The Failure of the French Tripartite Experiment in May 1947

Abstract

Why was the French Communist Party (PCF) evicted in May 1947, only two years after it was asked to join the Socialists (SFIO) and the Christian Democrats (MRP) in a tripartite government? According to Pierre Grosser, the chief cause of the eviction was the pressure exerted by the United States on MRP and SFIO leaders, who distanced themselves from their Communist counterparts. While rejecting the thesis of an American-led conspiracy, Irwin Wall also underlines the role of MRP and SFIO politicians, whom he believed nourished strong anti-Communist feelings. The assumption is therefore that of a passive role for the PCF, the aspirations of which were limited to the seizure of power through democratic means. In contrast, this article argues that the Communists had a strategic interest in their own expulsion. Given what they perceived as a French alignment with the Western bloc at the Moscow Conference in April 1947, they began to weigh the advantages of a temporary eviction from government. They concluded that this would allow them to regain the support of the discontented working class and force the MRP and the SFIO to finally concede some of their demands. The hope was to stage their retour en force to the government at a later point. Their abstention in a vote on military appropriations for Indochina on 19 March 1947 brought them close to expulsion. However, it was not until their defiance of government wage policy that Paul Ramadier finally evicted them on 5 May 1947. In retrospect, contrary to the PCF’s original plan, its ‘temporary’ return to the opposition was to last more than 30 years.