Georget Victoire-5104661-The French Communist Party, a revolutionary Party or a governmental faction?

Abstract

This thesis seeks to analyse what differentiated the communist experience in France from other European countries within the national context of the Fourth Republic, which saw the increased influence of legislative powers in decision-making. The international context of the emergence of the Cold War was also key, with the division of the world into two distinct blocs: the capitalists in the West fighting the communists in the East. Within the ambit of an International Relations framework, this study utilises discourse analysis and the securitisation theory to examine to what extent the ideological confrontation between the United States and the URSS had repercussions on the French Communist Party (PCF) and more generally how it shaped France’s political landscape between 1944 and 1953. After a thorough review of the PCF's history up to the Second World War, this paper explores how the influence of the two superpowers in Western Europe and their geopolitical strategies transformed the leadership of the Party. The findings suggest that the US and the URSS were both directly and indirectly responsible for the decline in the PCF's reputation and influence. Initially enjoying widespread popularity in the aftermath of the conflict, the PCF was excluded from power in 1947 and subjected to repression measures by the French government during the following years. While the spread of the anti-communist doctrine by the US in Western Europe affected the French political arena, it led to an instrumentalisation of the PCF by the URSS, which sought to capitalise on the Party’s popularity among the population to diffuse the communist ideology. Research shows that not only did the USSR's strategy fail to establish communist-led governments in Western Europe, but the revolutionary stance chosen by the Soviets eventually contributed to the isolation of the Party within French politics.