The French communists’ exercise in recuperation. The Champigny Manifesto

The objective of this article is to examine the Champigny Manifesto of the French Communist Party, adopted during the meeting of the Central Committee on 5th and 6th of December, 1968. I argue that it was intended to serve a dual purpose: to recuperate the leftist ideas of 1968 and thereby reposition itself as a revolutionary force within the political landscape, and simultaneously to lay the groundwork for a left-wing alliance in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This goal was achieved by reworking three of the watchwords of 1968: democracy, socialism, and revolution, and in particular by introducing and elaborating upon the concept of advanced democracy as a transitional phase between the Gaullist regime and socialism. The shift in political language exemplified by the manifesto resulted in reimagining socialism and socialist transition in democratic terms, which then became a stepping-stone toward a subsequent theoretical evolution that led to the development of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and to the communists’ coming to terms with liberal democracy decades later.