Abstract
On his swing through the South of France on the eve of the Socialist Congress of April 1979, François Mitterrand, anxious to leave no stone unturned in his battle to retain the party’s leadership, stopped at the little town of Bandol to address the local PS section. Some 300 people (more than twice the section’s membership) packed into the tiny village hall to hear him. The Mayor, literally moved to tears by the folk-memory of a previous political visit, explained his emotion to the Socialist leader: ‘The last great personality who stopped at Bandol was Clemenceau. In 1908. And the mayor, a Socialist, refused to shake his hand.’ Cheers, as well as laughter, prevented the Mayor from getting much further with his welcome…1
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Notes
F. Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform (London: 1975) p. 343.
B. Graham, The French Socialists and Tripartisme: 1944–1947 (London: 1965)
A. Werth, France 1940–1955(London: 1956) especially pp. 284–316
G. Elgey Histoire de la IVè République: La République des Illusions: 1945–1951 (Paris: 1965)
F. Billoux, Quand Nous Étions Ministres (Paris: 1972).
For all his later fulminations against the ‘Iron Curtain’, these were all Churchill’s suggestions. Stalin, Churchill recalled, took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it… The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper’. ‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin [cited in G. Kolko, The Politics of War (London: 1969) pp. 144–5].
See M. Thorez, France Today and the People’s Front (London: 1936).
P. Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth French Republic (London: 1964) p. 24.
Ibid. See also J. Fauvet, Histoire du Parti Communiste Français: II: Vingt-Cinq Ans de Drames: 1939–1965 (Paris: 1965) pp. 201–4.
J. Davidson, Correspondant à Washington: ce que je n’ai jamais cablé (Paris: 1954) pp. 15–16; cited by Werth, op. cit., p. 314.
Werth, op. cit., p. 413. The AFL was a major conduit of CIA funds to the anti-Communist side of the European labour movement in these years, notably through the ‘effective and witting’ collaboration of George Meany, the AFL President, Jay Lovestone, the AFL Foreign Affairs chief and head of the CIA labour operations branch, and Irving Brown, the AFL European representative. For Brown’s operations in recruiting strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports see V. Marchetti and J. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (London: 1974) p. 77.
See also F. Hinch and R. Fletcher, The CIA and the Labour Movement (London: 1977).
In 1955 Thorez attempted to show that real wages were still 30 per cent below their 1938 level; Werth suggests 20 per cent; the Ministry of Labour 13.5 per cent. This was despite a 21 per cent rise in real wages in 1949–54. In 1955 49 per cent of unskilled and 31 per cent of skilled workers were still earning less than 30,000 old francs (= £30.67 = $85.28 at 1955 exchange rates); 57 per cent were working forty-five or more hours a week; and 52 per cent of unskilled and 40 per cent of the skilled had experienced unemployment: see Werth, op. cit., pp. 633–6; and R. Hamilton, Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (Princeton: 1967) pp. 71–3.
Werth, op. cit., p. 404; J. Bruhat and M. Piolot, Esquisse d’une Histoire de la CGT (Paris: 1967) p. 216.
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© 1981 R. W. Johnson
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Johnson, R.W. (1981). The Last Left Government. In: The Long March of the French Left. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16491-2_2
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