David S. Bell

The French Communist Party within the Left and alternative movements

French Communism once dominated the Left of the Left and assimilated within itself most of the ‘alternative’ political movements. However, the decline of Communism has created a space on the extreme Left that has been exploited by a myriad of small movements. These have occupied a political territory that the Communists would like to claim for their own, but they are unable to reclaim their once hegemonic position and find themselves a junior partner in many of the transactions on the extreme Left. Communist decline and their inability to find a way out of their impasse are connected with the same thing–their rigidity. However, if Communism changes it will cease to be Communist and the indications are, given Communist history and politics, that it is not capable of making the changes.

The French left after the 2002 elections

The presidential and parliamentary elections of 2002 were disastrous for the French Left, brought together in coalition by Mitterrand in the 1960s and 1970s. Already at a loss following the implosion of the Socialist Party and the right-wing landslide of 1993, the position was held for a while by Lionel Jospin and his creation, the ‘plural Left’ coalition. The performance of Jospin in government, abandoning traditional views, discredited the Socialists, however, and his failure to address the electoral issue of law and order led to a spectacular defeat at the hands of Chirac and the ultra-Right Jean-Marie Le Pen, which forced the broad Left to support the Gaullist Chirac in the second round of the presidential election. Other Left candidates polled poorly, the Communist leader Robert Hue gaining a miserable 3.37 per cent, worse than two Trotskyite candidates, and losing his electoral expenses. In the parliamentary elections of June, the Left emerged as highly fragmented and in turmoil, desperately in need of a new coalition, but lacking a credible leader to forge such a united political force around an appealing platform.

The Challenge from the Minoritarian Left

Under the apparent bipolar carapace of the French party system can be seen the features of the ‘polarised pluralism’ of the Fourth Republic, in which the extremes at both ends of the spectrum make manoeuvres for the centre difficult if not impossible. Because the two-ballot presidential elections force a run-off between the two top contenders, with the apparent air of bipolarity, of a Duverger-friendly two-party system, the movement to bipolarity has a plausibility. However, both centre-right and centre-left parts of the party system have their problematic members on the extreme wings, and in the case of the Socialist Party, this is the Marxist far left. Under the Fourth Republic, this far left was the Communist Party (Parti communiste francais; PCF), untouchable until the leadership in Moscow opted for the ‘parliamentary road’, when a small space opened on its flank. But more recently, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the 2000s, it has been the Trotskyite far left and the Front de gauche (FG; Left Front) coalition that have been the Socialists’ main contestants. There are some parallels elsewhere in Europe, but the rejection of social democracy by the far left is a permanent feature of French politics and a context with which the Parti socialiste and its candidates have to deal. In France, the far left flourishes on the myth of revolution: unless everything changes, nothing changes.

Socialist Politics Post-Mitterrand 1988–2002

The final chapters provide a narrative of the Socialist Party’s trajectory from the end of the Mitterrand presidency to the Hollande presidency of 2012. A chronology of the main events of those years follows: Chronology 1988 — Re-election of President Francois Mitterrand: Michel Rocard nominated prime minister Pierre Mauroy becomes First Secretary 1990 — March — Congress of Rennes: factional confrontation 1991 — December — Covention at l’Arche de la Defense; new ideological statement Edith Cresson nominated prime minister 1992 — Pierre Beregovoy nominated prime minister July — Bordeaux Congress: Laurent Fabius becomes First Secretary 1993 — PS election defeat -Rocard First Secretary; Chevenement quits PS to found MdC October — Le Bourget PS Congress 1994 — Poor European Parliamentary election results — Rocard loses vote of confidence; Henri Emmanuelli becomes First Secretary November — Lievin Congress: Emmanuelli confirmed as First Secretary

Presidentialism and Primaries

Socialists, since the formation of the SFIO, have been a ‘Republican Party’. They, like the Radical Party and others in the centre ground of French politics, maintained well into the Fifth Republic their conviction that the government should be responsible to the legislature and that the executive president, recalling the plebiscitary dictatorship of Napoleon III, is an illegitimate development. A president, in this view, if needed at all, had to be a constitutional monarch with at most the powers to advise, to encourage and to warn, but no more. Parliament, in this view, is the people’s representative and holds the executive to account, and where necessary it removes and replaces governments. Parliament is sovereign because it represents the national will, and the people are the ultimate source of legitimacy.

Ideology and Policy

Social democracy has faced an onslaught from the free market right in the last two decades, and the French Socialist Party has been as vulnerable to this as the other Second International parties and as ineffective in finding a reply. But although there was a near collapse of the banking system in 2008, the left’s former commitment to the state-run economy had also been dismissed. Even while Socialists elsewhere in Europe have been relatively successful in national elections, the French Socialists also face competition on the anti-capitalist left and from the extreme nationalist right over mobilising issues, and in the French case this challenge is particularly acute and includes competition from the ecologist movement, which is hostile to globalisation and ‘capitalist’ growth. Their political problem, in trying to reconcile these articulate movements, is part of the Socialist Party’s theoretical impasse, which has not been resolved and which the financial crisis of the twenty-first century has (paradoxically) done nothing to dissipate (Callaghan 2000 and Bergounioux, 2012).

Socialist Party Development after 2002

Francois Hollande, in the position of First Secretary of the Socialist Party, was Lionel Jospin’s Jospin. From 1981 to 1988, Jospin had been Mitterrand’s placeman at the head of the party and thus owed his authority to his ability to speak on behalf of the president. In 1997 Jospin had placed the little-known but well-liked Hollande at the head of the party, and the First Secretary’s authority derived from his closeness to Jospin. Like Jospin in 1981, Hollande was no threat to the absent (real) leader and maintained a sedulous balance within the party, but built up no independent support of his own. Jospin’s disappearance might have touched off a round of infighting, but there were no obvious successors. Nobody was in a position to force the issue, and in the run-up to the 2002 general election after Jacques Chirac’s re-election, a facade of unity was required to save seats.

Party Factional Identity and Personalities

Factionalism, in French Socialist politics, is endemic. There are many reasons for this, including the history of amalgamation of different parties into the Socialist Party (SFIO) itself and external pressures. In the post-war decades of the Cold War, the presence of the Communist Party and the Marxist heritage meant that the factions had an ideological outlook that distinguished them from each other. Often abstruse, but rarely underplayed, the ideological orientation gave the outsider a purchase on the positioning of the factions if they could find their way through the ideological thickets. Most of this discussion took place either in a Marxist framework or in relation to that ideology. Thus the Marxist vulgate became the essential reference point in these battles between internal groups, although power was at stake in addition to the simple ideological position.

The Competitive Context

Despite origin of the bifurcation of adversarial politics into ‘left’ and ‘right’ during the French Revolution, there has never been a neat dualism of progressive and traditionalist forces in France. Political behaviour may have been conceptualised around the traditions of left and right, but each tradition has comprised different, antagonistic groupings (Morris 1994).

In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle

This book is a contribution to the substantial library that has built up on the career and politics of the General. De Gaulle remains an inescapable presence looming over the French political landscape, the first politician to develop a united conservative party and, moreover, one capable of imposing a governing stability on a turbulent society in troubled times. Part of de Gaulle’s stature was his ability, dissected here, to weave together elements from different parts of the political spectrum into an enduring myth while at the same time (as is noted on page 57) endeavouring to avoid the disruptive and divisive features of that rich political culture. De Gaulle, of course, tried to overcome the left–right clash but only partially did so and added some controversies of his own. However, the approach here is not the standard historical perspective or political diagnosis, but an investigation of the way in which de Gaulle and the Gaullist movement are keyed into the culture of the French political system. It is probably the right time for a study of this nature—any earlier and it would have been premature. De Gaulle emerged in public perception, starting in the War and developed over the years, as an imposing father figure attributed with some quasi-religious dimensions—few other political figures achieve this status in France or elsewhere. De Gaulle, himself, constructed this myth in memoirs and in actions that portrayed a leader of a particular kind and one not congenial to Republican sensibilities. There remains the problem of the ‘teaching of reality’ as outlined by Hargrove and others: is the sedulous construction of myth a help or hindrance in the Gaullist case and does its assimilation cause problems? There are numerous difficulties in the Gaullist myth; not the least is the shuffling of the Vichy regime to the side as a dream and that has prevented the Pétainist state being tackled. It is also unclear to what extent the Gaullist hostility to international institutions, to the European project and to the USA served French interests however these are defined. The book is packed with references and allusions, although it is readable and (rare in books of this sort) very well informed, anecdotal and with a command of material that is confident, but aware of the readers’ needs. As such it is an essential addition to the material on de Gaulle and on the construction of political myth.