French Left
The French Left refers to communist, socialist, social democratic, democratic socialist, and anarchist political forces in France. The term originates from the National Assembly of 1789, where supporters of the revolution were seated on the left of the assembly. During the 1800s, left largely meant support for the republic, whereas right largely meant support for the monarchy.
The left in France was represented at the beginning of the 20th century by two main political parties, namely the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International, created in 1905 as a merger of various Marxist parties.
In the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution and the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the French Left divided itself in reformists and revolutionaries during the 1920 Tours Congress.
Left and Right in France
The distinction between left and right wings in politics derives from the seating arrangements which began during the 1789 National Assembly, in which the more radical Jacobin deputies sat on the benches to the left of the hall. Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividing Left and Right in France was between supporters of the Republic and those of the Monarchy. On the right, the Legitimists held counter-revolutionary views and rejected any compromise with modern ideologies while the Orléanists hoped to create a constitutional monarchy, under their preferred branch of the royal family, a brief reality after the 1830 July Revolution. The Republic itself, or, as it was called by Radical Republicans, the Democratic and Social Republic, was the objective of the French workers' movement, and the lowest common denominator of the French Left. The June Days uprising during the Second Republic was the attempt by the left to assert itself after the 1848 Revolution, that foundered on its own divided radicalism which too few of the population shared.Following Napoleon III's 1851 coup and the subsequent establishment of the Second Empire, the Left was excluded from the political arena and focused on organising the workers. The growing French workers movement consisted of diverse strands; Marxism began to rival Radical Republicanism and the "utopian socialism" of Auguste Comte and Charles Fourier with whom Karl Marx had become disillusioned. Socialism fused with the Jacobin ideals of Radical Republicanism leading to a unique political posture embracing nationalism, socialist measures, democracy and anti-clericalism all of which remain distinctive features of the French Left. Most practicing Catholics continue to vote conservative while areas which were receptive to the revolution in 1789 continue to vote socialist.
History
19th century
Bourbon Restoration and the July Revolution
was throughout the 19th century the permanent theater of insurrectionary movements and headquarters of European revolutionaries. Following the French Revolution of 1789 and the First French Empire of Napoleon I, the former royal family returned to power in the Bourbon Restoration. The Restoration was dominated by the Counter-revolutionaries who refused all inheritance of the Revolution and aimed at re-establishing the divine right of kings. The White Terror struck the Left, while the ultra-royalists tried to bypass their king on his right. This intransigence of the Legitimists, however, finally led to Charles X's downfall during the Three Glorious Days, or July Revolution of 1830. The House of Orléans, cadet branch of the Bourbon, then came to power with Louis-Philippe, marking the new influence of the second, important right-wing tradition of France, the Orléanists. More liberal than the aristocratic supporters of the Bourbon, the Orleanists aimed at achieving a form of national reconciliation, symbolized by Louis-Philippe's famous statement in January 1831: "We will attempt to remain in a 'juste milieu', in an equal distance from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of royal power."July Monarchy
The July Monarchy was thus divided into the supporters of the "Citizen King", of the constitutional monarchy and of census suffrage, the right-wing opposition to the regime and the left-wing opposition. The loyalists were divided into two parties, the conservative, center-right, Parti de la résistance, and the reformist center-left Parti du mouvement. Republicans and Socialists, who requested social and political reforms, including universal suffrage and the "right to work", were then at the far-left of the political board. The Parti du mouvement supported the "nationalities" in Europe, which were trying, all over of Europe, to shake the grip of the various Empires in order to create nation states. Its mouthpiece was Le National. The center-right was conservative and supported peace with European monarchs, and had as mouthpiece Le Journal des débats.The only social law of the bourgeois July Monarchy was to outlaw, in 1841, labor to children under eight years of age, and night labor for those of less than 13 years. The law, however, was almost never implemented. Christians imagined a "charitable economy", while the ideas of Socialism, in particular utopian socialism diffused themselves. Louis Auguste Blanqui theorized Socialist coup d'états, the socialist and anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon theorized mutualism, while Karl Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, and met there Friedrich Engels.
Marx had come to Paris to work with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, while Engels had come especially to meet Marx. There, he showed him his work, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marx wrote for the Vorwärts revolutionary newspaper, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just, founded by German workers in Paris in 1836 and inspired by the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf and his ideal of social equality. The League of the Just was a splinter group from the League of the Just created in Paris two years before by Theodor Schuster, Wilhelm Weitling and others German emigrants, mostly journeymen. Schuster was inspired by the works of Philippe Buonarroti. The latter league had a pyramidal structure inspired by the secret society of the Republican Carbonari, and shared ideas with Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier's utopian socialism. Their aim was to establish a "Social Republic" in the German states which would respect "freedom", "equality" and "civic virtue".
The League of the Just participated in the Blanquist uprising of May 1839 in Paris. Hereafter expelled from France, the League of the Just moved to London, where they would transform themselves into the Communist League.
In his spare time, Marx studied Proudhon, whom he would later criticize in The Poverty of Philosophy. He developed his theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, published posthumously, as well as his theory of ideology in The German Ideology, in which he criticized the Young Hegelians: "It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.". For the first time, Marx related history of ideas with economic history, linking the "ideological superstructure" with the "economical infrastructure", and thus tying together philosophy and economics. Inspired both by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Adam Smith, he imagined an original theory based on the key Marxist notion of class struggle, which appeared to him self-evident in the Parisian context of insurrection and permanent turmoil. "The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class," did he conclude in his essay, setting up the program for the years to come, a program which would be further explicated in The Communist Manifesto, published on 21 February 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, three days before the proclamation of the Second Republic. Arrested and expelled to Belgium, Marx was then invited by the new regime back to Paris, where he was able to witness the June Days uprising first hand.