Jean-Marie Vincent

The PCF and its History

The socialist revolution in France cannot be a repetition of the May events, any
more than the 1917 Revolution (February and October) was a repetition of
1905. The May events were a tremendous explosion, in which (through tracts,
meetings, newspapers and even sometimes through the distorted accounts in the
bourgeois press) forgotten revolutionary traditions and intellectual weapons
were rediscovered by hundreds of thousands of workers and students. But it
must not be thought that a confident and coherent vanguard with properly
formulated objectives has arisen out of it. Only a beginning was madea start
which both reflects the unfinished, interrupted character of the revolutionary
process and the embryonic, incomplete and contradictory nature of the political
leadership which tried to confront the crisis. The abortive revolution of May
was profound in its implications for the collective unconscious of the masses, in
the energy released in numerous strata of society, in its shock to new and old
hierarchical structures; but it was also marked by a kind of political debility
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both at the base and at the summit. This is not to deny its exemplary
character of its importance as a point of reference for future revolutionary activity, but care must be taken not to idealize all its aspects or to
believe that it is a model that can be faithfully reproduced. A political
advance, or more exactly a break with the political practice of the
various organizations, is necessary if the conditions of victory are to be
assured. In particular, the more or less instinctive receptivity of
students, technicians and young workers to oppositional Marxist
tendencies must be transformed into a creative assimilation of Marxism
which presupposes a fairly rapid ideological clarification of the May
movement. In this respect, it is of crucial importance that the theoretical
and political positions of the revolutionary current which is now emerging in France should not remain at the level of an abstract and general
critique of the PCF (revisionism, social-democratization) but should be
such that they erode day by day the conservatism of the PCFs apparatus
and its influence on the masses.
The First Years
This is why it is important, indeed essential, to grasp all the dimensions
of the problems posed by French Communism, in its specificity. It is not
enough to content oneself with defining the party as Stalinist; the modalities of the partys formation and insertion into the French political
and social context must be taken into account. Unlike the German and
Italian Communist parties, the PCF did not have to confront revolutionary or counter-revolutionary situations during its first years of existtence.
Although it formed a majority of the working-class movement when
the latter split at the Congress of Tours (December 1920), it gradually
lost its dominant position during the years which followed the First
World War because of its inability to take any initiative. Up to
1923 its leadership represented a slightly rejuvenated version of the
ideological and organizational methods of the pre-war Socialist Party.
Even when accompanied by inflammatory speeches about the October
Revolution and extreme denunciations of the social order represented
by the Third Republic, it pursued an essentially parliamentary and
electoral strategy. The left wing of the party, which was more proletarian in composition and effectively closer to authentic revolutionary
positions, lacked sufficient weight to impose its views. Hence it had constantly to appeal to the Communist International to defend its position
at the head of the party. The party thus became more completely
dependent on the Soviet leadership of the Communist International
than either the German or Italian parties, and this as early as 1924. In
fact the Left became the faithful interpreter of policies laid down by the
dominant fractions of the CPSU. Lacking the originality and political
traditions of the leading tendencies of the German CP (from Brandler to
Ruth Fischer) or of the Italian CP (from Bordiga to Gramsci), and with
memories of anarcho-syndicalism as its only theoretical equipment, the
French party offered only very limited resistance to the conceptions of
Zinoviev, and later of Stalinconceptions heavily influenced by events
in Russia. The class struggle in France was now seen only through
Moscows optic. Between 1927 and 1930, for example, the PCFs policy
was largely polarized on the hypothetical danger of war between the
major capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. Severe repression
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accentuated still further the isolation produced by the abstraction and

divorce from social reality of its slogans, and thereby reinforced its
dependence on the political aid of the Internationalon the revolutionary prestige and reputation of the USSR. In these conditions it was
virtually impossible for the party to resolve the fundamental problems
of the time: how to build a united front to win over large masses to
communist positions, and how to define a strategy for taking power.
The most it could do was to try and make the best of the Cominterns
policies. In 1930 the most absurd and ruinous tacticsarbitrary strike
decisions and demonstrations, etcwere abandoned, and with the
agreement of the executive committee of the International the BarbCelor group was condemned; the PCF now regained, under Thorez, a
certain equilibrium. The new line had a dual emphasis: on the one
hand great attention to working-class and popular economic demands
(wages, unemployment benefits, soldiers pay) which in particular
allowed the CGTU to maintain a minimum link with the masses; on the
other a ritual and incantatory denunciation of the SFIOs social-fascism,
presented as the main, if not the only obstacle blocking a proletarian
revolutionthis thesis provided party) militants with an explanation for
the PCFs relative immobility despite its abundant activism.1 This mixture of economism and political fantasy obviously did not encourage
theoretical work, analysis in depth of French capitalist society or any
challenge to the intellectual and political hegemony of the bourgeoisie.
Its result was rather to block the incipient politicization of party members at their initial decision to join the party, offering them instead an
impoverished and dichotomous vision of the tasks ahead: on one side,
a small cohort of the faithful, belonging to the organization and predestined to represent the masses; on the other, a vast category of
obstacles to be exorcised. The militants revolutionary fervour, their
undeniable devotion to the Communist cause, was thus transformed into
a sort of messianic expectancy, a spirit of unconditional discipline. The
path of the future was obscure; the essential was that leaders confirmed
by the entire Comintern should be followed without second thoughts.
Popular Front
On the face of it things should have changed after the unity pact with
the SFIO in 1934, an alliance which became inevitable after the 1933
catastrophe in Germany and the rise of fascism in France. The PCF did,
in fact, abandon many of its most sectarian positions (the theory of
social-fascism, the refusal of a united front at the summit) and even
made enormous political concessionsunder pressure from Stalin
on the positions it had held up to the beginning of 1934. In 1935 it
accepted the national defence of the capitalist homeland, and was
successful in a bid to ally itself with the Radicals and Socialists in a
popular grouping in which it played a very moderate role in comparison with certain Socialists who wanted radical reforms. Going indeed
far beyond the wildest hopes of those observers who claimed that it had
rallied to a responsible policy, the party did its utmost to limit the
effects of the mass movement in June 1936 and to end the strikes and
1
On this, see Book 2 of Volume II of the Oeuvres de Maurice Thorez (June 1931
February 1932).

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factory occupations. When Marceau Pivert, one of the Socialist Party

leaders, asserted that the strength shown by the working class proved
that everything was possible, Maurice Thorez replied: If the aim is
now to satisfy economic demands while progressively raising the level
of consciousness and organization of the mass movement, then we must
be ready to finish as soon as satisfaction has been obtained. We must be
ready to compromise even if all the claims have not been met but if
victory has been won for the most essential and important of these . . .
We must not risk dislocating the unity of the masses, the unity of the
Popular Front. We must not allow the working class to be isolated.2
The fact that the PCF refused to participate in the Leon Blum government should not be attributed to its systematic desire to criticize its
partners in order to profit from their difficulties. In a report to the
Partys Central Committee at Ivry on May 25th 1936, Thorez made it
quite clear that he had no intention of pursuing aims he considered
too advanced: When we said a united front at any price we knew that
this was the condition for changing the relation of forces in France to
the benefit of the working-class and democratic forces. The presence of
Communists in the government under present conditions would only
be a pretext for panic, for a campaign of panic. In August and September 1936, when the difficulties of the Popular Front were growing and
divisions were increasing within the coalition, the PCF through Thorez
proposed the transformation of the Popular Front into a wider coalition, the French Front. Considering in particular the horror of events
in Spain, the fact is that we reject the perspective of two irreconcilable
blocs that confront each other as one that would lead to civil war,
which in our country would be even more fearful than in Spain, if only
because of Hitlets threats. The fact is that we believe that one still can
and must win over men to the cause of liberty and peacefor how many
votes did the Popular Front parties win at the last elections? A few
more than five million. And how many votes did those hostile to the
popular front receive? Just under five million. As a Communist, do
you want me to say that these five million are all fascists, all traitors to
their country ? Do you want usfaced with these five million, of whom
the majority are peasants and workersto abandon the policy of unity
which does honour to our Communist Party? We who have fought for
unity between Socialists and Communists, who have fought for the
union of radicals, republicans, democrats, do you want us now to say
The path of unity goes no further?3
It would have been difficult for the PCF to put into effect a policy more
directly aimed at pandering to the French bourgeoisie and limiting
working-class action. While there were politicians both on the extreme
left and on the right who appreciated this accurately enough, it was not
seen as such (i.e. as a bid for an opportunistic arrangement with the
western democracies) by the immense majority of Communist militants
and cadres, and obviously even less so by Communist voters. While
accepting a policy that was hard to distinguish from traditional political
reformism, the party leadership neither presented nor conceived it in
terms of traditional reformism. Apart from popularizing the defence of
2

See Book 3 of Volume XII of Oeuvres de Maurice Thorez (May-October 1956, p. 48).
p. 196.

3 Ibid

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economic demands (in opposition to structural reforms) as the only

realistic policy compared with any illusory search for a way to deal
with the economic and social organization of France at the time, the
party leadership took care to reassure its militants that the Popular
Front confrontation was not a conflict for the seizure of power by the
working classwhile stressing that the idea of revolutionary struggle
was not abandoned. It was simply that an unforeseen phasethe phase
of the struggle against fascism and for the consolidation of bourgeois
democracyhad intervened before the phase of the struggle for socialism. Opportunism was thus reconciled with a revolutionary dogmatism designed to preserve the internal cohesion of the organization
and the continuity of the party leadership. The anti-fascist prior condition now came in a sense to replace the social-democratic obstacle
as justification of the fact that the PCF did not seek the objective of
taking power, while at the same time still claiming to monopolize the
revolutionary spirit.
Resistance, Cold War and 20th Congress
The same explicative schema is again to be found during the Resistance: the PCF is a revolutionary party, but before dreaming about
socialism, national independence must be regained, collaborators swept
out and political democracy organized. At first sight, the Three-Party
Coalition after the Liberation appears to contradict this schema because the Communists participated in the government and, with their
Socialist and MRP partners, were responsible for a certain number of
reforms such as nationalizations; at the same time on the theoretical
plane they heralded this governmental collaboration with a fraction of
the dominant class as the dawn of a new democracy which would
supersede bourgeois democracy and the capitalist State. On closer
observation, however, it is apparent that not only was the difference
between new democracy and democracy very imprecise, and the
frontiers between these two forms of society barely traced out, but that
the Communist leaders relegated the struggle for Socialist democracy
to a time well beyond the immediate present. In consequence they
could allege the tasks not yet accomplished to justify the need for a
Marxist-Leninist party and thereby maintain distinction from socialdemocratic (Blumist) ideology. The Communist departure from the
government in 1947 rapidly sealed the fate of these elucubrations on
new democracy without, however, leading to a revision by the principal party leaders of their concepts of political struggle. During the
entire period of the Cold War, their fixed objective was the reconquest
of national independence from American imperialism and its French
lackeys. To this end they had to seek an alliance with the national
bourgeoisie and with all strata of society opposed to the domination of
American capital. It hardly needs to be emphasized that such an orientation could not be revolutionary, even if on occasion it led to serious
confrontations with the State (as in 1952) and to other more or less
adventurist undertakings.
Since the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, and above all since the
advent of Gaullism, another orientation has gradually come to predominate. According to this conception, the Partys task is to defeat
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the power of the monopolies and install a true democracy, which

would not be Socialist democracy but would open the way to it. The
new theme is thus very close to that of the period from 1945 to 1946;
but it is developed in a different context, marked in particular by a
pronounced evolution of social-democracy to the right. It has thus
made such concessions to the post-Stalinist climate as admission of a
plurality of parties in the transition to socialism, the importance of
structural reforms and the parliamentary road. However, from this new
orientation to the conclusion that the PCF has simply become a socialdemocratic party, there is a step which should not be taken. The PCF
still aspires to be the party of the working class, the for-itself of the
class in-itself, and it still lays claim to leadership of the Labour movement, as the French detachment of the international army which is
supposed to constitute the socialist camp. In effect, the links which tie
it to the non-capitalist countries of Europe, whatever the internal
difficulties of the latter, appear to guarantee that it continues to seek a
different economic and social order. It no longer has an immutable
model to offer those whose follow its lead, but at best experiences
which, however imperfect they may seem at first sight, nevertheless
indicate that a social system different from capitalist society can exist.
By comparison with social-democracy, whose only possible references
are Scandinavia, the PCF is thus able to suggest that it hopes for much
more profound and complete transformations of the present social
order. Of course, the superiority of the socialist camp is subject to
doubt. It is certainly no longer military (if it ever was), it is not obvious
economically (if the criterion is a higher per capita income than the main
Western powers), but it does seem evident as far as the form of social
organization is concerned (production for profit is no longer the first
imperative). Thus Waldeck-Rochet is able to define what it means to
be a revolutionary in our time by asserting that the PCF does not
reduce its activity to seeking reintegration into the most banal routines
of French political life under the Fifth Republic, but in spite of everything aims at a plausible horizon beyond capitalism, even if this goal
does not seem accessible in the immediate future. However abstract it
may be in the minds of most militants, it at least has the concrete and
irrefutable character of something which already exists on the same continent. Hence the party can always play on the combination of its
reasonable policies in the present and its aim of a qualitatively different
(revolutionary!) if very hypothetical future.
Politicization of the Masses?
A balance-sheet of the politicization of the French working masses by
the PCF must therefore conclude that it has been both partial and
ambiguous. It has certainly developed their consciousness of the social
antagonisms, the differences in styles of life and values of everyday
existence, between the higher and lower classes of society. But it has
not raised these oppositions to the level where they reveal the irreducible contradictions between two different modes of production, and
between two incommensurable and irreconcilable types of politics.
Thanks to the PCF, socialism has become the hope of millions of men in
our country (a decisive progress compared with the epoch before the
First World War); but it has unfortunately not become a definite and
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specific task to be assumed as a function of present conflicts, but at

most a sort of projection into the future of solutions which the Party
dares not elaborate or advocate with adequate clarity and precision in
the midst of the difficulties created by capitalism. In truth, the French
working class has never been accustomed by the PCF to think in terms
of real relationships of force. There was always a preparatory phase
which avoided class confrontations, and which allowed it to shut its
eyes to the political manoeuvres planned by the different fractions of the
ruling class. The reactions of the petite bourgeoisie and of the middle
classes were either idealized (that is to say, conceived as very close to
those of the working masses), or on the contrary described very pessimistically (no extremism which might throw the petite bourgeoisie
into the arms of fascism), not as a function of the dynamic relationships
between classes, but of ephemeral diplomatic or parliamentary relationships. The result was that French workers never had a chance of
learning to assess their affairs and enemies soundly.
In this domain, the inflammatory statements with which parties of
notables in France are always so lavish came to seem more important
than their actions (e.g. the analysis of the Radical Party as a progressive
party during the Popular Front period). Relations of forces were not
appreciated in their changing reality, but in a static perspective, almost
as though fluidity of all positions attained was not the rule right up to
the definitive victory. In fact, French workers were not prepared for
the essential struggle, the struggle for power. The party that represented
them, on the contrary, tended to keep them in a state of ideological
tutelage, to make them delegate to it the hard task of the confrontation
with the bourgeoisie. Thus the relations established between party and
class were quite different from those Marx foresaw between a revolutionary vanguard and masses increasingly conscious of the difficulties
to be overcome before capitalist exploitation could be destroyed. The
party plunged into summit manoeuvres and bureaucratic manipulation,
while the masses only intermittently and partially emerged from the
passivity imposed on them by the capitalist system. In this context,
which the Communist leaders naturally regard as normal, every irruption of the masses on to the political stage other than in tested forms
of mobilization could not and cannot but appear as irrational or even
as the fruit of obscure manoeuvres. Despite its ridiculous nature, the
theory of the Gaullist-Ieftist plot developed by Waldeck-Rochet in his
analysis of the May movement was entirely consistent with this way of
thinking and acting.
Conclusion
Such an analysis certainly does not absolve the PCF, but it shows that
the process of social-democratization that it has undergone in the last
few years is neither simple nor rectilinear. To preserve its position as
the dominant party in the French workers movement, a position
acquired historically in opposition to classical social democracy, it has
to maintain a minimum of originality with respect to its partners, hence
the perpetually recast definition of a revolutionary orthodoxy. To
retain the trust of its cadres, its militants and its sympathizers, the
majority of whom are not yet reconciled to the idea of a simple adjust45

ment of capitalism, it must carry on the polemic against reformism. This

means that to ensure its re-integration into French political life (i.e.
its acceptance by the bourgeoisie), it must admit that it is torn in half
between the concessions it has to make to prove its goodwill to the
democrats and other republicans, and the concessions it must not make
if it is to preserve its links with the anti-capitalist sector of opinion.
This contradiction, which is still no more than painful, may become unbearable, and it is then likely that the majority of Communist leaders
would opt for the wrong side; but its very existence allows the revolutionary forces to react and intervene so as to transform its slow socialdemocratization into a continual series of crises. But beware! If there is
one further important lesson arising from this analysis, it is that it is no
good taking as a model some earlier period of French Communism:
before Stalin, or under Thorez before 1956. The matrix of the PCFs
failings and errors lies in the relations it originally established with the
masses and with political activity during its formative period, when it
was breaking with the conceptions of French Socialism from 1905 to
1914. So a critique of the PCF can only be a real reconstruction of the
politics of the French workers movement, accompanied by a redefinition of the relations between the political vanguard and the masses.

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