theorised the period following the Russian revolution into a “First Period” of working class upsurge and defeat following World War One and a “Second Period” of capitalist reconstruction in the 1920s, now announced the advent of a “Third Period”, that of the final working-class revolution. Necessary for this, he promulgated, was the purging of all non-Communist elements from the labour movement, in order to best position it to take advantage of the impending crisis of capitalism and Great Depression.
Standing aside from the Cartel des Gauches had been a justifiable move to distance the party from France’s perennially strong middle-class reformist left and to assert working-class politics, but the PCF now took this one step further with the “Third Period” attitude which regarded social-democrats — “social fascists” — as the main opponent of the Communists. A further effect of the “Third Period” was a major clampdown on internal dissidents, with a purge headed up by new leader Maurice Thorez in order to Stalinise the party. Thorez, a sort of French wannabe Stalin, would remain almost wholly unchallenged leader of the PCF from 1930 until 1964, a leadership spell longer even than those of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Stalin in the USSR, or Honecker in East Germany.
In the early 30s, the party refused to work together with the SFIO or the rest of the labour movement in opposition to France’s nascent fascist movement. A united front between the parties was briefly discussed in early 1933, with some PCF leaders like Jacques Doriot keen to build working class unity. The line of the Comintern and Thorez was to refuse to engage with the SFIO left on the grounds that social-democrats were “the enemy”. The SFIO entering government with the Parti Radical and taking responsibility for bourgeois budgets and cuts clearly did undermine the working-class movement, but the PCF’s error was to abstract from this fact the assumption that there was no point relating to the SFIO rank-and-file.
In Germany, the Communist Party’s refusal to organise united fronts with other working class forces to face off the Nazi threat — indeed it organised a transport strike in partnership with the Nazis in order to undermine the Social Democrat administration in Berlin — had eased Hitler’s rise to power, with the resultant smashing of all labour movement organisations. Now Stalin performed a complete volte-face, decreeing to his European satellites that anti-fascist campaigning, in alliance with absolutely whatever forces, was now the central priority.
This was a reflection of the changing priorities of Soviet diplomacy. Having established diplomatic relations with the USA in 1933, joined the League of Nations the following year, and agreed military accords with the British and French governments, the USSR now looked to a policy of co-operation with the bourgeois democracies to protect its “Socialism in One Country”. Buttressing the “democratic countries”, namely bourgeois-imperialist governments, was the central goal of the Communist Parties, at the expense of any revolutionary activity.
Some in the PCF were not impressed by this 180-degree change in policy. Doriot, mayor of Saint-Denis, MP and long-time contender for the party leadership, had always lobbied for the party to take anti-fascist campaigning seriously, and after the Paris riots of 6 February 1934, in which far-right and monarchist organisations such as Action Française, les Camelots du Roi and the Jeunesse Patriotes had brought down Édouard Daladier’s government, he took his own initiative to organise a local anti-fascist Vigilance Committee in Saint-Denis in partnership with the SFIO branch.
Criticised for breaking with the official party line, Doriot wrote a letter to the leaders in Moscow to demand left unity to fight fascism. The eclectic dogma of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now meant that Doriot’s position of anti-fascist unity was in line with Stalin’s orders, they could not tolerate his insubordination and he was expelled from the Parti Communiste Français in June. Doriot set up a breakaway party which soon evolved... towards fascism!
In a joint trade union protest against the fascists on 12 February, rank-and-file SFIO and Communist demonstrators merged their contingents, chanting “unity, unity!”, on the day of a large national strike action. The party leadership remained reticent. Thorez wrote in l’Humanité on 8 March that “The Communist Party will never tolerate a policy of over-arching entente, the politics of retreat and abdication before the social-fascists”.
But after a meeting with Dmitry Manuilsky in Moscow in April and negotiations with SFIO leaders including Léon Blum, Thorez announced to the PCF’s Ivry congress on 14 June a new programme, seeking “unity in action and trade union unity [with the SFIO] at all costs”. A concordat between the two parties was achieved the following month. The Communists’ CGT-U and the reformist union federation merged into a single CGT.
The unity tactic reinvigorated the party. It havd sunk from 50,000 members in 1928 to 32,000 by 1932, but the PCF’s anti-fascist efforts saw it grow to 235,000 by 1936. It now far outstripped the SFIO as an activist force. Having decided that Hitler was now the “main” enemy of the PCF, the party moved significantly to the right to cut the ground from underneath the Parti Radical and SFIO — playing down its previous loud complaints against the Treaty of Versailles and French colonialism. Party demonstrations now featured the tricolore flag. As early as April 1936, Thorez reached out to the right-wing Catholic Croix de Feu group in a bid for “national unity”.
Concretising the anti-fascist effort, the next month’s elections saw the victory of a cross-class Popular Front with 72 seats for the Communists, 147 for the SFIO and 167 for the Radicals and other middle-class liberals. Although the PCF did not take up any ministerial posts, it massively buttressed the government, and was central to the elaboration of the Popular Front’s common programme.
In the negotiations with the SFIO and Parti Radical, the Communists were the most righ-wing element, opposing the Radicals’ plans to nationalise the Bank of France and rail, and complying in the Popular Front’s refusal to address the issue of women’s suffrage, fearing that, given the chance, women would vote for the Catholic right.
The programme instead offered vague platitudes about defending democracy, increasing purchasing power and keeping a stable currency in the face of deflationary troubles. The most important thing, the PCF assured its members, was to keep a solid front against fascism.
The election victory, however, sparked a huge wave of strikes eager to improve on the Popular Front’s success.
June saw three million workers taking action, including nine thousand factory occupations — the first major use of this tactic in France.
The CGT from the outset made attempts to settle with the bosses, such as at the huge Renault plant at Billancourt at the end of May, but the strikes spread like wildfire, with France’s working class — confident in the aftermath of a record electoral success for the left — determined to assert their authority, fighting back against cuts in real wages and the victimisation of trade unionists. The CGPF bosses’ federation feared a “Bolshevik coup”, and hurried to Léon Blum’s new government to seek his support for “order” and “legality” against the strike.
Blum and Thorez had to balance their desire to keep the Popular Front government palatable to the bourgeoisie with the need to look militant in front of their parties’ members. On 7 June the government brokered a CGPF-CGT deal, guaranteeing all workers pay increases of between 7 and 15% and an extension of trade union rights, while also introducing the 40-hour working week promised by the Popular Front’s electoral programme.
This deal — known as the Matignon accords — was a great disappointment for many workers who had spontaneously occupied their factories and elected strike committees, and so the Communist Party went on a propaganda offensive to push strikers back to work. L’Humanité featured banner headlines such as “The victorious return to work”. In its 12 June issue Maurice Thorez declared: “comrades, we must know when to end a strike”.
As millions of workers headed back to more wage slavery, their powerful occupations movement fatally undermined, the paper pontificated;
“One must even know how to agree to compromises, in order not to lose any strength and, more importantly, not to make the fear and panic campaigns waged by reactionaries any easier. The working class, having imposed wage increases and the right to exercise trade union rights, must protect its unity with middle-class workers, particularly the peasants, by not separating itself from them through more accelerated [social] progress. Thorez reminds us that ‘Not everything is possible,’ and that the guiding word of the party remains ‘Everything for the Popular Front! Everything through the Popular Front’!”.
As the unusual wording of this extract implies, Thorez’s word was law in the PCF, and a special personality cult was built around the party leader, including the song Thorez, friend of the people, and 1937’s hagio-autobiography Son of the people. “Thorez to power!” became the party’s central slogan.
IT might seem strange that such a party was able to retain, and grow in, support. But the Parti Communiste Français had never just been a sect of committed revolutionary activists, but a mass working-class party with great internal contradictions. And the USSR had huge prestige.
When a Stalinist zig-zag or betrayal dispersed one layer of activists, the status of the PCF and the USSR as the “actually existing” alternatives to a capitalism mired in slump and lurching towards fascism would recruit a new layer. No longer ultra-left, the party was a safe haven for any labour movement activist wanting to be with the “big battalions”.
The PCF had a cultural life reminiscent of that of Germany’s Social Democrats before World War One, with local sporting associations. It sent large contingents to the Barcelona “People’s Olympiad” held at the same time as the Berlin Olympic Games. It had music and theatre groups, and a leading role in the hostelling movement, which sprang up as, having won 15 days’ paid time off work thanks to the Popular Front, workers now had the time and money to holiday with their families. It encouraged its full-time organisers to take Sundays off agitation, as the PCF became an entrenched part of the everyday French political scenery.
Trotskyist forces were extremely weak. It was difficult to mobilise the mass of the class against such well-resourced parties as the Communists, particularly given that the latter could expel far-left activists from the CGT union federation at will.
Despite, or even because of its posturing as an independent force from the government, offering “support, but not participation”, the PCF’s turn to “respectable” parliamentary politicking rather than revolutionary agitation was a major coup for the leaders of the Popular Front, in particular the ailing Parti Radical. The Radicals had significant support among the petty-bourgeoisie and had always swung from left to right and back again in search for electoral success. Now many of its supporters were becoming disillusioned and turning towards fascism. The PCF could, and should, have shown this party up for what it was, since, as Trotsky had realised in 1934, “the side to which millions of French peasants, artisans, small merchants and minor officials turn will determine whether the present pre-revolutionary situation will develop into a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary situation.”
Failing to pose a working-class alternative to the declining capitalist system under which the fascist movement thrived, the Communist Party instead aligned itself closely with the decrepit Radical Party.
The PCF’s approach to Nazism and fascism was to see them as essentially a foreign phenomenon. To resist they had to strengthen France’s national unity. The PCF toned down or abandoned all criticism of French imperialism, such as its exploitation of Algeria. The Popular Front government collapsed in 1938 under the weight of economic recession, a budgetary crisis and infighting over whether to actively support the Spanish Republic against Franco’s forces in that country’s civil war. By 1939 72 of the 75 MPs who opposed Daladier’s decision to sign the Munich Agreement which handed over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Hitler were Communists. The PCF’s patriotism did not flag — they simply called for an extension of the Popular Front. Although the Parti Radical had betrayed their alliance with the PCF and SFIO, Thorez sought yet more bourgeois partners — indeed, he reached out beyond mere bourgeois liberals and called upon even fascists “loyal to France” to join a “French front”. He himself joined the French Army amid much hubbub as war with Germany neared.
By the summer of 1939, the interplay of European imperialist forces left the PCF faced with a very different scenario. Hitler and Stalin, both spurned by Britain and France, made a treaty on 24 August to carve up Eastern Europe. This left the Parti Communiste Français in an uncomfortable position, forced to betray its own French patriotism in the interests of yet another volte-face in Moscow.
Unlike all other French political parties, the PCF now called for “peace” with the Nazi régime, declaring support for the German-Soviet pact which gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland in September 1939.
This was the most shameful — or, perhaps, shameless — episode in the party’s history. Before, the PCF had regularly betrayed working-class political and economic advancement for the sake of short-term parliamentary advantage, opportunistically defining itself as a soft-left party which posed no danger to capitalism. But now it was simply the Trojan Horse of two foreign powers’ imperialist designs, an apologist for the two of the most murderous regimes in human history.
Upon the Wehrmacht’s invasion of France in spring 1940, the PCF abandoned its previous support for the French Army — in an act of supreme selfishness, Thorez fled to the USSR, abandoning his party along with the army, and was sentenced to death in absentia for desertion. As Hitler imposed the puppet “Vichy France” régime of General Philippe Pétain, Maurice Thorez counselled support for the German-Soviet pact in July’s “Appeal to the People of France” which described capitulation to Hitler and Stalin’s carve-up of the continent as the best hope for peace. Attacking the bourgeois politicians who had allowed France’s defeat, the statement nonetheless ignored the Nazi occupiers themselves, instead focussing on generalised “anti-war” concerns.
While following Moscow’s line, the Appeal had a strong French nationalist streak, calling in vague terms for a “free and independent France”, off the back of a Communist government “which will represent national renaissance”. Although critical of the “plutocratic” Vichy régime, the PCF had no qualms about seeking its permission to continue publishing l’Humanité.
All of this jarred with the Communists’ long-held French patriotism, and, banned by Daladier for its support of the German-Soviet pact, the PCF shed much of its membership as activists rejected collaboration with fascist invaders. The policy set down by Moscow’s diktats was too brazenly anti-socialist — and, indeed, unpopular — even for a Stalinist organisation. In November 1940, as Stalin still held firm by his alliance with Hitler, clandestine — and brave — groups of Communist students started to stage France’s first demonstrations against fascist repression. These protests started some seven months before Germany invaded the USSR and Stalin was forced to switch his alliances.
The post-“Third Period” doctrines of national reconciliation and cross-class reformism ran deep within the Parti Communiste Français, whose centrist and “patriotic” core had become more than simply a reflection of Moscow’s agenda. The PCF’s own dynamic meant that defending France was top priority.
ONCE the PCF could switch its policy officially, in June 1941, it revived rapidly. In many ways, the Communists’ role in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation was truly heroic. Many thousands of Communists lost their lives in the struggle — although maybe not as many as the “75,000 activists shot” in party folklore — fighting against a huge war machine in the face of concentration camps, executions and the decimation of towns and villages where the resistance was strongest. They existed as an illegal organisation, with secretive cells, weapons cachés and communications, just like a real revolutionary party in conditions of extreme illegality. Here, the nationalist PCF was far more comfortable than in its role as a simple cipher for Stalin’s agenda.
Its leading role in the French resistance movement saw it recruit massively as the war in Europe closed, accelerating from 370,000 in 1944 to 800,000 in 1946.
Bourgeois-liberal politicians such as Pierre Laval had bowed down before Hitler and served in the Vichy government, while the PCF, after 1941, had shown itself to be the most committed fighter for French independence during the war.
The Communists murdered half a dozen Trotskyist participants in the resistance during World War Two, and had an utterly un-Marxist approach towards German soldiers.
The Trotskyist Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, which had at most three hundred members, saw that “behind every German soldier is a German worker”, and distributed a paper — Arbeiter und Soldat (Workers and Soldier)— to win Wehrmacht conscripts to socialist politics; meanwhile, the PCF raised the chauvinist slogan “À chacun son boche!” — “everyone kill a German!”
But the PCF’s ultra-patriotism did not make it unpopular. Upon the 1944 liberation of France, the PCF was in a stronger position than ever. Millions of people were waiting for major social reform in the wake of a destructive conflict which had shattered their lives. The party which had proven itself to be the nation’s bravest defender and the largest component of the working-class movement promised to deliver that reform — in due course.
The PCF opposed all strikes, but, in the first free elections following World War Two, the Communists emerged as the largest party, winning 26% of the vote and entering government in alliance with the SFIO and the Catholic Popular Republican Movement. For the next decade, the PCF would be the largest political party in Western Europe.
