The Socialist Drama: Where Have the Ideas Gone? by Serge July

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The origins of the socialist movement appeared in France after 1830. This delay compared to other major countries on the continent is due to late industrialization. The countries of Northern Europe developed mass parties and a social-democratic model generally linked to the trade union movement. If the French Socialist Party celebrated its hundredth anniversary in 2005, it is because the SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International) was born in 1905 from the merger of several socialist currents, combining workers' and reformists, including those of Jules Guesde and Jean Jaurès.

From 1920 and the split at the Tours Congress, the SFIO had to compete with a competing Communist Party, whose birth followed the October Revolution in Russia. It was not until 1936 that socialists and communists marched together. In the face of emerging fascism, the Communist International, from Moscow, had adopted the worst possible strategy in the 1920s: "class against class," with socialists all being branded social traitors.

It changed strategy at its seventh congress in 1935 and now defended the union of the left, with the socialists, the communists and the radicals in an alliance which was called