The Fertile Ground of French Communism

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/communism-melenchon-french-election.html

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PARIS — France’s presidential election this year was exceptional: because of Emmanuel Macron’s victory, because of the presence of a representative of the far right in the second round, because of the first-round elimination of the two main parties on the right and the left. And also because of the strong showing of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of the political movement “France Unsubjugated.”

Mr. Mélenchon, who also had the support of the French Communist Party, or P.C.F., obtained 19.5 percent of the first-round vote, though he came in fourth and couldn’t participate in the runoff. By refusing to give Mr. Macron (in Mr. Mélenchon’s eyes a contemptible neoliberal) an unequivocal endorsement, though at the same time declaring that Marine Le Pen must be opposed, Mr. Mélenchon aroused multiple controversies and raised questions about what exactly he stood for. Neither Mr. Macron nor François Fillon, the center-right candidate, hesitated: They called him a Communist. The specter of Communism, therefore, has made a sudden return to France in the 21st century.

For a large part of the 20th century, the P.C.F. was one of the most powerful forces in French politics. Born in 1920, the P.C.F. was rapidly Bolshevized after the Russian Revolution and submitted to the strict control of the Soviets, whose goal was to make it into a “real” revolutionary party. It achieved its first electoral successes in the 1930s. After its darkest period, from 1939 to 1941, when it was dissolved and suppressed for supporting the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, the party joined the Resistance to the Nazis — and played a heroic role.

Consequently, from 1945 to 1958, the P.C.F. became the No. 1 political party in France, a period when it could count on more than one voter out of every four. Destabilized in 1958 by General de Gaulle’s return to power and the foundation of the Fifth Republic, the Communists nevertheless remained the principal left-wing party in France until the end of the 1970s, when they were overtaken by François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party. The P.C.F.’s irresistible decline began in 1981. Today it has been drastically reduced, but the political culture the party formed in the postwar decades has by no means disappeared.

In fact, the P.C.F. constituted a powerful counter-society, one that stood apart from the rest of French political and social life without ever being completely cut off from it. The party’s base was principally composed of workers, but also of small farmers, teachers and prestigious intellectuals, like Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Louis Althusser, to name just a few. Having elevated Marxist doctrine to infallible dogma, the P.C.F. derived strength from its ability to arouse passions — that is, to generate feelings of a quasi-religious nature that in turn led to mass mobilizations.

The passion for the Soviets was a prime example. The P.C.F. considered the Soviet Union as the fatherland of the revolution and the achievement of utopia, an earthly paradise that was to be defended at all costs. At different times, the Soviet Union was extolled as an example of a rationally organized economy, as a social model for workers, as a force for universal peace, as a determined adversary against fascism — and after 1945 as a rampart against American imperialism. The cult of Stalin reached its height during the Cold War. The fundamentally pro-Soviet P.C.F. nevertheless criticized Moscow for its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, during the heyday of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, even for its domestic policies. But the party never truly broke with the Soviets. Communist sympathizers weren’t all ardent followers of the Soviet Union, but they did show empathy with it, mostly because of the role it played during World War II and for its anti-Americanism — a sentiment widespread in France.

Starting in the mid-1930s and then during and after the Resistance, the P.C.F. endeavored to be at once the herald of internationalism, organized around the absolute primacy of Soviet interests, and the champion of national independence, defined in the party’s terms. It was therefore at pains to reconcile a double allegiance to the Soviet Union and to France, though the former always won out over the latter. The Communists wanted to incarnate France, and beginning in the 1940s they tried in vain to deny De Gaulle a monopoly on the representation of the nation. For the P.C.F., France was a revolutionary nation, built on the tradition of 1789. In the 1970s, the P.C.F. claimed to have created “socialism in French colors.”

This glorification of the nation lies at the origin of the party’s opposition to European integration. Moreover, the P.C.F. saw itself not only as the protector of the working class, but also as the voice of all the ordinary people who opposed capitalism. The party oscillated permanently between a kind of “workerism” that exalted the worker as the repository of all virtues and a propensity for populism when it tried to address other demographic groups. Ever since the 1970s, the workers’ world has been disappearing under the effects of economic modernization, and the P.C.F. has lost the greater part of its base without being capable of appealing to others.

Finally, the P.C.F. has maintained a complex relationship with representative liberal democracy. For a large part of its existence, it was determined to strike down “bourgeois” democracy and install the dictatorship of the proletariat. This objective, along with the party’s ties to the Soviet Union, and its organizational structures, made it a totalitarian and revolutionary movement that hated socialist reforms. Gradually, however, the P.C.F. accepted the rules of democracy, assimilated them — and has often even contributed to defending them. Nevertheless, it has always maintained a certain inclination toward direct democracy.

These days, France’s Communist Party is on its deathbed. After lively internal debates, it supported Mr. Mélenchon in the presidential election, though it remained wary of him, because of the way he built his movement around his personality and the concern that he wouldn’t subject himself to Party control. But without blinking an eye, the P.C.F. called on its supporters to vote for Mr. Macron, even as it criticized him, in order to oppose Ms. Le Pen, in the tradition of the anti-fascist “republican front.”

But the legacy the P.C.F. leaves behind is the remains of a certainly deteriorated but nonetheless highly significant left-wing culture based on anticapitalism, anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism, hostility to reformism and gradualism, the call for revolutionary change, the aspiration to state administration of the economy, the praise of republican sovereignty. It is partly upon this rich soil that Mr. Mélenchon is thriving today. He denounces the free-market economy, economic liberalism and the United States, and he advocates economic intervention by the state, wants France to leave the European Union, talks about a “citizens’ revolution,” lays claim to France’s revolutionary and republican heritage. (And he’s even pro-Russia.) He has settled into the space on the radical left that the P.C.F. occupied for nearly 40 years.

But nothing would be more incorrect than to see in Mr. Mélenchon a Communist clone. He has made ecology a top priority, for one, a cause never taken up by the P.C.F. His movement, though it revolves around him, seeks to be inclusive. He explains that he’s not simply a man of the left but that he expresses “the strength of the people” against class privilege, thus adopting a populist posture reminiscent of some stances taken on occasion by the P.C.F. but above all influenced by Latin American and Spanish leftists, like Podemos.

All in all, Mr. Mélenchon perpetuates a certain communist tradition, while simultaneously transforming it. This allows him to attract voters who previously voted Communist (few remain), people disappointed by the Socialist Party and President François Hollande (much more numerous), as well as young people engaged in their first political experiences — and often unacquainted with the history of the P.C.F., which was once so powerful in France.