France: Communist Shrinking Pains

Flight 007 is costing the rigidly orthodox party popular support

The weather was cold and wet, and the faithful struggled to keep their wares as unsullied as their ideology. Neither was easy for France's Communist Party (P.C.F.) last week as hundreds of thousands of members and sympathizers gathered for their annual fund-raising fair, the fête de l'humanité, in a 37-acre park in the working-class Paris suburb of La Courneuve. While construction workers, secretaries and concierges wrestled with their crepes, foie gras and muscadet in the pounding rain, party leaders were striving to maintain loyalty on the most emotional issue of the day: the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union.

The airliner tragedy is one of the thorniest problems yet faced by the pro-Moscow French Communists in their uneasy 28-month alliance with the Socialist-dominated government of President FrançMitterrand —and one that has again raised speculation that the Communists ultimately will leave or be invited out of the government. In past months the party has disagreed with its coalition partner on a variety of issues, from the government's strong support for NATO's plan to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe to French intervention in Chad. The attacks, however, tended to become muted under Mitterrand's stern rebukes.

The death of 269 passengers and crew on board the South Korean airliner was a different matter: the P.C.F.'s response placed the party not only at odds with the Mitterrand government, which voiced outrage over the incident, but also threatened to alienate many members, who in recent years have become increasingly disillusioned with the party's policies.

Central to those policies is unquestioning support of Moscow's actions, no matter how offensive. Those who thought that the French Communists might have had some weakening of resolve over the shooting down of a civilian airliner were sharply reminded of ultimate loyalties by Party Boss Georges Marchais. Opening a fête exhibit titled "The Fight for Human Rights," Marchais called the incident "more complex than the caricaturish version given by those who have decided once and for all that the Soviet Union is the kingdom of evil and its leaders bloodthirsty ogres." Keeping his orthodox shibboleths in order, he accused the U.S. of reacting with "cries of vengeance" and "terms of abuse and invective."

Marchais's words were an open indication of the increasing strain between the French Communists' allegiance to Moscow and their loyalty to the Mitterrand government. "Pro-Sovietism is like an old shell that won't break off," said a Parisian woman who is married to a Communist journalist. "Party leaders are incapable of telling the U.S.S.R. to go to hell when they [the Soviets] do outrageous things."