Groups and individuals belonging to Gauche Proletarienne undoubtedly also belonged to groups that carried out a variety of violent acts in the early 1970s. The most spectacular of these was the kidnapping of Robert Nogrette, an assistant personnel director of the Renault auto factory near Paris, carried out by what called itself the New Popular Resistance, in March 1972. This took place four days after the funeral of a worker, Rene-Pierre Overney, who apparently belonged to the GP, since Alan Geismar was the principal speaker at the funeral. Virtually all other far Left groups condemned the kidnapping, and Nogrette was released after two days.[181]
The Gauche Proletarienne also used the name Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire,[182] and it was under this name that it was known by the late 1970s. By that time, it had abandoned practicing violence, although presumably still officially advocating it.
As we have noted, it had by 1978 begun to participate in electoral activity, running joint candidates with the PCMLF that year. Efforts in the following year to merge it with the PCMLF did not finally bear fruit.
The Mao Spontaneist Groups
One final group of French Maoists must also be mentioned. These were referred to as “Mao-spontaneists” or sometimes just “Les Maos.” Most were offshoots of the Union of Communist Youth, Marxist-Leninist, and at least some maintained at least tenuous ties with its successor, Gauche Proletarienne. But they had an aversion to central direction and leadership that bordered on a kind of romantic anarchism.
One of the few attempts to give some central leadership to these people was the group called Long Live the Revolution (Vive la Revolution—VLR). Its short career was described by Kay McKeough. She said that it “was formed in July 1969 by dissident ex-UFCML members. It functioned in Paris, particularly at universities, under the leadership of Roland Castro. With the slogan, ‘To Change Life’ VLR attracted various Maoists groups, all advocates of ‘spontaneity’ and believers in immediate revolution. A fortnightly publication, Tout, summarized VLR views: ‘What do we want? Everything.’ In the fall of 1970 VLR reoriented itself and chose a non-directed, loose structure. In April 1971 it dissolved: We are no longer going to proclaim the revolution, we are going to make it. … We are beginning to take ourselves seriously.’ Tout last appeared in July. ‘Autonomous units of struggle’ have been set up in local communities.”[183]
The New York Times found “Les Maos” of interest enough to carry a substantial article about them by Keith Botsford in its Magazine in September 1972. Botsford had interviewed a substantial number of these Maoist-spontaneists.
One of those he interviewed told Botsford about their methods of organization. That informant said that “We meet a lot in small groups, in which everyone carries it out. Until everyone agrees, there is no decision. And if there are some in the end who don’t agree, then they’re not Mao. Of course, there are people who coordinate all the small groups … as with any relatively small and dedicated group, there are some who are more active, more capable, more militant. These rise spontaneously from below.”[184]
Botsford commented that “Sometimes you come away from talking to the Mao with the impression that you’re been living their own hallucination. If 1968 made a fundamental alteration in the revolutionary ‘climate’ in France, why and how does France keep rolling on, immutable, full of Pompidou and ceremony, the France of the Common Market and the good life, superficially so unchanged? Part of the answer lies in the converse of the proposition that if you scratch a Maoist, you find a Maoist; or scratch another Frenchman, left, right or center, and he wants no part of the Mao, on any terms. To the official left, the Mao is Public Enemy Number One.”[185]
Botsford concluded, “Ultimately, the success or failure of the Mao in France will depend on their ability to create a network of small groups, in industry, among the impoverished rural workers, in key areas of control such as communications and the press-groups that can, when the signal is given, cause a breakdown in the routine operation of one of the world’s most rigidly centralized states.”[186]
Clearly, “les Mao” did not have the ability to establish on a lasting basis the kind of organization that Botsford described.
Conclusion
As in many other countries, there began to develop in France in the early 1960s elements in or near the Communist Party that sympathized with the Chinese in their quarrel with the Soviet Communists. By the middle of the decade this pro-Chinese tendency had begun to take organizational form. Only one of the resulting groups, the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Leniniste de France, was able to establish lasting contacts with the Chinese party and government. It remained loyal to the Chinese throughout the zigzags of Chinese policy during the 1970s, only a small group breaking away to organize a pro-Albanian party.
Three other recognizable Maoist groups appeared in France. The Marxist-Leninist Center of France ended up opposing the Great Cultural Revolution and supporting Liu Shao-chi, after which it gave little further evidence of existence. The Proletarian Left—Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire continued to support the Chinese, but apparently never enjoyed close relations with them, perhaps because of its toying for some time with putschist kinds of activity. Finally, there were the real putschists, who seemed to mix a potion of Maoist theory with near anarchist aversion to organization and centralization, and which, once the euphoria of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 wore off, largely disappeared from the scene.
Maoism in the German Federal Republic
Because of what was happening in Soviet-occupied parts of Germany and subsequently in the so-called German Democratic Republic, Communism of any variety was not very popular in the German Federal Republic. In 1956, the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschland—KPD) was outlawed by the Federal government, but some years later, in 1968, it was again legalized as the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP). After 1953, it did not receive enough votes to elect any members of the West German parliament, the Bundestag.[187]
By the time the DKP was legalized, there had developed a considerable number of parties and groups to the Left of the pro-Soviet party. Several of these were of Maoist inclination. The oldest of these was established by dissident members of the pro-Soviet party; most of the others grew out of the New Left movement of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
Although at least two of the Maoist groups sent delegations to China, none seems to have obtained the clear “Chinese franchise,” and the Chinese Communist party seems to have worked unsuccessfully to try to unite the parties that pledged support to its ideology, program and policies, to form a single organization.[188]
The Christian Democratic Union sought in the late 1970s to have the most important Maoist groups outlawed. However, this did not take place.[189]
The Communist Party of Germany-Marxist-Leninist
The oldest of the German Maoist groups was the Communist Party of Germany-Marxist Leninist (KPD-ML). A United States State Department source said of its formation that “Pro-Chinese dissidents in the KPD broke with the party in 1967 and attempted to form a rival organization. … In late October 1968—just before the DKP held its first conference in Offenbach—the new Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Germany (KPD-ML) was finally unveiled. The actual and potential strength of this new organization is impossible to estimate at this time … it may appeal to some of the dissident student radicals for whom the traditional communist organizations are too stodgy and conservative.”[190]
181
Milorad Popov, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1973, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 153; and David Thorstad, “French Left Condemns Renault Kidnapping,” Intercontinental Press, March 20, 1972, page 285.
183
Kay McKeough, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1973, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 156.
184
Keith Botsford, “If Les Mao Won Their Revolution, They Would Immediately Start Another,” New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1972, page 13.
187
Wayne C. Thompson, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1988, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 490.
188
Eric Waldman, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1977, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 165.
190
World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department, Washington, DC, 1969 edition, pages 24—25; see also SED, Dokumentation 1977, volume 2, for program of KPD-ML, pages 1—143, and Statutes of KP-ML, pages 144—154.