From Socialism to Communism

Although a majority of the SFIO's members voted to affiliate with the Third International and the new PCF in December 1920, only a minority of Socialist officeholders—including municipal officials—approved the decision. In the Paris region, however, of the twenty-five SFIO city administrations in the Department of the Seine, sixteen chose to join the new party; they included Bobigny's Socialists. Their choice in 1920 was not atypical.^[59] More unusual was their ability to keep the municipality in the hands of the PCF over the next few years. For members of the PCF, these were years in which the new party was being recast along more Leninist principles; many who had originally joined out of vague sympathy with the Russian revolution became disillusioned and often left or were expelled from the PCF. For municipal officials, the Communist leadership's insistence on their subordination to the national Party was an onerous consequence of the Congress of Tours. As a result, many city administrations that had declared themselves Communist in December 1920 soon revolted: in October 1922 an influential mayor, Henri Sellier of Suresnes, led eight suburban municipalities in the Department of the Seine to quit the Party. By 1925, on the eve of the first municipal elections contested by the PCF, it retained only three city halls in the Seine: Bobigny, Saint-Denis, and Villetaneuse.^[60]

The experience of Saint-Denis exemplifies the chaotic first years of PCF municipal government. In December 1920, seven Saint-Denis city councillors rejected the choice of the majority and voted to stay with the SFIO. More significant was the refusal of most of the new Communist city councillors to follow the directives of the Saint-Denis PCF section; they held to the traditional autonomy of municipal officials. In July 1921 these councillors elected one of their own as mayor, removing Saint-Denis from PCF control. The PCF regained city hall in May 1922 after byelections, only to lose control of it again in February 1923, after several of its city councillors were expelled from the Party. Not until the regular municipal elections of May 1925 (and just barely then) did the PCF succeed in wresting definitive control of Saint-Denis from a coalition of Socialists and dissident Communists.^[61]

Although in Bobigny the hold of the PCF over the city administration was never seriously contested during this period, discord among city councillors did lead to resignations from the Party and the city council. For example, Pierre Beaugé, one of the four SFIO city councillors elected in 1914, sent two letters to the prefect of the Seine in April and July 1921, alleging that Clamamus was abusing his functions as mayor. Beaugé then stopped coming to city council meetings. Refusing a summons to explain his actions to the council, he resigned his position in October.^[62] In a similar, though less dramatic, case, Jules Vasseur, another SFIO candidate elected in 1914, clashed with the mayor and his fellow city councillors over the relations between the municipality and local Communist organizations. At a March 1923 council meeting Vasseur protested Clamamus's endorsement, in the name of the Bobigny municipality, of a dance held by a Communist sports society, La Prolétarienne. Other councillors attacked Vasseur's position, one stating that it was natural for the mayor to grant municipal approval to a working-class organization.^[63] Vasseur and others like him did not last long in the new Bobigny. The slate that the Bobigny PCF ran in the 1925 municipal elections contained mostly newcomers. Out of twenty-two candidates, only eight had been elected in 1919, and only one (Clamamus himself) in 1914. Thus the PCF that fought the elections in 925 was not the same political party as at the beginning of 1921.^[64]

And yet despite these changes in Bobigny the PCF had managed to hold onto the municipality from December 1920. By the 1930s Bobigny was the only city in the Department of the Seine to have achieved this record without a break. Why was Bobigny unique? Structural explanations do not suffice. It is possible, for example, that the newness of Bobigny's Socialist administration allowed its members to accept the PCF; they had not had time to get used to the traditional autonomy of municipal officials, and the PCF's stricter guidelines might not have seemed burdensome.^[65]

More significant were the attitudes of the suburban mayors toward the new PCF. I have not analyzed the political history of every Parisian suburb in the early 1920s, but of those I have, in each case a Socialist suburban mayor led a majority of his city councillors in opting for either the new PCF or the SFIO. In Puteaux, the first Socialist administration was elected in 1912 and reelected in 1919; the municipality split in 1920, yet Mayor Charles Auray stayed in power as a Socialist, and the return of three city councillors from the PCF to the SFIO in 1924 assured him and his party full control of the city council. More typical were the experiences of Montreuil and Drancy. In both

communities the first Socialist municipality was elected in 1919; following the local mayors, the councils joined the PCF overwhelmingly in 1920 and left the Party at the end of 1922. Moreover both mayors, Poncet of Montreuil and Duchanel of Drancy, dominated local politics until the Popular Front of 1936.^[66]

Bobigny provided another example of this trend. The consistent emphasis that Bobigny's Socialists placed on local rather than national issues certainly kept their organizations intact amid national and international schisms in the workers' movement. Yet their emphasis resulted less from structural factors than from individual personalities, above all that of Mayor Clamamus. As mayor of Bobigny throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jean-Marie Clamamus was the city's preeminent Communist leader; to many inside and outside the community, he was red Bobigny. In 1920 Clamamus did not personally dominate politics as he would ten years later, but his prestige was sufficient in 1920 to cause his colleagues on the city council to follow his choice between the two leftist parties (unless they dropped out of politics). Unlike many other suburbanites, few who left Bobigny's city council and the PCF in the early 1920s rejoined the local SFIO, which between the wars remained weak, almost inexistent. Clamamus's stress on local concerns, above all the problems of the mal-lotis, meant that Communists who disagreed with national policy would keep their party membership without continuous, total adherence to the exact Party line. The local PCF was able to maintain the consensus reached at the Congress of Tours during the Party's stormy infancy, thanks to the political astuteness of the city's mayor.