Introduction: Exceptional Socialists

Abstract

The French Socialist Party (PS; Parti socialiste) is one of the least successful of the major European parties within the Second International democratic socialist tradition of parliamentary politics within a market system. Founded in 1905 as the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO; French Section of the Workers’ International), it has held governmental office for less than 30 of the ensuing 109 years, and within those years led governments for less than 20. It was an amalgam of parties with differing outlooks, some sectarian and others pragmatic, but marked by an internal factionalism that has not subsided. In what might be seen as the mature years of social democracy after the emergence and hegemonic positions of the parties on the left, the French Socialists have been at arm’s length from government or chary of it preferring, as did Léon Blum, the SFIO’s leader in the 1920s and 1930s, to maintain party unity rather that to test the disruptive effects of government authority. French Socialism has not become, as has the Swedish party or German Social Democrats, a ‘natural party of government’, but neither had it consolidated a position as the Opposition in the Fourth Republic (1946–58) or managed to be the single party of alternative government in a two-party system in the alternance of the (post-1958) Fifth Republic.