Exceptional Socialists

The Case of the French Socialist Party

D. Bell, B. Criddle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349328192, 9780230282278
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318688
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This engaging exploration of the French Socialist Party details the exceptional problems that the party has faced and the way it has dealt with them. The result is a comprehensive and compelling guide to the quiddities of political infighting, the structure of power and of the environment in which the party operates.

1

Introduction: Exceptional Socialists

The French Socialist Party (PS; Parti socialiste) is one of the least successful of the major European parties within the Second International democratic socialist tradition of parliamentary politics within a market system. Founded in 1905 as the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO; French Section of the Workers’ International), it has held governmental office for less than 30 of the ensuing 109 years, and within those years led governments for less than 20. It was an amalgam of parties with differing outlooks, some sectarian and others pragmatic, but marked by an internal factionalism that has not subsided. In what might be seen as the mature years of social democracy after the emergence and hegemonic positions of the parties on the left, the French Socialists have been at arm’s length from government or chary of it preferring, as did Léon Blum, the SFIO’s leader in the 1920s and 1930s, to maintain party unity rather that to test the disruptive effects of government authority. French Socialism has not become, as has the Swedish party or German Social Democrats, a ‘natural party of government’, but neither had it consolidated a position as the Opposition in the Fourth Republic (1946–58) or managed to be the single party of alternative government in a two-party system in the alternance of the (post-1958) Fifth Republic.

In 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, it chose the strategic option of defending the Fourth Republic, but in doing so it found itself in uncomfortable alliance with the centre and the right (Graham, 1994). Pressures from the left and disagreements about policies further animated the factional disputes in the post-war SFIO and contributed to its decline. In the Fifth Republic, the Socialists have normally had to bring other parties into coalition in order to find a governing majority. This is a position of dependence on allies that is unlike that of the major social democratic parties of Western Europe – with the exception of the Italian socialist left in the First Italian Republic (1948). It is necessary to look to contemporary Greece for a Second International party in a weaker position in Western Europe.

The weakness of French social democracy is a theme in much of the literature on French government. For stretches of time it has chosen not to enter government, and it failed to engage with the major issues of social and human rights that shook French politics. These issues essentially turned on the position of the Republic faced by adversaries of the authoritarian right, the status of the Church in education, and welfare. However, in part it has drawn on the Republican political culture, which saw the Great Revolution as the defining event in political history, and this was reinforced by a Marxist faith that emphasised that the next upheaval would be a socialist revolution (Moreau, 2003). With the Fifth Republic, however, its position has usually been as the main Opposition party without completely coming to terms with the new politics of the presidential Republic – an active and highly visible presidential executive that is widely supported by the French public (Cole, 2008). Socialists, and the left in general, regarded the president as a potential autocrat (after the experience of repression under Napoleon IIIrd’s Second Empire) and have been suspicious of the executive presidency. This outlook has not disappeared from the Socialist party or the left.

Hence, although Guy Mollet, the leader of the SFIO from 1946 to 1969, was one of the leaders in the drafting of the Fifth Republic Constitution, the Socialist Party (and much of the left) was actively opposed to or unhappy with the practice of the Fifth Republic’s presidentialism (Mollet, 1973). In the so-called ‘semi-presidential’ system of the Fifth Republic since 1958, the president with a majority in the Assembly has very extensive powers, but if that majority is lost the president is reduced to the status of a constitutional monarch with the ability to advise, to encourage and to warn but no more, because the de jure decision-making power rests with the prime minister, not the president. These interim times in which there is a president of the left and a prime minister of the right (or vice versa) are referred to as cohabitation, and are perceived as abnormal (even though the Constitution does not give the president per se more than minimal power). Under cohabitation, the premier exercises the extensive powers given to the prime minister’s office by the Constitution of 1958.

Under the Fifth Republic the Socialists had, before winning the presidential election of 2012, occupied the presidential office for 14 (1981–95) out of 54 years, although for 4 of those 14 years (1986–8 and 1993–5) the party lacked the parliamentary majority required for the presidency to command executive power, with President François Mitterrand having to cohabit with a prime minister of the right. For five further years (1997–2002), the party occupied the prime ministerial office in a ‘plural left’ coalition government, but under a president of the right. Thus between 1958 and 2012, it enjoyed, in total, ten years of presidential executive power and five years of prime ministerial power compromised by cohabitation.

The relative fragility of the Socialists’ electoral performance, with the remaining 39 years of the Fifth Republic having presidents and governments provided by the right, was underscored by a regular pattern of the party losing every election subsequent to the one which had put it in power. Thus it lost control of parliament in 1986 after winning in 1981, and again in 1993 after winning in 1988, and was eliminated from a presidential election in 2002, having had a parliamentary majority since 1997. The ease of alternation in power between left and right characteristic of mature liberal democracies, had not been established in the French case, and the most obvious evidence of the party’s exceptionalism has been in its record of recurrent national electoral failure.

In turn, this electoral failure has derived from French exceptionalism (Chafer and Godin, 2005 and Roman et al., 1990). It has been observed that ‘France was for long considered “exceptional” by foreign (chiefly Anglo-Saxon) observers, by virtue of a combination of an original, complex and intense pattern of political conflict, with a powerful intrusive State’ (Knapp and Wright, 2001). Both these features of French ‘exceptionalism’ (Le Monde, 2002) have served to undermine the appeal of the Socialist party, the nature of political conflict having created a pattern of cleavages that constricted the party’s audience, whilst the very fact of a pervasive state rather made superfluous the advocacy of a party for whom statism was a core priority.

Political conflict

The conceptualising of political conflict as a confrontation of left and right has its origin in the seating arrangements in the post-Revolution assemblies in France, with radicals separated from traditionalists. Subsequently, in the nineteenth century ‘left’ and ‘right’ variously delineated republicans from monarchists, parliamentarians from advocates of strong executives, and anti-clericals from observant Catholics, and in the twentieth century, high tax social welfare socialists from laissez-faire capitalists, and, in extremis, on the left those seeking a revolution or ‘rupture’ with capitalism and its replacement with a socialist economy and society.

Constitutional conflict saw 12 significant changes of regime following the Revolution of 1789, many if not all of them involving significant loss of life, and all of them leaving a trail of dates of historical significance for subsequent generations: 1789, 1793, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1940, 1944, 1958. To these may be added others of high symbolism to the left and the right, such as the Popular Front of 1936 and the ‘Events’ of May 1968. Not until the constitutional settlement of 1958 and 1962 was the perennial conflict between the left’s advocacy of democracy against the right’s call for authority reconciled in the Fifth Republic, whose founder created a political movement, Gaullism, identified with the defence of the regime he created, and which dominated electoral politics for the rest of the century.

The electorally most salient social cleavage dividing left from right in Europe has been social class, with the left seeking social justice through wealth redistribution and an interventionist state, and the right defending capitalism, private property and the free market. In France, this cleavage did not provide a workable balance of forces between a ‘working class’ left and a ‘bourgeois’ right. Slow industrial development meant a large peasant class persisting at the expense of a small, geographically dispersed working class lacking any leverage over capital and so driven by lack of influence into the hands of anarcho-syndicalists and Marxists who ensured that the trade union organisation, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labour), in 1906, declared its complete independence of all political parties. This was happening precisely at the time when a bigger trade-unionised working-class industrial population in Britain and Germany was being organised into mass membership social democratic parties and integrated into the workings of the capitalist economy. Such reformism was rejected in France. In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the French Socialists’ SFIO had 75,000 members and 17% of the vote, compared to the German Social Democrats’ (Sozial demokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) one million members and 35% of the vote.

The failure to integrate the working class was consolidated with the left’s split following the Russian Revolution, and the creation of the Communist Party in 1920. Communist activists took over or colonised institutions that in other systems would be social democratic bases: the unions, in the main, but also educational circles, newspapers, journals and recreational organisations. Subsequently, from 1936, and especially after the Liberation (1944), the Communist Party effectively ghettoised the working class by taking over its representation and insulating it in a subculture centred on fomenting (or using) rather than alleviating grievance as the party of working-class anti-capitalist protest. After the Bolshevik Revolution, that is, Lenin’s November 1917 coup d’état, the SFIO chose to contest the revolutionary credentials of the Communist Party, insisting that it, and not Moscow’s branch, represented the true revolutionary spirit of the working class, the vector of the future society.

The Socialist Party with no, or few, workers was denied the role played by social democratic parties elsewhere. Indeed moderate social democratic reformism was a force within the left which dare not speak its name, the practical moderation of the SFIO being overlaid with a rhetorical commitment to class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. ‘Restaurant ouvrier, cuisine bourgeoise’ was the sardonic refrain: the contrast between the party’s revolutionary rhetoric and its less-than-revolutionary practise in and out of weak divided coalition governments in the 1940s and 1950s, and the inevitable accusation of betrayal that resulted, from a hegemonic Communist Party, was a constant in the history of the French left in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This period in the Fourth Republic is crucial to the development of the Socialist Party, which chose to defend the Republic against its opponents of left and right and to behave when it mattered as a parliamentary Republican party. In the Cold War, this Westernism set it against the Communist Party, which was an outpost of the Soviet system, but the SFIO also invested its political capital in political and economic reform and in the development of European integration. More recently the rise of the Front national (FN; National Front) has led some of the working class to vote for the extreme right and further diminished the Socialist audience amongst workers. Some in the Socialist movement have also gone so far as to suggest that the Socialist Party should appeal directly to the liberal middle class and cease to define itself as a working-class party (Cole et al., 2008).

A further feature of French particularism in the patterns of political conflict involved nationalism. Nationalism as a political force in France was not solely the property of the right. The revolutionary Jacobins sought patriotically to export their trilogy of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ to other countries, and the Communists in 1941 rediscovered the ‘Marseillaise’ and at the Liberation presented their resistance record as le parti des 70,000 fusillés. (It is a measure of the Communist Party’s cultural power that this claim was accepted on the right and on the left for many years.) But if French politics is infused with Franco-centrism, its political advocates were predominantly on the right, and represented in the middle and later decades of the twentieth century by Gaullism.

The trauma of the humiliatingly swift Fall of France in 1940 and the German Occupation created a political phenomenon in Gaullism, which shaped French politics for the last part of the century. Specifically, it created an electorate for a heroic problem-solving leader who re-established constitutional stability, restored French international prestige, and whose presidency (1959–69) coincided with the main years of the trente glorieuses – the post-war economic boom – which saw annual growth rates of 5% and above, modernisation of the economy, the draining of the agricultural sector, urbanisation and white-collarisation, and the secularising of society (Hoffmann: 1967). Gaullism was an electoral phenomenon transcending left and right, de Gaulle having, in his earlier post-Liberation role as prime minister (1944–6), led a wartime-resistance-inspired government of Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats in nationalising banks and basic industries (including the Renault motor company) and created a social security system. De Gaulle was thus no conventional conservative, and his presidency from 1959 to 1969 rested on a catch-all electorate spanning the social spectrum. The force of such a powerful Franco-centrist phenomenon swept aside the modest resources of a Socialist party tainted with the failings of the Fourth Republic, which was replaced by de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in 1958.

The State

An important counterpoint to the exceptionalism of the pattern of French political conflict was the continuity of the French state, which prevailed regardless of constitutional upheaval. The tradition of a strong centralised state historically welding together an uneasy collection of provinces has its origins deep in French history (Weber, 1979). Statism, the primacy of the state, its autonomy and power predated the Revolution, was enhanced by it and under Napoleon, and in the twentieth century after the Liberation, and was acknowledged across right and left. Ramsay MacDonald, the British Labour politician, was astonished by the depth and vigour of the argument across the political spectrum about the positive role of the state. Unlike the British and American experience in which the state is treated with suspicion – monarchists defended the strong state as did the centrist Radical Party, which defined the Republican state as the institution that provided education and the means to citizenship for all, and the Socialist left saw the state as potentially benign, but in the wrong hands. Over the twentieth century, state activity supporting or promoting industry and science where the country lagged, and the provision of welfare became Republican principles and were shared across a wide spectrum, not confined to the left (Hazareesingh, 1994 Ch 6).

There was a consensus reflected in the state’s directing role in the economy, its economic dirigisme. Dating back to Louis XIV’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in the seventeenth century, the state was interventionist in the economy, and under the Jacobins and Napoleon intrusive centr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: Exceptional Socialists
• 2 The Competitive Context
• 3 Party Organisation
• 4 Party Factional Identity and Personalities
• 5 Presidentialism and Primaries
• 6 Ideology and Policy
• 7 The Challenge from the Minoritarian Left
• 8 Socialist Politics Post-Mitterrand 1988–2002
• 9 Socialist Party Development after 2002
• 10 Conclusion
• General Bibliography
• Index