Communism a La Francaise

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/BOBIGNY

Enter town on Stalingrad Street. Take a whiff of the pink and red flowers planted around V.I. Lenin's bust. Among the high-rise concrete blocks of the Karl Marx Quarter, comrades are hawking the latest edition of the Communist Party newspaper. Plastered along Avenue Yury Gagarin, Nelson Mandela Street and Avenue Salvador Allende, posters sport a red hammer and sickle and a soft- sell slogan: A JOB, JUST TO SURVIVE.

Welcome to Bobigny, fiefdom of the French Communist Party and not about to apologize. Will they rebaptize the streets and dismantle the monument to Vladimir Ilyich? Mayor Georges Valbon grins broadly and shakes his head. "I was suckled on the milk of the October Revolution," he says. "Lenin was a symbol of hope for French workers and intellectuals." With his monogrammed shirts and rough-hewn charm, Valbon, 67, has ruled blue-collar Bobigny, a northeastern suburb of Paris, for two decades, winning by 66% in the past mayoral election. "Communism is still on the horizon," he contends. "We build it little by little, not by decree."

The optimism is overblown. The cordon of communist-run industrial towns around Paris has frayed over the past decade as the country, ever more prosperous, moves rightward. In the 1988 presidential election, the Communist Party polled only 6.8%. Nonetheless, even as Soviet totalitarianism self- destructs, President Francois Mitterrand's minority Socialist government depends on 26 Communist deputies to pass its legislation. Unlike Communist parties in Italy and Spain, France's apparatus has no plans to change its name. Forty-six of France's 226 largest cities, including Bobigny, remain in Communist Party hands. And there, the mood is a mixture of nostalgic regret and last-ditch defiance.

"Perhaps we should offer you a vodka," city councilor Raymond Chapin quips to a reporter. In the next breath he grows serious, recalling how, when he first joined the party two decades ago, it sent its members to visit the Soviet Union, "telling us it was a workers' paradise. Today," he acknowledges, "that would make people laugh." Outside city hall, activist Gerard Kourland is selling L'Humanite, the party organ, and patiently explaining the difference between the Russian and French parties: "We officially gave up on the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976. And even before then, we had our doubts."

In Bobigny self-interest has replaced ideology, and the Communists have built their political machine on a hair-trigger response to the grass roots. "They blanket the city," says opposition city councilor Jean-Luc Romero. "The moment anyone loses a job, a party worker stops by to offer help, part-time employment or a social subsidy." Among Bobigny's 44,000 residents, the 2,700 Communist activists are organized into 70 neighborhood and factory- based cells. If a family cannot pay the rent in its low-income housing project, the local cell leader will intervene with the authorities. If police show up to evict, cell members have been known to physically block the gendarmes. Naturally, beneficiaries are expected to respond at election time.

The city sends hundreds of children to the country for summer vacations. It subsidizes three clinics for outpatient care. Municipal retirement homes shelter the elderly. Last week, street-corner notices invited students who cannot find places in universities to come to city hall for help. The largesse is financed by higher taxes on local business and subsidies from Socialist allies in state ministries.

Communist goodwill extends even to religion. On a recent Sunday, fresh carnations adorned the statue of the Virgin Mary in what Bobigny residents call Karl Marx church, although the official name of the sanctuary on Karl Marx Avenue is St. Andre's. In his sermon before 150 faithful, Father Jean Dechet tactfully avoided the subject of communism's demise. "Christians and communists collaborate here," he said after the service. "The communists are attentive to people's needs." Ten years ago, Valbon's government paid $500,000 to build a new church.

In Bobigny's mall, where the wine and cheese shop faces the Belgian chocolate shop, where McDonald's shovels out Big Macs and the video-store window displays the Gummi Bears, distinctions between communists and capitalists blur. Outside, three dozen streets are named for French communists, pacifists and revolutionaries. Politically correct artists are commemorated: the Pablo Picasso Metro station, the Charlie Chaplin Cultural Center and, most recently, a street named for detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett, once blacklisted as a communist. What does the future hold? A symbolic test looms, in the form of a new sports center. The city council's right-wing minority has proposed naming it the Andrei Sakharov Swimming Pool. The communists are squirming. Says Romero: "That really stumped them."