Postwar

Socialists. Only then did Georges Marchais, the PCF’s lackluster General Secretary, begin to realize the mistake his Party had made in aligning its fate with that of Mitterrand’s young and energetic party—a decision taken partly under the optimistic, ecumenical influence of ‘Eurocommunism’—but it was too late.

After improving upon his 1965 showing in the 1974 Presidential election, when he was narrowly beaten by Giscard d’Estaing after standing as the candidate of the united Left, Mitterrand had forged a superb electoral machine, turning the Socialist Party into a catch-all movement appealing across the whole spectrum of French society, including Catholics, women, farmers and small shopkeepers, all hitherto hostile to the Socialists.[256] His own image had mellowed with age: huge campaign billboards across France in the spring of 1981 showed Mitterrand’s portrait in soft focus, set against the same timeless bucolic rural landscape once favored in Petainist propaganda on those same billboards, under the promise ‘La Force Tranquille’—Quiet Strength.

The Communists, meanwhile, were weak—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an acute embarrassment, as were their own declining polls. During the course of the 1970s the Communist Party had ceased to be a fixed star in the ideological firmament: its prestige had collapsed along with its vote, even in the industrial ‘Red Belt’ of Paris that it had dominated since the mid-twenties. Nevertheless, Marchais was determined to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections: partly out of habit, partly from hubris, but mostly from a growing awareness of the need to cut the PCF loose from the poisoned embrace of its Socialist comrades.

At the first round of the 1981 Presidential election the two conservative candidates, Giscard d’Estaing and the young Jacques Chirac, together outpolled Mitterrand and Marchais (the latter winning just 12.2 percent of the vote). But in the run-off two weeks later between the two best-placed candidates, Mitterrand secured the backing of Socialists, Communists, environmentalists and even the normally uncooperative Trotskyists, more than doubled his first-round share and defeated Giscard to become the first directly-elected Socialist head of state in Europe. He promptly dissolved parliament and called legislative elections at which his own party trounced Communists and Right alike, winning for itself an absolute majority in the Assemblee Nationale. The Socialists were in complete control of France.

The spontaneous celebrations that greeted the Socialists’ victories were unprecedented. For the tens of thousands of (mostly young) Mitterrand supporters who danced in the streets this was the ‘grand soir’, the revolutionary eve, the threshold of a radical break with the past. On the basis of electoral data alone that would have been a curious claim. As in past electoral upheavals—the French Popular Front victory in April 1936 to which Mitterrand’s achievement was immediately compared, or Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979—the French vote in 1981 was not radically re-distributed. Indeed, Mitterrand actually fared worse, in the initial voting, than in his earlier bids for the presidency in 1965 and 1974.

What made the difference was the discipline showed by Left voters this time around in coalescing behind Mitterrand at the second round rather than abstaining in sectarian obstinacy, and the division of opinion on the Right. Of those who voted for Chirac in the initial round of the 1981 presidential election, 16 percent gave their votes to Mitterrand two weeks later—rather than re-elect the outgoing president Giscard d’Estaing: a man heartily disliked by Chirac’s Gaullist supporters. Had the Right not divided thus there would have been no President Mitterrand, no Socialist sweep in the ensuing legislative elections—and no grand soir of radical expectations.

It is worth emphasizing this because so much seemed to hang on the outcome of the 1981 election. In retrospect it is clear, as Mitterrand himself understood, that his achievement in 1981 was to ‘normalize’ the process of alternation in the French Republic, to make it possible for the Socialists to be treated as a normal party of government. But to Mitterrand’s supporters in 1981 the picture looked very different. Their goal was not to normalize the alternation of power in the future but to seize it and use it, here and now. They took for good coin their leader’s promises of radical transformation, his undertaking to sweep away not just the corruption and ennui of the Giscard years but also the very capitalist system itself. Excluded from office for so long, France’s Socialist militants had remained free to dream a dream of revolution.

For the Left had not exercised power in France for many decades; indeed, it had never exercised power untrammeled by coalition partners, uncooperative bankers, foreign exchange crises, international emergencies and a litany of other excuses for its failure to implement socialism. In 1981, as it seemed, none of these applied and there would be no excuse for backsliding. Moreover, the association of control of the state with implementation of revolutionary change was so deeply embedded in radical political culture in France that the mere fact of winning the election was itself taken as signifying a coming social confrontation.

Like Marx himself, the French Left identified all real change with political revolution in general and the great French Revolution in particular. Enthusiastic comparisons were thus made with 1871 and even 1791. Nothing Mitterrand had said in the campaign had led the more committed of his followers to think otherwise. In order to ‘dish’ the Communists and the left wing of his own party, Mitterrand had stolen their revolutionary clothes. His election campaign aroused expectations that he was now expected to fulfill.

Thus the Mitterrand years began with an ambitious and radical agenda: a blend of morally uplifting and overdue social reforms (of which the abolition of capital punishment was the most significant) with a phantasmagoric programme of ‘anticapitalist’ legislation. Wages were raised, the retirement age lowered, working hours reduced. But the core element of the programme was an unprecedented schedule of nationalizations. In its first year of office the new Socialist government of Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy took into state control, inter alia: 36 banks; two major finance houses; five of France’s largest industrial corporations (including Thomson-Brandt, the country’s major electrical and electronic products manufacturer); and Usinor and Sacilor, France’s giant iron and steel groups.

There was no pre-determined economic strategy behind these moves. There was talk of invigorating the slowing French economy by the injection of government capital; but this was not a new idea, nor a particularly Socialist one: Prime Minister Chirac, back in the mid-Seventies, had briefly entertained similarly demand-led projects for growth. The prime function of the nationalizations of 1981-82, like the exchange controls that accompanied them, was to symbolize the anti-capitalist intent of the new regime; to confirm that the elections of 1981 had really changed something more than just the personnel of government.

In reality, it was clear from the outset to those concerned that state-owned banks, for example, could only function if permitted ‘total autonomy of decision and action’, thus eliminating the regulatory and socially redistributive goals that had been adduced to justify their take-over in the first place. This pragmatic concession illustrates the broader impediment facing the Mitterrand ‘revolution’. For a year the new regime strove boldly to present a radical face to France and the world. At first this was convincing—Jacques Attali, Mitterrand’s close adviser, recorded that US officials (always on the lookout for such backsliding) claimed to see little difference between French economic policy and that of the Soviet Union.

But for France to take a ‘Socialist’ path in 1982 would have meant imposing not just exchange controls but a whole gamut of regulations cutting the country off from its commercial partners and putting the economy on a virtually autarkic footing. To take France out of international financial markets would not perhaps have been so unimaginable an undertaking as it would later become: in 1977 the market capitalization of IBM alone was twice that of the entire Paris Bourse. Of greater significance was the fact that such a move would have triggered France’s separation and perhaps even departure from the European Community, whose agreements on tariffs, markets and currency alignments—not to mention impending plans for a single market—already severely restricted the options open to member states.

These considerations appear to have concentrated Mitterrand’s thinking—aided, no doubt, by evidence of mounting panic in business circles and signs that currency, valuables and people were moving abroad with increasing urgency, precipitating an economic crisis. On June 12th 1982, the President decided upon a ‘U’ turn. Rejecting the advice of his more radical counselors, Mitterrand authorized his government to freeze prices and wages for a four-month period; cut public spending (which had been generously increased the previous year); raise taxes; give priority to the struggle with inflation (rather than print money, as he had been urged to do)—in effect adopting the economic strategy of the conservative economist Raymond Barre whose 1977 ‘Plan’, never implemented, would have introduced into France a dose of Thatcherism avant l’heure;