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The French Left () refers to communist, Socialism, Social democracy, democratic socialist, and anarchist political forces in France. The term originates from the National Assembly of 1789, where supporters of the revolution were seated on the left of the assembly. During the 1800s, left largely meant support for the republic, whereas right largely meant support for the monarchy.
The left in France was represented at the beginning of the 20th century by two main political parties, namely the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), created in 1905 as a merger of various Marxism parties.
In the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution and the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the French Left divided itself in Reformism and Revolutionary during the 1920 Tours Congress.
Following Napoleon III's 1851 coup and the subsequent establishment of the Second Empire, the Left was excluded from the political arena and focused on organising the workers. The growing French workers movement consisted of diverse strands; Marxism began to rival Radical Republicanism and the "utopian socialism" of Auguste Comte and Charles Fourier with whom Karl Marx had become disillusioned. Socialism fused with the Jacobin ideals of Radical Republicanism leading to a unique political posture embracing nationalism, socialist measures, democracy and anti-clericalism (opposition to the role of the church in controlling French social and cultural life) all of which remain distinctive features of the French Left. Most practicing Catholics continue to vote conservative while areas which were receptive to the revolution in 1789 continue to vote socialist.
The only social law of the bourgeois July Monarchy was to outlaw, in 1841, Child labour under eight years of age, and night labor for those of less than 13 years. The law, however, was almost never implemented. Christians imagined a "charitable economy", while the ideas of Socialism, in particular utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, etc.) diffused themselves. Louis Auguste Blanqui theorized Socialist coup d'états, the socialist and anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon theorized mutualism, while Karl Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, and met there Friedrich Engels.
Marx had come to Paris to work with Arnold Ruge, another revolutionary from Germany, on the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, while Engels had come especially to meet Marx. There, he showed him his work, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marx wrote for the Vorwärts revolutionary newspaper, established and run by the secret society called League of the Just, founded by German workers in Paris in 1836 and inspired by the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf and his ideal of social equality. The League of the Just was a splinter group from the League of the Just ( Bund der Geaechteten) created in Paris two years before by Theodor Schuster, Wilhelm Weitling and others German emigrants, mostly Journeyman. Schuster was inspired by the works of Philippe Buonarroti. The latter league had a pyramidal structure inspired by the secret society of the Republican Carbonari, and shared ideas with Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier's utopian socialism. Their aim was to establish a "Social Republic" in the German states which would respect "freedom", "equality" and "civic virtue".
The League of the Just participated in the Blanquism uprising of May 1839 in Paris. Marx and the Permanent Revolution in France: Background to the Communist Manifesto by Bernard Moss, p. 10, in Socialist Register, 1998 Hereafter expelled from France, the League of the Just moved to London, where they would transform themselves into the Communist League.
In his spare time, Marx studied Proudhon, whom he would later criticize in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). He developed his theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, published posthumously, as well as his theory of ideology in The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized the Young Hegelians: " It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.".Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845 (Part I, " Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular") For the first time, Marx related history of ideas with economic history, linking the "ideological superstructure" with the "economical infrastructure", and thus tying together philosophy and economics. Inspired both by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Adam Smith, he imagined an original theory based on the key Marxist notion of Class conflict, which appeared to him self-evident in the Parisian context of insurrection and permanent turmoil. " The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class," did he conclude in his essay, setting up the program for the years to come, a program which would be further explicated in The Communist Manifesto, published on 21 February 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, three days before the proclamation of the Second Republic. Arrested and expelled to Belgium, Marx was then invited by the new regime back to Paris, where he was able to witness the June Days uprising first hand.
"roughly 20,000 Communards or suspected sympathizers were, a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre's ‘Terror’ of 1793–94. More than 7,500 were jailed or deported to places like New Caledonia. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain and the United States. In 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the left. Not till 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned Communards. Meantime, the Third Republic found itself strong enough to renew and reinforce Napoleon III's imperialist expansion—in Indochina, Africa, and Oceania. Many of France's leading intellectuals and artists had participated in the Commune (Gustave Courbet was its quasi-minister of culture, Arthur Rimbaud and Camille Pissarro were active propagandists) or were sympathetic to it. The ferocious repression of 1871 and after was probably the key factor in alienating these milieux from the Third Republic and stirring their sympathy for its victims at home and abroad."
The February 1871 legislative elections had been won by the monarchists Orléanists and Legitimists, and it was not until the 1876 elections that the Republicanism won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Henceforth, the first task for the center-left was to firmly establish the Third Republic, proclaimed in September 1870. Rivalry between the Legitimists and the Orléanists prevented a new Bourbon Restoration, and the Third Republic became firmly established with the 1875 Constitutional Laws. However, anti-Republican agitation continued, with various crisis, including the Boulangisme crisis or the Dreyfus affair. The main political forces in the Left at this time were the Opportunist Republicans, the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, and the emergent Socialist parties who won several municipal elections in the 1880s, establishing what has been dubbed "municipal socialism." At the turn of the 20th century, the Radicals replaced the Opportunists as the main center-left forces, although the latter, who slowly became social conservatives, continued to claim their place as members of the Lefta political phenomenon known as " sinistrisme".
Furthermore, the Waldeck Rousseau law of 1884, legalized trade-unions, enabling the creation of the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) eleven years later, issued from a merger of Fernand Pelloutier's Bourse du Travail and other, local workers' associations. Dominated by anarcho-syndicalists, the unification of the CGT culminated in 1902, attracting figures such as Victor Griffuelhes or Émile Pouget, and then boasting 100,000 members.
The Opportunists broke away with the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party which aimed at deep transformations of society, leading to strong disagreements in the Chamber of Deputies, in particular with Georges Clemenceau. At the end of the 19th century, the Opportunists were replaced by the Radicals as the primary force in French politics.
In 1879, Paul Brousse founded the first Socialist party of France, dubbed Federation of the Socialist Workers of France ( Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France, FTSF). It was characterised as "possibilist" because it promoted gradual reforms. In the same time, Édouard Vaillant and the heirs of Louis Auguste Blanqui founded the Central Revolutionary Committee ( Comité révolutionnaire central or CRC), which represented the French revolutionary tradition. However, three years later, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue (the son-in-law of Karl Marx, famous for having written The Right to Be Lazy, which criticized Workforce's alienation) left the federation, which they considered too moderate, and founded the French Workers' Party ( Parti ouvrier français, POF) in 1880, which was the first Marxism party in France.
In December 1893, the anarchist Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb in the National Assembly, injuring one. The Opportunist Republicans swiftly reacted, voting two days later the " lois scélérates", severely restricting freedom of expression. The first one condemned apology of any felony or crime as a felony itself, permitting widespread censorship of the press. The second one allowed to condemn any person directly or indirectly involved in a propaganda of the deed act, even if no killing was effectively carried on. The last one condemned any person or newspaper using anarchist propaganda (and, by extension, socialist libertarians present or former members of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA)). Thus, free speech and encouraging propaganda of the deed or antimilitarism was severely restricted. Some people were condemned to prison for rejoicing themselves of the 1894 assassination of French president Marie François Sadi Carnot by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio.
Following these events, the United Kingdom once again became the last haven for political refugees, in particular anarchists, who were all conflated with the few who had engaged in bombings. Henceforth, the UK became a nest for anarchist colonies expelled from the continent, in particular between 1892 and 1895, which marked the height of the repression. Louise Michel, aka "the Red Virgin", Émile Pouget or Charles Malato were the most famous of the many, anonymous anarchists, desertion or simple criminals who had fled France and other European countries. These exiles would only return to France after President Félix Faure's amnesty in February 1895. A few hundreds persons related to the anarchist movement would however remain in the UK between 1880 and 1914. In reaction, the British restricted right of asylum, a national tradition since the Reformation in the 16th century. Several hate campaigns were issued in the British press in the 1890s against these French exiles, resulting in riots and a "restrictionist" party which advocated the end of liberality concerning freedom of movement, and hostility towards French and international activists Project of a doctoral thesis, continuing work on "French Anarchists in England, 1880–1905", including a large French & English bibliography, with archives and contemporary newspapers.
In the meanwhile, important figures in the anarchist movement began to distance themselves with this understanding of "propaganda of the deed", in part because of the state repression against the whole labor movement provoked by such individual acts. In 1887, Peter Kropotkin thus wrote in Le Révolté that "it is an illusion to believe that a few kilos of dynamite will be enough to win against the coalition of exploiters".Dynamite had been invented in 1862 by Alfred Nobel, who gave his name to the eponymous prize and ... to the Nobel Peace Prize. A variety of anarchists advocated the abandonment of these sorts of tactics in favor of collective revolutionary action, for example through the trade union movement. The anarcho-syndicalist, Fernand Pelloutier, leader of the Bourse du Travail from 1895 until his death in 1901, argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist involvement in the labor movement on the basis that anarchism could do very well without "the individual dynamiter."
In 1914, after the assassination of the leader of the SFIO, Jean Jaurès, who had upheld an internationalist and Antimilitarism line, the SFIO accepted to join the Sacred Union national front. In the aftermaths of the Russian Revolution and the Spartacist uprising in Germany, the French Left divided itself in Reformism and Revolutionary during the 1920 Tours Congress which saw the majority of the SFIO spin-out to form the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC).
The early French Left was often alienated into the Republican movements.
In the 1880s, the Socialists knew their first electoral success, conquering some municipalities. Jean Allemane and some FTSF members criticized the focus on electoral goals. In 1890, they created the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party ( Parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire or POSR), which advocated the revolutionary "general strike". Additionally, some deputies took the name Socialist without adhering to any party. These mostly advocated moderation and Reformism.
In 1899, a debate raged among Socialist groups about the participation of Alexandre Millerand in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet ( Bloc des gauches, Left-Wing Block), which included the Marquis de Gallifet, best known for having directed the bloody repression during the Paris Commune, alongside Radicals. Furthermore, the participation in a "bourgeois government" sparked a controversy opposing Jules Guesde to Jean Jaurès. In 1902, Guesde and Vaillant founded the Socialist Party of France, while Jaurès, Allemane and the possibilists formed the French Socialist Party. In 1905, during the Globe Congress, under the pressure of the Second International, the two groups merged in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO).
The party remained hemmed in between the Radical Party and the revolutionary syndicalists who dominated the trade unions. The General Confederation of Labour, created in 1895 from the fusion of the various Bourse du Travail (Fernand Pelloutier), the unions and the industries' federations, claimed its independence and the non-distinction between political and workplace activism. This was formalized by the Charter of Amiens in 1906, a year after the unification of the other socialist tendencies in the SFIO party. The Charte d'Amiens, a cornerstone of the history of the French labor movement, asserted the autonomy of the workers' movement from the political sphere, preventing any direct link between a trade-union and a political party. It also proclaimed a revolutionary syndicalist perspective of transformation of society, through the means of the general strike. This was also one of the founding piece of Georges Sorel's revolutionary syndicalist theory.
Opposed to collaboration with the Bourgeoisie parties, the SFIC criticized the first Cartel des Gauches (Left-Wing Cartel) which had won the 1924 elections, refusing to choose between Socialists (SFIO) and Radicals (or, as they put it, between "the plague and cholera"). After Lenin's death in 1924, the SFIC radicalized itself, following the Komintern's directions. Founders of the party were expelled, such as Boris Souvarine, the revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte, or Trotskyism such as Alfred Rosmer or Pierre Naville. The SFIC thus lost members, decreasing from 110,000 in 1920 to 30,000 in 1933.
In the same time, the SFIC organized the Anti-imperialism struggle, encouraging Abd el-Krim's insurgents during the Rif War or organizing an alternative exhibition during the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. The Communist Party was then admired by intellectuals such as the Surrealism (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard...). Young philosophers such as Paul Nizan also joined it. The poet Aragon traveled to the United States, and maintained indirect relations through his wife Elsa Triolet with the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
On the other hand, the SFIO opposed the revolutionary strategy of the SFIC, although maintaining a Marxism language, and prepared itself to seize power through the elections. It allied itself with the Radical-Socialist Party in the Cartel des Gauches, enabling it to win the 1924 election. The Radicals Édouard Herriot or Édouard Daladier then incarnated the Radicals' opening to both Marxist parties, the SFIO and the SFIC. However, despite their alliance, the SFIO and the Radicals diverge on their views on the role of the state or on their attitude towards Capitalism and the middle classes.
In 1932 a second Cartel des Gauches won the election, but this time the SFIO did not associate themselves in the government. The leader of the Cartel, Daladier, was forced to resign following 6 February 1934 crisis organized by far-right leagues, which were immediately interpreted by the French Left as a Fascist coup d'état attempt. This led to the creation of an Anti-fascism movement in France, unifying Socialists and Communists together against the fascist threat in a united front. The Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) was henceforth created, while the French Communist Party (PCF) signed a pact of unity of action with the SFIO in July 1935. The Comintern had then adopted the popular front strategy against fascism. The leader of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, then initiated a Patriotism turn opposed to previous internationalism.
On the other hand, in June 1934 Leon Trotsky initiated the French Turn, a strategy of entryism in the SFIO, supported by Raymond Molinier but opposed by Pierre Naville.
The same year, the Confédération générale du travail unitaire (CGTU) trade-union, which had split from the CGT after the Tours Congress, was reintegrated to the CGT. This alliance between Socialists and Communists paved the way for the victory of the Popular Front during the 1936 election, leading Léon Blum to become prime minister. Opposed to the alliance with bourgeois parties, the Trotskyists divided themselves, about 600 of them leaving the SFIO.
This new alliance between the two rival Marxist parties (the reformist SFIO and the revolutionary PCF) was an important experience mainly at the level of the party leaders. The base was already used to work together, from Social-Democrats to anarchists, against the rise of fascism.
The Popular Front saw harsh opposition from the conservatives and the French far-right. Fearing the action of the extra-parliamentary right-wing leagues, Blum had prohibited them, leading François de La Rocque to transform the Croix-de-Feu league into a new, mass party, dubbed French Social Party (PSF). Charles Maurras, the leader of the monarchist Action Française (AF) movement, threatened Blum with death, alluding to his Jewish origins. Biographical notice on Maurras on the Action Française's website On the other hand, the Minister Roger Salengro was pushed to suicide after attacks by a right-wing newspaper. Finally, the Cagoule terrorist group attempted several attacks.
In 1938, Marceau Pivert's Revolutionary Left tendency was expelled from the SFIO, and he created the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP) along with Luxemburgists such as René Lefeuvre.
The Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) twice had as President of the Councils figures of the SFIO (Félix Gouin and Léon Blum). Although the GPRF was active only from 1944 to 1946, it had a lasting influence, in particular regarding the enacting of , which were envisioned by the National Council of the Resistance, the umbrella organisation which united all Resistant movements, in particular the Communist Front National, political front of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) Resistance movement. Beside de Gaulle's ordinances granting, for the first time in France, right of vote to women, the GPRF passed various labour laws, including the 11 October 1946 act establishing occupational medicine. From 1945 to 1947, a socialist agricultural minister under Charles De Gaulle developed provision for marketing agencies and the protection of tenant rights. A Socialist law of 1946 replaced the metayage system with a tenancy statute (statut de fermage) that provided greater security from eviction "and put a normal annual rent in place of the tithe".The New France: A Society in Transition 1945–1977 (Third Edition) by John Ardagh
Paul Ramadier's Socialist government then crushed the Malagasy Uprising of 1947, killing up to 40,000 people. Ramadier also accepted the terms of the Marshall Plan and excluded the five Communist ministers (among whom the vice-Premier, Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF) during the May 1947 crisesan event which simultaneously occurred in Italy. This exclusion put an end to the Tripartisme alliance between the PCF, the SFIO and the Christian-Democrat Popular Republican Movement (MRP), which had been initiated after Charles de Gaulle's resignation in 1946.
Jules Moch (SFIO), Interior Minister of Robert Schuman's cabinet, re-organized in December 1947 the Groupe mobile de réserve (GMR) anti-riot police (created during Vichy France), renamed Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), in order to crush the insurrectionary strikes started at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt by anarchists and Trotskyists. This repression split the CGT, leading to the formation in April 1948 of the spin-off Force Ouvrière (FO), headed by Léon Jouhaux and subsidised by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and assisted by the AFL sole representative in Europe, Irving Brown, who worked with Jay Lovestone. Force Ouvrière : il y a 50 ans, la scission, L'Humanité, 19 December 1997 Annie Lacroix-Riz, Autour d'Irving Brown: l'A.F.L., le Free Trade Union Committee le Departement d'Etat et la scission syndicale francaise (1944–1947) in Le Mouvement social, No. 151 (April – June 1990), pp. 79–118 –
The Three-Parties alliance was succeeded by the Third Force (1947–1951), a coalition gathering the SFIO, the United States center-right party, the Radicals, the MRP and other centrist politicians, opposed both to the Communist and the Gaullism movement. The Third Force was also supported by the conservative National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), which succeeded in having its most popular figure, Antoine Pinay, named president of the Council in 1952, a year after the dissolving of the Third Force coalition.
Although Guy Mollet's government had enacted repressive policies against the National Liberation Front (FLN), most of the left, including the Personalism movement which expressed itself in Esprit, opposed the systematic use of torture by the French Army. Anti-colonialists and Antimilitarism signed the Manifesto of the 121, published in L'Express in 1960. Although the use of torture quickly became well-known and was opposed by the left-wing opposition, the French state repeatedly denied its employment, censoring more than 250 books, newspapers and films (in metropolitan France alone) which dealt with the subject (and 586 in Algeria). COLONIALISM THROUGH THE SCHOOL BOOKS – The hidden history of the Algerian war, Le Monde diplomatique, April 2001 Henri Alleg's 1958 book, La Question, Boris Vian's The Deserter, Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le petit soldat (released in 1963) and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) were famous examples of such censorship. A confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross leaked to Le Monde newspaper confirmed the allegations of torture made by the opposition to the war, represented in particular by the French Communist Party (PCF) and other Antimilitarism circles. Although many left-wing activists, including famous existentialism writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, denounced without exception the use of torture, the French government was itself headed in 1957 by the general secretary of the SFIO, Guy Mollet. In general, the SFIO supported the colonial wars during the Fourth Republic (1947–54), starting with the crushing of the Malagasy Uprising in 1947 by the socialist government of Paul Ramadier.
Socialist-led authorities were also innovative like PCF-led authorities, with a greater priority given by such councils to educational and social policies and public services than by councils headed by parties of the Centre and Right, although spending was not as proportionately high as in PCF-led municipalities. According to a study by Neill Nugent and David Lowe, there appeared to be "a much greater variation in specific priorities between PS-led councils than between PCF-led councils", with the range of issues identified by PS councillors and mayors as constituting their accomplishments and objectives being "enormously varied". As noted by the study, while traditional and expected concerns with issues such as urban renewal, educational facilities, transport, and housing remained, these had been supplanted by "a wide range of community, cultural and environmental interests". Amongst such accomplishments being cited by Socialist mayors in early 1980 included waste disposal schemes, the creation of pedestrian-only areas in town centres, the provision of municipal taxi and bicycle services, and making facilities available for young people (which included, in the one municipality, helping to set up cafes managed by young people themselves). One innovative authority, La Rochelle, had been led by Michel Crepeau (a proponent of environmentalism) of the MRG since 1971, and amongst his priorities had been a major waste recycling scheme which had come to make a profit for the town.
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