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

The referendum result, in which the constitution was approved by 53.5 per cent of those voting (or 36.2 per cent of the registered electorate) was hailed in Pravda as a ‘victory for democratic forces’ in France, and a ‘double defeat’ for ‘the reactionaries’. The ‘democratic forces’, the PCF chief among them, had first, at the price of significant concessions during the drafting, successfully defended articles defining the ‘republican and democratic’ nature of the regime, and had then prevailed in the ‘intense political struggle’ of the campaign. The three parties – PCF, SFIO, and MRP – that had backed the constitution now faced a further ‘fierce struggle’ at the parliamentary elections against the ‘reactionary camp’ – the PRL, the right wing of the Radicals, the UDSR, and the Union Gaulliste – which had opposed the text.

A ‘hard and important test’, requiring ‘the union of all the truly democratic forces of the country’, awaited France’s renascent democracy, especially as ‘outside influences’ were encouraging the reactionaries.[384]It would be hard to find a better exegesis of Stalin’s instructions to the PCF of two years earlier.

In the short term at least, the Party’s behaviour in the autumn 1946 appeared to pay off. It had played a significant role in drafting the constitution, with several clauses bearing its mark. And at the November 1946 elections it regained its leading position, winning a historical record score of 28.2 per cent. Yet the PCF had still not managed to implement the core of Stalin’s instructions – to unite the Left under its leadership, ready to move onto the offensive and take power in due course. Indeed, a final Thorez candidacy for the premiership failed – not, this time, because it was refused by the Socialist leadership, but only because the SFIO was unable to enforce voting discipline on its own Deputies, 23 of whom opposed the PCF leader. The PCF was again forced to fall in behind Socialist prime ministers (Blum in December 1946, and Ramadier in January 1947) and, with the constitution ratified, a Socialist president (Auriol). Despite these concessions, within a year the Party would find itself more isolated than ever, out of government and backing a fierce wave of strikes that shook, but did not topple, the new regime.

Into the ‘ghetto’, 1947

The PCF’s displacement from the seat of government to the political ‘ghetto’, where it would remain through (and beyond) the remaining life of the Fourth Republic, was played out in five main locations: the scenes of armed colonial conflict in Madagascar and Indochina; the shopfloor of Renault’s Boulogne-Billancourt works; the heart of political Paris, the Chamber and the Council of Ministers; the founding conference of the Cominform at Sklarska-Poreba, in Poland; and finally, in November-December 1947, across the whole of urban and industrial France.

Colonial conflicts, analysed in this book by Martin Shipway, undermined the Communists’ position in the Ramadier government from the moment it took office on 22 January 1947. War had broken out in Indochina a month earlier; it was a Communist Defence Minister, François Billoux, who was now responsible, at least nominally, for the armies fighting Ho Chi-Minh’s Communist-dominated nationalist movement.[385]By the early spring of 1947 the PCF was mobilising public opposition within France to the war; Billoux refused to stand up in the Chamber in homage to France’s troops fighting there; and when Ramadier sought a vote of confidence on his Indochina policy on 22 March, he was supported by the PCF’s ministers, but not by its other Deputies, who abstained. A week later an insurrection broke out in Madagascar its savage repression led the PCF ministers to walk out of the Council of Ministers on 16 April.