Letter from Paris: Between Pompidou and CP
Bloch-Michel, Jean
Between Pompidou and the CP F WE SET ASIDE the events of May 1968 (how aberrant they really were becomes increasingly evident), we may wonder whether it does not take a world war or...
...The non-Communist left, already hard hit by the events of May, thereby received a fresh blow...
...contingency measures will be adopted that will enable people, without sacrifices, to regain adequate if provisional economic security...
...In these circumstances, the CP, strengthened by its enormous success, was indifferent to the threat of "isolation"—an isolation that would be very much like that of the drunkard in the well-known story who, in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, circlesaround the grillwork that encloses the obelisk, shouting, "They've shut me in...
...Furthermore, the situation inevitably had to result in a confrontation between students and workers— or, more exactly, between young students and young workers on the one hand, and defenders of the status quo, the latter distributed among the so-called middle as well as the working class...
...The moment the political situation returns to normal,traditional structures reappear—not entirely unchanged, but continuing in the same evolutionary pattern that has been developing over a fiftyyear period and that persists, despite many shocks, sometimes in subterranean ways...
...But Poher vs...
...Here again, policies will be designed to satisfy everyone...
...But it is really in no way a sign that the electorate is rapidly shifting to the right, as it did in the July 1968 elections which followed upon the events of that May...
...Never had the Party taken such a position...
...2) Depending on the degree of violence, these movements risk being followed by defensive reflexes on the part of the society they will have alarmed...
...As in May PARIS: BETWEEN POMPIDOU AND CP 1968, and in response to the unexpressed wish of its voters, the CP again opted for order and stability and for the rejection of social democratic reforms...
...A policy of austere reform a la Mendes-France would have been ill received, and certainly everybody has had enough of the semblance of "leftism" under de Gaulle...
...This absence of the left—the absence of the non-Communist left vote in the first round of balloting, and that of the Communist vote in the second round—constitutes the most novel element of the situation...
...Therefore the CP's position at the time of the presidential elections was entirely consistent...
...The action will be led by others...
...The party that received 23 percent of the votes, or the party that collected 8 percent...
...Given the present situation of the left and the nature of the French JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL Communist party, any "union of all the left" would be merely a verbal sham and would amount to the non-Communists letting themselves be absorbed by the CP...
...1) As France in May 1968 indicates, it is possible—in what appears to be a socially peaceful and economically favorable situation— that on the most trifling pretexts, violent movements will materialize which have their origins in social strata that are alienated by new forms of civilization rather than exploited by socioeconomic institutions of society...
...If one discounts the motive of political morality—and the Communist party has never shown undue concern on that score—one recognizes that the Party preferred Pompidou to Poher...
...The left now is in danger of being doomed to total impotence...
...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE...
...it had always given its votes to Radicals and rightwing Socialists, calling for support of the "most democratic" candidate...
...However, such movements may also bring about an examination of conscience that will result in reforms (as the university reform in France), or attempts at reform (as, again in France, the attempt at "regionalization") , though such reforms may prove to be merely disguised self-defensive measures (as were, partly, the so-called "participatory" schemes...
...By acting on this political analysis, the Communist party ran the risk of total isolation on the domestic political scene...
...It is likely that the Socialist party and the supporters of Mitterand would have had to agree to his candidacy...
...Who on the left is isolated...
...This is not going to come about tomorrow...
...What does it signify that the CP issued an order to abstain—which is unique in the history of French Communism...
...Most of the big cities in the east and the west, the regions where Catholicism has remained most vital, vote for right and center, with the unpredictable exception of Marseilles...
...its followers seem to melt away and split between the center and the Communist party...
...Thereby, they wrecked any possi bility for the left to come to power and helped put de Gaulle back in the saddle...
...It is this last question we must try to answer first, but in order to do so we must move back in time...
...In no sense,therefore, was the defeat of the referendum a victory for the left...
...Now to the Communist party's order to abstain in the second round of voting...
...After a passing upheaval, society returns to its old habits, and on the surface nothing has changed...
...Faced with these distinctly unattractive "combinations," the left split between a center left that voted for Poher even on the first round and a leftthat, although not Communist, voted for Duclos because he was the only leftist candidate who could rack up a good score...
...From this perspective we may assess the reasons that, at times perhaps unconsciously, underly the position the French Communist party has taken in the last year...
...Nor is the defeat of Alain Poher at all surprising...
...It is quite possible that the country is entering a period of tranquility such as the center has been able to provide for it in the past, usually by postponing the solutions to the big problems...
...The removal of Edgar Faure from the Ministry of Education signifies that the new administration is determined to restore "order" in the university system...
...Thus, the May revolt could seem a pointless riot, ineffectual, without consequence or justification...
...The left-socialist PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifie) and its clubs will continue to be centers of interesting and often useful intellectual activity, but will have no true hold on the country...
...The composition of the new government and its leader's initial statements enable us already to discern its main features...
...On the one hand, because it is weak and divided where its opponent is strong...
...The CP preferred a solid government, based on a seemingly stable majority, to one that would have to dissolve both chambers, with no assurance whatever of winning a cohesive majority in the ensuing elections...
...A number of questions arise in this connection: what does it mean that 23 percent of the electorate voted Communist...
...Except for some student groups—leftists and others who are aware of what can be achieved by a reform that is at once incomplete, hasty, but attractive— this program will satisfy everyone, including the Communists...
...on the other, because of what "postGaullism" promises to be...
...His election can be construed as a success for the right and the right center and, even more, as a defeat for the left...
...W W E CAN FIND in this situation two characteristics of what the "twentieth-century revolution" is, and most probably will be, in industrialized societies...
...The CP's order to abstain seemed to be a response to moral scruples...
...and what has become of the great revolutionary, or seemingly revolutionary, tide of May 1968...
...Pompidou won the support of only 37 percent of the French electorate...
...therein the Party obeyed not only its own stricture against adventurism but also its perennial fear that such a social democratic effort might succeed...
...The moment there was no crisis, such as those of 1958 or 1968 which seemed to require recourse to General de Gaulle, and the moment the objectives of Gaullism no longer coincided with those of the right and center, voters reverted to their old, if now slightly modified, ways...
...Very likely, side by side with the CP, the left will continue to play the absurd role leftist Gaullists play within Gaullism: virtuous and futile protest will be its lot...
...Though for different reasons, the south and the southwest, the large industrial sectors of the Paris suburbs, the north, and the west (sometimes, as in Nantes and St: Nazaire, isolated sectors in areas where a contrary opinion holds sway) —all give support to the left...
...In the first place, it was not a class revolution...
...In the balloting pattern of the referendum Andre Siegfried would have recognized permanent characteristics of French politics— not unchanged, to be sure, but pursuing a consistent evolutionary pattern...
...However, once this candidacy proved impossible, the way was open for other "combinations" that were less sordid but were fated to fail, given the candidacy of Poher, whom the Socialists supported on the first round because they were eager to secure for the second round a nonGaullist who would not be the candidate of the Communist party...
...The balloting on the referendum reflected this more clearly than did the election of Pompidou...
...More and more it seemed, as later developments proved, that the Party wished to maintain a Gaullist or Gaullist-like regime in the context of a capitalistic system, where it could make out more easily than in any attempted "socialism with a human face...
...And the new Socialist party which, as Mitterand so rightly said, "was born a centenarian and died before it had lived," could acquire stature only on two conditions, neither of which seems likely to materialize soon: either the complete elimination of the cadres of the old SFIO (Section Frangaise de 1'Internationale Ouvriere—the Socialist party led by Guy Mollet), or the formulation of a new governmental program that sets forth reforms and manages to persuade the electorate they are necessary—without, however, alarming anyone...
...Primarily the "non" vote expressed both the voters' refusal to institute far-reaching reforms in the absence of a crisis, and their wish to return to traditional political habits and practices in the context of new institutions...
...A Gaullist regime would also supply assurances in the area of foreign policy that the Party could not expect from any other government in France...
...Many people, and in particular a number of the May revolutionaries, made the initial error of mistaking a revolutionary situation for a revolution...
...However, if that candidate had brought a sufficient number of the right kind of pledges, the Party would have accepted him...
...By abstaining the Communists blasted what hopes Poher might have had and insured the election of Pompidou...
...But it was unwilling for that candidate to be MendesFrance, the only man who stood a chance and brought with him firm views...
...In May 1968, at a moment when the Gaullist government was falling apart, thereby opening the way for a seizure of power not by the "workers" or by the "revolution" but by the left, the Communist party refused to support Mendes-France's attempt to form a popular front...
...One does not choose between cholera and the plague," Duclos had said...
...lacking them, he was rejected...
...The CP had supported such candidates as the late Robert Lacoste (former Minister for Algerian Affairs), Max Leleune, a Socialist partisan of a French Algeria, and indeed Guy Mollet...
...But what does "isolation" signify when it includes onefourth of the electorate...
...However, poor peasants in the less developed and fertile regions—the south, southwest, and south-central France (Massif Central) —vote left and sometimes, as in the Creuse, Communist...
...The mining regions of northern, northeastern, and central France, which were formerly bastions of So cialism, are now slipping over to the right as the coal industry is diminishing in importance, pits are closing down, and the miners no longer constitute the politically active element in the population...
...After all, under the Pinay administration France had less social conflicts than during any other period in the history of the Fourth Republic...
...In rejecting the "revolution," the Communist party acted in conformity with the wishes of a majority of militants and rank^and-file voters who want no part of a revolution under any pretext...
...right-and-center —with the left absent, as everyone knows...
...The non-Communist left will be hard put to combat the CP...
...The CP now will forget the presidential election in order to prepare for the parliamentary elections and the local contests that may enable it to become more firmly rooted throughout the nation...
...Between Pompidou and the CP F WE SET ASIDE the events of May 1968 (how aberrant they really were becomes increasingly evident), we may wonder whether it does not take a world war or the jolts of decolonization for France to lose her electoral equilibrium...
...Mendes-France, no...
...Because these alienations are characteristic of an industrialized society—i.e., a scientifically organized and hierarchic society—they might quite possibly be identical in countries with widely dissimilar political systems...
...it represents simply a return to traditional political habits...
...This also holds true in part for the election of Georges Pompidou to the presidency...
...And JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL alienation would be accentuated by authoritarian centralization, whether imposed by the right or by the left...
...Briefly, in industrialized societies, the "twentieth-century revolution" is, and perhaps will continue to be, much more a matter of revealing fresh alienations than of attempting, successfully or otherwise, to seize power—and this notwithstanding the mythology that animates, or the rhetoric that accompanies, revolutionary movements...
...It no longer commands strong organizations...
...The Communists knew that the chances of success for "a single candidate from the left" had eroded...
...They are obviously dictated by circumstances, but perhaps are also rather profound and, from the Party's point of view, justified...
...With no enthusiasm, and with full awareness that only a formality was involved, the Party insisted that "a single candidate from the left" be designated...
...In other words, the CP came to the aid of the right and center-right, against the centerleft and a segment of the left...
...But it was now a question of a presidential election...
...T T HE NEW REGIME'S economic policy will be conservative...
...Although it is always disagreeable to quote oneself, I must refer to what I wrote after the events of May, in my book Une Revolution du XXe Siècle: The revolutionary situation in which France found herself could not lead to a revolution of the classical kind, with one class destroyed to the advantage of another and the vic torious class seizing power...
...This is an important point, given the events of May 1968 and the distortions they suffered as reportage passed through the various propaganda mills...
...Porn PARIS: BETWEEN POMPIDOU AND CP pidou represented center vs...
...Nothing gainsays the possibility that a Poher government, relying on the center and on a left traumatized by the Czech experience, would have been somewhat aloof from the U.S.S.R., whereas the Realpolitik of the right—and with a cynicism for which it is not censured—allows it to overlook what Michel Debre used to call "a little traffic mishap" along the road toward EastWest rapprochement...
...However, we are here considering a presidential election, and I think it possible that a parliamentary election would have restored traditional party alignments, for they were more firmly rooted locally than they appear to be today...
...Now that there is no more question of "participation," employers are reassured, and workers who, rightly enough, never believed in it anyway are not worried...
...The Communist Duclos or the Socialist Deferre...
...As Maurice Duverger has demonstrated, the center, which Poher represented, can win only when it functions as an arbiter between left and right...
...However, when the Gaullist government had virtually collapsed and the state's administrative machinery lay idle, the Communists also rejected the leftist government that was then proposed by MendsFrance...
...Between a Communist party that is becoming more "radical" but is determined not to claim ortake power, and a center-right that is in power and, by force of circumstances, finds itself carrying out "leftist" measures (such as the university reforms), the enfeebled non-Communist left seems to have no immediate future...
...Mitterand, yes...
...The well-to-do and rich peasantry is split between center and right, thus adding votes to those of the poor peasantry of Brittany and the Vendee which, by reason of tradition, Catholicism, and in some cases duress, casts its vote for the right...
...Let us disregard such electioneering rhetoric as "innovation and continuity" and try to sort out a few of the facts...
...The "non" vote that defeated the reforms proposed by de Gaulle's last referendum can be ascribed to numerous circumstantial factors— not to mention their antidemocratic, somewhat Maurrassian aspects, which most voters did not clearly detect...
...A Poher government would obviously have been more Europeanminded than Pompidou's (though the latter is that too), and, in particular, more Atlantic-minded...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
