PCF often faced a stark choice between the isolation that Stalin had warned against and substantial concessions to its ‘weaker’ partners of the SFIO and the third major governing party of the Liberation era, the Christian Democrat Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP).

The divided Left, 1945

The alliance strategy won an initial success at the municipal elections of April-May 1945. Here the PCF ran broad-based lists labelled ‘republican, democratic, and anti-fascist union’. After the first round of voting it called for ‘a bloc of all the republican, democratic and secular forces’ for the second ballot.[360]The pre-election Communist-Socialist alliance secured victories in over 5,500 municipalities, over three times more than the prewar total (cf. Chapter 5); Communist mayors headed 1,462 municipalities, including, for the first time, big towns such as Toulon, Nantes, Limoges and Reims.[361]Pravda took note with satisfaction, underlining that the victorious ‘anti-fascist’ lists consisted of candidates proposed jointly by the PCF and the SFIO, as well as Resistance organisations and, in some areas, the Radical Party.[362]

At the same time, the PCF leadership heeded Stalin’s counsels of moderation and his instruction to build a left-wing bloc. The party’s watchwords were national economic reconstruction, the punishment of traitors, real guarantees of democratic rights and freedoms, and the drafting of a new constitution – all of which would require a broad union of national forces around the programme of the CNR. Speaking at the PCF’s first postwar congress (the Tenth Congress, held in Paris from 26–30 June 1945), Thorez declared that ‘the renaissance of France is not the business of a single party or of a few statesmen, but a problem to be solved by millions of French men and women, by the whole nation’.[363]Three weeks later he offered proof of his party’s commitment to workplace discipline when he told France’s miners that their first ‘duty as a class’ was to ‘produce, produce, and again produce’; the CGT did not hesitate to break strikes where they occurred.[364]

In party terms, the leadership counted primarily on the Socialists to avoid the isolation that Stalin had warned against. At the Tenth Congress, Thorez underlined ‘the urgent need to create a strong French Labour party which would bring together Socialists and Communists and constitute the basis of a union between all republicans and all true Frenchmen’.[365]Shortly afterwards, a PCF delegation made merger proposals to the SFIO leadership. But the Socialists were in no hurry. Many feared that their party would be weakened or (as in some East European countries) simply swallowed up by the Communists in a united structure. Léon Blum, the former prime minister, whom Stalin had called a ‘charlatan’ even in 1936, during the Popular Front era, and who now returned the compliment by referring to the PCF as a ‘foreign nationalist party’, reinforced these concerns after returning from deportation in Germany at the end of hostilities.[366]His growing influence within the SFIO leadership helped tip the balance at the SFIO’s Congress of August 1945: favourable to ‘unity of action’ with the PCF, the Socialists voted against a merger. Such a union might not have produced comparable results to those obtained in Eastern Europe. But the decision was a setback for the PCF’s strategy as set out by Stalin; and from that summer, relations between the two parties began to deteriorate.

Partial isolation: the referendum of 21 October 1945

The same balance of electoral success with political setbacks was discernible at the referendum and elections of 21 October 1945, the first vote at national level since the war. With 26.2 per cent of the vote (against the MRP’s 24.9 and the SFIO’s 23.8), and the largest parliamentary group, the PCF was France’s leading party. Pravda again noted the result with satisfaction, explaining that ‘the French people know very well the role played by the Communist party in the Resistance organisations, in the struggle against the Hitlerite occupation, and in the restoration of democratic principles’.[367]

The double referendum held concurrently with the elections, by contrast, produced a less welcome result for the PCF. The referendum (itself a break with tradition, since no referendum had been held in France since the fall of the Second Empire in 1870) concerned the powers of the new legislature, and specifically its right to draft a new constitution and the limitations, if any, to be placed on its mandate. Only the Radicals opposed any attribution of constituent powers: they preferred a straight return to the Third Republic, under which they had held a pivotal position. The PCF and the CGT took the opposite position, seeking open-ended and constituent powers for the new assembly. De Gaulle, however, proposed, in the name of the GPRF, that those powers be limited. The new assembly would have normal powers of a parliament; it would draft a new constitution; but its mandate would last just seven months and its constitutional draft would be submitted to a new referendum.[368]‘De Gaulle has openly thrown his gauntlet into the balance’, noted Pravda, apparently quoting from the French press.[369]Supported by the SFIO, the MRP, and other ‘bourgeois’ groups from the Resistance, this project was opposed, unsuccessfully, by the Communists and the Radicals, as well as the CGT. At the referendum, 95 per cent of the voters backed constituent powers for the new assembly, revealing the Radicals’ extreme weakness; but two-thirds also approved de Gaulle’s proposal to limit its powers, showing – in line with Stalin’s warnings – the relative weakness of the PCF when isolated.

A sense of isolation was aggravated by the behaviour of the SFIO during the campaign. Pravda noted gloomily that ‘The Socialist Party’s campaign was almost entirely directed against the PCF. The Socialist Party rejected… the hand held out to it, and preferred an unnatural alliance with the MRP. The outcome was more than unfavourable for the Socialists.’[370]Three days later, the main culprit was identified by name: ‘Léon Blum has repeatedly spoken in