Contenu du sommaire : À quoi sert un congrès politique ?

According to historians as well as contemporaries of the Tours Congress, the latter merely confirmed the split between those who adhered to the Third International and those who didn't. As such, it mirrors the congresses of other political parties, whose real stakes seem to be decided outside of the recorded debates. This article attempts to replace the 1920 split within a larger historical framework in order to show that the Congress' mechanisms were established by old political and militant practices. What is more, its resolutions were framed by decisions taken both by the Communist International and local organizations. What matters most in order to grasp the meaning of this “Congress Event” is what was said and done rather than the decisions that were taken.

The socialist congress held in Tours in December 1920 is studied and remembered as the moment when the French Communist Party was born. The goal of this article is to reflect over Franco-centrism and to open up, on its hundredth anniversary, new heuristic perspectives for its study on an international and transnational level. First, we need to make sense of the Congress' national and metropolitan shapes. Then, we must analyze the old and new internationalist practices that prepared and accompanied it, be it openly or covertly, by taking a look at new archives. Finally, we will return to the words and discourses that formed those mental world maps and at the same time articulated a certain view of international questions and Moscow's influence with the image of “French socialism”.

During the Tours Congress, delegates from all French departments were able to speak publicly over the first two days. These speeches showed the perception that people had of the future of socialism in these territories and allow us to understand more clearly the context that presided over the split between socialists and communists. The many feelings expressed reinforces the impression that the participants lived a decisive moment even though they failed to understand it at the time. The multiple contexts of experience, marked by the First World War, led to violent episodes provoked by the delegates from the Finistère department. The latter are analyzed in this article so as to better grasp the workings of activist identity, caught between references to the past and new aspirations.

The birth of communism in Europe can't be reduced to the dialog between the Komintern and national socialist parties, which were more or less ordered to adopt the 21 conditions. The process is of an eminently sociological nature, because it was partly supported by the younger generations who were marked by the War. This article sheds a light on the role played by Socialist Youth organizations, and the creation of a Young Communist International in 1919. Youth movements were the cradle for new forms of political mobilization, just as they reproduced, at their level, the divisions between socialists and communists.

The creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) did not entail a split within the Labor Party, and there was no congress during which such a split could occur like with the Tours Congress. More generally speaking, congresses, as the communist movement conceived and staged them, did not really resemble any of the conferences of the British pre-war movement. This article aims at showing that the CPGB's congresses of the inter-war years wavered between what could be termed “hallway congresses” and “tribune congresses” meant to portray the party's unity. The succession of these events reveals, therefore, the ways in which the CPGB established and organized itself, but also its limitations, caught up as it was between its fidelity to the Komintern and the personality cult that surrounded its leader, Harry Pollitt.

When the Communist Party of Germany was founded in 1918-1920, congresses had been an essential component of the workers' movement for a long time – since the middle of the 19th century. These congresses followed specific organization, functioning and location rules or rituals fixed by a very rich political culture. By comparing the congresses held by the German left during the Weimar Republic (SPD, USPD, KPD), this article shows that this tradition was upheld, but also how each party modified it depending on its own evolution after 1918. Under the Weimar Republic, German congresses maintained a function of representation – that of party unity – but they also bear witness to the waning of democratic practices and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the political forces of the time.

The reflection of Angelo Tasca (1892-1960), a communist who became a supporter of the Vichy regime, illustrates the possible shift from myth to utopia. Tasca relied, first and foremost, on the Sorelian myth which saw the war as the proletariat's “negative myth”, then tried to find a myth that could accompany the communist revolution. At that time, he realized that the construction of socialism in Russia was, in his words, a “20th century scientific utopia”. His thought was imbued with utopianism during the 1930s and 1940s, from the governmental plans, which he called on socialists to put forward “as if” they were in power, to his project of a communitarian revolution, which he exposed in Vichy. He gradually moved away from the reflection of Georges Sorel, all the while draping these utopian projects – whose feasibility mattered less than their ability to mobilize people – in certain aspects of the Sorelian myth.