“Recourse to the motive of treason is a constant in the history of the French left” | EUROtoday

Ln December 6, the primary secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, publicly known as for “reciprocal concessions” between socialist and macronist deputies so as to keep away from an institutional blockage following the censorship of the Barnier authorities. Asked to react, the “rebellious” MEP Manon Aubry vastly regretted the ” treason “ hundreds of thousands of voters having voted “with enthusiasm and hope” for the New Popular Front.

From the denunciation of “social traitor” by the Communist Party (PCF), on the flip of the Nineteen Thirties, to the accusation of “party from abroad located neither on the left nor on the right but in the East” uttered by the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) – ancestor of the PS, based in 1905 – on the coronary heart of the Cold War, the usage of this motif is a continuing within the historical past of the French left.

Its recurrence is, nevertheless, inversely proportional to its explanatory worth. What is actually at stake behind the trials in public is the existence, on the left, since no less than the tip of the nineteenth^e century, of various and competing relationships to energy and its train.

Before the Eighties, few socialists had been pleased with tasks. Like a sword of Damocles, the suspicion of betrayal of the working class hangs over all those that danger it. Major figures are marginalized following their participation in coalition governments. After serving alongside General Gaston de Galliffet – nicknamed the “Massacrer of the Paris Commune” – within the republican protection authorities of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau (1899-1902) on the time of the Dreyfus affair, the lawyer Alexandre Millerand, future President of the Republic (1920-1924), in a short time moved away from the socialist motion.

At the tip of the First World War, Albert Thomas, a number one political and mental chief of a dynamic reformist motion earlier than 1914, noticed his credibility tainted by his participation within the authorities of Sacred Union (1914-1917), the place he had, notably, held the armaments portfolio. “After all, it is better to get lost with Lenin than to escape with Albert Thomas”, ping in 1921 Humanity, the day by day newspaper created by Jean Jaurès and now within the palms of the younger French Section of the Communist International from which the PCF was born, shortly after.

Unfortunate experiences

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