After Ukraine and Palestine, nuclear power is one of the issues that could have prevented the left from uniting. And if a new Popular Front was finally able to emerge, this left united for the next legislative elections was careful not to pronounce in its program on the planned construction of new nuclear power plants launched because of the energy consequences of the war in Ukraine.
This Thursday, June 20 in the morning, the outgoing LFI MP Éric Coquerel finally conceded, in front of the big French bosses, that the New Popular Front, if it came to power, would not touch the French nuclear fleet and would not call into question the policies undertaken. This is a certain compromise for the one whose party campaigns for the exit from nuclear power, but also a position revealing the divided state of the left on the subject with environmentalists and rebels hostile to civil nuclear power, communists very attached to it and socialists rather favorable.
However, behind appearances, historically, the French left is not fundamentally hostile to nuclear power in all its forms, apart from its fringes from the self-managed and anti-authoritarian second left born of the post-1968 agitation.
The left even played an essential role in the development of French nuclear programs, even going, as far as the military was concerned, to sink the Rainbow Warrior a Greenpeace boat that wanted to prevent nuclear tests in French Polynesia in 1985, when she was in power.
So let’s go back a little to try to understand how we went from a left with historical support for nuclear power to current divisions.
Historic and undeniable support for nuclear power
The left-wing incarnation of nuclear power is, without context, Frédéric Joliot, son-in-law of Marie and Pierre Curie, a physicist who won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his wife Irène Curie and is also involved in the ranks of the Communist Party.
With his team at the Collège de France, he filed three patents in 1939: the construction of a reactor, the means of stabilizing it and finally a revolutionary explosive, a prelude to the atomic bomb.
After the war, he defended the relaunch of French nuclear research with the president of the provisional government, Charles de Gaulle, which led to the signing of the order of October 18, 1945 creating the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) of which he becomes the first high commissioner.
A first apparent nuclear “consensus” then opened in France since all the political forces agreed to support purely civilian research. The communists, out of patriotism and the hope of an emancipatory energy for the workers, were enthusiastic about the hopes raised by the atom and thus expressed their confidence in scientific progress.
However, the outbreak of the Cold War from 1947 and especially Joliot’s commitment to the peace movement under Soviet influence, notably the call from Stockholm requesting in 1950 the ban on nuclear weapons, led to his referral and that of other communist researchers at the CEA.
The end of this “consensus” only concerns the military program, quietly supported in the 1950s by the non-communist left, in particular Pierre Mendès France and Guy Mollet, heads of government who took decisive decisions in France’s march towards the bomb.
Everyone also continued to support civilian research without any ambiguity. The five-year atomic plan of 1952 was thus approved while financing the first CEA reactors, which produced electricity but whose plutonium was used to design the first French nuclear explosives. The return to power of de Gaulle in 1958 then caused the left to switch to opposition to the military program until 1977-1978 for the communists and the socialists while support for civilian applications remained.
The emergence of anti-nuclear opposition and its failure
But as the major forces of the left came together around a common program in 1972 and took a first step in favor of the bomb by accepting tactical (battlefield) weapons and retaining existing stocks, an anti-nuclear opposition emerged.
Outside of the major parties, it contests nuclear power as a whole but ends up favoring the energy issue. The historian and sociologist Sezin Topçu described the first organizations from the early 1970s critical of the “governmentality” represented by nuclear power and denouncing a technical and authoritarian model that ignored the risks in the name of industrialization. These include intellectual elites who engage in associations such as the French branch of the American Friends of the Earth movement. The structures are also local with the expansion of nuclear projects in Fessenheim in Alsace, in La Hague in Lower Normandy and in Bugey.
From 1974, the movement gained power with important organizations such as the CFDT against the “Messmer plan” of massive equipment in nuclear power plants under American license to respond to the energy crisis that occurred in 1973. The mobilizations were particularly strong against the Superphénix breeder reactor project in Isère in 1976-1977, at Pellerin in Loire-Atlantique and at Plogoff in Finistère in 1980. Around this commune, the movement was massive, bringing together almost all left-wing elected officials, including socialists, with a feeling of overflow after the construction of the nuclear submarine base at Île-Longue and the sinking of the tanker Amoco Cadiz.
The Communist Party remains fully in favor of nuclear power. This ideological divorce on the left, already observed during the protest of May 1968, can be understood in the loyalty of the PCF to its convictions and its electorate, many of whom are industrial workers, state workers in particular, unionized with the CGT. They are very present in EDF-GDF born from the nationalization of energy production in 1945 under the leadership of the communist, Minister of Industrial Production Marcel Paul. It is with the support of the company’s social action commissions that a Marcel Paul information space was opened and a tribute stele was inaugurated in 2012 on the site of the Flamanville nuclear power plant… quite a symbol !
For its part, the anti-nuclear movement of an ecological and far-left nature experienced its first difficulties with the violence of the demonstrations against Superphénix in 1977. It experienced a slight resurgence with the American accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. The 1981 presidential election saw anti-nuclear candidates but who only achieved low scores of 1 to 2%: Michel Crépeau for the left-wing radical movement (centre left) and Huguette Bouchardeau for the very left-wing Unified Socialist Party (PSU), she alone also spoke out against nuclear weapons. Above all, the election of François Mitterrand for whom, “the divide [avec les écologistes] “starts with nuclear” buries this protest.
Essentially left-wing, the few French anti-nuclear forces found themselves de facto disarmed with the latter’s arrival in power, favoring the success of the socialist experiment. The PS, however, conceded the abandonment of the contested programs of Pellerin and Plogoff as well as a very consensual parliamentary debate in the fall of 1981. A sign of this development, Huguette Bouchardeau became Secretary of State for the Environment in 1983, a form of guarantee of the turning point, but passed a law making public inquiries with environmental assessment obligatory for any large-scale project.
A situation that is actually not very contrasting today
If opposition to civil nuclear power still exists today among the Greens and France Insoumise, at the beginning of the 1980s it seems to have almost disappeared, especially when we look at what was happening at the same time in other Western countries, including the United States.
There was also a certain popular support for the atom, fueled by EDF awareness campaigns. Thus, Three Mile Island interrupted American projects and the Chernobyl accident was fatal to the German program. During the 1988 presidential election, barely two years after the latter, only the dissident communist Pierre Juquin and the candidate of the Greens (a party created in 1984), Antoine Waechter, called for the end of nuclear power after a referendum. However, they each won less than 5% of the vote. The context was also that of a pacifying image of the atom while the West had deployed missiles to balance medium-range Soviet weapons in the Euromissile crisis: a forceful discourse in which Mitterrand’s words carried weight and which led to an agreement to dismantle all these weapons in Europe in 1987.
It was then necessary to strengthen the ecologists in the 1990s and the arrival in power of the “plural left”, a coalition where socialists and communists were not in the majority alone, to obtain in 1997 the judgment of Superphénix experiencing numerous incidents . The debate was especially rekindled by the Fukushima accident in 2011 as well as by the media coverage of the German model, whose red-green coalition of 1998 chose to phase out nuclear power.
After the Japanese disaster, emotions are strong and voices are being expressed, even on the far right, to limit nuclear power. François Hollande then promised in 2012 the shutdown of the oldest power station, Fessenheim, and the objective of 50% nuclear electricity instead of around 75%.
But the growing rejection of the energy transition and in particular the deployment of wind turbines as well as the crisis following the invasion of Ukraine have swept away all these projects, the PS now only talking about promoting renewable energies. The Greens remain faithful to their history as for the France Insoumise created to bring Jean-Luc Mélenchon to the presidency of the Republic in 2017, it has promised from its origins the exit from nuclear power. Heir to the far-left protests at a time of climate concern, it wants to attract the green electorate, which may explain this positioning while there is no question of abandoning nuclear deterrence.
To describe the French left as fundamentally anti-nuclear is therefore a denial of its post-1945 history.
The recent development comes from the emergence of a fairly powerful new force, France Insoumise, having adopted this posture. However, his governance and some of these choices today represent important pushbacks to a moderate left-wing electorate. It is therefore not representative of left-wing opinion as a whole and is not representative of nuclear power either. According to a survey of more than a thousand people in 2022, 66% of left-wing voters are in favor of nuclear energy. In detail, they are 56% among supporters of La France insoumise, 83% among socialist voters, and 53% on the Green side. By not returning to current nuclear policies, the program of the New Popular Front demonstrates this because not changing anything means accepting.
What has actually changed in recent years is that the atom has become an argument, even a standard, of the right and the extreme right in their choice to seduce the rural and popular electorate with an anti-ecological discourse.
Yannick Pincé Associate researcher CIENS ENS-Ulm and ICEE Sorbonne Nouvelle University, École normale supérieure (ENS) – PSL
This article is republished from The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Read the original article on The Conversation.
