ABSTRACT
This was abandoned officially at the Twenty-eighth Congress, and to a significant extent in practice over the years after 1994. The party secretary-general was replaced by the national secretary, the bureau politique by the executive college, the central committee by the national council, while cells at the base of the party and the secretariat at the summit disappeared. Such changes were not merely cosmetic. Activists were invited to comment on the texts for discussion at the Thirtieth Congress, held in March 2000, not within the confines of their cells or through the carefully vetted columns of L’Humanité, but on the party’s website. Factions – the European wing led by the economist Philippe Herzog, the refondateurs who considered that change had not gone far enough, and orthodox groups of varying degrees of conservatism – were tolerated: Communists opposed to the ‘mutation’ held their own public meetings to attack it and the new leadership, and went unpunished. The former iron cohesion of the PCF’s parliamentary group has crumbled, with several of the Jospin government’s bills, such as the thirty-five-hour week, provoking deep controversy. Hue was in no position to impose the old disciplines on parliamentarians like Maxime Gremetz or Alain Bocquet, president of the National Assembly group, who had served for many years under Marchais and retained a significant following in the party. But he did succeed, at the Thirtieth Congress, in achieving a (relative) liberalisation of the party’s structures while at the same time weeding out the more Stalinist office-holders in its middle and upper ranks, and replacing them with younger members and more women. Two-thirds of the forty-six members of the executive college elected in March 2000, for example, were new to high party office (and two-fifths were women, a proportion that roughly reflected the membership as a whole). In this process Hue was able to count on the support of the rank-and-file membership, some four-fifths of whom either took a positive view of the process of ‘mutation’ or considered that it had not gone far enough.
