Pique-nic

Marchais eats a few words

Around the bend of the roller coaster, a booth peddled oysters, glasses of chilled Muscadet and posters decrying Brittany's disastrous oil spill of last spring. With a fine Gallic disdain for international worker solidarity, another food kiosk sold sangria and the message: SPAIN IN THE COMMON MARKET. A BAD BLOW FOR FRANCE. Workers hawked dish towels underneath a sign pleading SAVE THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY OF THE VOSGES. Break-the-bottle games featured images of such popular villains as French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, that advocate of dreaded social democracy.

In short, the French Communist Party's 42nd Fete de I'Humanite last week was outwardly the same as always. Part county fair, part political convention, the annual get-together is a celebration of gastronomy, games and proletarian sloganeering that for two days turns the working-class Paris suburb of La Courneuve into a Communist carnival. Yet for all the gourmandizing hoopla, this year's fete was hardly the joyful event of the past few Septembers, when the party was confidently anticipating a leftist victory in last March's parliamentary elections. In the wake of the left's stunning defeat and as the feud between Communists and Socialists enters its second year, the festivities this year seemed in large part an attempt at putting on a cheerful front.

And an exceedingly transparent front it was too. The village du livre, a vast tent that is the traditional showcase for Marxist authors' latest books, was barely large enough to contain the hubbub of dissent and debate that has raged through the party since last spring's electoral disaster. The brooding began in April, when Communist Secretary-General Georges Marchais came under widespread attack in party ranks as the cause of the disaster. Critics charged that party leaders' autocratic exercise of "democratic centralism"--the party's code word for unquestioned rule from the top--had provoked the split with Franc,ois Mitterrand's Socialists and the splintering of the once confident Union de la Gauche. When Marchais chose simply to blame the Socialists rather than examine in cold detail the causes of the March defeat, six party intellectuals took the unprecedented step of attacking the Politburo in Le Monde.

Suddenly, the battle within the party was joined. Communist Historian Jean Elleinstein launched a three-part Le Monde series. In it, he caustically observed that there had been "more centralism than democracy" in Communism's history and asked whether the French party could not now accommodate more debate, lest it continue to lose rank-and-file voters. Philosopher Louis Althusser, a party hardliner, joined the criticism with his own Le Monde series, and Jacques Fremontier, editor of a Communist magazine for factory workers, resigned in protest over Marchais's handling of the election.

Then in August came the first signs of an attempt at appeasement. Politburo Member Paul Laurent, a respected liberal in the party leadership, published a book defending the secrecy of top-level meetings ("The true freedom of a director is to debate tranquilly"), but conceded some "faults and insufficiencies" in party administration. The ultimate rehabilitation came from Marchais, in a speech televised from the Fete de I'Humanite last week. There are, he declared firmly, "no protesters in the French Communist Party"; there are only loyal "comrades who discuss." Contradicting his earlier condemnation of the critics, Marchais contended that "it is possible to have good politics in our party only to the extent that each person can press his own ideas freely." Noting that Archcritic Elleinstein was at the fete, busily autographing books, Marchais called his presence "obvious proof of the democracy that reigns within the breast of the party."

Not all French were immediately convinced that Marchais's ingratiating turnabout on dissent within the party was a permanent change. Observed Jean-Franc,ois Revel, perennial critic of the Communists: "Each time that the party steps on the democratic accelerator, it then pushes yet more vigorously on the brake." That helps explain why the Communists are stalled in France's political traffic. qed

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