France: The Fall of the Champagne Communists | European Journal

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a shock for communists in Western Europe. The Communist Party in France has still not recovered.Many Western European countries including Italy, France, Spain and Sweden had strong communist parties. They were all taken by surprise when their great role model, the Soviet Union, fell apart. Soviet-style communism had obviously failed and within the French communist party Stalinists and reformers engaged in bitter infighting. The reformers wanted to launch a renewal along the lines of their Italian comrades or the short-lived PDS party which emerged after the fall of the wall in Germany. They were prepared to jettison their class-struggle rhetoric rather than become politically irrelevant. But their efforts were in vain: the star of Western communism no longer shines brightly.