Rise of the Communist Party
Nationalism, Reparations, Imperialism, Socialist split, Communist Party, Class against Class to Popular Front – in progress
Nationalism, Reparations, Imperialism, Socialist split, Communist Party, Class against Class to Popular Front – in progress
Number: 16
The very short road was opened and named in 1912 after the engraver, Jacques Callot, who lived for about a year in Paris in 1629. It was built on an old alley-way to the Pont Neuf opened in 1823.
Its principal feature is the Café La Pallette (shown above) whose second back room is decorated with ceramics from the 1930s. Close to the Beaux-Arts de Paris institution the doorway next to it at No. 16 included the office of the review Le Paria edited by Ho chi Minh who, in respone to the police watching him, wrote to the Minister of the Colonies in August 1922 telling him what he was doing there.
In the early 1920s No. 16 was also the address of the literary review, Clarté, founded in 1919 by Henri Barbusse.
In the Spring of 1926 Breton and Aragon and Naville opened the Surrealist Gallery in the former office of the Clarté. And in December that year Pierre Naville described Breton bringing Léona Delcourt (Nadja) there at the end of Breton’s relationship with her.
What is shared between those who define themselves or are defined by others as ‘communist’? And how may ‘Communism’ be distinguished both from French anarchism and French socialism, with which it shared much common history and ground?
The 1795 Paris revolutionary ‘Manifesto of Equals’ inspired by François-Noel Babeuf and rescued from oblivion by Philippe Buonarroti (1761-1837) summarised what remained (and remains) common to nearly all those who described themselves as communist across the following two hundred and some years:
‘We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses… We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.
We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities. Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.
Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.’
After agreeing to this general statement of belief, communists had much more to disagree with each other upon.
We have divided the considerable history of Communism in France into five periods:
French socialism began to distinguish itself both from Proudhon’s anarchistic appeal to humanity’s moral responsibilities and from Blanqui’s insurrectionism in the 1890s. Founded by Blum, Jaures and Vaillant in 1905 in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, the SFIO united left reformist republicans and Marxist sectarians. The alliance broke up in 1920 when a majority at the Tours Conference voted to affiliate to the new Communist International.
Despite being a minority at that SFIO conference, the SFIO of left reformist socialism became the leading left political current through nearly all the interwar period. After the Communist Party ended Stalin’s ‘class against class’ propaganda against the Socialists and proposed a Popular Front alliance, Blum became prime minister in 1936.
Under the Fourth Republic its internal divisions over Algerian independence, with Mendes France and the challenge of the stronger Communist Party allowed De Gaulle to take power. In 1981 Mitterrand won a decisive majority on a left platform that he abandoned three years later. From then the Socialist Party became largely a party of elected national and local officials, without any real mass membership. In 2017, following five politically disastrous years under Hollande, the Socialist Party suffered a major defeat in both the presidential and National Assembly elections. A new left party, La France Insoumise (France untamed), did relatively well, with the Left Front’s presidential candidate getting 19.6% of the vote in the first round.
Like the Socialists, though, Melonchon’s La France Insoumise has still virtually no local membership base. In the European elections of 2019, its share of the vote fell to 6%.
Work in progress