The French and Italian Communist Parties

Cyrille Guiat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135773861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Beginning with a review of the numerous studies that tend to emphasize the national, societal dimension of the Italian and French communist parties, Cyrille Guiat's book is a comparative study of the two parties from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.

1

The French and Italian Communist Parties: A Critical Review of the Literature

The French and Italian Communist Parties, which were the two largest non-ruling communist parties in western Europe, have attracted substantial academic and media attention, mostly from French, Italian and English-speaking scholars. While a thorough discussion of this considerable body of work would go far beyond the scope of this study—and would indeed require a substantial volume in its own right—the present chapter aims to provide an outline of the main aspects of the literature concerning the French and Italian Communist Parties. In an attempt to classify these studies, and for heuristic reasons, this chapter is divided in three sections which review different schools of thought pertaining to the literature on French and Italian communism. However, it is recognised that these categories are, like any, somewhat arbitrary, and that they do not therefore claim to be comprehensive or watertight.

Accordingly, the first section of this survey discusses a number of studies which tend to emphasise the national, societal dimension of these parties by focusing on their interactions with the French and Italian political and social systems. These studies include the works published by scholars sympathetic to their object of research, such as communist historians.

Acknowledging the fact that these studies tend to neglect the international dimension of these parties, that is to say their constitutive and cast-iron tie to international communism and the Soviet Union, the second section examines what could be called the critical historiography of these parties. This is a body of works published by historians and political scientists who claim that communist parties were indissolubly linked to the Soviet model. They argue that these parties remained a foreign ‘transplant’ or a ‘counter-society’ dedicated in the long term to the promotion of a worldwide revolution embodied by the Soviet Union, the so-called ‘Fatherland of socialism’, which they defended at all costs, sometimes to the detriment of their domestic social integration and political success.

Yet, while these controversies have pitted scholars writing on either the PCF or the PCI against each other, it is argued in the third section that most comparative studies involving these two parties claim that there is a contrast between them. The French Communist Party, it is claimed, always remained more Leninist, revolutionary, sectarian and internationalist (or teleological) than its Italian counterpart, which is often described as a more pragmatic, reformist and societal force. The magnitude of this contrast is in itself a controversial matter. Some scholars see in it only a mere difference in style, while others systematically play one party against the other to produce a marked difference. It is concluded in this chapter, however, that there is sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of a contrast, which is tested empirically through the two case studies which form the core of this study.

COMMUNIST PARTIES AS PRIMARILY NATIONAL AND SOCIETAL PHENOMENA

A great number of studies published in French, Italian and English argue that the French and Italian Communist Parties were largely independent political parties whose strategies were determined by their respective national sociopolitical environments. It is possible to discern three broad categories of research here. The first two are suggested by Lazar. Writing about the PCF, he distinguishes between two groups of communist historians, official Party historians on the one hand, often paid, commissioned and published by the PCF, and university scholars not tied to the Party whose research was often conducted and published outside the Party, but who were PCF members or backers.¹ The third proposed category is less clearly defined and includes studies by non-communists (although some might have been close to the Party) which tend to echo or develop the view that the PCF (or the PCI) was first and foremost a national political force deeply rooted in its socio-political environment.

The PCF as a primarily national, societal force

Several studies highlight the highly political nature of PCF historiography.² This political function, largely based on a teleological dimension stemming from the self-proclaimed status of Marxism as the science of history, is best summarised by Courtois and Lazar in the introduction to their Histoire du PCF (History of the PCF):

The PCF, more than any other party, attributes decisive importance to history and to its own history, of which it always strives to give an official version: in 1964 this led it to publish a Manuel d'histoire du PCF [Manual of the History of the PCF] and to issue directives and injunctions to its historians. Claiming to be a Marxist, or more precisely a Marxist–Leninist party..., it sees itself as the bearer of a scientific and eschatological theory of history; in other words, everything in history had to demonstrate that the Communist Party was the party of the proletariat...whose mission and ultimate objective was to establish a communist society. But the PCF has also become its own historian for political and ideological reasons. Not only does it conscript the past in the service of its present strategy; but also, Marxism being erected into the science of history, it offers, from the Party's viewpoint, the opportunity to justify in irrefutable fashion the past, the present and the future of the Party.³

This obsession with history led to the publication of a Party historiography which was often ‘manichaean, simplistic, manipulative, constantly rewritten according to the imperatives of the day’, based on a few sacred texts and placed under the control of the Party's highest authorities.⁴ Among the sacred texts produced were the autobiography of Maurice Thorez, Fils du peuple (Son of the People), in fact written by a PCF ghostwriter, Jean Fréville, and published for the first time in 1937, and the Manuel of 1964, which echoed in format and orthodoxy the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union first published under the auspices of Stalin in 1938.⁵ The PCF also published orthodox studies on particular aspects of its history, such as Le PCF dans la Resistance (The PCF in the Resistance).⁶ To this official PCF historiography, one could add the numerous books of memoirs of orthodox PCF leaders such as Etienne Fajon, Gaston Plissonnier or André Wurmser, to name but a few.⁷ Most of these accounts play the general, hagiographic function summarised by Courtois and Lazar above, that is to say they echo, through personal testimonies, the official version of Party history.

Some official historical publications, however, play a more specific role. This is for instance the case of François Billoux's Quand nous étions ministres (When We Were Ministers), an account by a PCF leader of the three post-war years (1944–47), during which the Party formed a coalition government with other left-wing forces.⁸ This was published at the time when the PCF had just entered an official electoral alliance with the French Socialist Party on the basis of a Programme Commun de Gouvernement, and served to demonstrate that French communists could be trusted as a democratic, government party on the basis of their positive contribution to the reconstruction of France 25 years earlier. In his preface to Billoux's account, Georges Marchais, then Secretary-General of the Party, was keen to underline that this account played a key political role:

This book, although it deals with an experience which took place 25 years ago, is of direct relevance to the current political situation. It constitutes an element of the vast, nationwide campaign led by our Party on the theme of a programme of a democratic government of popular union.⁹

This admission that history was used for reasons of political expediency further illustrates that to PCF leaders history was not an independent endeavour. As a result, the historical production of communist historians was closely monitored, at least until the 1970s.

The communist historiography of French communism started to evolve in the 1970s, as a result of two factors. First, PCF official historiography, which had until then enjoyed in France a quasi-monopoly or at least a ‘hegemonic’ (as Gramsci would have said) status, was strongly challenged in the mid-1960s by the publication of Annie Kriegel's thesis on the origins of the PCF, which emphasised the ‘accidental’ creation of this party and its ‘foreign’ nature vis-à-vis the traditions of the French working-class movement (see below). This challenge prompted PCF historians to fend off Kriegel and her followers by emphasising the national and societal dimension of French communism through the detailed study of its strategy and implantation into the French socio-political environment, as discussed below.

The second factor is that communist historians, in the context of the relative relaxation of Party control upon its social scientists which followed the Argenteuil meeting of 1966 (see Chapter 4), were starting to attempt to ‘win their independence from the Party leadership, through research carried out in universities but also in specialised research centres funded by the PCF such as the Maurice Thorez Institute’.¹⁰ This changing approach to historical and political research was advocated in a number of books published in the 1970s and early 1980s. Thus, in the opening sentences of his study of the PCF, Jean Elleinstein wrote: This book is a result of my own work, I have not sought any authorisation from anyone prior to writing it, and I have not asked anybody to read it’, implying that he had not been submitted to any Party control or censorship.¹¹ By the same token, the team of PCF historians who published Le PCF, étapes et problèmes (Key Dates and Issues in the History of the PCF) in 1981 claimed that the notion of ‘official history’ was outdated and argued that they had produced genuine, rigorous historical research.¹² A very similar claim to have moved beyond official historiography and towards a critical approach was made by Burles, Martelli and Wolikow in their 1981 book on the strategy of the PCF.¹³

It should be argued that this autonomy was only very relative: for instance, historians were not allowed access to PCF archives which could have shed some light on controversial aspects of its history. However, the main argument here is that the need to fend off the emerging view that French communism was mainly an imported, foreign phenomenon and the process of relative freeing of PCF scholars resulted in a number of stimulating studies whose quality is widely acknowledged, even by historians who are highly critical of French communism such as Lazar.¹⁴ These studies can be gathered under two main concepts or variations—implantation and strategy.

The first, the implantation approach, emerged in the 1970s under the influence of Jacques Girault, PCF member and professor of history at the University of Paris-I, and had a clear, self-proclaimed goal: ‘We intend to react against the classical historiography [Kriegel and her followers] which places unwarranted emphasis on the role of the International.’¹⁵

Accordingly, in this collective work, Girault and his colleagues focused on the implantation of French communism in its socio-economic context, particularly in the red suburbs of Paris, between the two world wars, in order to outline its diversity. The main features of this approach, as foun...