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Research Article

The French Communist Party and the working classes (1920s–1970s): A perspective from local activism Julian Mischi INRA-CESAER, 26, bd Docteur Petitjean, BP 87999, Dijon, Cedex 21079, France. E-mail: [email protected] This article has been translated from French by Katharine Throssell.

Abstract Drawing on research conducted in several areas in France, this article shows that the communist movement was based on the formation of a militant elite based in heavy industry. Party leadership by industrial skilled workers led to the marginalisation of certain blue-collar groups (women, low-skilled workers, immigrants) and other non-elite social groups (agricultural workers, shopkeepers, artisans). We also emphasise the fact that working-class social networks provided fertile ground for communist activism, while also constraining collective action to some degree. These networks had an impact on the forms of engagement within the party, which might be out of sync with the norms set out by the national leaders of the Communist Party. At the local level, activism drew on both political actions by party leaders and the daily activities of the working classes. French Politics (2012) 10, 160–180. doi:10.1057/fp.2012.8 Keywords: communism; activism; working-class; social networks; political parties; local politics

Historiographical debates about communism in Western Europe have focused on the issue of Moscow archives since the early 1990s. The opening of former party archives in Moscow has provided access to rich new sources, and academics have announced the beginning of a ‘new’ period of history of the Communist Parties. The materials held by the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) led scholars to emphasise communism as an international movement dominated by the Soviet Union. They have dealt with the obscure issues of party leadership and of the relations between national Communist Parties and Moscow. This international and institutional outlook is essential in order to gain a better understanding of European communism r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419 French Politics www.palgrave-journals.com/fp/

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and its internal organisation (Morgan et al, 2005), but if it is the only perspective we adopt, we might understate the impact of social history and the significance of working-class militancy. Studying workers’ involvement in the Communist Party and grassroots activism implies research work conducted in specific contexts and local areas. Moreover, a renewal of the understanding of working-class activism can be expected thanks to the new historiographical context, because the decline of communism in Europe has also led to the opening of ‘local’ sources. In France, the Communist Party has become a minor political force since the 1990s and its leaders have progressively allowed social scientists to access its archives. This stance has gone alongside a discourse stressing the ‘mutation’ of the party towards a more ‘democratic’ and ‘open’ political force. In this political context, it has been easier to obtain party sources mentioning communist activism in towns and factories than it has in the past. Scholars who previously studied local communist experiences had to turn mainly to oral history. Today, we can also explore directly party sources and institutional interpretations. The new sources make it possible to reassess the significance of the communist movement for rank and file militants. The French Communist Party (PCF) was founded following the Tours Congress in December 1920. This congress saw the majority of French socialist activists leave the French Section of the Worker’s International (SFIO) and join the Communist International set up by Lenin in Moscow in 1919. From the 1930s to the end of the 1970s this party was a major force on the French political scene (Courtois and Lazar, 1995). Thanks to the expansion of its activist networks during the Popular Front, consolidated during the Liberation, the PCF became the largest party in France by number of members and its electoral impact outweighed that of its socialist competitor. Its appeal was especially large in industrial areas, areas from which the party drew most of its electoral support and its activists, and its influence was also important among the peasantry of some rural regions, especially in the centre of the country. The communist organisation was unusual from this point of view, especially when compared with the socialist movement. Workers were not only at the heart of its rhetoric; they also made up most of its representatives (Pudal, 1989). It is in this perspective that we can best understand the success of the PCF’s image as the Parti de la classe ouvrie`re (this expression translates literally as the Party of the Working Class, thus emphasising that there is only one Party for the working class). Communist leaders were able to lay claim to the monopoly of the representation of workers, because of their ideological valorisation of the industrial sectors, but also because they came from these parts of society themselves. In not looking to represent the workers by simply speaking in their name, but rather by mobilising them and giving them power, communist leaders worked towards the promotion of activists from working-class backgrounds. They formed a workers’ elite, occupying positions of responsibility r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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within the party and its networks (trade unions, associations and so on), as well as within public institutions (town councils, local government and public service and so on). Above a certain level, these activists left the workplace and became permanents, that is employees of the Party with a wage of a skilled worker. In the national and higher regional states of the Party, the so-called dirigeant ouvriers were in fact professional activists from blue-collar backgrounds. They played a key role in applying the Leninist strategy to keep elected and unionist officials separate from, and subordinate to, the Party apparatus. In this article, we focus on the PCF’s action in the mobilisation and representation of various social groups around the notion of the ‘working class’. In order to avoid the communist organisation’s categorisation and with the objective of illustrating the diversity of its social support base, we will use the notion of ‘working classes’. With the use of the plural, we notably follow Hoggart (1957, pp. 13–26) in his description of the working classes as a social milieu characterised by a particular lifestyle, that of the people in blue-collar neighbourhoods, possibly including certain members of the middle classes (office clerks, shopkeepers and so on). Indeed, we cannot reduce the support base of French communism to solely factory workers. Factory workers form the core of the organisation, but there are also those who work in the service sector, or in agriculture, or who are artisans or small business owners. This article draws on research conducted in various local areas in order to update our understanding of the role of these working classes within the PCF. Breaking with the general tendency to focus on one field site, our multi-site approach aims to analyse the PCF in a variety of social contexts that have been selected for their socio-economic and political diversity (Mischi, 2010). The study was conducted in the following areas in France: a mining and steel-manufacturing area in the North-East, a rural zone in the centre, an area dedicated to shipbuilding industries in the West, and a region of mixed industries (food processing, metalwork, textile) in the South-East.1 The research is mostly based on the study of the PCF’s national and provincial archives. This material provides the basis for a detailed analysis of the communist movement in different areas, allowing us to analyse the spread of the party model and its appropriation by local groups. We will begin by examining how the symbolic construction of the PCF as the Party of the Working Class is based on the promotion of an industrial workers’ elite, which is trained to take on responsibilities both in the party and its specific networks. An analysis of communist mobilisation on the local level will then allow us to observe the perpetuation of power relations within the organisation, in which certain groups (women, immigrant workers, low-skilled workers, rural workers) are relegated to subaltern positions. Finally, we will seek to identify local forms of mobilisation within the PCF, which may be relatively distinct from the party model set out by communist leaders at the national level. 162

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The PCF and the Genesis of the French Working Class Through its organisation and representation of workers, the PCF was involved in the organisation and then the relative homogenisation of workers as a class. The French case is characterised by the slow and incomplete unification of industrial workers, a situation linked to the long hegemonic position of the property-owning petit bourgeoisie, which delayed the migration of rural workers into towns and industry (Noiriel, 1986). Compared with its British and German neighbours, the French workers’ movement was historically fragile and slow to develop. It was not fully detached from rural and artisanal milieux and lacked autonomy for a long time. After several decades of instability, the crisis in the 1930s allowed French industrial workers to establish themselves around the major factories in the suburbs and towns. This new generation of factory workers born between the two world wars can be distinguished from the rural workers of their parents’ generation on several points: a tendency towards social homogeneity, the existence of a core group (skilled workers in metalwork industries), a certain autonomy in relation to other social groups, their urban environment, and their channels for the transmission of values. The increase of workers in the French population reached its peak between 1950 and 1970, when this generation reached maturity. The occupational homogeneity of the workers as a class was thus expressed within Taylorist industries where its members found themselves unified de facto by a relatively similar experience of the workplace hierarchy.

The selection and training of an ‘avant-garde’ These shared working and living conditions encouraged the development of a class culture that led to the emergence of networks of solidarity and mutual aid within workers’ groups and in particular to the development of the communist movement. In fact, the communists organised above all in the newly industrialised centres, in the workers’ suburbs of large cities or singleindustry enclaves within rural areas. Their strongholds were the companies of the second industrial revolution (steel-manufacturing, mechanical, shipbuilding, chemical, aeronautical and automobile industries), where they could rely on the support of skilled metalworkers. Outside these booming industrial areas, the worlds of skilled and highly skilled workers (railway workers, gas-workers and electricians, postal workers and dockers) and construction workers were also key areas for activism. In 1936, the Popular Front symbolised the emergence of this elite of upwardly mobile workers that exerted its hegemony throughout the working classes. This elite maintained the fiction of ‘the workers’ as a unified and homogenous group, through the association of trade r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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union and political interests, notably around the PCF and the CGT (Confe´de´ration Ge´ne´rale du Travail – General Confederation of Labour). From this period until the 1970s, the militant workers of the CGT and the PCF were at the centre of the social movements that shook the country (although in some cases, such as 1947 and 1968, the PCF and the CGT did not initiate the workers’ movement). Communist mobilisation was based on both the promotion of an industrial identity (focused notably on figures like the miner and the metalworker2) and on privileged access to leadership positions for working-class activists. If communist leaders were able to successfully claim the symbolic representation of the working classes it was because the party had its roots in that very milieu. Beyond the search for mass recruitment, the new revolutionary organisation strove to make the training of the ‘proletarian elements’ a priority, through various schools, in order to insert them into the party leadership. The leitmotiv of career management within the PCF was that, ‘it’s in the school of the factory, where they’re confronted with capitalist exploitation, that militants are recruited and trained – militants who will then take on responsibilities at all levels of the party organism’. In the different processes of promotion within the party, priority was given to workers (specifically to factory, mine and protected status workers), who ran the organisation in almost all the de´partements of France.3 By making themselves the spokesmen of the workers, by symbolically representing them as a unified class in both politics and the media, communist leaders contributed to the symbolic unification of this group and to its existence in the public. They promoted an image of a united and autonomous working class: autonomous both from other social groups and from the State and the employers. By emphasising working-class pride and the power of their organisations, Communists fostered the cultural processes of identification with the working class, processes that were evidently founded on the historical and social conditions mentioned earlier. Thus, until the 1970s the notion of ‘the working class’ dominated public debate. This notion was meaningful for those workers who identified with it. It was also meaningful for militants (peasants, teachers, shopkeepers and so on), who were fighting in its name within the PCF or the unions. The militant activity of these organisations participated directly in the formation of the working class by encouraging the diffusion of a feeling of class belonging among workers. For the English case, Thompson (1963) has clearly demonstrated the importance of these symbolic aspects in the making of the working class, shared systems of values, struggles and experiences that encourage the emergence of class consciousness. In France, the communist organisation made an important contribution to the cultural and political processes in the development of the working class by sending ‘workers’ representatives’ to the National Assembly, but also by setting up ‘workers’ councils’. 164

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The workers’ leadership in the PCF The ways in which militants were recruited and party managers were selected within the industrial sector contributed to the unification of party ranks. This should be considered an important element of the organisational structure that contributed to the consolidation of the party and its standardisation across the whole country. Workerisation was closely linked to the Party’s democratic centralist model, which stressed the unity of action and fostered strict Party discipline. Once the decision was made, all Party members are expected to uphold the directives of higher bodies of the organisation and to express regularly their personal loyalty to ‘the’ Party as the collective incarnation of the working class. The control of political orthodoxy (following the orders of the Communist International) was accompanied by a social filtering process that favoured certain blue-collar workers. The result was that the PCF branches in most French regions were led by militants with similar social backgrounds and career paths: generally young workers, new members who had become party employees after being identified and selected during their time in a National or International Party School (Tartakowsky, 1980). The training of local leaders was guided by instructions from the centre that emphasised the promotion of manual industrial labourers. These workers were to gradually replace the former elites of the SFIO. This shift to workers’ dominance in the party took place in the 1920s under the strict control of national leaders, sent into the regions to survey the social composition and political orientation of the party leadership. Trained at the Leninist schools in Bobigny or in Moscow, these party employees helped in the workerisation of the party throughout the whole country. They set up the first regional Communist schools and established or re-launched the press offices. At the cost of a substantial reduction in numbers among their militants, they genuinely embedded the party in these regions by applying the central principals of the ‘21 conditions’ of membership of the Third International, that is, the establishment of a centralised organisation and the exclusion of ‘reformists’ from positions of leadership, ‘without fear of having to replace, especially at the beginning, experienced militants with workers fresh from the rank and file’. Most non-blue-collar militants, who had led the party since the split of 1920 (particularly teachers, often elected to office, but also doctors and journalists) were thus excluded from the leadership. This workerisation of the party leadership within the regions took place as early as the 1930s in all of the sites we studied. The construction of a workers’ militant elite thus did not simply concern the highest echelons of the communist organisation but also its provincial networks. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the party leadership in the four areas we studied was almost exclusively run by workers – or rather by party employees from blue-collar backgrounds. r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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In Meurthe-et-Moselle, all the members of the governing body of the party (secre´tariat fe´de´ral) from 1944 to 1979 came from blue-collar classes, with the exception of a teacher and an industrial draughtsman promoted at the end of the 1950s.4 The predominance of workers increased in the higher echelons of party hierarchy: the higher the level of the organisation, the higher the number of militants from blue-collar backgrounds. In 1962, blue-collar militants made up 53 per cent of the comite´ fe´de´ral in Loire-Atlantique, and 60 per cent in the bureau fe´de´ral and the secre´tariat fe´de´ral overall. The dominant position of workers from heavy industries and of those with a protected status (railway workers, civil service workers, gas and electrical operators and so on) in the party hierarchy can be observed everywhere, including in rural regions like Allier. In this area, where rural populations – notably peasants – strongly supported the PCF, Party leadership was in fact composed mostly by militants from urban industries (who are often from peasants families).5 The promotion of workers within the Party was based on a system of supervision and training of militants, using biographical control procedures that involved militants regularly filling out questionnaires, especially when they were preparing for positions of responsibility (Pennetier and Pudal, 2002). These were very detailed documents, the militant being invited to respond to multiple questions regarding himself and his entourage.6 They were accompanied by managers’ evaluations that specified the responsibilities that might be attributed to or removed from the militant. One individual might then have been put forward as a candidate in his locality, another oriented towards his union board, still another removed from the propaganda sector of the party. This biographical instrument also meant militants could be offered the status of party employee, allowing them to leave the factory. It should also be noted that the status of party employee was almost always attributed to blue-collar militants. Taking on local responsibility within the PCF involved moving through different party schools – e´coles du Parti – (Ethuin, 2003). This socialisation in the party education system transmitted a range of skills, both theoretical and practical, to militants from blue-collar backgrounds. This was in order that they might do without supervision by ‘intellectuals’. The priority granted to industrial workers was confirmed by a national leader, in a report to the Central Committee in 1974: We have to emphasise that the essential objective of the Party Graduate School – Ecole Centrale – is to allow blue-collar militants to tackle theoretical concepts, to access the basics that will mean they can pursue their personal education and carry out their work in the best conditions. Too many fe´de´rations are still sending comrades because they are available or because they have intellectual training. Of course the school will be useful for them but they are not its principal objective. It is indispensible 166

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however for the training of working-class leaders. Thus we draw the attention of fe´de´rations to this question in order to accelerate the arrival of workers in these Central Schools.7

The overlapping of the professional sphere and local politics The workers’ elite of the PCF had to be trained for militant action in their workplaces, in workshops and worksites. Industrial establishments were thus at the heart of the communist project of politicisation of the workers. According to the Leninist strategy that gave priority to action within the proletariat, it was in the relationship with the industrial sector that the ‘Workers’ Party’ was constituted. Factories were the principle site for political struggle: a communist militant was expected to encourage and direct union activity in his workplace, and above all he was responsible for organising ‘communist core groups’ and carrying out ‘party work’ in his workplace. That is why communists had to focus their activism on the party cells and sections in the workplace. These structures attracted a significant amount of attention from the centre (financial support, meetings run by the leaders, constant references in the party newspapers), and these militants were given priority for promotion within the party (selection for party schools, privileged access to decision-making bodies, to employee status and elected positions). Militant action in the workplace was extended directly onto the local political scene where working-class militants could rely on interpersonal resources and symbolic prestige acquired in industry to become involved in local councils. In the area north of Meurthe-et-Moselle the union power of the communists in the workplaces meant that from the Liberation onwards, they could contest the power of those in elected office who were long recruited outside the working classes – among members of business management or the self-employed (shop-owners, doctors, pharmacists, farmers and so on). The social characteristics of this traditional elite became devalued in the public space as the ‘blue-collar style’ put forward in industrial disputes became more popular. The election to posts on local councils of communist workers of Italian origin in the 1950s was due to militant action in workshops and mines. We will now focus more closely on the example of Villerupt, a town structured around the factories of the Sidelor Company, and where the local council was won over by union activists in 1959. The communist propaganda emphasised this conquest all the more given that it took place at the heart of capitalist enterprise: ‘Villerupt, a heroic working-class town, was wrenched from Sidelor.8’ Armand Sacconi, steelworker and Secretary of the Communist Section of the company, took over as mayor from Gaston Poncin, a geometrical r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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engineer in the same factory. Sacconi had arrived in France from Italy in 1921 at the age of 8 and had worked in the factory deburring from the age of 13. As the union official under the Popular Front, he joined the PCF after the war while continuing his activities with the union. He sat for 12 years in opposition before gaining power on the local council. Probably because he was a steelworker, the party section decided to appoint a miner, Elio Fiorani, to the position of First Deputy Mayor. Fiorani was secretary of the miners’ union in the Longwy region. The Sacconi-Fioriani duo symbolised the duality of local communism, structured both around the factories and the mines. In this industrial region, the public representation of the PCF was characterised by this social divide. Miners and steelworkers might find themselves in latent competition for access to positions within the party and its networks (trade unions, associations, councils), and communist leaders had to make sure that the balance between the two groups was maintained in the representation of workers in the Party. A dynamic that might be described as fraternal competition structured the management of both party and local institutions by miners and steelworkers.9 In Meurthe-et-Moselle as in many other industrial regions, the success of the communist project in mobilising and organising the workers can be seen in the role of local government, which was progressively occupied by workingclass militants after the Second World War.10 These conquests to a certain extent inverted the professional domination within the local political sphere, with workers contesting the political power of their hierarchical superiors, wielding the electoral weapon against those to whom they were subordinate in their working environments. However, as has already been suggested in the relations between the miners and the steelworkers, a variety of different social categories may be obscured behind the unified image of the working class. It is this complexity of popular support for the communist organisation that will now be examined.

Behind the Image of le parti de la classe ouvrie`re Up until the 1970s the PCF successfully developed an image of itself as the legitimate representative of the French working class and had formed a workers’ elite, which had gained access to positions of responsibility in the party but also in trade unions, town councils and so on. This success of the communist project of political promotion for the factory workers can be seen in the image of ‘working-class strongholds’ or ‘red strongholds’ where the success of the PCF and the strength of the working class went hand in hand. In Great Britain the nickname ‘Little Moscow’ was commonly used for small communist strongholds (Macintyre, 1980). These images produced by 168

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political actors were often taken up in the scientific literature, which tended to overestimate the importance of the communist networks’ control over working-class life (for instance, with the view of the PCF as a ‘countersociety’11) and used to spread the image of a homogenous working class such as it was set out by the communist leadership. However, the action of militants both in terms of trade union representation and political representation symbolically consolidated the workers as a class while dissembling the reality of its diversity: between women and men, immigrants and non-immigrants, skilled and unskilled workers, rural and urban workers and so on. The reproduction of power relations and forms of social domination within the communist movement can indeed be demonstrated.

The gap between the rank and file and the party leaders in Meurthe-et-Moselle To reveal the complexity and the inequality of the social relations within the communist movement, we can use the example of the PCF in the Meurthe-etMoselle Nord region, where the main leaders came from the blue-collar groups of the iron industry and also from Italian immigration (Noiriel, 1984, pp. 355–370; Mischi, 2010, pp. 35–50). In the first instance, the study of the composition of the leadership reveals the marginalisation of female militants within the party. At the beginning of the 1960s there were between three and five female representatives in the comite´ fe´de´ral for roughly 40 men, even though women constituted more than a quarter of the total membership base. In 1961, there were 612 female members and 2302 male members.12 This insufficient promotion of women was regularly denounced by the representatives of the Central Committee, and lamented by local leaders. A working committee focusing on women was implemented towards the end of 1964. It was almost exclusively composed of women who were sisters or wives of militants, most often unemployed. In fact female militants were most often members of communist families. In the mid-1960s the women’s wing of the PCF, the Union of French Women (Union des Femmes Franc¸aises – UFF) was run by the wife of a union official. Sometime later she was replaced by another housewife, but the latter refused to participate in the party leadership. These problems with the policy of ‘promoting female leaders’ led to a significant turnover in representatives at the comite´ fe´de´ral. The women who gained access to these higher echelons of the party did not stay there long. However, the percentage of women in the comite´ fe´de´ral progressed steadily to attain 23 per cent in 1977 (although they represented 41 per cent of members). At the end of that decade, only one woman had the status of permanente. A former service sector worker from a blue-collar family, she was the Deputy Mayor on a local council. The fact that this militant was an elected official is not r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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irrelevant. Although women remained overall relegated to the margins of the party leadership, it ought to be noted that they were widely promoted in another domain, that of electoral competition. The PCF thus set itself apart as the party presenting the most female candidates at the local elections in Meurthe-et-Moselle, and several town councils of this region were run by female mayors. The investment of women in local politics reflects the fact that communist men and women tended to engage in two different forms of political action outside the party. The husband, a worker, was active in the trade union, while the wife, most often a housewife in this kind of district devoted to heavy industry, became engaged in local council work. We can see here a classic differentiation of gender roles in blue-collar environments, between masculine professional space and residential feminine space. If communist women ended up taking on elected positions, it was almost certainly because they had the resources associated with the management of local politics, particularly writing skills acquired through having invested more at school or from having worked in professions based on writing (secretaries, office workers, schoolteachers). Finally, the involvement of women in these instances of local politics was probably facilitated by the fact that this type of activity was considered secondary by communists. In the communist world, the organisation within the party is what dominates and what mobilises the efforts of the militants. The sphere of local politics was thus devalued and thus more easily occupied by women. Women were under-represented in the leadership of the Meurthe-et-Moselle Nord PCF in terms of their presence at the grassroots level of the party. For foreign workers the situation was still more problematic because they were absent not only from the leadership level, but also simply from all the militant structures. Thus, even though there were many workers from Maghreb (especially from Algeria) living in this area, particularly since the Second World War, they were largely absent from the communist networks. According to different internal memos, there may have only been 20 or so members of these communities active within the PCF in the 1960s. The local leaders responsible for ‘immigrant workers’ emphasised on several occasions the lack of effort made to accommodate Algerian immigrants. In 1975, in the context of the preparation of a national study day on Algerian immigration, the local leaders identified 8000 Algerians residing locally essentially in two communist-led council towns and working notably in the steel industry where they made up more than 10 per cent of the workers. Yet the delegation of Meurthe-et-Moselle did not include one single Algerian at this national study day. To explain the remoteness of north African workers from communist organisations, ‘cultural’ or even ‘ethnic’ reasons are often emphasised. Beyond questions of ‘religious culture’, however, we can best understand the absence of 170

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these workers within the Party by the issue of social domination. The militant structures were essentially driven by skilled workers, whereas immigrant workers were most often low-skilled or manual labourers. The situation of these recently arrived workers within the party reveals the marginalisation of certain social groups within the communist movement. There was also constant concern for the ‘reinforcement of the unity of the working class’, which made it difficult for the communists to take into account the specificity of the situation of these immigrants. Thus, when foreign workers from the hostels participated in militant action in the late 1970s, motivated by the improvement of their living conditions (accommodation facilities, rent levels, the right to have visitors) they did so outside communist networks. They were supported by committees led by militants from the far left who clashed with militants close to the PCF and the CGT. This marginalisation of Algerian workers within the communist movement leads us to consider the situation of workers at the bottom of the factory hierarchy. Unskilled workers made up more than a third of the communist workers of this area in 1978, although they were all but absent from the local Party leadership, which was instead made up of skilled workers. In the factories, the PCF was above all organised in maintenance services and among workers with CAP qualifications (fitters, turners, operators, electricians)13 who benefited from the development of professional training. On the other hand, the party did not gain access to the production workshops where there were numerous unskilled and immigrant workers. The same situation was observed for the CGT: union activists were professional workers who came out of training centres to work in maintenance services. The prevalence of highly skilled workers in the PCF reflected the independence they gained through their professional status more generally (the qualified metalworker could find work more easily if fired) and the educational virtues of professional training, which was also a form of training for collective action. The training centres constituted instances of militant socialisation, given that those who taught in them were also workers who were able to transmit their class values to the apprentices.

The rural membership of the Communist Party The party of the Working Class? This claim is even more problematic when we focus on the rural regions of France. As early as the 1920s the PCF had significant support from rural populations (Boswell, 1998; Lagrave, 2004; Bulaitis, 2008), for example in the countryside of the Allier, in the centre of France (Sokoloff, 1975). The communists here were recruited among workers in rural industries (wood, glass, mining), but also in the agricultural sector. Moreover, r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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the rural sections or cells of the PCF (that is, in the villages) were not only run by agricultural workers and sharecroppers but above all by smallholding peasants, craftsmen and shopkeepers (Mischi, 2004). This communist influence in the Allier region, as in other farming regions, was based on a particular form of communist propaganda that existed in the countryside and which was relatively out of step with Marxist–Leninist ideology. In rural areas the communists did not merely address the farm workers but also and above all the farmers – whether they were owners or tenant farmers. This was a sign of the party’s pragmatism in a rural context, banishing the themes of collectivism and the suppression of private property to focus on the defence of rural smallholders. Supported by the slogan ‘the land belongs to those who work it’, the communist message was only barely collectivist because it redistributed land and facilitated collective solidarity already in place through the development of farming cooperatives. The communist support for the farmers in the Allier region thus did not aim to apply Marxist precepts, but rather aimed for the enlargement of access to ownership. With the programmatic defence of private property, the rural militants of the PCF put forward essentially concrete claims to protect the farming families from economic insecurity, mobilising a discourse of the defence of les petits against les gros. In the Allier region the militant and electoral base of the PCF was made up of farmers (in particular small and middle-level landowners), but they were relatively marginalised in the context of an organisation that was run by leaders from urban and industrial backgrounds. Militants from the agricultural sector engaged within the Party essentially devoted themselves to agricultural organisations (farmers’ unions, cooperatives) and the running of their town. They were often responsible for rural sections and held elected office at a local level, but they rarely gained access to higher leadership positions within the PCF. Above all, the political supervision of rural militants was carried out by blue-collar industrial leaders, even on subjects directly related to the agricultural sphere. Problems specific to farmers were thus dealt with by urban party leaders. This monopoly of the urban and factory activists over party representation in a scarcely industrialised area could also be seen in many other rural regions. It illustrates the primacy that was accorded to blue-collar militants in the organisation, regardless of the social structure of the local population. A closer examination of the social differentiations within the PCF (some of which are encouraged by the party leaders, while others run against the sociological objectives of the institution) allows us to move beyond the overly general idea of ‘working-class’ support for the PCF. Along the same lines as the farmers organising within the PCF, there are other local forms of engagement that are relatively autonomous and which may voice their opinions 172

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on the fringes of the party apparatus. It is this composite character of communist social networks, stemming from the adaptation of the national party model at the local level, that we will look at now.

Local Adaptation of the Communist Message When studied in its everyday manifestations, local militant culture is quite different from the model set out by the national leaders of the PCF. It is adapted to the symbolic universe of the working classes and adopts the means of expression specific to the social environments of its members. Militant norms are appropriated according to local configurations, given specific meanings and may even be rejected. At the local level, forms of popular insubordination and ‘subaltern’ resistance (Scott, 1990) within the party itself are perceptible. There is a certain autonomy in the local forms of engagement within the PCF, and in the different ways of appropriating the communist message. Emphasising this diversity allows us to avoid a potentially miserabilist perspective according to which communist politicisation can be reduced to ‘delegation’ and ‘putting oneself in the hands of the party’. It is in fact overly restrictive to perceive the working classes’ relation to politics solely from the perspective of their domination. Focusing on the way the party is appropriated socially means demonstrating how the militant social networks can leave their mark on forms of militant expression and provoke variations from the blueprint set out by party leaders. Here we will be presenting some elements of political expression by bluecollar groups that, although they are part of the communist movement, do not conform to it perfectly. Insisting on these variations allows us to shed light on the complexity of the politicisation of the working classes – which cannot be reduced to the actions and intentions of those who speak for them. Two field sites (the mining sector in the north of Meurthe-et-Moselle and the lowlands of Brie`re in Loire-Atlantique) provide the opportunity to analyse the impact of working-class social networks on the communist movement.

Social networks among miners and union-based communism North of Meurthe-et-Moselle, the mines are concentrated in a rural landscape marked by small industrial towns that were built around the mineshafts at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the vicinity of farming villages. The local influence of the PCF is based on the activism of its trade unionists who acquired considerable prestige during the strikes of 1947–1948. These social victories paved the way for miners of the CGT to win several town councils for the PCF. Trade unionist leaders thus came to replace the managers and directors r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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of mining companies (who were supported by the clergy and the farmers) at the head of these councils. In this social and political struggle against the rural people in the villages and the technical supervisors in the mines, the union more than the party appeared to be the way for workers to access local political power. For a long time the party was thus not really present as such in mining country. Born out of the union struggles, the party set itself up late and did not challenge the central position of the CGT among the militant miners. Several party reports lament the fact that communist miners refuse to organise in the mining cells of the Party, preferring union activism with the CGT. They limited their organisation to local, not workplace, cells (with women, retired workers and workers from different companies) and considered that the mines themselves were the domain of the trade union. There was a separation in the minds of activists but confusion in their public image: a ‘unionist’ was presented mostly as a ‘communist’ when he was running for political positions. The double identity of Albert Balducci, both regional secretary of the miners union and the main local communist leader, symbolises these strong ties between the party and the trade union. We find the same kind of confusion among most of the local representatives and the leaders of the local communist sections. In terms of the management of local power, the connection between the mine and the union tends to trump party membership. In 1971, a trade unionist miner was elected mayor at the head of a mostly communist team. As an activist with Christian affiliations he did not join the PCF, yet he was represented locally as being a ‘communist’ mayor.14 His political affiliation was detached from his party membership because what mattered most was his involvement with the CGT. Set up in mining towns scattered across a vast countryside, the communist cells were isolated from each other. According to a report of 1963, the members of these cells came together without notifying the section and produced propaganda material without necessarily informing the decision-making bodies above them.15 Such behaviours flouted the principle of democratic centralism, which was at the core of the communist education. This kind of occurrence, which reveals an insubordination among activist miners within the Party, appears frequently in the archives of the organisation. Several documents make reference to conflicts between the treasurer of the Meurthe-et-Moselle Nord PCF and the elected representatives who were criticised for not having paid their party dues. On the other hand, in spite of directives recommending the organisation of female communist sympathisers within the UFF, miners’ wives were active within their own organisation, a committee of miners’ wives set up during the strikes after the war. In mining country the situation was one of mass trade unionism, led by militants embedded in the reality of local and professional life because of the proximity of their places of work and residence. In each mine, the union 174

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council, often substantial, was elected every 2 years by the assembly of union members. It was difficult to reconcile these practices with the hierarchical communist model. The organisation of the union into local sections made centralism impossible. The CGT sections were relatively autonomous; they were more active on issues that specifically affected their mines than on those of national concern. Under the impact of this union model, party activism took on a decentralised structure based on mining towns with strong local identities. In spite of the efforts of leaders, there was no shared structure that all the communist members in the mining region could connect to. Each mining village was the site of a local section of the party. This can be explained by a strong social cohesion that was built around one productive activity and the exceptional spatial environment of small working-class towns in a rural context. If the miners and their wives ended up organising on the fringes of the party, in the CGT or in the women’s committee, it was also because they did not find their place within the party leadership. Although they belonged to a zone with a strong communist vote, the local miners were underrepresented in the leadership organs of the party. The positions within the Meurthe-et-Moselle Nord PCF were above all filled by steelworkers from the main industrial centre of the area (Longwy). It was because certain communists felt that they had no place within the party that they would not engage in a process leading to promotion within the party hierarchy. As was the case for farmers who became involved in agricultural organisations, the union may have constituted a niche for communists who felt uncomfortable within the party.

‘Working-class activities’ versus ‘elite tourism’ In order to further explore the impact of blue-collar social groups on the forms of communist engagement, we now focus on the example of the Brie`re area in Loire-Atlantique. The PCF had gained increasing influence in this rural area during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when its activists were increasingly involved in local councils. Most of the inhabitants of this area were employed in the shipbuilding or aeronautical industries in the town of Saint-Nazaire, where they had qualified positions (carpenters, welders, boiler-makers). Commuting daily, these workers belonged to both worlds: both to the rural world of the wetlands and to the industrial world of the factory. The perpetuation of the rural way of life was facilitated by the joint-tenancy status of the wetlands. The local people have thus collectively inherited some 7000 hectares since at least the fifteenth century. The management of the marsh is entrusted to a committee on which the representatives of the town council sit. The wetlands were central to the practical and symbolic activities of the local populations r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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over the course of the twentieth century. Shooting birds in particular was the basis for the staging of a form of local belonging that was simultaneously working class and masculine. The success of the PCF and the forms of its local organisation are inseparable from the fragmentation of these traditional forms of local belonging. The development of communism in this area should be understood in the context of the emergence of new issues related to tourism, which led to the questioning of traditional uses of the local space and hunting activities in particular. Of course, communist networks were set up in the villages in and around the wetlands as early as the 1950s, centring on the activities of the shipyard or aeronautical workshops. But the communist project was above all locally embedded in the context of the struggle to preserve ‘local rights’ and rural practices. The rhetoric of local communists, on the defence of working-class activities and the maintenance of the undivided collective management of the wetlands, resonated strongly with the inhabitants of the area and especially the hunters, a key social group in village life. This resonance was reinforced by the same sociological composition of communist cells and local hunting clubs: the two of them were very working-class environments, and many communist militants were also hunters. The conjunction of these two types of claims, pro-rural and workingclass, is not new. It is also present in the British case, which saw a substantial workers’ struggle between the wars for the ‘right to roam’ (Darby, 2000). In the wetlands of Brie`re, the local representatives of the PCF were supported by the hunters when they opposed the ‘appropriation of the land by big money’.16 As early as the 1950s and 1960s, they organised against various real estate and tourism ventures, seen as radically questioning the ‘working-class’ identity of these villages. Communist actions to defend bird hunting as a ‘local pastime’ or as ‘working-class tourism’ (that of the ‘workers of the region’) received the support of hunting associations. The communists warned against the dangers of ‘upper-class tourism’, which would have been reserved for a ‘privileged elite’ of bourgeois visitors, and would threaten the survival of ‘traditional activities’ of the inhabitants of the area. The communist discourse aiming to preserve the blue-collar lifestyle of the local people was popular as these activities were challenged by the boom in urban uses of the rural environment. From this perspective, communists encouraged and transmitted popular mistrust regarding the establishment of the Regional Nature Park of Brie`re at the end of the 1960s. It was when the Park was created in 1971 that the first communist-led town council was elected at Trignac on the edge of the wetlands. The defence of local interests against the Park was the theme that dominated the first municipal publications in this small industrial town.17 After Trignac, three other villages in the region elected communist town councils, in close collaboration with hunting associations. These victories happened partly as a result of a platform based on limiting the 176

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development of tourism in the area. The communists declared themselves in support of ‘hunting that is both working-class and traditional’, considered a right since the French Revolution. They were opposed to European directives in defence of the environment, which led to a restriction of traditional local practices by encouraging the establishment of protected nature zones. In defending the ‘natural’ and ‘working-class’ character of this area against private and tourist interests, the communists furthered the mistrust of the local workers about the arrival of new inhabitants. Coming from cities, these new residents belonged to the middle or upper classes and they practiced more contemplative pastimes in rural areas (walking, wildlife observation and so on). The PCF gained a large audience among workers and their families living in the wetlands by taking on their particular issues, and this in a context of weakening traditional forms of local belonging. The strength of local communism therefore did not simply reflect the reinforcement of the workerisation of these villages between the two world wars, or the industrial disputes of the 1950s. It should also be seen in light of the fact that local identities became increasingly fragile from the 1960s as a result of new national and European regulations in the domain of environmental protection and the increasing intrusion of external groups (tourists, middle classes and so on) into the wetlands. Thus, the success of communism should be linked to the decline of social conditions of the local working classes in rural areas (Retie`re, 2003; Renahy, 2005). It also reflects the ability of these local representatives to position their movement within the ongoing local history of the defence of collective rights, seen as privileges acquired through class conflict. The communists made themselves attractive by becoming the modern spokespeople of traditional claims, and by linking their actions to past struggles against the ‘gentry’ or the ‘lords’ and for the preservation of the ‘full enjoyment’ of the resources of the local area. By opposing real estate promoters and defending the zone’s wetland status they meant to continue the nineteenth-century struggle against the bourgeoisie that had sought to drain and monopolise the undivided wetlands (Le Marec, 2008).18 The two case studies presented here demonstrate that working-class social networks, either union-based in the case of the iron miners or recreational with the hunters, can be sources of support for the PCF. However, they also suggest that these groups escape the control of the party and impose various forms of political mobilisation on it. Situating activism within the social groups that support it allows us to reproduce the complexity of working-class engagement: combining a negotiated submission to the party and a defiance towards institutions. The relationship of the working classes to politics is often presented from the perspective of total engagement and submissive delegation necessarily associating ‘communitarian’ working-class groups with blind activism. However, our concrete analysis of communist networks shows that workers’ collective practices can on the contrary be a way of distancing themselves from r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419

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the central party organisation and may even become vectors of specific ways of appropriating the militant model.

Conclusion By analysing militant practices within their local contexts, we have sought to demonstrate that the power of the PCF is based on the training and supervision of a militant elite based in heavy industry. This elite of party employees from working-class backgrounds supervises a socially diverse rank and file and is at the head of the various decision-making bodies able to reproduce the social inequalities existing in both domestic and professional spaces. The prevalence of skilled workers in the party leadership from the 1930s until the 1970s in the regions we have looked at is thus based on the marginalisation of certain lowstatus blue-collar groups (women, unskilled or low-skilled workers and immigrants) but also of other non-elite social groups (agricultural workers, farmers, shopkeepers, artisans). We have sought to underline the fact that local social groups constitute networks that are favourable to the development of communist activism, while also placing limits on collective action. They indeed have an impact on the forms of engagement within the PCF. Thus, union engagement can be a site of support for the PCF, as well as being an obstacle for the organisational deployment of the party as it is envisaged by its representatives. These observations lead us to both emphasise the fact that the PCF is embedded in the working classes and relativise its hold on these spheres of society. Local expressions of communism were fuelled by the diversity of working-class life and did not hold as a separate ‘counter-society’. Historical and empirical investigations tend indeed to make Kriegel’s view irrelevant at some points. The party discipline was at the core of the communist education, and national permanents were rarely at odds with the Party apparatus, but the situation among the rank and file members and in regions was not so clear-cut. The primacy of the organisation over elected officials and the treatment of the CGT as a ‘satellite’ organisation was, for instance, never automatic, because both local elected officials and unions had the potential to engage more directly with ordinary people’s needs. The use of the PCF archives led to the recognition that French communism is plural in its forms of expression. We are far removed from the monolithic and centralised image regularly attributed to the communist organisation, an image that has been produced by the leaders of the Party of the Working Class. The benefits of our detour via these socially specific local histories of the party apply to all organisations (associations, trade unions and so on). Collective mobilisations are strongly influenced by the social history of the areas in which they take place, and this is also true for those that are based on organisations with powerful structures of supervision, such as the PCF. 178

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Notes 1 More specifically, the sites are localised in the northern de´partement of Meurthe-et-Moselle, in the rural core of the Allier de´partement, as well as in and around the towns of Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique) and Grenoble (Ise`re). 2 The heroic constructions of the ‘worker’ and the ‘communist worker’ were at the heart of the communist celebration of the leader. Edifying life histories, autobiographies and fictional narratives were used to populate the proletarian myth. See Pennetier and Pudal (2009); Lazar (1990). 3 This is a general sketch: at the national level, Party leaders could come from more diverse working-class background: Jacques Duclos and Waldeck-Rochet, for instance, had started to work, respectively, as a baker and a market gardener. 4 Archives of PCF Federation of Meurthe-et-Moselle, lists of the members of the comite´ fe´de´ral (1944–1999). 5 A sociological and comparative analysis of rank and file members and leaders of the PCF in this area was conducted with the International Communist archives (regional reports) for the interwar period and then with the PCF Allier and CC archives. 6 We consulted this material in the Allier and Meurthe-et-Moselle PCF archives. 7 Marcel Zaidner’s report to the CC, 20 March 1974. 8 Nouvelles Voix de l’Est, 15 March 1965. 9 Traces of this conflict were collected in the PCF Meurthe-et-Moselle but also in the Miner’s Regional Union archives and during an interview conducted in 1999 with its former main leader Albert Balducci. 10 In this region as in numerous others, the PCF’s role in the Resistance had an enormous impact, and this explains the surge in voting and membership during the decade following Second World War. Nevertheless, there was continuity in terms of organisational orientations and most of the leaders came from a generation selected and educated in Party schools before the war. 11 The notion has been systematised by Kriegel’s work (1968). 12 Archives of PCF Federation of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Letter from J. Zaffagni to the PCF national Secretariat, 6 November 1961. 13 The CAP, Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle (Professional Aptitude Certificate), is a secondary school and professional school diploma. It provides a qualification as a skilled worker or employee. 14 Interview with the former mayor of Tucquegnieux, September 1999. 15 Archives of the PCF Meurthe-et-Moselle, report by R. Chovanel to the CC, 13 February 1963. 16 Rhetoric and action of the PCF in this area were analysed from propaganda material in PCF Loire-Atlantique archives and in personal archives of the former communist leader Maurice Rocher. 17 Tignac Town Council archives. 18 This point about the PCF grafting itself onto long-standing left-wing traditions can be extended to the Allier, where there was a strong tradition of left-wing voting and social protest since before 1914 (Roche, 2004; Mischi, 2010, pp. 251–259).

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