Коллектив авторов – Очерки истории Франции XX–XXI веков. Статьи Н. Н. Наумовой и ее учеников (страница 25)

A similar theme – the PCF’s alignment with France’s ‘democratic forces’ against the ‘reactionaries’ who opposed the constitutional draft – is found in the treatment of de Gaulle during the campaign. Thus Pravda reported Thorez’s carefully-worded attack on the General, who, ‘whatever the respect owed him for past services to the country’, had now lined up with a ‘reactionary coalition’ including former supporters of the 1938 Munich agreements with Hitler, and of the Vichy regime.[382]After polling day, Pravda again underlined that by supporting a strong executive and warning of ‘disorder and anarchy’ if the constitution were approved, de Gaulle had provoked negative reactions not only from the PCF (which now branded him ‘the representative of the reactionary forces’) but also from former supporters in the MRP and in newspapers like Le Monde and Le Figaro.[383]

The referendum result, in which the constitution was approved by 53.5 per cent of those voting (or 36.2 per cent of the registered electorate) was hailed in Pravda as a ‘victory for democratic forces’ in France, and a ‘double defeat’ for ‘the reactionaries’. The ‘democratic forces’, the PCF chief among them, had first, at the price of significant concessions during the drafting, successfully defended articles defining the ‘republican and democratic’ nature of the regime, and had then prevailed in the ‘intense political struggle’ of the campaign. The three parties – PCF, SFIO, and MRP – that had backed the constitution now faced a further ‘fierce struggle’ at the parliamentary elections against the ‘reactionary camp’ – the PRL, the right wing of the Radicals, the UDSR, and the Union Gaulliste – which had opposed the text.

A ‘hard and important test’, requiring ‘the union of all the truly democratic forces of the country’, awaited France’s renascent democracy, especially as ‘outside influences’ were encouraging the reactionaries.[384]It would be hard to find a better exegesis of Stalin’s instructions to the PCF of two years earlier.

In the short term at least, the Party’s behaviour in the autumn 1946 appeared to pay off. It had played a significant role in drafting the constitution, with several clauses bearing its mark. And at the November 1946 elections it regained its leading position, winning a historical record score of 28.2 per cent. Yet the PCF had still not managed to implement the core of Stalin’s instructions – to unite the Left under its leadership, ready to move onto the offensive and take power in due course. Indeed, a final Thorez candidacy for the premiership failed – not, this time, because it was refused by the Socialist leadership, but only because the SFIO was unable to enforce voting discipline on its own Deputies, 23 of whom opposed the PCF leader. The PCF was again forced to fall in behind Socialist prime ministers (Blum in December 1946, and Ramadier in January 1947) and, with the constitution ratified, a Socialist president (Auriol). Despite these concessions, within a year the Party would find itself more isolated than ever, out of government and backing a fierce wave of strikes that shook, but did not topple, the new regime.

The PCF’s displacement from the seat of government to the political ‘ghetto’, where it would remain through (and beyond) the remaining life of the Fourth Republic, was played out in five main locations: the scenes of armed colonial conflict in Madagascar and Indochina; the shopfloor of Renault’s Boulogne-Billancourt works; the heart of political Paris, the Chamber and the Council of Ministers; the founding conference of the Cominform at Sklarska-Poreba, in Poland; and finally, in November-December 1947, across the whole of urban and industrial France.

Colonial conflicts, analysed in this book by Martin Shipway, undermined the Communists’ position in the Ramadier government from the moment it took office on 22 January 1947. War had broken out in Indochina a month earlier; it was a Communist Defence Minister, François Billoux, who was now responsible, at least nominally, for the armies fighting Ho Chi-Minh’s Communist-dominated nationalist movement.[385]By the early spring of 1947 the PCF was mobilising public opposition within France to the war; Billoux refused to stand up in the Chamber in homage to France’s troops fighting there; and when Ramadier sought a vote of confidence on his Indochina policy on 22 March, he was supported by the PCF’s ministers, but not by its other Deputies, who abstained. A week later an insurrection broke out in Madagascar its savage repression led the PCF ministers to walk out of the Council of Ministers on 16 April.

But it was wages policy that provoked the final break. Whatever the benefits of some policy initiatives backed by the PCF – the greater security enjoyed by public-sector workers after nationalisations, and the foundation of France’s welfare state – the PCF’s support for wage restraint alienated workers. That was already visible in the slow rate of party membership renewals that spring, as well as in the CGT’s disappointing results in elections to governing bodies of the social security system.[386]A strike over wages at Renault, organised by a small Trotskyist group from 25 April, left the CGT, after four days, with little choice but to join in. And when Ramadier, by now resolved to force the issue, asked for a vote of confidence over wages policy on 4 May, all of the Communist Deputies, including the ministers, voted against the government of which they were a part. It is likely that they expected Ramadier to resign; in the ensuing negotiations to form a government, they could demonstrate the impossibility of ruling the country without Communist co-operation. Instead, Ramadier found non-Communist replacements for the PCF ministers, and carried on governing with the support of Socialists, MRP and Radicals.[387]

With the dismissal of Thorez and his colleagues on 5 May 1947, the PCF was out of office and friendless: Stalin’s strategy of November 1944 had clearly failed. The PCF leaders, however, went on trying to implement it for five more months. On the international scene, the PCF evoked the ‘division of the world into two blocs’, but as a danger to be avoided rather than a fait accompli – even if the summer saw increasingly hostile statements towards ‘American imperialism’, especially after the Soviets had finally withdrawn from negotiations over the Marshall Plan, as well as (unsubstantiated) claims that the Americans had engineered the Party’s removal from government. In domestic politics, the Communists now did nothing to restrain outbreaks of industrial unrest; the aim was to prove how necessary their participation in government was. Thus, the emphasis at the Eleventh Congress, held from 25 to 29 June, remained the PCF’s status as a ‘party of government’ and the need to bring the Socialists (if not the MRP) back to a left-wing alliance. Even on 22 September, Thorez was still calling for the PCF’s return to office within a ‘government of democratic union’.[388]

Just as L’Humanité was carrying Thorez’s message to thousands of Communist readers, Duclos was gathering with leading figures from the Italian and East European Communist parties in Sklarska-Poreba. What they heard from the Soviet Politburo member Andreï Zhdanov could leave them in no doubt that Moscow’s line had changed radically. The world, said Zhdanov, was now divided into ‘two camps’ – the ‘imperialist and anti-democratic’ camp aimed at the ‘world domination of American imperialism’, and the ‘anti-imperialist and democratic’ camp, led by the Soviet Union, which sought the ‘undermining of imperialism, the consolidation of democracy and the eradication of the remnants of fascism’. Particularly dangerous in this confrontation was the ‘treacherous policy of right-wing Socialists like Blum in France, Attlee and Bevin in England, Schumacher in Germany’, who, as the imperialists’ ‘faithful accomplices’, were ‘sowing dissension in the ranks of the working class and poisoning its mind’.[389]It followed that alliances with such traitors, as practised until May by the French and Italian parties, were a crass error. The French and Italian comrades now stood accused of legalism, opportunism, and parliamentarianism, as well as a soft line towards the Marshall Plan, and were forced to make a thoroughgoing self-criticism before going home.

The PCF digested the Zhdanov line within a month. Thorez reproduced it at length in his report to the Central Committee on 29 October, regretting the Party’s ‘slowness’ in analysing the new international situation. No longer were the SFIO and MRP placed, as a year earlier, in the ‘democratic’ camp: now all non-Communist forces, from Socialists to Gaullists, belonged to the American party’.[390]The new line was translated into action in France’s workplaces and streets, on the back of rising working-class discontent resulting from falling living standards. Now the PCF proposed to lead industrial action, through its CGT majority, and to add political demands to wage claims. On 12 November the CGT’s Central Committee linked a virulent attack on the Marshall Plan (henceforth an ‘attempt by warmongering American capitalists to enslave Europe’)[391]to calls for strikes in support of a 25 per cent wage rise. The strike wave that gripped France for the next four weeks involved some 2.5 million workers and an exceptional level of violence. Marseilles and other southern towns fell, albeit briefly, into a state of quasi-insurrection; CGT militants derailed the Paris-Lille express with the loss of sixteen lives. The Ramadier government fell on 22 November. But its successor, headed by Robert Schuman, held firm; the Socialist Interior Minister Jules Moch proved ferocious in his use of police and armed forces against strikers, adding further poison to his party’s now execrable relations with the PCF; the moderates in the CGT drifted back to work after three weeks; and the strike formally ended on 10 December. The PCF had made a significant demonstration of force; but it ended the year more isolated than ever, with the CGT now split by the defection of its moderates to form a new union, Force Ouvrière. In conventional political terms, the policy pursued since the Liberation was in tatters. But the autumn U-turn had returned the Party to Moscow’s good graces. A meeting with Stalin in Moscow on 18 November – three years almost to the day since their conversation of 1944 – confirmed Thorez as the leader who would take the PCF into its long crossing of the Fourth Republic desert.[392]