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| | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia - The online encyclopedia you can trust! |
 | | France's first Marxist party, the French Workers' Party (Parti Ouvrier Français), founded in 1880, claimed to represent the proletariat; its constitution was drafted largely by the radical labour leader Jules Guesde with input from Karl Marx (who wrote the preamble), Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, and Friedrich Engels. |
 | | In the legislative elections of 1945, the party emerged as the second largest in the country, winning 23 percent of the vote and 146 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and it entered a coalition government with the PCF and the Christian Democratic Popular Republican Movement (Mouvement Républicain Populaire). |
 | | However, party membership soon began a steep decline, dropping from about 300,000 in 1945 to 140,000 in 1951, and in subsequent elections in the 1940s and '50s the SFIO averaged only about 15 percent of the vote, though it continued to participate in a number of governments. |
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