The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520340213

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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, 1940D. Title. JN3007.C6J45 1984 324.244'075 83-18189 ISBN 0-520-04991-8 Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

À JEAN NOUS TE REMERCIONS POUR TON HUMOUR, TON INTELLIGENCE, ET TA GÉNÉROSITÉ

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ix

PART I. INTRODUCTION: ADAPT OR DECLINE 1. The Dilemma of European Communism The Story Begins: March 1978 The Dilemma Revealed The PCFs Historic Choices Studying Rank-and-File Communism 2. Settings Paris and Eurocommunism Danielle Casanova and Paris South

3 3 7 10 19 27 27 31

PART II. DANIELLE CASANOVA FACES ITS NEW WORLD 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

The Rentree of Confusion Practice and Theory: Union a la Base and the Amicale Women and the PCF: An Unscheduled Debate A Small Rebellion The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Laid to Rest The Night Anne Resigned Conflicts and Currents: The Section Committee Meets The Soviet Union and Us

43 55 63 71 77 84 90 100

PART III. FRENCH COMMUNISTS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH COMMUNISM 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

The Political Chill of Winter The Secret Crisis of Paris Paris South Reacts to Being Taken in Hand Union a la Base: Once More into the Breach? Trying to Learn About Europe vii

115 122 129 142 153

vii'i

Contents

16. Reaffirming Commitment: La Remise de Cartes 17. The Pressures Mount: Monique Under Siege 18. Debating the Difference Between Reformists and Revolutionaries 19. Danielle Casanova Talks About Sexuality

161 173 182 199

PART IV. THE TWENTY-THIRD CONGRESS 20. The Stage Is Set The Idea of a Party Congress The Future Begins Now Strategy for Congress Preparations 21. Discussing the Congress Proposal Danielle Casanova Assesses Democratic Centralism Anger and Debate 22. The Quiet Demise of the Women's Commission 23. To Reject or Not to Reject? 24. The Section Conference 25. The Conference of the Paris Federation 26. The Twenty-third Congress: "Unity" and Ritual

209 209 211 212

224 224 229 243 254 265 283 295

PARTV. CONCLUSION: THE STRATEGY OF DECLINE 27. The Logic of Decline: 1979 to 1981 28. The Effects of Democratic Centralism 29. Currents and Contradictions: Explaining the Strategy of Decline

309 327 334

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 relix

X

Preface

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 Henon 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.

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 3

4

Introduction

activity. In such neighborhoods, factories were surrounded by one- and twostory 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 P C F 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-

The Dilemma of European Communism

5

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

6

Introduction

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 Léaud, 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 corner 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

The Dilemma of European Communism

7

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,

8

introduction

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 substantia] 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 1930s. 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 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Writings. 1910-1920, selected and edited by Q. Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977).

The Dilemma of European Communism

9

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-

10

Introduction

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, resourceful, 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 PCF's 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 2. By "workerism" (ouvriérisme ), we mean a tendency to elevate the values and the political perspectives of blue-collar workers—proletarians—above all else in the party's vocabulary, theory, ideology, strategy, and tactics. Workerism is often seen in political parties, whether Communist or not, whose major social base is in the working class, and whose programs are constructed out of the immediate defensive interests of workers, often to the detriment of possible alliances with other social groups or plausible schemes for social change.

The Dilemma of European Communism

11

Given these conditions, the question of "adaptation" was on the PCF's agenda throughout its history.1 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 Warld War II. 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.4 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.5 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, ¡920-1976, 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 secrete, 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 Thorezian" history that justifies the stewardship of Maurice Thorez; see PCF, Histoire du Parti Communiste Français (Manuel), 2d ed. (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1964). More recently, a revisionist "Marchais" volume has appeared. Le PCF, étapes et problèmes by Roger Bouideron et al. (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1981). The Cahiers