Recent work on French and Belgian communism

With the ending of the first flurry of interest that followed the opening up of communist archives in the 1990s, some of the most interesting developments in the literature have been those showing a willingness to engage with wider historiographical concerns and methodologies. In a sense, this has always been the case, and some of the most durable accounts of communist politics have been those successively attesting the influence of the study of political parties, academic sociology and the new social history of the 1970s. In place of the simplified dichotomies that have occasionally featured in the centre-periphery debate, the relations between centre and periphery are increasingly being explored at a number of different levels (social, cultural, institutional and prosopographical), shifting over time and acknowledging specificities of context. Issues of language, memory, subjectivity and the construction of communist identities are seen to play a crucial role in the culture of stalinism, as do representations of the leader, the activist, the worker, and of gender, class and nation. The old debate around the party as transmission belt, centring on the execution or lack of it of instructions from above, is giving way to more complex narratives in which linear cause and effect have to be reconciled with the constantly shifting composition of communist parties themselves and of their relations with their host societies. Established periodisations interact with national chronologies involving existential issues such as whether or not a communist party could legally function, whether its leadership was located at home or in Moscow and how far it was subjected to the formative disciplines and physical threat associated with the latter. In a period of extreme ambivalence like that of the Popular Front, the combination of tightening controls at the centre and loosening ones at the periphery produced experiences ranging from virtual obliteration, as in the case of the Polish party, to the reputed 'heyday' of communism in a country like the USA. While by common consent the character of the centre-periphery debate has, at least in Britain, become somewhat 'esoteric', it is in the exploration of the complexities underlying the old bipolar model that future lines of enquiry are likely to develop.

There is not better place to start than with these texts published over the past four years in France and, in one case, Belgium. Precisely because the international dimension of communism is so important, the cross-fertilisation of its historiography across national boundaries provides particular opportunities for the opening up of more critical perspectives. Not only can the subject-matter of different communist parties provide a stimulus to comparison, but different historiographies provide an insight into alternative methodologies and intellectual traditions and their particular applications for the historian of communism. In relation to the literature under review, the development of a rich intellectual tradition in the field of prosopography and political sociology is particularly evident. Though debate over the PCF's policy at key moments like 1939-40 has naturally been intense, the party's sheer social presence also imposed itself on the historian of twentieth-century France, raising questions and demanding explanation at some level going beyond the simple party-line approach. Historians came to these questions from a variety of angles. If in one aspect the work of Annie Kriegel represented the work of the disillusioned former communist, the 'ethnographic' approach she adopted opened up wide-ranging questions concerning the cultural values and institutional disciplines holding together what she saw as a communist counter-society. Something of Kriegel's approach was taken forward by the journal Communisme, which she founded in 1982, but there was also a good deal of common ground with what Bernard Pudal describes as the 'axe "Institut Maurice Thorez-Sciences Po"' — younger communist historians exploring a less mythologised version of their own party's past, and inter-disciplinary studies emanating from the academic community and particularly the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris.[1] Among these academic studies, probably the best known to English-speaking readers is Georges Lavau's conception of the tribune party, while Pudal's own Prendre parti, published in 1989 and described as a 'historical sociology', was another major achievement.[2] At the same time, communists formed a significant population for the editors of the Maitron, the biographical dictionary of the French working-class movement, and with access to the party's 'cadre' files a flourishing literature on and around the issue of communist biography was quickly established. Beyond the burgeoning historiography of the PCF, contributions by international specialists like José Gotovitch in Belgium and Brigitte Studer in Switzerland opened up further opportunities for a comparative perspective.

None of this amounts to an orthodoxy, and it is explicitly intended not to. However, to the extent that this literature is informed by an overall theoretical framework it is to be found in the collection Le siècle des communismes, and the deliberate plural emphasis of its title. Edited by a group of scholars including Pudal, the collection is presented as an antidote to the style of indiscriminate polemic which Stéphane Courtois brought to the famous Livre noir, and like the Black Book itself it ranges beyond the Comintern and its European preoccupations to take in Soviet communism, China, Latin America and the Arab world. Of special interest to the comparative historian are the opening and closing sections on interpretations of communism and its political sociology respectively. The first of them includes an interesting essay in comparative historiography by Pudal and Bruno Groppo, suggesting how the well-worn contrast/comparison between the French and Italian communist parties can also be developed instructively in relation to their respective historiographies. There are also two worthwhile contributions by Brigitte Studer, one on the 'new communist woman', and the other providing a cogent evaluation of the development of traditional, revisionist and post-revisionist historiographies of communism. Here as elsewhere Studer argues for the increasingly 'transnational' character of communist historiography, which could cover a multitude of sins. If however it means not the sweeping application of general rules, but a sensitivity to both variations and commonalities running across national boundaries, then Le siècle des communismes may be taken as an impressive validation of the transnational approach.

The volume also contains contributions by Pudal and Claude Pennetier, the editor of the Maitron, on cadre formation and the role of leadership cults. Of considerable interest in themselves, these provide an introduction to an extraordinarily productive seam of biography and prosopography which several of the works under review draw upon in different forms. Probably the most conventional is the biographical dictionary Komintern: l'histoire et les hommes. This is a meticulous work of collective scholarship produced under the auspices of the Maitron and provides nearly five hundred biographical profiles relating to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxemburg. As well as covering communists from these countries exercising Comintern functions the dictionary also includes international leaders and functionaries from the perspective of their relations with and impact upon the French-speaking countries. As the editors point out, the dictionary is to some extent complementary to existing biographical dictionaries in emphasising those aspects of its subjects' lives most directly touching upon relations with the Comintern. On the other hand, access to information from Comintern personal files means that a vast amount of new biographical data is made available. Certain major figures like Jacques Duclos, who has not yet found a biographer (except, at inordinate length, himself), are the subject of essays comparable with a Dictionary of Labour Biography entry in this country. Though essentially a work of reference rather than analysis, the volume also includes a substantial introduction to the principal themes and issues of Comintern history by Serge Wolikow, who also provides a shorter literature review in Le siècle des communismes. Covering historiography, institutional structures, political cultures and the development of ideology and strategy, Wolikow provides a more discursive account which can usefully be read alongside the excellent short Comintern history of Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew.[3]

Also relatively conventional in format is Jean Vigreux' carefully documented biography of Waldeck Rochet. Successor to the longstanding PCF general secretary Maurice Thorez, after the latter's death in 1964 Rochet offered the prospect of a Khrushchev or even Dubcek-like modernisation of the PCF and its opening out to the changing social and political realities of post-war France and the particular challenge of alliance-building. As Vigreux demonstrates, Rochet won a good deal of respect for this approach from figures like Mitterand and it remains an open question how much further the process might have been taken had he not retired on grounds of health at the end of 1969. That, however, is a story in itself. The previous year Rochet had led the PCF in its first ever condemnation of the Russians over the suppression of the Prague Spring, and both the timing of his retirement and the fact that he was operated upon in Moscow shortly beforehand has naturally given rise to a good deal of speculation. Vigreux on the whole is somewhat dismissive of what are so far unproven theories regarding the state of Rochet's health, and he makes some telling points about the tendentious use of historical evidence that has sometimes characterised them. Nevertheless, on no evidence whatsoever except the weight of transnational expectations, this reviewer for one would be more surprised if the archives turned out to exonerate the Soviets from any role involvement than the reverse.

Vigreux is one of the few established authorities on the Krestintern, the Profintern's peasant equivalent, and has contributions on these themes in both Le siècle des communismes and Cultures communistes. From a British perspective one of the most striking aspects of Rochet's biography is the extent to which he bore with him the hallmark of his rural upbringing, for the CPGB of course had no Krestintern presence and no leader describable like Rochet as a 'man of the soil'. Perhaps the nearest equivalent was (and is) George Matthews, the son of a Bedfordshire farmer and the party's sometime assistant general secretary and editor of the Daily Worker. However, that only underlines the differences, for Matthews's university education and middle-class status again suggest by default the absence in Britain of any significant tradition of plebeian rural radicalism.[4] Rochet and Matthews might also suggest a further possible distinction, for whereas Rochet represented an older, 'Leninist' generation, sifted out on the basis of social class and in Rochet's case educated at the Lenin School, Matthews belonged to the Popular Front cohort of the 1930s' youth and student movement. By the time of Rochet's brief ascendancy, so too did a number of the CPGB's leading functionaries including Klugmann, Alexander, Ramelson and even - rather stretching the point - the general secretary Gollan.[5] One of the interesting questions for the historian of the CPGB is why the generational cohort represented by Rochet, and more specifically those trained at the Lenin School, should have played a far less prominent role in the post-war party leadership than it did in several other countries.[6]

One of Vigreux' most interesting chapters offers an account of the contested versions of Rochet and his political legacy not only within the PCF but across the political spectrum. Stéphane Sirot's book on Maurice Thorez provides a series of essays on similar themes from a number of different perspectives. In Thorez's case, the functions of the conventional biographer had to some extent already been met by Philippe Robrieux, though with the opening of the archives there is surely now scope for a more definitive study. Sirot's object here, however, is rather different, and to some exent builds on Pudal's work in exploring the diverse constructions and representations of Thorez's life, whether by the PCF, its detractors, its historians or - after a fashion - Thorez himself. He has a fascinating chapter revisiting the controversy over Thorez's vaunted identification with the coalfields, which was so important to his credibility as a self-proclaimed 'son of the people'. Refuting claims advanced by Robrieux, Sirot records that Thorez spent some three hundred working days in the mines and politically locates him within the tradition of the miners' deputy as well as the political rupture identified with bolshevism. This seems a significant but still rather limited qualification, at least if one compares Thorez with his British analogue Pollitt. Pollitt, after all, had accumulated a decade and a half of industrial experience before the Communist Party was even formed and continued working at his trade until he was thirty-seven. Similarly, while the significance of Thorez's participation in the 1923 and 1925 CGTU congresses is rightly pointed out by Sirot, the CGTU's close identification with the PCF means that politically speaking this was a rather different sort of grounding in union work from that provided by the TUC and its affiliates in Britain. Born a decade after Pollitt in 1900, Thorez appears from this perspective as part of a younger 'Leninist' generation politically formed with, and as a part of, the Communist Party.

Perhaps the comparison can be traced at the level of the two leaders' published autobiographies. Here in particular, Sirot draws on the work of Pennetier and Pudal, who in Le siècle des communismes and elsewhere have stressed the peculiar anonymity of Thorez's Fils du peuple as an 'apprenticeship manual of the 'perfect leader"' lacking any distinctive trait or experience setting him apart from the party. Indeed, not only does Fils du peuple itself lack any sort of individualisation, but it appears from a list compiled by Pennetier and Pudal in one of the other works under review that this was the only autobiography of a living French communist published until 1967.[7] Again, a comparison of the PCF and the CPGB in this regard raises some interesting questions. In grouping Fils du peuple with a series of lives embodying the depersonalised leadership cults of the Stalin era, Sirot cites William Gallacher's Revolt on the Clyde (1936) as an early prototype. Reasonable as that seems, it is not entirely clear that Gallacher's volume will bear this construction. For a start, it is no less individualised than many other British labour movement memoirs. Just as significantly, it deals almost exclusively with the somewhat mythologised pre-bolshevik past that set Gallacher apart from his younger contemporaries - the very reverse of Fils du peuple. The same was even more true of Pollitt's Serving My Time 1940), the nearest British equivalent to Fils du peuple, explicitly intended for the same exemplary functions and yet unmistakeably conveying a sense of something lost as well as gained since the appearance of communism. This is an issue I have explored more fully elsewhere, and to the extent that the construction of these exemplary lives played a defining role in the political culture of communist parties, then differences in their frequency, tone, scope, language, content and market will bear more detailed examination as a line of comparative enquiry.[8]

Further comparative reflections are stimulated by two very fine collections of essays broadly coming under the rubric 'political sociology'. The first of them, Militantisme et militants is not specifically concerned with communist activism[9] but gives a taste of the wider literature on which the more specialised accounts of communism draw, and to which they contribute their own distinct perspective. The nineteen essays cover themes ranging from the psychology of activism and the gendered construction of the activist to the role of the militant in a wide variety of movements, from the Christian trade unions to the Red Brigades. There is also an interesting contribution on the 'traitor' by Guy Desolré, confirming the renewed interest in the 'renegade' or the 'rat' which has naturally accompanied the interest in less teleological narratives of the left. Of more specific interest to historians of communism are the chapters by Rémi Skoutelsky on volunteers in the International Brigades and Henri Wehenkel on communist activism in Luxemburg. Skoutelsky's chapter contains the interesting information that Spanish veterans were marginalised within the PCF almost as they were in Eastern Europe - witness the purging of André Marty, discussed by Pennetier and Pudal in the same volume - and this again raises an interesting question: why, if one thinks of cases like Peter Kerrigan and the aforementioned Alexander and Ramelson, does this not appear to have been the case in Britain? Pennetier and Pudal again have two of the most interesting contributions, one discussing the mimetic phenomenon of purges within the PCF, the other describing the working-class militant as a sort of archetype of the activist, just as in some respect the communist cadre in turn embodied in an extreme form many of the generic characteristics of the working-class activist.

If a single volume can be recommended as an introduction to this body of literature, it is Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux. The book is divided into three sections, and the highlight of the first of these, on the USSR in the 1930s, is a powerful commentary by Berthold Unfried on the role of self-criticism in the Comintern, particularly the Lenin School. Unfried shows the crucial role of self-criticism, both as an affirmation of identity with the party and a purging of all that was pernicious in the communist's 'former personality'. He also describes how communists formed in a western cultural environment had difficulty in assimilating these requirements - the French-speaking sector of the school were accused of practising 'l'autocritique à la française' - and how with the mounting terror of the 1930s they became identified as a threat to socialist construction almost by their very existence. Like so many of the contributions, based extensively on materials in the Moscow archives, the chapter makes for sombre reading. A second section is devoted to the communist institutional biographies, on which Pennetier and Pudal themselves are established as leading authorities. Here their analysis is supplemented by contributions on the use of biographical controls at the district or federal level and within the Italian communist party. The book's final section is devoted to communist memory and autobiography particularly in the post-war period, and includes contributions on Italy and Czechoslovakia as well as France. Pennetier and Pudal again contribute, here analysing the published autobiographies of the PCF's 'sons of the people', and they also provide a substantial introduction discussing the role of the biographical 'tryptich' of 'party autobiography, self-criticism, confession' in the political culture of stalinism. This is a theme that would bear fuller exploration in the case of the CPGB. Though collected in line with international practices, in Britain the autobiographies were compiled less frequently, by fewer communists, and in many cases none can be found at all. That their number peaked sharply at the time of the show trials of the late 1930s and again during the Cold War suggests the importance of the external impetus, but at the same time there were criticisms from within the CPGB concerning the largely formalistic way it promoted self-criticism.[10] Precisely those themes traced by Unfried in a Moscow context would also repay study at a national level.

The final collection, Cultures communistes, is the latest in a series of volumes emerging from international conferences held at the University of Dijon. Loosely organised around the twin themes of war and modernity, the collection again bears out the claim of an emerging transnational historiography, taking in the mainly oppositional communist movements of the west as well as communism in power in Russia and China. The specific topics addressed range widely, from communist attitudes to commercial sport and the 'exaltation' of modernity in L'Humanité, to the role which the culture and/or organisation of war played in both stalinism - and in Gilles Vergnon's contribution - trotskyism, as well as the bolshevism in which they had their common root. A number of the contributions enter into fields of recent controversy, notably Nicolas Werth's very lucid discussion of violence in the Russian revolution and Bruno Groppo's rebuttal of the reduction of 'anti-fascism' to a simple tool of communism, as found in the work of François Furet and others.

The themes provide an effective focus for most of the contributions, and yet there are sufficient hints in some of them that communism also needs to be understood in terms including resistance to war and the rejection of many forms of modernity.[11] Perhaps that would make the subject of another volume. At the crudest level, it was the capitalists' wars and conceptions of modernity that communists rejected, and their own versions of the same that functioned as a sort of ideological glue. 'Battling' for peace while celebrating the might of the Red Army, or defending forms of industrial rationalisation in the USSR that were the focus of resistance in the west, it might be said that these were only seeming tensions and ambiguities: the basic underlying consistency was 'which side were you on?' However, if we are to think in terms of communisms plural, and not the now untenable concept of a simple monolith, then the coexistence of these different communisms even at the level of individual helps explain the countless personal movements in relation to the party that were so marked a feature of communism, at least in countries and periods where its formal disciplines were relatively weak. Some of these communisms contained an implicit critique of some of the others, and if that could be suppressed indefinitely by a process of doublethink, it also explains why those breaking with orthodox communism so often did so in the name of communism or its founding precepts. Part of the reality of anti-fascism, as an ex-communist like Furet might have realised, was that recruits of this period provided such a very high proportion of the anti-stalinists leaving the party in 1956.

As a sample of work published over the past four years, these contributions on the whole are of an extraordinarily high quality and open up fruitful lines of enquiry that will bear a good deal of further exploration. For those committed to a communist historiography that is rigorous, critical and transnational in scope, while retaining the plural form which is commensurate with the subject's complexity and longevity, these volumes will provide an indispensable point of reference and comparison.

Kevin Morgan

1.

Le siècle des communismes, p75.
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2.

Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989.
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3.

Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern. A history of international communism from Lenin to Stalin, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.
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4.

According to his son, Pollitt ruled out Matthews for the key symbolic role of CPGB general secretary because he did not have a working-class background.
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5.

Born into a working-class family nackground in 1911, Gollan was a communist from the age of sixteen and edited the Young Worker during the latter part of the Class Against Class period. However, he did not attend the Lenin School and made his political mark as secretary of the YCL from 1935.
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6.

For preliminary thoughts, see Gidon Cohen and Kevin Morgan, 'Stalin's sausage machine. British students at the International Lenin School, 1926-37', Twentieth Century British History, 13, 4, 2002.
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7.

See Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste, pp240-6.
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8.

See Kevin Morgan, 'Sons of the people: Harry Pollitt, Maurice Thorez and the construction of exemplary communist lives' in Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds), Power, Personality and Persuasion: the Impact of the Individual in British Politics Since 1867, I.B. Tauris, forthcoming, 2005. As my knowledge is confined to works available in English or French, I should be particularly interested to hear from anybody pursuing similar questions on works in other languages.
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9.

I have throughout used the terms 'activist' and activism as what seems the closest equivalent to the French term militantisme.
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10.

For example by the executive member and future maoist George Thomson.
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11.

I have throughout used the terms 'activist' and activism as what seems the closest equivalent to the French term militantisme.
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Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 16, Spring 2004

Available on-line since July 2004