then December 6, the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, publicly called “mutual concessions” between socialist and macronist deputies to avoid an institutional blockade following the censorship of the barnier government. Asked to react, “rebel” MEP Manon Aubry greatly regretted this ” betrayal “ millions of voters cast their ballots “with enthusiasm and hope” for the New Popular Front.
From the complaint of “social traitor” by the Communist Party (PCF), at the turn of the 1930s, on charges of “foreign party located neither on the left nor on the right but in the East” Pronounced by the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) – ancestor of the PS, founded in 1905 – in the heart of the Cold War, the use of this motif is a constant in the history of the French left.
Its recurrence is, though, inversely proportional to its explanatory value. What is really at stake behind public trials is the existence, on the left, at least as the end of the 19th century, of different and competing relationships with power and its exercise.
Before the 1980s, few socialists were happy with responsibilities. Like a sword of damocles, the suspicion of working-class betrayal hangs over all those who risk it. The most vital figures are marginalized due to their participation in coalition governments. After serving alongside General Gaston de Galliffet, nicknamed the “Slaughterer of the Paris Commune” – in the republican defence government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau (1899-1902) at the time of the Dreyfus case, the lawyer Alexandre Millerand, future president of the Republic (1920-1924), distanced himself very quickly from the socialist movement.
At the end of the First World War, Albert Thomas, political and intellectual leader of a dynamic reform movement before 1914, saw his credibility tarnished by his participation in the government of the Holy Union (1914-1917), where he had, notably, held the armaments portfolio. “After all, it is better to get lost with Lenin than to escape with Albert Thomas”, track in 1921 Humanity, the newspaper created by Jean Jaurès and today in the hands of the young French section of the Communist International from which the PCF was born shortly after.