The This paper investigates the main effects on the short and medium term of the détente policy carried out by Charles de Gaulle in 1962-1969 on the French communist party (Parti communiste francais, PCF). De Gaulle’s rappochement to the Soviet Union and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the mid-1960s, was, after the strategic changes in Soviet foreign policy announced in 1956, the first major event causing “early détente” on the European continent, and eventually leading to the global détente of the 1970s. 1 While the impact of de Gaulle's foreign policy on the Cold War in Europe has been analysed and interpreted in various accounts, 2 the question of its impact on French domestic politics, has, in my view, not been addressed in all its complexity. The paper aims at illustrating the interactions between international and domestic developments during the Cold War.

The central argument of the paper is that, through establishing friendly relations with the communist regimes, de Gaulle caused an impasse to the PCF on two levels, a strategic one and one related to political identity. 3 Firstly, I argue, Gaullist détente caused a true divergence of interests and an acute, open conflict between the PCF and the Soviet leadership. The very positive initial reactions expressed by the Soviet leadership to Gaullist détente, including Brezhnev’s explicit disfavouring of the coming to power of a communist-socialist alliance in France as an alternative to Gaullism in 1965, directly raised the question of Soviet support for the PCF's domestic strategy. Secondly, by exploiting anti-Americanism as a source of political legitimation and as a re-articulation of France’s place in global affairs in a post-colonial world order, de Gaulle fundamentally challenged the PCF in its domestic sources of legitimation. 4 Overtaken on the issue of anti-Americanism, the PCF was negatively affected not only in terms of electoral performance, but, more profoundly, in terms of its identity structure. De Gaulle’s ability to suggest the upsetting of the power balance on the European continent, gave him a revolutionary aura in a European and international perspective, which challenged the PCF's Soviet-aligned internationalism.

The paper is based foremost on extensive research into the archives of the PCF, including internal records of the party’s leading organs, correspondence with communist parties such as the Soviet communist party and the Italian PCI, and correspondence with other actors on the French left such as the SFIO and FGDS. 5 Additionally, it draws on a selection of press material, and on archive documents found in the collections of the East German Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), 6< and in the archives of the Italian communist party. 7

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1 The definitions and periodisations for détente are used here as outlined by: Garthoff, Détente and Co nfrontation . Détente and Confrontation. American-Soviet relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington, the Brookings Institution, 1994 (rev.ed.), pp. 3-52. For a more recent interpretation of détente and early détente, see for example: Suri, Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Harvard, Harvard Univ. Press, 2003, pp. 15-43.
2 Next to the above-mentioned works, see for example in French: Rey, M., La tentation du rapprochement, France et URSS à l’heure de la détente, 1964-1974. Paris, Publ. de la Sorbonne, 1991, pp. 277-284.
3 A view on the Gaullist challenge to the PCF in terms of identity is expressed in: Kriegel, A., “French Communism and the Fifth Republic”, in Blackmer, D., Tarrow, S. Communism in Italy and France. Princeton, 1975, pp. 69-88; and the various contributions to: Courtois, S., Lazar, M., eds. 50 ans d’une passion francaise. De Gaulle et les communistes. Paris, Balland, 1991. The strategic impasse, on the other hand, is hinted at in the account by F. Fejto: Fejtö, F. The French communist and the Crisis of International Communism. Cambridge, Mass., London, MIT Press, 1967, pp. 195-204.
4 Source of legitimation is used here as developed by the Italian historian F. De Felice in: De Felice, F. “Doppia lealta’ e doppio stato”, Studi storici, 1998, n.3, July-September, pp. 493-563.
5 These archives have been consulted by the author in 2000/2001, when the Archives PCF at Place Col Fabien in Paris were accessible to the public.
6 Zentrales Parteiarchiv SED (ZPA-SED), Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMDB), Berlin.
7 Archivio Partito comunista italiano, Istituto Gramsci, Rome.