French election
How French are the communists?
Martin Short
" So this is our choice: either the Gaullists with their hands in the till or the Communists and a gun in our back." The cynical reaction of a middle-aged French socialist, weary of Gaullism but wary of the alternative, somehow sums up a deepseated distrust of politicians which has turned what might have been a momentous general election into an irrelevant ritual. The fierce idealism of the Communist-Socialist alliance and its clear lead in the opinion polls are wearing thin, as the political chaos of the Fourth Republic and the totalitarian behaviour of Communist parties elsewhere today are rubbed home in a less than honourable Gaullist campaign plainly conceived in panic.
What ingratitude even to consider chucking out the General's men after fifteen years of stability, diplomatic triumphs and an economic boom which has put France well beyond Britain in the wealth stakes. With Frenchmen enjoying a 6 per cent growth rate while we struggle on at the bottom of the table, Pompidou's men have been rightly emphasising the headlines of the Hudson Institute report: France the top economic power in Europe by 1980 and a per capita GNP to match America ten years later. Equally astutely, they have attempted to suppress the negative aspects of the report, which was commisioned by the government, until after the election. These tend to destroy its entire vote-winning value — for it points out that the rapidly increasing wealth seems to be going into very few pockets and that in any case it's been built largely on the backs of foreign workers.
Apparently, it isn't too kind about the sort of rackets which have become the trademark of Gaullism in the last few years. As soon as the old man was gone, it seems, quite a few hangers-on decided to provide for their own old age. Property scandals have involved a whole series of
Gaullist deputies, and others have been implicated in the running of brothels while the former Prime Minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, seems to have paid no tax at all for some years. Now, of course, none of these activities is particularly diehonourable — indeed if certain traditional French pastimes have proved more lucrative in recent years, then that too is proof of a real increase in national prosperity. As one Gaullist friend pointed out: "So we've had a lot of property scandals — that only goes to show there's a hell of a lot of building going on."
And what are the other crowd offering? A good solid package of wealth redistribution, the nationalisation of 1 per cent of the country's companies that control 50 per cent of its wealth; the use of the growth rate to pay for social reform and the promise of decentralisation and participation in government and industry alike. A whole lot of other things besides, • but the details at this stage are not important. What does matter is a sense that it is all too good to be true. Either this Common Programme will not be applied because parliamentary chaos and the long-standing incompatibility of Socialists and Communists will soon break the alliance, or — as scare-mongering Gaullists are perpetually emphasising — it is just a Trojan Horse for a thorough-going totalitarian form of Communism which will gobble up the moderation of the Socialists as soon as the PCF has its hands on the Ministry of Interior.
"Who is fooling whom?" is the question one asks when looking at the handshake of Mitterrand and Marchais, the Socialist and Communist leaders respectively. Francois Mitterrand, the man who so very nearly took the Presidency from de Gaulle in 1965 — honourable, statesmanlike, urbane and quite witty. Marchais, coming on fast as a speaker and apparently as his party's real boss; a ready smile, a firm and earnest eye; but he still fails to convince most Frenchmen of his party's good intent.
Has the French Communist Party really changed? Is it really French and patriotic or is it still tied to Moscow? Did the formal condemnation of Russia's invasion of Czechoslovakia mean anything, and if so, why has there been precious little follow-up on this matter? And what about Marchais's own wartime record: working for Messerschmitt, in Bavaria, not it seems as forced labour, for he signed his work contract in December, 1942, two months before forced labour for Germany was introduced in France.
There are many reasons for accepting Communist protestations that as the world has changed, so has the PCF: the cold war is over, as indeed is the age of the European dictators which destroyed the Popular Front in the 'thirties, and in an age of steadily diminishing Christian faith, the anti-clerical implications of Communism in France now seem unimportant. But still, when Georges Marchais starts his public speeches with at least fifteen minutes devoted to that great strength of the French, "'richness in variety ", and poetic images bf " notre peuple " worthily ploughing fields in the shadow of Chartres Cathedral, you have to ask yourself, is he having you on? Are evocations of the vineyards of Languedoc and the Normandy prairies perhaps just a veneer?
And yet there is clearly a crying need for some idealistic alternative to the political stagnation caused by fifteen years of Gaullist rule. If the middleground Reformers emerge from the elections holding the balance in the Assembly, that will not .be enough. The Gaullists would probably stay in power, when what is really needed, is a critical outsider's stocktaking of all the skeletons in their cupboards, and there is enough honesty on the Left to carry that out.
By the way, if you're wondening what's happened to Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir or the great CP theorist, Roger Garaudy — excommunicated by the Party in 1970 — they are all lying pretty low. Sartre, particularly, has made it clear that the great betrayal by the Communists of the May 1968 Revolution, can never be forgiven. For him, it is only a bourgeois collaborationist party which would even contest such an election. Whether you vote or you don't vote, iit doesn't make any difference. The overthrow of the system has to be carried out through a much more fundamental and total struggle. The election is just a " snare for fools " — an opinion which Georges Pompidou himself seems to hold, for he has recently pointed
out that he was elected by direct suffrage in 1969 for seven years, as the executive head of state, and if the left-wing alliance should have so fooled the French as to secure a majority in the Assembly, he will simply ignore the result, or call another eledtion or indeed resign himself and make a new presidential election the occasion of a vote of confidence in the Constitution itself. No doubt about the platform: either me or chaos. The Fifth Republic can only exist, it seems, provided the government is always Gaullist. Which only goes to show that the forthcoming French elections are indeed un piege a cons.
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