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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The citadel party : The French Communist Party in the Age of Political Marginalization

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Since the late 1970s, the French Communist Party (PCF) has been experiencing a long period of decline, affecting several elements (electoral collapse, decrease in memberships, disintegration of its action system…). Nowadays, it is a minor player in the French party system and becoming politically marginalized. However, despite this weakening over several decades, it is still present in the political landscape and even in some ways, demonstrates a resistant skill. How can we explain that a communist party still exists in a modern society like France ? This work is aimed to answer this question with the following hypothesis : the PCF has undergone a mutation which allows it to survive. This change is not thanks to the voluntarist action of its leaders or activists, but to an organizational disintegration linked to decline. Thus, the PCF has become a citadel party, that is a party broke out in several spheres independent of each other and having their own operating mode. In the case of the PCF, we can distinguish the political apparatus (named « the Fabien party »), the activists party and the mayors party. These three parties have dissimilar logics, thus sometimes different objectives, and within each assembly we can notice a significant fragmentation.