A manifesto issued by the congress claimed, among other things, that “modern revisionism had ruined the PCF.” Although professing to see some positive aspects in President De Gaulle’s ongoing quarrel with the United States, it said that the French president’s position had not brought anything positive because De Gaulle was still “aligned with the monopolists.”
The first Maoist congress in France declared solidarity with the Chinese party and those of Albania, Indonesia, North Vietnam, and the Communist Party of Belgium, Marxist-Leninist. It characterized Mao Tse-tung as being the “Lenin of our time.” Two months later, a delegation of the Movement visited China and was received by Kang Sheng, a Chinese Politburo member in charge of the party’s international relations. Upon the return of the delegation, the Central Committee of the MCF-ML strongly endorsed the Cultural Revolution, which was just getting under way, declaring it to be a “great leap forward in all spheres” and that it would “consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[153]
The Peking Review devoted half a page to the French Maoist congress. Among other things, it noted that “While exposing the revisionists of the French Communist Party, the congress pointed out that today the French working class needs a politically conscious and militant vanguard to show it the road. The Congress affirmed the determination to build a ‘new type Party’ as required by the great Lenin, a Party of the Bolshevik type basing its action on the immortal theory of Marxism and Leninism and the thought of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, the great teacher of world revolution.”[154]
Only a few months after the founding of the PCMLF there took place the student-worker uprising of May 1968, which almost overthrew the regime of President Charles De Gaulle. Like all of the other far Left groups, the PCMLF played some role in these events. Subsequently, Jacques Jurquet maintained that “It is not the Marxist-Leninists who initiated the student revolt. On the other hand, their role in the launching of the strikes with factory occupations was assuredly not negligible.” When barricades were raised on the night of May 10, party members were involved in this and the PCMLF claimed that “Some twenty of our party’s comrades were wounded, two of them seriously.” As a consequence of its participation in the May events, the Parti Comuniste Marxiste Leniniste de France was one of several organizations that were officially outlawed by a June 12, 1968 decree of the De Gaulle government.[155]
Although officially outlawed, this Maoist group continued to function more or less clandestinely. Although its periodical L’Humanite Nouvelle was suppressed, it quickly appeared as the weekly L’Humanite Rouge, and Jacques Jurquet, Ramon Casa and Francois Marty were publicly associated with the new paper.
During the post-1968 period, the PCMLP group was calling for the establishment of a new “revolutionary trade union movement.” It also continued to strongly attack the PCF and its trade union group, the Confederation Generate du Travail (CGT) as well as carrying on polemics with another Maoist group centering on the publication La Cause du Peuple. In December 1969, Jacques Jurquet headed a delegation that visited China.[156]
The PCMLF suffered serious internal dissension during 1970. Its paper commented that “Division—a weapon long wished on us by our enemies—has penetrated everywhere in our ranks, even to the level of our principal spokesmen.” Its “political and financial status” was reported by L’Humanite Rouge to be “very serious,” particularly due to the loss of student readers. The Trotsyite paper Rouge claimed that there were five or six factions within the PCMLF and that some of the party’s members has joined competing Maoist groups. However, the party clearly continued to enjoy the “Chinese franchise” and its publication was cited from time to time by Chinese newspapers and news services.[157]
In 1973, Jacques Jurquet, in the name of the PCMLF, called for abstention in that year’s election, and denounced other far-Left groups that participated in the electoral contest, particularly the Trotskyists’ Communist League. However, Milorad Popav reported that “Most of the PCMLF’s activity … was of international orientation. … The PCMLF’s alignment with Chinese policy was total. The party’s Politburo interpreted President Pompidou’s visit to China as ‘a great contribution to the Chinese people in the world struggle against the double Soviet-American Hegemony.’”[158]
By 1977, the PCMLF had modified its antielectoral attitude. Although denouncing the Union of the Left (PCF and Socialists) as one of the “two political solutions of the bourgeoisie,” it announced that in forthcoming elections it was running five candidates for parliament in the Paris region.[159]
In 1979, plans were announced for the merger of the PCMLF and another Maoist group, Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire-Marxiste-Leniniste. This followed a joint campaign of the two organizations in the 1978 parliamentary elections. The merger was to come by steps. First, their two newspapers were to be merged and then a unification congress would result in a new party.[160]
However, these plans were frustrated by a new factional fight within the PCMLF late in 1979. According to the Paris newspaper Le Monde, this dissidence arose as a result of the legalization of the party in August 1978, after nearly a decade of more or less clandestine operations. “This clandestinity had the result that the members of the PCML (fifteen hundred last Spring) were only recently aware of how close to non-existence, numerically and politically, their organization was. The PCML, still led by M. Jacques Jurquet, former member of the PCF, owed its survival to dues and subscriptions from the militants, and the support of China, which had taken a thousand subscriptions to L’Humanite Rouge, the newspaper of the organization (this figure has fallen recently to one hundred one).”
The dissidence of 1970 centered on Brittany, where the principal party leaders resigned, and a subsequent regional conference resulted in a split in the organization there. The splitters attacked the leadership of Jurquet and denounced his “dogmatism, authoritarianism and sectarianism.” The Breton conference of the organization—split between those who abandoned the party and those who wanted to continue the fight against Jurquet within its ranks, agreed “almost unanimously” to use the regional funds that were supposed to go to the national organization “to form a fund for nine former paid party officials who had resigned or been dismissed by the central organization and were without re sources.”[161]
The PCML remained loyal to China through all of the changes in leadership and policy of the Chinese party during the 1970s. In December 1976, Jacques Jurquet, as leader of a PCMLF delegation to China noted that “the great victory of the Chinese people” [an apparent reference to the fall of the Gang of Four] “guarantees that, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party headed by Chairman Hua, China remains and will always remain Red.”[162]
In 1979, at the time of the hostilities between China and Vietnam, Jacques Jurquet wrote an article in Le Monde that he concluded by saying, “Marxist Leninists try to judge on the basis of real facts. … In that sense, the blow to stop the Vietnamese-Soviet expansionist moves is an outstanding contribution to the resistance of the peoples of the world to the hegemonic efforts of the leaders of the USSR. The military action of China can only push off the specter of world war and reinforce the preservation of peace.”[163]
153
Branko Lazitch, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1966, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., pages 110—112.
155
Branko Lazitch, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1969, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif, pages 333—334.
156
Branko Lazitch, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1970, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., pages 167—168.
157
Milorad Popov, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1971, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 168.
158
Milorad Popov, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1974, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif, page 146.
160
Nicholas Tandler with Jean Louis Panne, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1980, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 152.