French Communist Party
프랑스 공산당
French communist party founded at the Tours Congress in December 1920, when the majority of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) joined the Communist International. First called the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC), it took its present name in 1943. Through the Popular Front and the Resistance it became the leading force of the French left after the war, but its strength declined from the 1970s.
In depth
The first secretary-general of the new party founded by the Tours majority was Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, and the English-language source names Ho Chi Minh among the agitators involved in its creation. It soon took the name Communist Party–SFIC (PC-SFIC). In the 1920s it went through Bolshevisation and, from 1925, Stalinisation, with founding members expelled one after another, and it took an anticolonial stand, calling for fraternisation with the Moroccan insurgents during the Rif War. It won 9.8% and 26 deputies in the 1924 election but fell to 8.3% in 1932, when it refused all alliances. In 1930 Maurice Thorez took over the leadership at Moscow's request and led the party until 1964.
After the far-right riots of 6 February 1934 the party formed the Popular Front with the SFIO and the Radicals; in 1936 it won 72 seats and 15%, but on Moscow's orders supported Blum's government without joining it. It backed the Spanish Republic and was the only French party to denounce the Munich Agreement of 1938. After the Nazi–Soviet Pact the Daladier government banned it on 26 September 1939. From the spring of 1941 the party turned to armed resistance, organising the National Front and the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), and in 1943, after the dissolution of the Communist International, it became the French Communist Party. After the Liberation it called itself 'the party of the 75,000 shot'; the French-language source notes that historians put the number of resisters of all tendencies shot or deported at 25,000.
In the Constituent Assembly election of October 1945 it became the largest party with 26.2%, and it took part in the tripartite coalition of 1944–1947, helping to set up social security. Excluded from government in May 1947, it stayed out of office for thirty years despite winning more than 20% of the vote. It signed the Common Programme with the Socialist Party in 1972 but lost ground to it, and it served in Mitterrand's government in 1981–1984 and Jospin's in 1997–2002. From 2009 it took part in the Left Front, and in 2026 it claims some 37,600 dues-paying members.