France's Communists won a fifth of the vote yet sat out government for decades
After helping lead the wartime Resistance, the French Communist Party regularly drew more than 20 percent of the vote. Even so, it was pushed out of government in May 1947 and kept out for roughly thirty years. Its story tracks Europe's century: revolution, anti-fascism, Cold War isolation and slow reinvention.
The party was born in 1920, when most members of the socialist SFIO walked out to back the Bolsheviks and join the Communist International; Ho Chi Minh was among the activists involved in its creation. In the 1920s it took a lonely anti-colonial stance, urging fraternisation with Moroccan insurgents in the Rif War and organising a boycott of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Its leaders were deliberately working class: Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon, a miner, a pastry cook and a metalworker, steered it for almost three decades, with Thorez in charge from 1930 to 1964.
Against rising fascism it backed Léon Blum's Popular Front, which won in 1936, though it stayed out of the cabinet. It was the only French party to denounce the 1938 Munich Agreement. Yet after the Nazi-Soviet pact the Daladier government banned it in 1939. From 1940 it organised against the occupation, founding a National Front movement and the armed Francs-Tireurs et Partisans in May 1941 and cooperating with de Gaulle's Free France.
Liberation made it a major force, and it joined the governing coalition in 1945 and 1946 until Cold War fears ended that in 1947. Ambivalence over the Algerian war cost it support in the 1960s, and in May 1968 it backed striking workers while condemning the student revolutionaries. A 1973 Common Programme with François Mitterrand's Socialists promised retirement at 60 for men and 55 for women, but the Socialists steadily overtook it. Communists served in Mitterrand's first government until 1984 and again under Lionel Jospin from 1997.
Under Robert Hue from 1994 the party broke with the Soviet model, now calling it a perversion of communism. It has also reversed its 1970s hostility to feminism and gay rights, backing civil unions in 1998. Its support is far smaller today; Fabien Roussel won 2.28 percent in the 2022 presidential race. Oddly for a morally conservative party of its era, it elected seventeen of France's first thirty-three women deputies in 1946.
Source: French Communist Party
