Left Out: A History of the French Right and Left

The Party’s decline is the easier of the two to account for. It exited the war crowned in Resistance glory. Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Party Congress and the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 tarnished the reputation of the USSR and, by association, communist parties elsewhere, the PCF included. But it was not until the 1970s that the Party’s fortunes really took a turn for the worse. It is tempting to chalk up the tumble to bad tactical choices. The PCF entered into an electoral alliance with François Mitterrand’s Parti socialiste in the hope of siphoning working-class votes away, but the ploy backfired. Mitterrand won the 1981 presidential election, and the PS garnered an outright majority in the legislative contest that followed, thanks in part to labor voters who did not desert its banners, just the reverse. 

Yet, the PCF had deeper-seated problems than electoral miscalculation. It defined itself as the party of the working class, the industrial working class, and it aligned itself with the Soviet Union, the motherland of the proletarian revolution. The 1970s, however, were a catastrophic decade for labor in the core economies of the industrial West. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 were blows, substantive as well as symbolic, to Western economic preeminence. Almost everywhere, the manufacturing sector began to shrink, as industry relocated to the global South in search of cheap labor. The core economies did not cease to grow, but growth was now uneven, concentrated no longer in the smokestack industries of old but in the high-tech, service, and financial sectors. The working class did not disappear as a result, but its profile changed, and in a way that the PCF, so dependent on the votes of industrial workers in a deindustrializing era, proved unable to cope with. Then came the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. The PCF’s ultimate goal was the overthrow of capitalism, but without the Soviet Union on hand, was it possible to imagine a world beyond the horizons of capitalism?

The PS didn’t think so and said as much at its 1991 congress. For the present moment, a party declaration affirmed, "our historic horizon is bounded by capitalism." The concession did not prove fatal to reform-minded socialists the way it did to communists who still harbored dreams of le Grand Soir, of the Revolution. In fact, the fin de siècle appeared a moment of breakthrough, even triumph for reformist socialism. The party had repositioned itself in the 1960s and 1970s, holding on tight to its traditional labor constituency but opening itself at the same time to the energizing radicalism of the so-called New Social Movements born of the long ’68: feminism, anti-nuclear activism, and environmentalism. Add in Mitterrand’s wily deal-making and personal skills, and the combination proved a winning one, as the electoral results of 1981 demonstrated. 

And yet problems would soon set in. Mitterrand’s first septennate taught a hard lesson: that welfare-state expansion, so central to the socialist mission and agenda, was inflationary and that, given the globalization of financial markets, a mid-sized power like France did not have the requisite tools to right the fiscal situation except by backing down. There was also a political dimension to the challenge facing French socialists, indeed, socialists everywhere. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had a recipe for how to manage capitalist economies in a globalizing world: privatize, deregulate, make it easier for investment to pool and flow where it was needed. Economic growth was the objective, and let the Devil take the hindmost. The formula seemed to work, powering forward the conversion of outmoded industrial economies into financialized and information-based ones nimble enough to compete on the world stage.

Third Way socialism was at once a success and a disaster. It was a success in that it imparted a modern look to the socialist appeal, one in tune with the free-market impulses so pervasive a quarter century ago, and the appeal helped socialists win elections…in the short term. The long term proved to be another matter. Deindustrialization ate away at the PS’s base in organized labor, as it had eaten away at the PCF’s. Third Way socialism did too little to help out an ailing and shrinking industrial working-class, and so working-class voters began to drift. They abandoned la vieille maison, as Léon Blum had once called the socialist party, heading to the anti-system Left or to Lepenism. Even the party’s middle-class support faltered. The PS relied on the votes of public-sector employees and civil servants, but its privatizing and deregulating experiments exposed such people to the chill winds of the private labor market, if not to outright unemployment. Had the job creation so much touted by Third Way socialism in fact materialized, that might have staunched the general hemorrhaging of support, among middle-class people as among workers, but high levels of unemployment persisted. The PS had sold its socialist birthright for a mess of pottage, or so it seemed to many erstwhile loyalists.

Globalization played havoc with the Left, which is still struggling to chart a viable political path forward in a post-industrial France. The Left’s fragmentation and retreat are no doubt temporary, but with the Left out, it is the Center with its technocratic promise to manage things right, and the far Right echoing its timeworn slogan of France for the French, which are for now setting the pace of presidential debate. 

Copyright: Eric CABANIS / AFP