war the PCF went underground and formed a vital part of the resistance
movement, though as often as not fighting the other,de Gaulle-inspired or
Catholic, wings as well as the Germans. After the allied invasion in 1944
elements of the party tried to seize power in the south of France. Though
invited into the post-war government under de Gaulle it rapidly withdrew
rather than be tarnished with helping the US-backed French bourgeoisie. In
the immediate post-war elections the PCF received over 25% of the vote, later
settling to a level between 20% and 25%. Also during this period the party
started to cast off some of its Stalinism and to lose its revolutionary fervour; at
the time of the 1968 disturbances in Paris it exercised tight control on its
members and refused to see the situation as having any revolutionary potential.
This increasing moderation, however, culminating in 1976 when the party
officially abandoned the doctrine of thedictatorship of the proletariat, did
it no electoral good. Steadily its votes slipped away to the newly united Parti
Socialiste which had developed out of a mess of small splinter groups fighting
an internecine war. Though the PCF tried to counter this by alliances with the
socialists, they could not quite accept the degree of policy modification
required, and their best hope for power, the common programme between
the two parties, collapsed just before the 1978 National Assembly elections,
allowing the right to win yet again. By the 1981 presidential elections the PCF
had come to see a possible victory for the socialists as their biggest danger, but
the trend continued, and both the presidential election and the ensuing
Assembly election were won by the Socialists. Although they were given four
places in the Fifth Republic’s first left-wing coalition government, formed after
the general election held in the wake of Franc ̧oisMitterrand’spresidential
election victory, this arrangement lasted only until 1984, and even then was
often characterized by acrimony. Subsequently their decline accelerated, so
that by the late 1980s they had been surpassed as a force in French politics by
the far-right Front National, and their level of public support had generally
fallen beneath 10%. In the 2002 presidential election the PCF candidate
received just 3.4% of the first-round votes cast, less than several other far-left
candidates. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union effectively removed the PCF’s last source of legitimacy and there
seemed little prospect of its being able to arrest its decline and exert significant
political influence in the future.
Parti Socialiste
The French Socialist Party is, in its current form, a relatively new creation.
Originally created in 1905 by a merger of two socialist parties, and inspired by
the Second International (seeinternational socialism), it was called simply
the Section Franc ̧aise de l’Internationale Ouvrie`re (SFIO—French Section of
Parti Socialiste