Abstract
During the life of the Fifth Republic in France the discussion of charisma has been largely situated in a presidential context, and while its analysis has moved on from the Weberian notion of charisma as a seductive legitimation of the state’s monopoly of violence,1 it has tended to focus on the exceptional qualities of the charismatic leader rather than the given social structure that is conducive to the deployment of that charisma. When surveying the heyday of the PCF, it is possible to perceive a hierarchy of relations in which a charismatic general secretary, Thorez, exercised his influence over a party which itself deployed a charismatic influence over France. The Communist mobilisation in the Resistance tapped a collective sensibility among the French people to the charismatic profile of their nation internationally. The fight against Nazi barbarism was a fight for the kind of fundamental humanist values that the Revolution of 1789 had proclaimed universally, and by distinguishing themselves in that struggle the Communists were endowed with a charisma that was not so much a power in terms of what the party could impose, but the strength of an appeal to a sense of identity,2 or co-identity, between the PCF and France.
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Notes
See M. Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
J. Mer, Le parti de Maurice Thorez ou le bonheur communiste français (Paris: Payot, 1977), p. 36.
; B. S. Bell and B. Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 195.
E. Mortimer, The Rise of the French Communist Party 1920–1947 (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 339.
See C. de Gaulle, Mémoires (Paris: Gailimard, 2000).
See F. Mitterrand, Ma part de vérité (Paris: Fayard, 1969).
J. Fauvet, Histoire du parti communiste français, vol. II (Paris: Fayard, 1965), p. 167.
G. Elgey, La République des Illusions (Paris: Fayard, 1965), p. 17.
H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States. An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 5.
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6.
A. Kriegel, The French Communists. Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
P. Bourdieu, Distinction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 101.
J. Degras, The Communist International 1919–1943, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 166–72.
See D. Thomson, Democracy in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
See Gallie, Social Inequality and Class Radicalism in France and Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
T. Kemp, Stalinism in France (London: New Park, 1984), p. 98.
See J.-P. Brunet, Jacques Doriot (Paris: Balland, 1986).
See P. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, vie secrète et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975).
See F. Claudin, From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
A. Cole and P. Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections since 1789 (Aldershot: Gower, 1989), p. 68.
R. Rémond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1982), pp. 208–11.
A. Lecoeur, Le Partisan (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), pp. 105–7. Describing the general mood of the miners in the Pas de Calais, Lecoeur observed: ‘Aux yeux de la majorité, le pacte représentait une trahison des intérêts nationaux en laissant à Hitler les mains libres pour attaquer la France’ (ibid., p. 106). And the same sense of betrayal was expressed in the municipal bastions of the PCF in the Nord, the Paris region and Brittany, where the tone was set by the resignation of the mayor of Concarneau, Pierre Guéguin.
J.-Y. Boursier, La Politique du PCF 1939–1945 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), p. 42.
See S. Courtois, Le PCF dans la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste, 1945–1972 (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 271.
R. Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972), p. 28.
G. G. Raymond, André Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), p. 195.
G. Ross, Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 54.
A. Kriegel, Le Pain et les roses, Jalons pour l’histoire des socialismes, collection ‘1/18’ (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1968), p. 405.
‘Lorsque les ouvriers communistes se réunissent, c’est d’abord la doctrine, la propagande, etc., qui sont leur but. Mais, en même temps, ils s’approprient par là un besoin nouveau, le besoin de la société, et ce qui semble être le moyen est devenu le but’. In J. Bruhat, Marx/Engels, collection ‘10/18’ (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1971), p. 71.
A. Stevens, The Government and Politics of France (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 257.
For concise overviews of all these movements, see G. G. Raymond, Historical Dictionary of France (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1998).
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Raymond, G.G. (2005). Dynamics of the Counter-culture. In: The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic. French Politics, Society and Culture Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512870_3
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