French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a communist party in France. The PCF is a member of the Party of the European Left.
The PCF was founded in 1920 by Leninist members of the French Section of the Workers' International who supported the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution. It became a member of the Communist International, and followed a Marxist-Leninist line under the leadership of Maurice Thorez. In response to the threat of fascism, the PCF joined the socialist Popular Front which won the 1936 election, but it did not participate in government. During World War II, it was outlawed by the occupying Germans and became a key element of the Resistance. The PCF participated in the provisional government of the Liberation from 1944 to 1947, but for the next 30 years was excluded from government despite consistently winning more than 20 percent of the vote in elections. It fell behind the Socialist Party in the 1970s, though entered government early in François Mitterrand's presidency and participated in the Plural Left cabinet led by Lionel Jospin.
From 2009, the PCF was a leading member of the Left Front, alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Left Party. During the 2017 presidential election, the PCF supported Mélenchon's candidature; however, tensions between the PCF and Mélenchon's movement, La France Insoumise, have led the two parties to campaign separately for the general elections. Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a strong influence in French politics, especially at the local level. In 2012, the PCF claimed to have had 138,000 members, 70,000 of whom had paid their membership fees.
History
The French Communist Party originated in 1920, when a majority of members resigned from the socialist French Section of the Workers' International party to set up the French Section of the Communist International with Ludovic-Oscar Frossard as its first secretary-general, with the involvement of Ho Chi Minh as one of the notable agitators participating in its creation. The new SFIC defined itself as revolutionary and democratic centralist. The 1920s saw a number of splits within the party over relations with other left-wing parties and over adherence to Comintern's dictates. The party entered the French parliament, but also promoted strike action and opposed colonialism, a position that was isolated in the French political landscape at the time. The Intercolonial Union, created in 1922, brought together activists from the French colonies around demands for political equality and social equality. The communists thus called for fraternization with the Moroccan insurgents during the Rif War and to the evacuation of Morocco by the French army, they called for an end to the fighting and the independence of French Syria during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–1927, and denounced the festivities of the centenary of the colonization of Algeria, organizing in particular a campaign to boycott the Paris Colonial Exposition.The party was organized around leaders who were mostly from the working class, setting up training and promotion schemes and encouraging the presentation of working-class candidates in elections. The Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon team, who had been miners, metalworkers and pastry cooks respectively, had an exceptional longevity and led the French party for almost three decades. The railroad worker Pierre Semard had been secretary general of the party from 1924 to 1929.
Semard sought party unity and alliances with other parties; but leaders including Thorez imposed a Marxist-Leninist line from the late 1920s. With the rise of fascism after 1934 the PCF supported the Popular Front, which came to power under Léon Blum in 1936. The party supported the Second Spanish Republic and opposed the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler. It was the only political party in France to denounce this agreement.
The party was banned in 1939 by the government of Édouard Daladier as a result of the German–Soviet Non-aggression Pact, due to its membership in the Comintern, which opposed the War. The leadership, threatened with execution, fled abroad. After the German invasion of 1940 the party began to organise opposition to the occupation. Shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union the next year, the PCF formed, in May 1941, the National Front movement within the broader Resistance, together with the armed Francs-Tireurs et Partisans group. At the same time the PCF began to work with de Gaulle's "Free France" government in exile, and later took part in the National Council of the Resistance.
By the time the German occupation ended in 1944, the party had become a powerful force in many parts of France. It was among the leading parties in elections in 1945 and 1946, and entered into the governing Tripartite alliance, which pursued social reforms and statism. However, amid concerns within France and abroad over the extent of communist influence, the PCF was excluded from government in May 1947. Under pressure from Moscow, the PCF thereafter distanced itself from other parties and focused on agitation within its trade union base. For the rest of the Fourth Republic period the PCF, led by Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos, remained politically isolated, still taking a Marxist-Leninist line, though retaining substantial electoral support. On 21 December 1949, Thorez made his ceremonial speech titled "Long Live Stalin" to commemorate Joseph Stalin's 70th anniversary of his birth, further cementing his alignment with Soviet leadership.
Although the PCF opposed de Gaulle's formation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the following years saw a rapprochement with other left-wing forces and an increased strength in parliament.
By the middle of the 1960s, the PF lost members and sympathizers due to its ambivalent positions during the Algerian war and its perceived excessive focus on class and inadequate focus on imperialism and race.
With Waldeck Rochet as its new secretary-general, the party supported François Mitterrand's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1965. During the student riots and strikes of May 1968, the party supported the strikes while denouncing the revolutionary student movements. After heavy losses in the ensuing parliamentary elections, the party adopted Georges Marchais as leader and in 1973 entered into a "Common Programme" alliance with Mitterrand's reconstituted Socialist Party. It provided for an increase in wages and social benefits, a reduction in working hours, a retirement age of 60 for men and 55 for women, the expansion of workers' rights and freedoms, the abolition of the death penalty and nuclear disarmament. In 1979 it was proposed by revisionists in France that party documents should omit Marxism–Leninism and use scientific socialism in its place. Under the Common Programme, however, the PCF steadily lost ground to the PS, a process that continued after Mitterrand's victory in 1981.
Initially allotted a minor share in Mitterrand's government, the PCF resigned in 1984 as the government turned towards fiscal orthodoxy. Under Marchais the party largely maintained its traditional communist doctrines and structure. Extensive reform was undertaken after 1994, when Robert Hue became leader. This did little to stem the party's declining popularity, although it entered government again in 1997 as part of the Plural Left coalition. Elections in 2002 gave worse results than ever for the PCF. Under Marie-George Buffet, the PCF turned away from parliamentary strategy and sought broader social alliances. To maintain a presence in parliament after 2007 the party's few remaining deputies had to join others in the Democratic and Republican Left group. Subsequently, a broader electoral coalition, the Left Front, was formed including the PCF, the Left Party, Unitary Left, and others. The FG has brought the French communists somewhat better electoral results. Pierre Laurent was leader from 2010 to 2018, being succeeded by Fabien Roussel who stood as the party's candidate at the 2022 French presidential election. Roussel received 2.28% of votes cast, coming in eighth place.
Ideology
The PCF, in contrast to weaker and more marginal communist parties in Europe, is usually seen as a left wing, rather than far-left, party in the French context. While the French far-left has refused to participate in government or engage in electoral alliances with centre-left parties such as the PS, the PCF has participated in governments in the past, and still enjoys a de facto electoral agreement with the PS. Nonetheless, some observers and analysts classify the PCF as a far-left party, noting their political proximity to other far-left parties.During the Sino-Soviet split, the PCF aligned with the Soviet perspective.
In the 1980s, under Georges Marchais, the PCF mixed a partial acceptance of "bourgeois" democracy and individual liberties with more traditional Marxist–Leninist ideas. During this same period the PCF was run on democratic centralist lines and structured itself as a revolutionary party in the Leninist sense and rejected criticism of the Soviet Union. Under Robert Hue's leadership after 1994, the PCF's ideology and internal organization underwent major changes. Hue clearly rejected the Soviet model, and reserved very harsh criticism for Soviet leaders who had "rejected, for years, human rights and 'bourgeois' democracy" and had oppressed individual liberties and aspirations. Today, the PCF considers the Soviet Union as a 'perversion' of the communist model and unambiguously rejects Stalinism. It has not attributed the failure of the Soviet Union as being that of communism, rather stating that the failure of Soviet socialism was the failure of one model "among others", including the capitalist or social democratic models. It also tried to downplay the PCF's historic attachment to Moscow and the Soviet Union.
Since then, the PCF's ideology has been marked by significant ideological evolution on some topics, but consistency on other issues. Some of the most marked changes have come on individual rights and immigration. After having vilified homosexuality and feminism as "the rubbish of capitalism" in the 1970s, the PCF now supports gay rights and feminism. In the 1980s, the PCF supported reducing the age of consent for homosexual relationships, and opposed attempts to re-penalize homosexuality. In 1998, the PCF voted in favour of the civil solidarity pact, civil unions, including for homosexual couples. The PCF supports both same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption. On 12 February 2013, PCF deputies voted in favour of same-sex marriage and adoption rights in the National Assembly, though PCF deputy Patrice Carvalho voted against. The PCF also supports feminist movements, and supports policies to further promote gender equality and parity.
Despite its moral conservatism in the 1930s and 1960s, in 1946, it elected seventeen of the first thirty-three women deputies. In 1956, there were only nineteen women in the National Assembly, but fifteen were Communists.
On the issue of immigration, the PCF's positions have also evolved significantly since the 1980s. In the 1981 presidential election, Georges Marchais ran a controversial campaign on immigration which was harshly criticized by anti-racism organizations at the time. In 1980, the PCF's leadership voted in favour of limiting immigration. The same year, Marchais supported the PCF mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine who had destroyed a home for Malian migrant workers; the PCF claimed that the right-wing government was trying to push immigrants into ghettos in Communist working-class cities. The Libération newspaper also alleged that PCF municipal administrations had been working to limit the number of immigrants in housing projects. However, today the PCF supports the regularization of illegal immigrants.
One historical consistency in the PCF's ideology has been its staunch opposition to capitalism, which must be "overcome" because according to the PCF the capitalist system is "exhausted" and "on the verge of collapse". The PCF has interpreted the current course of globalization as a confirmation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's view on the future evolution of capitalism. The party position is that the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession have further justified its calls to overcome capitalism. However, the PCF has remained somewhat vague on how capitalism will be 'overcome' and what will replace it, placing heavy emphasis on utopic models or values.
The text adopted at the XXXVI Congress in February 2013 reiterated the party's call on the need to "overcome" capitalism, fiercely denounced by the PCF as having led to "savage competition", "the devastation of the planet" and "barbarism". It contrasts its vision of capitalism with its proposed alternative, described as an egalitarian, humanist, and democratic alternative. It emphasizes human emancipation, the development of "each and every one", the right to happiness and the equal dignity of each human being regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation. The party further posits that such an egalitarian society is impossible within capitalism, which "unleashes domination and hatred".
The party is generally seen as Eurosceptic.
For the 2022 French legislative election, the party joined the New Ecologic and Social People's Union bloc of left-wing and green parties. In the alliance, they were the only party to support nuclear energy.