Parti Communiste français - 1944-1945 - After the War
Maurice Thorez, French Communist leader, declared that if the Soviet armies found it necessary to occupy all Western Europe, the working people would greet them as liberators. After World War II the Communist Party of France [PCF] was the best disciplined political group and, at the same time, the one with the greatest number of adherents. Its official membership had passed the one million mark. Its ideology and political philosophy viewed collaboration with other groups only as a temporary expedient necessary until the Party would be able to seize the whole political power.
The political might of the French Communist Party - which a very large number of those who considered themselves to be proudly and positively at the core of the 'working class' saw their beliefs reflected in - had become very important. This was due to the role the Communist Party had played in the French Resistance, as well asto the heroism and abnegation of a great number of its members, and to the prestige awarded to the Soviet Union since the battle of Stalingrad which, in January 1943, inspired in the European conscience a sense of hope or conviction that the defeat of Nazi Germanywas in fact inevitable.
The very fact that the Communists were able to capture a great number of key positions in the Resistance movement and that they stood out as the driving force in the Estates General of the French Resistance assembling in July, 1945, in Paris hastened the disintegration of the Resistance movement. The most important of the Resistance organizations, the National Liberation Movement, split in July, 1945, into the Communist-led MUR (the Unified Movement of Reconstruction) and the vaguely Socialist UDSR (Union of Democratic and Socialist Resistance). From then on the Resistance organizations rapidly lost direct political importance and became more or less adjuncts, though sometimes rather useful ones, of the political parties. At the same time the Socialists refused finally the repeated Communist invitation to combine with them into a centralized working class party.
The dispirited middle-class groups took new courage. They saw a chance to identify themselves with the national cause of General de Gaulle and accordingly began to reassert themselves. In this emerging political struggle the Communists held a big advantage over all other groups, not only because their Resistance record after June, 1941, the time of Russia's declaration of war, was so much superior to that of any other group, but also because their political personnel, in so far as it survived the 1941-44 liberation campaign, was available to a large extent. This availability resulted from their complete removal in 1940 from political life, which immunized them from Vichy taint.
The largest trade union movement, the most broadly based one, was the C.G.T. While leftist, it was, of course, not totally Communist, although obviously heavily infiltrated and influenced by Communists. The PCF was a tool of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That didn't mean that every single Frenchman who voted Communist, was equally in their pocket, but the leadership was. That was proven - there was documentation of it both from defectors from the French and from the Soviet Communist parties.
But the French Communists did get a substantial protest vote from some otherwise patriotic French people, especially right after the war. The economic crisis in Europe had political and foreign policy repercussions that concerned American leaders. It was increasing the trend towards bilateralism there and hurting American efforts to build anew multilateral system of world trade. In France and Italy, it was eroding electoral support for the governments and enhancing the popular appeal of the communist parties.
In the elections that were held for the constituent assembly on 21 October 1945, Communists and Socialists commanded the loyalty of an absolute majority of the French electorate. But their plurality was uncomfortably small (51.9 percent). The Communist Party became the strongest political group in France with 25 per cent of the vote. The official leader of the Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, had spent the war years in Moscow, and de Gaulle originally wanted to exclude him from return to political life in France, only to be forced by the Communists and the Trade Union propaganda campaign to allow in autumn 1944 his triumphant reentry into French political life.
Most of the working class vote went to the Communists. To some extent this may be due to the fact that the Communists now dominate the General Labor Confederation with its five and one-half million members. Only the central organizations of white-collar workers, some government workers unions, the printing trades, and the port and dock workers, are still outside Communist Party control. In many industrial regions, especially the north, only the left wing of the MRP, supported by the Christian Trade Unions and the Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique youth organization could still compete with the Communist Party for the labor vote. But the Communist voters are not found only in urban areas- they are also found in considerable number among the sharecroppers, small landed proprietors and agricultural labor, noticeably in the southeastern district. The Rightist propaganda that the Communist party would expropriate even the smallest proprietor has not deterred an increasing percentage of the agricultural population from voting Communist. The Communists' great success with the peasants, in fact, has had an important effect on French food policies, as it has kept even the Communist Party, traditionally representative of urban consumer interests, from trying to pursue a strong policy of food control.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
