Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939 (review)

After the split in the Socialist Party following the Tours Congress of 1920 the new Parti Communiste Francais succeeded in building electoral support in particular rural areas as well as among the urban working-classes. This rural support for the PCF has always been problematic, no less for historians than for urban party organizers at the time. Was not the logical consequence of a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the imperatives of historical development that small-holdings were politically and economically retrograde? In this sparkling book Laird Boswell succeeds in breaking away from both the usual recounting of ideological manoeuvring in Paris and Moscow and a ‘top-down’ explanatory model of urban-rural diffusion. Instead, what emerges from this imaginative, yet closely documented, book is that rural people adopted the PCF as their own, but in the process adapted its program to their own ends.

Boswell contributes to debates about two broad questions. First, why would a party ostensibly based on Marxism-Leninism appeal to small property-owners? For PCF support did not come so much from rural workers and the poorest sharecroppers as from small-holding peasants, artisans and shopkeepers. What emerges from his analysis is that the key factors were anticlericalism and irreligiosity, the vulnerability of small producers to the market-place, bitterness about the sacrifices of World War I, and the commitment of skilled activists adept in using the spaces of male sociability. Of course, almost all of these factors parallel those emphasized by historians of an earlier period of radical rural political activity, during the Second Republic. On the surface this supports Francois Goguel’s classic 1951 argument that PCF support in the countryside was really no more meaningful than a representation of the tendency of impoverished people to vote as far left as possible.

However, Boswell is sharply critical of Goguel’s argument, and here makes an important contribution to a second major debate. He demonstrates that there is no statistical correlation between voting for the PCF in 1936 and support for the ‘démocrates-socialistes’ in 1849; similarly, in qualitative terms, he warns cogently against facile suggestions of continuity based, for example, on family political traditions. Such traditions, he argues, “went no deeper than earlier twentieth-century socialism. Socialists (before 1920) and later Communists did not continue an electoral tradition; rather, they founded a new, radically different one that endured through the 1930s, and even beyond” (237). In this way his argument parallels that of Tony Judt’s for Socialist support in Provence on the eve of World War I as ideologically and socially distinct from earlier radical traditions (Socialism in Provence 1871–1914, Cambridge, 1979).

The problem with Boswell’s argument is that ultimately he is able to adduce little evidence that support for the PCF was indeed ‘new wine in new bottles’. Fundamental to the success of rural activists for the Party was their relative autonomy from urban cadres who in turn seemed to have turned a blind eye to rural ideological impurities as the price of electoral support. Most significantly, rural activists invariably avoided references to collectivization; where their ideological zeal led them to raise the issue they were sharply rebuffed.

There is, moreover, a problem in relying heavily on regression coefficients. The fact that statistical correlation does not exist, for example, between voting patterns in 1849 and 1936 does not mean that there is no ideological connection. While Boswell is a pains to argue that support for the PCF was a political innovation, the many examples of allusions made by militants to the revolutionary heritage of 1789 makes one pause. Indeed, the activists he interviewed often alluded to political tradition as an explanation of voting patterns. Like generations of radical peasant activists, Communist militants articulated a combination of economic protectionism and political radicalism to promise the protection and extension of small-holdings. What was new was a visceral anti-militarism and the use of a founding myth of the Russian Revolution as having returned all land to the producers...