In order to analyse the conflicts which affected the French Socialist Party in the first six months of 1938, we need to understand the context of tradition and custom within which they occurred. This chapter is intended to establish this context in three stages: first, it discusses the history of the party (the SFIO, Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière) from its origins to 1937, identifying the main problems of doctrine and strategy which it encountered in the 1920s and 1930s; secondly, it reviews the ideas which formed the background to the party's internal discussions in these two decades; and thirdly, it describes the organizational, social and geographical factors which influenced the competition for power between the party's internal groups.

The Origins and History of the SFIO, to 1937

The SFIO was formed in 1905 as a result of a merger of several existing groups, including the Parti Socialiste de France, headed by Jules Guesde (1845–1922), and the Parti Socialiste Français, led by Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). The new organization was expected to co-operate with other parties belonging to the Second Socialist International with the aim of solving the problem of how social and political revolution could be achieved in the existing system of capitalist states.

The origins of this book lie in the study of the French Socialist Party which I undertook as a postgraduate student at St Antony's College, Oxford, under the able direction of Mr Philip Williams. It was also my good fortune to have as a neighbour in Winchester Road Dr Saul Rose, Fellow of St Antony's, who had previously been the International Secretary of the Labour Party and whose work with the French Socialists had given him a sensitive understanding of their outlook and their characteristics as a party. Both then and later he was unfailingly generous with help and advice and he remained an intellectual stimulus and good friend until his untimely death in 1992.

My initial research was carried out between 1958 and 1962, first at St Antony's College and then as a member of the Cycle Supérieur d'Etudes Politiques at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, where I received invaluable advice from Professor René Rémond, M. Serge Hurtig and M. Jean Touchard. At the time I was mainly concerned with the Socialist Party's involvement in tripartisme at the levels of parliament and government, but I became increasingly aware of the readiness of the Socialists of the post-war period to compare the internal difficulties which they were experiencing with those which had beset the party in 1938.

Although not altered beyond recognition, the SFIO which re-emerged after the liberation of France differed in many ways from its pre-war counterpart. Having been badly divided over questions of foreign policy between September 1938 and May 1939, it had remained on the margins of the French political scene during the first nine months of the Second World War and had virtually ceased to exist as a political force by the summer of 1940. Then, having re-established itself as an underground organization during the years of the German occupation and the Vichy regime, it had re-entered politics in 1944 as a more centralized party, determined to impose strict standards of discipline on its membership. The changes which had taken place over this period form the background to that phase of internal conflict which cast its shadow over the party between June 1945 and August 1946 and led to the appointment of Guy Mollet as General Secretary, and it is to them that we must now turn our attention.

The conflict between Blumistes and Fauristes, September 1938–May 1939

The Czech crisis of September 1938, which developed with frightening rapidity, forced political observers in the western democracies to face the fact that their efforts to restrain Germany might well involve them in a European war.

National Council and National Congress Divisions

The research for this book has entailed an analysis of many of the divisions by mandate at meetings of the National Congress and the National Council of the SFIO between June 1937 and September 1946. During that period the results of these divisions were recorded both as aggregate votes and as lists of the distribution of mandates by federation and were presented in the party's journal (La Vie du Parti until 1940 and the Bulletin Intérieur du Parti Socialiste (S.F.I.O.) after 1945) and for the 34th (1937) and 35th (1938) National Congresses in the published Comptes rendus sténographiques.

In order to obtain reliable and comparable division lists, the records of votes by federation were checked for any errors of transcription and addition which might have been made when the original data were prepared and printed. Two basic checking techniques were employed: first, the addition of the mandates attaching to each federal delegation, to make sure that the total matched the number of national mandates allocated to that federation, and, secondly, the addition of the mandates recorded under the different headings of a division in order to compare the results with the official returns published in the party journal.

The SFIO's 35th National Congress, held in the town of Royan between 4 and 7 June 1938, marked the conclusion of a brief period of bitter feuding between the Gauche Révolutionnaire and its opponents. At this meeting, the delegates decided to uphold the disciplinary action which had been taken against the Seine Federation in April and approved a policy resolution which confirmed the cautious strategy which the leadership had followed in the months preceding the congress, whereupon Marceau Pivert and his close supporters left the party to form an entirely new organization.

In this chapter we shall trace the stages by which this happened, dealing first with the period extending from mid-March to mid-April 1938, which saw the imposition of sanctions on the Seine Federation and the fall of Blum's second government; then with the attempt by Pivert and his group to challenge the dissolution of the Seine Federation, and with the various policy motions produced during the preparations for the Royan Congress; and finally, with the debates at this meeting, assessing the factors which enabled the leadership to gain the upper hand in its struggle with the tendances.

During the immediate post-war period the SFIO found itself under increasing stress as the combined task of restoring the national economy and constructing a constitutional settlement imposed heavy demands on successive governments. All of these rested on the alliance of three parties, the Communists, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats (the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, MRP), and as the Socialist Party possessed the greatest degree of internal democracy of the three, its rank-and-file members were the first to express their discontent at the disadvantages of being part of a governing coalition. By degrees their sense of grievance brought them to the verge of revolt and the task of this chapter is to describe this change of mood within the SFIO and to analyze the organizational crisis which it brought about at the party's 38th National Congress of August 1946.

The 37th National Congress of August 1945

Early in May 1945 as the war in Europe drew to its close, the French authorities were trying to locate and free those public figures who still remained in German hands. Prominent amongst these was Léon Blum and on 4 May Jules Moch, who was still serving in the navy, was given the task of searching for him.

By the end of 1937, the Popular Front was no more than a ghost of its former self, and each of its constituent parties was coming to accept that the balance of forces within the party system might alter drastically and suddenly, with only the briefest of warnings. This uncertainty weakened the internal cohesion of the SFIO and worked to the advantage of its dissident tendances, whose prescriptions for changes of strategy could now be recommended to the membership with much more urgency than in the past. In this chapter, we shall examine how both the Bataille Socialiste and the Gauche Révolutionnaire responded to this opportunity, and how the latter group greatly improved its organizational and moral position within the party. Its first gains were made at the National Council meeting of 17 January 1938, where the central leaders maintained their authority only by agreeing that the party should not be represented in the government which Camille Chautemps was then trying to form. Shortly afterwards, the Gauche Révolutionnaire took charge of the Seine Federation, one of the most powerful administrative units within the party's organization, and immediately launched a drive to force a change of strategy upon the next regular meeting of the National Council, which was expected to take place on 27 March.

Within a few months of its 38th National Congress, the SFIO was embroiled in the complicated politics which accompanied the establishment of the Fourth Republic. The constitutional framework developed by the second Constituent Assembly was approved by 53 per cent of the votes in the referendum of 13 October 1946 and arrangements were then set in hand for elections to the two houses of parliament, the National Assembly and the Council of the Republic, the members of which would elect the first President of the Republic for a seven-year term. The President's first task would be to choose a Premier who, once in office, would be expected to obtain the approval of the National Assembly for the government which he intended to form. At last the period of provisional government was coming to an end and there was intense competition between the parties for a secure place within the permanent system.

The Socialists had hopes that they would emerge from the National Assembly elections of 10 November as the largest party in the new house and thus be in a position to form a purely Socialist government based on a broad parliamentary alliance with other parties so the results of the poll were a great disappointment to them.

This book deals with an unusually turbulent chapter in the history of the French Socialist Party, the period from the beginning of 1938 until the summer and autumn of 1946. During the late 1930s, the party was still tolerating the activities of two dissident groups within its ranks, the Gauche Révolutionnaire and the Bataille Socialiste, both of which wished to see the organization take a new direction. The intense competition between them as each tried to gather support for its own views on strategy produced a series of major crises within the party during the first six months of 1938 and threatened to undermine the leadership group, which had some difficulty in maintaining its position at the party's Royan Congress in June that year. No sooner had order been restored than the party found itself divided again, this time over foreign policy and the question of whether it should favour conciliation as a means of avoiding war or should come out in support of a firm policy towards Germany and Italy. The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to normal political activity in France but throughout the period of German occupation and the Vichy regime, a new generation of Socialists played a prominent part in the Resistance movement and looked forward to the re-emergence of the party, freed from disagreements and structural weaknesses, when hostilities ended.

We have now completed our review of the crises which affected the Socialist Party in 1938 and 1946. All that remains is to compare their general features and to draw some conclusions from the comparison.

As we have seen, the crisis of 1938 occurred because of the reluctance of the SFIO's leaders to abandon the Popular Front or, more precisely, to end the alliance with the Radicals and have the party return to the role of qualified opposition which it had assumed before 1936. They took this position first because they wished to protect the reform legislation of 1936, which they feared might be repealed or watered down by a conservative government; secondly, because some of them, especially Léon Blum, were concerned about the deterioration of the international situation and the need to ensure an adequate measure of continuity and stability in French domestic politics; and finally, because they still hoped that the Popular Front could be given a new lease of life and a further programme of reforms carried through parliament. Their difficulty lay in justifying this policy to the party's ordinary members, who were still wedded to the view that, ideally, the party should avoid participation in the government of a bourgeois state and that, rather than compromise its principles by attempting to sustain an alliance which no longer served its purpose, it should retreat once more to the well-known ground of opposition.

One of the posters produced in the early 1920s by the Moscow Provincial Soviet of Trade Unions shows a grim industrial town, and a crowd of downtrodden women shuffling from left to right, shawls round their shoulders, kerchiefs over their heads; in the foreground a group of plump men of the bourgeoisie stand and leer. Its central characters are a young man and a young woman: he, disproportionately large, holds in his left hand a hammer, sign of his membership of the proletariat; she, small-scale and dejected, is clearly in need of assistance – and indeed, the worker is holding out his free arm to her in a gesture of fraternal solicitude. The text reinforces this visual image of the prostitute as victim: ‘By destroying capitalism the proletariat destroys prostitution. Prostitution is a great misfortune for humanity. Worker take care of the woman worker.’ The date of publication was 1923, two years after the introduction of the New Economic Policy; the country was still recovering from the economic and social chaos of revolution, civil war and famine, and for the working class faced with a housing crisis, low wages and high unemployment, life was hard. It was particularly hard for women, many of whom had to support themselves and their families in conditions of a shrinking job market. The alarming level of redundancies among the female labour force appeared, albeit as a minor item, on party and trade union agendas.

Over the past two decades, the study of women in Russian and Soviet society has become one of the liveliest areas of Western research into Russian literature, history and the social sciences. The spark that ignited this new enthusiasm was, for many, the women's movement in the West, which burst into life in the late 1960s after a long quiescence of almost fifty years. For some of those who became involved in Russian women's studies, this new wave of feminism affirmed what they already knew; for others it had the force of a revelation; for still others it produced confusion or ambivalence and only slowly prompted them to view the world – and academia – from a new perspective. But however the new ideas were received, there is no doubt that they were responsible for generating a widespread curiosity that had never previously existed in the West about the history of Russia's female population, about Russian women writers and artists and about the current social and economic situation of women in the Soviet Union.

During this twenty-year period, however, most of the Western scholars who pursued these new concerns were living with a paradox. Many were initially attracted to the study of Russian and Soviet women because it seemed (from a Western perspective) that a degree of equality and recognition had been won by women in the Soviet Union that had not been achieved in the West.