The Collapse of French Communism

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Voters generously chose to forget that the Communists did not consider Germany the enemy until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union...

...These self-styled renovators—Marchais calls them "liquidators"—have since joined forces with an array of unaligned Leftwing groups, and their leader plans to run as an alternative to the PCF candidate in France's May presidential elections...

...Another setback at the polls could send the PCF the way of the Spanish Communist Party, which disintegrated into three factions following its poor performance in Spain's 1982 general election...

...It was not until 1981 that the electorate plucked up enough courage to choose a Socialist president, François Mitterrand...

...Not everyone was impressed: The students' leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, scornfully referred to la canaille staliniste ("the Stalinist riffraff") that had jumped on the bandwagon...

...A Siberian wind is blowing over the Communist Party," the Left-of-Center Le Nouvel Observateur has observed...

...But even such awkward attempts to rewrite its lyrics to fit Moscow's new tune are eroding the PCF's raison d'etre, making it likely that large numbers of former supporters of the Communists at the polls will defect to the Socialists...

...In fact, it is his unorthodox style that has been the greatest source of the present discord in their ranks...

...Marchais blames the PCF's downward slide on a cultural "swing to the Right...

...Spokesmen for the Communist-controlled trade union federation, Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), and Marxist history teachers in secondary schools are tying themselves in verbal knots over perestroïka: After decades of praising the Soviet economy for leaving no one (officially) unemployed, they now have to justify Gorbachev's willingness to slash thousands of jobs in an effort to liven up economic activity...

...The 870,000-worker CGT, though still the biggest trade union federation in France, has less than half the membership it had 15 years ago...

...Moreover, the past four decades have seen Party membership shrink from 900,000 to some 300,000...

...Promptly booted out of the PCF by Marchais, Juquin and his pals have now formed such an alliance, and have attracted some rank-and-file Socialists disillusioned by their party's swing toward the center...

...Although not the Communists' first internecine ideological battle, this one is perhaps the bitterest so far...

...French apparatchiks are known to be the most unsmilingly doctrinaire in Western Europe...

...Pro-Communist sympathies have cooled in the universities, too: Opinion polls carried out after a wave of student unrest in the winter of 1986 showed that while a majority of 18-25-year-olds preferred Socialist politicians, only one in 10 was drawn to the Communists...

...Similarly, the Communist daily L'Humanité recently mentioned the release of prisoners from the Gulag—previously a nonword in the paper's style sheet— and was sternly reprimanded for doing so by hard-core readers...

...Unlike their Spanish and Italian counterparts, they have tended to stolidly toe Moscow's line—that is, until Mikhail S. Gorbachev took charge in the Kremlin...

...They moaned when he was selected Time magazine's Man of the Year...

...Mitterrand needed the Communists' support to win in 1981 in the second electoral round (when minority candidates step down...

...Juquin has already intimated that he would endorse the Socialists...

...The party leadership reached agreement with the Socialists on a list of policies they would jointly pursue in the event of an electoral victory over the Right-of-center parties...

...Juquin intends to run for the French presidency in May, to the understandable irritation of PCF candidate André Lajoinie...

...In the 1978 election Francois Mitterrand's Socialist Party pulled ahead of the Communists for the first time, winning 22.6 per cent of the vote cast to 20.4 per cent for the PCF...

...While publicly hailing Gorbachev as a peace-seeker, French Communists gritted their teeth when he flew off to Washington with gift-wrapped missiles for a pre-Christmas party with President Ronald Reagan...

...As this aura began to fade, opposition to the wars in Indochina and Algeria gained the PCF favor in anti-colonial circles...

...Georges Marchais, Secretary General of the French Communist Party (PCF), was "unanimously" re-elected to his post last December, but only because he had earlier in the year expelled a fistful of dissenters clamoring for glasnost...

...The Socialists—who indignantly deny Marchais' charge that Juquin is a "Socialist submarine"—do not relish this fissioning on their Left flank either...

...During the past decade Left-of-center voters in France, as in Spain and Italy, have increasingly preferred Democratic Socialism to Marxism, no matter how diluted...

...Just as surely he—or any other Socialist candidate, should Mitterrand decline to run—is going to need non-Socialist votes this year to beat Jacques Chirac, the neo-Gaullist prime minister, or Raymond Barre, a former centrist prime minister under Valery Giscard d'Estaing...

...In a mild replay of wartime tactics, the Communists organized small groups for the "Defense of the Republic, " enlisting the cooperation of anti-GaulMst Socialists, Jews, Protestants, and others...

...UnabletostopdeGaulle, and deprived of the anti-colonial cause by his eventual negotiation of a French pullout from Algeria, the Communists turned their attention to social reform...

...In the area of foreign affairs, however, the Communists welcomed de Gaulle's anti-American tetchiness, his withdrawal from NATO'S military structure, and his belief in a neutral France on friendly terms with la Russie (as the General insisted on calling the Soviet Union...

...But at this point they are uncertain whether his vague pink-andgreen banner can rally more votes than his comrades' tattered red one...

...French society, he says, no longer considers revolutionary ideas trendy...

...The PCF's leaders—like de Gaullewere caught off balance by the eruption of social discontentin May 1968...

...He also accuses the Socialists of betraying the Left and flirting with Right-wing parties...

...Current opinion polls give the two the same electoral strength: 5-6 per cent of potential votes...

...Ignoring hints that he lacks charisma, Marchais appears determined not to beejected from the seat he has occupied for 15 years, and is dealing ruthlessly with anyone opposed to him...

...His government included four Communists, but they resigned in 1984 to protest Mitterrand's introduction of austere economic measures to curb inflation...

...Ungracious lip service has also been paid Gorbachev's modernization plans by Marchais, under pressure from journalists...

...Our party's recovery is certain, even if it takes a long time...

...The Socialist Party is sick," he commented recently...

...Despite his assurances that there is no alternative to Communism, the Soviet leader's announced intention to tamper with the system he inherited has put his comrades here in an ideological fix...

...And to shake the party out of its "deep crisis," the signatories suggested that it ally itself with a variety of other Leftist elements —environmentalists, student organizations, anti-racist lobbies, Trotskyists, and erstwhile Maoists...

...Since then the rise in unemployment —now holding at 12 per cent—has not seemed to enhance Marxism's appeal...

...It further earned the wrath of the General's Right-wing military cronies for balking at his decision to scrap the Fourth Republic and create the Fifth, with a constitution designed to give the president greater authority than hitherto...

...Their proposals included reform of the PCF's "anachronistic, authoritarian hierarchy...

...In the immediate post-World War II period the Communist Party was still glowing from the role some of its members had played in the Resistance against the Nazis and the pro-Hitler Vichy regime...

...It takes place after a decade of sharply declining membership and electoral appeal for the party...

...In 1986 the Communists limped home with 9.8 per cent, their lowest score since 1932 and barely a third of the total they obtained in 1945...

...Though they had no taste for the Gauchistes— their blanket term for the Maoists, Trotskyists and other radical groups that sprouted that spring—and disapproved of the messy classroom-and-factory revolutionary mood, they couldn't very well avoid joining in...

...The events of May 1968 sent French voters scurrying for conservative cover...

...In an attempt to force a change, a group of Communists headed by former party spokesman Pierre Juquin drew up a "manifesto" at the beginning of last year...

...It was the only party brave enough to challenge Charles de Gaulle when he came to power in 1958 promising that Algeria would remain French...