Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (110 page)

France, too, changed dramatically in the course of these years, and with some of the same consequences. But whereas in Britain the core assumptions of the postwar consensus were shattered by a revolution from the Right, in France it was the revival and transformation of the non-Communist
Left
that broke the political mould. For many years, French politics had been held in thrall to the parallel and opposed attractions of the Communist Party on the Left and the Gaullists on the Right. Together with their junior partners on Left and Right alike, Communists and Gaullists faithfully incarnated and extended a peculiarly French tradition of political allegiance determined by region, occupation and religion.

These rigidities of French political sociology, unbroken since the mid-nineteenth century, were already under siege, as we have seen, from the social and cultural shifts of the Sixties. The Left could no longer count on a proletarian bloc vote. The Right was no longer bound together by the person and aura of De Gaulle, who had died in 1970; and the fundamental measure of political conservatism in France—the propensity of conservative voters to be practicing Catholics—was being undermined by the decline in public religious observance, as the churches of village and small-town France lost their parishioners, and especially their parishioners’ children, to the metropolitan centers.

But a deeper change was also under way. In the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, traditional French society and an older way of life—variously and affectionately described and recalled as
la France profonde, la douce France, la bonne vieille France, la France éternelle
—seemed, to the French, to be disappearing before their eyes. The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside. The revitalized national economy was effecting a transformation in the jobs, travel patterns, and leisure time of a new class of city-dwellers. Roads and railways that had gathered weeds and grime for decades were rebuilt, re-landscaped, or replaced by a virtually new network of national communications. Towns and cities themselves, long preserved in the dowdy urban aspic of decay and underinvestment, were becoming crowded and energetic.

The French were not always comfortable with the speed of change. Political movements emerged to protest at the acceleration and urbanization of social life, the growth of cities and depopulation of the countryside. One legacy of the Sixties—the renewed interest in local and regional languages and culture—seemed to threaten the very territorial integrity and unity of France itself. To fearful contemporaries their country appeared to be modernizing and splitting apart all at once. But the state remained above the fray. In Britain the relationship between an all-embracing state and an inefficient economy, upon which Margaret Thatcher placed such pejorative emphasis, appeared self-evident to many. But in France it was the state itself that seemed to hold the key to the country’s economic resurgence. Its managers were the country’s intellectual élite; its planners saw themselves as a class of disinterested civil servants unaffected by the nation’s ephemeral ideological passions and social eruptions. Politics in France divided the nation bitterly over the question of
who
would gain power and to what social ends; but concerning the question of
how
they would wield that power there was a remarkable practical consensus.

From 1958 to 1969 the French state had been ruled by Charles De Gaulle. The President’s self-consciously traditional style, and his avowed unconcern for the minutiae of economic planning, had proved no impediment to change. Quite the contrary: it was under the camouflage of a semi-authoritarian constitution, tailored to the requirements of a charismatic military autocrat, that France had begun the disruptive modernization that helped spark the protests of 1968—indeed, it was the unsettling mix of old-fashioned paternal authority and destabilizing social changes that brought those protests about.

De Gaulle’s opponents and critics made much play with the ‘undemocratic’ way in which the General had seized and exercised power—‘le coup d’état permanent’ as François Mitterrand called it in a pamphlet published in 1965—but the resources and trappings of virtually unrestricted presidential power proved no less appealing to his successors of all political stripes. And the distinctive system of direct presidential election cast a shadow across the country’s quinquennial parliamentary elections, placing a premium upon the political skills and personality of individual candidates around whom political parties had perforce to regroup. It was in this setting that the redoubtable Mitterrand was himself to excel.

François Mitterrand, like Margaret Thatcher, was an implausible candidate for the role he was to play in his country’s affairs. Born to a practicing Catholic family in conservative south-western France, he was a right-wing law student in the 1930s and an activist in some of the most extreme anti-democratic movements of the age. He spent most of World War Two as a junior servant of the collaborationist government in Vichy, switching his allegiance just in time to be able to claim post-war credentials as a resister. His parliamentary and ministerial career in the Fourth Republic was pursued in various minor parties of the center-Left, none of them bearing any allegiance to the Marxist mainstream.

Even when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1965 with the support of the parties of the official Left, Mitterrand was in no sense their candidate and took care to keep his distance from them. It was only after the implosion of the old Parti Socialiste in 1969, following its electoral humiliation in 1968, that Mitterrand began to plot his role in its renaissance: a take-over bid launched in 1971 with the appearance of a new Socialist Party led by Mitterrand and a new generation of ambitious young men recruited to serve him.

The relationship binding Mitterrand and the remnants of French Socialism’s proud heritage was mutually instrumentalist. The Party needed Mitterrand: his good showing in the presidential election of 1965, when he secured the backing of 27 percent of registered voters (including many in conservative bastions of the East and West) and forced De Gaulle into a run-off, revealed him to be a vote-winner—as early as 1967, during a
parliamentary
election, Mitterrand badges and photos were selling well. The country was entering a new age of televised, personalized politics—as Michel Durafour, the mayor of St Etienne, glumly noted in 1971: ‘France lives only in anticipation of the next presidential election.’ Mitterrand would be a trump card for the Left.

Mitterrand, in turn, needed the Socialists. Lacking an organization of his own, more than a little tainted by the compromises and scandals of the Fourth Republic in whose governments he had served, this consummate opportunist used the Socialist Party to recycle himself as a man of the committed Left while keeping clear of the burdensome doctrinal baggage with which the old Left was freighted. He once described his religious allegiances thus:
‘Je suis né chrétien, et je mourrai sans doute en cet état. Dans l’intervalle . . . ’
(‘I was born Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile . . . ’). In much the same cynical vein he might have added that he was born a conservative and would die one, but managed to become a Socialist in the meantime.

This marriage of convenience worked better than either party could have imagined. In the course of the 1970s, as the British Labour Party was entering its terminal decline, so France’s Socialists were on the verge of their greatest success. The twin impediments to the re-emergence of a left majority in France had been De Gaulle’s personal appeal, and the fear of many voters that a government of the Left would be dominated by the Communists. By 1970, De Gaulle was dead; within ten years, so were the prospects of the Communists. For the former Mitterrand could take no direct credit, but the latter was unquestionably his achievement.

Acknowledging the logic of necessity, and lacking the ideological delicacy of his genuinely Socialist predecessors, Mitterrand at first aligned his new Socialist Party with the Communists; in 1972 he formed an electoral coalition with them behind a vaguely-worded, anti-capitalist Common Programme. By the elections of 1977 the Communists, the dominant party of the Left since 1945, were ten percentage points behind Mitterrand’s Socialists. Only then did Georges Marchais, the PCF’s lackluster General Secretary, begin to realize the mistake his Party had made in aligning its fate with that of Mitterrand’s young and energetic party—a decision taken partly under the optimistic, ecumenical influence of ‘Eurocommunism’—but it was too late.

After improving upon his 1965 showing in the 1974 Presidential election, when he was narrowly beaten by Giscard d’Estaing after standing as the candidate of the united Left, Mitterrand had forged a superb electoral machine, turning the Socialist Party into a catch-all movement appealing across the whole spectrum of French society, including Catholics, women, farmers and small shopkeepers, all hitherto hostile to the Socialists.
²⁵⁰
His own image had mellowed with age: huge campaign billboards across France in the spring of 1981 showed Mitterrand’s portrait in soft focus, set against the same timeless bucolic rural landscape once favored in Pétainist propaganda on those same billboards, under the promise ‘La Force Tranquille’—Quiet Strength.

The Communists, meanwhile, were weak—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an acute embarrassment, as were their own declining polls. During the course of the 1970s the Communist Party had ceased to be a fixed star in the ideological firmament: its prestige had collapsed along with its vote, even in the industrial ‘Red Belt’ of Paris that it had dominated since the mid-twenties. Nevertheless, Marchais was determined to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections: partly out of habit, partly from hubris, but mostly from a growing awareness of the need to cut the PCF loose from the poisoned embrace of its Socialist comrades.

At the first round of the 1981 Presidential election the two conservative candidates, Giscard d’Estaing and the young Jacques Chirac, together outpolled Mitterrand and Marchais (the latter winning just 12.2 percent of the vote). But in the run-off two weeks later between the two best-placed candidates, Mitterrand secured the backing of Socialists, Communists, environmentalists and even the normally uncooperative Trotskyists, more than doubled his first-round share and defeated Giscard to become the first directly-elected Socialist head of state in Europe. He promptly dissolved parliament and called legislative elections at which his own party trounced Communists and Right alike, winning for itself an absolute majority in the Assemblée Nationale. The Socialists were in complete control of France.

The spontaneous celebrations that greeted the Socialists’ victories were unprecedented. For the tens of thousands of (mostly young) Mitterrand supporters who danced in the streets this was the ‘
grand soir’
, the revolutionary eve, the threshold of a radical break with the past. On the basis of electoral data alone that would have been a curious claim. As in past electoral upheavals—the French Popular Front victory in April 1936 to which Mitterrand’s achievement was immediately compared, or Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979—the French vote in 1981 was not radically re-distributed. Indeed, Mitterrand actually fared
worse
, in the initial voting, than in his earlier bids for the presidency in 1965 and 1974.

What made the difference was the discipline showed by Left voters this time around in coalescing behind Mitterrand at the second round rather than abstaining in sectarian obstinacy, and the division of opinion on the
Right
. Of those who voted for Chirac in the initial round of the 1981 presidential election, 16 percent gave their votes to Mitterrand two weeks later—rather than re-elect the outgoing president Giscard d’Estaing: a man heartily disliked by Chirac’s Gaullist supporters. Had the Right not divided thus there would have been no President Mitterrand, no Socialist sweep in the ensuing legislative elections—and no
grand soir
of radical expectations.

It is worth emphasizing this because so much seemed to hang on the outcome of the 1981 election. In retrospect it is clear, as Mitterrand himself understood, that his achievement in 1981 was to ‘normalize’ the process of alternation in the French Republic, to make it possible for the Socialists to be treated as a normal party of government. But to Mitterrand’s supporters in 1981 the picture looked very different. Their goal was not to normalize the alternation of power in the future but to seize it and use it, here and now. They took for good coin their leader’s promises of radical transformation, his undertaking to sweep away not just the corruption and
ennui
of the Giscard years but also the very capitalist system itself. Excluded from office for so long, France’s Socialist militants had remained free to dream a dream of revolution.

For the Left had not exercised power in France for many decades; indeed, it had
never
exercised power untrammeled by coalition partners, uncooperative bankers, foreign exchange crises, international emergencies and a litany of other excuses for its failure to implement socialism. In 1981, as it seemed, none of these applied and there would be no excuse for backsliding. Moreover, the association of control of the state with implementation of revolutionary change was so deeply embedded in radical political culture in France that the mere fact of winning the election was itself taken as signifying a coming social confrontation.

Like Marx himself, the French Left identified all
real
change with political revolution in general and the great French Revolution in particular. Enthusiastic comparisons were thus made with 1871 and even 1791. Nothing Mitterrand had said in the campaign had led the more committed of his followers to think otherwise. In order to ‘dish’ the Communists and the left wing of his own party, Mitterrand had stolen their revolutionary clothes. His election campaign aroused expectations that he was now expected to fulfill.