THE PATH TO AMERICA…
The impact of the events in Prague in August 1968 on the French and Italian Communists cannot be fully comprehended without including the events of Paris in May 1968. French intellectual and student activist Régis Debray ten years later quipped, “The French path to America passed through May ’68.” While much of the youth movement rebelled against the materialism and consumerism of the U.S. way of life, it also followed trends and a redefinition of oppression based on the ethical, individualistic modes of American radicalism rather than the Marxist script or the “French-style revolutionary sensibility.”64 Much has been said about the Italian and especially the French Communists’ ineptitude in absorbing these movements. Suffice here to underline how their dilemmas between establishment and antiestablishment broadly affected their reactions to the Prague Spring.
The pressures of the antiestablishment from both sides of Europe ultimately undermined the ideological tension that the two parties formulated in strictly Cold War terms. As U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs George Springsteen observed to French conservative leader Raymond Barré, the generation gap in Eastern Europe meant that the youth were not interested in ideology. In the West, the two concurred, all the revolutionary romanticism sounded like a triumph of ideology and like a “virus” causing contagion from France to the rest of Europe, but, in fact, if “no system of spiritual, political and social values [was] immune,” then it meant that the post–World War II generations had no reference at all, or even that their “real problems [could] spread into other areas and provide the foundation for frivolity.”65
Sir Isaiah Berlin described the 1960s movements as “the rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and oppressive proletariat.”Both the PCF and the PCI appeared insulted and worried by this new development. The French Communists’ reaction to the youth movement is often exemplified by Marchais’ Humanité article that lambasted Daniel Cohn-Bendit as an anarchist and the movement as bourgeois.66
While the PCI developed a strategy of “attention” toward the youth movement, even a moderate such as Amendola lamented the “resurgence of extremist infantilism,” and an anarchic tendency that equated criticism of the Soviet Union to that of American imperialism. In the secret debate within the party’s political bureau in June, Amendola waxed confident about absorbing a diversified extreme Left and not “repeating the same errors as the PCF”; but he also worried that the students, rather than advancing Maoist sectarianism, might instead, with their defiance “against all intellectual heritage,” feed the theories on “the end of ideologies.” In much harsher tones poet and movie-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini excoriated the students for their fascination with the counterculture: “the Americans,” he pointed out in a controversial poem addressed to the students, “with their stupid flowers, are inventing a ‘new’ revolutionary language, for their own!… But you cannot do it because in Europe we already have one: can you ignore it? Yes you want to ignore it. You ignore it by ‘going more to the left’… you set aside the only instrument that truly threatens your parents: communism.” Earlier, just as significantly, Pasolini had denounced the “beatnik Stalinism” of the Italian New Left.67
To paraphrase historian Jeremi Suri, the two parties in the end sided with power more than with protest.68 They feared being outflanked on the left and from below. They wanted détente and, possibly, a restoration of security into European hands, which was to their internal advantage because it would open a path to the government.
In Czechoslovakia, the disjunction between workers and intellectuals also evoked the emerging split in the West. The country was very egalitarian by the 1960s, and Stalinism had repressed the intellectual elites the most. So with the first signs of liberalization from above, it was the intellectuals who began to clamor for more. Czechoslovakia was also the first country in Eastern Europe to have a student revolt, in October 1967 at Prague’s Technical University. When Italian students sang, “We are not with Dubček; we are with Mao,” a major miscommunication between East and West was revealed: for many students in Rome, Paris, and Berlin, “pluralist democracy was the enemy,” whereas for the Czech students “it was the goal.”69
Another way in which Prague was connected with the student revolt in the West was by challenging democratic centralism. It was Achille Occhetto, as one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Youth Federation (Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana or FGCI), who most explicitly invited “in Italy a new socialist experience, in which… next to the socialization of the means of production there will be a socialization of the power system” with a “mixed system of delegated democracy and participatory democracy.” Party secretary Longo recognized that the youth movement was “a struggle against authoritarianism… for greater participation of the masses in decision making… both in capitalist and in socialist countries [where] the bureaucratic structure of power tends to suffocate and exclude the single as well as the group.”70
To be sure, the student movement, especially in Italy, saw this change as the precursor of true socialism. But in denying the party its function of guide in favor of that of mere “coordination” of factory and student counsels, it was, in fact, undermining its Marxist-Leninist essence.71 In the end, democratic centralism could not be given up because with a genuine internal debate the PCI and PCF would have become as factionalized as the other parties. Even the FGCI gave priority to the struggle for unity with the proletariat, gaining members in the following years, but at the price of its ideological cohesion.
The intellectual diaspora was also more consequential for both parties in 1968 than in 1956 because of the combined effect of the youth rebellion, the increasing gap between intellectuals and the “complacent proletariat,” and the events in Prague. Attention to dissent had started earlier in France, with Communist intellectual Pierre Daix prefacing the first French edition of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1963. The journal Les Lettres Françaises accepted dissident contributors beginning in 1965, and its director Louis Aragon shed all his remnant orthodoxy and called the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia a “Biafra of the spirit.” Roger Garaudy was expelled from the party after a critical speech at the 19th Party Congress in 1970.72 For Jean-Paul Sartre, 1968 actually changed the role of the intellectual altogether: the existentialists took an active part instead of just being moral supporters. This change was inspired in part by the Chinese model, but it ended up encouraging the individualist implications of the youth rebellion. Sartre’s condemnation of the PCF’s handling of the student movement matched his condemnation of Prague: “today the Soviet model,” he sentenced, “smothered as it is by a bureaucracy, is no longer viable.”73
In part because of the influence of Sartre and Existentialism and in part because of economic conditions, the countercultural aspects of the youth rebellion held a broader appeal on the French Left than on the Italian Left. With its individualist pathos, the French cultural scene fielded several intellectuals who waged with fervor human rights campaigns against the Soviet Union. But the PCI had also better absorbed the intellectual dissent: the Yalta Memorandum had called for more freedom in intellectual life. The party’s Cultural Commission had been phased out in 1962 and absorbed by the more liberalized Gramsci Institute.74