Toward the Left

Born in 1895, Pivert was the child of an agricultural laborer and a domestic servant. Coming from such a background, his only possibility of higher education was to train as a teacher. His training was barely completed when World War I broke out.

Pivert, who was strongly patriotic as a young man, was happy to be called up into the French army. He fought in the trenches but was invalided out of the army in 1917. His experience of war probably helped to develop the anti-militarism which was an important part of his later politics.

He became an effective and well-liked teacher of science and mathematics. He was also a firm believer in laïcité who was opposed to religious influence on education, a subject on which he wrote a book.

His concern to defend the interests of education meant that he became heavily involved in trade unionism, and that in turn led to a growing involvement in politics. He was faced with a divided socialist movement in France.

In 1920, the French Socialist Party (SFIO) had split, with a majority voting to affiliate with the Communist International, thus forming the French Communist Party (PCF). The minority kept the name SFIO. By the mid-1920s, the PCF was increasingly under Moscow’s control, and many of the most militant members who had formed the party had been driven out. Pivert had little interest in joining the PCF and found the SFIO to be a more open and welcoming environment.

While the PCF was becoming ever more monolithic, the SFIO allowed permanent factions which could propose different strategies for the party. Pivert was attracted to the Bataille socialiste (Socialist Battle) tendency, led by Jean Zyromski. He soon became an active member, believing that the SFIO should be openly revolutionary, committed to the overthrow of capitalism.

Resisting Fascism

Now the Left faced the threat of fascism. In 1933, Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany, his success made easier by the fact that socialists and communists refused to unite to resist him. Then in February 1934, a large right-wing demonstration in Paris sought the overthrow of the government. It showed the very real possibility that fascism could triumph in France.

Pivert was active in calling for a “Popular Front,” an anti-fascist alliance of Communists, Socialists, and the Radical Party, which was the party of the lower middle classes — lawyers, shopkeepers, and civil servants. A sharp change of line by the Communists meant that a Popular Front electoral alliance was established.

Pivert was increasingly dissatisfied with Zyromski, who supported the need for national defense and was moving closer to the Communist Party (which he would later join in 1945). In September 1935, Pivert split to form the Revolutionary Left tendency. It recognized that a Popular Front government would mean a direct confrontation with capitalism, which could not be resolved by purely electoral politics — it was necessary to mobilize workers for direct action.

As the founding program of the Revolutionary Left put it:

As soon as a Popular Front government tries to satisfy even the most modest aspirations of the masses, it will face the most ferocious extra-parliamentary resistance from the forces of capitalism. Then it will either have to betray these masses and capitulate shamefully, or else throw itself — under the pressure of the masses — into a combat government moving towards socialism. Only a government based on the will of the organized masses, committed to struggle and at least partially equipped for the fight, will be able to turn itself into a workers’ and peasants’ government and carry through its revolutionary task . . . the Socialist Party must prepare the masses for direct action, for struggle in all forms (from meetings and street demonstrations as far as a general strike organized together with the trade unions).

As the far right took to the streets, Pivert played a leading role in setting up the TPPS — Toujours prêts pour servir (Always ready to serve) — an organization of activists who confronted the fascists. As one of those involved, Yvan Craipeau, described it:

It was not simply a military organization, but a grouping of activists, ready for any task at any time. Organized in tens, thirties, and hundreds, with their leaders elected by the rank and file, the TPPS went out at night to fly-post, paint slogans in red lead, and throw leaflets into factories. The TPPS were likewise mobilized to steward meetings, and when necessary were sent as reinforcements when a fight was expected. They went to defend working-class paper-sellers, and sometimes stopped the fascists selling their papers. There’s no need to add that they were very badly armed (usually one revolver among six, the rest having truncheons or improvised weapons). Sometimes they were routed . . . usually the fascists were dealt with. Everywhere they were driven out of the working-class quarters.

“Everything Is Possible”

An electoral alliance of Communists, Socialist, and Radicals was formed, which gained a parliamentary majority in the election of April–May 1936. Socialist leader Léon Blum became prime minister. However, before the new government could take office, workers took matters into their own hands, enthused by the result. Some two million struck, with many occupying their workplaces.

Blum was more interested in doing things for the working class than in workers doing things for themselves. As he put it in his own election address in 1936:

The program presented by the Socialist Party does not have the aim of establishing socialism, but, within the framework of the present social order, of relieving the suffering caused by the crisis.

Pivert, however, welcomed the action, seeing it as opening the possibility of pushing the new government in an anti-capitalist direction. In the SFIO daily paper, he wrote an article with the title “Everything is Possible”:

What millions and millions of men and women are calling for from the depths of their collective consciousness is an immediate radical change in the political and economic situation. The most vigorous anti-capitalist offensive can’t be put off till later under the pretext that the program of the Popular Front did not explicitly define it. The masses are much more advanced than we imagine. They don’t worry over complicated doctrinal considerations, but with a sure instinct they call for the most substantive solutions: they expect much.

The strikes produced the only real gains of the Popular Front, notably two weeks of paid holidays for all workers and guaranteed trade-union rights. Pivert and the Revolutionary Left gave full support to the struggles. One of Pivert’s allies, Daniel Guérin, was actively involved as secretary of the local committee for trade union propaganda and action in the northeast suburbs of Paris; he visited factory occupations and encouraged action.

Yet as Guérin later recounted, there were limits to the Revolutionary Left’s role:

In my modest sphere of activity, on the Inter-Union Committee at Les Lilas, I took care not to politicize the strikes. I didn’t believe that it was possible, by adopting the attitude of someone with an axe to grind, to win the confidence of the working masses who were pouring into the unions. It would have been contrary to my nature, and moreover both dishonest and clumsy, to take advantage of a trade union position to push the Party or the tendency to which I belonged. I scrupulously respected trade union independence and the workers I was responsible for never had occasion to suspect my intentions or purposes . . . we had played the game of trade union legality too scrupulously.

In other words, there was full support for the strikes, but no real attempt to build a political alternative. Pivert now found himself in an ambiguous position, committed to an anti-capitalist program, yet at the same time caught up in support for his party.

Responsibility Without Power

Blum, seeking to co-opt and muzzle his most vigorous rival, offered Pivert a post of responsibility for press, radio, and cinema. This was a role in some ways equivalent to the Ministry of Information, although Pivert was to hold no ministerial title and have no say in cabinet decisions.

In this situation, Pivert could scarcely help becoming an apologist for the Blum government. He played a large role in developing the SFIO’s political propaganda. He came under the influence of the Russian sociologist Sergei Chakhotin, who had some rather eccentric ideas on propaganda techniques.

Guérin described the grotesque lengths to which this went after an attempt by a right-wing mob to assassinate Blum:

On Marceau’s initiative, the Socialist Party devoted a film to the attack on the revered leader’s life presenting him as one of the best servants of the French people, one of the best fighters for bread, peace, and freedom. His features were reproduced on gigantic hoardings. When, on June 7, the day after his presentation to Parliament, he came to the Vélodrome d’Hiver to swear to the French people never to let himself be removed from power without a fight, his entry was greeted by an extraordinary spectacle. Projectors were trained on him. An orchestra played the Internationale. The militants were transformed into choristers. The young guard in blue shirts formed an eager double line. The faithful chanted endlessly till they were breathless: Long Live Blum! or Blum! Blum! The man behind this cult was Marceau Pivert himself.

Breaking With Blum

When the war in Spain broke out, Pivert initially supported Blum’s refusal to send arms to support the opponents of the fascist general Francisco Franco, fearing that this could lead to European war. But soon the Revolutionary Left became involved in practical support for Franco’s opponents, helping to send lorry-loads of weapons across the Pyrenees into Spain. The Revolutionary Left grew highly critical of Blum’s policy of nonintervention.

Pivert and the Revolutionary Left, notably under the influence of Guérin, also urged a complete rethinking of France’s position in relation to its colonial empire. They had close links with Messali Hadj, leader of the movement for Algerian independence (though in 1937, the Popular Front government banned Messali’s organization, the North African Star).

On the other hand, Pivert seems to have said little about women’s rights. French women still did not have the vote at the time. The Popular Front had agreed not to give women full citizenship, on the grounds that most women were under the influence of the Catholic Church and would vote for right-wing parties. It was the pro-Nazi Vichy regime that first gave women the right to vote in the constitution it enacted during the war.

Meanwhile, the Popular Front government grew increasingly tame. Inflation largely destroyed the economic gains made by workers: by 1939, the purchasing power of the working class was lower than it had been in June 1936. Now friction between the Blum leadership and the Revolutionary Left intensified, and Pivert resigned his governmental post in protest.

He formally agreed to the winding up of his faction. However, he and his supporters continued to criticize the Blum leadership. In June 1938, the SFIO Congress voted to exclude Pivert and his followers.

Shadows of War

They now formed a new party, the PSOP — Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan (Workers’ and Peasants’ Socialist Party). This had at most eight thousand members, whereas the Revolutionary Left had counted thirty thousand supporters inside the SFIO.

It faced the opposition not only of the SFIO but also of the Communist Party, which was happy to make alliances to its right, but could not tolerate rivals on its left. Three hundred PCF members broke up one public PSOP meeting and physically assaulted Pivert, calling him a “Trotskyist murderer.”

The biggest problem the PSOP faced was the growing threat of a new world war. Pivert argued against support for national unity, which could, he insisted, lead to a rerun of World War I: “There is no obligation of national defense for the mass of workers as long as the latter have not conquered the economic and political leadership of the country.”

For Pivert, the only alternative to war was revolutionary action by French workers. This was fine in principle, but the PSOP did not have the strength to translate theory into practice.

Pivert had made plans for the PSOP to become a clandestine organization at the outbreak of war. But in September 1939, the secret committee due to assume the leadership was nonexistent — its members were abroad or in jail. Within months, the PSOP had disintegrated.

Pivert himself was on a speaking tour in the United States at the time and he remained in Mexico for the duration of the war. When right-wing general Charles de Gaulle escaped to London to organize resistance to the German occupation of France, Pivert addressed a letter to him, arguing that “only the socialist revolution in freedom can liquidate fascism” and offering to put at his disposal some “packets of political dynamite.”

De Gaulle replied politely, but studiously refrained from responding to Pivert’s request to distribute revolutionary Marxist literature for him. It was an indication of how out of touch Pivert had become.

During the war. Pivert worked with other exiles from the non-Stalinist left in Mexico, including Victor Serge, formerly a leading figure in the Soviet Union’s Left Opposition. At times they faced violent attacks from supporters of the Mexican Communist Party.

After the Liberation

In 1946, Pivert returned to France and rejoined the Socialist Party. At the time of the liberation, there was a sharp debate in the SFIO. One wing sought to break the SFIO from its formal adhesion to Marxism and make it into something more akin to the British Labour Party.

At the party congress in July 1946, the supporters of this line were defeated by the tendency led by Guy Mollet, whose position represented an assertion of Marxist purity. Initially Pivert supported Mollet. His experiences in Mexico had made him fiercely anti-Communist, and he opposed any cooperation with the PCF. When a wave of strikes broke out in 1947, Pivert opposed it on the grounds that it was controlled by the PCF.

In 1948, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others launched the RDR — Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Democratic Assembly), an alliance open to members of other parties which rejected “the rottenness of capitalist democracy, the weaknesses and defects of a certain social democracy, and the limitation of Communism to its Stalinist form.” Pivert played a key role in getting the SFIO to forbid its members from joining the RDR, which helped ensure the organization’s rapid collapse.

But Pivert did move to the left of the SFIO leadership. He opposed the war in Indochina, and in general called for an end to French colonialism. In 1947, he helped to launch the International Committee of Study and Action for the United Socialist States of Europe, advocating a Europe free of Cold War alignment:

We appeal for solidarity in our efforts to the American workers, and we will attempt to associate in our undertaking the workers of Eastern Europe, as well as the Russian workers themselves, so sadly isolated from the rest of the world.

In 1956, Mollet became prime minister. He led the SFIO on a disastrous path. He escalated the war in Algeria and gave “special powers” to the army, allowing it to detain and interrogate suspects and replace civilian courts with military courts.

In tandem with the British government of Anthony Eden, Mollet launched an invasion of Egypt after its leader Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. For Mollet, this was in the vain hope of cutting off the head of the Algerian revolt, which he blamed on Nasser.

Pivert in Context

Pivert was strongly opposed to this attempt to preserve France’s role as a colonial power, and he associated with other oppositional elements in the SFIO. By now, his health was in serious decline.

He remained in the SFIO when others were leaving. However, in his last article, he wrote that it was “no longer possible to coexist” with “the traitor Mollet.” He died on June 3, 1958, just after de Gaulle had returned to power on the back of a military coup in Algeria.

Had he lived, he would probably have joined those who broke with the SFIO to form the PSU — Parti socialiste unifié (United Socialist Party). The PSU went on to play a creditable role opposing the last years of the Algerian war and de Gaulle’s authoritarian rule.

Pivert was a man of integrity and courage, which made him something of a rarity in French politics. He opposed French colonialism and supported direct action by workers. Yet both in the 1930s and after the war, he overestimated what could be achieved in a mass social democratic party that was dominated by reformists and careerists.

When he did launch an independent party, it was far too small to have any impact, partly because it had not put enough effort into winning support from those engaged in trade-union struggle. If Pivert’s best moments remain a source of inspiration, in terms of strategy and tactics, he does not offer a model that we can apply today.