The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis

By Jane Jenson and George Ross

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520340213

Jane Jenson

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THE VIEW FROM INSIDE

The View from Inside

A French Communist Cell in Crisis

JANE JENSON and GEORGE ROSS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

©1984 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jenson, Jane.

The view from inside.

1. Parti communiste français. Cellule Danielle Casanova. 2. Communist parties—France—Paris.

3. Communism—France. I. Ross, George, 1940H. Title.

JN3007.C6J45 1984 324.244’075 83-18189

ISBN 0-520-04991-8

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

À JEAN

NOUS TE REMERCIONS POUR TON HUMOUR, TON INTELLIGENCE, ETTA GÉNÉROSITÉ

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Chapter 1 THE DILEMMA OF EUROPEAN COMMUNISM

The Story Begins: March 1978

The Dilemma Revealed

The PCFs Historic Choices

Studying Rank-and-File Communism

Chapter 2 SETTINGS

Paris and Eurocommunism

Danielle Casanova and Paris South

Chapter 3 THE RENTRÉE OF CONFUSION

Chapter 4 PRACTICE AND THEORY: UNION A LA BASE AND THE AMICALE

Chapter 5 WOMEN AND THE PCF: AN UNSCHEDULED DEBATE

Chapter 6 A SMALL REBELLION

Chapter 7 THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT LAID TO REST

Chapter 8 THE NIGHT ANNE RESIGNED

Chapter 9 CONFLICTS AND CURRENTS: THE SECTION COMMITTEE MEETS

Chapter 10 THE SOVIET UNION AND US

Chapter 11 THE POLITICAL CHILL OF WINTER

Chapter 12 THE SECRET CRISIS OF PARIS

Chapter 13 PARIS SOUTH REACTS TO BEING TAKEN IN HAND

Chapter 14 UNION ALABASE: ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH?

Chapter 15 TRYING TO LEARN ABOUT EUROPE

Chapter 16 REAFFIRMING COMMITMENT: LA REMISE DE CARTES

Chapter 17 THE PRESSURES MOUNT: MONIQUE UNDER SIEGE

Chapter 18 DEBATING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REFORMISTS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

Chapter 19 DANIELLE CASANOVA TALKS ABOUT SEXUALITY

Chapter 20 THE STAGE IS SET

The Idea of a Party Congress

The Future Begins Now

Strategy for Congress Preparations

Chapter 21 DISCUSSING THE CONGRESS PROPOSAL

Danielle Casanova Assesses Democratic Centralism

Anger and Debate

Chapter 22 THE QUIET DEMISE OF THE WOMEN’S COMMISSION

Chapter 23 TO REJECT OR NOT TO REJECT?

Chapter 24 THE SECTION CONFERENCE

Chapter 25 THE CONFERENCE OF THE PARIS FEDERATION

Chapter 26 THE TWENTY-THIRD CONGRESS: UNITY AND RITUAL

Chapter 27 THE LOGIC OF DECLINE: 1979 TO 1981

Chapter 28 THE EFFECTS OF DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM

Chapter 29 CURRENTS AND CONTRADICTIONS: EXPLAINING THE STRATEGY OF DECLINE

PREFACE

The View from Inside is based on participant observation of the day-to-day political lives of rank-and-file Communists in the Parti Communiste Français. The comrades of Cellule Danielle Casanova were ordinary Communists in the sense that they were the foot soldiers, the militants, of the PCF, and not its leaders. As readers will see, however, they were far from ordinary people. We do not pretend that they represent French Communism as a random sample would. Indeed, unbeknownst to us when we first met them in early 1978, we had stumbled onto a group of people who were in the vanguard of modernizing change in the PCF, strong advocates of what we call Eurocommunism. Our friends were at one end of the political spectrum in a party that, despite being mistakenly viewed by many analysts as monolithic, is in fact a complex political system. Moreover, in the period during which we worked with Danielle Casanova, the Eurocommunist politics in which the cell’s activists believed was systematically eradicated within their party. Our story is therefore one of efforts to create political change inside the PCF, a story of great political conflict and, ultimately, defeat. We think that the story we are about to tell would be interesting in its own right, even without reference to its more general context. But this narrative is centrally concerned with processes in the PCF that led to electoral and political disaster and initiated what may turn out to be the party’s definitive decline. Our story is also, then, the journal of a major turning point in French politics and for Communist movements in Western Europe.

We have done our best to reconstruct what we saw from voluminous field notes and documents. We attended meetings, engaged in party activities, listened to speeches, read literature, and, in general, did what the Communists of Danielle Casanova did. We also built an extensive web of informal relationships with them, friendships we came to prize highly. After each occasion, formal or informal, we sat down and attempted to reproduce to the best of our abilities what had happened, particularly the specific course of conversation and argument. On those occasions when the people around us took notes, we did the same, thereby establishing nearly verbatim reports. But such occasions were rel atively rare, and the use of a tape recorder was inconceivable. Thus our memories were constantly tested. Participant observation is a perilous enterprise and there is undoubtedly much we were unequipped to see that would have enriched our story and much we did see that we did not completely understand. The reader will judge our success.

We have written about real people and real institutions, whose lives continue; we have therefore changed their names here. The Communist cell we worked with was originally named for a hero from French working-class history. We chose the name of another hero and called it Cellule Danielle Casanova after the Communist Resistance martyr of the same name. There are, in fact, dozens of cells named Danielle Casanova; one of the reasons we selected this name was to emphasize the ordinariness of our Communists. Choosing a woman’s name was not coincidental, either, since women’s issues were of central importance to our friends, and it seemed appropriate to us that even if the real name of the cell did not reflect this focus, our fictional name should.

A number of people and institutions helped us complete this book. The German Marshall Fund of the United States provided George Ross with a Fellowship during the research period, while the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded Jane Jenson a Leave Fellowship and Research Grant. In both cases, the money was awarded for other, different projects, which were also completed. The View from Inside is, therefore, a "spinoff’—proof to us, at least, of the tremendous benefits of helping scholars to have time free from teaching commitments. Funding for further research and clerical work subsequently came from Carleton University (the Faculty of Social Science, the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and the Department of Political Science) and from Brandeis University (the Dean of the Faculty and the Sociology Department). Thanks also to Alain Hénon and Mary Renaud of the University of California Press for enthusiastic and expert editorial work. The Harvard University Center for European Studies provided both of us, at different times, with a warm and sophisticated intellectual second home.

Special thanks are due to Bridget Jenson who bore, more or less graciously, the repeated absences of her parents, who were out with the Communists, and who herself helped us to understand some of the contradictions between adult politics in the PCF and the politics of everyday life, as seen by the children of Communists.

Our greatest debts, of course, are to our friends from Cellule Danielle Casanova. They welcomed us into their party, their homes, and their lives with great enthusiasm. They undertook the sometimes difficult task of teaching us, in many gentle but serious ways, what it is to be a French Communist. They felt that our lives in North America lacked dimensions that they valued greatly in their own lives and that they wanted us to share. From them, we learned more about France and about politics than we ever could have hoped. Their good will and generosity will always be an example to us.

PARTONE

Introduction: Adapt or Decline

Chapter 1

THE DILEMMA OF EUROPEAN COMMUNISM

The Story Begins: March 1978

The members of Cellule Danielle Casanova, one of six local cells in the Paris South Section of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), had been called together to discuss the results of the March 1978 legislative elections. The living room of Nicole, the cell’s First Secretary, was a familiar place to these Communists. Nicole and Alexandre, her dentist husband, lived with their two small children in what their comrades called the luxury flats of the cell’s territory. In fact, there was nothing particularly luxurious about their apartment—except, perhaps, the rent they had to pay—but the term luxury flat was local usage to distinguish free market housing in the area from the massive Habitations à Loyer Modéré (HLMs), or publicly subsidized housing, where the bulk of the local population lived. The main advantage Nicole’s apartment held for the cell was the size of its living room. Despite a very large set of cabinets running along one wall of the rectangular room, containing Alexandre’s collection of Russian and Soviet memorabilia (Alexandre was the son of Russian immigrants and proud of it), recent PCF publications, and an extensive library of popular music from many countries, there was plenty of room for everyone even at well-attended meetings of the cell.

It was a balmy March evening, beautiful, precocious Parisian springtime weather, and from Nicole and Alexandre’s balcony the view was lovely. While waiting for the meeting to begin, we surveyed Danielle Casanova’s turf, spread out beneath us in the slightly misty evening air.

The territory of Danielle Casanova and Paris South had a long, honorable, and varied Communist history. From the interwar period into the 1950s, it had been Red to the core. As Paris had industrialized and in particular as modern massproduction industry had developed after 1914, the area just inside the boulevards périphériques ringing the central city had become the locus of much industrial activity. In such neighborhoods, factories were surrounded by one- and two- story working-class housing, interspersed with larger apartment houses, small workshops (often engaged in subcontracting for the big firms), and shops. It was in neighborhoods such as Paris South that the PCF had built up the social base among the semi-skilled, mass-production workers that had made it a major political force in the interwar years. And it was in places such as Paris South that a coherent and powerful proletarian culture had developed around factory and neighborhood. Paris South had been the location of major sit-down strikes in 1936, for example, and it had contributed more than its share of members of the Resistance.

But prolo Paris South did not survive the massive changes that transformed France from top to bottom in the 1960s. The social effects of the postwar economic boom in France were enormous, and nowhere more visible than in Paris, particularly in Paris South. Big mass-production industry migrated to the suburbs and sometimes even to distant rural areas. Paris became almost exclusively an administrative and service center, with jobs requiring educational credentials replacing industrial work. The capital’s population became more and more a patchwork of the wealthy and the white-collar middle strata, while lower-paid white-collar and blue-collar workers were exiled into low-rent suburbs and became commuters.

The landscape of Paris South symbolized these changes. Where factories and working-class housing had once stood, huge high-rise apartment complexes grew, along with shopping centers, hotels, and office buildings. Many of the new high-rise residential buildings were in the luxury category, which meant very expensive in the Paris of the late 1970s, accessible only to relatively well-paid professionals and managers. Interspersed with such housing were the publicly subsidized HLM complexes.

From Nicole’s balcony on that March evening, we could make out what remained of the old Paris South. At the far end of the street we saw tiny brick and stucco houses, sometimes built along little mews, with occasional shops and small workshops. Closer to us were blocks of luxury flats, nondescript ten- and twelve-story apartment houses. Across the street was a huge HLM complex, which dominated the cell’s territory. It consisted of several towers and some lower buildings, a shopping center, a theater, playgrounds, and a central courtyard. There was little aesthetically to differentiate between the luxury flats and the HLMs. They had all been constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the face of the Paris South area had been completely transformed. And they were only slightly different (perhaps a shade uglier) from similar buildings from a similar period in Munich, Minneapolis, and Manchester. What distinguished the luxury flats from the HLMs was, of course, the people who lived in them. Only reasonably successful professionals—university teachers, administrators, doctors, and, as we knew, dentists—could afford the unsubsidized rents. These people also tended to be relatively young, in their thirties for the most part, because as careers blossomed and families grew, older professional people mi grated to larger apartments in the suburbs. Occupants of the HLMs, in contrast, qualified for the subsidized housing on the basis of limited income. There one found workers, for the most part Paris’s new working class—those employed in urban public services such as the metro and the post office rather than in heavy industry. Almost everyone else held low- to middle-level white-collar jobs.

The Communists who had answered Nicole’s convocation this evening were representative of both Danielle Casanova’s history and neighborhood. The group was a mix of young professionals, white-collar workers, and housewives, with but one or two blue-collar workers. It was also a mix of generations, but the generations were not spread evenly throughout the occupational clusters. The professionals tended to be of the post-May 1968 generation, from twenty-five to thirty-five, whereas the white-collar workers and the housewives spanned a greater age range, from thirty through nearly sixty. Enough people had shown up on this occasion to make Nicole’s living room crowded. In fact, almost half of the nearly fifty official members of the cell came—a response to the recent elections, in which, despite Danielle Casanova’s heavy investment of time and energy, the Communist candidate in the cell’s constituency had lost. Moreover, the PCF generally had not done as well as in the past, and worst of all, the Left as a whole had lost. These setbacks had happened in circumstances many, if not most, Communists in Danielle Casanova did not completely understand.

While we had been overlooking the scenery of Danielle Casanova’s territory, the cell members had arrived at this crucial meeting. Thus, when we came back through the glass doors from the balcony, we had a good view of the small group of Communists with whom we were to live politically for more than a year. We already knew several of them slightly. Pierre, the voluble, energetic center of Danielle Casanova’s activity, was standing next to Monique, who was the Paris South First Secretary and a longtime cell member. Pierre was always visible in a crowd because he was larger than anyone else—larger than life in many ways, we were to learn—being more than six feet tall and rather portly. This evening he looked even bigger standing next to Monique, who was just a fraction over five feet. They made a strange pair of comrades, this huge man in his early fifties, affecting the long hair and sartorial habits of someone two decades younger, and the tiny Monique, dressed in the clothes of a fashion-conscious but not very wealthy office worker. Pierre’s dark green corduroy suit over a striped, collarless peasant shirt would have put Monique’s nondescript skirt and sweater at an aesthetic disadvantage, had not the suit jacket been rather rumpled and dusted here and there with the wayward ashes of the cigar Pierre always clasped in his mouth. Monique, quiet and intense, turned her strong-featured face and intelligent brown eyes to learn Pierre’s reasons for being optimistic about their party’s situation, despite its electoral defeats.

Two other Danielle Casanova women, Anne and Janine, were sitting side by side on Nicole’s soft couch, animatedly discussing the pronouncements of Communist leaders during the electoral weeks just past. Anne, dark, with jet-black, curly hair, dressed in blue jeans and a gray sweater, was a philosophy graduate student in her late twenties. She possessed an unusual capacity to make herself the center of attention in any situation. This evening she was well into a characteristic flight of verbal indignation about the statements of Georges Marchais, the Secretary-General of the PCF, which she found to be very bad politics indeed. Janine, a slight, blonde, thirtyish sociologist with a face radiating both volatility and intelligence, nodded in agreement from time to time while interjecting, Yes, they really were terrible, weren’t they? Nicole, the mistress of the house and cell First Secretary, hovered around this dialogue reflectively, speaking only after some thought, and then cryptically in an accent we later learned to recognize as Alsatian. Her husband, Alexandre, blonde and youthful-looking like Nicole although he was nearing forty, sat across the room making small talk with a balding little man wearing an omnipresent smile—Monique’s husband, Robert, the treasurer of the section, as we quickly found out.

Of the dozen or so people who rounded out the attendance that evening we knew little. A couple of middle-class-looking men in their twenties sat rather stiffly and quietly by themselves, waiting for the meeting to start. Both were classic, if different, French types. One was slight, carefully bearded and coiffed, and dressed in stylish casual clothes we knew to be expensive; we later learned that he was Marc, a professional agronomist. The other, very handsome, with an angular face surrounded by straight, dark hair, resembled Jean-Pierre Leaud, the actor used by François Truffaut in many of his films. He eventually came to be known to us as Jean-Claude, another graduate student in philosophy. Next to these two, sitting on one of Nicole’s folding chairs, was Sandro, an obvious prolo, dark-haired, sharp-featured, with the strong hands of a manual laborer. Finally, gathered in a group in the far comer of the room were several soft-spoken older women making small talk about a TV program they had seen the night before. These women, we were to learn, all lived in the HLM complex across the street.

Almost everyone in the room on that balmy and gentle March evening in 1978 was a dedicated Communist, deeply concerned about the party and its future. Confusion and perplexity were the most common attitudes we detected. The 1978 election campaign had gone badly, and the defeat of the Left had occurred in bewildering circumstances. The formerly united Left had turned to intemperate internecine conflict, and the PCF leadership had begun to talk in terms unfamiliar to Danielle Casanova Communists. What would the future bring? No one really knew, and many were clearly worried. They had expected the Left to succeed and it had failed. What would happen next was unclear.

The View from Inside is a chronicle of what did happen. Our own destiny, even if we were not yet quite aware of it on that March evening, was to become the recorders of the cell’s history during the most turbulent and important period of the modern history of French Communism. As participant observers, we were to share in the passion and the pain of these people, whose particular brand of politics was defeated as the PCF as a whole struggled with the profound strategic difficulties it faced after March 1978. This book is the story of Cellule Danielle Casanova and the Paris South Section of the PCF as their members lived through that struggle and defeat. Almost all of what follows is the story of cell and section as seen through the eyes of their members. But before we begin this story in earnest, we must step back in history and away from Paris South to review the sources of the dilemma European Communism and the PCF in particular faced in the 1970s.

The Dilemma Revealed

The Russian October of 1917 took the Left everywhere by storm. The unanticipated and electrifying success of the first proletarian revolution consecrated Bolshevik theoretical and organizational practices as models. Although bitter conflict about the desirability and usefulness of these models marked the subsequent history of Left social movements, by the mid-1920s the Bolshevik-inspired and -coordinated Third International (Comintern) challenged social democracy for the role of legitimate bearer of working-class revolutionary hopes. From that time on, the schism of the Left between Communists and social democrats played a central role in politics around the globe.

In Western Europe, however, the Bolshevik challenge was much diminished in the post-World War II period. By that time, the Soviet experiment had come to appear less as a model of revolutionary change than as an illiberal, if perhaps effective, approach to overcoming underdevelopment. As such, it had considerable appeal in the non-European world, which was marked by decolonization and changes in traditional social orders. In the advanced capitalist societies, however, Third International-style Communism had generally failed to spread solid roots, despite great effort. True, the Red Army had successfully exported real socialism to several East European countries. But military conquest followed by occupation and political manipulation from outside could hardly be confused with revolution. In most parts of Europe and North America, Communist parties had become small sects composed mainly of hopeful intellectuals trying to communicate largely pro-Soviet messages to workers who had very different things on their minds. Working-class and Left movements did not disappear; but where they existed, they were usually reformist and social democratic. Only in Latin Europe, particularly in France and Italy, did Communism thrive after 1945.

Communism in France and Italy provided a persistent reminder that the social democratic Keynesian welfare states set up throughout Northern Europe were neither universally accepted nor inevitable. The existence of healthy Communist movements in France and Italy perpetuated hopes—and fears—that a Left alternative to social democracy might yet materialize in the advanced capitalist West. Both the Parti Communiste Français and the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) could count on strong working-class support in the aftermath of World War II. Additional support came from pockets of protest against the capitalist status quo, from people who were less in agreement with the actual politics of Communists than with the radical posture of rejection the Communists maintained. The French and Italian parties’ abilities to defend the material interests of workers, often through trade-union activities, in the hostile environments of these two countries after 1947 also bolstered Communist strength.

Despite such resources, neither the PCF nor the PCI was able to overcome the basic problems facing neo-Bolshevik parties in liberal-democratic societies. The spectrum of progressive forces in both countries remained stubbornly divided between Communists and social democrats, with the latter maintaining a substantial following among workers. Communists found it extraordinarily difficult to make much progress at overcoming such divisions. Moreover, their allegiance to the Soviet experiment as a model for the future proved as much a liability as an asset. With time, the lack of democracy in existing socialism became increasingly evident, and knowledge spread rapidly that Communist rule in the Eastern European Popular Democracies and in the Soviet Union itself had been maintained by monumental brutality. After 1956 and the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party (CPUSSR), many European Communists were forced to face reality.

It was out of the question that either French or Italian Communists would come to power through social revolution. Advanced capitalist societies such as France and Italy were too well integrated and organized, despite their many problems, for the extreme social disintegration that bred revolution. Both the PCF and PCI were forced to spend much of their time and effort working in and through democratic parliamentary procedures. Moreover, since both parties, although powerful, were minorities (and seemingly destined to stay that way), they needed allies to go with them at least part of the way toward basic social change. It was virtually impossible, however, for the PCF and PCI to find allies foolish enough to trust them as long as they remained ultimately committed to replicating the Soviet system—and both parties maintained such commitments well into the 1950s.

Communists therefore confronted a complicated puzzle in the postwar years. If they maintained their allegiance to the Soviet model, they would never be able to gain power and effect change. To attract new supporters and allies and to make credible claims for power, they would have to distance themselves from the Soviet path. In other words, to be anything more than stymied minorities in their domestic politics, the French and Italian parties had to stop being Third International Communist parties.

This dilemma had been visible in the earlier histories of the PCF and PCI. One sees recognition of it in the PCF’s Popular Frontism and in Antonio Gramsci’s writings about Italy. 1 By the late 1950s and 1960s, the parties could not avoid searching for radical new answers, however. In addition to the 1956 revelations about the crimes of Stalin and the crushing of several Eastern European revolts—events that definitively cracked the legitimacy of the Soviet model—it was the social change accompanying the postwar economic boom in Western Europe that created new urgency. GNP and per capita income shot up. Social geography was modified, with declining agrarian populations and massive urbanization. Consumption patterns and tastes changed, influenced by the new technologies of radio and television. Educational attainment levels rose. Higher incomes, longer vacations, automobiles, airplanes, and mass tourism vastly increased mobility. The influence of religion declined, along with regional parochialisms. Occupational structures and hierarchies changed. Industrial workers remained a stable percentage of the work force, while white-collar work increased dramatically. Most such occupational change reflected growing numbers of tertiary employees such as service workers and office operatives. But the numbers of people working in educationally credentialed professional, administrative, and technical jobs—the so-called new middle classes, or intermediary strata—also dramatically increased, resulting from the postwar expansion of the state and the modern large corporation.

The social changes of the boom period challenged all European political forces. Older maps of the social world were no longer useful guides. New understandings had to be reached, and new strategies developed. French and Italian Communists were not exempt from such challenges. The working class itself, on which the PCF and PCI based themselves both theoretically and practically, began to change. Its social isolation was attenuated by the new media, by new consumption patterns, by new educational experiences. Changing social geography began to undermine blue-collar ghettos and the working-class culture that had grown out of them. Old approaches and old certainties about workers proved less and less reliable. The new situation also brought massive opportunities, however. Recruiting from among white-collar employees and the intermediary strata was open to both parties. Thus for the first time since the immediate postwar years the PCF and PCI could act to increase their support.

Such mammoth and complex social changes underlined the historic dilemma of French and Italian Communism. As Western Europe was growing more prosperous and socially more pluralistic, the Soviet experiment was foundering. The centrally planned economies of real socialism sputtered and seemed less capable than ever of delivering to consumers and citizens. The political promises of de-Stalinization were never kept. Lack of basic civil and political liberties persisted, as did the glaring absence of democratic process. Yet, despite the diminishing appeal of the Soviet experience, great possibilities existed in Western Europe for promoting progressive movements aimed at transcending capitalism. The postwar boom brought great change, but it also brought new, and acute, contradictions. Large numbers of people sensed the inequalities, waste, and authoritarianism of advanced capitalism. Most were equally sensitive, however, to the great limitations of existing socialism. Thus for the PCF and PCI to seize the new opportunities for recruitment created by the postwar boom (indeed, even to maintain their existing support in the face of change), they had to reconsider their neo-Bolshevik habits and longstanding admiration of the Soviet model. They had to transform themselves into new and different types of political forma tions bent not on reproducing the Soviet model, but on moving forward autonomously toward socialist change unguided by any model at all.

In effect, the end of traditional Communism in France and Italy had become inevitable by the 1960s. The PCF and PCI faced a situation in which they had to either adapt, to become something substantially different from what they had originally set out to be, or decline. By the early 1980s, the trajectories of the two parties had become clear. Italian Communism had turned toward adaptation. The PCI had dramatically changed its political identity, restructured its organization, remapped its social world, and reconstituted its social base. The PCI was no longer a Communist party in the generally accepted sense of this term. Gone was any allegiance to the Soviet Union in international affairs. Gone, likewise, were any beliefs that existing socialism and the Soviet experience provided useful guides to the Italian future, except perhaps in a negative sense. Traditional forms of internal party organization, including the democratic centralism of the Third International, were also modified. The PCI seemed to have become a new type of Left party—open, resourcefill, innovative, and entrepreneurial. It had come to resemble the more creative Western European Left parties—the French Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Swedish Social Democrats—more than it did any Third International Communist party. The PCF’s story was, however, very different.

The PCFs Historic Choices

Although the PCF deservedly acquired a reputation as one of the most orthodox and faithful members of the Third International, a pure Bolshevik model for change never fit in France. In the 1920s and 1930s, France was already a functioning, advancing, imperialist metropole, far removed socially from the fragile transition to capitalism that had made Russia the weakest link and that, in turn, had made the seizure of power by a highly disciplined minority of professional revolutionaries a plausible course. The full Bolshevik vision of socialist transformation—proletarian democracy, one-party dictatorship, centralized economic planning—also seemed unlikely to strike fire in France. Great popular commitment to republican and democratic ideals existed, which clashed with the institutional outlines of the Soviet experiment. Among French progressives, in fact, feelings developed rather early that all was not quite as advertised in the Soviet workers’ paradise. Although the PCF did carve out a significant place for itself, mainly by organizing and mobilizing semi-skilled mass-production workers in ways that conferred a continuing workerist bias on the party’s politics, social democratic reformism preserved its own social roots, and by 1920 the Left in France had already assumed the pluralistic character that persists today.²

Given these conditions, the question of adaptation was on the PCF's agenda throughout its history? It was not surprising, then, that the PCF’s most significant efforts at adaptation came rather early in its history, in both the Popular Front (Front Populaire) period and the years immediately after World War n. Following an extremely sectarian period of class against class politics during which the PCF refused to ally with any other political formations, the Comintern—faced with the threat of fascism and strongly prompted by the situation in France itself in 1934-35—shifted its general line toward the United Front Against Fascism perspective. Although this shift was motivated largely by Soviet diplomatic concerns, it ultimately provided the PCF with a domestic strategy that persisted in one form or another for more than four decades.³ The Popular Front turned the PCF toward compromise and cooperation with other political forces. For the first time, the PCF was able to lay claim to a share of French republican symbolism: the Red Flag and the Tricolore appeared together at PCF events.⁵⁴ After a perilous departure from this line in 1939-41, the party shifted

3. The general literature on the PCF's history is quite extensive. Useful points of departure in French are Jacques Fauvet, Histoire du Parti Communiste Français, 1920-1976, with the collaboration of Alain Duhamel (Paris: Fayard, 1977); and Philippe Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du Parti Communiste Français, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1980,1981). Robrieux’s third volume, which appeared in 1982, covers the years 1972-81; it is tendentious, underdocumented, and generally unreliable. Robrieux’s Maurice Thorez, vie secrète, vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975) is useful. Georges Lavau’s excellent book A quoi sert le Parti Communiste Français? (Paris: Fayard, 1981) is especially attuned to the PCF’s historic problems of adaptation to the complexities of French society.

The PCF’s own histories are well worth consulting, not so much to find out what actually happened, but rather to discover what the PCF, in retrospect, convinced itself had happened. There is a Thore- zian history that justifies the stewardship of Maurice Thorez; see PCF, Histoire du Farti Communiste Français (Manuel), 2d ed. (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1964). More recently, a revisionist Marchais volume has appeared, Le PCF, étapes et problèmes by Roger Bourderon et al. (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1981). The Cahiers (T histoire of the Institut Maurice Thorez are a constant source of good PCF scholarship.

For information on specific periods, see Annie Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme français, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1969); Danielle Thrtakowsky, Les Premiers communistes français (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1980); Jacques Girault et al., Sur l’implantation du PCF dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1980); Stéphane Courtois, Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris: Ramsey, 1980).

In English, the selection is more limited. See D. L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow, Communism in Italy and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Annie Kriegel, The French Communists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Ronald Tiersky, French Communism, 1920-1972 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); and George Ross, Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).

back to a united front mode for the Resistance and Liberation years. At Libera* tion, Communists became ministers in the French government for the first time. And while post-Liberation governments were implementing major reforms, the PCF itself reached a historic high point in membership, electoral support, and mass organizational power.

United frontism brought important changes in French Communists* vision of socialist transformation. Revolution—for the PCF remained a self-proclaimed revolutionary party—would henceforth require a preliminary stage of reformist alliance politics. The party would first attempt to promote formal coalitions to its immediate Right, primarily with the Socialists, around programs for major structural change to be enacted when the coalition won electoral victory.5 Such reforms, however extensive, would not in themselves constitute revolutionary change; but if they were properly enacted, the party believed, they might well work to shift the balance of forces toward the Left, and toward the Communists within the Left, thereby facilitating subsequent and much more dramatic changes.

Maurice Thorez, longtime PCF Secretary-General and architect of French united frontism, summarized this strategic adaptation in a famous interview granted to the London Times in the autumn of 1946.

The progress of democracy throughout the world, despite those rare exceptions which confirm the rule, allows us to foresee a passage to socialism by roads other than the one taken by the Soviet Communists. … The way is necessarily different for each country. We have always thought and declared that the people of France, rich in glorious traditions, would find their own way toward greater democracy, progress and social justice.6

Bolshevik methods were therefore not appropriate for seizing power in France, however correct they might have been for Russia in 1917. The PCF would find its own national road to socialism, beginning with united frontism.

Maurice Thorez made this statement, of course, when the outlines of Popular Democracy in Eastern Europe were being drawn. Thus the national road to socialism through united frontism had clear limits and was to be understood as but a partial strategic adaptation to French national circumstances. Coalition building, common program writing with allies, electioneering, and program implementation were viewed as a first, nationally specific stage, allowing the PCF to generate new resources to deploy in subsequent, more radical, stages of transformation. These later stages would conform more closely to an orthodox Bolshevik scenario. The PCF did not renounce its belief in the desirability of a Communist seizure of power, a dictatorship of the proletariat, and, ultimately, a full-fledged replication of Soviet-style socialism.

Such a partial, national road adaptation to the specific contours of French society and politics never did open a path to socialism. The party began implementing the united front stage of its strategy on two separate occasions. In both instances, however, relationships between Communists and their allies proved frail and tenuous. Major reforms of great importance for French life were indeed enacted in both the Popular Front and Resistance-Liberation years. But they never cumulated into the movement toward socialism the PCF envisioned. The reasons were not difficult to perceive. The premise of united frontism was that because the PCF alone was not strong enough to initiate socialist transformation, it would need the assistance of allies. But the PCF only envisaged a highly unequal and manipulative relationship with such allies, seeing itself as the vanguard, and the only vanguard, of any revolutionary movement in France; real change could only be defined and led by the PCF. The purpose of united frontism was to persuade other political forces to strengthen the PCF so it could exercise its vanguard role effectively. As actual or potential allies became aware of this, alliances became difficult to conclude and fraught with suspicion. If the PCF’s vanguard pretensions were not enough to make allies wary, contemplating their own destinies in the PCF’s strategic scenario ¡was even more sobering. In addition, the PCF persistently tried to load pro-Soviet diplomatic concerns onto its domestic alliances, concerns which allies only rarely shared.

The PCF carried united frontism, contradictions and all, into the 1960s. This perspective was the strategic point of departure from which the party confronted the changing social and political realities of the postwar boom in France. The astounding rapidity and concentration of socioeconomic change in France contributed to great political volatility. The Gaullist Fifth Republic, which presided over much of this modernization after 1958, played an important role in shaping this volatility. Gaullism and its institutions polarized French politics between Right and Left, replacing the complex pattern of coalition mongering that had characterized the last decade of the Fourth Republic. As the new Right majority deepened its hold in the 1960s, the Socialists, who had refused any cooperative arrangements with the PCF during the Cold War, had to reconsider united frontism. No other road to power seemed open to them. Additionally, the coming of peaceful coexistence in the international sphere began both to loosen the PCF’s devotion to Soviet diplomatic goals and to make the USSR seem less frightening to non-Communists.

In this changed context, the PCF leadership moved to elaborate and modify the Thorezian national road united front line. At first, in the mid-1960s, the party simply promoted the old united front positions with the minor addition that peaceful transition to socialism might be possible in France. The first stage of this transition would involve an alliance with the Socialists around a common program to be enacted by an elected Left government. Beyond this, however, the passage to socialism necessarily involves the socialist revolution, the destruction of the old state machinery, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 7

As the 1960s progressed, the possibility of a real alliance with the Socialists increased, causing the PCF to make doctrinal concessions of a more important kind. The Seventeenth Congress in 1964 (at which Waldeck Rochet succeeded Maurice Thorez) concluded that the notion, attributed to Stalin, that a one-party regime was necessary to move to socialism was an abusive generalization from the particular historical circumstance of the October socialist revolution. Furthermore, unity between Communists and Socialists was desirable not only during the stage of advanced democracy—as the PCF called the first round of united frontism—but also during the construction of socialism itself. This was the first indication that the PCF would be willing to allow partisan pluralism during the stage of proletarian dictatorship.8 The landmark Manifeste de Champigny, issued in the aftermath of May-June 1968, clarified the party’s strategic situation.9 The first stage of united frontism would create advanced democracy. The reforms initiated at this point would create conditions for further, more radical, rounds of reform until the transition to socialism was irreversibly engaged. Socialism in France would be impossible without such a period of democratic transition in which a majority of the French people were persuaded of its desirability.10 Not only advanced democracy, but also the actual construction of socialism, would be accomplished by partisan coalitions formed around the PCF. Pluralism, at least of this type, had become an important part of the PCF’s doctrinal baggage.11

Orthodoxy persisted nonetheless at the end of the PCF’s scenario for change. Socialism still involved the abolition of the bourgeois state and its replacement by a workers’ state. The PCF furthermore held firm to its belief in the necessity of proletarian dictatorship.12 According to the Manifeste, proletarian dictatorship would install a higher form of democracy than could ever be achieved in a bourgeois state, involving the direction of society by the working class allied with other noncapitalist social groups, the largest possible level of democracy for the working masses, a state which is the emanation of the working people.13 In addition, the dictatorship would protect working-class victories against social forces opposed to socialist transition. Finally, within such proletarian democracy, the political role and ideological importance of the Communist party would steadily increase.

The Manifeste de Champigny was a contradictory document that pointed backward as well as forward. In addition to restating old Third International theories of the state and the transition to socialism, it also contained, in embryo, a perspective that reached beyond such views. Over subsequent years, a new PCF theoretical map of the world of state monopoly capitalism (SMC) emerged.14 15 16 17 18 SMC theory proposed that monopoly capital could no longer counteract the tendency for the rate of profit to decline by simply intensifying economic exploitation. In addition, the monopoly caste would need an even larger degree of control over the state. As a result, the state would fall increasingly under direct monopoly rule, with state policy and agencies entering new realms of activity in open assistance to the monopolies.

The most important element in this new theory was its prediction that state monopoly capitalism would heighten antagonisms between the monopoly fraction of the bourgeoisie and all the rest of the nation. SMC meant greatly increased socialization of production, intensifying an awareness of the potential of scientifically based economic activity and the impossibility of realizing it under monopoly control. Moreover, the greater the politicization of the economy and the monopolization of the state, the more transparent would monopoly caste political control appear. Sociologically, the industrial working class would expand as a result of widespread proletarianization. New intermediate strata of scientists, technicians, white-collar employees, administrators, and intellectuals would come to share the conditions of salaried work, thereby losing any lingering sense of independence. And the very existence of independent producers and petit bourgeois groups would be threatened by monopoly-induced rationalization of production and distribution. Finally, even small and middle-sized capital—the competitive sector of the bourgeoisie—would be squeezed. An obvious conclusion followed: the potential existed for a vast cross-class alliance in France including almost everyone except the monopoly caste. Thus the question of democracy in the transition to socialism was implicitly posed in a new light. The social structures of state monopoly capitalism created the possibility for a peaceful and democratic transition in which proletarian dictatorship would not be needed.

The political logic of the PCF’s situation in the early 1970s pushed toward similar conclusions. Contradictions between the PCF’s immediate political goals and its doctrinal commitment to Third International views were bound to become more glaring as real Left Unity (Union de la Gauche) came into being, with the Communists and Socialists signing a Common Program in June 1972 that specified reforms to be enacted by a United Left government. Thus in 1973 the PCF announced its willingness to accept universal suffrage at each stage in the transition to socialism and to step down if the electorate subsequently defeated a Left government.19 Then in 1975, in an attempt to establish itself as a defender of liberties, the party began denouncing antidemocratic political practices in the Soviet Union and produced an innovative statement on civil liberties in France.20

The culmination of this piecemeal adaptation of traditional united frontism came at the party’s Eurocommunist Twenty-second Congress in 1976. Here the PCF resolved the contradiction in its official doctrine between the rhetoric of democracy and proletarian dictatorship by abandoning its commitment to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Behind this was a major strategic change, following in part from the PCF’s theoretical reflections on state monopoly capitalism. Given France’s state monopoly capitalism, the party announced, the basic battle that Left forces faced was between democracy and monopoly capital. The continued development of monopoly capital was no longer compatible with the expansion of democracy. By inference, struggle for expanding democracy became struggle against monopoly capital. The PCF’s new strategic motto followed from this. Promoting la démocratie jusqu'au bout (democracy to the fullest) would open the road to socialism. The PCF did not change its traditional united front strategy with this new emphasis on democracy. What did change, however, were the party’s notions about the last stages of this strategy. The whole process, from its initial stage of advanced democracy through to socialism, was to be undertaken with the same concern for deepening and respecting democratic procedures.21 Thus the PCF jettisoned a theory of the state that had been the linchpin of Third International political thought, a theory that, more than anything else, had distinguished Communists from other formations of the Left, and from which a great deal of Communist organizational behavior had flowed. To replace this older theory, the PCF embraced a Eurocommunist perspective in which the transcendence of capitalism would occur democratically, followed by a democratic socialism. In this Eurocommunist formulation, the Soviet experience no longer had any standing as a model, and the Soviet party and regime no longer had any claim to hegemony over the policies of other Communist parties.22

This process of gradual change within the more general united frontist strategic framework was, in fact, a major gamble. Despite doctrinal concessions, the party had never abandoned its basic conviction that it was a vanguard, that real change could occur in France only if the PCF were in a position to control its direction. Thus, the party’s conversion to pluralism notwithstanding, it still needed to generate sufficient resources—electoral, mass organizational, mobili* zational—to allow it a decisive voice in any pluralist coalition. PCF united fron- tism in the 1970s could be summarized in a few simple formulas. The party wanted Union de la Gauche to become a majority in France, to come to power. At the same time, it wanted the bulk of this new support to swell the PCF’s own fund of resources.

The key to success for the PCF in this united front gamble lay in constructing a favorable balance of power between itself and the Socialists. As of 1972, the party leadership, now headed by First Secretary Georges Marchais, had solid grounds to hope for such a favorable balance. The PCF could legitimately present itself as the major architect of the 1972 Common Program, which in itself would bring the party new support, or so the PCF leadership thought. The balance of strength between Socialists and Communists was heavily favorable to the PCF along all the dimensions that counted—electoral support, party membership and organization, level of activist energy, and mass organizational (particularly trade-union) power. The party also hoped that its efforts to modernize Communist theory and strategy would enable it to recruit new support among the critical middle strata of the population—new social groups whose partisan political leanings were as yet undefined. Despite such hopes, however, the PCF faced a serious resource problem. The party had maintained about 25 percent of the vote through the Fourth Republic, but had then dropped in 1958 to 20-21 percent, where it remained stuck. Assuming the Left could become a majority in France, the PCF needed to expand its support beyond 25 percent in order to be the senior partner in any Left government. The party would have to maintain and, if possible, increase its traditional working-class strength, as well as recruiting substantial new support from the middle strata.

In agreeing to the Common Program in 1972, the Socialists, of course, made a similar gamble that an electoral shift toward the Left would strengthen the PS at the relative expense of the PCF. The Socialists, although weaker at the outset, reasoned that they might benefit disproportionately from Left Unity because, having reorganized itself after 1968, the PS could present itself to the public with a new identity. The strategy of First Secretary François Mitterrand, around which the new PS organized itself, had this in mind. Instead of facing toward the Center as the old Socialist Party had, the new PS would face resolutely leftward— hence Union de la Gauche. If this stance reconstituted French Socialist fortunes, the PS would then become the plausible leader of the Left and the natural new home of voters shifting from the existing majority to the opposition.

The general story behind The View from Inside begins with these contradictory gambles. Left Unity did indeed draw support to the Left; to this degree both parties were correct. In the 1974 presidential elections, the Left’s candidate, François Mitterrand, who was supported from the outset by both the PCF and the PS, came within a hairsbreadth of defeating the Right’s candidate, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. From that point, the United Left was poised for victory, perhaps at the next legislative elections, scheduled for 1978.

Close study of the patterns of electoral support for Mitterrand showed that Communist voters were only a minority of those who had supported him. Who were the others, and what were they likely to do in the future? Was not the near-successful candidacy of a Socialist in the presidential elections likely to enhance the appeal of the Socialists generally? A series of by-elections in the fall of 1974 provided some answers. Not only had the PS become the principal electoral beneficiary of Union de la Gauche, but, worse still, the PS had begun to eat into the PCF’s traditional electoral base. It was not altogether surprising that the refurbished Socialists might make gains with middle strata, since the PS was a middle-class party to begin with. Beyond this, its membership in Union de la Gauche and its commitment to the Common Program had given it new radical credentials. After decades during which only the PCF could claim to be a party genuinely dedicated to socialist change, Left Unity gave the PS access to this privileged status. As this occurred, the Socialists gained a new entrée to two categories of traditionally Communist electors—protest voters and genuinely radical voters, whose only alternative, up to this point, had been voting for the PCF although they did not necessarily agree with the party. Now they had a new choice.

Although the turn of events in 1974 activated forces in the PCF who had consistently opposed Union de la Gauche—extreme workerists and diehard antiSocialists—the party at its Twenty-first Congress in October 1974 decided to soldier on with Union. The Congress deemed certain adjustments to the party’s trajectory necessary, however, in the interests of reequilibrating the Left. On the one hand, the party decided to reassert its identity on the Left by attacking the Socialists, sometimes outrageously, as unreliable agents of change. On the other, from 1975 to 1977, the party plunged toward greater Eurocommunism. This was the period of the Twenty-second Congress and the high point in the party’s efforts to distance itself from existing socialism—efforts that included tentative steps toward allying with the PCI in a Eurocommunist international bloc.23 In an attempt to Italianize the party (to open it up to different kinds of people in larger numbers), the PCF also began loosening its stringent recruitment