by Philip Short
The turning-point came four months later. A string of by-elections at the end of September, which returned five new Socialist MPs, proved beyond doubt that the alliance was eroding Communist support. To hardliners in the Politburo, led by Roland Leroy, it was time to call a halt. The Socialists’ attitude, he charged, ‘aims at weakening the position of the French Communist Party’. Mitterrand had never made any secret of that. But only now, it seemed, had the penny finally dropped.
Georges Marchais denounced the Socialists as class traitors bent on undermining the Union of the Left and ready to do a deal with the Right at the first available opportunity.
At Mitterrand’s insistence, the Party turned a deaf ear. To engage in polemics, he said, would play into Marchais’s hands. At a meeting of the Secretariat that winter, he recounted an acid fable about the dangers of creating ‘a dialectic of disunion’:
One day . . . l’Humanité accuses Pierre Mauroy of having raped a little girl in a street in Lille. Pierre Mauroy shrugs his shoulders. He finds the story absurd. Next day l’Humanité splashes it across three columns . . . with the little girl’s name and the time and date of the crime . . . Pierre Mauroy shakes his head. [On that date] he had been in Poland addressing a meeting of 3,000 people . . . The following day, l’Humanité does it again with an enormous headline right across the front page: ‘The Rape of Lille: Mauroy is hiding . . .’ This time Mauroy is angry. He calls a press conference . . . Next day . . . a journalist writes: ‘Pierre Mauroy re-launches the debate.’22
The Communist leaders, he said, were ‘obliged to have us as allies. History leaves them no choice. But they don’t like . . . the Union of the Left . . . It is up to us . . . to stop them breaking it.’ Socialism and communism were not the same thing. ‘All our efforts are aimed at eliminating the difference, but we will not achieve that by ceasing to be ourselves.’
By the end of 1974, the Communists were exactly where Mitterrand wanted them: locked into the trap he had sprung two years earlier when the Politburo had approved the Common Programme.
They could not say he had not warned them. In a dozen or more speeches over the previous decade, he had spelled out precisely what he intended to do. Not to destroy the Communist Party – it was still useful for mobilising those parts of the Left which the Socialists could not reach – but to reduce it to a supporting role.
Now they realised that he had meant what he said.
But it was too late. If the Communists were seen to be responsible for breaking the Union of the Left, their electorate would not forgive them. All they could do was try to force the Socialists to take more account of their concerns and, if that failed, to destabilise them so that, when a split occurred, Mitterrand’s party would get most of the blame. That was what he wanted to prevent. Three years after the champagne corks had popped to mark the signing of the Socialist–Communist alliance, the question, ‘Who whom?’, had been answered, not to the Communists’ advantage. Small wonder that the party leadership was writhing like a nest of snakes, trying to find a way out of the pit in which the Socialists had confined them.
In April 1975, Mitterrand was to lead a Socialist delegation to Moscow. Two weeks before they were to set out, the Russians cancelled. No reason was given. However, he had been outspoken about the plight of Soviet Jews, whose right to emigrate was restricted. He had also criticised the banishment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the exile of the cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich. And he had condemned the Portuguese Communists, the last Stalinists in Western Europe, for sending party thugs to wreck the newspaper offices of their rival, Mario Soares’s Socialist Party, in Lisbon. The Italian and Spanish Communists had condemned their Portuguese comrades. Marchais had remained silent. ‘Farewell, free press!’ Mitterrand had written, ‘The French Communists are embarrassed.’
The clumsiness of the Russians’ cancellation made even Marchais wince. After an outcry in the French press, the Soviet leaders changed their minds. On April 24 Mitterrand arrived in Moscow and two days later was ushered into the Kremlin office of the General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, of whom afterwards he left a curiously sympathetic portrait. Brezhnev, he wrote, was ‘a pope of transition’, determined to keep the Soviet Union moving forward because he feared that otherwise he would fall from power. In fairness to Mitterrand, Brezhnev in 1975 still came across as an energetic, bombastic figure, very different from the decrepit old man he became two years later. But he was already ill. Charles Salzmann, who accompanied Mitterrand and, unknown to their hosts, was a Russian-speaker, told him afterwards that at one point Brezhnev had asked an aide: ‘How do I sound? I sometimes find it difficult to articulate properly.’ In his account of the meeting, Mitterrand did not mention that, perhaps from the same delicacy that had made him keep silent about Georges Pompidou’s long illness.
Not all his judgements were off-beam. He was right about Brezhnev being a transitional figure. He was right, too, in detecting the first flickerings of self-doubt in the system, marked by an unwillingness to use prison camps with the same ruthlessness as in the past. Brezhnev and his colleagues had rolled back some of the liberalising reforms brought in by Khrushchev but not all.
In Eastern Europe and in the West, national communist parties were growing restive. The Italian and Spanish Party leaders, Enrico Berlinguer and Santiago Carillo, were developing a pluralistic, democratic approach to communist government which would come to be known as Eurocommunism. The Politburo’s guardian of the Tables of the Law, the austere Mikhail Suslov, whom Mitterrand also met, wanted none of that. The contradictions of capitalism, he insisted, were so impoverishing the West that revolution was inevitable. To prove his point, one of Suslov’s acolytes assured Mitterrand that the average British worker was able to eat meat only twice a month.
The talks in Moscow made Mitterrand realise that the Common Programme was unique. No other communist party, whether in Italy, Spain, or anywhere else, had concluded an alliance with a Socialist Party with a view to eventual participation in a coalition government. The Russians were torn. On the one hand they wanted good relations with whoever would next rule France. On the other they were terrified that a new model of socialist society would arise in Europe which would be different, if not antagonistic, to their own. Philippe Robrieux, the foremost historian of the French Communist Party, himself an ex-Communist, spelt out for Mitterrand the Kremlin’s dilemma: ‘You belong to the Socialist International, which Moscow considers its most stubborn adversary. The possibility of a left-wing government headed by a Socialist with popular backing dismays them . . . For Brezhnev, you represent every possible disadvantage.’23
For Mitterrand that was no problem. In the spring of 1975, it seemed that everything was going his way.
In private he was contemptuous of Marchais’s leadership. ‘My historic good fortune,’ he said in an off-the-record conversation, ‘is the unbelievable intellectual mediocrity of the Communist leaders. Look at them! . . . You can manipulate them as you like. Each one is stupider than the others. All their reactions are predictable . . . If I had been facing people of the level of the Italian Communist Party leaders, it would have been much harder for me.’
But pride comes before a fall: Georges Marchais was more cunning than Mitterrand gave him credit for.
In July 1975, the Party published a previously confidential report which Marchais had given to the Central Committee three years earlier, immediately after Mitterrand’s speech in Vienna. In it he warned his colleagues that the signature of the Common Programme did not mean that the Socialists had changed their colours. ‘Their permanent characteristics . . . are fear that the working class and the masses will start moving, hesitancy towards class combat against big capital, a tendency to compromise . . . and class collaboration.’
It marked the beginning of a year-long attempt by the Communists to regain the initiative.
By reminding his own party that, far from being Mitterrand’s dupe, he had measured from the outset the perils of dealing with the Socia
lists, Marchais silenced those who wanted to accuse him of adventurism. By reminding his partners that they had a history of class treachery – which for most of the past twenty years had been no more than the truth – he put them on the defensive. Mitterrand might dismiss his remarks as ‘grotesque’, but they gave him pause. Two months later he told a Socialist Party seminar that the Common Programme was not sacrosanct. ‘We need a back-up plan,’ he said. ‘We can’t keep being dependent on a partner which wants to get back its freedom.’
But Marchais was just getting into his stride.
The following January he announced that the French Communist Party was following its Italian and Spanish counterparts in abandoning the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, until then a core concept of Leninism. A month later, at the Party’s 22nd congress, he promised that the Communists would build ‘socialism in the colours of France’. In March 1976, he joined Carillo and Berlinguer in approving the fundamental principles of Eurocommunism. It was logical enough. If the French Communists loosened the umbilical cord with Moscow and rid themselves of Leninist jargon, Marchais argued, they would win back those parts of the electorate which the Socialists had wooed away.
The problem was that Eurocommunism was essentially socialism under another name. If that was what you wanted, why not vote for the real thing?
A succession of election results over the following year suggested that significant numbers of communist voters had drawn precisely that conclusion. But the coup de grâce came in the spring of 1977. In the municipal elections – vital for all parties because control of town halls provided access to financial resources – the Left won 50.8 per cent of the vote against 41.9 per cent for the Right. For the Socialists, it was a triumph, a ‘tidal wave’, as Le Monde put it. ‘France has given herself,’ Mitterrand exulted. But for the Communists, it was a disaster. The Socialists had won twice as many of the biggest towns as they had.
Had it been up to Marchais, the French Communists might have persisted. The results were not actually as bad as the headline figures implied. But it was no longer his call. That winter the Kremlin had belatedly reacted to the Eurocommunist heresy. Soviet ideologists denounced ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and accused Western Communists who allied themselves with socialist parties of revisionism. That could only apply to the French. It was time for the Union of the Left to be broken.
Ten days after the elections, Marchais told Mitterrand that the Common Programme, now five years old, needed to be revised. Somewhat reluctantly, the Socialists agreed. The following month Mitterrand was to appear in a television debate with Raymond Barre, the rotund and orotund economist who had succeeded Chirac as Giscard’s Prime Minister.24 On the eve of the broadcast, l’Humanité published a costing of the Common Programme purporting to show that it would double government spending. Mitterrand, never at his best on economic topics, was crucified by the portly professor.
When the three partners – Communists, Socialists and Left-Radicals – met on May 17, the knives were out. ‘The Communist Party is trying to free itself from the constraints of the alliance [which] has made us the leading political force in the country,’ Mitterrand said afterwards, ‘but it cannot admit to this crime without attracting people’s anger.’
Four months later the talks foundered in a manner that neither of the principals had foreseen. Robert Fabre, the normally mild-mannered head of the Left-Radicals, incensed by the Communists’ intransigence, stormed out to announce before the television cameras that his party was breaking off negotiations. Fabre’s outburst – his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, as one observer unkindly put it – gave Marchais the opening he was looking for. For another week the Socialists and the Communists argued about the extent of the nationalisation programme, the issue that had come close to killing the Common Programme at birth five years earlier. At 1.20 a.m. on September 23, the delegations separated without agreement. This time the rift was final.
Mitterrand had been expecting it since the summer. ‘The primary enemy of the Communist Party is the Socialist Party,’ he had told Georges Dayan over dinner one night. ‘Their primary enemy within the Socialist Party is me.’
With hindsight it is obvious that whatever strategy the French Communists adopted in the 1970s was doomed to fail. The communist movement was already entering a period of global historical decline. But no one saw that at the time. The buzzword among the European Left was ‘convergence’, based on the now forgotten notion that the Western and Soviet systems would gradually come together as a by-product of détente. No Western leader – not Mitterrand, not Giscard, not Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, not Margaret Thatcher – imagined in their wildest dreams that, little more than a decade later, the Soviet Empire would collapse and most of the rest of the communist world with it.
In 1977, Marchais’s strategy seemed reasonable. Since embracing the Socialists had not worked, the Communist Party would hunker down in its corner, pose as the champion of the ‘authentic Left’ and wait for the Socialists to fall apart under the weight of their internal contradictions.
Mitterrand’s strategy was the mirror image of Marchais’s. Sooner or later, he felt certain, the Communists would have no choice but to return to the fold. ‘They can’t continue as they are,’ he told an interviewer in February 1978, two weeks before the first round of parliamentary elections. ‘Thanks to their policy, [we] can claim to be both the party of the Union of the Left and the party which resists the Communists. I come out on top on every count. It’s too good to be true.’
That spring it seemed that he would be proved right. Giscard warned that if the Left won a parliamentary majority, as the opinion polls were indicating, he would not resign, but nor would he be able to prevent the new government carrying out the Left’s policies. If the French failed to make ‘the right choice’, they would have to live with the consequences. Mitterrand, who by then was thinking along the same lines, decided he would name Pierre Mauroy Prime Minister so as to be able to concentrate on the presidential election which would follow in 1981.
It turned out to be a fine example of counting chickens before they hatched.
He realised too late that Marchais was determined to take the strategy of rupture to its logical conclusion. The last thing the Communists wanted was a victory of the Left. Surreptitiously they made common cause with the Right to prevent a Socialist victory. Mitterrand’s efforts to reassure communist voters – Socialist candidates would stand down, he promised, whenever the Communists were better placed, even if the Communists refused to do the same – alienated moderate voters without significantly increasing communist support.
On the evening of March 12, when the results from the first round came in, the Socialists had far fewer than the seven million votes that Mitterrand had hoped for. They had made a good showing, garnering, for the first time, more support than any other party. But it was not what they needed.
The Communists were cock-a-hoop. ‘Everything is set for a beautiful defeat!’ one Politburo member crowed.
And so it was.
The ill feeling generated by the collapse of the Common Programme meant that in the second round many Socialists refused to vote for Communist candidates, and vice versa. Mitterrand might insist, ‘Our hopes rest on one word: Union!’, but the electorate refused to follow. The Union of the Left was definitively broken. In terms of the percentage of votes cast, the Socialists still achieved their best result ever. But in the new assembly, the Left had 199 seats (113 Socialists and Left-Radicals; 86 Communists), while the Right had 277. Giscard would remain in power for the rest of his seven-year term.
* * *
fn1 It would be tedious even to begin to list the now-vanished and, for the most part, forgotten parties created to further the aspirations of French presidential and prime ministerial contenders: the RPF and later the UNR to support de Gaulle; the UDSR, a vehicle for Pleven and Mitterrand; the RPR for Jacques Chirac; the UDF for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and so on ad infinitum. Of the dozen or so pa
rties active in French politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century, only two, the Communists and Radicals, existed under their present names before 1970. The latter, originally a left-wing movement which drifted to the Centre and finally to the Right, is the oldest French party, established in 1901. By comparison the British Conservative Party originated in the seventeenth century, the US Democratic Party was founded in the 1830s and the Republican Party in 1854.
fn2 This time André Rousselet, who was again in charge of fund-raising, was able to gather some tens of millions of francs (upwards of £3 million or US $7 million). Substantial sums were provided by Socialist-led municipalities, but nothing by the Communist Party. Additional contributions came, as before, from wealthy individuals who counted themselves as Mitterrand’s friends – among them André Bettencourt, René Bousquet and François de Grossouvre – and from the Patronat, the French industrialists’ confederation.
10
Politics is War
FOR THE SECOND time in four years, Mitterrand had failed to deliver. In 1974, when the Left had been united, he had missed the presidency by a whisker. Now the Left’s disunity had snatched away a parliamentary victory which had been within its grasp. The stage was set for a challenge to his leadership.