Elsewhere on this site you’ll find an excellent set of reviews of Martin Conway’s Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. Of the immediate postwar period Conway writes:
But Communism no longer possessed a realistic strategy for acquiring political power. The parties found themselves, not for the first time, pursuing the chimera of a large democratic alliance with the Socialists and other progressive forces at the same time as their actions and statements were reinforcing the gulf in policy and above all in mentality between the Communists and these other political forces.
Reading this, I can’t help thinking that a similar “gulf in policy and above all in mentality” separates Mélenchon and his party from the “other political forces” with which he is attempting to align himself. He really should consider the history.