Communist Party of France
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The Communist Party of France was founded in December 1920 at the Tours Congress of the Socialist Party (SFIO). A large majority of the congress's delegates voted in favor of affiliating with the Communist International (Comintern) and reorganizing the SFIO as the Section français de la Internationale Communiste (SFIC). (The non-Communist delegates left the congress and re-constituted the Socialist Party shortly thereafter.) The PCF grew by leaps and bounds, and by 1928, regularly received over 1 million votes and had over a dozen deputies in Parliament. Along with the Partito Comunista d'Italia and the German Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the PCF was one of the three largest Communist parties in the Western Hemisphere. During the battle in the Comintern between gactions led by Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, the PCF sided with the latter; consequently, when Stalin's faction won, most of the PCF's Central Committee was removed and replaced with non-Trotskyists. From this point forward, the French party expelled any Trotskyist or pro-Zinoviev factions in the party. In 1929, it adopted Stalin's theory of the Third Period, and verbally attacked the Socialists and other non-Communists as social fascists; however, the PCF back-peddled away from the Third Period after the KPD was destroyed in Germany.
In 1936, PCF head Maurice Thorez led his party into a Popular Front electoral pact with the Socialists and the Radical Party, a middle-class liberal political party. Further, Communist trade union Confédération générale du travail uni (CGTU) dissolved into the social-democratic CGT as a minority. (By the end of World War II, however, the Communists would gain full control of the CGT — causing Léon Jouhaux and other anti-Communists to split and form Force Ouvrière in 1947.) In April-July 1936, the Popular Front was voted into power and ousted the old center-right government. Though at first the Socialists led the Front (with the Socialist Léon Blum as Prime Minister), the Radicals won a majority between 1938-1940. The Radicals ended social reforms and betrayed the Front, leading the Socialists to leave it in 1940. Soon afterwards, the Popular Front became useless anyway after German troops invaded and occupied France. During the Nazi-German Occupation, the Communists played an important part in the French Resistance and gained much popularity as a result: In roughly a decade, the PCF jumped from 25,000 members to 500,000. By the end of World War II, the Communist Party was much larger in membership in membership than even the Socialist Party or Charles de Gaulle's MRP. They also gained popular support from workers by taking control of the militant General Confederation of Labor (CGT).
The Communist Party has been in slow decline since 1947. Due to the Sino-Soviet split and Hungary intervention in 1956, the PCF lost both Maoist and revisionist members at the same time. In 1965, the PCF supported the Plural-Left candidacy of Socialist François Mitterand for President. During the student/worker revolt of May 1968, the PCF failed to support the uprising — allowing groups to its left to draw the newly radicalized youth as a result. Many feel that if the PCF had supported Mai68, a revolution would surely have occurred. In 1969, the Communist Jacques Duclos received 21.27% of the vote for President in the first round. In 1972, the Communists established a common program with the Socialists and in 1974 once again supported Mitterand for President. Continuing to "de-Stalinize", the PCF officially ended its pursuit of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976. In the 1979 European elections, the PCF received 20.52% of the vote. In the 1980's, the PCF took part in President Mitterand's center-left coalition — just as the Communist Party continued to fall into decline. In 1988, two Communists (the "official" candidate, Andre Lajoinie, and the dissident Communist Pierre Juquin) ran for President, dividing the PCF vote.
After the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, the slow disintegration of the French Communist Party intensified. To try to stop this, the XXVII Congress of the PCF elected modernizer Robert Hue national secretary of the party. Hue sought to democratize the party while keeping it militant. In the 1995 Presidential elections, Robert Hue received 8.64% of the vote in the first round. In 1997, the Communists entered a new Socialist-led government under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and consequently received several ministerial posts. Meanwhile, orthodox Stalinists and other hardliners continued to attack Hue's revisionist tactics, forming such factions as Communist Regroupment and Communist Left in the 1990's. In May of 2002, the Communists received a shocking defeat. For President, Robert Hue received only 957,385 votes (3.41 percent); this not only placed him below moderate candidates, but also ones to his left (those of the Revolutionary Communist League and Lutte Ouvrière). Because Hue received less than five percent of the vote, his party was not reimbursed for its expenses and faced bankruptcy. Fortunately, the PCF received an flood of small and large checks, from as diverse an element as young militants to French actor Gerard Depardieu; membership rose by about 5,000 during this time. This softened the blow that was to come in June 2002, when the number of Communist deputies in Parliament dropped from 38 to 21. One of these lost seats was that of Robert Hue.
As long as the Communist Party continues to cling to the neo-liberal Socialists to "democratize," this trend of decline will probably continue as its left wing departs the party. The youth group of the PCF is the Movement of Communist Youth (MJC). The Communist union federation, the CGT, has 600,000 members, making it the second largest federation in France.
