Abstract
In the previous chapter we analysed the way in which Marchais’ leadership discourse became introverted to the point of no longer being able to convince his own party members of its pertinence. In the current chapter we shall open up this theme to look more broadly at the relationship between the party and the national community whose belief in the mission of the PCF was in manifest decline. Whether it was the open challenge to the PCF of an erstwhile party functionary like Pierre Juquin, or the forlorn attempts to reform the party from the inside by distinguished but disenchanted members like Charles Fiterman (especially when faced with what they believed to be the failures of Georges Marchais’ leadership), their actions added to the evidence of a lack of synchronicity between the PCF and the society it aspired to change, and even between the party and the members it purported to serve. But the actions of Juquin and Fiterman marked the ultimate phase in a long-term process of change that pointed to the need for a reappraisal of the sense of identity and mission that lay at the heart of the PCF’s raison d’être. One of the original strengths of the party, certainly in the way it understood itself, had been as a refuge from the exploitation characteristic of capitalist society and the superstructure of oppressive values it generated. As a consequence, apart from the overthrow of that system, the defining mission of the party was to offer an alternative set of values around which to organise the collective existence of its members: a counter-culture.
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Notes
A. Prost, Education, société et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 123.
In reality, the police were initially disinclined to intervene when the agitators began to congregate in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on May 3. According to some commentators, it was the rector of the university, Roche, who was keenest to see the perturbateurs expelled and invited the police to do so. See R. Backmann and L. Rioux, Mai 1968 (Paris: Laffont, 1968). Thereafter, contingent factors led to the point where an initially awkward situation degenerated into violence. Unable to make identity checks on the spot because the students were judged to be too numerous, the police decided to take the students away in waiting vehicles, thus igniting the rumour that spread like wildfire in the Latin Quarter that the students were being victim-ised in a repressive police raid.
L. Jofrin, Mai 68. Histoire des événements (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 23.
S. Courtois and M. Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 350.
It has been forcefully argued elsewhere that by cutting itself off from the anti-totalitarian sentiment that emerged in May 1968, the PCF cut itself off from an underlying process of profound change, creating a ‘cultural blockage’ between itself, French society and even a new wave of its own party members, that would result in a time-bomb set to explode in the 1980s. M. Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italiens de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), p. 130.
H. Hamon and P. Rotman, Génération, 2 vols, vol. 2, Les années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 10.
J.-P. Le Goff, Mai 68: L’héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), Part III.
F. Picq, Libération des femmes. Les années mouvement (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 14.
R. Pronier and V.-J. Le Seigneur, Génération verte. Les ecologistes en politique (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992), p. 26.
See Parti Communiste Français, Kremlin PCF: Conversation secrètes (Paris: O. Orban, 1984).
Interestingly, archival evidence shows that in exchanges between the Czech embassy and Prague in the spring of 1968, their ambassador in Paris had come to the conviction that Waldeck Rochet was caught between the sympathies he shared with those in favour of the reasons for the experiment in Prague, and those who shared his (Rochet’s) instinctive fear of doing anything that might jeopardise the PCF’s relationship with the CPSU. See K. Bartosek, Les aveux des archives. Prague-Paris-Prague, 1948–1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 187.
J. Elleinstein, L’Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972–5);
J. Elleinstein, L’Histoire du phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset, 1975).
A. Adler et al., L’URSS et nous (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1978).
See A. Glucksmann, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), and
B.-H. Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977).
T. Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 198.
A term coined by S. Daney in Libération, 25–26 April 1987.
See A. Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
S. Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 286.
M. Goldring, ‘A quoi sert un intellectuel communiste en 1986’, in A. Spire (ed.), La Culture des camarades (Paris: Autrement, 1992), p. 94. Goldring situates this observation in the context of a broader evolution in which the public is no longer interested in the clash of intellectual titans defending one system of thought against another, since systems of thought themselves have no purchase on the public imagination.
J. Kehayan and N. Kehayan, Rue du prolétaire rouge (Paris: Seuil, 1978);
J. Kehayan, Le tabouret de Piotr (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
See D. Labbé and F. Périn, Que reste-t-il de Billancourt? Enquête sur la culture d’entreprise (Paris: Hachette, 1990).
See A. Bevort, ‘Les effectifs syndiqués à la CGT et la CFDT’, Communisme, 35–37 (1994); and D. Labbé, ‘Le déclin electoral de la CGT’, Communisme, 35–37 (1994). There was in fact a nuanced process of osmosis during the 1980s that saw a growth in the number of communists entering the CGT, but a declining number of CGT members present in the party, just as the presence of CGT members declined throughout the working population. See Y. Santamaria, ‘Difficult Times for the French Communist Party and the CGT’, The Journal ofCommunist Studies, 6:4 (1990), 58–79.
By March 1983, 46 per cent of respondents to a SOFRES poll agreed with the proposition that the Left had done too much for immigrants, and 34 per cent disagreed. Among the Left’s own supporters, 38 per cent agreed with the proposition that government policy had been too liberal regarding immigrants. See J. Julliard, ‘L’Alerte’, in SOFRES, Opinion publique. Enquêtes et commentaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 125.
For the government’s attitude to this potentially revolutionary understanding of citizenship, see P. Weil, La France et ses étrangers. L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991), pp. 157–62.
One of the salient characteristics of the FN in terms of its sociological profile during the 1980s is the youth of its members and elected representatives. In C. Ysmal, Les partis politiques sous la Ve République (Paris: Montchrestien, 1989), p. 226.
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© 2005 Gino G. Raymond
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Raymond, G.G. (2005). A Tale of Clashing Counter-cultures. In: The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic. French Politics, Society and Culture Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512870_8
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