The psychoanalyst and documentary maker retraces, by avoiding hagiography, the journey of this figure of French communism, more complex than it seems.
by Abel Mestre
His documentary on Georges Marchais (1920-1997), former secretary general of the French Communist Party (PCF), Gérard Miller designed it as a multiple path. First geographic: from native Normandy of the future worker manager until his last home in Champigny-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne) via Malakoff (Hauts-de-Seine). Then, interior: we follow the route of this son of farmers, apolitical, choir child, dreaming of becoming a worker, first wary of communism before becoming one of the main world figures. Politics, finally, when, young activist, he quickly climbed the ladder of the apparatus, claiming a certain freedom but which can also be “without moods” when it is a question of purging certain internal opponents.
All this, Gérard Miller tells Talent in his film, which will be screened at the headquarters of the Communist Party, in Paris, Wednesday, December 14. A symbol: just fifty years ago, in December 1972, therefore, Georges Marchais entered the most important position of the PCF. At the time, it was not nothing. The PCF was, with the Italian Communist Party, the most important in the Western world. He had his hand on the CGT and was the main left party, much stronger and implanted than the Socialist Party (PS) which had just recovered in Epinay (Seine-Saint-Denis), six months earlier, placing his head François Mitterrand. Things will change radically in less than ten years.
If the period – long by more than twenty people – when Georges Marchais directed the PCF constitutes the heart of the documentary, his (numerous) family holds a place of choice in this story, opening his archives, sharing his memories, detailing certain scenes everyday. We will thus remember the story of two of the Marchais girls who explain how happy they were all when, for the first time, in the early 1960s, they had a bathroom in their accommodation.
areas of Shadow
Gérard Miller also interviews many party figures, former leaders Robert Hue, Marie-Georges Buffet, Pierre Laurent or the current national secretary, Fabien Roussel. All tell “Georges” as he was, with a fundamentally endearing side but also certain gray areas or passages of his life not necessarily glorious.
This is one of the forces of this documentary: not being hagiographic. Without dwelling on it, he recounts as the young Marchais was requisitioned to go to work in Germany in 1942 and how it was used against him, many years later, by his opponents within and outside the PCF. Also mentioned his writings in humanity, in May 1968, against the “leftists” and their leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Finally, Gérard Miller explains how, from the end of the 1970s, in reaction to the first signs of decline in his party, Marchais will deny everything he had done previously, in particular the distance from the USSR On the democratic question, to get closer to the Soviet “big brother”, going so far as to judge his “globally positive” assessment and justify the invasion of Afghanistan. In the end, an exciting and nuances of a political leader much more complex than it seems.