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Fabian Society No. Sll 


French Lessons 
for Labour 


Denis MacShane 


Fabian Tract 512 


French Lessons for 
Labour 

MsS 

Chapter \+} 
1 Introduction I

'2-l~ 

2 The Hopes of 1981 2 
(-\\~ 3

3 Problems Emerge 
4 Decentralisation 6 
5 Party Politics on the Left and Running the State 7 
6 French Unions -the Missing Link? 10 
7 Foreign Policy and Defence Divide No-one 12 
8 Counter-Productive Reforms IS 
9 Including the Excluded 18 

10 Style 20 
11 Conclusion: What Lessons for Labour? 22 

Denis MacShane has been a trade union official since 1977 and currently works for 
the Geneva based International Metalworkers Federation. He lives part of the year 
in France. His books include a political biography of Fran<;ois Mitterrand as well as 
studies of trade unions in Poland and South Africa. He has written on French politics 
for the New Statesman, New Socialist, Tribune and Labour Weekly . 

The author wishes to thank Mark Cousins and Collin Gonze for their comments. 

This pamphlet like all publications of the Fabian Society represents not the collective 
view of the Society but only the views of the individual who prepared it. The responsibility 
of the Society is limited to approving the publications it issues as worthy for 
consideration within the labour movement. 

June 1986 
ISBN 07163 0512 7 
ISSN 0307 7523 
Typeset by Character Typesetting Ltd. 01-253 1766 
Printed by Blackrose Press (TU) 01-251 3043 
Published by the Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1H 9BN. 


I. Introduction 
For most of this decade the leading industrialised countries in the West 
have been controlled by right-wing governments -those headed by Mrs 
Thatcher in Britain, President Reagan in the United States and Chancellor 
Kohl in West Germany. The exception has been France where 
Fran~ois Mitterrand was elected President in May 1981 followed by ~m 
outright victory for the Socialist Party (285 seats out of 491) in 
the National Assembly. 

The French Socialist Party, at first in 
alliance with the Communist Party, and 
then alone after July 1984, governed 
between June 1981 and March 1986. Even 
after its defeat in the legislative elections 
of March 1986, the Socialist Party 
remained the biggest group inside the 
National Assembly. Mitterrand remains 
in office until 1988. France is now in an 
uncertain period of cohabitation (literally, 
living together) between a Socialist President 
and a right-wing Government. Mitterrand 
has the power to call for fresh 
legislative elections at any moment and in 
any case there has to be a presidential 
election by May 1988. So the politics of 
cohabitation are of interest to those in Britain 
who think that an absolute majority 
for one party is unlikely to be obtained 
after the next general election. 

In the meantime it is useful to examine 
the record of the five years of Socialist 
Government in France and ask why the 
victory of 1981 , a major electoral 
upheaval in a France that had seen 25 
years of unbroken right-wing rule, should 
have become the defeat of 1986. For 
however brave a face was put on the result 
of the legislative elections in March 1986, 
and however pleased the Socialist Party 
was with its 32 per cent score in comparison 
with previous post-war results, the left 
in France was ejected from office. Unlike 
the German or Nordic countries, France 
seemed to follow Britain's example in 
maintaining a left-wing Government in 
office for about only half a decade before 
replacing it. What was it in the political, 
economic and social strategies of this 

period which stopped the Socialists gaining 
a second term of office? Was it a question 
of policies that were fundamentally 
wrong in themselves or of sensible socialist 
policies that were inefficiently or incorrectly 
applied? What is the tension 
between carrying out manifesto promises 
developed over a long period of fractious 
opposition and governing a mixed economy 
in a world in which production, trade 
and finance are to a great extent internationalised? 
What role did foreign and 
defence policy play in strengthening or 
weakening the Socialists' position in 
France? 

The purpose of this pamphlet is not to 
provide an assessment of every aspect of 
the five years of Socialist Government in 
France but to try to offer some political 
analysis which is useful to those formulating 
policy for post-Thatcher governments 
and for those who will have the responsibility 
of implementing such policy. The 
links between the British and French left 
seem tenuous and socialist politicians of 
both countries are unwilling to acknowledge 
that they might have something to 
learn from each other. But without even 
raising the discussion of the merits or 
demerits of the European Economic 
Community as presently constituted the 
future of Britain under any government is 
now linked with Europe. A greater understanding 
(not agreement on every policy) 
of what sister parties in Europe are thinking 
and, when in government, doing is 
both necessary, and, some might argue, 
long overdue for the British labour 
movement. 


2. The Hopes of 1981 
The result of the French presidential and legislative elections of May-
June 1981 was quite rightly seen as an historic victory for the left 
comparable to the Labour Party victory in Britain in 1945. 

It was savoured for two reasons . Firstly, 
despite its long and dramatic history , the 
left in France has hardly ever been in government. 
The Popular Front of 1936 collapsed 
after eighteen months; the postwar 
tripartite Government (1945-1947) 
lasted not much longer; and while there 
were one or two left-wing Prime Ministers 
during the Fourth Republic their periods 
of office were brief -a few months for 
Pierre Mendes-France in 1954 and a gruesome 
period marked by the Suez fiasco 
and increased repression in Algeria for 
Guy Mollet in 1956. In 1981, for the first 
time in French history the left took office 
with the prospect of a long period of 
power ahead of them. 

Secondly, it appeared that the division 
between Socialists and Communists, if not 
healed , had at least been patched over. 
The 110 points in Mitterrand's pro-
gramme were almost all drawn from the 
Common Programme drawn up between 
the Socialist Party and the Communist 
Party in 1972 and in the second round of 
both elections the Communists had urged 
support for Mitterrand and the best placed 
Socialist candidate. (Before the switch to 
proportional representation for the 1986 
elections, French elections were fought 
over two rounds which allowed a great 
number of candidates to seek endorsement 
in the first round but then permitted 
a more clearly defined choice between the 
two best placed candidates in the second 
round.) Having campaigned together for 
most of the 1970s, the Communists had 
moved apart from the Socialists in 1978 
yet Mitterrand sought to reward them 
after the 1981 victory with four ministerial 
posts. 

Nationalisation 

Once in office the Socialists implemented 
nearly all of the programme on which they 

had been elected.lt was an ambitious mixture 
of economic, administrative and 
social reforms, and on paper represented 
a sharp break with pre-1981 France. Five 
of the country's largest industrial groups 
were nationalised. And unlike the British 
pattern of nationalisation the 1981 French 
nationalisations included sectors at the 
frontier of technological development and 
profitable export-led growth such as the 
Thomson group (electronics and computers) 
and Rhone-Poulenc (chemicals). 35 
banks and the major insurance c9mpanies 
were taken into public ownership. 900,000 
workers went from private to public 
employment and the proportion of the 
economy under government control 
increased from 18 to 32 per cent. Some 
dismissed the Socialist nationalisations as 
being little more than an extension of classic 
French state control of the economy 
exemplified by the nationalisation of, say, 
Renault by de Gaulle after the war or the 
French aerospace industry by Pompidou 
in 1970. But Mitterrand claimed that the 
nationalisations gave him an "economic 
strike force", an industrial equivalent of 
the military force de frappe. 

In themselves, the nationalisations did 
not transform the French economy. An 
emphasis on sound management, geared 
towards profit and international competitivity, 
meant that whatever hopes 
existed that publicly-owned firms would 
guarantee or in some way extend employment 
have not been fulfilled. On the other 
hand the view strongly advanced in British 
and American circles that state ownership 
means poor management , bureaucratic 
interference, over-manning, lack of innovation 
and entrepreneurship has not been 
the French experience. The nationalised 
companies were permitted indeed encouraged 
to apply the managerial methods of 
the private sector including shedding of 

2 


labour, raising funds on the bourse and 
selling off subsidiaries. Yet because they 
were publicly owned the state had a crucial 
extra element of control in running the 
economy. There has been neither the flow 
of capital out of France nor the relentless 
selling off to overseas multinationals that 
has characterised the industrial policy of 
Mrs Thatcher. State ownership has permitted 
the retention of a manufacturing 
base and its restructuring to take place in a 
more orderly and less painful fashion than 
that dictated by privately-owned industry 
in Britain or the United States. 

One problem that nationalisation 
entailed was the insistence in 1981 that 100 
per cent state ownership was necessary. 
This involved paying out some £5 billion in 
shareholder compensation which added 
considerably to government indebtedness. 
Yet the new Socialist Government of 
1981 was only fulfilling its manifesto upon 
which it had been elected. 

Reforms 

Other manifesto promises were swiftly 
implemented. The minimum wage was 
raised by ten per cent. Family allowances 

went up by 40 per cent. A fifth week's 
holiday was introduced. Retirement age 
was reduced to 60. The manifesto had 
called for a 35 hour working week against 
which employers fiercely protested. In the 
end, a 39 hour week was introduced, but 
this had little impact either on unemployment 
or on workplace relations. The 
death penalty was abolished, consigning 
the guillotine finally to the museum. The 
Socialist Government made clear its commitment 
to other reforms especially the 
creation of directly-elected regional 
authorities. 

The character of the new ministers in 
office was also important. At the Interior, 
Justice and Education Ministries were 
men whose outlook was very different 
from their predecessors. As Culture Minister 
in came the dashing, provocative 
Jack Lang, who claimed that the Socialist 
victory meant that "France had passed 
from night to day". There were also more 
women ministers than in any other western 
government and a specially created 
Ministry for Women's Affairs which set 
out to put into legislative and administrative 
practice some ofthe demands that had 
been raised by women in previous years. 

3. Problems Emerge 
In the first nine months of the Socialist administration some dramatic 
decisions were taken. It was a very clear break with the previous Government, 
in content and style. But was it the "change in society" or even 
more ''the rupture with capitalism" that Mitterrand had so often proclaimed 
during the 1970s? 

The answer appeared to be no. Changes unemployment, even though the Prime 
were made but not the upheaval which Minister, Pierre Mauroy, declared: "Each 
had been implied in the pre-election rhet-morning, as I arrive in my office, I say to 

oric of the left. In particular, the Govern-myself, what can be done today to reduce 
ment seemed unable to do much about unemployment?" In May 1981, unem


3 


ployment stood at 1.8 million and Mitterrand 
had made the need to increase jobs 
the primary theme of his presidential campaign. 
By October 1981, it had risen to 2 
million and by March 1986 it stood at 2.4 
million. Of course, by comparison with 
Conservative Britain the Socialist Government 
had done well to limit the rise in 
unemployment to 600,000 over five years. 

France was no different from other 
Western industrialised countries in finding 
it difficult to cope with increased competition 
across a broad range of manufactured 
products from low labour-cost countries 
or the technologically advanced Japanese. 
The rul}-down in mass employment heavy 
industries such as steel, shipbuilding, coal 
and automobiles had been staved off to a 
certain extent by the previous Government 
with massive subsidies and these 
were continued by the Socialist administration. 
But the problems raised by the 
structural transformation of work, and the 
need for much less labour input because of 
new technology, were not tackled. 

The effects of the recession 

What the Socialists hoped for was a return 
to economic growth, internationally and 
nationally. It was that and that alone that 
would provide jobs. This was not entirely 
wishful thinking as the Organisation for 
Economic Co-operation & Development 
(OECD) at the beginning ofthe 1980s was 
also predicting a return to world growth 
once the second oil shock of 1979 had been 
absorbed. Instead the deliberately deflationary 
policies of the United States in the 
opening period of President Reagan's first 
administration plunged the world into the 
recession of 1981-82. This recession coincided 
with the election of the Socialist 
Government in France committed to policies 
of demand-led growth produced 
through raising the minimum wage, continuation 
of index-linked wage increases 
for workers, cuts in working time and an 
increase in public expenditure of 27 per 
cent. But the result was an influx of 
imports as the demand pumped into the 
economy was in no way restricted to 
French products. 

There were one or two random 
attempts at controlling imports as for 
example when Japanese-made video 
recorders had to be cleared by customs 
authorities at a small and ill-equipped 
office in rural Fr(\nce but overall the left 
was extremely uneasy about import controls. 
Partly this was from a long ideological 
commitment to building up Europe as 
an economic counter-weight to the United 
States and Japan. For France to endeavour 
to protect its own industries would 
make a nonsense of this policy and would 
set in train protectionist counter-measures 
that would reduce West European countries 
to a group of autarchic economic 
dwarfs. In addition, geography does not 
help a French policy of controlling 
imports. France has borders with six other 
countries and thousands of unguarded 
frontier roads. The horrors of illegal 
imports, giving rise to a black market and 
a dual currency, all argued against imposing 
import controls. 

Devaluation 

As a result the French attempt at reflation 
inside an open trading economy at a time 
when its major trading partners were 
deflating turned out to be a disaster. The 
one mechanism that might have lent some 
breathing space -a major devaluation of 
the franc -was ruled out. Mitterrand, 
rather like Harold Wilson in 1964, did not 
want the entry of a Socialist Government 
to be marked by a devaluation of the currency. 
As it was, a devaluation was forced 
upon the Government as the trade deficit 
doubled in twelve months . Inflation made 
nonsense of wage increases and voters 
showed their dismay at what seemed a 
confused economic policy by deserting 
Socialist and Communist candidates in 
parliamentary by-elections and local elections 
in the spring of 1982. 

At summit meetings with President 
Reagan , Mrs Thatcher and other Western 
leaders, Mitterrand had made repeated 
appeals for joint economic growth pro-
grammes but he was simply ignored. His 
re-alignment of French foreign policy to 
move it closer to that of Washington 


4 


especially over the issue of the installation Republic's constitution which Mitterrand 
of the Euro-missiles and strenuous hos-retained makes the President the chief 

tility towards the Soviet Union-produced 
no response from the United States in 
easing its international financial policy. 
The first days of the French Socialist 
administration coincided with the last 
period of the Social Democratic Schmidt 
Government across the Rhine. Having 
adhered to a fairly tight monetary policy 
emphasising manufacturing productivity 
and industrial exports, Schmidt was not 
willing to change what had been , in his 
terms, fairly successful policies to please 
his newly-elected French confrere. 

A year after electoral victory, the 
cumulative effect of inflation, a sinking 
franc and a plummeting trade balance 
forced the Government to act. In June 
1982, the franc was devalued and prices 
and wages were frozen for four months. 
The warm-hearted Social Security Minister, 
Nicole Questiaux, who had dismissed 
the problem of mounting welfare costs by 
announcing that it was not her job "to 
balance the books" was dismissed. Wages 
were controlled and de-indexed. Social 
security costs were cut. There were major 
lay-offs in the steel producing region of 
Lorraine and in the car industry. 

A strict anti-inflationary policy based 
chiefly on controlling wages was maintained 
during the rest of the period of 
government. Modernisation, efficiency 
and entrepreneurship became key-words 
in government speeches and Mitterrand 
made highly publicised visits to Japan and 
to Silicon Valley in the US to associate 
himself with what he considered to be 
symbols of the techno-industrial future. 
The symbolism was further underlined in 
July 1984 when Laurent Fabius, the technocratic, 
38 year old Industry Minister, 
replaced as Prime Minister Pierre 
Mauroy, the doyen of French provincial 
and municipal politics whose portly figure 
and commitment to hallowed left-wing 
ideals seemed out of place in the world in 
which socialist France was obliged to 
carve out an existence. (Technically, the 
Prime Minister of France is the Head of 
Government responsible to the President 
who is Head of State. But the Fifth 

governing executive as long as he has a 
majority in the National Assembly. So the 
policies and ministers of the two Socialist 
Governments between 1981 and 1986 
were determined by Mitterrand.) 

Manifesto promises 

The Socialists had won in 1981 with a manifesto 
including a wide range of proposals. 
They were to involve a transfer of power 
within society and immediately to 
improve living standards. The problem 
was that in putting into immediate effect 
those generous proposals the Government 
was severely limiting its ability to 
transfer power within society because it 
rapidly lost control of what should be the 
most important instrument in any socialist 
government's hands-its ability if not fully 
to control, at least to dominate and direct 
the economy. 

There is a dilemma here. How can a 
newly elected left-wing government 
adjust its manifesto promises to an international 
reality which is none of its making? 
Indeed, can a democratic socialist 
opposition party win an election by limiting 
promises of immediate economic and 
social benefits at all levels if elected? Is the 
electorate so immature that it will reject a 
party that offers medium and long-term 
improvements but refuses to guarantee 
instantly more jobs, more income, more 
welfare if elected? 

One conclusion that must be drawn 
from this brief look at the economic policies 
of the French Socialist Government 
is the international environment within 
which a newly elected left-wing government 
has to operate. To seek to implement 
policies without the fullest reference 
to what is happening beyond national borders 
(assuming that one is not prepared to 
seal off the country in some starkly 
authoritarian fashion) is to invite disaster 
as the French discovered. The French 
Prime Minister, Pierre Mauroy, on taking 
office asked two senior state functionaries 
to draw up a balance sheet of the seven 
previous years of right-wing administra


5 


tion. This was published but little attempt 
was made to link its conclusions with the 
extent or timing of the new Government's 
proposals. A more widely drawn national 
audit which involved input from more 
groups than civil servants, and which 
examined a victorious party's manifesto 

based on information only obtainable 
once in office and in the light of prevailing 
international conditions, should be the 
counterpart to the programme drawn up 
in opposition and presented to the electorate 
as the manifesto. 

4. Decentralisation 
A major success in the area of reform for the Socialist Government was 
the creation of directly-elected regional government which marked a 
historic break with centralised state administration. The most dramatic 
reform was to abolish the office of Prefect, the representative of Paris, 
who since Napoleon's day had sat in an imposing mansion in each one of 
France's 95 departments ensuring that the will of Paris was enforced. 

The office itself remains but with a new 
title, Commissioner ofthe Republic, and a 
new task-to help , advise and act as point 
of contact between the regional councils 
(and especially the communes too small to 
hire experienced local government staff) 
and Paris. The 22 directly-elected regional 
councils will have many powers transferred 
to them, but areas of national control, 
notably education (the content and 
form of syllabuses but not location or size 
of schools) and the police, will remain in 
ministerial hands. French local government 
pays for itself with locally-raised 
payroll, property and vehicle licence taxes 
and about half their income comes from 
central government. The regional councils 
and communes will now have more control 
over how the government funding is 
spent though a newly-created auditing 
commission will keep a watchful eye for 
Paris on improper budgeting. In addition, 
the Commissioner of the Republic will 
also receive reports of budgets, and can be 
expected to raise the alarm in Paris at any 
gross financial misbehaviour. So the system 
of interlocking checks necessary to 

mesh together the work of regional and 
local governments with the overall policies 
of the state is still maintained. The 
single biggest gap in the new structure is 
the absence of any permission for the 
regional councils to levy their own taxes or 
develop new sources of revenue. 

Decentralisation without the right to 
impose locally decided forms of taxation is 
less than the whole loaf, but overall the 
transfer of so much decision making to 
regionally elected councils plus the few 
powers for the communes is a positive 
democratic gain and, in terms of French 
history, a courageous reform of which the 
Socialist Government should be proud. 

The Government also maintained the 

regional policy of its predecessors in order 

to reduce the dominance of the region 

around Paris which has 18.5 per cent of the 

population and 26 per cent of the gross 

domestic product. This has worked rea


sonably well, and some of the booming (in 

relative terms) parts of France are far 

from Paris on the Atlantic and Mediterra


nean coasts. There is not the fantastic 

regional imbalance of employment such as 

6 


exists in Britain. Moreover, the theory . 
fashionable for many years that the industry, 
wealth, jobs and development of 
Europe would be concentrated in the 
so-called "golden triangle" with its apexes 
at Paris, Milan and the Ruhr appears to 
have been disproved in France. A vigorous 
regional policy, though it has the 

usual problems of companies taking maximum 
advantage of fiscal and other incentives 
in exchange for often only a few jobs, 
has worked in sharing out jobs and not 
allowing the market and company managers 
to allocate capital and investments 
to its preferred regions. 

S.Party Politics on the Left 
and Running the State 


Mitterrand's first act upon winning the Presidency was to announce that 
he was no longer leader of the Socialist Party but the President of all 
France. It is a vanity to which newly-elected national leaders are much 
given but in Mitterrand's case he meant it and it was only during his 
interventions in the few weeks of the 1986 election campaign that he again 
let drop the word "socialism" from his lips. 

Mitterrand and the Socialist Government 
did not exclude the Parti Socialiste 
(PS) from contact with the Government. 
There was a weekly breakfast meeting at 
the Elysee between the President, Prime 
Minister and the PS Secretary, Lionel 
Jospin, but the newly-elected Government 
quickly settled into the role of being 
functionaries of "the referee state" and 
the rhetoric of France and the national 
interest came almost immediately to dominate. 
The language of combativity and 
class which had done so much to mobilise 
support in the pre-1981 period gave way to 
emollient appeals to "national solidarity". 
Appeals to patriotic sensibility or exclusive 
claims to represent the "national 
interest" are a special danger for the left; 
of course the rhetoric of the party conference 
in opposition cannot be maintained 
in government but the almost 
complete replacement of the language of 
tough and eloquent advocacy of the interests 
of those who put you in office by a 

bland discourse which seeks to embrace 
and pacify all interests tends to leave supporters 
indifferent without convincing 
opponents. Mitterrand, as Head of State, 
was in a more difficult position perhaps 
than the other ministers but he might have 
taken a lesson from the tactics of Franklin 
Roosevelt whose strident attacks on Wall 
Street while President in the 1930s, and 
whose open championing of labour, 
although they earned him the undying 
enmity of American bankers and many 
businessmen, seemed to serve him well in 
the polls. 

Party structure 

The PS was not a sufficient instrument to 
help carry forward the Government's 
message nor was it sufficiently well-established 
to act as a counter-weight to the 
ministers. Founded only in 1971 to bring 
disparate left-wing groups together with 
the SFIO (Section Fran~aise de 1'/nterna


7 


tionals Ouvriere -the French Section of 
the Second International, the party title 
the French socialists adopted in 1920 after 
the split with the communists), the PS 
never developed into a mass party. In 1981 
it had 200,000 members. Given that there 
are 38,000 communes in France-the commune 
is the basic unit of local government 
stretching from a village of a few hundred 
to a city like Marseilles the 200,000 party 
members (195 ,000 by 1986) were clearly 
spread pretty thin. 

The French Socialist Party is a classical 
vertical political organisation with representativity 
channelled upwards from the 
base. The rough equivalent of the Labour 
Party's NEC, the 27 member Bureau 
Executif, is formed in proportion to the 
number of votes received for a general 
policy statement put forward by opposing 
tendencies at the congress, though congress 
delegates are elected regionally also 
in proportion to the relative support that 
different tendencies have in the country. 
This at least ensures that the congress is 
broadly representative of the grass roots 
membership. Between 1971 and 1981 the 
Socialist Party increased its membership, 
influence and electoral success under the 
dominating leadership of Mitterrand. It 
will be interesting to see what happens 
after the 1986 defeat and whether the 
party structure can survive the debate 
about who should be the presidential candidate 
in 1988 and what changes in party 
policy or leadership may be needed to win 
power again. What is clear is that the party 
emerged from five years of Socialist Government 
no stronger in membership or 
role. Party leaders had transferred to ministries 
taking with them top party activists 
as advisers. No thought appeared to have 
been given to how to maintain and 
increase the support of party members at 
the base. The introduction of proportionalrepresentation increased the power of the 
party secretariat in Paris and there was 
considerable resistance in the provinces to 
efforts by Paris to force national candidates 
upon local parties. 

The strength of the Socialist Party lay in 
its control of big cities and when 33 of 
these were lost to the right in the 1983 

municipal elections it was a major blow to 
party organisation. The financing and 
structure of all political parties in France 
has always been ramshackle and ad-hoc. 
The Socialist Party continued to be 
financed from a mix of private and corporate 
donations, income from elected representatives 
(PS deputies earn £3,000 a 
month of which 20 per cent is given to the 
party which in theory provides £2 million 
annual income), membership dues, 
income generated from control of municipalities 
and state aid in paying for printing 
as well as postage costs in elections. 
Reform of the financing of political 
activity was not part of the Party or 
Government programme. 

The cabinet system 

In Britain much hope is placed on introducing 
a cabinet system to reduce 
ministerial dependence on the civil service 
and to maintain better contacts with the 
Party, unions and outside groups. The 58 
ministers in the Mauroy Government 
(1981-1984) each had a cabinet: 
altogether 683 outsiders worked in ministerial 
cabinets. "Outsider" is not quite the 
right word as the French system allows 
highly qualified civil servants to detach 
themselves from government service to 
take part in party politics or work as managers 
in France's publicly-owned banking, 
industrial and service sectors. About one-
sixth of the Socialist ministers had this 
background which gave them some 
knowledge and experience of the inside 
workings of government, industry and 
state administration. Ministerial cabinets 
also had such political civil servants in 
them as well as those engaged purely for 
their political or personal merits by the 
minister. But detailed studies of the working 
of the cabinet system under the Socialist 
Government (see especially P. 
Birnbaum, Les Elites Socialistes au Pouvoir, 
PUF, Paris, 1985) suggest that the 
presence of a cabinet, in itself, does not 
make a minister's task more easy nor keep 
him or her ideologically sound. What 
counted was the President and his rela


8 


tionship with ministers. As one commen-· 

tator noted: 

"It was unclear whether President 

Mitterrand was indifferent to plan


ning because Michel Rocard (Mitter


rand's long-standing and popular 

rival) was Minister of Planning or 

whether he sent Rocard to that post 

because he knew planning would not 

play a big part in the Government. " 

Cabinets also became centres of intrigue 
and rivalry between different ministries 
and took on the political coloration of 
their ministers. Where a minister had a 
specific policy he sought to have implemented 
and this was fully backed by Mitterrand 
then there was no problem. 
Where doubt and uncertainty existed, as 
for example, over the reform of the education 
system, the fully committed cabinet of 
the Education Minister was not able to 
overcome the willingness of the President 
to compromise and eventually withdraw 
the proposed reform. In short, the system 
of ministerial cabinets is not a magic solution 
whereby socialist ministers will 
remain more faithful to their politics: 
drive , decision-making capacity and support 
from colleagues and above all from 
the Head of Government are far more 
important. On the other hand the recognition 
that civil servants are not politically 
neutral and the possibility for experienced 
civil servants to become involved in party 
activity, either as party advisers, cabinet 
members or even deputies and ministers, 
without losing permanently the chance to 
revert to their posts could add some expertise 
and experience to a party preparing 
for and then taking office. 

The Socialist group in the National 
Assembly were also, in the main, 
excluded from major policy decisions 
taken by the Government. They were 
given far more of a role than right-wing 
deputies had been under the previous 
administration and ministers came to dis


cuss proposed changes in laws with the 
group. But this was a technical discussion , 
the policy decision had already been taken 
in the President's office. The group was 
able to intervene in minor areas as when 
the anger of the deputies stopped Mitter


rand from granting pardons to right-wing 
army officers who had betrayed France in 
the disputes over the Algerian war and the 
168 teachers in the group had much to say , 
most of it unhelpful , on attempts to 
change the education system. But for the 
most part the deputies, like the Party, 
were largely passive onlookers. 

The Communist decline 

Yet if the test of the Socialist Party's success 
is how well it did in comparison with 
the Communist Party then another picture 
emerges. The decline of the Parti Communiste 
Franr;aise (PCF) is perhaps the 
spectacular event of the Socialist Government. 
In 1946, the PCF received 28 per 
cent of French votes. In 1986, its vote was 
under 10 per cent and it could not secure 
the return of a deputy in Paris. Its decline 
had been the corollary of the rise of the 
Socialist Party since its launch in 1971. 
This was partly because of the changes in 
the composition of the working class and 
the rise of new groups to which the PCF 
had little to say except "Place yourself 
obediently under the leadership of the 
working class and more especially its vanguard, 
the Communist Party, follow its 
directives and accept its turns without 
debate". Critics of the party were hustled 
from official positions and sometimes 
expelled. The PCF's attitude towards the 
black population was summed up for 
many by the decision of a Communist 
mayor to destroy a hostel in which immigrants 
from Mali were living. In contrast 
to its Italian sister party, the French Communists 
became ever more devoted apologists 
for the Soviet Union under its 
gerontocratic pre-Gorbachev leadership, 
and in effect approved the declaration of 
martial law in Poland and the suppression 
of Solidarity. The Communist newspaper 
L ' Humanite lost half its circulation and 
the Confederation Generate du Travail 

(CGT) the trade union whose leadership 
is communist-orientated also lost more 
members-800,000-than its rivals. 

So the Socialist Party emerged from five 
years of government with a much greater 
number of votes than its Communist part


9 


ner and rival. The question remains 
whether this is a high water mark of 
Socialist votes -at around a third of the 
electorate -or whether it is a base to 
which all other non right-wing votes will 
be attracted in the next few years. The 

Socialists obviously hope for the latter. 
Yet, the failure to increase party membership 
after 1981 and the indifference to the 
reform of the party-parliament-ministerpresident 
nexus will be a major problem. 

6. French Unions-the MissingLink? 
Where democratic socialist governments have remained in office over 
periods of two or more elections, as in the Scandinavian or German 
countries, there is to be found a well-implanted, usually fairly centralised 
trade union movement which has a real presence in all workplaces, 
private and state sectors, blue and white collar, with wide-ranging 
collective bargaining responsibilities allied to considerable technical 
expertise in economics and consistent politics. These are not features, on 
the whole, of the French trade unions. 

Fewer than one in five workers in 
France is a member of a union which gives 
France the lowest density of unionisation 
of any advanced industrialised country. 
Many reasons have been given for the low 
level of union organisation: the relatively 
late transformation of France from being a 
predominantly agricultural country to 
being a modern industrial state; a mixture 
of employers' paternalism towards workers 
and a very effective hostility towards 
unions; the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism 
and rejection of reform or compromise 
within the capitalist system; the 
major socialist-communist splits of 1921 
and 1947, destroying unity at a moment 
when the unions had some real strength ; 
the influence of the PCF in making sure 
that the political line of the biggest French 
union , the Confederation Generale du 
Travail (CGT) , faithfully echoed that of 
the party; the seduction of the pre-1981 

state which consulted top union leaders in 
a quasi-corporatist fashion , thus providing 
access to minsters without the need to 
develop a mass presence at the base. 

The major unions 

The French unions are divided into five 
major groups. The CGT is the largest , 
with about 1.2 million members. Its membership 
is concentrated in the older industries, 
mines, steel, shipbuilding and 
production line manufacturing industry. 
The Confederation Fram;aise Democratique 
du Travail (CFDT) is next with about 
800,000 members spread out thinly in all 
sectors but with strong membership in the 
tertiary sector. The CFDT took off after 
1968 when its flexible anti-statist, anti-
authoritarian , anti-centralist line had considerable 
appeal. It was very much the 

10 


fashionable union of the 1970s and was 
publicly identified as a champion of autogestion, 
a concept which is literally translated 
as "self-management" but which has 
undefined overtones of workers' control, 
cooperation, decentralisation, spontaneity 
and grass-roots initiatives. The 
third general union is Force Ouvriere 
(FO), also about 800,000 strong, with 
most of its members in the civil and other 
state services such as post and railways, 
banks and a small number of industrial 
workers. FO was born out of the split in 
the CGT in 1947. Two other separately 
organised unions represent teachers and 
supervisory and junior management personnel. 
The latter union together with the 
FO have been more critical of the Socialist 
Government than either the CGT (up to 
the Communists leaving the Government 
in 1984) and the CFDT. In elections held 
for local industrial and social security tribunals 
the more moderate and anti-government 
unions did much better than the 

CGT. 

Inflexibility 

The union confederations remain aloof 
and independent from one another and 
there is thus no central forum in which the 
different ideas, political, economic or 
social, of the unions can be debated and 
some common line developed. 

Action or policy initiatives by the CGT 
will often be denounced as communist 
trickery by FO, while positions adopted 
by the FO leadership are proof, in the 
COT's eyes, of FO's incurable reformism. 
The CFDT has zig-zagged through various 
policies and is the most open of the major 
unions to new ideas and to a sense that 
both work and the workforce are going 
through a process of change which 
requires imaginative responses from the 
unions. But its flexibility has not been 
matched by mass organisation at the base 
which lays the CFDT open to the charge of 
being as much a think tank of left-wing 
ideas as a body that employers respect and 
governments must heed. 

French unions have often refused to 

negotiate and sign collective agreements 
with companies and rejected closed shop 
or checkoff agreements for fear that one 
federation (ie the CGT) might be privileged. 
As a result , unions have little 
financial resources and cannot hire 
experts to provide analysis to match the 
arguments put forward by employers. 
There is sporadic union militancy and agitation 
at the base, sometimes flowering 
into the great outbursts of 1936 and 1968, 
but after those high peaks have passed by, 
the failure of the French unions to have 
strong, experienced and expert representation 
at all levels once again manifests 
itself. There is some cooperation between 
unionists in different industries and , on 
occasion, between different unions (notably 
the CFDT and CGT in the 1970s) , and 
this is often helped by the presence of a 
bourse du travail, a kind of trade union 
meeting centre cum club in each town. 
The bourse du travail privileges horizontal, 
decentralised, localised action at the 
expense of building a powerful, national 
organisation based on industries or other 
common linkages between workers. 

The French system corresponds to the 
ideal of highly politicised militants, free 
from bureaucratic control, with good horizontal 
local links: at the top, the union 
leaders focus on politics and securing 
influence within and from the state. In 
between, the company, public or private, 
is not the major terrain for union activity 
via collective bargaining which is regarded 
suspiciously, except in wage disputes, as a 
mechanism for sharing responsibility with 
management.

The Socialist Government has not 
brought any noticeable benefit to unions. 
Both the CGT and the CFDT lost membership. 
In a SOFRES poll carried out in 
1986 among 3,000 workers, 53 per cent did 
not feel themselves close to a union. In a 
poll carried out late in 1985 for the Nouvel 
Economiste, workers were asked whom 
they would vote for in workplace elections 
to represent their interests to the management: 
36 per cent said they would opt for a 
non-union list , 12 per cent for the FO, and 
11 per cent for the CGT and the CFDT. 
This rejection of trade unionism is par


11 


ticularly significant because the Government 
had endeavoured to pass laws giving 
workers wide new rights. 

The Auroux Laws 

The Auroux Laws, named after the 
Labour Minister responsible for formulat-· 
ing them, provided new legal rights for 
workers to elect workplace representatives 
, who would be given time off and 
other facilities. Union access to the workplace 
was also guaranteed and works' 
councils were given new rights to information. 
To begin with, the four Auroux Laws 
were bitterly opposed by the Opposition 
and employers. French managers had 
always opposed the arrival of effective 
trade union representation in the workplace. 
But four years after their passage, 
the French employers' federation finds 
them quite satisfactory because they have 
found out, as the above opinion polls sugge~
t, that giving workers rights does not 
automatically provide for an extension of 
union power. Firms are now living with 
shop stewards and works· councils inde


pendent of union orientation. Of course, 
the existence of the CGT, CFDT, FO, etc. 
shapes the attitude of managers and 
restrains those who would wish to move to 
a full-blown company unionism. But the 
extension of legal protection to representative 
rights in the workplace, although it 
has changed the precise nature of 
employer-employee relations, has not 
benefited the unions or altered the way 
companies are run. In 1985 and 1986, 
there was a witch-hunt of CGT militants in 
many factories, and neither the new laws 
nor their own unions have been able to 
protect them. 

The Auroux Laws are an important case 
for consideration when debating future 
labour legislation in Britain. The two 
trade union and industrial relations systems 
are wide apart, but statutory protection 
of workers' rights may neither help 
their collective power and is far from 
being a boost to unions unless those 
unions are already well-implanted and 
popular with their members. On the other 
hand , it is difficult to see what even the 
best-intentioned left government can do 
to help unions whose structure and style 
do not persuade workers to join them. 

7. Foreign Policy and Defence 
Divide No-one 
France is alone among the major Western states in having very little 
internal political division on foreign policy or defence issues. This needs 
some qualification as there is a longstanding Atlanticist tradition but 
nowhere near as powerful as that of Britain or West Germany. The 
French Communists defend Soviet positions but support France's possession 
of nuclear weapons. While the 1980s was a decade which saw 
momentous demonstrations, debates and divisions over nuclear weapons, 
NATO and the foreign policy of the other Western democracies, the 

12 


Socialist Government in France continued unperturbed on its course of 
maintaining nuclear weapons, intervening with its troops in Lebanon 
and Chad, exploding nuclear weapons in the Pacific, and overtaking 
Britain as the world's biggest exporter of arms after the Soviet Union and 
the United States. Not even the Greenpeace affair, with its lethal state 
terrorism compounded by a cover-up in Paris, disturbed the bi-partisan 
consensus. 

Nuclear consensus 

While there is some technical discussion 
on defence policy, hardly anyone questions 
the acceptance of French nuclear 
weaponry, even in the Socialist Party's 
left-wing or the Communist Party. Why is 
this? The answer lies in the past occupation 
of France by foreign troops and the 
application of a logic which postulates that 
the defence of national independence 
requires a nuclear deterrent. 

For British or American citizens whose 
countries have never been occupied, it is 
sometimes difficult to understand the 
sense of humiliation and destruction 
wrought upon France by the successive 
wars with Germany in 1870, 1914 and 
1940. The French armed services have 
been unable to protect the country's integrity 
and have needed American help to 
defeat the Germans in both world wars. 
After 1945, the desperate attempt to 
maintain an imperial presence in Vietnam 
and Algeria collapsed in military defeat. 

But the main factor determining French 
defence policy remains the fact that 
France, along with Switzerland, Sweden 
and Yugoslavia, is the only European 
country without important foreign military 
bases and foreign troops owing allegiance 
to another power on her soil. To 
put it another way , France shares with the 
United States the privilege of being the 
only member of NATO which is not 
defended by permanent bases and garrisons 
(even if small ones) of foreign military 
personnel. The decision of de Gaulle 
to pull France out of the military wing of 
the NATO alliance has had immense 
impact on altering the political debate 
about defence in France. Of course, the 
contradictions are there. French officers 

take part in NATO discussions in 
Brussels, and a full disengagement of the 
United States from Europe, with the possible 
consequent nuclear rearming of 
West Germany, would terrify Paris. (Two 
jokes sum up the French attitude towards 
Germany. The first is Franc;ois Mauriac's 
old crack: "I like Germany so much I am 
delighted there are two of them". The 
other is the French general's idea of the 
perfect German army: one strong enough 
to take Moscow but weak enough to be 
defeated by Luxembourg!) And, of 
course, in any nuclear conflict France 
would not be spared. 

De Gaulle's expulsion of NATO headquarters 
and American bases and troops 
from France in 1966 was widely supported, 
irrespective of political or class 
alignment. De Gaulle also insisted that 
French nuclear weapons were aimed taus 
azimuts-at all points of the compass, with 
the clear implication that a de-nuclearised 
France could, one day, be as open to military 
blackmail from the United States as 
from the Soviet Union. France under 
de Gaulle criticised American involvement 
in Vietnam, Israel's occupation of 
Arab territory after 1967 and sought to 
distance itself as far as possible from a 
Washington world view. 

Foreign affairs 

Mitterrand, in opposition, had maintained 
a guarded set of contacts with the 
Soviet Union , but his main public pronouncements 
had been on the issue of 
human rights which he had made the banner 
of the opposition in contrast to the 
silences of right-wing Presidents before 
1981. The invasion of Afghanistan and the 

13 


installation of the Soviet SS20 Euro-
missiles in the run-up to his election produced 
a perception of the Soviet Union as 
an aggressive, expansionist power. In contrast, 
America in the late 1970s, after its 
defeat in Vietnam, its humiliation in Iran, 
the ousting of its client Somoza in Nicaragua 
and the weakness of its economy, 
currency and diplomacy was perceived as 
a weak defender of Western interests. The 
suppression of Polish Solidarity a few 
months after the Socialists were elected 
put the seal on the anti-Soviet orientation 
of Mitterrand's foreign policy and set it on 
a course where it was barely distinguishable 
from that of the born-again 
Reaganism. At first , there were some 
efforts to strike out in new directions. 
Arms were sold to Nicaragua, France 
joined with Mexico in recognising the left-
wing FLM in El Salvador, the French Foreign 
Minister met Arafat, but these signs 
of independence did not add up to a foreign 
policy. 

Foreign affairs is a highly secretive policy 
area reserved to the President of 
France under the constitution and Mitterrand 
had almost mystical belief in his role 
as protector of France's status and glory. 
Such an obsessive interest led to some 
considerable lack of balance. He considered 
the debate on the installation of 
Cruise and Pershing missiles on a par with 
the Berlin airlift in 1948 or the Cuban 
missile crisis of 1962 as a test of will for the 
West. It led him to intervene directly in 
the West German elections when he 
openly supported the pro-missile right-
wing Government of Chancellor Kohl 
against the PS's sister party, the SPD, 
which hardly needed lessons on anti-communism 
or anti-Sovietism, but which was 
struggling hard to develop defence policies 
that would guarantee security, relax 
European tension and divisions and 
reduce the arms race. 

Arms sales 

As Denis Healey pointed out in his Fabian 
pamphlet on the twin threat of nuclear 
weapons and world debt, the contribution 

of the arms exports to destabilising the. 
development of peaceful trade and balanced 
economic growth is considerable 
(D. Healey, Labour and A World Society, 
Fabian Tract 501, 1985). The French 
Socialists seemed as unwilling as the British 
Labour Governments of the 1960s and 
1970s to reduce or contain arms exports. 
The need to sell arms also severely limited 
the application of Mitterrand's human 
rights pronouncements and the eloquent 
defender of human rights, to us azimuts of 
the 1970s had nothing to say about the 
suppression of human rights in countries 
such as Iraq or Morocco, both considerable 
purchasers of French arms. The kidnapping 
and murder of French hostages 
by pro-Iranian Shiite extremists in 
Lebanon was directly linked to France's 
support for Iraq in the Gulf war. Iraq buys 
40 per cent of French arms exports. The 
sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and subsequent 
imbroglio showed the extent of 
French willingness to protect its nuclear 
weapons system. Mitterrand's pointless, if 
headline-grabbing, meeting with Poland's 
General Jaruzelski, outraged those on the 
left who had welcomed France's endorsement 
of human rights issues in East 
Europe. Unprincipled inc~herence 
marked the dying days of the Government's 
foreign policy. The indifference of 
Reagan and Gorbachev to French nuclear 
pretensions showed that in the superpowers' 
eyes the French force de frappe 
was not so much irritating as irrelevant. 
Although the bi-partisan consensus prevented 
these issues from being raised , 
French foreign policy at the end of the 
Socialist Government had made little 
impact on the world yet had sacrificed the 
elan and independence of de Gaulle. 
Moreover, the future development of a 
common European left-wing international 
policy, suggested in the works of the 
Brandt and Palme Commissions, remains 
unlikely to be realised while the French 
left continues to be obdurately fixated on 
national status, military interventions 
overseas, rapid deployment force diplomacy, 
nuclear weapons and arms exports. 

However, there is a paradox lurking in 
the background. The removal of Amer


14 


ican bases from national soil did not lead, 
in France's case , to a reduction in nuclear 
weaponry or to limited industrial de-militarisation 
and a lesser emphasis on the 
armed forces-rather the contrary. Those 
who sincerely want all US bases out of 
Britain may end up with rather different 
consequences from those they hope for. 
The problem of national defence in the 

context of over-armed superpowers, a 
divided Europe, a world which devotes a 
disproportionate amqunt of resources on 
arms remains the number one issue for 
many on the left. Itcannot be said that the 
theory or practice of the French Socialists 
in government have provided any help or 
guidance in developing an alternative policy 
in this area. 

8. Counter-Productive 
Reforms 
The epithet "reformist" is one of the oldest insults flung around by those 
holding different political positions on the left. Yet, a socialist government 
without a series of reforms is a nonsense. The problem rather lies in 
devising reforms that are relevant, carrying them out in a way that 
ensures they have a real impact and bring clear and direct benefit to 
people and discarding those that either represent muddled commitments 
to ideological formulations or are likely to provoke such resentment from 
a majority that they act more as a stimulant to the opposition than 
purveyors of benefits to their intended recipients. Overall, the record of 
the Mitterrand Government was a good one in many areas such as 
justice, women's rights and protection of those in rented accommodation. 
But it is worth looking at two areas where well-meant efforts at 
reform backfired. 

A. EDUCATION 
In July 1984, 1.5 million people demon-withdraw the bill , the Education Minister 
strated in Paris against the Government's resigned and the right was given a boost 
proposal to change the education laws and which set its confidence and morale soar-
to integrate the Catholic schools and the ing right up to the elections 20 months 
lay national education system more later. The opposition had stolen the classic 
closely. It was the biggest demonstration tactic of the left -the massive, peaceful 
seen in the capital since the end of the war. occupation of a city by committed demon-

The banners of the protestors were strators and had identified itself, however 
inscribed with the word liberte. The dem-falsely, as the champion of liberty against 
onstration forced the Government to an oppressive government. 

IS 


A religious war 

Was the row worth the damage it caused 
the left? Hardly, unless it is necessary for 
socialist governments to prove their ideological 
commitment to long-standing doctrine 
without analysing its contemporary 
relevance. The fight in France between 
Church and lay control of education is a 
century old and a matter of great passion 
to activists in the teachers' unions and the 
Socialist Party. "Ni Dieu, ni maftre" -neither 
God , nor master-is a sticker still to 
be found on teachers' cars in France, and 
the hostility to the Church as a champion 
of conservative values and a redoubtable 
organiser in the path of socialist advance is 
based on considerable historical fact . 

But a religious war over education was 
not something that a late twentieth century 
Government should have got 
involved in unless the issue was so central 
and reform so necessary that an all-out 
fight could not be avoided . The Catholic 
Church in France runs about 15 per cent of 
the schools. In British terms, they would 
be called public schools but, confusingly, 
in French are known as ecoles lib res, free 
schools to distinguish them from state 
schools. They do not occupy the same 
place as British private schools and in no 
way are centres of academic excellence. 
The children of the bourgeoisie in France 
go to state lycees and look down upon the 
church schools as rather second-rate academic 
institutions. Although Mitterrand's 
election manifesto promised that they 
would be incorporated into "a single, unified 
, secular system ," the Education Minister 
proceeded slowly by negotiation with 
the Church and Catholic parents' representatives. 
He was right to do so as an 
opinion poll carried out in 1982 showed 
that only 31 per cent of those who had 
voted left in 1981 wanted the Catholic 
schools taken over , while a majority (SS 
per cent) said the system should be left as 
it is. A compromise was reached but was 
spoiled when militant socialist teacher 
deputies in the National Assembly insisted 
on amending the proposed compromise 
law to reinsert more anti-Church 

provisions. The Church exploded and 
accused the Government of a double-
cross and gave the right-wing politicians 
the opportunity to mobilise the demonstration 
and place themselves at the head 
of a defence of parents' rights and educational 
independence. From an outsider's 
point of view , other school reforms in 
France were much more urgent, especially 
the need to reduce the elitist, exam-dominated 
orientation which reinforces social 
division and favours the children of the 
bourgeoisie, but the teachers' unions so 
prominent in demanding government 
reforms of Catholic schools were equally 
solid in defending the existing system 
which favours interesting academic work 
in schools, absolute security of tenure and 
the lightest teaching load in Europe. 

While the reforms in the field of justice 
were broadly welcomed, the attempts at 
educational reform were a disaster. They 
represented the wishes of party or union 
activists and were not rooted in objective 
social need. 

Some of the lost ground was recovered 
with the return of Jean-Pierre Chevenement 
to the Government in 1984 as 
Education Minister. He began his term of 
office with the remark : "There are two 
groups in our schools and universities. 
Those who know . They are called teachers. 
They are there to teach. The rest are 
there to learn. They are called students." 
He went on to insist on the need for academic 
discipline, emphasis on the three 
"r's" and a return to teaching republican 
history and civic values. It was an assertion 
of values at odds with some , not all, of 
the teaching methods that had become 
fashionable since 1968. It turned out to be 
immensely popular for student or pupil 
self-discipline and hard work to be associated 
with a Socialist Education Minister. 
The right having become the champions of 
educational "independence" between 
1981 and 1984 were outflanked by a minister 
who refused to let concern for school 
standards be taken out of the left's hands 
and presented exclusively as a right-wing 
cause. 

16 


B. THE MEDIA 
When the Government imposed its austerity 
programme in 1982 and confirmed it 
in 1983 by rejecting the alternative of leaving 
the European Monetary System and 
trying to impose import controls , the strategists 
around Mitterrand decided that as a 
kind of exchange for the acceptance of 
economic austerity the Government 
would endeavour to extend freedom in 
ways that corresponded to socialist 
demands. One such attempt was to revive 
the educational issue which ended in disaster. 
Another was to develop policies for 
the media which during the long years in 
opposition were often the subject of left-
wing attack. 

In fact, France, partly by design, partly 
by chance, has the most pluralist press in 
Europe outside Sweden. The design lies in 
the laws passed at the liberation in 1944/45 
which dispossessed the owners of the 
right-wing papers which had supported 
Hitler before 1939 and the Vichy regime 
after 1940. A right of reply law and , more 
important, one that nationalised the press 
distribution agency were also passed. The 
latter means that left-wing newspapers 
and magazines are on sale in the most 
remote parts of France and the distribution 
censorship which is exercised in Britain 
by the two main wholesale/retail 
companies does not exist in France. In 
addition, the Government subsidises the 
press with cheap postal tariffs, zero V AT 
rating and , on occasion , direct subsidy. 

The chance lies in the willingness of 
businessmen or corporations to put up 
money for left-of-centre newspapers and 
to support them during periods of low or 
zero profits. Le Matin, Liberation and the 
left-wing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur 
(circulation 400,000) all provide a width of 
reporting and comments. In addition, Le 
Monde , whose independence is assured by 
the right of journalists to elect its editor, 
maintains an objectivity and authority, 
and an influence because of those two values, 
which are not automatically hostile to 
a socialist government. 

The plans for reform 

The national newspapers in Paris provide 
a wide range of views and choices of news 
story. In consequence, the 1981 Government's 
plans for reform focussed on television 
and radio. In the latter area, the 
Government permitted the creation of 100 
local radio stations, and after some initial 
problems over accepting advertising, this 
reform has been successful and worked 
well. On television, it was far from willing 
to be so liberal. An attempt to remove the 
direct control of the state was made by 
setting up a so-called "High Authority", 
rather like the BBC Board of Governors 
or the Independent Broadcasting Authority, 
to act as a buffer between the Government 
and the three television 
channels. Moreover, political appointees 
made by the previous right-wing administration 
were fired and some resigned . It 
was a period of considerable chaos in 
which television workers, journalists, 
technicians and others tried to insert 
themselves in one of the few examples of 
workers' activity from below auto-generated 
as a result of the change in government. 
Unfortunately, the employees were 
unable to agree on a common policy or 
common set of demands: at one stagethere were fourteen different unions or 
newly created groups representing different 
sections or tendencies amongst the 
audio-visual workers. A brief glimpse of 
autogestion had turned out to be 
autochaos. 

The press 

The one attempt to legislate a major 
change in press law came in too late to 
have any real impact. It was a law limiting 
press concentration and, in essence, 
returned to a 1944 law which laid down 
similar provisions. The problem lay in the 
fact that the 1944 law had never been 
applied. In 1978, a group of journalists 
had launched an action against Robert 
Hersant, the right-wing press magnate, 
under the 1944 law. Hersant, a former 
Vichy collaborator, owns 19 national and 
provincial dailies and controls 35 per cent 

17 


of the national and 14 per cent of the 
provincial circulation. In re-asserting the 
1944law, the Government had difficulties 
in defining what it meant by monopoly 
especially as Hersant, in common with 
other media corporations, was involved in 
radio and television as well as newspapers. 
Although the law had been included in the 
election manifesto, it only became an 
issue in 1983 when Hersant purchased a 
key regional chain of papers which was 
sympathetic to the Government. But by 
that time, the right was back in harness 
and launched a major press freedom campaign 
and submitted 2,598 amendments to 
the law. Unfortunately, the law was seen 
to be aimed at one person only, and there 
was no sense that even if Hersant was 
forced to sell off his newspapers, the new 
owners would be any less right-wing than 
he is. In fact , the law was passed late in 
1984 and nothing happened. Hersant had 
split up control among different companies 
and the Government would not 
take steps to implement its own law. In 
January 1986, he went so far as to take 
over two important regional papers in 
Lyons and Reims. Again, the Government 
was caught out, and by the time of 
the election in 1986, Hersant, now elected 
as an RPR deputy , was more powerful 
than ever. 

The issue of media ownership and control 
and press freedom is exceptionally difficult 
for the left. What appears to be the 
lesson from the issue of media reform in 

France after 1981 is the need to introduce 
any reform in the immediate wake of electoral 
victory. If left until later, it is a perfect 
subject for the right, however 
hypocritically, to seize upon as an issue of 
liberty. 

Television 

With television, Mitterrand allowed two 
new television channels paid for by advertising. 
He brought in an Italian television 
entrepreneur, Silvio Berlusconi, who 
dominates Italian private television, to 
run a fifth channel for French television in 
partnership with a French transport corporation 
whose owner is close to Mitterrand. 
Berlusconi runs openly populist, 
mass audience shows, many brought in 
from America, unleavened by quality 
news , current affairs , drama or documentaries. 
There was neither demand nor agitation 
for these new television channels 
and there was considerable dismay 
amongst French film-makers and others 
about the impact of Berlusconi. It seemed 
almost as if Mitterrand wanted to do 
something for the sake of doing something 
dramatic at the end of the Government. 
At any rate, the newly elected Government 
had said it may not let Berlusconi (in 
partnership with Robert Maxwell) goahead with a direct satellite broadcast service 
which the Italian needs to consolidate 
his hold on Europe's private television 
system. 

9. Including the Excluded 
For champions of proportional representation as the sine qua non of 
British recovery, its introduction in France is worth looking at -though 
the 19861egislative elections may be the first and last to be fought on PR. 

18 


One of the first proposals of the newly elected right-wing Government 
was to abolish PR and return to the first-past-the-post system fought over 
two rounds. 

Principle and expediency came together 
in Mitterrand's decision to introduce PR. 
The principle lay in the fact that a commitment 
to PR was in the 1981 election manifesto 
and had been a key point in the 
common programme agreed by the Socialists 
and Communists in 1972. It was the 
latter who insisted on PR , feeling with 
some justice that they had never had the 
parliamentary seats equivalent to the 
number of votes they received in elections 
after the war. Proportional representation 
would overcome this exclusion. 

But it was also expedient for Mitterrand 
to switch to PR and he did so after the 
Communists had left the Government in 
July 1984. According to the opinion polls 
in that year and 1985 , the Socialists faced a 
massive loss of seats had the 1986 election 
been fought on the old system and in the 
event of an overwhelming right-wing 
majority in the National Assembly, Mitterrand's 
position as President would have 
been untenable. As it is, the revival of the 
Socialist Party in the months before the 
election now shows that even if it had been 
contested according to the old system 
something fairly similar to the current balance 
of seats between the two majorgroupings would have emerged. Successful 
management of the economy (which byMarch 1986 was showing near zero inflation, 
a slight dip in unemployment, and a 
healthily profitable public and private sector) 
combined with aggressive participation 
by Mitterrand in the campaign had 
done more to pull up the Socialist vote 
than the re-jigging of the electoral system . 

National Front 

By far the most important beneficiary of 
PR has been the extreme right-wing 
National Front party which now has 35 
deputies in the National Assembly as well 
as 135 regional government representatives. 
It was the PR system used in the 
European elections in 1984 which first 
gave the National Front the respectability, 

status and income that goes with winning 
elected positions in a democracy. The 
French National Front is a racist, antisemitic 
party with an authoritarian pro-
gramme of repatriation of "non-European 
foreigners" , which it combines with anti-
unionism and calls for stronger policing. 
Among its deputies are two former OAS 
terrorists, and a Vichy wartime collaborator 
but there are also doctors , university 
professors, accountants as well as farmers , 
small businessmen and party functionaries. 
The media have treated the 
National Front as a legitimate party 
organisation and provided relativelyuncritical (in the case of the Hersant press, 
highly positive) coverage of the party 
leader, Jean Marie le Pen. 

A movement against the National 
Front, SOS Racisme, was launched under 
the slogan "Touche pas man pate" (Don't 
touch my mate) and although its badges 
were everywhere to be seen and it 
organised a domestic Live Aid type of 
massive rock concert in Paris it has had 
nowhere near the same success as the 
much more vigorous and confrontational 
Anti Nazi League in Britain a few yearsago . The widespread hope is that France's 
National Front will just fade away much as 
the right-wing Poujade movement did in 
the 1950s and the next election will be 
crucial in that regard. Voting by PR 
allowed into the political system those 
who had been previously excluded or 
rather those who felt that their policies 
were not sufficiently dominant in the two 
major groupings but the price , the 
appearance in parliament and regional 
assemblies of a fascist party, was one that 
had to be paid. 

Policy on immigrants 

Among those who were not seen wearing 
the open hand badge of "Touche pas man 
pate" were the President, Prime Minister, 
or Socialist ministers except for the Arts 
Minister, Jack Lang, who sponsored 

19 


multi-ethnic cultural events. In general 
the Socialist Government's record has 
been timid and uncertain in handling its 
immigrant problem. France has always 
been a country open to immigrants and 
the overall immigrant population of 5.5 
per cent is roughly the same today as it was 
fifty years ago. The single biggest block of 
immigrants in contemporary France are 
the 860,000 Portuguese. But two million 
of today's immigrants are from North 
Africa or further south in West and Central 
Africa and, as such, are easily identifiable. 
They face problems common to 
such immigrant groups everywhere in 
Europe. Crowded into poor housing , 
doing dirty, low-paid work, with high 
youth unemployment, the object of constant 
racial harrassment from whites who 
complain that neighbourhoods and 
schools are being "taken over" by blacks. 
Moreover, many of the Arab and African 
immigrants arrived in the 1960s and 1970s 
without papers and face added exploitation 
and fear . 

The main relevant promise in the 1981 
manifesto was to give the immigrants 
(who often retain the nationality of their 
country of origin) the right to vote in 
municipal elections after five years' residence. 
This pledge was not carried out for 
fear of a backlash by white voters and so 
an important mechanism for allowing people 
to make their presence felt and change 

I 0. Style 


the conditions under which they live-participation 
in the democratic electoral process 
-has been denied the immigrant 
community by a Socialist Government. 
The Government did a little for immigrants. 
They are now allowed to form 
their own associations and an openly racist 
law permitting police checks according to 
"facial characteristics" was repealed 
which perhaps is more of a comment on 
how backward France was in this area in 
1981 than a tribute to the progressiveness 
of the Government. On the other hand the 
Government encouraged a voluntary 
repatriation scheme and did not rebuke 
union leaders when they made the facile 
and age-old equation between the two 
million unemployed and the presence of 
two million immigrants. Neither 
resources, nor political vision, nor generous 
leadership were provided by the 
Socialist Government in respect of 
France's black population. They remain 
as excluded in 1986 as in 1981. (Although 
the greatest athlete France produced in 
this period , the tennis star, Yannick 
Noah, is Camerounian.) Mitterrand's 
Government was solidly white. Ironically, 
it has been Jacques Chirac who has given 
Lucette Michaux-Chevry, a black deputy 
from Guadeloupe , a minister's post in his 
Government. He has made her the minister 
responsible for the French language. 

One of the successes of the Mitterrand Government was that of the Arts 
Minister, Jack Lang. Given France's cultural history one might expect 
this but left-wing governments sometimes exclude themselves from this 
area of national life througl: parsimony of resources or myopic politicisation 
of cultural policy. 

20 


Government spending on the arts has 
gone up three-fold since 1981 and now 
runs at about £1 billion or one per cent of 
all government spending. It has been distributed 
as much to the high art of Paris-
the Comedie Fran~aise and the opera-as 
to the regions and so-called fringe arts like 
strip cartoons, the circus, fairgrounds and 
furniture design. The Ministry of Culture 
also sponsored all-night music festivals in 
summer-time Paris. 

Lang has made his political views clear. 
At a UNESCO conference in Mexico in 
1982 he attacked "American financial and 
intellectual terrorism that no longer grabs 
territory, or rarely, but grabs consciousness, 
ways of thinking, of living." 
Yet he has not lapsed into a chauvinist 
provincialism. Almost his first act as Culture 
Minister was to go to a Stevie Wonder 
concert and his ministry has financially 
supported the making of films by the Polish 
director Wajda and the Japanese, 
Kurosawa. Altogether support for film 
making increased seven fold under Lang's 
reign. Britain's Peter Brook receives a 
£400,000 subsidy for his Paris based company, 
the American novelist, William 
Stryron, was chosen to host an international 
conference on culture in Paris, and 
the Government has decorated American 
film directors. Art and artists of all disciplines 
and configurations are not supported 
according to whether they conform 
to some notion of "people's or popular" 
culture but according to their excellence, 
vitality and originality. 

Shortly before the 1986 election major 
artists and intellectuals signed and spon


sored a newspaper advertisement endorsing 
the Socialist Government's cultural 
policy and urging its continuation no matter 
who won at the polls. Among the signatories 
were Graham Greene, Anthony 
Burgess, Ingmar Bergman, Peter Brook, 
Arthur Miller as well as French citizens. 
Their intervention was not sufficient to 
keep Lang in his post though the success of 
his ministry has been a major bonus for 
the Socialist Government and won it votes 
and support. Indeed such has been the 
impact of a generous and all-inclusive 
rather than a sectarian cultural policy 
under the left that the incoming Government 
will find it difficult to indulge in the 
philistine privatisation that has characterised 
Mrs Thatcher's approach to the 
arts. 

For some the activities of Lang's ministry 
and Mitterrand's full personal endorsement 
of an expansive and expensive 
cultural policy will be criticised as far too 
much emphasis on circuses when bread , as 
it were, was in short supply. Other critics 
may feel that the flamboyant Lang and his 
refusal to restrict his sponsorship to 
"socialist art" (whatever that is) betrayed 
left-wing ideals. On the other hand the 
politics of culture under the French Socialists 
passed three tests which any left policy 
ought to achieve. They enriched people's 
life in the community on a non-sectarian 
nationwide basis and did so with panache 
and style. They encouraged people and 
groups to develop their potential. They 
showed the state as a positive and liberating 
instrument and its intervention as an 
act that gains popular support. 

21 


11. Conclusion: What Lessons 
for Labour? 
Socialists have always put a premium on analysis in opposition before 
action in office. The French experience of government between 1981 and 
1986 suggests that a much more thorough interpretation of the world, as 
opposed to the nation, was needed at the moment of electoral victory. 

The manifesto on which Mitterrand was 
elected was drawn up essentially in 1972. 
It expressed preoccupations of the 1960s 
and was premissed on economic growth. lt 
was mainly about distributing wealth more 
equally and had little about creating 
wealth. The socialists had ideas on how to 
make a beautifully planned pensionscheme, efficient and smoothly running 
and a model for the world. They had no 
idea about creating the conditions under-
which a motor car or computer system 
sharing the same criteria could be made 
and little sense that one might be contingent 
on the other. 

Economic policy 

Demand was to be increased by increasingwages and transfer payments and this was 
supposed to get the economy moving. It 
did not work because of inflation and the 
growth of imports. 

In addition the franc was devalued 
under external pressure three times in 18 
months. There was no reason why it could 
not have been devalued as a deliberate 
controlled act by the Government at the 
very outset. Devaluation, of course, 
forces up the prices of imports which is 
important in France's case which has to 
import all its oil. The moment a government 
decision alters prices it is in the business 
of controlling national income 
distribution to some extent. The Government 
had already shown its willingness to 
increase incomes generously upon entering 
office. Within a year, for reasons mentioned 
earlier in this pamphlet continuing 
inflation, massive trade deficit, 
runs on the franc-the Government intervened 
to freeze incomes and then main


tained a prices and incomes policy. In this 
it was little different, as many commentators 
have pointed out, from the Labour 
Governments of Britain in the 1960s and 
1970s. Generosity followed by austerity 
seems the rule. Would it not be possible to 
reverse this and get the austerity in first? 

To govern, observed Pierre Mendes-
France, is to choose. In 1981, the French 
Socialist Government refused to ·make a 
hard choice between the different, mostly 
equally worthwhile claims for more 
income, more funds, more financial support 
from different sectors. It found out 
quickly that the choice was made for it. If 
nothing else is learnt from the French 
Socialist Government it is the necessity of 
taking the hard decisions early on. Once 
an economy starts controlling a government 
rather than the other way round the 
latter is in dangerous waters. 

The role of the state 

The state has taken quite an ideological 
battering this decade from right and left. 
The convergence between free market followers 
of Adam Smith, on one hand, and 
libertarian , syndicalist anti-bureaucracy 
supporters of socialism from below has 
left the state pretty friendless. The great 
hope of many on the French left in the 
1970s was for autogestion. But almost bydefinition autogestion starts from below. It 
cannot be imposed from above. However 
the Socialist Government did not stop any 
autogestion projects from being implemented. 
The 1970s had seen workers take 
over some factories and Socialist controlled 
cities, notably Grenoble, had helped 
with the formation of co-ops and invested 
in local enterprises. Michel Rocard, one 

22 


of the chief advocates of autogestion, had 
a powerful place in the Government but 
no-one arrived at his door with projects 
for workers' take-overs. 

The point is not to decry the usefulness 
and need of such projects but rather to 
warn against placing excessive hope that 
there is an untapped mass of British autogestionnaires 
only awaiting a Labour government 
to set about creating hundreds of 
thousands of new jobs. The state at 
national or regional level through public 
investment (as in Reagan's America), 
public ownership (as in Mitterrand's 
France) , investment guidance (as in conservative 
Japan), or labour market control 
(as in Sweden) may still be the only agent 
which can keep down unemployment and 
the only force capable of demanding and 
imposing the common duties and obligations 
of citizenship and preventing a 
decline into a mess of competing, sectoral 
pressure groups. 

Of the countries cited above, Sweden is 
the only one which would correspond to 
some extent to a socialist project. But an 
eff~ctive labour market policy was ruled 
out in France in the absence of a numerically 
strong, coherent, politically and 
economically competent trade union 
movement. Without an effective counterweight 
to both the state and employers, a 
labour market policy will not necessarily 
favour the creation and maintenance of 
jobs. History, political differences and the 
lack of an organic link between the Socialist 
Party and the unions means that the 
best the state could do was legislate to 
extend some workplace rights. Worthwhile, 
necessary progress but open to 
repeal and accommodated by all except 
backswood employers. Starting from their 
base and divisions it was impossible in 
France to strengthen the unions as institutions. 
This may not be the case in Britain. 
Union reform is problematic and seen 
more in terms of the workplace rights of 
union members and lay officials, the legal 
obligations of unions, their internal 
democracy, and their access to government 
to help discuss policy and be represented 
in a wide range of institutions as a 
representative body. Is there no mecha


nism possible in Britain for mergingunions along mainly industrial lines and 
providing more resources so that they can 
match capital with analytic rigour as well 
as collective strength and generousintentions? 

Furthermore, the extension of trades 
unionism into the centre of capitalist managerial 
control through industrial democracy 
is a priority. The difficulty of the 
French Socialist Government in creating 
an effective partnership with the unions 
and its inability to build up unions as an 
effective but responsible counter-force to 
a purely management control of the firm 
may be said to be its greatest failure and a 
similar failure would have similar consequences 
for a Labour government. 

The need for socialist values 

The relative failure of the French Socialists 
to set the economy moving in the right 
direction or to develop a positive partnership 
with the unions may be related to 
their dropping of the ideas and values of 
socialism soon after the election. By the 
end of the five years' government, Socialist 
ministers were openly saying that their 
main achievement had been to show that 
they could alternate with governments of 
the right. This may be so but it was a major 
scaling down of ambition and unlikely to 
mobilise mass support. 

Mitterrand's and ministers' assumption 
of the "national" or "above party" mode 
so quickly after the 1981 election and 
thereafter until very shortly before the 
1986 contest was more than a choice of 
language. It was a suspension of that part 
of the socialist project aimed at developing 
egalitarian values and practices in 
society. In a country that attaches great 
importance to parole, headed by a Socialist 
President with an extraordinary command 
of the language, the adoption of the 
discourse of "modernisation", "flexibility", 
"dynamism" is to dilute the reference 
to politics with the nostrums of the 
Wall Street Journal. The qualities listed 
above may be necessary but to emphasise 
them to the exclusion of other values that 
distinguish socialist from conservative 

23 


governments is a mistake. On all French 
coins the three words "Liberty", "Equality", 
"Fraternity" are inscribed. They predate 
Marx but each is an important element 
of socialist values. Of these, the concept 
least applied by Mitterrand was 
equality. Studies of the last Labour Government 
in Britain also showed that inequalities 
widened and poverty increased. 
If a democratic socialist government is to 
lessen those inequalities then some sense 
of necessary austerity, some imposition of 
standards of citizenship will have to take 
place. There must be some link between 
sacrifices and citizenship and equality that, 
in addition to economic growth, is 
perhaps the beginnings of the modern 
socialist project. The call to equality, the 
call to sacrifice was not heard clearly 
throughout the five years of socialist government 
in France. They began by thinking 
they could please everyone and ended 
by being voted out. 

In a sense, the Socialist Party campaigned 
until the summer of 1981 , it governed 
until the end of 1985 , it then began 
campaigning in the few weeks before the 
March 1986 election. There was no visible 
sense that on entering office in 1981, the 
ministers and Mitterrand worked out a 
programme aimed at continuous political 
mobilisation in the following five years 
with the respective local , regional and 

European elections acting as reference 
points or targets. Instead, the elections in 
1982, 1983 and 1984 showed large swings 
to the riglit whose confidence rose. 

Compared with Mrs Thatcher's Government 
over the same period, Mitterrand's 
Government looks like a model of 
sanity, efficiency and reforming purpose. 
In comparison with some ideal socialist 
measure the dark spots and failures look 
bad. Which yardstick should one use? The 
one that counts is that of the ballot box 
and the voters in France returned a less 
than favourable verdict in March 1986. 

Much is still left to play for. The 1986 
election result is by way of being an interim 
poll. The presidential contest, probably 
linked to legislative elections, of 1988 
or earlier will set the seal one way or the 
other on the Socialist experiment in 
France of the 1980s. Much depends on the 
policies of the Chirac Government. Much 
also depends on the internal coherence 
and self-discipline of the Socialist Party. 

But the period of left-wing government 
that has just ended should provide an 
opportunity to the Labour Party to see 
what mistakes can be avoided when 
Labour returns to power. Labour may not 
always be able to learn from its own 
defeats. Perhaps by looking across the 
Channel it can learn from those of the left 
in France. 

24 


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French Lessons for Labour 

For most of this decade, the leading Western, industrialised countries have 
been controlled by .right-wing governments. The one exception has been 
France where in 1981, Fran<;ois Mitterrand was elected President followed byan outright victory for the Socialist Party in the National Assembly. For the 
first time in French history, the left had arrived in office with the prospect of a 
long period of power ahead of them. In this pamphlet, Denis MacShane 
examines the record of the Socialist Government and asks: e Why did the euphoric victory of 1981 become the defeat of 1986? e Why were the political, economic and social strategies of these five years

unable to secure a second term of office? e Were the Party's policies fundamentally wrong or just badly applied? e What is the tension between carrying out manifesto promises developed 

over a long period of opposition and governing a mixed economy in a world 
in which production, trade and finance are largely internationalised? 

By offering answers to these questions, Denis MacShane draws out some 
lessons to be learnt by the Labour Party as it prepares policies for government 
and by those who will have the responsibility for implementing them. 

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