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3 The French Socialist Party 1920-I 936 THE eighteenth national Congress of the Parti Socialiste, Section Fran«aise de l'Internationale Ouvriere (SFIO), held at Tours in December 1920, ended in the definitive division of the French socialist movement. The majority voted to join the Third International and thereby gave birth to the French Communist Party. For the minority of socialists left in the old party, no less than for the newly formed' Parti Communiste, the scission at Tours was the central reference point in the twentieth-century history of the Left in France, and so it is still. My concern in this chapter is to trace the impact ofthis split upon the post-Tours socialist movement, from 1920 to the eve of the Popular Front; however, in order to set in relief the consequences of the scission for the history of socialism in France it is necessary to remind ourselves of the characteristic features of the united socialist movement in the years before Tours. The first point to recall, and it is something ofa paradox, is that the experience of political unity among socialists in France was of very recent origin. It was only in 1905, and then only through pressure from an international socialist movement frustrated with the endless internecine bickering of competing French parties, that the two major movements within French socialism joined to form a single party. These two movements, the Parti Socialiste de France and the Parti Socialiste Fran«ais (dominated respectively by the personalities of Jules Guesde and Jean Jaures) were themselves of recent vintage, formed from alliances of the older French socialist parties which had come together during (and in part because of) the Dreyfus affair and the attendant political crisis in France.! The paradox lies in the fact that socialism in France may have found national political unity long after the appearance ofstrong socialist and ! Among the more useful general histories of French socialism to 1905 are the following: Georges Lefranc, Le Mouvement socialiste sous la Trolsieme Republique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1977); Claude Willard, LeMouvement socialiste en France (1893-19°5): les guesdistes (Paris, 1965); Madeleine Reberioux, 'Le Socialisme franc;ais de 1871 it 1914', inJacques Droz (ed.), Histoire generale du socialtsme, vol. 2, (Paris, 1974). II6 The Socialist Party 1920-1936 workers' parties in other European countries (notably Belgium and Germany), but the history of the socialist idea in France, and of attempts to embody it in practice, went back a very long way. The problem of separating the collective social interest of the working population from the organizations and aspirations of the republican bourgeoisie was already old when it took the form ofbloody conflict in June 1848. This, taken together with the shattering defeat of the 1871 Commune and the frustrations and divisions of the Imperial decades, helps to account both for the proliferation ofparties and organizations in late nineteenth-century France, each with its own ideas on how to organize within and combat the republican state, and for their separate and collective weakness when compared with other member parties of the Second International. When unity was finally achieved in 1905, then, it was a unity which of necessity papered over certain very severe doctrinal and tactical differences within the SFIO. This is not to say that unity was not taken seriously. Quite the reverse: precisely because the foundations of socialist unification were so shaky, there was a tendency to make a fetish of the principle of unity and to regard with horror any actions or pronouncements liable to threaten it. Hence the rather unwieldy and ineffectual socialist policies of the pre-war years and the importance of Jaures, with his unequalled capacity to hold together conflicting wings of his party. Hence, too, the older socialists' fury at the Communists after Tours for destroying the precarious achievement of an earlier generation. The internal differences of opinion with the pre-war SFIO fall broadly into three areas. The first ofthese concerned the attitude to be adopted towards the organs of government. A central issue in the years before 1905 had been the entry into government in 1899 of Alexandre Millerand, a close associate of Jaures and until then a leader of the 'right' tendency in French socialism. Millerand's supporters held that in the absence of any imminent revolution it was incumbent upon socialists to work in all ways possible for the improvement of the condition of their social constituency in the present. Since socialists accepted the republican form of...

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