Municipality, State, and Party

Before looking at the accomplishments of the Communist municipality of Bobigny in the interwar period, we must bring into context two constraints on its activities. The French national government

strictly limited the powers of municipal governments; the French Communist party, like the French state, was a centralized national organization and left as little as possible to local initiative. They did not act in concert, but both forces influenced the policies of Bobigny.

The law of 5 April 1884 created the regulations that governed French municipalities, continuing the highly centralized government established by Napoleon. The responsibility of overseeing the work of city officials fell to the prefect of each department. Appointed directly by the president of the republic, the prefect was a department's administrative head and worked under the minister of the interior. The prefect's broad range of powers over municipal government was perhaps most significant in city finances; all city budgets had to be approved by the prefect. Moreover, if the city government failed to include enough funding for necessary services like police or education, the prefect had the power to add these to the budget and force the municipality to levy additional taxes to cover their cost. This policy allowed him a part in determining what programs a municipality could undertake.^[1]

Finances were by no means a prefect's only avenue of influence over city governments. The prefecture administered programs for education and relief of poverty with little input from local municipalities. Although city governments paid for police services, police commissioners were usually appointed by the prefect or the president of the republic. The prefect had the general right to annul any city council decision that he judged to be beyond the parameters of municipal concerns. Finally, the prefect had extensive disciplinary powers over municipal governments. In the case of illegal actions by city officials, he could temporarily suspend them from their functions or expel them from their positions.^[2]

Although not applicable to the city of Paris itself, the law of 1884 did cover its suburbs and the rest of the Department of the Seine. In the Seine, however, in contrast to other departments, suburban municipalities had not one but two prefects to deal with; they were also subject to the decisions of a prefect of police. This official had jurisdiction over all matters of public order and safety in the suburbs, such as surveillance of public places, control of vagrants, and maintenance of prisons. The function was justified by a greater need for security in the capital, and by the natural turbulence of large cities.^[3]

These strict prefectural controls meant that major aspects of life in Bobigny lay beyond the influence of its Communist municipality. The

city council could not change the curriculum in local schools to reflect Marxist ideology, for example. The relative powerlessness of French municipal government explains the PCF's pessimistic view of its possibilities: the PCF rejected the concept of "municipal socialism" within a capitalist state and constantly emphasized national political issues over local concerns.^[4]

The Communists were not the first leftist political party to grapple with socialism's implications for municipal government. In 1881 the "Possibilist" party of Paul Brousse published a program advocating municipal autonomy from the central government, municipal ownership of public utilities like gas and water, and local control of unemployment relief and other services. Other socialists, notably Jules Guesde, attacked this program as simply reformist. In rejecting municipal socialism, therefore, the PCF adopted much of the prewar critique by the Guesdists.^[5] This attitude toward city government was not restricted to Communists in France; for the Comintern, municipal issues definitely had secondary significance. The Second World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow from 19 July to 7 August 1920, indicated its view of the relation between communism and municipal government by devoting a single paragraph to the subject:

13. Communists, if they obtain a majority in municipalities, should: a) form a revolutionary opposition to the central power of the bourgeoisie; b) try by all possible means to serve the interests of the poorest part of the population (economic measures, creation of or attempts to create an armed workers' militia, etc. . . .); c) use every opportunity to reveal the obstacles raised by the bourgeois State against all radical reforms; d) develop on this basis energetic revolutionary propaganda, without fearing conflicts with the bourgeois State; e) replace, in certain conditions, municipal governments with soviets of workers' deputies. All the action of Communists in the municipalities should be integrated into the general task of the disintegration of the capitalist system.^[6]

Aside from specific instructions, such as replacing municipal governments by soviets, which reflected the revolutionary hopes of the era, this Comintern document clearly expressed the view that all specific actions by Communist municipalities should work to overthrow capitalism. It referred to concrete reforms that Communists in control of city governments could make to improve the material conditions of the working class only obliquely, in one phrase, "economic measures." It devoted greater attention, in subsections (c) and (d), to using the

municipality to embarrass and hinder the central government. Even in its single paragraph on local issues, the Comintern emphasized the primacy of national politics; this remained a central theme of the PCF's programs for municipal government.^[7]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s certain broad themes characterized the Party's policies on city government. First and foremost—in line with the Comintern document—all municipal activity must be subordinated to the main task of challenging the capitalist system on a national level; municipal socialism was simply reformist or unrealistic. The municipality could serve the interests of the working class only by helping to prepare the socialist revolution; without this clear perspective any reforms it achieved could harm those long-term interests by delaying the development of revolutionary class consciousness. PCF propaganda constantly pointed out the limits that the French state imposed on municipal activities, as in an article on the Communist city government of Clichy. After listing all the material improvements implemented, the author noted,

Certainly, the workers are still exploited by capital just as much in Clichy as elsewhere. And that which a municipality can do in the bourgeois state, under the yoke of bourgeois power, is nothing in comparison with what should be done—with what cannot be done until the proletariat holds state power in its hands . Certainly, what a municipality can do is nothing in comparison to what the soviet will do tomorrow.

The example of Clichy shows nonetheless that Communist workers are capable of managing the interests of the workers much better than the bourgeois who administer city halls for the profit of their class.^[8]

Aside from general revolutionary theory and strategy, a more immediate reason for the national leadership to downgrade municipal issues was its determination to ensure that local Communist politicians remained firmly under the control of the Party. Where the PCF controlled a city government, a Communist mayor could build up a personal base of support and thus challenge the Party's leadership.^[9] Traditionally, political parties in France were loosely structured organizations, with little effective control over the activities of their elected officials. This was particularly true at the municipal level, where a politician's activities often had more to do with his position in local society than with his party affiliation. In trying to create a new kind of political party in France, party leaders rejected the traditional autonomy of French politicians; they feared moreover that municipal officials immersed in local affairs would lose sight of the broad lines of PCF policy and gradually lapse into reformism. Therefore the goal was to

keep Communist mayors and city councillors on a short leash; but this was easier said than done.

Circular on the Control of Municipal Activity

In spite of precise directives repeated a hundred times, there are still some municipalities that try to evade, the control of the Party, or district organizations that neglect their duty to control the municipalities.

We remind you that this control is an absolute obligation and also that the actions of municipal councillors cannot be overseen from a distance, but only by working closely with them. If this is not done, the municipal councillors can hide behind the excuse of artificial technical difficulties, or else comrades may ignore real technical difficulties and commit mistakes.^[10]

In general the organizational methods devised by the PCF to manage municipal politics seem to have functioned sporadically, if at all.^[11] They were part of the larger organizational structure decreed by the policy of bolchévisation, which tried to increase the role of working-class militants and the control of PCF leaders over all aspects of Party life.^[12] Yet in spite of the plethora of dummy committees, commissions, and sections, the PCF asserted effective control over its city governments. It did so by ensuring the uniformity of all municipal electoral campaigns;^[13] most important, it expelled Communist municipal politicians who failed to adhere to the Party line. In 1929 there was a wave of expulsions of local officials who had refused to accept the PCF's new, ultraleftist "class against class" position.^[14] The PCF's ability to regain control of Saint-Denis after expelling Jacques Doriot clearly showed its success in changing the traditional relation between French political parties and their elected representatives, and in dominating municipal policy.^[15]

Involvement in city politics benefited the Party, especially when the PCF gained control of a municipality. First of all, the Communist municipality was useful in providing an electoral base for Party leaders, such as Maurice Thorez, mayor of Ivry (or Doriot, mayor of Saint-Denis). The PCF also used city payrolls to provide sinecures for important Party activists; for example, a police report of March 1933 noted that the Communist militant Suzanne Girault had been appointed a mayoral assistant in Vitry.^[16] The leaders of the young Communist party considered control of a city government gave its organizers on-the-spot training in administrative skills. By training and closely supervising the work of Communist municipal officials, the Party could exercise greater control over them and create the administrators for the workers' state of the future.^[17]

From time to time the PCF called on city governments to challenge the national government, to defy "bourgeois legality." By going beyond the juridical bounds set for municipal government, PCF local officials would show workers how those legal limits worked against their class interests. Workers would then, the Party hoped, draw the lesson that only by destroying the bourgeois state that set and enforced those limits could they improve their condition.

We must always keep in mind that this program and the revolutionary municipal action that it entails will inevitably break the limits of bourgeois legality and that it will come up against the repressive measures of the bourgeois state and its apparatus (prefecture, police). Thus every time that the authorities place obstacles before our [workers'] class policy, and harass or imprison our elected officials, we should seize the occasion to denounce to the masses more vigorously than ever before the constraint, the repression, and the dictatorship of the bourgeois state, to undertake a vast campaign of agitation and mobilization of the masses for the defense of their Communist municipality and their Communist party.^[18]

The Party expected Communist mayors, for example, to close their city halls in observance of its general strikes, to show that they were not simple politicians like any others but were above all servants of the revolutionary interests of the working class. In January 1930 the Party censured the PCF mayors of Clichy and Chambon for "capitulating before the bourgeoisie" when they agreed not to hold Communist meetings at their city halls if the local prefects agreed not to send police into their communities during the PCF's general strike on 1 August 1929.^[19]

Perhaps most useful in winning over the vast numbers of workers unaware of revolutionary class consciousness, Communist municipalities could enact reforms to improve the material standards of the working class. They could demonstrate at once their administrative competence and their working-class credentials. The Paris suburbs, which had more people living under PCF governments than any other part of France, were key to this strategy. The Communist municipalities of the Department of the Seine thus became the PCF's laboratory for testing its municipal policies.^[20]

Communist city governments in the Paris suburbs did devote a lot of attention to improving local living conditions. Bobigny and Vitry took the lead in dealing with the problems of their defective allotments, of vital concern to suburbanites. Saint-Denis, the largest suburb controlled by the PCF, was especially active in building new urban facilities and

upgrading old ones. During the 1920s and early 1930s the city built an entire new school complex, repaired or enlarged many other school buildings, built a swimming pool, a day-care center, a city library, and set up a summer camp for the city's children. And such activities built the long-term bases of PCF electoral strength in the Paris suburbs.^[21]

A related aspect of the PCF's municipal policy was the concept of Communist city governments as "bastions of socialism." PCF municipalities were expected to use their governmental powers to aid unions and other working-class organizations.

We must create, or at least try to create, a proletarian municipal policy, whose principal tasks were determined by the last presidium of the Communist International: . . . support the economic struggles of the workers by the vote of subsidies to strikers, by the organization of soup kitchens for the strikers and their families, by the organization of colonies for their children.^[22]

One instance was the massive sitdown strikes of June 1936, the largest of the interwar period, when Communist municipalities organized soup kitchens for the striking workers. During the depression PCF city governments were instructed to help committees of local unemployed workers, by letting them hold meetings in municipal buildings, for example.^[23]

For us, the PCF's interwar municipal policies are more than a record of events, however significant: they give us the key to a fundamental characteristic of the Party, its centralized structure. To a greater extent than in socialist groups before 1914, decisions within the PCF were made by the leadership and imposed on Party members. The leadership took this structure from Moscow, believing that such centralization made the Party more effective in fighting capitalism. But the structure also mirrored that of the highly centralized French state. Especially for municipal policy, the structure of the PCF was both a result of Soviet directives and a distorted reflection of French government. "Fighting fire with fire" in working for the revolutionary overthrow of the French government, the PCF reproduced the French hierarchical structure within itself.^[24]