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influence on the French left without bearing in mind that the latter's
heritage was made up of three basic ideas: that revolution implied
violence, that the citizen could be regenerated by the state, and finally
that the nation was the advance guard of human progress. In actual fact
the Soviet experiment was largely seen by French public opinion through
the filter of the French Revolution which itself was thereby transformed:
prolonged, brought forward to the present, endowed with a mythology
more contemporary than ever before. Thus the communists were able to
perform their score on a broader keyboard than that of the working
class, and either alternate or marry the themes of proletarian dictatorship
and national union. They were thus able to use the origins of French
democracy to give the October Revolution a sort of national legitimacy
in France, among friend and foe alike.
In this way the revolutionary idea, of which they became the
guardians and heirs, made it possible for the communists to exercise a sort
of political trusteeship over the left as a whole - the revolutionary idea
being, in my view, essentially the concept according to which the passage
from one society to another, a precondition for the regeneration of in–
dividuals, can and should be accomplished in a brief period of time by
the violent takeover of the state. In this sense, the revolutionary idea has
until quite recently been common to the communists and socialists in
France. One need only to go back to the famous speech by Leon Blum
at the Congress of Tours in 1924: even as the great split was taking
place, precisely when he was rejecting the Leninist model as a "putchist"
deviation, the socialist leader was reaffirming the idea that the revolution
must institute the dictatorship of the proletariat. To be sure, Blum can
be credited with a less subjectivist interpretation of Marxism than Lenin's:
he remains sensitive to the objective conditions required for the working
class to take power. But he remains no less faithful to the analysis which
looks forward to the Day of the Revolution - a day perhaps more dis–
tant than the one envisaged by Lenin, but the Great Day, nevertheless.
Even in 1936 when he came to power, Leon Blum insisted on the dis–
tinction, in his view an essential one, between the short-term socialist
program, a defensive and antifascist program making necessary the man–
agement of the capitalist system, and on the other hand the ultimate
goal , which remained to destroy it.
It
is true that in the political practice of the SFIO after World War
Two this dichotomy could hardly survive intact. Guy Mollet took con–
trol of the party from the left, in 1946, but he governed in coalition
with the Christian Democrats and the center-right. Between his rhetori–
cal fidelity to revolutionary Marxism and his administration there was a
great and lasting gap, and it grew to the point where it had to weaken
the ideological appeal of the socialists precisely at a time when the com-
