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

That summer’s events in France worried the Soviet press. The MRP used its electoral success to propose its leader Georges Bidault for the premiership. Izvestia saw the hand of Blum in the post-election manoeuvring, oddly claiming that he sought a single-party MRP government, able to ‘back the anti-communist campaign that certain political parties are currently leading’.[376]Commenting on the signs of anti-communism appearing within French society against the background of the developing Cold War, Pravda observed that on the day before the vote on the premiership, ‘a group of young Fascist sympathisers attacked the offices of the PCF Central Committee in Paris, looting the bookshop in the same building and burning its stock’, and added that ‘the police showed complete negligence’ in the matter.[377]

The Constituent Assembly voted Bidault into the premiership on 19 June 1946 by 384 votes. The 161 Communist Deputies abstained, neither welcoming Bidault as premier nor wishing to move into opposition. It was ‘a pity’, Duclos observed (and Pravda agreed), that France had foresworn the opportunity of ending the provisional regime by rejecting the first draft constitution, but the Communists, as good republicans, respected the people’s will. The new government could only be provisional. On the constitution, the PCF was open to concessions, except on two issues: the secular character of the state (a reference to the MRP’s Catholic loyalties) and the powers of the second chamber (a reference to the MRP’s intention to revive the Senate in some form).[378]

This relative self-restraint allowed the PCF to join the Bidault government, which was approved by an overwhelming majority in the Constituent Assembly on 26 June: Thorez and Gouin both became vice-premiers. But the government’s composition, with nine MRP ministers, seven Communists, six Socialists, one member of the UDSR and one with no party allegiance, reflected a weakening in the positions of the PCF and the SFIO, which now controlled only slightly over half the portfolios between them. Meanwhile de Gaulle had joined in the constitutional debate: his Bayeux speech of 16 June called for strong leadership at the top in what resembled a presidentialised republic. France’s anti-communist forces were now divided between Gaullists, main– stream conservatives, and the right wing of the MRP. Yet de Gaulle was always the PCF’s most formidable opponent; his return to the political scene inevitably gave the leadership pause for thought.

For the PCF, the two years since the liberation of Paris presented a mixed picture. Its membership and electorate had grown to levels unimaginable before 1939; ministerial office had won it respectability, plus the chance to place Communists in key administrative posts. But its wooing of the Socialists had been rebuffed; its claims to lead the government, however democratically legitimate, had been vetoed by the Socialists and the MRP; its preferred constitutional project – whose lack of checks and balances offered the best opportunity for any party that dominated the National Assembly to install itself durably in power – had been rejected by the voters; and the MRP had overtaken it (briefly, as it would turn out) at the ballot-box. Above all, perhaps, the ‘left-wing bloc’ was no nearer being achieved than in 1944. It was against this background of setbacks that the PCF received further advice from Moscow.

Stepping back: the Frachon-Suslov meeting and the October 1946 referendum

Within the ongoing contacts between the PCF and Moscow, the meeting of 19 June 1946 between Mikhail Suslov, a member of the CPSU’s Central Committee, and Benoît Frachon, joint secretary of the CGT and an unofficial member of the PCF’s Bureau politique, is especially important. Suslov sent a record of the conversation, marked ‘Top Secret’, to Molotov, stressing that Frachon had asked, in the name of the PCF leadership, for advice from the CPSU, though without raising any specific questions.[379]