By Adrien Welsh (translated by Dave McKee)
This article originally appeared in French in Jeunesse militante
France has a long tradition of electing communists locally. As Georges Marchais noted in his 1980 book L’espoir au present (Hope in the Present), “The French Communist Party has 28,000 elected officials, 1500 mayors, nearly 500 councillors. One in five French people live in a communist-controlled municipality.”
Forty years later the French Communist Party (PCF) has certainly faded, especially after the counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Still, even today several “red cities” remain, particularly in the working-class suburbs around urban centres. These centres of power, which elude the bourgeois parties, are commonly called the “red belts.” The tradition of communist municipalities is so strong that it is sometimes crudely identified as "municipal communism." Some town halls have been run by the PCF since the 1920s (the Parisian suburb of Malakoff is a notable example) but the history of most of these red cities began with the Liberation in 1945.
