In August, over 1300 people attended the Revolutionary Communist League's (LCR) annual "Summer University".
However, despite being the biggest such gathering for the LCR — born out of the May-June 1968 revolutionary upsurge, it will be the last. LCR activists are preparing to dissolve their organisation and throw themselves into building the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA).
Beginning with a massive public sector strike wave in 1995, France has experienced an uninterrupted cycle of struggles by workers, students and a diverse range of social movements.
While still mainly defensive, these ongoing struggles have created new layers of activists and regenerated the radical left. Over this period, the LCR has more than tripled its membership to more than 3500.
But while the LCR has prospered, other sectors of France's large and diverse left have either withered, got stuck in sectarian dead-ends or become left in-name-only.
The "official" left is the Socialist Party (PS). While essentially cut from the same cloth as the "labour" parties in the English speaking world, it scooped up a lot of young militants in the aftermath of 1968, giving it a radical edge.
Furthermore, it managed to be a relatively late convert to the more extreme versions of the neoliberal drive towards privatisation, cut backs on social spending and wage restraints that have infected most labour/social democratic type parties.
However, now it's well and truly joined that club and earned the mixture of public disgust and cynicism that goes with it.
Most dramatic has been the decline of the French Communist Party (PCF). Sixty years ago it was the country's largest political party and won over 25% of the vote, still polling double figures at the beginning of the 1980s.
In the 2007 presidential poll, it won only 1.93%, while LCR candidate Olivier Besancenot won more than 4%, or nearly 1.5 million votes.
Just as significant is the multitude of organic links it used to have with the working class, not just through unions, but a host of other organisational forms that have now disappeared.
The PCF's decline was dramatically accelerated by its decision in the 1980s to participate in neoliberal governments dominated by the PS. This was poison to the party's working class supporters, but the PCF leaders became addicted to the trappings of cabinet posts and couldn't kick the habit.
The PS quickly drew the French Greens into the same trap, destroying their image as any kind of radical protest party.
The PS, by contrast, never had the same sort of organic link with working class communities and has always been much more just an electoral machine.
While the LCR and now the NPA might have replaced the PCF in the media and public imagination as the most significant force to the left of the PS, it is still far from being able to match the sort of daily organisation and contact that the PCF had with French workers in its heyday.
Many of the speakers at the LCR's Summer University emphasised the challenge still ahead for the NPA to show "it could make a difference" and prove that it can be "useful" to workers and their communities.
The LCR, by itself, is still a long way from filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the PCF. It's in this context that, in September 2007, it made the call for the formation of the NPA.
A whole series of preparatory town meetings have been held and committees formed. In the process nearly 10,000 people have now joined this party in-formation.
Many are disenchanted PCF stalwarts. Some are militants that left the dogmatic Workers Struggle (LO) group after it turned its back on the LCR despite some very successful joint election campaigns.
However, the greatest number are people with no history in the socialist movement who identify with a party that is uncompromising in its support for all of society's oppressed.
The LCR threw open the doors and turned over the Summer University platforms to all these participants in the NPA. It is expected that the LCR will formally dissolve at a congress in December, paving the way for a founding congress of the NPA in January 2009.
The proceedings made the front page of the major newspapers. Besancenot, as NPA spokesperson, was followed by a media scrum as he wandered around the venue while his comrades looked on with the calm but serious amusement of people who realise what an enormous challenge they have ahead of them.
At every plenary, workshop and in most discussions around the bar, activists discussed how they were on the threshold of creating a party that would not only condemn the crimes of the capitalist system, but one that will be required to demonstrate that it can, even in small steps initially, make a difference to peoples lives.
[Sam Wainwright is the convenor of the Fremantle Socialist Alliance branch. He attended the 2008 LCR Summer University and was active with the LCR while living in France in 1996-1997.]