H-France List Archives

• Message-Id: <199604041002.LAA04320@listserv.rl.ac.uk>
• Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 15:06:50 -0800
• From: "Bertram M. Gordon" <bmgordon@mills.edu>
• Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Chastain on Vinen,

Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 18:36:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Michael Carley <mcarley@ccs.carleton.ca>


Richard Vinen, _Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945-1951_.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.  xiv + 300
pp.  Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.
$59.95 US.  ISBN 0521 47451 5.

Review by James Chastain, Ohio University, March 1997,
for H-France.

Richard Vinen contends that his is the "first general
study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic to
be founded on extensive primary research" (p. i).  The
title is descriptive of the methodology and the content.
This is bourgeois history of the bourgeoisie.  Vinen
depicts insiders, bourgeois politicians, and such
business groups as the plastics manufacturers who have
found in him a sympathetic vindicator.  The book is a
homage to his bourgeois sources: using the archives of
Francois Mitterand's _Union democratique et socialiste de
la resistance (UDSR) and the  Christian Socialist
_Mouvement Republicain Populaire_ (MRP), the private
papers of ten politicians, the passionate apologies of
political memoirs, and papers of the Paris Chamber of
Commerce, Vinen exalts the "triumph of bourgeois France"
(p. 2).

               The result is a book that "attempts to
describe the institutions of the bourgeoisie... by
dealing with the links that individual political parties
had to business associations, civil servants, church
organizations and the press" (p. 3).  Vinen "approaches
the period in terms of successful conservatism rather
than thwarted reform" (p. i).  Moreover, "means by which
the French bourgeoisie preserved its interests were
unusual.  There have been many occasions in European
history when property-owners have successfully reacted
against threats to their interests.  But most (sic) of
these reactions involved violence and the suspension of
democracy" (p. 2).  France was saved from the "Bolshevik
disease... without destroying democracy and without
large-scale violence" (p. 2).  Thus Vinen claimed that
business groups sheltered France from a supposed
"Bolshevik" menace.

               Vinen's highly revisionist thesis is
inconsistent.  He recognizes the anti-Communism of the
French Socialist Party (SFIO), but arbitrarily includes
the UDSR and excludes the SFIO because the "long-term
aims of the SFIO remained different from those of its
allies" within the anti-Communist "Third Force"
coalition (pp. 7-8).  The "SFIO leaders were much more
discreet about their links with capitalism than the
leaders of any other party were" (p. 8).  But
"discretion" does not deny the SFIO's Cold War service to
American interests: "Relations between leaders of the
SFIO and MRP were facilitated by anti-Communism" (p.
141).  Vinen repeatedly cites Leon Blum's denunciation of
the Communists as "a nationalist party of foreign
allegiance" (p. 141).  The SFIO purged the _Parti
communiste francais_ (PCF) from the government and
organized the "Third Force" to protect French
civilization against the twin foes of French democracy:
the Gaullist _Rassemblement du peuple francais (RPF)'s
supposed "Fascism"  and the "Bolshevism" of the (PCF).

               The leader of the SFIO in the 1950s, Guy
Mollet, charged that the PCF was neither right nor left,
but east, i.e., an agent of the Soviet government.  The
Socialists' strong anti-Soviet stance was hardly unique
to France.  The Italian Socialists were coalition
partners of the Italian Christian Democrats.  Blum's
denunciation of the PCF was echoed by Kurt Schuhmacher of
the German Social Democrats, who opposed merger with the
Communists to form a Socialist Unity Party.

               The title and substance of Vinen's book is
essentially correct.  As my old mentor, H. Stuart Hughes,
said, everything that you can say about France is either
cliche or it is wrong.  Politics in France is a domain of
bourgeois intellectuals.  No one is surprised with the
underlying bourgeois nature of France and her government.
However, Vinen falls into the trap of exaggerating French
intellectuals' rhetoric for reality.  Indeed, "[t]he
Vichy regime had the support of many intellectuals.  It
was only because these men were discredited by
collaboration with Nazi Germany, and disappeared into
obscurity that, after 1945, intellectuals appeared to be
predominantly left wing.  But this was a short-lived
illusion" (Theodore Zeldin, _History of French Passions,
II, 1122).  Vinen bases his thesis on that illusion.  His
discovery of the bourgeois reality behind leftist
rhetoric of the "third force" SFIO is hardly new.  He
emphasized the bureaucrats' "newly found willingness to
accept a more dirigiste view of the economy" (Vinen, p.
91).  Yet Zeldin showed that a series of state
interventions and take-overs began long before World War
II, and "[t]he nationalisations of 1944-6 were thus not
revolutionary" (Zeldin, II, 1052).  Zeldin noted the
common theme of an idea of technocracy in Andre Tardieu,
Blum, and Philippe Petain, "[a]ll of whom contributed
powerfully to the formation of Gaullist France, which was
in some ways a compromise between them" (Zeldin, II,
1064).

               During half of the period covered by the
book (1945-47), France was governed by a coalition of the
Socialists, Communists, and MRP.  After the immediate
postwar reforms, the Communists shared responsibility for
the moderate legislation; during the remainder, from
1947-51, the Socialists were a major component of the
"Third Force" which sought to protect France from an
allegedly insurgent Communism.  Vinen pays credit to
bourgeois leaders because "[t]here were no civil wars, no
political murders, no private armies" (Vinen, p. 2).  If
so, only because the _Milice_ had discredited recent
collaborators of the Gestapo and Vichy government.  And
the Socialists preferred to ally with the bourgeois
parties with whom they shared a common mistrust of the
Communists; the PCF in turn allowed itself to be
marginalized.  Vinen's supposed Bolshevik PCF was a
dubious revolutionary danger; the French Communist Party
was more of a shelter for bourgeois intellectuals, than
a serious revolutionary menace.  In the maxim of the
1960s, the bourgeois intellectuals feigned a _gauche_
posture of "revolutionary chic".  Thus, Zeldin
categorized the essential nature of both fascist and
communist intellectuals as "hypocrisy".

               Vinen's assertion that French business
groups saved France from a PCF conspiracy to subvert
democracy is as unproven as his assertion that there was
something unique in the lack of violence in France.  The
bourgeoisie have seldom resorted to violence to defend
its interests over the centuries.  Their control of the
media and their advocates in government were sufficient.

               This book is hardly a general history; it
greatly suffers from its uncritical recounting of the
insiders' passionate justifications.  We are left with
Vinen's praise of the conservatives' flexibility.  More
flexible that the leftist parties?  What could be more
flexible than the PCF's serving in tripartite cabinets,
or the SFIO's exclusion of the PCF from the French
cabinet in 1947 to join a third force?  Vinen fails to
include the second volume of Zeldin's Oxford History of
France in his bibliography.  A more careful reading of
Zeldin's tome would have improved Vinen's analysis.

James Chastain
Ohio University
chastain@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu

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