French Left
[1] On the right, the Legitimists held counter-revolutionary views and rejected any compromise with modern ideologies while the Orléanists hoped to create a constitutional monarchy, under their preferred branch of the royal family, a brief reality after the 1830 July Revolution.
The growing French workers movement consisted of diverse strands; Marxism began to rival Radical Republicanism and the "utopian socialism" of Auguste Comte and Charles Fourier with whom Karl Marx had become disillusioned.
The House of Orléans, cadet branch of the Bourbon, then came to power with Louis-Philippe, marking the new influence of the second, important right-wing tradition of France (according to the historian René Rémond's famous classification), the Orléanists.
Inspired both by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Adam Smith, he imagined an original theory based on the key Marxist notion of class struggle, which appeared to him self-evident in the Parisian context of insurrection and permanent turmoil.
Both Raspail and Lamartine obtained less than 1%, Cavaignac reached almost 20%, while the prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte surprisingly won the election with almost 75% of the votes, marking an important defeat of the Republican and Socialist camps.
According to historian Benedict Anderson... "roughly 20,000 Communards or suspected sympathizers [were executed during the Bloody Week], a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre's ‘Terror’ of 1793–94.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Radicals replaced the Opportunists as the main center-left forces, although the latter, who slowly became social conservatives, continued to claim their place as members of the Left – a political phenomenon known as "sinistrisme".
The Opportunists broke away with the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party which aimed at deep transformations of society, leading to strong disagreements in the Chamber of Deputies, in particular with Georges Clemenceau.
Louise Michel, aka "the Red Virgin", Émile Pouget or Charles Malato were the most famous of the many, anonymous anarchists, deserters or simple criminals who had fled France and other European countries.
The anarcho-syndicalist, Fernand Pelloutier, leader of the Bourse du Travail from 1895 until his death in 1901, argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist involvement in the labor movement on the basis that anarchism could do very well without "the individual dynamiter."
In 1899, a debate raged among Socialist groups about the participation of Alexandre Millerand in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet (Bloc des gauches, Left-Wing Block), which included the Marquis de Gallifet, best known for having directed the bloody repression during the Paris Commune, alongside Radicals.
The General Confederation of Labour, created in 1895 from the fusion of the various Bourse du Travail (Fernand Pelloutier), the unions and the industries' federations, claimed its independence and the non-distinction between political and workplace activism.
The new context issued of the Russian Revolution brought a new split in the French Left, realized during the 1920 Tours Congress when the majority of the SFIO (including Boris Souvarine, Fernand Loriot, etc.)
The leader of the Cartel, Daladier, was forced to resign following 6 February 1934 crisis organized by far-right leagues, which were immediately interpreted by the French Left as a Fascist coup d'état attempt.
The Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) was henceforth created, while the French Communist Party (PCF) signed a pact of unity of action with the SFIO in July 1935.
In 1938, Marceau Pivert's Revolutionary Left tendency was expelled from the SFIO, and he created the Workers and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP) along with Luxemburgists such as René Lefeuvre.
After the Liberation, the SFIO, under the leadership of Guy Mollet (1946–1969), definitively adopted a social-democrat, reformist stance, and most of its members supported the colonial wars, in turn opposed by the PCF.
Beside de Gaulle's ordinances granting, for the first time in France, right of vote to women, the GPRF passed various labour laws, including the 11 October 1946 act establishing occupational medicine.
Ramadier also accepted the terms of the Marshall Plan and excluded the five Communist ministers (among whom the vice-Premier, Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF) during the May 1947 crises – an event which simultaneously occurred in Italy.
This exclusion put an end to the Three-parties alliance between the PCF, the SFIO and the Christian-Democrat Popular Republican Movement (MRP), which had been initiated after Charles de Gaulle's resignation in 1946.
[13][14] The Three-Parties alliance was succeeded by the Third Force (1947–1951), a coalition gathering the SFIO, the United States center-right party, the Radicals, the MRP and other centrist politicians, opposed both to the Communist and the Gaullist movement.
When French Generals threatened Pierre Pflimlin's government with a coup in May 1958, leading to the recall of Charles de Gaulle to power in the turmoil of the Algerian War (1954–62), the Radicals and the SFIO supported his return and the establishment of the semi-presidential regime of the Fifth Republic.
Although Guy Mollet's government had enacted repressive policies against the National Liberation Front (FLN), most of the left, including the personalist movement which expressed itself in Esprit, opposed the systematic use of torture by the French Army.
Although the use of torture quickly became well-known and was opposed by the left-wing opposition, the French state repeatedly denied its employment, censoring more than 250 books, newspapers and films (in metropolitan France alone) which dealt with the subject (and 586 in Algeria).
[15] Henri Alleg's 1958 book, La Question, Boris Vian's The Deserter, Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le petit soldat (released in 1963) and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) were famous examples of such censorship.
A confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross leaked to Le Monde newspaper confirmed the allegations of torture made by the opposition to the war, represented in particular by the French Communist Party (PCF) and other anti-militarist circles.
Although many left-wing activists, including famous existentialists writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, denounced without exception the use of torture, the French government was itself headed in 1957 by the general secretary of the SFIO, Guy Mollet.
[17] According to a study by Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright, at a time of more or less full employment "Communist mayors were purposeful and competent at building housing, schools, clinics, sports halls and cultural centres", but were however "far less successful at delivering the economic development that became the key voter priority as joblessness rose in the 1980s".
As noted by the study, while traditional and expected concerns with issues such as urban renewal, educational facilities, transport, and housing remained, these had been supplanted by "a wide range of community, cultural and environmental interests".
One innovative authority, La Rochelle, had been led by Michel Crepeau (a proponent of environmentalism) of the MRG since 1971, and amongst his priorities had been a major waste recycling scheme which had come to make a profit for the town.
