French Left Research Articles

French Social Democracy in Turmoil

AbstractFor decades, the Parti socialiste (PS) was the major party of the French left. It elected a president three times and was a ruling party on several occasions between 1981 and 2017, at which point it suffered crushing defeats in the 2017 presidential and legislative elections. Since then, the PS has been between a rock and a hard place: on the left, it is dominated by Jean‐Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise (LFI, Unbowed France) and on the right by Macron's Renaissance party. The success of both parties has a lot to do with the PS's own setbacks. Emmanuel Macron's election in 2017 was rendered possible by internal conflicts in the PS during François Hollande's term. Those who thought that Benoît Hamon's candidacy was too left‐wing that year, or those who now regard an alliance with Mélenchon as ‘illegitimate’, found refuge in Macron's party. This article aims to explain the reasons for the PS's dramatic setbacks and to explore its prospects for recovery.

The French Left’s Delicate Unity

ABSTRACT: In many respects, the French left is one of the strongest in Europe. Its loose coalition of parties—the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES)—makes up the biggest opposition bloc in the National Assembly, counting dozens more seats than the far-right National Rally.

The French Left's Delicate Unity

ABSTRACT: In many respects, the French left is one of the strongest in Europe. Its loose coalition of parties—the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES)—makes up the biggest opposition bloc in the National Assembly, counting dozens more seats than the far-right National Rally.

Wither the French left?

ABSTRACT The 2022 electoral cycle was a major disappointment for the French left. It failed to win the presidency and no left-wing candidate even made it through to the second round. While in the parliamentary election the left did manage to win over 150 seats, this total was well below the 289 required to form a majority in the National Assembly. In short, in 2022 the left seemed a long way from gaining office through either of the two main electoral contests in France. A renewed focus on strategy, organization, policies, and leadership was required if the left were to have any realistic hopes of returning to power at the national level in the near future.

The French left and Russia: History and modernity

The article analyzes approaches of France’s leading left forces towards Russia (USSR) from beginning of the 20th century to the present. At beginning of the twentieth century, almost all parts of the French left expressed hatred of the Russian monarchy and, at the same time, solidarity with the struggle of democratic and socialist forces in Russia for freedom and a republic. The question of the attitude to Soviet Russia played a central role in the historic split of the SFIO in 1920 and in the future for decades to come; “the Soviet question” was the line of the watershed between the two leading French left-wing parties, SFIO (SP) and FCP. If the communists from the very creation of the Party took a position of total solidarity with Soviet internal and foreign policy, the socialists, speaking for the development of equal and friendly relations with the Soviet Union, criticized domestic political realities of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s foreign policy. The collapse of the USSR led to serious changes in the perception of Russia in French leftist circles of France. The French left was characterized by an ambiguous attitude towards Boris Yeltsin’s policies. As before, the French left is expressing its sympathy for the Russian people. However, in general, most of the French left movement at present negatively evaluates the socio-economic and domestic political evolution of Russia, as well as Moscow’s foreign policy in the first two decades of the 21st century. First, this applies to positions of the socialists and the Greens. The Communist Party opposes the dignity to the insulating pressure on Moscow. For their part, politicians and power related to left populist and left patriotic direction see Russia as a strategic ally in the struggle for more equitable international relations.

Feminist psychogeography long after May 1968:Whatever Happened to My Revolution

Whatever Happened to My Revolution offers a French feminist perspective on the impact today of the uprising by the left in Paris in May 1968. The continuing appeal of the events of ‘68 are considered to be in decline, yet the film suggests that the energy of 50 years ago continues to mobilize cultural politics through cinematic appeals that amount to the radical recuperation of some of the ambitions of the day, a continuation of the past in the present. Whatever Happened to My Revolution is explored with reference to Guy Debord's concept of psychogeography, which suggested new phases of discovery in social life for remaking urban life, cross-referencing aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical approach that appear in the film, especially the concept of desire, informing its feminist psychogeography. The challenges facing the current generation can be described as a desire by the French left, in this film defined and described by women, for the realization of May ‘68s cultural transformations in public and private culture.

State Violence, Justice, And The Suffering Of Others

In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.

The Left and Henri Bergson

This article studies the polarizing role Henri Bergson played in twentieth-century political theory in France and beyond. A controversial and charismatic philosopher, Bergson’s thought traveled a notoriously convoluted itinerary. Though his critiques of scientific positivism before the First World War endeared him to Catholic intellectuals, sectors of the French left were his most committed interpreters, a fact that mystified and enraged his contemporaries. Tracing the assorted ways the left took up Bergson—from syndicalism to negritude—brings into focus the left’s historically bipolar relationship to scientific progress and its promise of emancipation. It also underscores something fundamental about the history of the twentieth-century left: It maintained an ideologically unpredictable yet indispensable concern for “lived experience.”

Jalal's Angels of Deliverance and Destruction: Genealogies of Theo-politics, Sovereignty and Coloniality in Iran and Israel — CORRIGENDUM

This article discusses the historical context of the famed dissident intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–69) travelogue documenting his visit to Israel in early 1963, posthumously titled Safar beh velayat-e ʿezraʾil (Journey to the Province of the Angel of Death), focusing on (1) the political and intellectual context and reception of his controversial essay, in particular the brief infatuation of Iranian anti-Soviet socialists in the League of Iranian Socialists with socialist Zionism; (2) Al-e Ahmad’s discussion of political sovereignty and theo-politics in modern Israel and the important insights and observations provided therein; and (3), finally, the shifting sands of Al-e Ahmad’s engagement with Israel and Zionism and their relation to how he understood the politics of anticolonialism in the context of modern Iran following the 1953 coup d’etat, which overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s “White Revolution” and the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The development of his views from ones of curiosity, fascination and ambivalence to condemnation echo less a simplistic and psychologized “return to religion” or “quest for authenticity” than an integration of the category of coloniality in relation to a wider field of struggles then unfolding across the global South during the 1960s, and provided the basis for a critique of not only Iranian social democrats, but several leading lights of the French left.

Parallel Lives

Philippe Herzog and Jean-Louis Moynot were members of the top leaderships of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), respectively. Each participated in and lived through the dramatic years from the 1960s through the 1980s when both organizations first supported Union de la Gauche and then turned away from it, eventually precipitating both into decline in ways that would transform eventually the French political and trade union left. The strategic shifts underlying these deep and significant changes were traumatic for those who lived through them. Herzog and Moynot have recently published memoirs detailing their experiences of this period and their political lives thereafter. Both books, in different ways, give us new and important understandings of what happened during a critical moment of change in French politics.

Jalal’s Angels of Deliverance and Destruction: Genealogies of Theo-politics, Sovereignty and Coloniality in Iran and Israel

This article discusses the historical context of the famed dissident intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–69) travelogue documenting his visit to Israel in early 1963, posthumously titledSafar beh velayat-e ʿezraʾil(Journey to the Province of the Angel of Death), focusing on (1) the political and intellectual context and reception of his controversial essay, in particular the brief infatuation of Iranian anti-Soviet socialists in the League of Iranian Socialists with socialist Zionism; (2) Al-e Ahmad’s discussion of political sovereignty and theo-politics in modern Israel and the important insights and observations provided therein; and (3), finally, the shifting sands of Al-e Ahmad’s engagement with Israel and Zionism and their relation to how he understood the politics of anticolonialism in the context of modern Iran following the 1953coup d’état, which overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s “White Revolution” and the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The development of his views from ones of curiosity, fascination and ambivalence to condemnation echo less a simplistic and psychologized “return to religion” or “quest for authenticity” than an integration of the category of coloniality in relation to a wider field of struggles then unfolding across the global South during the 1960s, and provided the basis for a critique of not only Iranian social democrats, but several leading lights of the French left.

프랑스의 좌우 패러다임에 관한 통시적 고찰: 종식인가 변형인가?

Since the 1789 French revolution (political revolution) claiming to stand for liberty, equality, fraternity, we have commonly used the terms ‘left and right-wings’ as respectively signifying progressive/conservative forces. By later development of the Industrial revolution (economic revolution) conservative right-wing camps support ‘free-marketism,’ whereas progressive left-wing camps defend planned ‘state-interventionism.’ The former (right-wingers) socially protects traditional values (social order/hierarchy), while economically endorses free market economy. On the other hand, the later (left-wingers) struggles to obtain equal rights for all against the rigid social order of Ancien Régime based on ‘birth’ or ‘blood.’ As a convenient tool of political option, the left-right paradigm has been firmly established as a universal and omnipresent-pattern term in modern political science. Nevertheless, is this contradictory dichotomy still effective in the 21st century? In the 1990s many politicians pretend to be ‘beyond the left-right divide,’ with the advent of the ‘Third Way’ advocated by the former British prime minister Tony Blair. Some scholars also insist that the old left-right paradigm can no longer describe the political propensities of voters or their view of the world. So, with too much simplistic/schematic left-right paradigm, we cannot exactly explain blue-color workers who support the populist far-right and right party or moderate-left voters & green party supporters who positively advocate free market economy, commonly known as right-wing values. Alain de Benoist, founder of the French New-Right (Nouvelle Droite) movement point to the gradual disappearance of traditional political ideologies in both left and right parties. The class consciousness can be the proper criterion which parts left and right. According to the recent survey, more than 70% of French people consider class consciousness or ideological antagonism as banal or hackneyed. If so, what are the main reasons for the disappearance or decline of bifurcated ideologies, and of class consciousness in late 21st century France? Does really revolutionary France want to switch her long direction from the left into the right or even far-right? In France, homeland of the political labels left and right, nobody expects the revival or resurgence of far-right even until 1980s. In France where left-wing culture was dominant and still is, what makes the French far-right so popular in the public opinion? How has a resurgent far-right been able to challenge to the moderate right or the left? As an electoral strategy which made the French left (socialist party) act in partnership with the far-left (communist party), can the right also reconciliate with the far-right? With the election of Macron as president, is the traditional left-right paradigm over? But democracy, too, needs directions. For all the details of policy making, all the nuances of ideology, we as voters, need a straightforward way of lining up the options and making our choices. Thus, to answer to these above-mentioned questions we need to comprehend the historical contexts which have made form the left-right topography and its political identity. This paper presents a diachronic study on the history of French left/right paradigm from the French revolution into the centric government of Macron, in order to examine the causes of the rapid growth of French far-right (Front National), and to investigate the validity of stereo-typed left-right paradigm. According to French political scientist René Rémond, the French right-wings can be divided into four categories: traditionalist, liberal, Bonapartist, and revolutionary right. On the other hand, the French left-wings can be also divided into liberal (republican), radical (communist), and anarchist. Due to the divides and conflicts caused by the French revolution in 1789, modern France could not succeed in making a ‘

Je Suis Charlie or the Fragility of the Republican Sacred: On January 11th, 2015 and Its Afterlives

Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the demonstrations or “public mourning” of January 11th, 2015 were heralded by many as the return of the republican sacred, the re-crystallization of a long dormant people, and the resurrection of French fraternity en vivo. However, in the saturation of these political hagiographies, a series of trenchant critiques and observations quickly sought to deconstruct the meaning and putative symbolic power of January 11th. One was struck by the homogeneity of “the people” and the ostensible absence of Arabo-Muslim voices in the somber effervescence that typified the post-Charlie ambiance. Moments of silence were mocked in the banlieue and the homage rendered to the “blasphemers” was blasphemed itself. The imperative to “be Charlie” emerged less as a totemic index of republican solidarity than a Manichean strategy which exacerbated the generally perceived “fracture française”. The result was not only a calling into question of the legitimacy of January 11th, but also a series of counter-articulations which affirmed inter alia “Je ne suis pas Charlie” or worse “Je suis Coulibaly”. January 11th also divided the French left between those who read the event as the re-enchantment of the republican sacred and the people and “liberal” missives which deemed it a simulacra of solidarity, a racist demonstration comprised of “Catholic Zombies” and “Islamophobes”. This paper examines the cleavages engendered by January 11th and its afterlives which reveal not only the fragility of the Republic as a project, but also the fragility of the political sacred that has historically girded this project. At stake is not simply the question “who is Charlie”, but rather “who are the people” and what form they can or should take in a pluralist republic plunged in the perilous entre-deux between communitarianism and the possibility of a cosmopolitan republicanism. January 11th, far from being a simple demonstration, is a metaphor, a nodal point, and a seismograph of the force and frailness of the republican sacred and its capacity to enthrall, convince, and console.

Working-class politics and cultural capital: Considerations from transformations of the French left

Cultural capital is a relevant and useful concept for analysing working-class activism, provided that it is not reduced to educational capital and particular attention is given to its incorporated forms. Workers acquire resources from activism that may compensate for their paucity of formal educational qualifications, thus allowing them to build an activism-based cultural capital. From this perspective, the activities of workers who become full-time union officers may be considered as activist work, calling on specific skills and offering possibilities for social ascension that set them apart from their former peers still doing manual work. This analysis of such activist promotion is based on long-term fieldwork among unionised railway workers in a rural town in France. This case study addresses transformations in the worker-activist profile, notably in changed logics for forming activism-based cultural capital and weakened ties drawing activists into the political field. Approaching left-leaning activism ‘from below’ ultimately sheds light on how it is being reshaped and the ever-greater separation of trade union and political party spheres. The study also elucidates the expanding divide between the working classes and political elites that can be observed in many European countries, especially in rural areas.

Whose Populism? The Mixed Messages of La France Insoumise

La France Insoumise now boasts that it is the dominant force on the French left. One year after Mélenchon and his allies upstaged the Parti Socialiste in the country's presidential election, however, the movement's populist political strategy has become the subject of much debate. The term "populism" has most often been used by critics as an epithet, a synonym for extremism, but it is in fact an apt description of Mélenchon's plan to reshape French democracy—and it is a badge he wears with pride. Seeking to engage disaffected voters by rallying "the people" against "the elites," La France Insoumise believes it can build an unconventional but durable coalition for a twenty-first-century left. Its attempts to reinvigorate participatory democracy suggest that La France Insoumise is not the authoritarian menace centrist opponents have made it out to be. But its insistence that it, and only it, can save the left threatens to stifle both its political success and the democratic and egalitarian elements of its project.

Past, present and future of European idea through the eyes of the French left

Past, present and future of European idea through the eyes of the French left

Is this crisis of French socialism different? Hollande, the rise of Macron, and the reconfiguration of the left in the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections

With the extraordinary rise of Emmanuel Macron and the near complete collapse of the Parti Socialiste (PS), the past year has seen arguably the most dramatic upheaval in the French party system since 1958. This article develops a political economy analysis of the Hollande quinquennat to better understand how we arrived here. It argues that Hollande’s programmatic failures must be situated within an institutional account of the constraints of the presidential logic of the Fifth Republic and tensions between competing factional courants within the Socialist Party. Here we shed fresh light on this moment of rupture by situating a political economy analysis of Hollande’s economic programme within a more intricate institutional analysis of the specificities of the PS and its position within the Fifth Republic. The article traces the most salient political developments of the 2017 elections and outlines the political landscape of the contemporary French left. These factors explain why, after numerous crises of French socialism, this time is different.

‘In the Colonies, Black Lives Don't Matter.’ Legalism and Rights Claims across the French Empire

This article examines convergences and divergences between various expressions of communism, French republicanism, and pan-black solidarity in overseas France and among metropolitan communities of activists from the 1920s to the rise of the Popular Front against fascism in the mid-1930s. From the time of the first administrative reforms arising from France’s official anti-communist colonial policies in 1922, until the formation of the Popular Front in 1936, anticolonial activism and anti-revolutionary policy dialectically produced sites of judicialization, with agitators deliberately harnessing legal processes to contest the policies, practices and politics of imperial France, and French officials variously legislating against protest, including by extra-parliamentary decree. Experiments in anti-revolutionary legislation culminated in 1935, when the French Minister of the Interior collaborated with the Minister of the Colonies and governors of overseas territories to legislate against ‘acts of disorder or demonstrations against French sovereignty’ whether committed by French citizens, subjects, or protected persons, and regardless of their location. By the early to mid-1930s, legalists on the French left – whether Marxist or republican and in large part due to their involvement with anticolonial activist groups in overseas France – viewed extra-parliamentary legislation and judicial irregularity in overseas France as a sign of increasingly authoritarian French governance. Many joined forces to mobilize against what some agitators described as fascist tendencies in French governance.

From the Communist Party to the Front de gauche. The French radical left from 1989 to 2014

This article examines the political transformations experienced by the Communist Party and the evolution of the radical left in France in the twenty-five years after 1989. Interpreting the Communist Party and Left Front as anti-establishment, that is, opposed to the political elite, but pro-system parties that are not interested in changing the nature of democratic governance. The peculiarities of French communism and its political philosophy are illustrated. Finally, this study considers the constituent process of the Front. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Front plays the role of a political federation to the left of the Socialist Party with positive electoral results.

André Gorz: wage labour, free time and ecological reconstruction

ABSTRACTAndré Gorz (1923–2007), a leading theorist of the French left, argued that the ecological reconstruction of society required a transformation of its political culture and economic basis. This case is made in his influential 1978 volume Ecology as Politics and developed in subsequent books and articles discussing the link between alienated labour, technocratic ideology and environmental destruction. His work’s critical and emancipatory vision reflects the synthesis of Marxist, existentialist and ecological elements. Gorz advocated a reduction in heteronomous labour and a corresponding expansion in the sphere of autonomy, supported by the distribution of society’s wealth among all its members in the form of a guaranteed social income. The present article (originally published in 2007 in Entropia, the theoretical and political journal of the French degrowth movement) offers a detailed account of Gorz’s work, highlighting its pertinence to ecological politics. It concludes by summarising his last writings, in which he argued that the recent crises of capitalism showed that it was more than ever necessary to realise the productive powers of twenty-first-century technology not by expanding still further the manufacture and sale of commodities, but by creating a social and economic order in which goods and work would be provided for the common good.