ABSTRACT
The symptoms of sickness in the French Communist party (PCF) are the loss of half its electorate, from twenty percent in 1978 to 9.8 percent in 1986, and a declining membership, which has dropped by 100,000 in three years even according to official figures. The PCF was founded in Tours in late 1920, when a majority of the French Socialist party decided against the resistance of a minority, led by Leon Blum, to enter the Communist International. The Leninist character of the PCF influenced the Popular Front alliance with the Socialists and the left-bourgeois Radical Socialists in the mid-1930s, which in PCF eyes was only a temporary antifascist association with limited goals. In the party’s self-image only the PCF, vanguard of the working class and thus the only authentic revolutionary force, is both able and legitimized by history to determine the dynamics and direction of the revolutionary process.
