La fête de l'Humanité

The politics

by Tony  Cross

Article published on the 2008-09-05 Latest update 2008-09-15 10:36 TU

United we stand? - Marie-George Buffet (L) with previous presidential candidate Robert Hue
(Photo: AFP)

There may be music, advertising and fun for the kids, but ultimately the Fête de l'Humanité is still a political event. Communist Party members and visiting left-wingers want debate on the issues of the day and the party leaders want to find allies to help revive their flagging fortunes.

The festival, which started in 1930 when the party was faithfully following Moscow's sectarian "class against class" line, has followed the example of the French Communist Party (PCF) in a long, slow de-Stalinisation.

Debate with rival parties is now actively encouraged. Last year Communist Marie-George Buffet debated with rival presidential candidates, including François Hollande and Olivier Besancenot, who would have been categorised respectively as a ‘‘social-fascist’’ and a ‘‘Trotsky-fascist’’ back in the old days.

In the past the party’s embrace of all things Gallic, from fashion shows to Alstom engineering, has led to jibes that it was more French than Communist. But the outlook that led party members to lecture visitors on EU plots against French cheese and resistance to burger-imperialism, now finds itself more or less in step with the local-produce tendency of today’s anti-globalisation movement.

So this year the fight for a “sustainable planet” gets top billing in the political section. Transport trade unionists will defend rail versus road, researchers will explain the connection between politics and hunger in Africa and more trade unionists will hold forth on the international energy crisis.

After the French voted non in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution, the party tried to use the grass-roots committees set up during the campaign as a way to win allies and influence voters.

It proposed that the committees adopt a collective candidate for the 2007 presidential candidate and no-one was surprised when it put forward Communist Marie-George Buffet to carry the "anti-liberal" banner.

The attempt backfired when many non-Communists accused the party of reverting to old-style dirty tricks to impose its choice and squeeze out other candidates, including international media darling José Bové.

Buffet eventually stood under the lengthy title of "Candidate of the people's anti-liberal left supported by the French Communist Party", making a long ballot-paper even longer. Apart from her, it featured two far-right candidates, a hunter and fisherman, a mainstream right-winger (who won), a free-market "centrist", no less than three Trotskyists, a Green, a Socialist ... and José Bové.

Buffet received 1.93 per cent of the votes in the first round, the lowest score ever for a PCF candidate. 

Despite Marxists' well-known interest in history, surprisingly little of the festival's time is devoted to discussing 1968, the year of revolutions whose 40th anniversary has been widely covered virtually everywhere else.

Maybe l’Humanité wants to avoid the accusations of betrayal, which always surface on such occasions.

The men and women who manned the barricades back then may now be grey-haired and stooping, but that doesn't mean that they've forgiven or forgotten l'Humanité's headline denouncing them as “false revolutionaries who need to be unmasked".

But the trade union leader principally responsible for ending the general strike of that year, Georges Séguy, has no fear. On Friday the former Secretary-General of the CGT union federation will be the focus of an evening entitled "Vive mai 68", to be followed by sessions on "the daughters of workers in 68", "Hi to the 68 comrades" and, perhaps a little tardily: "May 68 is only a beginning".