, and delegates from the cells attend Section Conferences. Ranked above the Sections are the Federations which maintain offices and permanent staff. Federation delegates attend the Party Congress which meets every three years. The Party Congress "proclaims important changes in the party line" and is the supreme national body of the PCF. The supreme governing body of the PCF is the Central Committee. The Central Committee elects the PCF leadership consisting of the Bureau politique (approximately 20 members), the Secretariat (eight members) and the Secretary-General. Georges Marchais was the party's Secretary-General from 1972 until 1993, when he resigned.
Membership in the PCF has declined dramatically over the past several decades. In 1978, the party boasted 520,000 members; this figure has since dropped to roughly 200,000 in 1990. Paris, once considered to be a stronghold of Communist control, experienced the most dramatic losses. The PCF is no longer a dominant political power in France: "The PC retains the trappings and the apparatus of a major party but it has ceased to be one." At the peak of its power, the PCF maintained support in wide-ranging areas of France. Support was greatest among the heavy industrial zones of the north, the Paris region, the east, the rural areas of the center and south-west, areas with weak ties to the Catholic church, traditional left-wing sections, and where the populace retained strong memories of the Communists' participation in the Resistance. It is not surprising then that the Communist party has declined in popularity given the reduction in size of the heavy industrial labor force, and the lengthy gap in time between the present and the Resistance. Support for the Communists has declined across the board in all categories--both young and old, men and women, and among manual laborers.
Evidence of the decline of political importance of the PCF is exhibited in their perfor...