Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

EPILOGUE: Cultural and Political Decline

347 EPILOGUE Cultural and Political Decline The Disconnection between Communists and the New Radical Movements In the face of sharp economic downturns, the radicalism and optimism of the 1960s gave way to anxiety. Most radicals, it has been widely recognized, “abandoned ‘the Revolution’ and worried instead about their job prospects.” This retrenchment did not necessarily mean a loss for the Communists.They still profited from the general social and economic “malaise” of the 1970s. At the peak of the Eurocommunist experiment in 1977, Henry Kissinger reflected that “the spread of Marxism” in Western Europe “[could] be one of the profound problems of the modern period, namely the alienation of the population from the modern industrial state, that in the modern industrial state no matter how it is governed the people feel that they have no influence over the real decisions, and if you couple that with certain left wing traditions in Italy and France you can see why it spreads.”1 What Kissinger and other intellectual observers failed to see was that, in the end, the combination of social retrenchment and the persistent orthodoxy of the Communist Parties toward the radical 1960s legacy eroded the influence and even the identity of both the French and Italian Communists. The moment of their greatest political influence—as has been noted about the PCI especially—“coincided with the beginning of [their] definitive decline as a cultural force.”2 Through the 1970s both parties remained unable to address the new problems of education, individual liberties, and sexual liberation. This was evident in the PCF’s and PCI’s dialogue with the new feminist movement, with the radical youth, and in their approach to high and mass culture. FEMINISM After the controversies over Simone de Beauvoir’s work and over the “Malthusian ” campaigns on birth-control policies,3 feminism continued to have trouble introducing its agenda in the PCF. The role of women in the communist movement was also forced into gender clichés. According to Yvonne Dumont, a frequent contributor to Cahiers du communisme, in France, as in the United States, women best defined their political role through pacifist demonstrations. “Their maternal instinct,” she wrote in 1967, “renders them more quickly empathetic to the suffering and anguish of the women in 348 EPILOGUE Vietnam; their instinctive horror of war makes them apt to understanding that there’s no true security for any people as long as war rages in any part of the world.”4 By contrast, the PCF still ignored issues of personal liberation. In a 1970 essay describing the main problems affecting women, Mireille Bertrand included exploitation in the workplace, war, and even sexual violence. But she did not stress the “right to choose” on abortion. In fact, the article presented an extended argument in favor of the “protection of the mother and the child” through “higher state contributions to families with dependents.” Concerns about welfare were prominent, but birth control did not figure among the party’s priorities.5 The new women’s liberation movement (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) had an official debut in France a few months later, when Le Nouvel Observateur published a manifesto signed by 343 women who declared that, illegally, they had had abortions. To underline the urgency of this matter , and the issue of sexism, the signatories provokingly called themselves salopes (“sluts” or “bitches”). The document included the names of Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, and lawyers Yvette Roudy and Gisèle Halimi. The government chose not to prosecute them. Four years later the government, prompted by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and on the initiative of Minister of Health Simone Veil, finally passed laws legalizing abortion.6 Among the “salopes” only a handful, including de Beauvoir, believed that women’s true emancipation was impossible outside a socialist world. But the PCF’s position had by then only slightly evolved. In October 1973, at the meeting of the Paris Central Committee, Bertrand said that one of the main problems with feminism was that it reflected women’s “inadequate consciousness , compared to men, about the global character of capitalist exploitation .” For this reason, she proudly reported, the party had, through various factory assemblies in the textile and mechanical sectors, contributed to raising that consciousness and redirecting women’s protest against the system of state monopoly capitalism.7 A few months later, Madeleine Vincent admitted that the parties in power had dominated the debate on abortion and contraception, while...