The First Year of Socialist Government in France

With the election of François Mitterrand to the Presidency on May 10, 1981, and the subsequent election of an overwhelming Socialist majority in the National Assembly, the French electorate not only turned its back on twenty-three years of government by the center-right but it brought to power a party that clearly distinguished itself from the old Socialist party, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), which had led several governments during the Fourth Republic. In his speeches and writings between 1977 and 1981, Mitterrand repeatedly expressed the view that the social democracy, represented by the SFIO, ‘has not gone far enough in the reforms and, in particular, it has not appropriated the means to create a radical break with capitalism, by taking away its most decisive weapons’.1 One also finds frequent references to the division of French society into two camps and to the transposition of this division into the political arena: It is his profound conviction, and he has expressed it on a number of occasions, that society is divided into two camps. This division corresponds to the most traditional division of our political future, between the right and the left, which is linked to a second division that finds its origin in the antagonism of the propertied classes and the wage-earners.