One way or another, François Mitterrand and his Socialists must come to grips with the other major force on the French left, the 500,000-member Communist Party of France (P.C.F.). That will be no easy thing to do. Relations between the two parties over the years resemble nothing so much as a complicated minuet. For a while the parties move in step, and then they each go their separate and stubborn ways.
The dance began in 1920 when delegates to a Socialist convention in Tours walked out and joined the fledgling Comintern, the external arm of the Bolshevik Revolution. Over the next 15...
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