Очерки истории Франции XX–XXI веков. Статьи Н. Н. Наумовой и ее учеников

Throughout the existence of the GPRF, France’s Communists did their utmost to implement Stalin’s directives of November 1944. They remained within government in order, as they said, to ‘bring the war to a victorious conclusion’ and to ensure ‘the co-operation of all the patriotic forces towards France’s democratic renaissance’. On one level, they were extremely successful. The PCI established itself as France’s premier political party, heading the poll at two out of the three national elections (of October 1945 and June and November 1946) with over a quarter of the vote – ahead of their Socialist rivals and over 10 points above their own best pre-war result of March 1936. Progress at the ballot-box was paralleled by an explosion in membership. Out of a pre-war total of some 300,000, the PCF had counted barely 5,000 members in the winter of 1939-40. Their numbers had risen to 60,000 by August 1944, to over 200,000 the following month, and to nearly 544,000 by April 1945; they would exceed 785,000 by the year’s end.[358]This was, to a degree, part of a wider international movement. The prestige of the USSR, as the country which had made the greatest sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany, was at its peak.[359]Communist ideas had won widespread popularity, not least because state control and egalitarianism were readily associated with the wartime mobilisation which had secured victory. In nine countries of Western Europe, including Italy, Belgium, Finland and France, as well as in four Latin American countries, Communists were in government. And in central, eastern, and south– eastern Europe the Communists had won power on the heels of the Red Army. Within France, meanwhile, the influence of the Resistance and of the democratic and antifascist forces linked to it were at their height; the PCF, as one of the principal forces of the Resistance, could not but reap the benefits. Its leading role within the main trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), itself experiencing a membership boom (with close to four million members), also helped the party put down deep roots in French society.

But France’s Communists were less successful in implementing the central thrust of Stalin’s directives – the construction, under their leadership, of a broad-based left-wing alliance. Parallel to the string of electoral victories ran a series of battles over the new constitution and over the formation of governments; in these, the PCF often faced a stark choice between the isolation that Stalin had warned against and substantial concessions to its ‘weaker’ partners of the SFIO and the third major governing party of the Liberation era, the Christian Democrat Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP).

The divided Left, 1945

The alliance strategy won an initial success at the municipal elections of April-May 1945. Here the PCF ran broad-based lists labelled ‘republican, democratic, and anti-fascist union’. After the first round of voting it called for ‘a bloc of all the republican, democratic and secular forces’ for the second ballot.[360]The pre-election Communist-Socialist alliance secured victories in over 5,500 municipalities, over three times more than the prewar total (cf. Chapter 5); Communist mayors headed 1,462 municipalities, including, for the first time, big towns such as Toulon, Nantes, Limoges and Reims.[361]Pravda took note with satisfaction, underlining that the victorious ‘anti-fascist’ lists consisted of candidates proposed jointly by the PCF and the SFIO, as well as Resistance organisations and, in some areas, the Radical Party.[362]

At the same time, the PCF leadership heeded Stalin’s counsels of moderation and his instruction to build a left-wing bloc. The party’s watchwords were national economic reconstruction, the punishment of traitors, real guarantees of democratic rights and freedoms, and the drafting of a new constitution – all of which would require a broad union of national forces around the programme of the CNR. Speaking at the PCF’s first postwar congress (the Tenth Congress, held in Paris from 26–30 June 1945), Thorez declared that ‘the renaissance of France is not the business of a single party or of a few statesmen, but a problem to be solved by millions of French men and women, by the whole nation’.[363]Three weeks later he offered proof of his party’s commitment to workplace discipline when he told France’s miners that their first ‘duty as a class’ was to ‘produce, produce, and again produce’; the CGT did not hesitate to break strikes where they occurred.[364]