Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
L'Interminable Enterrement: Le communisme et les intellectuels français depuis 1956
Gavin Bowd, L'Interminable Enterrement: Le communisme et les intellectuels français depuis 1956, Digraphe, Paris, 1999, ISBN 2-84237-029-5, pp224, 120 FF.
After the wave of largely sympathetic literature devoted to French communism in the 'eurocommunist' era (from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s), there was a distinct reduction in the scale of journalistic and academic interest from the mid-1980s on. There are several interlocking reasons for this.
First, the French Communist Party (the PCF) simply became of less significance in the domestic party political landscape. During the post-war decades, up until the end of the 1970s at least, the PCF had consistently won more than 20% of the popular vote, except in the special circumstances of the election of 1958, which consecrated de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, and for much of this period was the best-organised, best-funded French party, with more members than any other, and more influence in national life. Indeed, the highly polarised character of French political life during these years is illustrated in André Malraux's famous comment that there were only two political realities in France during the 1960s, the Gaullists (Malraux was one of the General's most loyal ministers), and the Communists. This huge influence existed in spite of the fact that the PCF had not played a role in government since it was expelled from the national unity administration in 1947. By the time of the 1986 parliamentary election, held under a proportional system that ought to have benefitted the communists, the PCF was reduced to less than 10%, and it has struggled, generally without success, to climb above that figure subsequently.
Second, many of those on the left in Britain, Ireland and the US, who were captivated by the potential of eurocommunism, and followed the discussions and debates between the PCF, Enrico Berlinguer's Italian CP and Santiago Carrillo's Spanish CP, had their hopes for a radical departure in Western communist theory and practice dashed. In the French case, by 1984, and in fact well before that, the PCF had definitely turned its back on this strategic ouverture, summed up by the decision of the party to withdraw its ministers from the Socialist-dominated government. There were two dimensions, international and domestic, to this phenomenon: the PCF, under General Secretary Georges Marchais, flirted with a genuine break from Soviet tutelage in the decade between 1968-1978, and many members did reassess their political and emotional relationship with the international communist movement, and 'actually existing socialism'.
However, increasingly concerned that the PCF's revolutionary vocation and distinctiveness was in danger of being watered down, so the party was coming to resemble the 'social democratic reformism' that it had so long maligned, the leadership moved to re-establish its credentials as the most 'loyal' and orthodox of the Western parties. Marchais, in a live broadcast from Moscow, resolutely defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then lent his support to the Polish imposition of martial law. In domestic terms, the PCF had worked tirelessly to construct the Union of the Left and the Common Programme, only to see it bring Mitterrand's PS to effective power. After 1981, the PCF found itself with little or no influence over the direction of government policy, and its 'workerist' base increasingly found itself at the sharp end of Mauroy's austerity. In these circumstances, the PCF seemed less relevant, and less attractive, to many observers, even sympathetic ones.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the party, and the historical tradition of communism in France, was on the wane. Some commentators, particularly gleeful anti-communists, sought to explain the decline, whether in terms of the failure to respond to socio-economic change, political marginalisation, an internal culture that remained marked by incomplete 'deStalinisation', or the crisis of international communism. Others, especially those who had invested a great deal of hope in the capacity of Western communists to innovate and renovate Marxist theory for a new historical era, decided to draw a discreet veil over the painful case of the PCF, preferring instead to follow the transformation of Italian communism. For both groups, the decline was either explicitly (the anti-communists) or implicitly (the 'reform' communists) viewed as irreversible. The French communist tradition was in the process of dying, and while it might be instructive and necessary to pick over the bones of the carcass, it was understandable that this wasn't a job that appealed to everybody.
The 'endless burial' referred to in the title of Gavin Bowd's study of communism and French intellectuals since 1956, is a phrase used by François Furet, historian and ex-communist (he left the PCF in 1956). According to Furet, the endless burial began in 1956 with Khrushchev's 'secret speech' denouncing aspects of Stalinism, and finally concluded in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union. In his introduction, Bowd underlines his refusal to accept the prevailing opinion of writers such as Furet (in English, the most interesting examples include Sudhir Hazareesingh, Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani [1]), who effectively see the decline of communism in general, and in France in particular, as a 'normalisation', involving the 'exorcism' of the very idea of revolution. Furet draws a parallel between the experience of communism in the twentieth century, and the legacy of the French Revolution of 1789. Stalinism and Jacobinism serve a similar function in Furet's schema, as a 'totalitarian' betrayal of the true spirit of the utopian dream.
For Bowd, however, this belief in the triumph of Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, and more specifically the unfettered law of the market, ignores the continued existence of elements of French 'exceptionalism'. Tony Blair's exasperation at Lionel Jospin's 'plural left' government, and his misunderstanding of the political lineage it encapsulates, can be traced to real historical and theoretical differences; when Stéphane Courtois (the main editor of the monumental Black Book of Communism, a study of the crimes committed by communist regimes and movements over the course of the last century) claimed that there was a 'totalitarian' correspondence between fascism and communism, that the latter was responsible for 100 million deaths (four times as many as Nazism), and that therefore a 'Nuremburg' process is required for communism and communists, Jospin replied that he was proud to have PCF ministers in his cabinet (p.210). It is certainly hard to imagine Harry Pollitt and the CPGB being 'rehabilitated' by new Labour in a similar vein! Bowd points out that in spite of their hatred of 'totalitarianism', many of these authors, when they write about the defeat of French (and international) communism, display a 'totalising' vision of the world. There is no alternative, in this conception, to the global new world order, and the Left must adjust its sights to this 'pensée unique'.
The public and political role of intellectuals in French life, and their relationship to the PCF and the minor, yet significant, strand of 'communists outside the PCF', is the subject at the core of this book. Bowd takes a basically chronological approach, but implicit in much of his exposition, is the argument that the role of the politically- committed intellectual, and the specific role of communist intellectuals, has not disappeared, even in the apparent wreckage of the 'post-communist' decade since 1989-1991. The question that really needs an answer in Bowd's view, is not why the 'endless burial' of French communism took so long to finally be completed, but why it is that, ten years after the collapse of communism, the French party survives, even though not exactly in rude health.
Bowd takes some critics to task for their tendency to see French intellectuals in the PCF only through the prism of developments in the East, though of course he recognises the crucial importance of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and Poland (not to mention Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and others). Bowd's aim here is not to deflect attention from the deceptions and self-deceptions of many communists throughout these years, for he casts an unflinching eye over the 'mental acrobatics' performed by some intellectuals in their desire to avoid some of the truths of 'actually existing socialism'. No, what he does argue is that to understand the overall balance of judgment to be made by communist sympathisers during the 1950s and 1960s, the Manichean character of Cold War politics must not be excluded. Neither, especially in the French case, should the trauma of decolonisation, the bloody war in Algeria and the conflict in Vietnam, be left out of the reckoning. Bowd recognises that these examples can be used as a device to neutralise the stains of socialism, but he is surely right to argue that a broader geo-political perspective is necessary if we are to explain the continuing attraction of the PCF even after the tanks rolled into Budapest and Prague.
Another theme that runs throughout this fascinating study is the difficult and uneasy position of intellectuals within a party that was avowedly 'workerist' in nature. In a revealing analysis of the roles played by Louis Aragon and Louis Althusser, Bowd investigates the way in which intellectuals could be 'instrumentalised' by the PCF leadership, as prestigious symbols for the defence of the party line. However, the PCF failed to come to terms with the growth of intellectuals as a social category, who needed to be addressed and won over with distinctive social and economic policies. This was perhaps unsurprising, given the fierce attachment of the PCF to its self-identity as a proletarian party, a 'parti-guide' to lead the 'masses' towards revolutionary consciousness. Nevertheless, with intellectuals as a social category growing markedly in French society, particularly from the late-1960s on, and the number of 'genuine' proletarians in sharp decline, this attachment had severe consequences for the popularity of French communism.
Bowd has painstakingly traced the trials and tribulations of French communist intellectuals, and the political polarisation of intellectual life in France for much of this period. He has conducted revealing interviews with some of the major protagonists, and it is to be hoped this work reaches a wide audience. For the PCF, there was no simple way out of the core dilemma that faced the party from the mid-1970s on. As Jacques Derrida, cited by Bowd (p.116), acknowledges, the party could retreat into a hardline posture, but retain much of its identity and structure intact, or it could soften its stance, increase its distance from the international communist movement, but risk being conflated with the PS. Either way, there was a strong likelihood that the French people would begin to ask themselves whether they any longer had a need for the PCF. Under Marchais's leadership, despite the brief dalliance with eurocommunism, the PCF chose the former strategic direction, with disastrous consequences in terms of the party's marginalisation from mainstream French society, and waves of internal dissent that severely weakened the party from 1978 until 1994. After Marchais's retirement, and the accession of Robert Hue, the PCF has moved much further than ever before towards the 'mutation' of its revolutionary identity. As Bowd states, the self-proclaimed role of the party as Leninist avant-garde, as sole representative of the French proletariat, has been unceremoniously dumped, but whether this represents the prelude to the discovery of newly-creative revolutionary thought for the twenty-first century, or as simply a means of staving off the still-inevitable defeat and final 'burial', remains an open question.
Stephen Hopkins, University of Leicester
This review will also appear in a forthcoming edition of the Irish political review Times Change.
