Francois Mitterrand and his Socialists:Minuet A La Francaise

One way or another, François Mitterrand and his Socialists must come to grips with the other major force on the French left, the 500,000-member Communist Party of France (P.C.F.). That will be no easy thing to do. Relations between the two parties over the years resemble nothing so much as a complicated minuet. For a while the parties move in step, and then they each go their separate and stubborn ways.

The dance began in 1920 when delegates to a Socialist convention in Tours walked out and joined the fledgling Comintern, the external arm of the Bolshevik Revolution. Over the next 15 years the P.C.F. developed into a faithful replica of its Soviet parent. The first real opportunity for Communist-Socialist cooperation came in 1936 with the Popular Front government of Socialist Léon Blum. The Communists officially refused to take part in the short-lived Front because the Socialists were the dominant force. But the party tacitly supported such Blum reforms as sponsorship of the 40-hour work week and collective bargaining.

The P.C.F. was almost destroyed in 1939 following its knee-jerk endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 quickly changed that, and many Communists, like 1969 Presidential Candidate Jacques Duclos, were a key force in the French Resistance. The party was thus strong enough to earn a place in Charles de Gaulle's first postwar Cabinet—the first and only time that the P.C.F. has taken part in the French government.

The Communists were frozen out of power with the inauguration of the cold war and slumped into a thoroughly Stalinist mold. Indeed, the first word of anti-Soviet criticism from the P.C.F. did not come until the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and even that was muted. In the same year, the party dashed the faith of many leftist true believers by refusing to support the insurrectionist "May events," which eventually undermined De Gaulle's presidency. The Communists saw no opportunity to take control of the worker-student rebellion that shook France, and therefore labeled it counterrevolutionary.

But four years later the party accepted the Socialists' idea of a Common Program. During that period of thaw, the P.C.F. dropped the notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" from its charter. As the Socialists increased in popularity, the Communists recoiled in envy. The Common Program fell apart prior to the 1978 legislative elections. Some old Communist habits made a comeback: the P.C.F. was the only Western European Communist party, for example, to endorse the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

All the doctrinal flip-flopping has only served to inflame contending sectors within the P.C.F. During the period of internal bickering, about 100,000 members dropped away. As always, the chief source of Communist strength is its dominance of the 2 million-member, Paris-based General Labor Confederation (C.G.T.), France's largest trade union organization, which has particular influence in such public-sector enterprises as railways and the electric companies.

Traditionally, the well-organized Communists have been able to count on 20% of France's electoral vote. In April that figure dropped to 15.3%, the lowest since 1936. More than any other factor, that led the party's leaders to take up their dance with Mitterrand once again.