Communism and the French intellectuals, 1914-1960

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part One: The Party and Intellectuals
1. La Main Tendue
2. Principles of Utility
3. Alienation and Discipline
Part Two: Intellectuals and the Party
1 1914-1927
2 1927-1934
3 1934-1939
4 1939-1940
5 1940-1945
6 1945-1956
7 Four Themes
8 1956-1960
Part Three: Three Case Histories
André Gide
André Malraux
Jean-Paul Sartre
Part Four: Intellectuals and the Intellect
1 Marxism and Communist Intellectuals
2 History in the Making
3 Communism and Science
4 The Writers-Socialist Realism and Zhdanovism
5 Politics and Painting
6 Vanguard and Rearguard: Education and the Law
Conclusion
Notes on the Cinema
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

C O M M U N IS M A N D T H E F R E N C H IN T E L L E C T U A L S

Communism and the

French Intellectuals 1914-1960

D A V ID C A U T E FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE OXFORD

T H E M A C M IL L A N C O M P A N Y NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT ®

1964 BY DAVID CAUTE

First published in the United States o f America by the Macmillan Company, 1964 Printed in Great Britain

Library o f Congress catalog card no, 64-12166

All rights reserved

Contents

ABBREVIATIONS

page 9

INTRODUCTION

11

PA R T O N E: TH E PA RTY AND IN T E L L E C T U A L S 1. La Main Tendue 2. Principles

of U tility

3. A lienation and D iscipline

23 34 48

P A R T T W O : IN T E L L E C T U A L S A N D TH E PA RTY 1. 1914-1927 2. 1927-1934 3. 1934-1939 4. 1939-1940 5. 1940-1945 6. 1945-1956 7. Four Themes: 1. 2. 3. 4.

59 93 112 137 147 162 197

N ationalism Anti-Semitism? Colonialism The Defence o f P ren d í Culture

8. 1956-1960

215

P A R T T H R E E : T H R E E C A S E H IS T O R IE S 1. André Gide

237

2. A ndré M alraux

242

3. Jean-Paul Sartre

247

CON TENTS

P A R T F O U R : IN T E L L E C T U A L S A N D T H E IN T E L L E C T

page

1. Marxism and Communist Intellectuals 2. History in the Making

261 276

3. Communism and Science 4. The Writers - Socialist Realism and Zhdanovism

300 318

5. Politics and Painting

336

6. Vanguard and Rearguard: Education and the Law

348

c o n c l u s io n

361

NOTES ON THE CINEMA BIBLIOGRAPHY

369 371

INDEX

389

Acknowledgements In preparing this volume, I have been fortunate to receive help from more quarters than I can adequately acknowledge. I am particularly grateful to Mr. James Joli, who guided the project from its beginning, suggested innumerable further lines of inquiry, and kindly read and criticized the text at the various stages of its development. I am also indebted to Pro­ fessor Denis Brogan and Mr. W. F. Knapp, who suggested changes in content and style; to Mr. Richard Cobb, who read the text, drew my attention to further sources, and offered me invaluable insights from his personal experience; to Mr. Philip A. Williams, who criticized the text with painstaking care and who generously placed his formidable know­ ledge of modem French politics at my disposal; and to Mr. A. C. Crombie, who was kind enough to read the chapter on scientists. It is no mere formality to add, bearing in mind the contentious nature of the subject, that the opinions expressed in this book, not to mention any errors of fact, are entirely my own. My thanks are due also to Professor Jean Seznec, for many kindnesses; to Miss Diana Athill, for helping me, not for the first time, to say what I mean; to the Reverend Dominic de Grunne, for undertaking to check the quotations in French; to Miss Abley, Librarian of St Antony’s College, for much kind help; and to Miss Campbell, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, for placing at my disposal the valuable collection of press cuttings at Chatham House. I am grateful to the Warden and Fellows of St Antony’s College, where this study was begun, on a Senior Scholarship; to the Trustees of the Henry Fund, whose award of a Fellowship enabled me to spend a year at Harvard in 1960-61 ; and to my colleagues at All Souls, for their constant assistance. DAVID CAUTE All Souls College Oxford 18 September 1963

Abbreviations Abbreviations used in Text A.E.A.R. Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires. A.R.A.C. Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants. C.G.T. Confédération Général du Travail. C.N.E. Comité National des Ecrivains. C.P.S.U. Communist Party of the Soviet Union. C.V.I.A. Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes. Mouvement de Libération Nationale. M.L.N. Mouvement Républicain Populaire. M.R.P. Parti Communiste Français. P.C.F. Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. R.D.R. R. P.F.Rassemblement du Peuple Français. Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière. S. F.I.O. U.D.S.R. Union Démocratique et Socialiste de la Résistance. Union des Femmes Françaises. U.F.F. U.N.E.F. Union Nationale des Etudiants Français. Abbreviations used in Footnotes B.C. Bulletin Communiste. Cahiers du Bolchévisme. C.B. C. C. Cahiers du Communisme. D. N. Démocratie Nouvelle. Défense de la Paix. D.P. Les Lettres Françaises. L.L.F. La Nouvelle Critique. L.N.C. Les Nouvelles Littéraires. L.N.L. L.N.R.F. La Nouvelle Revue Française. Les Temps Modernes. L.T.M. All other journals, periodicals, newspapers, etc., are given their full title. N O TE: Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction Of the major Communist Parties of western Europe, the French alone can boast of a more or less continuous existence since 1920. Officially illegal from September 1939 until the Liberation, the Parti C o m m u n iste Français nevertheless climbed toward the peak of its power and prestige as a result of its clandestine activity in the Resistance. The German Communist Party (K.P.D.), the strongest outside Russia until the Nazi seizure of power, was completely crushed in 1933, re-emerging after the war in changed circumstances, as the agent of direct Soviet rule. Italian com­ munism suffered an almost total eclipse from 1926 until 1943-44, the Spanish Party enjoyed no more than three years of substantial activity, and in Britain the C.P. has played only a minor rôle in the political life of the nation. Viewed from any angle, French communism affords a number of advantages for analytical study. Continuity is the most obvious; its policies have mirrored every significant situation in forty-odd years of European history. A period of illegality and persecution which it was able to survive is another; in such conditions the fibres of a movement are thoroughly tested. The growing size, prestige and wealth of the Party, and its consequent self-assurance in formulating opinions on cultural and aesthetic questions, as well as on political and social ones, have tended to magnify tendencies which might otherwise have remained hidden, or obscure. Above all, and with particular relevance to the present study, France has no peer in her high regard for intellectuals as a class. Not only do French intellectuals regard one another as the guardians of an elevated vocation, the vocation of Vesprit, but society has tended to value them on their own terms, according their pronouncements an attentive, if sometimes sceptical, hearing. The communist leaders, aspiring to lead ‘the Party of France* and immensely proud of the national cultural heritage, have on the whole shared this attitude, employing every tactic of persuasion to bring the cream of the intellectuals into the fold and regarding their support as of major importance to the Party. Although this attitude in some measure distinguishes the French Party from others, the distinction remains one of degree rather than of kind. In Germany, Italy, Spain, England and elsewhere the logic of the struggle, despite marked anti-intellectual phases, has led the C.P.’s to regard intellectuals with a distinctly covetous, if not predatory, eye. The French situation, far from being unique, is the one where issues and problems fundamental to west European communism have been writ large.

11

INT RO D U CT IO N

particularly the issues arising from its nature as minority communism, as communism out-of-power. Thus we are concerned here not with governmental regulation of cultural life but with the relationship of intellectuals to the Party in a capitalist-democratic state where support, and even obedience, are offered within the context of free adherence and the right to free withdrawal. Motives such as majority-conformism, physical fear, the desire for security or the prospect of immediate financial advancement, which might on occasion determine such relation­ ships in a communist state, can largely be ruled out from the start. The term ‘intellectual’, as applied to a man, is a relatively recent one in France. The Dreyfus case, and the famous Manifesto of the Intellec­ tuals of 1898, had the effect of subjectively confirming the moral-political vocation of intellectuals in a climate of crisis which, in varying intensities, has become a permanent feature of French life. It has proved by no means easy, in terms of vocation, attitude and belief, to arrive at a satisfactory definition of what constitutes an intellectual, and I have generally found it useful to proceed on an ad hoc basis, accepting in principle the Com­ munist Party’s own classification which in practice embraces not only writers, philosophers, scientists and scholars of all kinds, but also artists, people engaged in the performing arts and members of certain liberal professions. But within so broad a field a degree of selectivity is un­ avoidable, and I have in general focused attention on intellectuals who tend to apply theoretical arguments to the solution of practical problems or, conversely, search for the principles and symbols embodied in concrete instances. A further necessary distinction arises between the creative and the receptive intelligentsia. While the educated and professional classes, as an influential section of the community and in their capacity as the disseminators of ideas, have consistently attracted the Party’s attentions, their rôle emerges as a relatively passive one when compared with that of the more creative, articulate and well-known intellectuals. It is with the latter that we are primarily concerned. But if it remains true that several of the figures to whom reference will be made could not, by the strictest definition, be classified as intellectuals, I can only emphasize that their inclusion is justified on grounds of political function; the Party has found it useful and plausible to regard them as intellectuals, and the scope of this study makes that the most relevant consideration. The antecedents of French communism were numerous and varied. While the post-war Communist Party shared with the pre-war Socialist Party a common ideological foundation in Marxism, the movement which developed on the extreme Left after 1917 can also be viewed partly as an outgrowth of a tradition of revolutionary violence dating back to 1789, and partly as something qualitatively new, an alien importation from an economically backward Russia. But if there was a conflict or contradic-

12

IN T RO D U CT IO N

tion here it was not one which the earliest French communists were prepared to recognize. In their eyes the theory and practice of Leninist Bolshevism were absolutely compatible with the sacred legacy inherited from the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, from Babeufs Conspiracy of the Equals, from the June Days of 1848, from the Commune of 1871, from the Marxist wing of the Socialist Party, from the anti-capitalist intransigence of the revolutionary syndicalists, the legacy developed in the polemics of a Marat, a Buonarroti, a Proudhon, a Blanqui, a Guesde, and many times immortalized in the streets of Paris, Lyons and the newer industrial towns. If this was a heteromorphic legacy it was nonetheless a singularly revolutionary one, and communism, with its promise to act where others had recently only talked, appeared to many as its logical synthesis. By way of contrast, the German Spartacists and communists of 19181919 appear as a more direct outgrowth of the Marxist left-wing of the S.P.D. Pre-war Germany had experienced no counterpart to the French syndicalist movement with its direct and serious challenge to the Socialist Party as the focal point for working-class allegiance and as the embodi­ ment of the revolutionary tradition. Hence the P.C.F. was less exclusively an outgrowth of the S.F.I.O. than was the K.P.D. of the S.P.D. In France Marxism, despite the teachings of Jules Guesde and the writings of Paul Lafargue, was much less widely understood or assimilated than in Germany, and it was perhaps not entirely paradoxical that in its first years Leninism appealed almost as intensely to French syndicalists as to parliamentary socialists, although the Bolshevik dictatorship flagrantly violated the cherished syndicalist ideal of the immediate withering away of the state. While many syndicalists believed they saw in the Russian soviets organs of decentralized workers’ control, socialists found them­ selves bitterly divided as to whether Bolshevik communism was a Blanquist or Narodnik perversion of the true Marxism. It was a period of intense doctrinal confusion on the intellectual Left, and possibly no two militants who joined the Communist Party at its inception in 1920 had an identical view of the nature of the creed to which they had com­ mitted themselves. By the late ’twenties, however, the true nature of the Third International had emerged beyond reasonable doubt. Both the necessity of defending the internal and foreign policies of the Soviet Union and the ‘Bolshevization’ of the C.P.s under Stalin’s inspiration resulted in increasing uniformity and conformity. Particular national characteristics and intellectual traditions, though still visible, were effectively discouraged. Thoroughly disillusioned, many of the early pioneers deserted or were expelled; what had a few years previously assumed the form of a logical synthesis of French revolutionary traditions now appeared almost exclusively in the guise of an alien and unsympathetic importation. By

13

IN T R O D U C T IO N

1929 the French Party, regarded with almost universal hostility by the intellectual Left, its ranks depleted and its parliamentary representation reduced by sectarian tactics, appeared to hover within a hair’s-breadth of complete extinction. And yet, far from dying, it grew into the largest single political party in France, enjoying an intellectual support probably unique both in its quantity and its quality. Non-communists often express bewilderment as to why, in the face of a swelling literature of disenchantment, and in a France which had been a republican democracy since 1875, so many evidently honest intellectuals could have supported so evidently bankrupt a creed. That the question is more frequently posed by Anglo-Saxons than by Germans or Italians is significant; for England, in the European context, has shown itself the exception in resisting the growth of communism as a mass movement. Both Italian communism in its first years, and again since 1945, and the German Party before 1933, proved themselves singularly attractive to intellectuals of the Left. And while French intellectuals, as this study will attempt to show, have undoubtedly been affected by the persistence of both the tradition of revolutionary violence to which we have referred, and of a rationalist outlook, finding themselves unable at the same time to regard European upheavals with any of the detached insularity so often apparent in England, it is important to stress at the outset that the principal explanation for the quantitative growth of intellectual com­ munism in France (as in Italy and Germany) is to be found in the rapid expansion of the Communist Party itself, and in the manner in which it has plunged its roots deep and wide in the national social structure. The Party began its life in 1920-21 with approximately 130,000 members. In 1924, 880,000 votes were cast in favour of its candidates, twenty-five of whom were elected. In 1928, the Party received over one million votes at the first ballot but, due to sectarian tactics, only fourteen communist deputies were elected and by the following year Party membership had reached its nadir at under 20,000, a situation which did not materially improve until after 1932, when only ten deputies were elected (774,000 votes). It was in the 1930s that the P.C.F. first took shape as a major force in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1936, seventy-two communist deputies were elected, supported by 1,487,000 votes (14*9 per cent of the votes cast), and by 1938 membership had risen to 350,000. Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the subsequent banning of the Party in 1939, a severe set-back was inevitable, but in the event this proved to be only a prelude to the period of maximum growth from 1944 until 1947, although in assessing post-war figures we have to take into account a marked discrepancy between official membership claims and the lower estimations suggested by Auguste Lecœur after his break with the Party. By 1947, membership stood at over one million (official), or at under 800,000 (Lecœur). From

14

IN T RO D U CT IO N

1945 until 1947, communists became, for the first and last time, ministers in the Government, although key ministries like the Interior and Foreign Affairs were carefully denied them. In November 1946, 183 communist deputies were elected, endorsed by approximately 26 per cent of the votes cast. Party membership fell steadily after 1947. By 1954, it was down to about half a million (official), or under 340,000 (Lecœur), and by 1961 to about 300,000. Yet these figures were considerably in excess of those that could be claimed by any other party, andin the elections of 1951 and 1956 the P.C.F. preserved the allegiance of approximately one-quarter of the voters. The collapse and rout of 1958, and the inability of the Party to achieve any but a partial recovery since, suggests that de Gaulle himself poses the greatest threat to communist influence in France. Furthermore, in statistical terms at least, the P.C.F. has generally strengthened its claim to represent the working class in particular and the poorer classes in general. In 1951, 47-8 per cent of French workers were estimated to have voted communist, and there was in addition clear evidence of considerable peasant support in traditionally left-orientated geographical areas. But, if we are to account for the attraction the Party has exercised for intellectuals, certain subjective factors must be set against the statistics, the Party’s image against its quantitative growth. While a close examination of the Party’s line over the years on the peasantry, on nationalism and colonialism, on war and peace, on the question of relations with other parties and so forth, reveals numerous examples of calculated opportunism and compromise, the fact remains that the general subjective impression created in many quarters has been one of a refusal to compromise with parliamentary politics, of in­ corruptibility allied to enduring idealism, of an intransigence which is ultimately revolutionary. Nor is this subjective impression, when measured against the behaviour of other parties, particularly of the socialists, entirely an illusory one; it is certainly an impression many intellectuals of the Left, even in the face of an increasing disquiet about the realities of Stalinism in Russia and eastern Europe, have been unable to resist. The P.C.F., then, has grown large while remaining aloof, integrating its cells and sections in France’s social structure while continuing to reject as anything more than provisional her political superstructure. For these reasons, the quantitative scale of the Party’s active relations with intellectuals has been marked by a qualitative development, the emergence of a disciplined and cohesive corps of loyal intellectuals committed to a single party, without precedent in French history. Intellectuals of all persuasions were, of course, politically conscious in the nineteenth century, and the pre-1914 Socialist Party derived much of its doctrine, its leadership and its articulateness from the support of intellectuals. But only the P.C.F. has shown the ability to fashion a

15

IN T R O D U C T IO N

formidable satellite army of intellectuals whose main professional life often lies outside politics but whose activities as communist writers, scholars, scientists and painters have been transformed into a unified weapon in the general political struggle. The revolutionary movements, the demonstrations of the workers in 1848, the 1871 Commune, the Dreyfus case, the syndicalist strikes in the early years of the present century, had all focused and rallied considerable left-wing intellectual support, but the unity created was necessarily a transitory unity which fell apart with the collapse of the event or the movement, bringing into the open once again the destructive, yet enduring rifts between Jacobin and socialist, anarchist and Marxist, syndicalist and parliamentarian. If we were to search for a precedent for the trend which, particularly after 1944, rallied intellectuals to the P.C.F., then the pre-1914 S.P.D. in Germany would perhaps provide the closest parallel. And yet the P.C.F. would never have permitted within its own ranks the Bernstein ‘revisionist* controversy and the subsequent widening rift between Right and Left which belied the formal unity of the S.P.D. prior to the First World War. Discipline in a party founded upon ‘democratic centralism* gains a dimension nowhere to be found among Socialist Parties, whose basic structure and channels of communication have remained more open and more democratic. Thus the communist intellectual enters a realm of stress and strain which is quite novel, and the reflexes and postures which such a situation engenders are of considerable interest As already pointed out, the intellectual in a non-communist state remains apparently free to with­ draw his allegiance at any time; but the real dilemma of freedom and necessity, seen in both philosophical and psychological terms, is far from simple and never easily resolved, as the present study should make clear. Yet to the outside observer easy analogies with Kafkaesque nightmare worlds penetrable only by psychoanalysis may come too easily: such analogies have too often been used as pseudo-descriptions by writers who have abandoned the attempt to examine the ideas and objectives of Marxism-communism in rational terms, and who have ceased to view its activities dialectically, in terms of the defects of capitalist democracy. But the rejection in this book, particularly in Part 4, Chapter 1, of certain psycho-analytical judgements which purport to explain communism simply as an aberration among intellectuals, should not be taken as a rejection of the scientific psychological approach to politics as such. That radical as opposed to conservative, and extremist as opposed to moderate political attitudes can often be associated with specific per­ sonality traits and family influences, cannot be doubted. If the evidence on which this study is based suggests fruitful fields for psychological investigation, then such an investigation must be undertaken by a psychologist.

16

IN T R O D U C T I O N

The method of approach I have chosen being primarily an historical onô (although questions of philosophy, education, science and aesthetics relevant to particular intellectual disciplines are discussed in Part 4), a word of explanation may be in order. There can be little doubt that the sociological approach to communism, while of cardinal importance in analysing proletarian or peasant behaviour, is of strictly limited use when applied to intellectuals. The intellectual in search of an allegiance is certainly confronted by a social situation which will shape his thinking, but the nature of his knowledge and the breadth of his perspective render him and his choices relatively free. The communist insistence on the recognition of historical necessity, the claim that ‘between myself and freedom there is knowledge’, begs too many questions and is too mechanical a formula to explain the varied responses of intellectuals of similar background, similar intelligence and similar learning. The existentialist insistence on free choice, even when modified by a Marxist framework, seems, whatever the merits of its formulation, to carry more plausibility when applied to the political decisions of intellectuals than to those of any other class. The development of a capitalist economy and of industrial technology, the expanding demand for higher education and its products, the growth of the educated public, these are among the factors which have conspired to inflate rapidly the size of the intellectual classes. Economic instability and periodic contractions in demand have at times generated intellectual unemployment, or under-payment, particularly in the late ’twenties and early ’thirties, and in such conditions there has been a marked tendency for intellectuals to polarize on the extreme Right or the extreme Left of the political spectrum. But if, in time of crisis, the intellectual’s political attitude is to some extent affected by a threat to his personal, social and economic status, he is likely to be far more deeply stirred by the social convulsions he sees around him, and by the mood of the poorer and worst hit classes. Nor does the evidence point to any clear correlation between the individual intellectual’s social origins and his later political orientation. Both a stable upper class and an under-privileged proletariat are inclined to be theoretically unselfconscious, or inarticulate, about their own class position and interests, the result being that the apologists for both groups have tended to be drawn from indeterminate social strata. Communist intellectuals in France have emerged from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the lower middle classes and, more recently, from the working class, with a few aristocrats thrown in for good measure. The intellectual’s vocation tends to blur these differences; his way of life, taken on the average and regardless of his political commitments, becomes essentially middle class, or, as some would prefer it, even ‘classless*. This seems inevitable in society as we know it. It is not otherwise in communist countries. Ultimately, therefore* the act of political affiliation remains,

17

IN TROD UCTION

within a given historical context, one of personal conviction, personal psychology, personal choice. But such choices are not made in a vacuum. The proviso ‘within a given historical context* is of the utmost importance. Communism as an intellectual force and as a force acting upon intellectuals has never been static; its horse-power, like that of the Party itself, has undergone marked fluctuations closely associated with the political and social trends in France, in the Soviet Union and in Europe in general. Consequently, it is within the framework of French and European history that not only the overt political relationship of intellectuals to the Party, but also the more complex literary, philosophical, scientific and artistic implications of a commitment to communism can best be understood. The examples and evidence I have relied on are in the main limited to the years 19141960. This period spans the history of French communism from its immediate origins until the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the clarification of the issues raised by the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. and by the Hungarian Revolution. Developments since that time suggest no modification of the general analysis and conclusions I have drawn and, because the long-term significance of the Fifth Republic is not yet entirely clear, any attempt to carry the narrative up to the present time would have entailed the risk of a certain loss of perspective. The intellectual, then, makes his political choices as a relatively free agent; some gravitate to the Right, some to the Centre, some to the Left. But every inquiry has its limits, and I have not attempted to explain systematically why men of the Left have rejected the Right and the Centre. The investigation must begin within the Left itself, defining the implica­ tions of the communist position at any given time by contrast with the positions adopted by the non-communist, or ‘democratic’. Left. The ‘idealist’ intellectuals to whom I shall frequently refer have, on the whole, willed the end of communism but not the means employed in practice by Bolsheviks and communists. They have accepted a number of Marxist premises, the general critique of capitalist society as exploitative and warlike, as well as the belief that in liberating itself the proletariat will liberate mankind, but they have shrunk from the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as it manifested itself in the Soviet Union, from what the communists consider to be an indispensable intermediary stage. For these idealists ends and means have proved an obsessive problem. While normally criticizing the steady withdrawal from the revolutionary ideal of the avowedly reformist socialists, they themselves have had to fall back on a kind of revolutionary reformism, on the power of persuasion, of Vesprit. But to conclude that every non-communist of the far Left is an ‘idealist’ would be to concede to the communists’ own pejorative use of the term. Trotskyists and syndicalists have willed the classless society while disowning Stalinist methods, but it would be more tendentious than

18

IN T R O D U C T I O N

precise to classify them as idealists. Consequently I have attempted to use the word with as much precision and discrimination as possible. Certainly the idealist is not to be confused with the ‘fellow-traveller’, a bogeyman whose contours have changed constantly since Trotsky first described him as a type of Russian populist writer. The fellow-traveller can here be taken as an intellectual who accepts and supports the communist position in its essential points, while opting to remain outside the Party.

PART ONE

The Party and Intellectuals

PART ONE

The Party and Intellectuals

1. La Main Tendue international Marxist movement was originally fathered and mothered by intellectuals. The great names of the Third (communist) International at its inception, like those of the Second (socialist) International, belonged to intellectuals. The Council of the People’s Commissars - the first Soviet government - consisted in 1917 of eleven intellectuals and only four workers. Not until the victory of Stalinism in the late ’twenties did the intellectuals become what Arthur Koestler called the ‘non-Aryans’, the distrusted and barely tolerated campfollowers of international communism. The French Communist Party1 was founded at the Tours Congress of the Socialist Party in December 1920. Within its leading cadres the same climate, or class structure, prevailed. Only four of the thirty-two members of the Directing Committee were classified as workers, the leadership being composed for the main part either of intellectuals or of men generally predisposed in their favour.12 Almost immediately after the communists took control of the socialist daily paper, VHumanité, the quantity of space devoted to the arts increased, while a new page entitled *La Vie Intellectuelle’ became a regular feature. Struggling against complete isolation under the violently hostile régime of the Bloc National, of Millerand and Poincaré, and anxious for support among the middle classes, the Communist Party extended its hand {la main tendue) to all intellectuals who would suffer the embrace. Every effort was made to create a favourable image of Bolshevik Russia. Already, in the summer of 1920, the future communist leader Marcel Cachin had, quite wrongly, as communists themselves were later to admit, assured Frenchmen that the best intellectuals in Russia were adhering T he

•

1. O riginally the Section Française de FIntem ationale Communiste (S.F.I.C .) but henceforward referred to as the P.C .F. (Parti Com muniste Français). 2. The D irecting Com mittee included L.-O. Frossard (Secretary-G eneral), F. L oriot (International Secretary), M. Cachin, A. D unois, G. Lévy, P. Louis, V. M éric, C. R appoport, B. Souvarine. Humanité, 5 January 1921.

23

THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

to the new régime.1 But the emphasis was significant, as was the eager reproduction in the French communist press of the relatively liberal pronouncements of A. Lunacharsky, Lenin’s Commissar for Public Instruction. Lunacharsky was anxious to dispel the impression that the Party was imposing a ‘for us or against us’ ethic on sympathetic but hesitant intellectuals. Those who are against the bourgeoisie, he wrote, are with us.123Paul Vaillant-Couturier, the P.C.F.’s spokesman on intellec­ tual affairs, enthusiastically re-echoed this adroit slogan.8 However, evaluating the lessons of four years of Bolshevik rule, Lunacharsky admitted that the majority of the Russian intelligentsia had more or less openly opposed the régime and that the Party had been compelled to resign itself to the uneasy co-operation of indispensable technicians, doctors and teachers upon whom no very rigid discipline could be imposed.45It was, consequently, all the more vital to dispel the ‘knife between the teeth’ image of Bolshevik man which enjoyed a wide currency in the West, even in progressive circles, and he was at pains to reassure western readers that Soviet cultural policy, far from being a levelling process, was one which put a premium on higher learning and which scrupulously conserved the museums and scientific institutions inherited from the Tsars.6 All this, of course, was perfectly true. If the French communists suffered, in this respect, from popular super­ stitions about the situation in Russia, they also enjoyed certain far from negligible advantages. The Zhivagds of France could let their idealism develop on Marxist lines in an atmosphere free from dictatorship, civil war, famine and chaos. And the moral need for their support was acute. Although the French Party, while still in opposition, did not share the immediate need of scientific, technical and cultural assistance without which a government in power can scarcely survive, it is easy now to forget that in 1921 the more sanguine communists of western Europe still lived in expectation of an imminent extension of the Revolution to their own countries. Within a few years, however, attitudes underwent a marked change. The revolutionary movement had been checked indefinitely. And the continued recalcitrance of the Russian intelligentsia was bound to arouse fundamental doubts as to the political reliability of the class as a whole. Victor Serge reported from Russia early in 1923 that the rôle of intellec­ tuals in the revolutionary vanguard was increasingly a matter of controversy among Bolsheviks, and that there was now a consensus of opinion that the intellectual could be accorded an honoured position only 1. Humanité, 14 A ugust 1920. 2. 'L es Intellectuels et l’Internationale Communiste*, Clarté, 3 Decem ber 1921. 3. Humanité, 4 December 1921. 4. Op. cit.. Clarté, 19 Novem ber 1921. 5. 'L a Révolution et la C ulture en Russie*, Clarté, 1 February 1923.

24

THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

so long as he broke utterly with his class.1The warning signs were out. The mounting struggle against Trotsky and its repercussions throughout the International deepened the mood of anti-inteliectualism. In 1924 the P.C.F. was shaken by the noisy indiscipline, then expulsion, of its most influential political intellectual, Boris Souvarine, who proceeded to exploit his editorial position to convert the theoretical monthly, Le Bulletin Communiste, into an organ of opposition. Almost at once VHumanité underwent a violent transformation. The page *La Vie Intellectuelle’ vanished abruptly. The arts were increasingly ignored and most of the paper’s intellectual contributors disappeared from view,123their place being taken by Marty, Cachin, Doriot, Sémard, reliable leaders who ceaselessly hunted down and denounced manifesta­ tions of ‘intellectual arrogance’, a term which gradually became synonymous with Trotskyism as the majority of communist intellectuals followed in Souvarine’s wake. By 1929 membership had sunk to under 20,000 from the 1921 figure of 131,000. The Barbé-Celor leadership, more interested in purges than in recruiting drives, brought about a situation in which 70 per cent of the Central Committee members were workers. La main was no longer tendue. This trend was accelerated by factors not specifically French, particularly by the situation in Russia where, in December 1930, there took place the ‘Industrial Party’ trial in which Professor Ramzin and seven other leading engineers were convicted of forming a secret party, of sabotage, and of conspiring with France. The Sixth Congress of the International in 1928 had proclaimed, somewhat arbitrarily, an intensification of the class war so that, by Stalinist logic, engineers and intellectuals, on account of their social origins, were now considered more likely to be engaged in sabotage than a few years previously, under the N.E.P.8 In March 1931, fourteen professors and officials were convicted of conspiracy with Mensheviks abroad. The Webbs, generally sympathetic to Soviet Russia, wrote that the Ramzin trial ‘inaugurated a veritable reign of terror against the intelligentsia . . . Evidence was not necessary. The title of engineer served as sufficient condemnation.’45In June 1931j while calling a halt on this specialist baiting for reasons of productive efficiency, Stalin declared the intelli­ gentsia incapable of understanding the politics of the working class which, he warned, must recruit its own intellectuals from factories, mines and shock brigades.6 The mood was as faithfully echoed in the western parties as were all 1. B .C ., 15 M arch 1923. 2. H enri Barbusse was a notable exception. 3. The ‘left-sectarian’ phase was a trium ph for deductive thinking. Probably m ost o f the charges o f the 1930-1 trials were false. 4. Q uoted in M. Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, H arvard, 1956, pp. 363-4. 5. J. Fréville, Sur la Littérature et VArt: V. /. Lénine, / . Staline, Paris, 1937, pp. 123-4.

25

THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

other aspects of Soviet internal policy. Recalling the situation in the German Communist Party under Thaelmann, Arthur Koestler has written: ‘A special feature of Party life at that period was the cult of the pro­ letarian and the abuse of the intelligentsia . . . We had to be tolerated because Lenin had said so, and because Russia could not do without the doctors, engineers and scientists of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. . . the “Aryans” in the Party were the Proletarians, and the social origin of parents and grandparents was as weighty a factor both when applying for membership and during the biennial routine purges as Aryan descent was with the Nazis.’1 If the parallel tension eased somewhat in France in the early ’thirties, it may largely be attributed to the personality of Maurice Thorez, who became Secretary-General in 1930 at the climax of a series of convulsive purges which shook the P.C.F. to its foundations. Thorez, an ex-miner of strictly proletarian origins, showed himself a man of shrewd and flexible intelligence capable of disregarding dogmas which had outlived their purpose. When Aragon wrote that Thorez had always read the Party’s numerous cultural organs, inquired after leading intellectuals and been" strongly conscious of the French cultural heritage, from Corneille to" Victor Hugo,123this was propaganda with a sound foundation in f a c t . ^ non-communist critic remarked in 1949 that the history of the previous WerHyyears showed his strong impulsion towardldeology and culture,8 and in Thorez’s own writings one finds frequent references not only to the works of pro-communist French writers such as Anatole FrâncêT Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, but to those of the great writers of the French and German classical traditions.4 At the Eighth Congress of the P.C.F. in 1936, Thorez could be heard castigating the most recent award of the Prix Goncourt and the ‘vulgar politicians and sabrerattlers’ of the Académie.5 *~Under Thorez, la main was once again tendue. It is not true, as one commentator has maintained,6 that throughout the ’twenties the Party treated intellectuals with contempt, and that this persisted until the 1934 United Front pact with the socialists produced an abrupt change. For one thing, such a judgement ignores the favourable attitude shown toward the intellectuals in the early ’twenties; for another, it overlooks the steps of rapprochement made by Thorez before 1934, notably his personal visit to Barbusse in 1932 and his support for the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement. In a speech to the Chamber in November 1933, seven months before the 1. A. K oestler in The God That Failed, New Y ork (Bantam Books), 1959, p. 42. 2. L. Aragon, VH om m e Communiste, //, Paris, 1953, pp. 252-4. 3. J.-M . Dom enach, *Le P arti Com muniste Français et les Intellectuels’, Esprit, May 1949, p. 729. 4. M. TTiorez, Fils du Peuple, Paris, 1937, pp. 70-2. 5. M. Thorez, Œuvres, vol. 11, Paris, 1953, p. 45. 6. F. Borkenau, European Communism, London, 1953, p. 222.

26

THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

pact with the socialists was signed, Thorez called upon the workers and the intellectuals to unite with other exploited classes against fascism, and this he repeated in l'Humanité on January 7th, 1934. Early in February he appealed to ‘noble consciences’ for support, holding up as an example Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse.1 At that moment the concept of a United Front was still remote. Certainly the United Front, inspired as it was by the consolidation of Nazism in Germany, the subsequent smashing of the German communists and the growth of fascist leagues in France, gave added impetus to a policy which Thorez had already begun. After the February riots in 1934 his appeals to all anti-fascist intellectuals became more urgent and more frequent8 and the attraction of intellectual support on a massive scale became henceforward a primary task for other Party leaders. In a widely publicized report to the Central Committee in October 1936, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, now the main spokesman on intellectual affairs and a member of the Political Bureau,8 showered sympathy on the scientists, educators, doctors, artists and writers who were striving to safeguard ‘l'esprit' in a society enslaved by the tyranny of money, assuring them that: ‘The Communist Party listens to them. It hears them. It understands their fears, it collects them together. It is more than its duty. It is one of the reasons for its existence.'12345And he concluded with the flattering demand for an immediate convocation of an ‘Estates-GeneraP of the intellectuals, to give France both the fruits of their researches and their solutions to her problems.6 In a July 1937 speech to the Central Committee, also intended for a wider audience, Georges Cogniot saluted the ‘thousands’ of intellectuals who had now joined the Party, while appealing for even more members.6 Thorez himself found cause for congratulation in both the quantity and quality of the new recruits who, ‘coming to the people’, had ‘plumbed the roots of France’.7The pre-war period closed with a climactic appealfor sup­ port made by Jacques Duelos to a massed congregation of over a thousand intellectuals. It was to this speech of Duelos’ made seven years previously 1. M . Thorez, Œuvres, Vol. 6, Paris, 1951, p. 30. 2. See for exam ple: Humanité, 3 Septem ber 1934 and 3 July 1935, also L'Inter­ nationale Communiste, Num ber 5, M arch 1935. 3. Paul V aillant-C outurier, 1892-1937. O f a cultured bourgeois Parisian fam ily, he studied law, served as an officer in the war and was seven tim es cited. Elected in N ovem ber 1919 socialist deputy for the Seine, he was re-elected as a com m unist in 1924. D efeated in 1932, he was re-elected deputy for V illejuif in 1936. A m ayor, m em ber o f the Political Bureau and a m inor poet, he was the Party’s leading spokes­ m an and organizer on intellectual affairs. A rrested m any tim es, he was also editor o f l'H um anité. 4. P. V aillant-C outurier, Au Service de l'Esprit, Paris, 1937, p. 4. 5. Ibid., p. 31. 6. G . Cogniot, L'avenir de la culture, Paris, 1937, pp. 6-9. 7. M . Thorez, Fils du Peuple, p. 205.

27

THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

that Georges Cogniot1 referred in his address to the Tenth National Congress of the Party in June 1945. Thus continuity was established. In the intervening period the Nazi-Soviet Pact and communist policy during the ‘phoney war’ had shed most of the liberal-progressive intellectual sup­ port gained in the late ’thirties, a trend sharply reversed by the Party’s subsequently patriotic Resistance record which made of it a focal point of hope and loyalty such as it had never been before and was not to be again. In 1945 the communists, strongly placed, were anxious to weave a tougher fibre out of the threads spun during the Popular Front and Resistance periods. Roger Garaudy12 reminded the Tenth Congress of recent electoral successes among the urban middle classes, equating this with a growing influence among intellectuals. Half a million Frenchmen belonged to the liberal professions, their influence on national life far exceeding their numbers.3 Superficially at least, the communist hand remained fully extended until the Cold War had hardened, leaving the P.C.F. isolated, on the defensive and once again deprived of left-wing support. In January 1948, Laurent Casanova, invested with the direction and disciplining of intellectuals,45declared that although the road was a long one which brought together the democratic intellectual and the communist worker, it remained open.6 A year later, however, Casanova made a rule of the slogan: Il ne fa u t pas se placer sur le terrain de Vadversaire. Despite the immensely effective propaganda surrounding the Peace Movement (which was largely the achievement of Yves Farge), for the next few years a definite hardening of attitudes was apparent, the general sentiment being that intellectuals as a class had once again proven their inherent unreliability, failing to adopt correct ‘class positions’ on subjects such as Titoism, the trials in the Popular Democracies, Zhdanovism and Soviet labour camps. The practice of entrusting intellectuals with key positions was now on the wane, although Cogniot, Hervé, Aragon, Stil, 1. Georges Cogniot. Bom 1901, the son o f a farm er. A student a t the Ecole N orm ale Supérieure, and later a professeur de lycée. Secretary-G eneral o f the U niversité Ouvrière in 1934, he was a deputy for Paris 1936-40 and for the Seine 1946-58. Elected Senator 1959. Editor-in-C hief of VHumanité 1944-9. A member o f the Central Com­ m ittee and author o f num erous political works, Cogniot specialized in questions o f education. 2. Roger G araudy. Bom 1913, he joined the Party in 1933. H e was a member o f the Central Com mittee from 1945, and later o f the Political Bureau. A deputy 1945-51 and 1956-8. Elected Senator 1959. A uthor o f novels, political and philosophical works, and a leading polem icist. 3. R. Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, Paris, 1945, p. 2. 4. Laurent Casanova. Bom 1906 in Algeria, the son o f a railwaym an. A lawyer, and secretary to Thorez, he was active in the Resistance, was elected to the C entral Com­ m ittee in 1945 and to the Political Bureau in 1947. A deputy 1946-58, a mem ber o f the Bureau of the W orld Council of Peace, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959. The victim of a purge in 1961. 5. L. Casanova, 4La C asse Ouvrière a des Alliés’, C.C., January 1948, p. 73.

28

THE PA RTY AND INTELLECTUALS

Kanapa and Leduc edited Party papers and journals. In the period between the wars, on the other hand, intellectuals like Dunois, Rappo­ port, Souvarine, Vaillant-Couturier and Péri had held posts in the Political Bureau or in the Comintern. However, this trend was to some extent revived in the late ’fifties; in 1959, the Central Committee included Aragon, Cogniot, Garaudy (later a member of the Political Bureau), Joannès, Stü, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Courtade, with Kanapa and Vigier as candidate members. It was not until 1952-3, after the anti-Ridgway riots and the Govern­ ment’s subsequent policy of victimization, that the tide of feeling began to run again in the Party’s favour. A new recruiting drive was at once launched, one of the primary objectives of the ‘national study days* organized in Paris in March 1953 being to stimulate interest and con­ fidence in the communist attitude toward specialized intellectual disciplines.1 Six months later. Duelos claimed a large number of recent adherents.2 In April 1956 Marcel Servin8 reported that several hundreds of students had joined in the previous few months and that there were now more than one thousand communist students in Paris alone.4 In fact, Party membership among students at the Ecole Normale dropped from 25 per cent, after the war, to 5 per cent in 1956,5 although in the latter year the P.C.F. obtained about 26 per cent of the votes in the Cité universitaire, as against 21 per cent in 1951. But the total number of intellectuals in the Party at any given time is difficult to estimate, in the absence of adequate statistics. In 1959,2-7 per cent of the Party member­ ship was comprised of teachers, the largest single category among intellectuals. In 1955, one observer put ‘diverse groups’ of the Party at 5 per cent of its total: this would include the intellectuals. If we accept the official claim to a membership of 506,535, made in 1954, then a reasonable estimation of card-carrying intellectuals for that year would be 15,000. It would be tempting to conclude that the Party welcomed intellectuals into its ranks during united front, popular front or patriotic phases, while turning its back during ‘left-sectarian’ periods or times of enforced isolation. But the pattem was less simple. The Party, at the moment of its birth, at once called for intellectual support at a time when co-operation with the socialists was regarded as the most heinous of heresies, a denial of all that communism stood for. Furthermore, it was at the height of the 1. L .N .C ., A prfi-M ay 1953, p. 126. 2. J. D uelos, ‘Sur les Intellectuels*, L .N .C ., Decem ber 1953, p. 2. M embership of the Party was not always considered necessary or desirable. Intellectuals like Rolland and M alraux were equally useful outside the Party and m ight be term ed crypto­ members in contrast to mere sym pathizers. 3. M arcel Servin. A form er railwayman and Resistance leader, he became a member o f the Political Bureau and organization secretary. A victim o f the 1961 purge. 4. M. Servin, ‘A Propos de l’A ctivité du P arti parm i les Intellectuels’, C.C., A pril 1956, p. 410. 5. Le M onde, 17 Novem ber 1956.

29

THE PA RTY AND INTELLECTUALS

first United Front period, in 1924, that the major glaciation set in. This first freeze had its origins in the question of the relationship of the individual parties to the International and, more immediately, in a personal dispute between the ‘triumvirs’ and Trotsky. It was a new Stalinist leadership which alienated or kicked out the vast majority of intellectuals. But the second, and less extensive, glaciation of 1949-52 differed from the earlier one in the important respect that there remained within the Party a formidable and devoted élite of Stalinist intellectuals. It was only toward the idealists, the occasional allies and the peripheral communists who could no longer tolerate the Party line on certain political events and on doctrines in art and literature which were regarded as objectively related to those events, that an uncompromising attitude was adopted. This was not anti-intellectualism per se. It was, after all, in December 1948 that La Nouvelle Critique was founded. But this journal at once adopted an orthodox and uncompromising line. International events had forced the leaders to the view that if ‘quality’ among intellectuals was still at a premium, quantity was a doubtful asset. Yet the same leaders were only too anxious to win back wider support after 1952, when circumstances safely permitted. It is, in fact, easier to generalize about the conditions in which intellectuals have felt attracted toward the Party than about the conditions in which the Party has opened its arms to the intellectuals. The French Communist Party has appealed to the political and cultural idealism of the intellectuals and, in so far as they have responded, it has been for the main part out of idealism. But that is not the whole story. Writers, artists, teachers being no less conscious of their economic status than other sections of the community, the theory has been insistently advanced that intellectuals as a class extending to the liberal professions are so grossly exploited and pauperized in capitalist society that they can, at a pinch, regard themselves as in natural solidarity with the proletariat. Marx, in his History o f Economic Doctrines, had written that capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of mental production such as art and poetry, while Karl Kautsky prophesied that under a proletarian régime the demand for educated people would increase and that the intellectual workers would no longer be subject to the pressures of a ruling class.1 In 1920 Henri Barbusse was talking of a French intellectual proletariat and Marcel Cachin was insisting that the Soviet Republic was assuring the ‘intellectual élite’ a privileged position and material prosperity.12 VaiUant-Couturier, with characteristic lack of moderation, went so far as to claim that the manual worker in France was less 1. K . K autsky, ‘Intellectuals under Socialism*, quoted in G . B. de H uszar (ed.). The Intellectuals, Glencoe, 1960, p. 332. 2. Humanité, 14 A ugust 1920.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

exploited than the communist professor who, under orders, was com­ pelled to teach his pupils the benefits of a bourgeois republic and who, like artists, scientists and inventors, was probably living close to the poverty line. Secondary and higher education were throwing out intellec­ tuals for whom there was no available employment: 'Rien n'égale la détresse morale de ce prolétariat intellectuel*.1 The reality of the problem was excellently defined and documented by Victor Roussot in his La Condition Economique et Sociale des Travailleurs Intellectuels.* The economic depression of the early ’thirties worsened an already acute situation. The public cut down on expenditure and enter­ tainm ent Technical inventions like the ‘talkies’, and an influx of foreign artists, were accompanied by a steady rise in the number of students receiving higher education (44,037 in 1914, 82,655 in 1932).8 The teaching profession was saturated. ‘Everywhere,’ wrote Roussot, ‘is revealed a poverty which seeks in vain to hide itself under a false bourgeois calm, the dignity of which is not without a certain grandeur’.4 It is often charged that communists ‘exploit’ poverty, as if the fault were with the communists and not the systems (or classes) which are responsible for the poverty. One of the gravest dangers facing the P.C.F. was that pauperized intellectuals would turn in desperation to fascism, as occurred on an appreciable scale in Germany. The ‘false bourgeois calm’ concealed violent tensions seeking immediate outlet. The French communist leaders showed themselves tireless and adept at channelling resentments away from fascism. Thorez, in a speech intended for delivery in the Chamber on February 6th, 1934, placed the intellectuals high among the exploited classes,5 and in his report to the Eighth Congress of the Party in January 1936 he castigated the Laval Government for reducing credits to the universities, libraries and laboratories, pointing to the fact that in 1935 5,000 teachers, besides many professors, lost their jobs.6 In October, Vaillant-Couturier depicted a Malthusian process 1. Humanité, 4 Decem ber 1921. 2. Paris, 1934. R oussot showed how the war had profoundly changed the lives o f the m iddle and lower strata o f intellectuals, forcing them into unions. The post-w ar years were bad n o t only for w riters and journalists (who suffered from the increased com m ercialism o f newspapers) but also for teachers, doctors, lawyers, technicians and actors (p. 7). In M arch 1920 the Confédération des Travailleurs Intellectuels was constituted to organize professional collective action. O ther unions created in these years included the C onfédération Internationale des E tudiants (1919), the Union Internationale des A rtistes D ram atiques (1926) and the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés des G ens de Lettres (1931). Roussot pointed out th at unemploym ent among engineers, chem ists, etc., often took a disguised form , they being forced to accept jobs a t low salaries. Am ong actors, the situation was even worse (p. 225). In Paris, early in 1931, o f 7,000 professional m usicians, 600 were unemployed and 1,200 only partially employed. 3. Ibid,„ p. 237. 4. Ibid., p. 223. 5. M . Thorez, Œuvres, vol. 6, p. 30. 6. Ibid., vol. 11, p. 45.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

marked by ‘intellectual over-production’, inventors dying of hunger, a moribund theatre, museums falling to pieces.1 No branch of intellectual life was ignored. In 1934 the Party organized a meeting at the Bourse du Travail, under the presidency of Francis Jourdain, the objective being an increase in artists’ unemployment allowances.123Writing in the official theoretical organ of the Party, Joanny Berlioz8 called the allocation of only 0*05 per cent of the 1934 National Budget to the fine arts a striking symptom of capitalist decadence under the ‘rule of the 200 families’. Berlioz had done his homework. The first violin of the orchestra of the Opera earned only 1,582 francs a month and could count on a pension of a mere 3,500 francs a year at the end of thirty-five years’ service. He contrasted the situation in France where 35 m illio n people lived outside the range of the serious theatre with that in the U.S.S.R. where, he claimed, thanks to State Aid, nearly 800 theatrical troupes with 100,000 collaborators reached 700 million spectators.45The bait of material prosperity was equally held out by Marcel Cohen, the communist Professor of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne, who reported after a visit to Russia that a Soviet professor normally had ‘an easy life’ and that an academician could expect to earn more than 1,500 roubles a month.6 Such statistics proved heady wine: many a French intellectual returned from Russia in the ’thirties innocently boasting of the privileges of the Soviet intelligentsia, evidently unaware, as Georges Friedmann pointed out, that some Soviet workers were coming to regard their own writers as a new bourgeoisie.8 The last of the major communist bids for intellectual support made before the war, Jacques Duelos* speech at the Maison Berthelot in 1938, provided a quite blatant and unashamed appeal to materialism. Through­ out the long oration, the proletariat was scarcely mentioned. ‘Too often,’ Duelos declared, ‘the artist is the victim of speculators.’ Rodin’s work, evidently, was being suppressed by the reactionary Municipal Council of Paris. ‘In society as we shall construct it, the writer will not run the risk of falling prey to the clash of contradictory interests, since these interests will have disappeared. He will be able freely to judge human values and to affirm his personality without being subjected to the law of the market’.7 No group or vocation was overlooked. ‘Yes, a French musical 1. P. V aillant-C outurier, Au Service de VEsprit, p. 26. 2. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, 7, Paris, 1957, p. 90. 3. Joanny Berlioz. Born 1892. A student at the Ecole N orm ale Supérieure, deputy for the Seine 1936-39, senator 1946-58 and a member o f the Central Com m ittee. 4. J. Berlioz, ‘Les Com munistes et les Beaux-Arts*, C .Ä , 20 February 1937, pp. 154-65. 5. M. Cohen, ‘Aspects de renseignem ent supérieur en U nion soviétique'. Commune, July 1939, p. 857. 6. G . Friedm ann, De la Sainte Russie à V U .R .S .S ., Paris, 1938, p. 120. 7. J. D uelos, Communism, Science and Culture, trans. by H erbert Rosen, New Y ork, 1939, p. 32.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

centre must be created, and national interests require that it be done quickly . . .n He called for theatrical road tours of the provinces and more funds to send the best of French theatre abroad. ‘Fiim production is in the hands of the tru sts. . . they consider film production simply from the viewpoint of profits. . . ’ As for the teaching profession, the big prob­ lem was that of salary and pension increases. Not only did the Party endorse the Teachers’ Union’s demand for a 10 per cent pay increase, but, taking into account the cost of living indices, it considered 20 per cent would not be unreasonable.123However, continued Duelos, ‘of all the sciences it is perhaps medicine which suffers most from the oppression of economic forces . . . perhaps the most noble of human activities is the activity of the engineers of life. . . the doctors.’ And he closed by remind­ ing the architects and technicians of the material benefits their Soviet colleagues had enjoyed from the Five Year Plans.8 After the war, no time was lost in resuming the agitation. In June 1945, Roger Garaudy said it was nonsense to ask the Party’s intellectuals to help the cause ‘for nothing’. There was no reason why the financial aspect of the intellectual organizations and journals should not be ‘healthy’.4 However, it was not until after the communists had finally left the Government in 1947 that they felt free once again to indulge in unfettered criticism of the national wages policy. Garaudy lamented the steady decrease of exhibitions devoted to the work of living artists. How many artists or sculptors, he asked, got the 250-300 thousand francs indispensable to the exercise of their professions? His answer was a mere 20 per cent.56Marx’s condemnation of the division of labour and his vision of a world where there would be no painters, only men who painted, was, for the time being, conveniently lost sight of. But of all the intellectual spheres, the teaching profession has excited the most consistent interest. For one thing, the teachers’ grievances have been real and justified; for another, teachers in France are apt to be politically-minded; above all, their key position in the dissemination of ideas has marked them out as a priority target for the Party’s attentions. Jean Kanapa8 made much of the ‘teaching factories’ of the capitalist world where teachers, producing ‘surplus value’, were exploited. In conformity with Thorez’s theory of increasing pauperization and, on this occasion, with the facts, Kanapa cited the example of Professor Auguste Prenant who had received a salary of 15,000 francs a year in 1914, the equivalent of 300,000 francs a month in 1957, while his son, the 1. Ibid., p. 36. 2. Ibid., p. 38. 3. Ibid., p. 41. 4. R. Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 8. 5. R. Garaudy, ‘Sur la Condition matérielle et morale des Artistes plasticiens', L .N .C ., January 1949, pp. 51-2. 6. Editor of the cultural monthly La Nouvelle Critique.

33

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

communist biologist Professor Marcel Prenant, with precisely the same job in Paris, received only 172,000 francs a month, not taking into account the huge growth of direct taxation.1 Yet teaching burdens had increased: Auguste Prenant supervised only five or six researchers in his laboratory, while Marcel Prenant had thirty-five under his charge. Kanapa also revealed that in 1954-55,103 professeurs in the Faculty of Letters of Paris had to examine 4,250 theses, and he concluded, not without reason, that ‘the communists (intellectuals or not) are the most energetic, the most combative defenders of the rights of intellectuals and of intelligence. . .’a It is, of course, not possible to isolate this factor in accounting for the appeal of the Party for French intellectuals, whereas the ebb and flow of support occasioned by political events is more easily discernible. But the leadership’s insistent exploitation of the theme, as well as its support for bodies such as the Union des Arts Plastiques, which agitated for family allowances and social security for intellectuals, would indicate that it has proven an effective one. Raymond Aron has argued that this type of explanation for the leftwards orientation of intellectuals does not touch the heart of the matter, since the gap between the wages of a skilled worker and of a university professor in France is at least as great, and possibly greater, than it is in the U.S.A.8 But the P.C.F. makes its unfavourable comparisons with socialist Russia, not with capitalist America, and while it is doubtful whether any leading intellectual or professor has become a communist for reasons of personal impoverish­ ment, the argument much more cogently applies to the lower ranks of the professions, and to intellectuals without regular employment. 2. Principles o f Utility We have seen, then, that the Party has made consistent and strenuous efforts to gain the support or co-operation of intellectuals, the periods 1924-32 and 1949-52 being, respectively, major and minor exceptions to this rule. But here the obvious question intervenes: why should an avowedly proletarian party have adopted such an attitude, particularly when its prospects of achieving full state power could not be numbered among even contingent possibilities? A study of the Party’s relationship to intellectuals during a period of more than forty years, and of the activities of communist intellectuals as political militants, scholars and artists suggests that, from the Party’s point of view, the sympathetic intellectuel de métier may serve one or more of five useful functions, called henceforth principles of utility. These are: 1. J. Kanapa, Critique de la Culture, 7, p. 62. 2. Ibid., p. 98. 3. R. Aron, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, trans. by Terence Kilmartin, London, 1957, p. 220.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

First principle: pure prestige, or eminence, reflecting favourably on the Party. Second principle: professional excellence, if possible within the frame­ work of a Marxist-communist philosophy, with the primary object of influencing politically other intellectuals and the educated community in general. (A subsidiary function, namely the raising of the Party’s own ideological level, was naturally regarded in practice with suspicion.) Third principle: political agitation for short-term objectives within professional bodies, or through front organizations and the Party press. Fourth principle: political journalism. Fifth principle: the intellectual, as a creative Marxist, guides and advances the political and cultural attitudes of the masses. To describe and separate these principles is only to induce, from the accumulated evidence, a fruitful line of inquiry, a manner of perception. The principles, in themselves, are a post hoc rationalization, and there is no suggestion that the Party has ever formulated its policies in this way, or acted consciously on the basis of such a schema. On the contrary, the leaders of the P.C.F., astute and self-aware as they have in general been, have been compelled by the vicissitudes of the Party’s situation to construct their policy toward intellectuals step by step, on a largely ad hoc basis. To admit this, however, is by no means to pretend that no recog­ nizably distinctive attitudes have come into operation, or that the observer’s rationalization, however post hoc it may be, is a valueless fabrication simply because it may not correspond on a given occasion to a coherently formulated subjective intention on the part of the agent. The fact is that intellectuals have been asked to serve, and have served the Party for reasons which, far from being infinitely various, logically group themselves into the five main categories already described. But where, in subsequent sections of this study, attention is drawn to these principles in operation, it should be borne in mind that they do not imply that the intellectual concerned regarded himself as fulfilling one of five distinct functions. This was obviously not the case. The belief persists, particularly in France, that a man who has acquired prestige by applying his brain or sensibilities with outstanding success in a specialized field has a judgement on political and social questions which should command respect, the more so if his life’s work has shown him to be a ‘humanist’, a ‘humanitarian’, or simply a ‘man of conscience’. And since communism puts a high premium on ‘reason’ and intelligence, it consequently generates a constant demand for renowned intellectual sympathizers willing to lend the lustre of their names to the cause. Hence the first utilitarian principle - prestige. Three weeks after the creation of the French Communist Party, VHumanité hastened to announce the application for membership of

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Henri Barbusse and of the veteran feminist socialist, Séverine.1 In March 1921, the same paper gave considerable prominence to the denunciation of the trial of leading communists made by Romain Rolland, Anatole France and others. France’s salute to the fifth anni­ versary of the Bolshevik Revolution was printed in banner headlines.123 Phrases like: ‘the world of intellectuals responds to our appeal’, or ‘the intellectual élite is with us, for an amnesty and the liberation of Marty*, were common, the intellectuals concerned being invariably listed. Lunacharsky commented that the support - or even lack of hostility - of great names like Einstein and Gorky was the surest method of ridding the western students of their anti-communist poisons.8 The ostentatious display of prestige names was reduced in scale with the onset of the first anti-intellectual freeze in 1924, and it was not until Thorez took over the reins that it became once again a regular feature of Party propaganda. Thorez himself was quick to publicize the anti­ fascist or pro-communist stand of eminent scientists such as Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin, the older generation of writers led by Barbusse and Rolland (‘the greatest French writer of our epoch’, said Thorez) and of notable younger writers such as J.-R. Bloch, Aragon and Léon Moussinac.45Vaillant-Couturier, in his report of October 1936, claimed that the greatest intellectuals of the time marched beside the Party, listing not only communists and close sympathizers like Gide, Rolland, Malraux, Aragon, Léger, Lurçat, Langevin, Perrin, Prenant, Wallon and Jourdain, but also men who were merely conspicuous anti-fascists, such as Benda, Durtain, Romains, Le Corbusier and Renoir.6 The brandishing of names was clearly taken to be of cardinal importance in the struggle, with the result that other considerations tended to be swept under the carpet. Thus Jacques Duelos, conveniently ignoring the newly formulated orthodoxy of socialist realism, was able to boast that in Paul Signac the Party had a loyal friend in one of the greatest representatives of ‘the new technique in painting’.6 Soon after the Liberation in 1944, the first legal issues of VHumanité gave much prominence to the valuable new haul of leading intellectuals who had applied for Party cards. Picasso, Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Langevin headed the list, occasioning a front-page article, by Marcel Cachin, which stressed the importance of a trend by which high intelli­ gences, ‘formed under rigorous analytical methods’, were coming to the Party,7 and Roger Garaudy told the Tenth Congress: ‘Our Party has the 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Humanité, 12 January 1921. In fact Barbusse did not join the Party until 1923. Humanité, 3 November 1922. Clarté, 3 December 1921. M. Thorez, La M ission de la France dans le M onde, Paris, 1938, p. 36. Humanité, 1 November 1936. Gide was on the verge of renouncing communism. J. Duelos, Communism, Science and Culture, p. 33. Humanité, 1 September 1944.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

ambition to be the animator of the intellectual and moral Renaissance of France. It can be, so long as the greatest masters of science and of the arts are with it or close to it.’1 In 1949, the names which came first to Casanova’s lips were those of Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Aragon and Eluard. And there could be no sharper indication of what amounted, finally, to a mania for prestige names, than the speed with which Kanapa, Garaudy and others welcomed Sartre’s tentative steps toward a rapprochement in 1952, having themselves heaped upon him every conceivable epithet of abuse in previous years.2 Nor were physical demonstrations of pride lacking. A funeral or an art exhibition served equally well. The funerals of Barbusse and VaillantCouturier in Paris in 1935 and 1937, and of Langevin in 1946, were enormous prestige successes for the Party which took the reflected glory of the genuine affection in which these men were popularly held. Thorez, recently returned from Russia, was not too busy to attend personally Rolland’s funeral in January 1945. Paul Eluard’s death in 1952 was announced officially by the Central Committee, while all available members of the Political Bureau (Duelos, Cachin, Casanova, Billoux, Michaut and Mauvais) visited his death-bed. Duelos, Cachin, Billoux and Fajon forming the last guard of honour round his coffin.8 When Irène Joliot-Curie (who was not a Party member) died in 1956, the communists were quick to turn her official state funeral to good account. In the same spirit, both before and after the war, exhibitions by notable communist artists were always visited by a formidable array of political figures. Again, prestige was a decisive consideration. Picasso’s June 1954 exhibition in Paris was attended by every leading communist from Thorez down, despite the fact that his work had never conformed to Party principles and, on occasion, had even given positive offence.4 It might be argued that in these utilitarian postures - exhibiting paintings, signing an appeal or lying in state - the famous intellectual strikes at once his most effective and least dangerous pose in the eyes of his Party. But the question of utility assumes complex dimensions. A big name is one thing; continual, creative excellence as a Marxist in a specialized field of art or study is the reverse, and more important side of the coin. By his pre-eminence, and by the weight of his example and teaching, the communist intellectual may influence the political and social thinking of his colleagues, his students and perhaps the educated community in general. At the same time, he can bring to the ideological development 1. Humanité, 29 June 1945. 2. See J. Kanapa, ‘J.-P. Sartre, les Communistes et la Paix’, L .N .C ., SeptemberOctober 1952, pp. 23-42. 3. Le M onde, 19 November 1952. 4. Among those who attended were Duelos, Billoux, Fajon, Guyot, Servin, Mme Vermeersch, Cogniot, Feix. Humanité, 30 June 1954.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

of the Party the fruits of his specialized knowledge (although, in practice, there are pitfalls here). There is little evidence to support Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the intellectuals preferred by the com­ munists were those who never wrote a word of politics or philosophy, but simply let their names be added to the indices of communist journals.1 The organization and direction of intellectuals by the Party on a serious and efficient level dates from the time of the Popular Front. But in the pre-war years the Party made promises, not demands; it exhorted and pleaded; it did not command. After the war, however, it was in a stronger position, able at last to exert the regular Leninist-Centralist discipline which had long been applied to ordinary militants. Hence it was only then that a coherent and consistent doctrine of the communist intellectual’s primary tasks crystallized. One dominant fact emerges. Coercion had to be exerted not to force intellectuals to dirty their hands in routine Party life, but, on the contrary, in order to persuade them to extend their ‘communism’ to their own specialized fields and disciplines. On the whole they were only too anxious not to claim privileges over their proletarian comrades. Garaudy related a case he found typical. In 1945 a professor at the Sorbonne, an eminent scholar, told Garaudy he wanted to join the Party. Garaudy urged him to work as a communist in his own field, but the professor replied: ‘No! I would like to serve in something more useful, more social.’12 This attitude had been bred and fostered during the Resistance. Garaudy commented: ‘There is the problem. Our intellectuals have learned to serve the Party as citizens, they haven’t all yet learned to serve it as intellectuals.’ And he went on to insist that they were expected to be active militants not only at local cell meetings but each day of their lives. ‘The first duty of a communist engineer is to be a good technician. The first duty of a communist artist is to be a great artist.’3 This is the second principle of utility. Party spokesmen returned to the theme of the double life led by intellectuals again and again. Why, Casanova complained in 1947, did they continue to separate their creative work from their political activity? As citizens they were communists, but as artists or poets they remained artists or poets. This deficiency can be divided into two closely related aspects, one of which is rooted in the second principle of utility and the other of which reveals a third principle. On the one hand, as the communist Cazaux comments in Pierre Courtade’s novel La Place Rouge, intellectuals liked to stick up posters and collect signatures, but if one asked them to write a useful novel, a novel which engaged them, a 1. M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur, Paris, 1947, p. xxiii. 2. R Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 7. 3. Ibid., p. 4.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

militant’s book, they cried out as if they were being flayed.1 This was the second principle unfulfilled. Alternatively, as Casanova said in 1949, they were insufficiently active politically in their own professional organiza­ tions, whether the teachers’ unions or the Committee for the Defence of the French Cinema.123Here the third principle emerges. These twin aspects of the problem were frequently mentioned in the same breath. It was both as a member of the Central Committee and as a model communist intellectual that Louis Aragon began his address to the Thirteenth Congress of the Party in June 1954 by enumerating the books, brochures and articles he had written in the four years since the Twelfth Congress. T say this because my books are the books of the Party, written for it, with it, in the struggle.’ Like all communists, he continued, intellectuals were regularly organized in cells, sections and federations up to the Central Committee, and they shared the obligations of routine work. But their primary task was to work in professional organizations where they met their non-communist colleagues.8 Jean Kanapa later went so far as to interpret Party doctrine as positively discouraging intellectuals from devoting their energies to the general combat in an effort to get them to work as specialists in their own fields, where they could best serve the workers.45 It should be said here that the second principle raised far more serious difficulties, a much greater passive resistance, than the third. Why was this? The Party propounded its doctrine and made its seemingly reason­ able demands in deceptively bland and simple language. It was all very well, as Garaudy urged, to become a skilled engineer or even a great artist. It was quite another thing to write what Cazaux in La Place Rouge called a ‘useful novel’ or a ‘militant’s book*. For it was at this juncture that a new element intruded, the question of Marxism, or socialist realism, or simply dictation in art.6 Many intellectuals had the best part of a lifetime’s specialized work behind them when they joined the Party; habits of thought and technique died hard; they showed themselves, in practice, far more jealous of what they considered their integrity than of their time or comfort. Behind its mild pleas the Party was in effect demanding a communist culture; and all too frequently it found itself up against, say, the historian anxious to sell /’Humanité-Dimanche on street comers but stubbornly continuing to produce ‘empirical’, nonMarxist works of history. And indeed, as we shall have reason to observe repeatedly throughout this study, even if he were a Marxist he might still find in the immediate Party line a threat to his integrity as a scholar. 1. P. Courtade, La Place Rouge, Paris, 1961, p. 265. 2. L. Casanova, L e P arti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Nation, Paris, 1949, p. 12. 3. L. Aragon, ‘L’Art de Parti en France’, L .N .C ., July-August 1954, p. 11. 4. J. Kanapa, Critique de la Culture, I, p. 121. 5. For a fuller discussion of socialist realism, Zhdanovism, see Part 4, Gh. 4.

39

THE PA RTY AND INTELLECTUALS

But, to simplify the issue at this stage: the intellectual willing and able, with the maximum degree of skill, to produce a communist-Marxist work of scholarship or art was the one most cherished by the Party. For if vocational brilliance appeared to bear little relationship to Marxian-communism (as in the cases of Anatole France, Rolland, Gide, Signac, Picasso and certain ‘empirical’ scientists) two impressions damaging from the Party’s point of view might be made. Firstly, the great man might appear to believe in communism with only one half of his mind; secondly, he might plausibly be passed off as a well-meaning, naïve and slightly extravagant political dupe. Hence loss of effectiveness. Such intellectuals would only qualify as useful on the first principle, that of prestige. The integrated intellectual on the other hand, the one whose political and cultural work appeared as logically united within a single, coherent philosophy, was bound to command the greatest respect. J.-M. Domenach’s contention, made in 1949, that the Party urged its intellectuals toward the ideological, political struggle rather than toward the cultural one1 was true only in a short-term perspective, as a reflection of temporary priorities induced by political conditions unusually tense, even by communist standards. In the long term, and so long as the Party’s leaders kept their rationality, it depended on an unreal distinction between the political and cultural, simply because the value of a political opinion, in the intellectual community, is intimately linked to the cultural prestige of its author, or to his vocational brilliance. A t the highest level of utility the political and cultural fronts are closely united, the political being more urgent, the cultural more basic.8 But to return to the third principle of utility. The appeals for regular militancy in professional organizations made by Casanova, Aragon and others reflected idleness on a more narrowly political level. This was easier to overcome. The task of the communist is not so much to convert his colleagues into Party members (although this is usually desirable) as to work for resolutions and declarations which are more or less in line with Party policy. In this sense the communist is engaged in a permanent united front operation with others of his own vocation. This operation, like others, was first fully developed by the Party in the anti-fascist struggle. In his speech to the Seventh Congress of the International in 1935, Dimitrov, the Secretary-General, charged the western intellectuals with negligence in failing to respond with sufficient vigour to a fascist ideology which they scorned because it appeared so12* 1. J.-M. Domenach, 'Le Parti Communiste Français et les Intellectuels’, E sprit, May 1949, p. 733. 2. At the height of the Zhdanovist period politics and culture became virtually indistinguishable. The 'best’ novels were purely political.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

irrational.1 The primacy of this single task was readily appreciated by Vaillant-Couturier, who urged intellectuals to demonstrate how intelli­ gence and peace were inseparable, at the same time declaring: ‘We can sum up the significance of national socialism in the spiritual domain in a word: the replacement of the intellectual-type by the soldier-type/12 In 1937, Cogniot warned that Trotskyism was the agent of fascism among the intellectuals and must be ruthlessly combated.3 ‘Fascism’ was a useful word: in 1948 Casanova declared the primary task to be agitation against •fascist’ methods of dealing with the strikes.4 Similarly, the Peace Move­ ment, which became the ordained focal point for intellectual activity the following year, was ostensibly directed not only against war, but against the numerous crypto-fascisms causing war. In October 1953, before an audience of 1,200 intellectuals and students at the Mutualité, Raymond Guyot, secretary of the Seine Federation, enumerated the immediate political tasks: to participate in the Peace Movement; to make contact with socialist intellectuals to assist the United Front of workers; to struggle against German rearmament; to increase the sales of Party journals, and to lead the ideological offensive against the bourgeoisie.5 The last two were routine tasks. In December, Duelos directed the intellectuals toward ‘the struggle for national independence’, citing the recent dismissals of communists from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, as well as the need to protest against the project embodied in the Centre Européen de la Recherche Nucléaire and against the ‘Europeanization’ of certain rooms in the Louvre.6 Here the perfect totality of communist thinking is demonstrated: a major political battle - in this case against the plan for a European Defence Community - was adeptly extended and translated into areas of intellectual sensitivity such as the internal emphasis of the Louvre. In May 1955, Garaudy again urged the intellectuals toward the priority tasks of opposing German rearmament and the destructive use of atomic energy, following the lead of Frédéric Joliot-Curie.7 In 1956, Marcel Servin added to these familiar themes that of peace in Algeria, at the same time sharply warning teachers and professors against their tendency to avoid organizations controlled 1. G. Dimitrov, V Unité de la Classe ouvrière dans la Lutte contre le Fascisme, Paris, 1935, p. 61. 2. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Au Service de VEsprit, p. 18. 3. G. Cogniot, L'avenir de la culture, p. 7. 4. L. Casanova, ‘La Classe ouvrière a des Alliés’, C.C., January 1948, p. 70. 5. Humanité, 10 October 1953. 6. J. Duelos, ‘Sur les Intellectuels’, L .N .C ., December 1953, p. 2. With regard to the E.N.A., five students, thought to be communists, were refused permission to sit the entrance examination. But the Government's decision was successfully challenged in the courts. 7. R. Garaudy, ‘A propos de la Position de Parti dans les Sciences’, C.C., May 1955, p. 607.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

by socialists or others, so leading to isolation and abdication.1 In this instance, the intellectuals were again being driven back toward their permanent united front posture, serving as the probing antennae of a new political tactic of realignment. This was an integral function of the third utilitarian principle. The third utilitarian principle depended for its efficiency on two major weapons which the Party took care to cultivate: communist-dominated front organizations and an expanding intellectual press, ultimately controlled by the Committee for Ideological Supervision, responsible in its turn to the Political Bureau and the Secretariat. The front organizations had a long history, dating back to the founda­ tion of Clarté in 1919. Centred in Paris, but with branches in many countries, Clarté was ostensibly intended to group together progressive and anti-war intellectuals. The aims of the movement, as interpreted by Henri Barbusse, sounded innocent enough: ‘To organize the struggle against ignorance and against those who direct it like an industry . . . it is not bom of any political or national influence. It is independent and international, it is sincerely and highly human.’12 Such abstractions tended toward absurdity as Barbusse must have known when he went on, in the name of Clarté, to denounce reformist socialists and to hail the Third International as coming closest to its ideals.3 In fact, the French section was, in 1919-20, one of several effective pressure groups agitating for the formation of an independent Communist Party in France. In 1921, the new Party rapidly got a grip on Clarté, mainly through the agency of Barbusse, Vaillant-Couturier, Noël Gamier and other intellectuals in close contact with Party leaders. Clarté had in theory an elaborate organization of national sections, committees and bureaux under an International Directing Committee whose original members, by Article III, were irremovable and to be replaced by co-option. The principle that a General Assembly should meet in January of every year could not counter-balance the ominously élitist centralism inherent in the co-option clause. From the very beginning Clarté looked remarkably like a micro­ cosm of the Third International. Although the first Directing Committee was impeccably drawn from the progressive intelligentsia of Europe,4 the French comprised by far 1. M. Servin, ‘A propos de l’Activité du Parti parmi les Intellectuels', C.C., April 1956, pp. 405-8. 2. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans VAbîme, Paris, 1920, p. 123. 3. Ibid., p. 135. 4. Including: Barbusse (x), Georg Brandes, Paul Colin, Victor Cyril (x), Georges Duhamel (x), Eckhoud, Anatole France (x), Noël Garnier (x), Charles Gide (x), Thomas Hardy, Henry-Jacques (x), Vincente Blasco Ibanez, Andreas Latzko, Laurent Tailhade (x), Raymond Lefebvre (x), Magdeleine Marx (x), E. D. Morel, Edmond Picard, Charles Richet, Jules Romains (x), René Schickelé, Séverine (x), U pton Sin­ clair, Steinlen (x), P. Vaillant-Couturier (x), H. G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, Stefan Zweig. French members are marked with an (x).

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

the largest national group on the Committee and they were almost all pro-communist. As early as February 1921, Clarté published a declaration affirming the Absolute principles of international communism’, while disclaiming any official ties with the P.C.F. The resentments this attitude engendered were reflected in Barbusse’s resolute denial in November that Clarté was an annex of the Party, although, he conceded, as an organ of action it was its undeniable duty to foster the spirit of revolt and to orientate public opinion toward ‘the great truths’.1 The communists, in fact, were learning the art of manipulating a front organization the hard way. In December, Vaillant-Couturier, for seventeen years the unrivalled genius at handling non-communist intellectuals, spoke with a softer and more persuasive voice. He fully appreciated how entry into the Party, with its obligations, might frighten certain intellectuals, and he urged them to join instead Clarté, ‘a tribune of education and free discussion’.2 A year later he reiterated that it was not a Party organ, although it would be unworthy if it did not take part ‘in the struggle’.3 The contradictions between the liberal theory and the dictates of Party policy were apparently insoluble, particularly after 1923 when even communist intellectuals began to rebel. The basic weakness of Clarté, when compared to front organizations of the ‘thirties, derived less from clumsy tactics than from the sheer lack of intellectual support for the communist cause. The real influence of Clarté in France is open to doubt. It is known that different regional sections adopted independent political affiliations, the Troyes section even endorsing the Bloc National candidates at the 1924 elections. According to a hostile witness, Marcel Fourrier, there were never more than 5,000 members in the whole of France.4 By 1924-5, desertions from the Party were on such a scale as to leave Vaillant-Couturier and Barbusse generals without an army, and in the latter year the journal fell under Trotskyist control and surrealist influence. It was under Thorez’s leadership that intellectual front organizations once again came into their own. Rolland, Barbusse and the French contingent generally were the leading spirits in the Committee of Anti­ fascist Intellectuals and in the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement of 1932-33, although the guiding organizational dynamism came from an exiled German, Willi Muenzenberg.6 Most effective and influential of the new 1. Clarté, November 1921. 2. Humanité, 4 December 1921. 3. Clarté, 1 December 1922. Robert Dell recorded that at a date he did not specify the French executive decided to impose a 'communist test' on members of Clarté. Barbusse, who was on the Riviera, acquiesced. E. D. Morel and Dell himself resigned from the International Executive. The English branch was dissolved and others soon followed. M anchester Guardian, 31 August 1935. 4. Clartéy December 1925-January 1926. 5. For a discussion of the Willi Muenzenberg front organizations which, although directed from Paris, were not under the direct control of the P.C.F. see pp. 106-8, 114-15.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

pressure groups was the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolu­ tionnaires (A.E.A.R.), founded in March 1932 under the guiding hand of Vaillant-Couturier. Less specialized but more extensive were the Maisons de la Culture, which grouped together the A.E.A.R. and kindred pro-communist cultural bodies and which, by 1937, had spread a network throughout France with a claimed total membership of over 70,00o.1 These united front tactics, first begun in France, were accelerated on an international level by the decisions taken at the Seventh Congress of the International in 1935. In the same year the French Party, now the most powerful outside Russia, assumed a leading rôle in organizing in Paris the First Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. The fascist threat and the Spanish Civil War made of left-wing intellectuals dry tinder for the communist flame; in 1937 a second, equally successful Congress met in various cities of Republican Spain, and finally in Paris. Although the communists were rarely lacking in organizational expertize and energy, the climate of the pre-war years made their task, in this respect, a relatively easy one. The Resistance struggle provided a no less favourable climate. One by one the widely dispersed intellectual groups organizing illegal activity fell under communist control, or were constituted by the communists123* until, with a total membership of almost 100,000, they were effectively federated into the Union Nationale des Intellectuels, on the Directing Committee of which sat Aragon, Joliot-Curie and other communists whose combination of personal prestige with an acute political awareness was bound to prove at least temporarily decisive over those less passionately committed. Aragon was also associated with the classic communist-dominated front organization to emerge from the Resistance, the Comité National des Ecrivains (C.N.E.),8 which in 1944 included writers as conservative 1. G. Cogniot, U avenir de la culture, p. 7. The Maisons de la Culture were founded in Paris in April 1934, with Aragon as Secretary-General and a membership of 5,000. Membership grew with the Popular Front to 45,000 in July 1936 and 65,000 in January 1937. Apart from the A.E.A.R., they grouped together the Union des Théâtres Indépendants de France, the Fédération Musicale Populaire (founded in June 1935), the Alliance du Cinéma Indépendant and others. 2. Including the Front National Universitaire, the Comité National des Médecins Français, the C.N.E., the Comité National des Juristes, the Front National des Arts. 3. The Union Française Universitaire was one of several others. Later, the Organisa­ tions de Rapprochement avec les Pays Démocratiques, the Combattants de la Paix et de la Liberté, and the Mouvement de la Paix, although not strictly confined to intellectuals, were bound by their nature to attract a large number from that class. The Party also ran non-intellectual front organizations in which distinguished intellectuals exerted influence, particularly the Union des Femmes Françaises in which Irène Joliot-Curie, Eugénie Cotton, Elsa Triolet and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier were active. The growing awareness of the potentialities of front organizations, as opposed to strictly Party ones, was shown by the dissolution of the Jeunesses Com­ munistes in 1945 and its replacement by the Union de la Jeunesse Républicaine de France, in which young intellectuals were conspicuous.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

as François Mauriac, although they soon dropped out. The C.N.E. provided in the first instance an excellent instrument in the Party’s campaign against collaborationist writers, publishers and presses, most of which were confiscated or closed down. But the very violence of this campaign, and the bitterness it engendered, were bound to have unfavourable repercussions as soon as the unity of the Left began to break up. In March 1948, Aragon’s wife, the communist writer Elsa Triolet, lamented to the C.N.E. how critics who, in 1944-45, found qualities of talent, even genius, among writers of the far left, could now only ridicule their shortcomings, and she noted a tendency by which ‘collaborationist’ writers and translations from America were little by little replacing the works of Resistance writers in the libraries and book­ shops. Communist writers, in short, were no longer reaching the public.1 Raymond Aron has remarked that ‘persecution is more bearable to the intelligentsia than indifference’. The C.N.E. naturally ascribed its diminishing influence to a kind of negative persecution on the part of critics, bookshops and publishers, rather than to indifference and neglect on the part of the reading public. Against this situation, which threatened to undermine the value of the intellectuals' support, the Party launched a prolonged and effective campaign through the C.N.E. The communists were from the first careful to cover the realities of power within it. A succession of non-communist presidents (Jean Cassou, Louis MartinChauffier and Vercors) succeeded one another until the communists Francis Jourdain and Aragon took overt control in the crisis of 1956-57. Meanwhile, widely supported by the Party press, the C.N.E. began a series o f ‘battles of the book’ throughout France. For example: thirty-two meetings were held in and around Marseilles in March 1950, more than a million francs’ worth of books being sold.2 In August the ‘battle’ was transferred to the Alpes-Maritimes, to Nice and Cannes, with Picasso, Eluard and other prestige figures present. The technique was also developed of bringing stage and film stars to the annual sales; Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, for instance, helped to sell Eluard’s poems in 1952.8 In 1954, l'Humanité claimed record sales amounting to 8,667,583 francs’ worth of books, largely those of communist authors, but by no means exclusively so.4 There is no doubt that leading Party writers like Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Léon Moussinac and Claude Morgan, well supported by the rank and file, maintained a consistent control over the C.N.E. despite some shaky moments, as in 1953, and despite the choice of non-communist presidents. In the years preceding the major 1. E. Triolet, L ’Ecrivain et le Livre, Paris, 1948, pp. 67-9. It is unlikely that authenti­ cally collaborationist writers were reappearing as early as 1948. But many writers had an ambiguous wartime record. 2. Humanité, 31 March 1950. 3. Humanité, 27 October 1952. 4. Humanité, 4 November 1954.

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THE PA RTY AND INTELLECTUALS

schism created by the Hungarian Revolution, the C.N.E. was justly regarded as the most important of the intellectual front organiza­ tions. Party leaders kept a vigilant eye on all spheres, constantly urging intellectuals to agitate in the broadest possible professional bodies open to them and so to avoid isolation. Isolated or aloof, the intellectual lost his functional attributes. In 1956, Marcel Servin displayed irritation at the laxity and indiscipline of the 1,000 communist students in Paris. We don’t exactly know what they discuss in their cells, he complained, but it would be more useful if they made it their primary task to work among the mass of students belonging to the U.N.E.F. (the Students* Union). He demanded a study of the possibilities, faculty by faculty. However, he was quick to stress that the Party had no wish to take over the U.N.E.F.; it should remain an organization where all students had their place.1 This was not simply hypocrisy, lip-service to liberalism; Servin realized that once such a body came under overt communist control, it would split, leaving the communist wing isolated. Indeed, the third principle of utility for intellectuals could best be summed up in the slogan ‘faculty by faculty’, rather than ‘cell by cell’. The second method by which this principle has been fulfilled concerns the Party press. A lively press with a wide coverage, largely run by intellectuals, served to penetrate a larger audience from outside, much as the front organizations did from inside. The daily Humanité has normally given respectable coverage to intellectual questions, to the theatre and cinema. In the ’twenties the Party exercised a dominant influence over Clarté (the group’s journal) as well as running the more strictly political Bulletin Communiste which was replaced, after Boris Souvarine’s defec­ tion, by the Cahiers du Bolchévisme which in tum were transformed into the post-war Cahiers du Communisme. The Revue Communiste had a briefer existence in the early days of the Third International. In the ’thirties, Monde (edited by Barbusse), Nouvel Age and Europe were among several intellectual journals favourably orientated, although they remained independent of Party control and were frequently critical of its policies. Commune, on the other hand, founded in July 1933 by VaillantCouturier and Aragon, first as the monthly organ of the A.E.A.R. and then, after 1934, of the Maisons de la Culture as a whole, remained strictly orthodox and was Vaillant-Couturier’s most potent organ of propaganda. The appeal to the students and the young in general was diffused through a number of papers, notably Avant-Garde and, after the war, Action. The post-war Party, stronger, richer and better organized, was in a position to multiply its press. To the regular dailies, VHumanité, Ce Soir 1. M. Servin, ‘A propos de l’Activité du Parti parmi les Intellectuels', C.C., April 1956, p. 410.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

(which failed in 1953) and the fellow-travelling Libération, was added the weekly France Nouvelle which often contained theoretical or cultural articles. Also on the political level but run mainly for and by intellectuals were Démocratie Nouvelle (covering the Popular Democracies and directed by Jacques Duelos), Défense de la Paix and Horizons, directed by the fellow-traveller Pierre Cot and edited by the communist writer Claude Morgan. On the cultural front, Europe had now come under effective Party influence. La Pensée: Revue du Rationalisme moderne, which had appeared a few times in 1939, became after the war a weighty tribune for Marxism, history and the sciences.1 Another new monthly, La Nouvelle Critique, founded in December 1948 and edited by the die-hard Stalinist Jean Kanapa, dealt widely with the arts but with constant relevance to the immediate political struggle. Les Lettres Françaises, founded clandestinely in 1942 as the organ of the C.N.E., quickly came under full Party domination after the war, although it was careful to maintain its C.N.E. page as a tribune for fellow-travellers or left idealists, until the tensions of 1953 made this no longer possible. A literary weekly with a heavy political bias, edited first by Claude Morgan and later by Aragon, Les Lettres Françaises kept its title in 1952 when merging with Tous les Arts and the film journal UEcran Français, both of which brought a greater variety to its pages. Nor were academic and professional interests ignored. Immediately after the Liberation, the Party sponsored the Encyclopédie de la Renais­ sance Française, covering a wide variety of subjects from architecture to medicine and engineering. Professional journals either run by or effec­ tively controlled by the Party included La Raison, La Nouvelle Médecine and Droit Français. In the 1920’s there were several publishing houses or presses on which the Party could rely, notably Editions Clarté, Les Ecrivains Réunis, Librairie de FHumanité, and Editions Rieder. In the ’thirties the main Party publishing house was the Editions Sociales Internationales, trans­ formed after the war, in line with the new ultra-patriotic policy, into the Editions Sociales, which dealt primarily with political and social litera­ ture. The Editeurs Français Réunis (a merger of the Bibliothèque Française and the Editions d’Hier et Aujourd’hui) concentrated on creative writing, novels and poems. The arts and music were placed under the care of the Cercle d’Art and the Chant du Monde respec­ tively. In the effort to reach a broader and less exclusively intellectual public, communist intellectuals of varying calibre were employed on some seventy local papers and on journals meeting particular urban, rural or 1. Georges Cogniot who, with Paul Langevin, founded La Pensée, claimed for it a circulation of 10,000 in 1945.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

trade union interests.1 The Secretariat’s report to the Eleventh Party Congress in 1947 listed four million educational pamphlets for Party members, twenty million other pamphlets, eighty-six million ‘tracts’ and five million posters as distributed during the period July 1945 - December 1946.2In so far as this work entailed the services of a considerable number of journalists and minor writers, and in so far as this type of production was constantly in demand, it could, with respect particularly to the lower ranks of the intellectual hierarchy, be said to reveal the fourth principle of utility, that of political journalism. In practice, however, as this study will show, this fourth principle had a Frankensteinian propensity for growth and metamorphosis, and few intellectuals, whatever their personal distinction, found themselves permanently immune from the Party’s insatiable demand for political journalism. The fourth principle was forever devouring its more sophisticated brethren. A fifth principle of utility, namely that the writer, scientist, painter or historian should, on his own initiative, and as a creative Marxist, guide and advance the political and cultural attitudes of the masses, has faced in practice so many obstacles and restrictions that it exists only in a limited and spasmodic form. It has suffered historically the same fate as the second principle (that of Marxist excellence in a specialized field as a means of influencing other intellectuals and the educated community in general), a principle to which it obviously has close affinities, since it is not always easy to be sure, for example, to which audience a novel, painting or History of Soviet Russia is directed. Their common fate has been subordination to the fourth principle, to journalism, to propaganda. The reason for this situation will emerge more clearly with a discussion of the related problems of alienation and discipline. 3. Alienation and Discipline While the notion of discipline, in connection with the Party’s attitude toward the activities of its intellectuals, is a self-explanatory one, the notion of alienation, as here described, relates to the intellectual’s ambiguous class relationship to the proletariat, and therefore to the Party itself. But the temptation to regard the two notions as quite distinct, to classify the one as purely a matter of practice and the other as purely a matter of theory, would be dangerous, since the Communist Party, like others, is inclined in any given situation to adapt its theory to its practice. Theory, to be a weapon, must be flexible. 1. The 1952 figure given by Charles A. Micaud, 'Organization and Leadership of the French Communist Party’, World Politics, April 1952, p. 325. Admirable as this rapid proliferation of cultural journals was, it is doubtful whether it could have been sustained without substantial subsidies, particularly in view of the existence of leftwing periodicals like Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, Combat, etc. 2. As Micaud commented, these figures indicate that the P.C.F. was spending more on propaganda than all the other parties put together.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

The concept of ‘alienation’, as used by Marx, concerns primarily the estrangement of the worker under capitalism from the process of produc­ tion, from the tools he wields, from the heart of his daily existence. But the term can also be used in its obverse connection, as applied to the intellectual who, witnessing the proletarian condition and becoming aware of the ‘scientific’ laws of history, feels himself alienated from his own class and compelled to throw in his lot with ‘the class of the future’, the proletariat. He then has a positive rôle to play. Nevertheless, his confrontation with the proletarian party is likely to have its brutal side; he must shake off the last vestiges of an outlook he too readily believes himself to have fully discarded. And that the P.C.F. is, as its doctrine demand, an authentic working-class party, there can be no doubt.1 It was Marx’s belief that although life determines consciousness, theory, when it penetrates the masses and is radical, becomes a material force in itself. Lenin developed the concept. Lunacharsky, writing in 1920, claimed that true propaganda disseminated through every form of art, from statues to the theatre, could stimulate the masses to revolt.2 VaillantCouturier in France declared eloquently that ‘the intellectuals lead the masses, galvanize them, increase tenfold their explosive force by the power of the spirit {Vesprit). They drag the people from their rut and throw light into the shadows.’3 In 1938, Duelos was equally insistent that the head must lead the tail. ‘The mission of the intellectuals is to be the heralds, to precede the great mass of the human flock along the road to progress.’4 Drawing attention to recent translations of French classical and contemporary works in Russia, he continued: ‘What is needed is to raise the people towards culture, to create libraries whose existence would necessitate abundant literary production.’5 On this occasion there was no doubt in Duelos’ mind that ‘the workers know that their destiny is bound up with that of the intellectuals’. At another time all these utterances would have been convicted of ‘Hegelianism’. But theory is flexible and the need of the moment was to woo the intellectuals, and flatter them. The post-war period started off on the same note. Cogniot reminded the Tenth Congress of Diderot and Condorcet, thus pointing the task for the intellectuals of the new Renaissance française* Two years later, Casanova told the Eleventh Congress that the working class, advancing in the national struggle, had 1. In 1951, 46 per cent of communist votes were calculated to have been cast by urban or agricultural workers. In that year 47*8 per cent of the urban workers voted communist, the socialists getting only 14-8 per cent. In 1954, about 40 per cent of the Party’s members were urban workers, and 30 per cent peasants. M. Duverger (ed.). Partis Politiques et Classes Sociales en France, Paris, 1955, pp. 185, 33 and 182. 2. A. V. Lunacharsky, ‘Art et Révolution*, B .C ., 30 May 1924. 3. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Au Service de VEsprit, p. 13. 4. J. Duelos, Communism, Science and Culture, p. 15. 5. Ibid., p. 32. 6. O. Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 13.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

need of the support of the particular arguments that specialists could provide for it on the technical and scientific levels.1 In much the same vein, he urged the communist intellectuals assembled before him in 1949 at the Salle Wagram to ‘give to the proletariat the supplementary reasons and the new justifications that you can bring to it through more con­ vincing works’.1 23 All this made of alienation a seemingly comforting process. And there was comfort to be derived from the past too. Marx, Engels and Lenin had been middle-class intellectuals, as had been most of the leaders of the Marxist parties of the Second International; Liebknecht, Guesde, Jaurès, Adler, Hyndman, Iglesias, Plekhanov. ‘Without a revolutionary theory,’ Lenin had written, ‘there can be no revolutionary movement.’8 There could be no question of a spontaneous working-class movement other than negative trade-unionism, i.e. enslavement to the bourgeoisie.45 The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses, the greater the need for correct theoretical work. ‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.’6 And in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin demonstrated his belief that apparently obscure quarrels among philo­ sophers had a direct bearing on the political attitude of the Party, and therefore on the immediate fate of the workers. This was all very well, but were the intellectuals to run the show indefinitely? Naturally not. The coin of alienation had its tarnished side. Warning notes had been struck from an early date. In 1903, Karl Kautsky complained of the new intellectuals coming to Marxist parties, opposing discipline and conformity, their hatred of oppressive capitalism only matched by their fear and contempt for the workers.6 The intellec­ tual as anarchist became a common caricature at times of stress. Clara Zetkin, addressing the Fifth Congress of the International in 1923, warned against allowing the C.P.’s to be submerged by intellectuals who would often prove inconstant allies.7 This mood, as we have seen, dominated international communism during the subsequent decade, until the French began (in the anti-fascist panic) to stress the positive rôle awaiting the alienated intellectual, with extravagant statements such as those of Vaillant-Couturier and Duelos. After the war, the Party stressed both the positive and negative 1. L. Casanova, Le Communisme, la Pensée et l'A rt, Paris, 1948, p. 10. 2. L. Casanova, Responsabilités de l'Intellectuel Communiste, Paris, 1949, p. 31. 3. V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done?, Moscow, 1950, p. 41. 4. Ibid., p. 67. 5. Ibid., p. 130. 6. K. Kautsky, (The Social Revolution’, in G. B. de Huszar (ed.), The Intellectuals, p. 336. 7. G. Walter, Histoire du Parti Communiste Français, Paris, 1948, p. 378.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

qualities of the intellectual in rapid succession, first to attract hi*» in, or to keep his loyalty, and secondly to discipline him, to play on his guilt complexes, his sense of an original social sin. In 1945, Garaudy raised the spectre of Gide: did not the social origins of the majority of com­ munist intellectuals leave them in constant danger of losing contact with the masses? In fact the new recruits were heavily drawn from the bourgeoisie and middle classes. Thorez began to talk of ‘revolutionary romanticism*. Autocritiques - notably that of the philosopher Henri Lefebvre - by those who were deemed to have over-stressed the impor­ tance of the ‘ideological superstructure’ became more numerous. In the summer of 1948, Thorez, addressing the Central Committee, noted a tendency among intellectuals to give lessons in Marxism and to educate the Party. He reflected that while it was all very well for Marx and Engels to bring to the proletariat an elaborate scientific socialism, the pretension of any contemporary intellectual to teach Marxism-Leninism to the P.C.F., when it had forged its doctrine and proved it in many combats, was intolerable. In declaring that the working class alone could guide intellectual movements, Thorez momentarily took theory to an opposite, and absurd extreme in order to rub in a tactical lesson. Since the working class could directly be identified with the Party, the intellectual had to ‘place himself entirely, without any reserve, in the ideological and political positions of the working class*.1 Again discipline and doctrine fused. In 1949 Casanova, anxious to discipline the intellectuals at all costs, put the darkest complexion on the question of alienation. ‘The Party does not restrict itself by considering the intellectuals as “specialists” in ideology. It considers them, beyond, on the class level. As such the intellectuals represent an important fraction of the middle classes.’2 He pointed to a double danger: that of ouvriérisme,8 of worship of the masses with a consequent scorn for non­ communist intellectuals; and that of the tendency of the intellectuals to set themselves up as a distinct body, with peculiar prerogatives.4 Thorez and the Party had noted with disfavour the tendency to become ‘coun­ sellor to the Prince’ (i.e. to the Party); they would be better employed adapting themselves to actual forms of popular sensibility, to the actual preoccupations of the workers. The idea, concluded Casanova, that the Party shared with the intellectuals the direction of the revolutionary movement was absolutely untenable.5 The intellectual was apt to be caught between cross-fires. In 1952 August Lecœur, rising fast in the hierarchy, took to task those intellec1. Le Populaire, 14 July 1948. 2. L. Casanova, Le P arti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Nation, p. 10. 3. The best Fnglish translation for ouvriérisme would be ‘labourism*, as opposed to ‘socialism*. 4. L. Casanova, op, cit., p. 11. 5. Ibid,, p. 75.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

tuais who under-estimated the proletariat. André Stil, in his novel Paris avec nous, had described the hesitations of dockers in face of a political strike and was consequently chastised by Lecœur according to whom the proletariat never hesitated.1 By 1954 Lecœur had been expelled from the Party, causing a wave of pronouncements denouncing ouvriér­ isme and the ‘demagogic doctrine of the spontaneity of the masses’. Duelos stated that ‘the communist intellectuals ought to guard against any tendency to fall back on themselves, against any manifestation of ouvriériste scorn vis-à-vis other intellectuals, which would be an obstacle to the development of the political and ideological influence of the Party’.2 In these years the Party strove to rescue the masses from the influence of Hollywood and the commercial press, an operation in which the intellectuals were bound to play a key rôle. Yet Europe, La Pensée, La Nouvelle Critique, Les Lettres Françaises, etc, tended to pass over the heads of the great public. Marx had said that a really free literature is one overtly linked to the proletariat. But this is ambiguous; who provides the values? Does the head wag the tail or the tail the head? Owing to a complex o f tactical considerations, the P.C.F. constantly varied the emphasis of its declarations. The intellectual must not succumb to the romantic doctrine of the spontaneity of the masses. On the other hand, Casanova once said, when the people rose up the intellectual would be rudely reminded that abstract research, debate or technical inventions were not the decisive means of cultural enrichment. Thus the dilemma. The intellectual must align his values with the values of the masses; he must not worship the values of the masses. He must be a militant Marxist; he must not scorn the values of non-Marxist intellectuals. He has a key rôle in leading and enlightening the people; he is only a useful element of the middle class, cursed by the original social sin of his birth. Finally, he must rescue the masses from mass culture. More often than not the intellectuals swallowed this punishing medicine stoically. In their eyes the worker remained the embodiment of optimism, health, virility, of the absence of doubt, while their own problems, the Party often made it clear, sprang from weakness and neurosis, from their original social sin. The worker’s character and the worker’s condition had become their raison d*être. Besides, there were causes, memories and friends which demanded fidelity; in the darkest hours one hung on à cause des copains. The Party’s attitude to the related problem of discipline has varied from promises of complete freedom to demands for absolute obedience. The doctrine of democratic centralism allows of a wide latitude of 1. L. Aragon, ‘L’Art de Parti en France’, L .N .C .y July-August 1954, p. 14. 2. J. Duelos, ‘Le Parti et les Intellectuels*, L .N ,C .t July-August 1954, p. 5.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

interpretation. Again, it was short-term tactical considerations that most often prevailed. Writing from Moscow in 1925, Clara Zetkin claimed th^t in the Soviet Union each artist enjoyed the right to pursue his vocation in liberty and independence, conforming only to his own private ideal.1 While this view was almost plausible at the time, it remained communist dogma about the U.S.S.R. long after it had ceased to be so. The French naturally stressed this liberal theme for all it was worth at the time of the Popular Front. ‘Man can only think and create when he is free,’ said VaillantCouturier. Capitalism was the negation of the individual, whereas communists desired only to create the social conditions necessary for the free development of each man. ‘Liberty of conscience is for us one of the most sacred forms of liberty.’ Conveniently glossing over the real facts about Russia during the trials and purges, he went on to draw a contrast between fascism, which put art exclusively at the service of politics, resulting in *un art desséché, officiel, menteur*, and the communists who ‘repoussent la pièce à thèse, le roman à thèse, la thématique obligatoire\ and who demanded only that art be free, sincere and human.2 This was astonishing cant. But it was the fashion. In his 1938 speech at the Maison Berthelot, Duelos expressed the wish ‘to free man from all things which restrict his physical and intellectual development*. Communists, according to Duelos, ‘conceive the development of culture only as within the most complete freedom . . . Freedom for the scientist to seek and discover without fear of seeing his discoveries go to waste if they run counter to one or another special interest. . . Freedom for the thinker, for the writer, to express human aspirations without having to fear a quarantine, a boycott by the moneyed pow ers.. .’8 He, like Vaillant-Couturier, making statements quite inconceivable in the post-war years, also assured his listeners that ‘we do not at all confuse literature with political propaganda and we think that a man cannot be considered a great literary figure solely because of his political beliefs’.4 Duelos, too, was guilty of cant although his insistence on the illusory nature of bourgeois liberties under the rule of money was basic to communist thinking, and it was in the same vein that Garaudy reminded the intellectuals in 1945 that they lived in a society where liberty was that of the strong and rich to crush the weak and poor.5 Despite the rigorously Stalinist mood of these years. Party leaders could occasionally be mild and persuasive, remembering that too much whip and too little carrot could do no good. Casanova apologized that the Party could not create geniuses or even talent, but 1. J. Fréville, Sur la Littérature et l'A rt: V. /. Lénine, J. Staline, p. 144. 2. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Au Service de l'Esprit, p. 19. 3. J. Duelos, Communism, Science and Culture, p. 13. 4. Ibid., p. 28. 5. R. Garaudy, Le Communisme et la M orale, Paris, 1945, p. 109.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

could only offer good will, patience and protection to its members,1 while Thorez, despite his mounting ferocity, was able to assure the Twelfth Party Congress in 1950 that ‘we ask of men of thought, men of art, only to renew the great traditions which have triumphed in the periods of literary and artistic expansion’.123 But discipline had tightened steadily in the ’forties. Before the war, few and far between were remarks such as Cogniot’s, to the Central Committee in July 1937, that ‘for our Party an intellectual can be the worst or best of things. He can become the worst of things if he comes to the Party without the spirit of discipline, of total devotion to the cause of the working class’.8 But in the ’forties the problem was to contain, channel and regulate the very considerable numbers of intellectuals who had come to the Party during and after the Resistance but who were unprepared to face the tensions raised by the Cold War and by the Soviet cultural policy known as Zhdanovism. The Party gradually tightened the screws until the minor glaciation of 1949-52. In July and August 1948, in the wake of Thorez’s attack on the intellectuals for attempting to teach the Party Marxism, a series of articles appeared in the Party press on the theme: you will obey the Party because you are a good communist, and not because the Party compels you to.45Discussions, often in the presence of the political leaders, remained frequent and lively, but they invariably took place in private. In public unity must prevail; and in private dissent was stifled by one means or another. During the Resistance the Party intellectuals had been grouped into amicales, according to their vocation. But after the war these groups proved indisciplined and began to make decisions outside the regular organs of the Party, so that by the time Casanova brought the intellec­ tuals to heel in 1948-49 the amicales had been systematically suppressed and dissolved.6 Casanova had no time for Combat, Figaro and Carrefour who complained of ideological tyranny within the P.C.F.; for such papers, he said, liberty meant liberty to betray one’s country, to be a fascist assassin of free men. The Party would not countenance such liberty.6 It was on February 28th, at the Salle Wagram, that the hardest blows fell. Casanova began with a demand that henceforth the intellectuals cultivate the spirit of the Party in the Leninist-Stalinist sense of the term. Comrades must now allow a technical discussion to become one of principle. ‘If this is socialist realism!’ they were apt to cry, not seeing they 1. L. Casanova, Le Communisme, la Pensée et l'A rt, p. 17. 2. J. Kanapa, Critique de la Culture, //, Paris, 1957, p. 202. 3. G. Cogniot, L'avenir de la culture, p. 6. 4. For example: Pierre Hervé in l'H um anité, 19 July 1948, and Jean Fréville in l'Humanité y 6 August 1948. 5. L. Casanova, Le Parti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Nation, p. 12. 6. Ibid.y p. 25.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

were delivering a veritable attack on the Party. A comrade intellectual had backed all reserve’ in criticizing the work of the socialist realist painter André Fougeron. The Party had had to ‘suggest to his cell’ that sanctions be taken against him. The comrade had replied: ‘I’m being persecuted because I don’t like Fougeron’s painting.’ But this, according to Casanova, was to misunderstand. The manner of the original criticism of Fougeron amounted objectively to a political attack on the Com­ munist Party of France. ‘Discussion is necessary, but it ought to be conducted without forgetting the adversary is on the watch to excite discord and to profit from it. Discussion can be public: but only on the initiative of the responsible organization of the Party.’1 Casanova left the intellectuals with the lesson: ‘Defend in all circumstances and with the most extreme resolution all the positions of the Party . . . cultivate in us love of the Party in its most conscious form: the spirit of the Party.’12 Discipline could go no further in a non-communist country. For the next few years the type of ‘democracy’ prevailing within the Party was what Aragon proudly called ‘autocriticism and the confrontation without fear of criticism’.3 For many the breaking point had been reached. Those who remained were on the whole tough and reliable. In the ’fifties, the Party tended to maintain its grip by subtler and more creative means. In March 1953, the Central Committee organized national study days for communist intellectuals in. which 603 intellectuals drawn from many disciplines took part, learning to adjust their specialized work to the broad doctrinal principles of the Party. Six commissions were set up to study the ideological struggle in the fields of philosophy, history, letters and languages, medicine, the natural sciences and the human sciences.4 These study days were directed by a Bureau which included F. Billoux and E. Fajon of the Political Bureau and Georges Cogniot of the Central Committee. There was a tendency for more caution and less cohesion in policy, particularly at the period of the expulsion of Marty and Tillon, then of Lecœur, from the Political Bureau. In December 1953, there was an apology for a quite normal act of bullying. Billoux officially regretted the abrupt manner in which the Secretariat had attacked the publication of Picasso’s post mortem drawing of Stalin, forcing Aragon as editor to publish in the offending Les Lettres Françaises numerous letters attacking the portrait. This behaviour was now considered to have been ‘in­ opportune’. Billoux was anxious that they should not give a false idea of the links the Party had with the intellectuals, or create the impression that it proceeded on the basis of orders and commands, rather than of 1. L. Casanova, Responsabilités de l'Intellectuel Communiste, p. 29. 2. Ibid.y pp. 30-1. 3. L. Aragon, L'Homme Communiste, //, p. 221. 4. L .N .C ., April-M ay 1953, p. 126.

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THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

conviction and free adherence.1 A few months later, Aragon told the Thirteenth Congress that intellectuals must follow the tendency laid down by the Party in their art or field: too many comrades were ignoring this.* There was something pathetic about the effort of Billoux and the leader­ ship to deny the obvious, but it should be noted that the first principle of utility, affecting Picasso’s unrivalled prestige, had been rudely violated by the original response of the Secretariat. Hence the oppor­ tunistic withdrawal. The principles formulated by Casanova in the late ’forties were not abandoned, even after the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. in 1956, and it is for this reason, among others, that the French Party has been called unrepentantly Stalinist.123Some lip-service was paid to liberalization, but few real concessions were made. In April 1956, after Khrushchev’s speech, Marcel Servin made it clear that the old principles of inner-Party democracy remained valid.45The decisive moment arrived with Thorez’s report to the Fourteenth Congress at Le Havre in July 1956. A few of his statements, judged by their emphasis, seemed to presage a certain thaw. ‘It is necessary to assure our writers and artists the possibility of deploying their personal initiative, their inspiration, their tastes, without imposing on all the same forms.’ (Such remarks at least had the value of implicitly admitting the nature of past policy.) But, he continued, ‘we ask com­ munist scholars and scientists to combat any tendency toward conciliation with bourgeois and reactionary philosophy . . . The Party understands and studies the problems and preoccupations peculiar to intellectual comrades, but they all have in common, whatever may be their speciality, the obligation to understand Marxism-Leninism.’6 But communist slogans, promises and catch-phrases had long since cancelled one another out. Action had become the only valid criterion. And, as the reaction to the Hungarian Revolution and the sterile, con­ servative policy of the next few years were to show, if Stalin was officially banished, his ghost remained.

1. F. Billoux, ‘Sur les Intellectuels', L .N .C ., December 1953, pp. 4-5. 2. L. Aragon, ‘L’Art de Parti en France’, L.N .C ., July-August 1954, p. 16. 3. For the repercussions of the events of 1956, see Part 2, Ch. 8. 4. M. Servin, ‘A propos de l’Activité du Parti parmi les Intellectuels', C.C., April 1956, pp. 401-3. 5. G. Cogniot, ‘Les Intellectuels devant le Bilan du XlVème Congrès du Parti Communiste Français’, La Pensée, September-October 1956, p. 102.

56

PA R T TW O

Intellectuals and the Party

CH A PTER ONE

1914-1927

T he First World War was the decisive experience. European communism was bom out of the ashes of past revolutionary movements, socialist, anarchist and syndicalist, movements whose harsh threats and brave promises had been drowned and mocked in August 1914 by the disciplined tramp of marching boots. Under the impact of the war, theories and dogmas, once so vehemently defended, lost their lustre and wilted, before springing to life again with an intensified dynamism. The first generation of communist intellectuals in France shared no common ideological background; what they shared was a burning revulsion from the sheer physical horror of the war, from the evil passions it let loose and from the insane waste it everywhere inflicted. Martinet, Dunois and Guilbeaux had been syndicalists; Souvarine and Pioch, socialists; Séverine and Serge, at one time or another anarchists; Barbusse, a man of the Left; Vaillant-Couturier and Lefebvre, bourgeois students. They and their future copains were inexorably drawn together, separate strands woven into a tight fabric (the Party) by an event (the war), an idea which justified itself in an action (Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution), and by a movement that flowed from the action (inter­ national communism). The great testimony was Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu. First published in instalments in L'Œ uvre in August-September 1916, this novel appeared in book form in August 1917, strangely uncensored at a time when French morale, both military and civilian, had reached its nadir. Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), an ardent patriot in 1914, a soldier cited for saving the lives of his comrades at the front, emerged from hospital and from literary obscurity with a work of stark realism and bitter social protest. Besse h a d a shell-splinter cu t through his abdom en an d stom ach . . . little G odefroy, you rem em ber him? T he m iddle o f his body blow n aw ay; he was em ptied o f b lood o n the spot, in an instant, like an u p tu rn ed b u ck et.1 1. H. Barbusse, Le Feu, Paris, 1918, p. 53.

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INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

Shame on military glory, shame on the armies, shame on the profes­ sion of soldier which transforms men step by step into stupid victims and ignoble executioners.1 Lenin read the instalments approvingly in Switzerland, and by November 1918 230,000 copies of the novel had been sold. An illusion long since shattered in the trenches was no longer safe even in the book­ shops of Paris. Raymond Lefebvre, martyred in 1920 at the age of thirty, and the idol of this first generation, proudly listed the soldier writers who had blasphemed against la gloire and la patrie, against the union sacrée. For the first time the nobility of death on the field of honour had been denied by the dying themselves; the cult of military duty, he believed, was destroyed for ever. Lefebvre wrote not only of the horrors of the trenches but of the appalling lack of hygiene in the factories, of rampant tubercu­ losis, of the lack of hospitals, of the miserable pensions awarded to the wounded. ‘The wounded have lost the battle.’1234 In hospital Lefebvre encountered by chance his old student friend Paul Vaillant-Couturier, an officer who had received seven citations for gallantry before being finally discharged with his whole view of society permanently transformed. In July 1915, he addressed these lines to the pacifists whom he could now regard as his brothers: O P acifiques, ô m es frè re s de souffrance, Vous chez qui le p résent vivait du souvenir, E t q ui cachiez, sous votre apparente indolence, Une action p lu s haute e t de grands avenirs*

By January, this dominant compassion and melancholy had turned to frustration and anger. Vaillant-Couturier had taken his first steps on the path to political revolt. A h! noble idée, être un héros9 en avoir P air . . . Q uand on rêvait de célébrer la vie exquise E t pacifique, entre ses m onts de pierre grise.*

The isolated strands were being drawn together; the holocaust was creating comradeship among intellectuals as yet unaware of one another’s existence. Marcel Martinet (1887-1944), a writer, critic and former syndicalist militant, could discern no victor in war other than the upper classes of all countries, with ‘their machine-guns and their bombs and all their instruments of hell’.5 Henri Guilbeaux who, unlike Barbusse, 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Ibid. R. Lefebvre, La Révolution ou la M ort, Paris, 1920, pp. 25-30. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Poésie, Paris, 1938, p. 75. Ibid., p. 83. M. Martinet, La N uit, Paris, 1921, p. 14.

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1914-1927 Lefebvre, Vaillant-Couturier and Martinet, had been a strict pacifist from the outset, asked in his poem. To a German Friend: ‘Where are you, you whom I have known and loved?* In 1914 the Left had been shattered, but now the carnage was bringing together individuals from every fragment. Jean-Richard Bloch, a patriot in 1914, wrote later of his humility before dumb and infinite suffering, before spiritual anguish, explosions, gangrene, mutilations, fear, separation, doubt, before the courage of human beings.1 Bloch spoke for the women as well as for the soldiers, but some women spoke for themselves, notably the future communist Magdeleine Marx (b. 1889). Life w as in th eir hands, life a n d the fate o f the w orld. So an d so m any killed - abstractions w ith which the w orld juggled in figures . . . I was one o f the vast h erd w hich fretted the surface o f the e arth like a canker, m oulded a n d m oved by a deadly m aniac h a n d . . .

What Barbusse, Lefebvre and Vaillant-Couturier had seen, she dreamed of: H e fills his mess cup a n d em pties it a t one draught. H e spits o u t thick threads, they han g from his m o u th - bits o f brains . . . A pool o f h u m an b lo o d from w hich he has quenched his th irst.2

Life had indeed determined consciousness, although consciousness varied. Disgust in itself did not necessarily lead to acceptance of the Leninist definition of the causes of the war, and there were of course hundreds of writers and poets of all nationalities who mourned their dead without becoming communists, or even socialists. Nevertheless, it was in the question of war that the roots of west European communism were to be found. The Second (socialist) International had wrestled unavailingly with the problem since the beginning of the century. At the 1907 Stuttgart Conference of the International the Left had pushed through a clause which pledged the Socialist Parties ‘to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of class rule*. As late as July 16th, 1914, the French Party had called for a general strike in the event of war, while the syndicalist-dominated trade unions had adopted an even more militant tone, the Bataille Syndicaliste declaring on July 26th that ‘the workers must answer any declaration of war by a revolutionary general strike*. The collapse of the Second International in 1914 cannot be traced in detail here. Ultimately, the French socialists and the English Labour Party found themselves defending parliamentary democracy against the 1. J.-R. Bloch, Carnaval est M ort, Paris, 1920, p. 19. 2. M. Marx, Woman, trans. by Adele Szold Seltzer, New York, 1920, pp. 161-2 and 165.

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militarist autocracies of Germany and Austria, while the socialists of these powers felt compelled to take up arms against the Cossacks and the Tsarist despotism. There were other factors. To oppose the war meant to court suppression, the destruction of years of patient work.1 Above all, the workers themselves proved violently patriotic, rendering the notion of insurrection farcical. Europe, like Barbusse’s Godefroy, was emptied of blood like an upturned bucket. Under the pressure of events the divisions within the Socialist Parties opened into cracks, three principal groupings appearing in both Germany and France: the majority, wishing to pursue the war to a victorious conclusion; a centre group, standing for an immediate peace and the restoration of all conquered territories; and a small, but growing left wing, calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war. To the left of the Left stood Lenin. In August 1915, Lenin spoke out in terms more uncompromising than any previously heard. ‘It is a war between two groups of predatory Great Powers over the division of the colonies, over the enslavement of other nations, over advantages and privileges in the world market.’ And he concluded that ‘only the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois governments, and primarily of the most reactionary, savage and barbarian tsarist government, opens the road to socialism and international peace.’123 Later Lenin developed his thesis on the causes of the war in more precise economic terms in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage o f Capitalism (1917). He and his small following of Bolshevik exiles attempted to win support for their views within the European parties through what has become known as the Zimmerwald movement. The first Conference took place in September 1915 and was attended by thirty-eight delegates from eleven countries. The second (Kienthal) Conference met in April 1916, with forty-four delegates from seven countries, and passed a resolution calling for ‘the conquest of political power and the ownership of capital by the people themselves’. Even so, Lenin’s position was still to the left of the majority, calling as he did for immediate revolution and a complete break with the Second International. Of the first generation of French communist intellectuals, those who had been intransigent, anti-war, revolutionary Marxists in 1914 com­ prised a small minority. Barbusse, for example, had written to the Director of l'Humanité on August 9th, 1914, maintaining that in going to the front he was taking up arms against militarism, imperialism and monarchy.8 For Barbusse, as for so many others, this was to be a war 1. The S.F.I.O. gained 103 seats in the Chamber, supported by 1,346,744 votes, at the April-May 1914 elections. Party membership had risen 50 per cent since 1908. 2. V. I. Lenin, (Manifesto on the War*, On the International Working Class and Communist M ovement, Moscow, n.d., p. 208. 3. H. Barbusse, Paroles d*un Combattant (1917-1920), Paris, n.d., p. 8.

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1914-1927 to end wars. Victor Serge,1 languishing in jail, was one of the few who found the mass capitulation of socialists, syndicalists and even anarchists quite incomprehensible. Against the threat of Prussian militarism he posed the dangers of its French counterpart and memories of the Dreyfus case. As for the German invasion of Belgium, he had not forgotten another episode, the Boer War.8 Nor, while Lenin was still in exile, was the influence of his works and of the Zimmerwald movement more than incidental among French intellectuals. It was only later, after the Bolshevik Revolution, that his whole teaching on the war and its causes gained immeasurably in stature and influence. Those in closest contact with Zimmerwald were Marcel Martinet, Gustave Dupin and Henri Guilbeaux. Guilbeaux,8 first a socialist, then a syndicalist, but always a pacifist, had, like Martinet and Serge, been one of the few to oppose the war from the outset, working on the paper La Vie Ouvrière with Martinet and Trotsky, at that time exiled in Paris. Evading military service, Guilbeaux reached Switzerland and helped to found the revue Demain in January 1916, while at the same time collaborating on its German Leninist counterpart Die Arbeiterpolitik, edited by Karl Radek. Guilbeaux and Martinet were conscious of Lenin and Leninism before the Bolshevik Revolution in a way that Barbusse, Lefebvre and Vaillant-Couturier were not. Indeed, in the early days of the war it was not Lenin but Karl Lieb­ knecht who aroused the emotions of the internationalist Left. Liebknecht achieved the status of a living symbol when on December 2nd, 1914 he became the first Reichstag deputy to refuse to vote war credits. He published his case, was hailed by Lenin, and soon imprisoned. In Barbusse’s Le Feu, at the climax of a terrible and prolonged infantry attack, the normally taciturn Corporal Bertrand gives vent to his feelings: ‘There is a figure who has raised himself above the war and who will shine for the beauty and importance of his courage . . . Liebknecht!’4 1. Victor Serge (1890-1944). Bom Kubalcic, the son of a Russian revolutionary exile, and brought up in Belgium, he moved into Parisian anarchist circles in the pre-war period. Imprisoned in the Santé 1912-17. In 1917 he took part in the Barcelona uprising. Rearrested on his return to Paris, he reached Russia in 1919. He joined the Party and worked with Zinoviev in the International. In 1923 he joined the Opposition. In 1928 he was expelled from the Party in Russia, imprisoned and then released. In 1933 he was deported to Orenberg and held prisoner until his release in 1936, when he was deprived of Soviet citizenship and left Russia. Works include: VH om m e dans la Prison, Naissance de notre Force, Ville conquiset Les Derniers Temps, Mémoires d'un Révolutionnaire, L'A ffaire Toulaev. 2. V. Serge, M émoires d'un Révolutionnaire, Paris, 1951, p. 57. 3. Henri Guilbeaux (1884-1938). Bom in Belgium of a French family, he knew Ger­ m an well and edited anthologies of German poetry, besides writing on Marxism. Imprisoned in Switzerland in 1918, he was sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1919, for High Treason. The only French representative at the First Congress o f the Comintern in 1919, he worked in the early ’twenties as Berlin correspondent for l'H um anité. 4. H. Barbusse, Le Feu, p. 280.

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Improbable as such a statement may have been in the circumstances, it gives an indication of the influences at work on Barbusse. Henri Guilbeaux wrote: ‘comrade Karl Liebknecht/you are virtue, you are audacity/glory to you, spotless hero of the Revolution’.1 And Georges Pioch, on the road from bourgeois pacifism to communism, was moved by Liebknecht’s solitary stand to write: Frère impeccable en qui la paix se réfugie, O vainqueur de toi-même, égal à tes destins . . .2 Thus the need for action, solidarity and organization was impressing itself on men whose revolt had previously been an affair of the lonely conscience. Yet during the war, and particularly before the Bolshevik Revolution, the sharp ideological divisions which were to emerge with the creation of the Third International were conspicuously absent among French intellectuals of the Left. Traditions springing from 1789, 1848, 1871, from the Dreyfus Case, from Marxism, Proudhonism, syndicalism, from the teachings of Jaurès, and from a broad idealism, fused in a common front of Vesprit against militarism. Thus the gulf which was later to separate Romain Rolland from the communists was ignored, although it was already obviously inherent in his idealist critique Au-dessus de la M êlée which he published in the autumn of 1915, from Switzerland. Rolland8 saw a demented Europe, the bastion of civilization itself, seized by a maniac lust for destruction under the force of which the political, spiritual and cultural leaders had abnegated all responsibility. He could see no cause for war, but believed the root villains to be the three Empires, although each warring nation harboured its own type of imperialism, whether military or financial, republican or feudal.4 Rolland’s protest sprang from an outlook radically different from Lenin’s. For Rolland, the war was a stupid aberration, a denial of advanced western civilization, a ‘disease’. For Lenin, it was the logical outcome of the historical dialectic and of the dominance of finance capital. Rolland believed in a pure, enlightened esprit which could rise above such folly: Lenin regarded militarism as the natural outgrowth of capitalism in its last and ‘highest’ stage. The war threatened to destroy all that Rolland held most precious; for Lenin it promised to usher in the reign of social justice. Rolland wanted peace, Lenin called for revolution. While Rolland took his stand beside Bertrand Russell, E. D. Morel, Gorky and the left-wing democrats, Lenin regarded such men as dangerous and traitorous ‘centrists’. 1. H. Guilbeaux, Du Champ des Horreurs, Geneva, 1917, p. 68. 2. G. Pioch, La P aix inconnue et dolente, Paris, 1929, p. 73. 3. Romain Rolland (1858-1944). Author of the Jean-Christophe novels, besides works on Tolstoy and Gandhi. He was a semi-pacifist and a socialisticaUy-indined idealist in 1914. 4. R. Rolland, Pages Choisies, II, Paris, n.d., pp. 262-8.

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1914-1927 Yet the French intellectuals of the far Left managed to gloss over, or ignore, these differences. When Rolland was attacked by French patriots like Gide and Anatole France as a traitor, Guilbeaux, Martinet, Dunois, and the poet P. J. Jouve, all well-disposed toward Leninism, sprang to his defence.1 This fusion, or confusion, of doctrines was seen in the first steps in political consciousness of Jean de Saint-Prix, the cultivated grandson o f President Loubet who, at the age of twenty-one, came under Rolland’s influence in 1917. Such was the prevailing climate that Saint-Prix could henceforth speak with equal enthusiasm of Rolland, Russell, Trotsky, Martinet, Guilbeaux and Jouve. He could both follow Marcel Martinet in advocating violent revolution on the ground that the death of a hundred men could avert those of millions, and also follow the Rollandist, idealist tendency in declaring himself to acknowledge no other fatherland than the Internationale de l'Esprit.12 Nor could any single label be pinned to the revolutionary philosophy of Barbusse, who had been among the first in France to support Rolland’s moral leadership. Against tradition, legend and Taise gods* Barbusse preferred reason, social justice, the law of numbers, the republican idea, equality.3 This was not Marxian, yet Lenin saw in his novels Le Feu and Clarté clear signs of the mounting revolutionary movement among the masses. And Jean-Richard Bloch,4 while regarding socialism as the logical outcome of the war, continued to borrow more from Péguy, Jaurès and Rolland than from Marxism. Bloch, who attacked capitalist values, the ‘egotistical disorder’ of bourgeois anarchy, and who felt that men should be bom free and equal, with the energies of society directed toward social justice, nevertheless maintained the voluntarist strain which characterized the journal VEffort Líbre he had founded in 1910, and he still pinned his hopes on the victory of reason, rather than of class violence.5 While it was to take the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Third International in 1919 to clarify the real, practical choices, in terms of thought and action, the strength of disgust, horror and grief drove a number of intellectuals toward preliminary action. It was Barbusse who most persistently expressed their resentment against the rich, the war profiteers, the gulf between ‘those who gain and those who grieve’.6 If his contention that the officer class avoided death while the soldiers fell was statistically refutable,7 his claim that the English arms manufacturers 1. Ibid., p. 315. 2. J. de Saint-Prix, Lettres ( 1917-1919), Paris, 1924, p. 78. 3. H. Barbusse, Clarté, Paris, 1920, pp. 269-90. 4. Jean-Richard Bloch (1884-1947). A Jewish writer from Alsace, he fought Marne and at Verdun, where he was seriously wounded. 5. J.-R. Bloch, Carnaval est M ort, pp. 15-16. 6. H. Barbusse, Le Feu, p. 328. 7. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans l'Abîm e, Paris, 1920, p. 23.

65

on the

c

I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

had made 15 milliards of francs during the first thirty-one months of the war seemed to lead logically to the view that ‘the rule of life every­ where rests on the arbitrary wishes of the Alliance of the rich’. The urge to act was powerful, even if doctrines were still confused. Barbusse joined with Lefebvre, Vaillant-Couturier and Georges Bruyère in founding in March 1917 the Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants (A.R.A.C.), a left-wing association of ex-servicemen which later fell under communist control. Raymond Lefebvre had evolved from a neo-Tolstoyan, then Rollandist, position to a fiercely militant and Marxist attitude. A young law student turned writer, his novel Sacrifice cTAbraham shared with Martinet’s La Maison de VAbri the honour of being one of the best novels of life in the rear to come out of wartime France.1 Lefebvre’s anger against right-wing socialist leaders like Renaudel and Sembat was shared by VaillantCouturier, whose activity for the A.R.A.C. and anti-militarist articles resulted late in 1918 in the first of his many subsequent imprisonments.12 The authorities were becoming less tolerant. Martinet’s Paris paper La Plèbe was forcibly closed early in 1918 and his colleague Fernand Desprès was imprisoned in the Santé. These intellectuals were tending increasingly to co-operate with the revolutionary leaders within the socialist and syndicalist movements at a time when not only the desperate situation at the front but also the success of the Bolshevik Revolution had injected new elements of tension into the situation. As Victor Serge recalled, the Bolshevik Revolution and the consequent withdrawal of Russia from the war were not generally popular with the French working class. But the intellectuals as a class showed a more spontaneous enthusiasm than the mass of socialist militants, whose attitude changed appreciably only after November 1918. Serge himself saw in the Revolution the beginning of everything, the realization of aspirations long nursed and nourished in prison.3 The news of the Revolution came to Lefebvre as *tm coup de tonnerre’. Russia became his Holy Land, the focus of his emotions and his reason. In 1920 he admitted that the condition of the Russian workers was grave, but attributed this, correctly, to external causes. Then he set out for the Holy Land himself. Clearly the quickest and least equivocal responses came from those who 1. Raymond Lefebvre (1890-1920) also wrote La Guerre des Soldats and brochures such as V Ancien Soldat and La Révolution ou la Mortt which had a striking effect on young intellectuals. 2. Lefebvre and Vaillant-Couturier both came from prosperous Protestant families. From 1911 until 1914 they were at the Sorbonne. They met again in 1916 in hospital and began to discuss plans for a ‘Zimmerwald of intellectuals*, the seminal idea of the Clarté movement. Amedée Dunois’ comment, that the war had hurled Lefebvre from his inheritance, applied equally well to Vaillant-Couturier. 3. V. Serge, Mémoires d’un Révolutionnaire, p. 73.

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1914-1927 had already adopted a semi-Leninist position. Henri Guilbeaux had greeted the February Revolution with the words: Jeune Russie tu as terrassé le noir dragon de Poppression; tu as vaincu, sois saluée.1

The events of October appeared as the culmination of his dreams, and he too determined to set out for Russia. Barbusse predicted that ‘the figure of Lenin will appear as that of a kind of Messiah9, and he soon revealed an outlook that remained prevalent among certain French intellectuals over the next four decades: namely the tendency to accept Soviet laws at their face value, ignoring any discrepancy between theory and practice. Barbusse saw in the Soviet representative system convincing proof of a popular democracy.123The workers, he said, enjoyed direct power. The exploitation of man by man had been abolished by Article 3 of the Constitution of Soviets of July 1918. More plausibly, perhaps, his admiration was extended to the work of Alexandra Kollontai, Commissar for Public Hygiene, and of Luna­ charsky, Commissar for Education. Yet his Marxism remained an imperfect thing. The argument of his novel Clarté, that the rule of the proletariat was based on the justice of the ‘Law of Numbers’, difficult to sustain with regard to any country, became positively ridiculous when applied to Russia, four-fifths of whose population were peasants.8 If Barbusse tended to borrow indiscriminately from an alien vocabulary, and if Russia, in his eyes, was assuming a messianic, religious quality, with figures like Trotsky attaining almost supernatural proportions, then he was by no means alone in his fervour. In November 1918, Georges Pioch wrote: Sainte Révolution, humaine, décidée A convertir le monde à ton verbe âpre et sûr, Tu fais jaillir des cœurs battant vers le futur Le cri de la Misère et Péclair de l'Idée.45

Among the future communist intellectuals, enthusiasm for the Bol­ shevik Revolution was as universal a feature as was denunciation of the war. To this rule there existed, however, an interesting exception in Boris Souvarine.6*Soon to become the most politically energetic and authorita1. H. Guilbeaux, Du Champ des Horreurs, p. 72. 2. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans PAb me, p. 88. 3. See L'H om m e, Number 1, October 1919. 4. G. Pioch, La Paix inconnue et dolente, p. 71. 5. Boris Souvarine. Bom 1893 at Kiev, later a naturalized Frenchman. He was wounded and discharged from the army early in the war. Arrested on May 17th, 1920, as one of the secretaries of the Committee for Adhesion to the Third Inter­ national, he was imprisoned until his acquittal in March 1921. A member of the Executive Committee of the Third International, he was expelled from the Party in 1924.

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tive communist intellectual in France, Souvarine had criticized Lenin’s left Zimmerwald movement throughout the war in the socialist paper Le Populaire, and in November 1917 he wrote: ‘It is to be feared that for Lenin and his friends the “dictatorship of the proletariat” means the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and their chief, which would be a disaster for the Russian working class and, consequently, for the world proletariat.’1 While the precise moment of his conversion remains obscure, its cause doubtless lay in a growing conviction of the necessity of a Party dictatorship, and not in the sudden revelation of a genuinely proletarian one. Not only the future communists, but even the idealists and those who were to hesitate long before joining the French Communist Party, like Bloch and Paul Langevin, rejoiced at the news of the Revolution in Russia. Rolland, the moral leader of this school, declared somewhat equivocally in March 1918 that the example of the new Russia, whatever the immediate results, would not be lost on the peoples of the West once the war was over.123A disciple of Rolland’s, Jean Guéhenno (b. 1890), a teacher of the classics and a future idealist sympathizer, recalled his ‘religious joy’ at the thought of vast, desperate Russia where the Marxist Revolution had first triumphed against all the teachings of Marx himself.8 But, for the idealists Russia was one thing, the advanced West another. In their eyes the Revolution was an unmixed blessing—at a safe distance; whereas for Barbusse, Lefebvre, Guilbeaux, Vaillant-Couturier, Martinet and Pioch it furnished a reason for urging the formation of a French Communist Party at the earliest possible moment. Here was the first specific issue dividing the future communists from the idealists. With time, this rift was to widen, rather than diminish. Within the next few years a number of the intellectuals were able to visit Russia. Few returned disillusioned. Henri Guilbeaux, condemned to death in France in his absence, arrived in Russia to find that Lenin was applying Marxism as a ‘living organism’, as a science ‘like biology’. In the circumstances, Guilbeaux had no difficulty in accepting the dictatorship, and he was the only Frenchman to attend the founding Congress of the Comintern in March 1919. Victor Serge, following a revolutionary escapade in Spain, was finally transported to Russia in 1919 on the basis of an exchange of political prisoners between the Russian and French Governments. He later wrote: ‘The entire first phase of the Russian Revolution seems to me today to have been dominated by the utter honesty of Lenin and his group. It was this that attracted all of us to him, regardless of our nationality and viewpoint . . . the first days of the International were the days of heroic camaraderie. We lived in 1. Le Populaire, 17 November 1917. 2. R. Rolland, Pages Choisies, //, p. 294. 3. J. Guéhenno, La Foi D ifficile, Paris, 1957, p. 44. 68

1914-1927 boundless hope.’1 The doubts of westerners tended to be swept away by the mood of the Bolshevik leaders themselves. When Serge warned Zinoviev that the western revolution would be slow in coming, Zinoviev replied: T see you are not a Marxist.’2 Serge, like Guilbeaux, Lefebvre and other French visitors, saw in the Red Terror the only possible alternative to a White Terror. The Mensheviks were considered honest, but quite unpractical in their approach to such a situation. According to Serge, the centralizing tendency and the intolerance of the Bolsheviks were temporarily necessary, and could be fought at a future date only from within, not from without. Serge, who settled down in Russia to put his culture and his extensive grasp of foreign languages at the service of the International, remained until 1924 one of the principal apologists for Bolshevism writing in the French communist press, particularly in the journal Clarté. Raymond Lefebvre, too, went to Russia in 1920, running the Allied sea blockade to attend the Second Congress of the International. In September he reported enthusiastically on a journey made across the South and the Ukraine. Trotsky remembered him wearing a Russian shirt as a symbol of solidarity; Georges Duhamel described his ‘youthful and generous fever’; Rolland spoke of him as ‘the symbol of the youth of the old world offering itself to new crusades’; Serge wrote of Lefebvre’s ‘luminous optimism’.8 The picture which emerges of him is compellingly attractive. In the autumn, with other French companions, he set out for France even more determined that a French Communist Party must be created, but he did not live to witness the event. His boat, again running the blockade, sank in the Murmansk area of the Arctic on October 1st, 1920, with the loss of all lives. Lefebvre was not the first visiting intellectual to fall victim to the Allied intervention, although he was perhaps the most notable. Others, equally enthusiastic, had preceded him in their eagerness to put themselves at the service of the Revolution. According to an anonymous account published by the French communist group at Petrograd, and not subsequently denied, the publicist de la Fare was ‘assassinated’ (executed?) by the Allies at Constantinople in February 1919. Michel, editor of Tocsin, was ‘tortured and shot’ by the Allies at Odessa on March 3rd, 1919, the same day as Jeanne Labourbe, a teacher and member of the French communist group at Moscow, had been shot at Odessa, also on Allied orders.4 She later assumed a minor place in communist hagiography and was the subject of a painting and of a mention by Thorez even as late as 1952. 1. V. Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, trans. by Ralph Manheim, New York, 1937, p. 34. 2. V. Serge, Mémoires (Tun Révolutionnaire, p. 82. 3. See A la Mémoire de Raymond Lefebvre, Lepetit, Marcel Vergeat, Petrograd, Editions de l'Internationale Communiste, 1921. 4. Ibid., p. 3.

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Any lingering doubts that the intellectuals may have entertained about Bolshevik methods were dispelled in the mood of bitterness which fol­ lowed from the prolonged Allied intervention. Barbusse’s anger at the crushing of Bela Kim’s Hungarian communist régime and at the blockade prompted him incessantly to urge the French proletariat to come to the aid of their starving Russian brothers. The White Terror reigned in Finland as well as in Hungary, the Spartacists had been crushed in Germany and their leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, murdered. The equivocal attitude of the C.G.T. and the S.F.I.O. toward these events and toward the strikes of the summer of 1919 seemed to confirm the Leninist view of the objectively reactionary nature of the Majority Socialists. The anger of west European revolutionaries was matched only by their frustration. Vaillant-Couturier, in his poem Un Deux . . . Soldat de VOrdre, wrote: Ce soir pour clôturer le bal la mort jettera dans le noir canal le corps de Rosa près du corps de Karl.1

Even Romain Rolland, by now increasingly suspicious of Bolshevik methods, wrote in October 1919 that the intervention in Russia again demonstrated that the war had been one waged by plutocracies against both monarchies and the people of all countries,123and he was no more reluctant than Barbusse and Vaillant-Couturier to blame the Entente powers for the murder of the Spartacist leaders.8 Thus, for the time being, the reactionary policy of the British and French Governments, combined with the conservatism of the Majority Socialists, served to prevent a split in the alliance between Leninist revolutionaries and left idealists formed early in the war. This continued alliance among intellectuals was embodied in the Clarté organization,45 one of whose first public pro­ nouncements was directed against ‘the ferocious coalition of inter­ national finance’ still striving to keep the working class in its centuries-old state of slavery.6* Allied intervention, no longer justifiable as essential to the general war effort after November 1918, yet still mounting in intensity, h a d \ curious effect on at least three Frenchmen whose recent history and outlook separated them sharply from the others under discussion. The fact that 1. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Poésie, p. 110. 2. R. Rolland, Quinze Ans de Combat (1919-1934), Paris, 1935, p. 31. 3. Ibid., p. 12. 4. See pp. 42-3. 5. The French signatories included Anatole France, Barbusse, Victor Cyril, Georges Duhamel, Henry-Jacques, Laurent Tailhade, Raymond Lefebvre, Magdeleine Marx, VaUlant-Couturier. Humanité, 9 September 1919.

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1914-1927 all three were resident in Russia, when set beside the experiences of Guilbeaux, Lefebvre, Serge and others, tends to dispose of the idea that western intellectual support for the Bolshevik experiment at this stage depended on remote idealization and ignorance of the real situation. René Marchand had been living in Russia as an admirer of Tsarism, a contributor to the conservative Figaro, and as a personal correspondent of President Poincaré. An unlikely Bolshevik, in fact, Marchand did not radically change his opinions in November 1917, continuing to abhor Bolshevism and its 'demagogic violence’. He regarded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as ‘infamous’ both for Russia and her former allies. Yet by the summer of 1918, he was increasingly dominated by the impression that the Soviet Government enjoyed wide popular support, was the only feasible alternative to complete anarchy and, so he believed, was bound to take up arms against the Central Powers if given time. A conference he attended on August 23rd with the American Consul, General Poole, and certain Allied agents, convinced him that their plans for sabotage could lead only to further chaos and famine, without having any material effect on the war effort. N ot having heard a single mention of the question of the struggle against Germany, he urged Poincaré, in an open letter, to reverse this policy at once.1 It was a strange testimony in which patriotism and hatred for Germany were tempered by a pragmatic attitude toward the problem of administra­ tion within Russia. Subsequent frustration at the intensification of the intervention policy after the defeat of Germany made of this French conservative a communist and an exile. In May 1920, he wrote an article in /’Humanité denouncing French capitalism and the ruling class of profiteers who had tried to crush the Revolution in Russia, and who had succeeded in Germany.2 Marchand was to become one of the most sensitive critics of Soviet cinema. Marchand’s case bore analogies to that of Pierre Pascal who arrived in Russia in 1916 as a member of a French military mission. Later, he became convinced that the ‘terrorist’ campaign of 1918 against Lenin and Zinoviev had been financed by Lockhart and Grenard, the British and French representatives, in order to stimulate a bloody reprisal. Like M archan^ he regarded French press accounts of Bolshevism in action as grotesquely distorted, and he too was impressed by the fact that the Bolsheviks stood for order and efficiency in co-operation with any experts, officers and specialists who offered their assistance.3 Pascal, by a series of pragmatic judgements, soon came to believe that communism stood for a new, higher moral order, for justice, for ‘the springtime of a new world’. 1. R. Marchand, Pour la Russie Socialiste, Berne, 1918, pp. 5-14. 2. Humanité, 26 May 1920. 3. P. Pascal, En Russie Rouge, Petrograd, 1920, pp. 12-17.

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Another member of the French military mission to Russia whose conversion to c o m m u n ism condemned him to exile was the socialist lawyer Jacques Sadoul.1 Sadoul had been a ‘Majority’, patriotic socialist, and a close friend of Albert Thomas, who took office in the wartime Government. He too rebelled against the Allied intervention, but the basis of his accusation against the French and British Governments rested on the interesting claim that from December 1917 until February 1918 Lenin and Trotsky had called repeatedly for military support from the Entente, on the condition that the authority of the workers’ Government be respected. This being refused, Brest-Litovsk was inevitable. Sadoul, cut off from his own Government in Paris, had in fact worked with untiring optimism to convince his immediate military superior in Russia, General Niessel, of the need to support the Bolsheviks militarily, but without avail. Trotsky, with whom Sadoul had occasional contacts, had, without committing himself to an outright request for assistance, managed to give the impression that the Bolsheviks might at any time throw in their lot with the Entente against the Central Powers.123Being patriots themselves, and witnessing the pressure exerted by left com­ munists, left S.R.’s and other revolutionary groups for a resumption of the war against Germany, both Marchand and Sadoul managed to forget that Bukharin and his colleagues based their case on the possibility of a revolution behind the Austro-German lines, and not on any reliance on Allied military support. There is a certain irony in the way in which these two French intellectuals came to communism by forgetting Lenin’s critique of the imperialist war and the doctrine of the Zimmerwald movement, and by overlooking the astute perception which led the Germans to send him back to Russia in a sealed train. As with Marchand and Pascal, Sadoul’s admiration for the Bolsheviks as practical administrators doing the essential job enabled him rapidly to overcome earlier beliefs. Thus Sadoul, a democratic socialist, excused the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on the ground that it had been elected before the Bolsheviks took power and on the illogical assumption that the majority of peasants (whose votes had in fact put the Bolsheviks in a small minority within the Assembly) really upheld the Soviet system. By way of a number of such tortuous arguments Sadoul arrived at the view that there had never been a revolution so rapid, profound and clearly popular.2 1. Jacques Sadoul (1881-1956). Condemned in absentia by a court martial in November 1919, he ran the same month as an absentee and unsuccessful socialist candidate. He joined the P.C.F. and wrote articles from abroad for VHumanité. In 1924 he returned to Paris and his sentence was abrogated. He later worked as Paris correspondent of Izvestia, remaining in the Party until his death. 2. R. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-21, vol. I, London, 1961, pp. 127 and 136-7. 3. J. Sadoul, Vive la République des Soviets/, Moscow, 1918, p. 8.

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1914-1927 But the intervention was only one facet of a wider problem, the general triumph of reaction after the war. In January 1919, Barbusse pointed out that with the Entente coveting the German colonies and France claiming the left bank of the Rhine, the nations of prey were changing their names. Public opinion (for which Barbusse never had much regard) he saw as ‘myopic and animal* before these dangers.1 In October, addressing him­ self to the young, he posed the question: was humanity to emerge from the war more free? or more enslaved than ever? The old gang, generals, ministers, deputies and profiteers were all back in the saddle.123The Treaty of Versailles confirmed his worst fears and could only lead to future wars. The people of Alsace-Lorraine ought to have been consulted: ‘the other annexations are proportionate to the respective powers of the con­ querors’.8 But, according to Barbusse, it was not Clemenceau, Millerand, Orlando, Lloyd George et al. who were to be blamed; it was the system which produced them. And in calling for a complete change of system, Barbusse spoke for a young and rising generation. In the first two years following the war, the Socialist Party’s membership grew again from 34,000 to 133,000, most of the new recruits being young left-wingers in an embittered mood. The cause of parliamentary socialism was further discredited by the Party’s defeats in the elections of 1919; the number of socialist deputies in the Chamber fell from 103 to 68. At the National Congress held in August 1919, a motion was passed declaring that ‘it is capitalism in all countries which bears the responsi­ bility and the eternal shame of the war’. The Congress saluted the Bolsheviks and denounced the intervention. This swing to the left was accelerated at the Strasbourg Congress in February 1920, when a large majority (4,330 votes against 337) of the delegates decided that the Party should withdraw from the Second International, although the Comin­ tern’s subscription fee, the rigorous twenty-one conditions, caused the Congress to defer the decision whether or not to join the Third Inter­ national and to send a negotiating mission, led by M. Cachin and L.-O. Frossard, to Moscow. In the summer and autumn of 1920 the campaign in favour of joining the Comintern was intensified, aided by a new wave of strikes affecting transport workers, miners and engineers, and by the struggle within the C.G.T. over the question of the feasibility of a revolutionary general strike. The failure of these strikes did the reformist cause no good. A number of intellectuals were active in the final campaign, particu­ larly Boris Souvarine, Vaillant-Couturier, Lefebvre, Martinet, Barbusse, George Pioch, Noël Gamier and Jacques Sadoul (still exiled). Vaillant1. H. Barbusse, Paroles d*un Combattant (1917-1920), p. 86. 2. VH om m e, Number 1, October 1919. 3. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans l'Abîm e, p. 34.

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Couturier, by nature an activist, was elected deputy for the first sector of the Seine in 1919, while continuing to blast away at the right wing led by Renaudel which, he said, having plunged headlong into a bloodbath, into useless massacres, into the Union sacrée, now had the impudence to claim the great Jaurès as its spiritual leader.1 The choice was not, as the reformists argued, between Jaurès or Lenin, but between Lenin or Noske, Pilsudski and Millerand.123In his eyes the socialists were ‘politi­ cians’ while the communists were ‘fighters’.8 His friend Raymond Lefebvre, equally passionately committed, was angered by the confusion and cowardice prevalent within the C.G.T. and the S.F.I.O;, the fear of breaking ‘the non-existent unity of the workers’ which resulted in the frittering away of the 1920 strike wave. Between capital and labour, he believed, the only relationship could be one of naked force. He was convinced that in May there had been situations where the workers could have taken control of a town or locality, but firm leadership had been lacking and the reformists afraid.4 Even before his fatal journey to Russia, Lefebvre entertained no doubts at all about the Comintern’s twenty-one conditions. Jacques Sadoul wrote from Russia that the French communists must form a militant élite, create shock cadres and throw out the ‘opportunists’. Meanwhile in France intellectuals joined and manipulated pressure groups and front organizations like the A.R.A.C., the Committee for Adhesion to the Third International and Clarté. Although the leading intellectual co-ordinator and publicist of the campaign, Boris Souvarine, was put out of action during the decisive months by his arrest on a charge of conspiracy, the sympathy this evoked within the socialist movement rebounded in the communists’ favour. The ground had been so thoroughly prepared that the final vote in favour of joining the Com­ munist International, taken at the Congress of Tours in December, was almost a foregone conclusion. 3,028 delegates voted in favour, 1,022 against. The majority became the new Communist Party, with a membership of 131,000. On January 12th, 1921, /*Humanité, henceforward the daily organ of French communism, announced that both Barbusse and Séverine (1855— 1929), the veteran feminist, and for many years an anarchist sympathizer, had joined the new Party. With regard to Barbusse, the report was premature. Arguing that he was more useful outside the Party, he main­ tained, for so militant a writer, a curious shyness of direct political affiliation, almost as if some of Rolland’s regard for the independence 1. Jean Jaurès, leader of the S.F.I.O., had been assassinated in Paris on the eve of the war. 2. Humanité, 7 August 1920. 3. Humanité, 9 December 1920. 4. Humanité, 13 June 1920.

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1914-1927 of Vesprit had lodged in his protesting mind. It was not until 1923, when the Political Bureau had been incarcerated in the Santé as a result of their opposition to Poincaré’s occupation of the Ruhr, that he did finally join, with the reported statement: ‘Since I have espoused their ideas, I ought to espouse their risks’.1 According to his secretary, he commented on February 18th: ‘Perhaps I would be more useful to the Party without joining it, but this is not the time, when all the militants are imprisoned. . . to stand on one side.’2 And although he was fond of reflections such as, ‘the best way to serve a cause is to bring the spirit of discipline and of unity into the ranks of the organized militants of that cause’,8 he nonethe­ less refused in 1924 to stand for election in a Paris constituency where he had a good chance of winning. But the contradictions Barbusse allowed himself between his thought and his action were perhaps less serious than the contradictions apparent within his thought. It was the following year, 1924, that one of Barbusse’s younger admirers, Léon Moussinac, joined the Party.4 Seven years and forty-five days in uniform had imbued him with an eternal hatred of war. A friend of Vaillant-Couturier, Moussinac had been invited by Marcel Martinet to collaborate on the literary page of VHumanité, while his contact with Barbusse and other communists in Clarté clinched yet another conversion to communism. The report that Séverine had joined in 1921 was correct. A militant for forty years, she explained her attitude when testifying at the trial of Souvarine and other communists in March 1921. ‘One is a communist for many reasons. We who fight poverty, we have seen in communism the régime which assures the worker the right to eat: we wish to suppress prostitution - communism has suppressed it as it has protected the children. All this has pulled us toward communism.’6 Séverine was one of the few intellectuals who had been mature ‘Dreyfusards’ in the ’nineties and who were willing to grasp the hand of international communism at this early stage. Another, though from totally different motivations, was Anatole France (1844-1924), winner in 1921 of the Nobel Prize, and the first intellectual of international stature to bring his support to the French Party. Although his satirical works, particularly Penguin Island (1908), carried clear socialist implications, the abruptness of his conversion from 1. J. Duelos, J. Fréville, Henri Barbusse, Paris, 1946, p. 15. 2. A. Vidal, H enri Barbusse Soldat de la Paix, Paris, 1953, p. 126. 3. Ibid., p. 130. 4. Léon Moussinac. Bom 1890. Attended courses at the Ecole Socialiste given by Jaurès, Guesde, Sembat, from 1908. He published anti-war poems in Le M ercure de la France, and later novels {La Tête la première. M anifestation interdite), volumes of poetry {L'Echarpe denouée. Les Reflets de Bonheur, Dernière Heure, Aubes Clan­ destines). He later performed notable services for the communists in the theatre and cinema. 5. Humanité, 12 March 1921.

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the fiercely patriotic stand he took early in the war caused a number of hostile critics to charge him with sensationalism. True or not, one is bound to conclude that his espousal of the view that ‘there is only one power which can reliably, that is to say scientifically, guarantee world peace: the proletarian power’ came strangely from a writer whose approach to politics remained one of secluded, abstract and somewhat superior rationalization. Yet the articles he wrote throughout 1919 in /’Humanité, attacking capitalism, praising Jaurès, supporting the Clarté group and appealing, with Barbusse, on behalf of socialist candidates at the elections,1 revealed a genuine emotion not unconnected with the futility of the slaughter he had witnessed and with the realization that his years must be numbered. He denounced the intervention, called on the western workers to rally in support of their Russian brothers, and later went so far as to call Lenin ‘the greatest man of Russia since Peter the Great’.12 The exact nature of Anatole France’s relationship to the Party is not clear. The view that he joined it has been generally accepted, a view which the communists have assiduously propagated, bearing in mind the first principle of utility, that of prestige. Georges Cogniot made the claim in 1945,3 and VHumanité listed him among the great adherents of the past in the same year.45In 1954 Jean Fréville, a communist historian of the Party’s early years, wrote that France ‘apporte son adhésion’ to the Party soon after its foundation.6 The German historian Jürgen Rühle has likewise accepted this version without comment.6 He may have joined. The gesture would certainly have conformed to the rather quixotic mood which marked his old age. However, /’Humanité went no further on January 11th, 1921, than to claim that France had ‘affirmed his solid­ arity’ with the Party, whereas the next day it mentioned Barbusse and Séverine as having joined, thus drawing an implicit distinction. Annette Vidal recalls that Barbusse met France a good deal at this time and tried to impress upon him the need for action, but France replied: ‘You’re right, but I’m too old, I haven’t the strength to follow you, but I’ve confidence in you.’7 In February 1922, Amedée Dunois wrote an article entitled ‘Anatole France and Us’, arguing that although France belonged to no political party, he was still a true friend of the revolution.8 It is most unlikely that Dunois, a member of the Central Committee, was ignorant of the facts. Soon after, the veteran writer 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

See VHumanité, 3 February, 26 March, 16 May, 6 November 1919. Quoted in J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, Berlin, 1960, p. 348. G. Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 22. Humanité, 12 October 1945. Humanité, 12 October 1954. J. Rühle, op. cit., p. 345. A. Vidal, Henri Barbusse Soldat de la P aix, p. 168. Humanité, 20 February 1922.

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1914-1927 began to protest against the Moscow trial of Social Revolutionaries, drawing from Boris Souvarine a sharp diatribe about France’s 'indulgent eclecticism’ which allowed him to remain a friend of Louis Barthou, the Foreign Minister, and to take his information on Russia from Renaudel.1 Henceforward, his name appears almost to have dropped out of the Party press, and when he died Clarté devoted most of one issue to denigrating his career, Marcel Fourrier calling him variously a ‘socialdemocrat’, ‘social-traitor’, ‘social-chauvinist’, etc.8 The cumulative evidence against France’s membership is strong, and since the Party, resolutely pursuing the prestige principle, has not bothered to mention these ruptures, one is entitled to dispute the entire claim. Only by an extremely elastic extension of the term could any of these senior friends of French communism be called Marxists. While Marxist ideas and social categories were by no means alien to a veteran socialist like Séverine, who had taken over the Cri du Peuple from Jules Vallès, she came to communism as to the least corrupted force opposing the old enemies of militarism, clericalism, commercialism and anti-feminism.8 As for Barbusse, his utterances echoed variously the Utopian socialists, or even Rousseau, rather than Marx. ‘Communism,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘is a practical application, in the conditions of contemporary social life, of the eternal truths of reason and of conscience.*12345Earlier, in 1917, he had defined the moral law as the law of the general interest. It implied the sacrifice of each to all, for all men had a right to share in the govern­ ment of the society to which they were attached ‘by a sort of contract’.6 But Barbusse’s attraction toward the paternalist, if not the authoritarian, aspect of Bolshevism, is not a mystery. In his eyes socialism was ‘the clarification of reason’, yet the masses conspicuously lacked reason. Deeply as he shared their sufferings, he was apt to shower them with abuse as *bêtes\ ‘fous*, ‘myopic’, ‘animal’, as having short memories and poor judgement, as revering sacred objects and hating anything new. Liebknecht had been ‘killed by the German people’.6 While his slogan, ‘Reason first. Sentiment ought to spring from the idea; the idea ought never to spring from the sentiment’,7 appears to reverse the Marxist emphasis on life determining consciousness, and although Barbusse’s ‘eternal Reason’ owed more to the Cartesian tradition than the Marxist, the spirit of Barbusse’s thought came close in practice to that of the Bolsheviks. He too believed that only the enlightened could liberate the unenlightened and he, like other French intellectuals, was driven to 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Humanité, 26 April 1922. Clarté, 15 November 1924. See Séverine’s article on bourgeois morality, Clarté, 3 December 1921. H. Barbusse, Le Couteau entre les dents, Paris, 1921, p. 54. H. Barbusse, Paroles d'un Combattant (1917-1920), p. 16. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans l'Abîme, p. 128. Ibid., p. 68.

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action as much by revulsion against stupidity as against injustice, by the same frustration Raymond Lefebvre had felt at the sight of soldiers succumbing to syphilis for lack of a little basic teaching by their officers, by the same outrage which led Magdeleine Marx to write: ‘Tell me, how do men and women who have nothing to do look the workers in the face?'1 But, as Barbusse said, the idea was potent. It was devotion to a burning idea which enabled the French communist intellectuals to regard the Soviet Republic, despite the chaos and misery of its early years, as sustaining its first promise. Vaillant-Couturier’s report of a visit to Russia in 1921 sprang from the conviction and the inspiration, derived from witnessing in the flesh a co-operative social effort, which alone can raise propaganda to the level of art.123 Magdeleine Marx, who had been working on famine relief, followed a journey through war-ravaged Greece and Turkey by a visit to Russia. ‘You find,' she wrote, ‘a totally new relationship between men and things . . The idea, the romantic vision preceded her. Her room in Moscow was modest, ‘but no room ever looked so beautiful to me’.8 So imbued was she with the communist idea and spirit that she found it everywhere; a Russian child told her that in the new society nobody could be jealous because they were all equal and no one had the slightest privilege. This she faithfully reported. The communist experiment represented to foreign intellectuals not only social justice on the economic level, but also general enlightenment on child­ care, health, the status of women, abortion, capital punishment, the rehabilitation of prisoners, advanced teaching methods, the experimental theatre of Meyerhold and so forth. These were the flexible years of N.E.P., of a mixed economy, of the apparently timeless harmony of the Bolshevik leaders, of cultural tolerance. Even so, Magdeleine Marx found ‘too much dogma, too much preaching’.45 But if this generation of communist intellectuals had not fully shaken off the legacy of the bourgeois, or Fabian, enlightenment, they were com­ munists as well, understanding the need for unity, discipline and a strong line. The stark alternative posed by Raymond Lefebvre before his death, La Révolution ou la M ort, remained at least a viable ideal. He had written: ‘The human race imprisoned by imperialist capitalism, I see it as a suppurating wound, and each day which passes without the operation having been performed, is a day gained by death.’6 To that attitude Vaillant-Couturier remained faithful, rejecting courtesies or concessions toward the reformists: ‘Between them and us it is war to the knife’.4 1. M. Marx, Woman, p. 204. 2. Humanité, 16 September 1921. 3. M. Marx, The Romance o f the New Russia, trans. by Anita Grannis, New York, 1924, p. 11. 4. Ibid., p. 165. 5. R. Lefebvre, La Révolution ou la M ort, p. 8. 6. Humanité, 12 January 1921.

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1914-1927 As Secretary to the Propaganda Commission he directed the violent campaign against the S.F.I.O. Barbusse, too, had no more time for ‘bourgeois pacifists’ (the erstwhile allies of the war years) who shrank from the major changes in society which alone could render war im­ possible. The evolutionist reformers were equally dangerous because ‘little by little conservative inertia absorbs the will to reform, and eliminates it*. He did not insist on violence; Zola had said the world would be changed by the pen, not the sword, but the use of violence depended, in Barbusse’s view, on the attitude of the privileged classes. In any case, ‘there are only two parties; the extreme Left and the Right*.1 The image of the knife, the ‘war to the knife’ of which Vaillant-Couturier spoke, was a dominant one in 1921-22, Barbusse’s main text of the former year being entitled Le Couteau entre les dents. Here the fury of his invec­ tive brought even cliché to life: ‘Whoever wills the end wills the m eans. . . violence is today the reality of justice.’12 While political journalism, especially eulogies on the Soviet Union (fourth principle of utility), perhaps took precedence over agitation through front organizations and professional bodies (third principle) once the battle for an independent C.P. had been won, the latter remained an important function for intellectuals. Here Barbusse tirelessly gave a lead, supporting the causes given priority by the Party, praising the Secours Ouvrier International and the Comité pro-Hindou (founded in 1924), creating committees for the defence of victims of the White Terror in the Balkans, denouncing Pilsudski’s treatment of political prisoners and Poincaré’s occupation of the Ruhr, mobilizing intellectuals against the Moroccan war.3 One of the younger communist writers imprisoned in the Santé for sending to French soldiers leaflets protesting against the Ruhr operation was the future Nazi victim Gabriel Péri.45Péri later described his early political evolution. T awoke to the thinking life in a world still at w a r. . . the war was the great fact that one encountered at every turn in the road . . . I searched for an explanation.’ It was in the Communist Mani­ festo and later works of Marx and Engels that he found one. ‘It seemed to me I had a service to render, a task to fulfil. . .’6 1. H. Barbusse, La Lueurfans VAbîme, p. 120. 2. H. Barbusse, Le Couteau entre les dents, pp. 46-7. 3. On the Moroccan war, see p. 206. 4. Gabriel Péri (1902-1942). From a bourgeois Toulon family, he joined the S.F.I.O. in 1919, and the Communist Party a year later. He wrote for Avant-Garde, for Clarté, and became secretary of the Jeunesses Communistes. In 1922 he visited Moscow and lectured on ‘Vanguard literature in France*. From 1924 he worked for the foreign section of 1*Humanité, which he later directed. He was Paris correspondent for Pravda 1928-9. Elected to the Central Committee in 1929. Elected a deputy in 1932 and 1936, he became Vice-President of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chamber. In 1942 he was executed by the Nazis. 5. Gabriel Péri—un grand Français, Paris, 1947, pp. 111-12.

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Not least of the tasks the intellectuals could usefully fulfil was to explain and defend the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Henri Guilbeaux, still in exile, first in Russia then in Germany, wrote frequently in VHumanité justifying Soviet diplomacy, and Pierre Pascal in Moscow ridiculed myths about the conquering designs of Trotsky which had gained added currency during the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920. Barbusse himself entered into a detailed apology for the first eleven years of Soviet foreign policy, pointing to the renunciation of the aggressive designs of the Tsars in Turkey and Persia, to Soviet calls for general disarmament and to the series of non-aggression pacts concluded by Chicherin with Turkey, Germany, Lithuania, Persia and other states. Tn the whole eleven years’ history of the Soviets,’ Barbusse declared, ‘no step has been taken that was not directed toward the effective realization of peace.’1 But pacts meant little; the capitalist powers them­ selves had subscribed to the League Covenant, to Locarno and to the Briand-Kellogg Pact. Proof, in the eyes of Barbusse, Magdeleine Marx* and others, that the imperialist tigers had not changed their spots, was to be found in actual policies pursued in the Greco-Turkish war, in Syria, Morocco, India and in the stratagems of the world oil magnates who, according to Barbusse, had wrecked the 1922 Genoa Conference, prevent­ ing a rapprochement with Russia. The detested leaders of the Third Republic who, until 1924, refused to grant diplomatic recognition to Russia, were ceaselessly satirized by communist writers and cartoonists, particularly ‘Poincaré-/a-gwerre’, Clemenceau, 'Ange de la Paix', Mil­ lerand and Barthou, to whom Georges Pioch referred as ‘ce singe sans génie. . . cynique. . . qui passe l'indécence et lasse l'ironie'.8 The battle with conservatives and socialists was open and obvious. The quarrel with the left idealist intellectuals, on the other hand, which slowly gathered momentum, was more tortuous and more painful. The wartime coalition, the internationale de l'esprit, had broken down. From the outset the leading protagonists were Barbusse and Rolland. As friends like Gorky quit Russia in sorrow or bitterness, and as reliable reports about the Russian situation began to form a coherent picture in his mind, Rolland’s antipathy to Bolshevism grew, although he was careful to frame his criticism in cautious, discreet terms. It was Barbusse who launched the first personal attack in an article A propos du ‘Rollandisme' in December 1921.1234 The ‘intellectual Left’, Barbusse argued, having attacked the old régime, remained adversaries of the new. He paid tribute to Rolland’s moral strength, his genius, his courage during the 1. 2. 3. 4.

H. Barbusse, The Soviet Union and Peace, New York, n.d., pp. 1-20. M. Marx, ‘La Turquie vaincue’, Humanité, 4, 8, 10, 24, 29 November 1921. Humanité, 25 April 1921. Clarté, 3 December 1921.

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1914-1927 war. But were these qualities enough? The rôle of the pure moralist was purely negative, always wise after the event, always trying to begin anew within the complex world of existing laws. Violence, about which Rolland and his friends made so much fuss, was merely a ‘provisional detail’, a short-term necessity, like constraint on common criminals. The spiritual­ ists must come out of their ivory tower, unless they wished to remain an ‘ornamental Left* to useless pacifisms and liberalisms. Rolland replied in January 1922, in the Brussels journal L 'A rt Libre. The doctrine of ‘neo-Marxist communism’, he explained, seemed to him to conform very little to true human progress under the absolutist form it took. In Russia humanity, liberty and truth had been sacrificed to raison d'état. ‘Militarism, police terror, brutal force are not sanctified for me because they are the instrument of a communist dictatorship instead of being that of a plutocracy.’1 Barbusse’s description of violence as a ‘provisional detail* would, he felt, have come more suitably from a bourgeois Minister of National Defence. ‘It is not true that the end justifies the means. The means are still more important to true progress than the end.’ Rolland concluded with the provocative apology that the best service the intellectual could render to the communist cause was to criticize it freely, and with the observation that Lenin alone exercised independence of judgement, whereas around him were only scribes of the law.123 The following month Barbusse banished the ‘Rollandists’ from the revolutionary movement altogether, heaping them with charges of egoism and self-love.8 The debate grew more bitter. ‘Party thought, church thought, caste thought,’ replied Rolland - ‘instruments of every oppression.’4 Against acceptance of violence he posed the example of conscientious objectors, of Gandhi, of the technique of Non-Acceptance. The great factors of human change were sacrifice and time, the ‘mastermason*. As he himself was later to admit, he had worked himself into an excessively idealistic position, viewing ‘means* in absolute terms and forgetting that the ‘Non-Acceptance’ of Denikin and Kolchak was not likely to prove efficacious, even with the aid of the ‘master-mason*. At this point L 'A rt Libre invited the opinions of twenty-six French, German and Belgian intellectuals, thereby clarifying and advertising the gulf which had opened up so rapidly between the communist and idealist schools. The majority of responses called for unconditional independence of the spirit, but within the framework of a general sympathy for the Revolution. Not all went so far as Georges Duhamel who wrote: ‘The Revolution is a thing of the spirit (Galileo, Newton, Beethoven) . . . 1. R. Rolland, Quinze Ans de Combat (1919-1934), p. 36. 2. Ibid., p. 38. 3. Clarté, 1 February 1922. 4. U A rt Libre, February 1922.

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the political Revolution is a superficial act, without real consequences’.1 P. J. Jouve spoke of the mission of art, while Gustave Dupin, Jacques Mesnil (briefly a communist), René Arcos and Charles Vildrac were for independence of the spirit, but always translated on to the level of action. Luc Durtain and Léon Bazalgette sought to reconcile the principle of individuality with that of the community. A violent attack on the idealists was launched by Marcel Martinet, now literary critic of l'Humanité. Martinet, who spoke of their ‘vain retreat’, found most of the replies ‘worthless’. These ‘bons garçons’ had learned nothing since 1914: René Arcos who wrote of ‘the animal passivity of sad crowds always ready for a fight’, Charles Vildrac who believed a writer forfeited his value as a revolutionary by putting himself at the service of a political party, Luc Durtain who had the impudence to think that intellectuals were the fathers of all revolutions. Perhaps, commented Martinet, predestined fathers never recognize their children. Ultimately, in his view, the famous internationale de l'esprit took shape only to combat, in the name of liberty, the workers who fought for liberty.12 Again Rolland replied, with restraint.3 He still maintained that to defend liberty by upholding a tyranny was a sophism. The trial of the Social Revolutionaries earlier in the year had not struck him any more favourably than it had Anatole France, Bertrand Russell or George Brandes. However, he had to admit he did not know ‘the truth of the affair’. There could be no real dialogue, no give and take. This debate was the first of many future ones in France which were to bear it an uncanny resemblance. It was as if in each decade a new group of intellectuals came to these problems of ends and means afresh, as if the logical possibilities had not already been exhaustively demonstrated. Theoreti­ cally, concessions were rarely made. The individual intellectual might move across toward the Soviet position, gradually as with Charles Vildrac and Jean-Richard Bloch, or abruptly, as with Rolland, or he might desert it, as Martinet later did. But such troop movements resulted less from a change of view about ends and means, violence and non­ violence, the spiritual and the material, than from a revised estimate of the balance of good and bad, social justice and terror, actually prevalent within the U.S.S.R. at any given time, and also from the pressure of certain external events such as the rise of fascism. Nevertheless, it is only by way of contrast to the idealist attitude that the communist intellectual position can be appreciated in all its implica­ tions, since their ultimate ideals of a just society had much in common. Not only that: a number of communist intellectuals served their ap­ prenticeship through idealism, and it is of interest to find them at an early, 1. R. Rolland, op. cit., p. xxiii. 2. Humanitéy 25 March 1922. 3. V A rt Libre, April 1922.

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1914-1927 or formative, stage. What was Rolland’s position in communist/sodalist terms? InFebruary 1919, he had launched a series of articles denouncingrthe unholy alliance of the German social democrats (Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske) with the Freikorps and the Entente in crushing the Spartacists.1This stand put Rolland in a position close to that of the German Independents (or Centrists) and to Longuet’s ‘Minoritaires’ in France. If Rolland was sympathetic to communists who were being crushed, he was less so to those who were doing the crushing. He later recalled that at the time of the Congress of Tours he had tried to dissuade Jean Longuet (the socialist with whom he doubtless had most sympathy) from joining Blum, Renaudel and those intransigent^ opposed to communism. Rolland refused to take sides between the two factions which emerged,123and did not thereafter endorse any Socialist Party policies in specific preference to their Communist alternatives. Another idealist of the older generation, the physicist Paul Langevin (1872-1946), who did not join the P.C.F. until 1944, a Dreyfusard, a member of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, and a friend and colleague of Einstein, came out in support of both the Russian and German Revolutions. A t a meeting at the Salle Wagram in 1921, he spoke of the Revolution as cthis first realization of hopes of universal liberation . . . this first collapse of political despotism’.8 Nor were Langevin’s sympathies extended only to remote events and causes, as was frequently the case with idealists. When, in 1920, the Union Civique announced its intention to enrol students to break the Paris transport strike, Langevin, as Director of the Ecole de Physique, tried to balk this manœuvre by ensuring that full academic courses continued. He also lent his weight to the campaign for the amnesty of André Marty, leader of the mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet at the time of the intervention in Russia. Marty, in Langevin’s eyes, had ‘an elevated conception of his civic duty’.45The scrupulous care with which he examined the details of Marty’s career to prove his personal worthiness calls to mind Sartre’s defence thirty years later of another revolutionary sailor, Henri Martin. Frequently the idealists shared the communists’ critique of existing social situations without necessarily espousing the same solutions. The novelist Pierre Hamp6* was bitterly critical of the western capitalist system which put thousands of men on the dole, degrading their minds and bodies; yet he told the communist critic Maurice Parijanine: ‘I am 1. Humanité, 16, 17, 18 February 1919. 2. R. Rolland, op. cit., p. xvii. 3. P. Langevin, La Pensée et rA ction, Paris, 1950, p. 268. 4. Humanité, 12 July 1920. Marty had been condemned to twenty years’ hard labour. 5. Pierre Hamp. Bom 1876, of working-class stock, he was self-educated and developed an interest in the history of French crafts and trades. He was author of the series of novels, La Peine des Hommes, and of several stage plays. A pacifist, he was considered a collaborator during the Second World War.

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not a communist. I am a revolutionary. I have passed through anarchism, and not without effect.’1 But the idealists’ sympathy for the French workers rested less typically on a detailed knowledge of their economic predicament than on a more general desire to raise their mental and cultural standard of life. Nobody strove more earnestly to introduce culture to the workers in acceptably clear - but never condescending language than the poet, critic and journalist Georges Chennevière (1884-1927), a member of the pre-war ‘unanimist’ literary group which fathered a number of post-war idealists of the Left like Duhamel, Durtain, Vildrac and Arcos.2 They, like J.-R. Bloch, ardently hoped for a new surge of art from below, from the ‘popular genius’, to supersede bourgeois art. When this did not come some, like Bloch, became sceptical, putting their faith in art alone as the heroic, dynamic and revolutionary force, while others, like Chennevière, resigned themselves to a patient process of education. Though not a Party member, he wrote for /’Humanité in the early ’twenties on subjects ranging from Napoleon, Fragonard, and the work of Louis Pasteur, to the problems of infinity, the cell and heredity, Molière and the historiography of the Renaissance. As Parijanine said, in a posthumous tribute, Chennevière's materialism was one of warm serenity, of robust optimism and of constant meditation on problems which other men ignored.8 Something held the idealists back. The theoretical objections on ends and means, on the independence of the critical spirit, raised during the Barbusse-Rolland controversy, were not perhaps the basic cause of dissension, but more often its rationalization. As a group, the idealists could not shake off their heritage as Frenchmen of the Left, sincerely as they subscribed to the internationalist ideal. The subordination of the French Party to the International, i.e. to Moscow, went against the grain. For Guéhenno, Marxism and Lenin were admirable for backward Russia, but not for France. He believed in ‘Jaurès, in truth and justice’. When he came to study Lenin’s life in detail, he was overcome by guilt, finding himself to be at heart a ‘Girondin’, a ‘petit-bourgeois’. Something held him back from the dictatorship of the proletariat; reason and expediency seemed to justify the idea, but ‘an inexplicable refusal of conscience prevented me’.4 In short, it did not seem a good idea for Frànce. Georges Duhamel’s revolt dated from as early as 1920, when he resigned from Clarté. After conversations with Léon Blum, he decided not to put himself at the service of a ‘sect’, but of the ‘nation’, to be a 1. Humanité, 30 September 1923. 2. Chennevière was author of Le printemps, Le chant du Midi, Appel au monde.

Poème pour un enfant russe. 3. M. Parijanine, ‘La Poésie de Georges Chennevière’, La Revue Européenne, November 1927, pp. 460-70. 4. J. Guéhenno, La Foi Difficile, p. 59.

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1914-1927 French citizen of the world.1 Although the idealist strain in Duhamel kept him out of all political parties, Blum had obviously convinced him that French socialism should be independent, and French. In 1927 he returned from a visit to Russia praising communism there, but arguing that it could still be averted in France by ‘judicious reforms’.2 Duhamel was not the first traveller to apply this convenient double standard inherent to the idealist position. In 1923 Charles Gide, the economist, returned from attending a conference of the General Federation of Soviet Co-operatives, by whose vigour he was delighted. The Bolsheviks, for whom the interests o f the workers alone counted, were entitled, in his opinion, to despise bourgeois rights.8 Yet Gide found the co-operative principle, to which he was devoted, to be in conflict with the aims and policies of French communism. The accounts of life in Russia given in 1927 by both Duhamel4 and Luc Durtain5 constitute a useful joint testimony on the basic traits of left idealist thinking. First, a generous response to all the positive advances made in the U.S.S.R.; secondly, disgust at the mental uniformity and narrow indoctrination they found prevalent; thirdly, a determination to express their criticisms openly as a useful social function; fourthly, a tendency to make a distinction (which communists denied) between physical and mental life; finally, a provisional verdict that, while the ends had so far justified the means in Russia, the same would not have been true in France. Both communists and idealists considered themselves simultaneously to be patriots and internationalists. But the internationalism of Duhamel, Hamp and P. J. Jouve denied, by its semi-Keynesian, semi-technical outlook, the primacy of the class struggle within each nation. Drawn to the far Left by the war, these writers came to preach a pure reason which would rise above egoisms, almost a return to the doctrine of enlightened self-interest. Complaining in 1925 of the continuing hegemony of pre­ war rulers, diplomats, financiers and soldiers, of secret diplomacy, threats and ultimatums, Duhamel concluded that ‘the world must unite’ with all its material and moral forces; idealism and good sense were now the same thing.6 But the logic of idealism took devious paths far from good sense. Antipathy to economic nationalism as the root of all evils led Pierre Hamp to bracket Lenin, Mussolini and Gandhi as apostles of the same god, nationalism,7 and later, like the ex-communist Georges Pioch, to collaborate with Nazism in the name of the internationalist, pacifist ideal. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

G. Duhamel, Les Espoirs et les Epreuves 1919-1928, Paris, 1953, p. 27. G. Duhamel, ‘Le Voyage de Moscou’, L .N .L ., 16 July-1 October 1927. Humanité, 29 November 1923. G. Duhamel, op. cit. L. Durtain, ‘L’autre Europe: Moscou et sa foi’,Europe, October 1927-January 1928. G. Duhamel, Délibérations, Paris, 1925, pp. 57-63. P. Hamp, ‘Eloge de Shylock’, Europe, January 1926, p. 18.

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A decade after the Bolshevik Revolution few of the first generation of French communist intellectuals remained in the Party. Desertions (or expulsions) took place in two main phases which I shall call the national and the Trotskyist. The political circumstances which fostered the first dissident movement were of a complex order and revolved on the question of the French Party’s relationship to the International. Late in 1921, the Third Congress of the Comintern endorsed a decision already taken by Lenin calling for a new United Front policy throughout the International. The principal factors behind this decision were: a) the failure of the 1920 campaign against Poland which, if successful, might have set off a revolutionary chain reaction throughout Europe; b) the failure of the March 1921 communist rising in Germany; c) the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia; d) the desire of the Soviet Government to establish trading relations with the capitalist world. The revolutionary wave having ‘temporarily’ subsided, the United Front tactic was defined in December 1921 as a way of organizing all workers on the basis of a programme of transitional demand. Although the International preferred unity ‘from below’, rather than pacts with socialist leaders, the distinction, in practice, was an obscure one.1 For the westerners, this was hard to swallow. As G. D. H. Cole said, the Comintern in the ’twenties was altogether too apt to ask of its supporters more than flesh and blood could bear. In 1922 Bukharin had to admit that the new tactics were opposed by 69 per cent of the French Party, 40 per cent of the German, 26 per cent of the Italian, and 24 per cent of the British.123 Opposition was strongest in France. Not only the Party’s SecretaryGeneral, L.-O. Frossard, but forty-six federations opposed the United Front, with only twelve in favour.8 It was no more than a year since the communists had broken the hard-won unity of the Left in the interests of revolutionary purity and intransigence. Since the Communist still remained the larger of the two parties, why, it was asked, make con­ cessions? Why must Moscow impose a uniform policy on all countries, regardless of national circumstances? It seemed absurd, amoral. The French, in fact, were getting their first taste in practice of the absolute discipline laid down in the twenty-one conditions which they had so enthusiastically endorsed twelve months before. The test came at once with the Party’s First Congress at Marseilles in December 1921. The Congress was split between the ‘Centre’ (i.e. the national faction) led by Frossard and Cachin, and the Left, urging unity on the basis of the International’s directives, led by Boris Souvarine. In the 1. J. Degras, ‘United Front Tactics in the Comintern 1921-1928', International Communism, St Antony’s Papers No. 9, London 1960, pp. 9-12. 2. Ibid., p. 12. 3. G. Walter, op. cit.f p. 83.

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1914-1927 event, the Centre triumphed; the Party, for the first and last time, said no to Moscow. The intellectuals were also divided, the majority being emotionally repelled by the idea of collaboration with the socialists. Prominent on the Left, apart from Souvarine, the editor of Le Bulletin Communiste, were Vaillant-Couturier, the Propaganda Secretary, Marcel Martinet, literary critic of VHumanité, and Amedée Dunois, SecretaryGeneral of that paper. Their position in the Party was now weakened, but only temporarily, since they had the International behind them. The term ‘Left’ in this context may require a note of explanation. In political terms, a communist of the Left rejects alliances with reformists and compromises with capitalism, concentrating always on the ultimate revolutionary goal. On the other hand, the Left is equally defined by its absolute devotion to the commands of the International in the interests of revolutionary discipline. When, as in the case of the United Front period, the two definitions of Left are ostensibly in conflict, the indivi­ dual must choose. Those intellectuals who chose the path of discipline were strong critics of the majority rebels. Souvarine, working on behalf of the International, quoted from Lenin’s work Left-W ing Communism - an Infantile Disorder, repeating the official argument that the reformist socialists in France should first be brought to power so that the masses might once and for all be disabused, and so turn to communism.1 Tirelessly Souvarine worked to inculcate a complete acceptance of all that Moscow might do. Dismiss­ ing the 1922 trial of Social Revolutionaries which caused many private qualms within the Party, as well as less private ones outside it, he wrote: ‘The Revolution wishes to live, and that is all there is to sa y . . . in Russia, when they are thirsty . . . they drink tea.’12 Explaining how in 1905 and 1917 the Bolsheviks had successfully exploited united front tactics, he reminded French militants that ‘communist discipline is not imposed by constraint or by force’, but through understanding.3 Vaillant-Couturier, equally adamant and contemptuous of the national group, dismissed Marcel Cachin’s reference to the peculiarities of French psychology, made at the Marseilles Congress, as ‘a sophism’.4 Pressure from the Left mounted steadily. In December 1922, the Fourth Congress of the International renewed its attacks on the French Party, castigating the ‘intellectual careerists’ within its ranks and calling for their purge by a commission of workers. L.-O. Frossard, who resigned as Secretary-General on January 1st, 1923, complaining that this Jesuit-like discipline and dogmatism were unbearable, subsequently formed the Socialist-Communist Union Party, to which many of the first dissidents 1. 2. 3. 4.

Humanité, 26 October 1921. Humanité, 26 April 1922. Humanité, 3 June 1922. Clarté, 1 December 1922.

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adhered. The ‘Centre’ intellectuals were now routed. A Committee of Resistance was set up to let the International know their reactions to its decisions, including Georges Pioch, Professor A. Julien, the lawyer Henri Torrès, the journalists Charles Lussy, Manier and B. Lecache, the poet and novelist Noël Gamier and the caricaturist Gassier.1 They particularly protested against the attempt to split the workers and the intellectuals, and to stifle discussion and the critical spirit within the Party. All were immediately expelled from the Party.2 The Left regained control. Boris Souvarine, arriving back from the Moscow Congress, called for a general purge of reformists, arrivistes, etc. Quality, integrity, were more important than quantity. 'La sélection par-dessus tout.9* Restored to power, he made of himself the stem, ascetic and highly intellectual conscience of French communism. ‘The Party traces its line without letting itself be influenced by disabled, hesitant or erring elements. Its strength has always been to rectify its tactics according to the needs of the m om ent. . . this strength has remained intact.’4 Pioch was the most notable of the intellectuals of the national group to be expelled. Secretary of the Federation of the Seine, he was a pacifist, cultivated bourgeois with a passion for music and the theatre, and with a strongly idealist vein running through his poetry. According to VaillantCouturier, he once described communism as 'la form e organisée et pacifique de Vamour9* He was one of many French intellectuals who have joined and left a Communist Party to which they were temperamentally unsuited. Noël Gamier, expelled at the same time, earned a mention by the Comintern agent Manuilsky as a ‘decadent poet’.6 He was anything but decadent. A war hero, but deprived of his right to wear the Légion d’honneur in view of his activities with Barbusse, Lefebvre and VaillantCouturier in the A.R.A.C., he wrote a regular Tribune du Soldat column in /’Humanité. After his expulsion he became an active member of the Communist Opposition. It was at this period, but in different circumstances, that Séverine left the Party, her offence being membership of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, a liberal-democratic body bom out of the Dreyfus case. In December 1917, the Ligue had urged the Bolsheviks not to conclude a separate peace with Germany, and two months later it criticized the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. In April 1919, while condemning the White generals and the Allied intervention, the Ligue repeated its protests against Bolshevik dictatorship and censorship. The last straw 1. G. Walter, H istoire du Parti Communiste Français, p. 122. 2. Ib id , p. 123. 3. Humanité, 18 January 1923. 4. Humanité, 24 April 1923. 5. Clarté, 1 December 1922. 6. B.C ., 15 February 1923.

1914-1927 in communist eyes were the protests against Stalin’s actions in Georgia and against the trial of the S.R.’s in 1922.1 Membership of the Ligue was declared incompatible with membership of the Party by the Fourth Congress of the International, thus bringing to a head the dilemma of those who wanted to reconcile the great causes of the nineteenth-century Left with modem communism. The choice was Séverine’s. In a long article in L'Ere Nouvelle, she protested against her excommunication and affirmed her loyalty to Peace, Humanity and Justice.123Exhorted publicly by another communist feminist, Louise Bodin, not to desert the Party,8 she remained silent. She had not been excommunicated; in view of the Ligue’s actions, the choice imposed on her by the Party was a reasonable one. The exodus of intellectuals following the defeat of the national, or Centre group, was on a minor scale compared to the much more serious deser­ tions which began a year later on the issue of Trotskyism. In January 1924, at the Thirteenth Conference of the C.P.S.U., the ‘Triumvirs’, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, produced a resolution denouncing Trotsky and forty-six oppositionists for a ‘petty-bourgeois deviation from Leninism’. By the time he was again denounced at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May, the International had been drawn into the controversy. Trotsky’s prestige in western communist circles ranked second only to Lenin’s, and late in 1923 the Central Committee of the French Party had protested against the defamation of his name. Yet the strength of the majority faction within the Soviet Party was sufficient to ensure Trotsky’s almost universal condemnation by the leaders of the European parties in May and June 1924. Boris Souvarine, who stood up against this capitulation, was publicly crushed at the Fifth Congress of the Inter­ national in July 1924. Le cos Souvarine precipitated an anti-intellectual crisis within the P.C.F. A member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern since 1921, and also of its small Praesidium, he had upheld the International’s policy against the Centre in 1921-22, and then led the triumph of the Left a year later. Editor of le Bulletin Communiste and of VHumanité, he was as powerful a figure in the Party as any intellectual before or since. In January 1924, he launched an attack on the Secretary-General, Treint, whom he charged with ‘excessive centralism’ and ‘mechanical discipline’. While Treint supported Zinoviev in the Russian power-struggle, Souvarine took the law into his own hands by publishing in France Trotsky’s New Course, a book which upheld the cause of permanent revolution against the new ‘socialism in one country’ thesis. Souvarine, 1. W. Drabovitch, Les Intellectuels Français et le Bolckévismet Paris, 1938, pp. 30-2. 2. Quoted in B .C ., 8 February 1923. 3. Humanité, 10 February 1923.

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impulsive if not arrogant, began to use le Bulletin Communiste as if it were his own, perhaps forgetting that not many months before he had written that communist journals were organs of the Party and their editors mere servants of the Revolution, without autonomy and subject to a strict and necessary discipline.1 Relieved of his editorship by the Central Committee, he proceeded to destroy, or conceal, valuable documents in his possession. Arraigned before a commission of inquiry by the Fifth Congress of the International in July, he rested his case on the revised doctrine that ‘the question is not to speak of indiscipline, but to examine the political basis of the indiscipline’. He explained that he only wished ‘to put my comrades on guard against the habit of creating a pogrom atmosphere against certain comrades*.12 It was to no avail. Denounced by Zinoviev, he was expelled from the Party and held up by the French Secretariat as an example of pride gone wrong, of authori­ tarianism, of the dangerous influence of personalities, and of the original social sin forever hanging over bourgeois intellectuals.3 Le Bulletin Communiste reappeared in October 1925, still under Souvarine’s editorship, as the organ of the Communist Opposition. He depicted the present Party leaders as incapable, irresponsible adventurers, as laughable Utopians who had lost half the Party’s membership.45 The so-called Bolshevization of the Party was in reality its ‘socialdemocratization’, although it now lacked the quality and prestige of even the S.F.I.O.67For the next two years Souvarine continued to support Trotsky, printing his articles on China, attacking Stalin and Bukharin and, somewhat opportunistically, rallying to the side of Zinoviev and Kamenev, now fallen out with Stalin, as ‘the closest collaborators of Lenin’, though it had been they who had been responsible for his own expulsion in 1924.® It was eleven years after his break with the Party that Souvarine published his reflections on the course of the Revolution in his highly scholarly Staline - aperçu historique du Bolchévisme? Aspects of the book were consistent with his own career, especially his accurate account of Stalin’s character and rise to power through manipulation of the Secretary-Generalship and the suppression of Lenin’s will. Souvarine’s contempt for the mystification of the Lenin legend was not, retrospec­ tively, inconsistent with his own enduring respect for Lenin’s character.8 But other opinions in the book could only be explained in the light of 1. B.C ., 5 April 1923. 2. Humanité, 15 July 1924. 3. Humanité, 19 July 1924. 4. B.C ., 30 October 1925. 5. B.C ., 20 November 1925. 6. B .C ., January-M arch 1927. 7. Paris, 1935. 8. See Ibid., pp. 276-329.

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1914-1927 ‘mature reflection’ on the part of their author. If, as he claimed, only the military conception of the Revolution remained by 1920, how was it that he, who had lived for eighteen months in Russia, had been able to advertise the virtues of Bolshevik rule until 1924? His lament that even under Lenin liberty of the press and trade union independence had disappeared conflicted with the views he himself had expressed on the subject in the years in question.1 Souvarine went so far as to criticize the whole attempt to build socialism in a backward country,2 while justifying the Kronstadt mutiny which he had denounced at the time. If, by 1922, the interests of the people were, for the Party, ‘foreign abstractions’,8 why had he depicted for the benefit of his French readers the scene at a Congress of Soviets, with the Central Committee of the Party seated on the rostrum as the supreme expression of the will of a whole people, the slaves of the proletariat?4 On so broad a question as this he must surely have known the truth at the time. The many contradictions between his words and his actions, between his old life and his new, he did not care to analyse; proceeding from one absolute dogma to the next for eighteen years, he never paused for the autocritique which would have been so instructive. Souvarine’s defection in 1924 precipitated a chain reaction. Amedée Dunois and F. Loriot left the Party soon afterwards. It was not only the anti-Trotsky campaign, but also the Bolshevization of the Party and the hectic atmosphere of intrigue and purges which accompanied it which proved too much for the intellectuals. Marcel Martinet quit, as did Magdeleine Marx who was one of many signatories of a ‘Communist Opposition’ manifesto in December 1925 which warned the Party that if it continued to close its press to the Opposition they would have to resort to their own means. The Opposition demanded a new policy toward the trade unions, real communist penetration in place of formal take-overs o f key posts, and they called for a congress regularly elected after a serious ideological discussion in all the Party organs.6 In January 1926 Magdeleine Marx was among 280 militants who sent a joint letter to the International protesting against the intolerable dictatorship of a coterie of megalomaniacs within the P.C.F., and against the incessant purges which threatened to liquidate the Party altogether.6 All, of course, in vain. The disease emanated from the Stalinist International itself, but this was not fully clear to all the French intellectuals while Zinoviev still headed the International and Trotsky was still nominally a member of the Party. 1. Ibid., p. 241. 2. Ibid., p. 257. 3. Ibid., p. 300. 4. Humanité, 26 January 1922. 5. B.C ., 1 January 1926. 6. B .C ., 22 January 1926.

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Marcel Martinet surveyed the situation in May 1926. Recalling that the Russian Revolution had been the ‘resurrection’ of his generation, he reflected that in so far as it had compromised and retreated it had been their defeat. Stabilization had set in before the death of Lenin. The outlook had been too narrow, the tactics faulty. Instead of concentrating on organization and education, the P.C.F. had frittered away its strength in constant verbal violence accompanied by political compromise. Miserable ambition now prevailed in an army of generals. In his view, the ultimate responsibility lay with the Russians, who had abandoned the West for the East, come to terms with capitalism and lost their sense of the absolute which had marked the genius of Lenin and Trotsky.1 Victor Serge, too, joined the Opposition, an enterprise considerably more hazardous in Russia than in France. For a while he was able to continue writing and to publish articles on the Opposition and on the Chinese Revolution in Clarté, of whose editorial board he was a member. The Opposition, he wrote, sought the inner renewal of the Revolution ‘by the time-honoured socialist method of appealing to the workers’.* Looking back, he saw the Civil War as the destroyer of democratic liberties, and the Stalinist bureaucracy as the perverter of the Revolution. Marxist thought had given way to stereotyped formulas; the spiritual atmosphere had changed sharply.123 Prior to his first imprisonment, which began in 1928, Serge was expelled from the Party. The collapse and rout of communism as an intellectual force in the ’twenties finds no better illustration than in the way which the journal Clarté turned eventually into an organ of opposition. O f its leading communist spirits of 1919, Victor Cyril and Lefebvre had died, Magdeleine Marx joined the Opposition, leaving only Barbusse and VaillantCouturier in the saddle. The impression of unity given in 1924 by the Directing Board of Barbusse, Vaillant-Couturier, Georges Michael, Maurice Parijanine, Jean Bernier and Marcel Fourrier was deceptive, for by the following year the rebels Bernier and Fourrier alone were in charge, capitalizing on the massive desertion of intellectuals from the Party. Contributions were now invited from surrealists like Aragon, Breton and Eluard, with Serge collaborating from the Soviet Union. From the December 1925 issue, the journal became ever more intensely political in a Trotskyist sense, attacking Barbusse for his ‘mysticism’ and ridiculing the Party’s few remaining intellectuals, until, in FebruaryMarch 1928, it appeared under the new title of La Lutte des Classes: Revue théorique mensuelle de VOpposition Communiste. The Party, as an intellectual force, had reached its nadir. 1. M. Martinet, ‘Contre le Courant*, Europe, May 1926, pp. 93-5. 2. V. Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 41. 3. V. Serge, Destin d'une Révolution, Paris, 1937, p. 173,

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1927-1934

first generation of intellectuals, with a few exceptions, notably Barbusse, Vaillant-Couturier, Péri and Moussinac, had quit. Party membership probably touched rock bottom in 1929. Yet the class war waged by the Right had rarely been more intense. Simone de Beauvoir has recalled how a meeting at which Jean Guéhenno was speaking in 1929 was broken up by Action Française thugs.1 But the ‘fascist’ leagues were not yet dangerous; the main assault came from the parliamentary Right, from Tardieu, Minister of the Interior, and from Chiappe, the Prefect of Police. Before the 1928 elections, the scrutin cParrondissement voting system had been reintro­ duced, one objective among several being to prevent communist gains which seemed otherwise inevitable.2 In August 1928, a communist clash with the police at Ivry resulted in 1,339 arrests. In May 1929, Tardieu, who had banned all communist street demonstrations, ordered four thousand preventive arrests. Vaillant-Couturier, now editor-in-chief of VHumanité, who had been detained on a charge of insulting the police, was condemned under the ‘Loi Scélérate’.8 Soon after his release a new warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of sedition.4 He went into hiding, but was discovered near Meaux. In October, Henri Barbusse was added to the list of directors of /’Humanité charged with espionage after the paper had printed certain letters of protest from munitions workers.6 T he

1. S. dc Beauvoir, M emoirs o f a D utiful Daughter, trans. by J. Kirkup, New York, 1959, p. 347. 2. The change in the electoral law was not primarily the work of the Right, but of the Radical ‘Centre* and of the S.F.I.O., which abandoned on this occasion its traditional commitment to proportional representation. In so far as the manœuvre was directed against the communists, it was effective. The number of communists elected fell from 25 to 12, although the Party’s candidates received 184,000 more votes than in 1924. 3. The Times, 4 August 1928. The bomb thrown into the Chamber on December 9th, 1893 by the anarchist Auguste Vaillant gave Casimir-Périer an excuse for passing the first so-called Loi Scélérate. Intended for use against the anarchist press, it began to be employed against the socialists also. 4. M anchester Guardian, 26 July 1929. 5. M anchester Guardian, 8 October 1929.

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The Party leadership was arrested en bloc, and /’Humanité seized. This heavily repressive atmosphere, seemingly unnecessary in view of the Party’s pitiable weakness, extended even to the cultural front. When Eisenstein came to Paris to present his film The General Line, special brigade cars waited in the rue Saint-Jacques while he spoke in the Sorbonne.1 Provocative behaviour of this sort, the pervading atmosphere of a brutal class war, was bound to precipitate a reaction among intellec­ tuals of the Left and to bring the P.C.F. new support. A striking, if extreme, example of violent defiance and hatred was provided by Louis Aragon’s Front Rouge, written in 1930: C arpets have been p u t under the bottles so th a t aristocratic arses m ay n o t collide w ith life’s difficulties . . . B ring dow n the cops C om rades B ring dow n the cops O n o n tow ard the W est w here sleep rich children an d first-class tarts . . . I sing the violent dom ination o f the bourgeoisie by the p ro letariat fo r the annihilation o f th a t bourgeoisie fo r the to tal annihilation o f th a t bourgeoisie H ail to m aterialist dialectic a n d hail to its incarnation the R ed a r m y . . .2

The Red Army. This was the time when André Breton longed to see the Cossacks watering their horses on the Concorde.3 The atmosphere of the period among young intellectuals was faithfully recaptured in Paul Nizan’s novel La Conspiration, whose characters were predominantly bourgeois students in revolt, still in their early ’twenties and not much concerned with the upheavals which had shaken the Communist Party in previous years. Nizan’s fictional revolutionaries came together in June 1928 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and produced a magazine, Guerre Civile, which was a characteristic mixture of communism. Trotskyism and anarchism. Two of his heroes, Laforgue and Rosenthal, had left Clarté when it was already ‘decomposing’, devoting their energies to a wild, anarchistic conspiracy to steal the army’s plans for the protection of Paris. But the conspiracy in the novel, like the Party in real life, was easily 1. P. Courtade, La Place Rouge, p. 54. 2. L. Aragon, The Red Front, trans. by E. E. Cummings, N. Carolina, 1933, n.p. The extracts quoted above are not contiguous in the poem. Aragon (b. 1897) had studied medicine in Paris before serving in the war. 3. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à ‘Aden-Arabie*, Paris, 1961, p. 19.

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1927-1934 smashed by the police, and the book closed on a note of suicide and despair.1 La Conspiration recorded the arrival on the scene of a new, more romantic and less disciplined generation of quasi-Marxist intellectuals who, unlike the Rollandists, tended to find the P.C.F. not uncompromis­ ing enough. The disillusioned veterans of the first mobilization were bound to watch this process with mixed feelings, scarcely aware that each generation must experience its own private set of betrayals, its own col­ lapsed gods. Marcel Martinet found himself tom between hope and dis­ gust. The students of the late ’twenties he considered confused, infantile and often distressingly scornful of the proletariat. 'Joli début? He detested the pseudo-elegance of the pseudo-anarchists who thought it smart to shout 'à bas la France', or even ‘d bas l'intelligence*. What, Martinet asked, did they know of doctrine, discipline and self-sacrifice?2 Paul Nizan,8 who depicted the situation so vividly, was among the few students who appreciated and mastered these contradictions, this civil war inherent in the petit-bourgeois intellectual who had taken the side of the people and yet must always bear the weight of his social original sin and guard against hesitation or desertion. ‘Nous pensions vie intérieure quand il fallait penser dividendes.’4 For Nizan, the Communist Party, despite its faults, provided a framework of order, duty and discipline within which the individual could channel his sense of revolt while avoiding self-love.6 But it would be wrong to exaggerate the personal factor. The Party, it seemed, could change society; the individual alone could not. Similar considerations had begun to appeal to another group who were moving toward the Party at this time but who had, on the average, a decade or more of adult life behind them - the surrealists. Rebels against bourgeois conformity, literature, family ties and religious ethics, writers like Aragon, Paul Eluard and André Breton had collaborated on Littérature, signed manifestos and indulged in sensational escapades. The group mood had been one of social derision, of cynicism in the face not only of their own society but of the whole condition humaine. Nihilists, cultivators of ‘integral despair’, some of them believed that only children were truly free (e.g. in Cocteau’s Enfants terribles, 1929). In the view of a hostile Soviet writer, they might be full of Hegel, Marx and the Revolution, but they refused to work at anything more useful than the 1. P. Nizan, La Conspiration, Paris, 1938. 2. M. Martinet, ‘Contre le Courant*. Europe, May 1926, pp. 98-102. 3. Paul Nizan, A philosopher, he joined the Party while still at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, after a visit to Aden. He became a school-teacher and then a journalist. He left the Party in September 1939 and was killed at Dunkirk. Works include: AdenArabie, Les Chiens de Garde and the novels Antoine Bloyé, Le Cheval de Troie, La Conspiration. 4. P. Nizan, Aden-Arabie, p. 80. 5. A number of this generation were philosophers. See Part 4, Ch. 1.

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study of pederasty and dreams, and the gaining of notoriety.1 So wrote Ilya Ehrenburg. According to Marcel Aymé, ‘literary viruses’ like Dadaism, futurism and surrealism weakened the critical faculties and sense of values of the bourgeoisie, depriving it of its defence reflexes against its real class enemy.2 True or not, the corollary seems equally if not more probable, namely that the concept of Revolution - ‘the fourth dimension’ - was readily adaptable and expandable from its Hegelian or metaphysical form into a social, or Marxist form, for the surrealist writers themselves. In nineteenth-century France the political and cultural vanguards, with one exception, had forged only isolated links through a Delacroix, a Daumier, a Lamartine, a Courbet. The Impressionists, as a school, had no idea of changing the social order, although certain post-impressionist poets and painters, like Pissarro and Signac, developed sympathies for anarchism.8 The exception lay here, in anarchism. The review Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires, which became clearly anarchist in 1892, listed among its collaborators Paul Valéry, Paul Adam, Bernard Lazare and Stephen Mallarmé, while contributors to VEndehors included SaintPol Roux, Octave Mirbeau and Tristan Bernard.4 After 1918 some form of regular alliance between the vanguards first became perceptible in Germany, where the experimental theatre of Piscator and Brecht was committed, although with reservations, to communism. In France surrealism emerged gradually from its political vacuum. The change of title from Révolution surréaliste to Surréalisme au service de la Révolution reflected this trend. But extreme individualism could not be shed in a day; the ‘fourth dimension’, when transferred from spiritual to material, from individual to social terms, tended to prove illusory. Roger Vailland later reflected through his fictionalized self, Marat, that ‘the first of my generation who joined the Party, around 1928, were all out to save their souls.’ They never fully came to terms with communism. ‘We were Trotskyists really, forever talking about “the permanent revolution” , unemployed intellectuals, more keenly aware of the emotional aspects of rebellion than of revolution.’5 Breton, Aragon and Eluard, as well as lesser surrealist writers like Unik and Péret, joined the Party in 1927. Eluard belonged to a cell of tramwaymen, while Breton and some of his friends spent a short time in the cell of the quartier des Gobelins.6 But the episode was short-lived. 1 .1. Ehrenburg, Duhamel, Gide, M alraux, M auriac, M orand, Romains, Unamuno vus par un écrivain d 'U .R .S.S., Paris, 1934, p. 57. 2. M. Aymé, Le Confort Intellectuel, Paris, 1949, pp. 94 and 145. 3. See Part 4, Chapter 5. 4. J. Maitron, H istoire du M ouvement Anarchiste en France {1880-1914), Paris, 1951, p. 123. 5. R. Vailland, Drôle de Jeu, Paris, 1945, p. 15. 6. R. Vailland, Le Surréalisme contre la Révolution, Paris, 1948, p. 39.

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1927-1934 Both Breton and Eluard were put off by the oppressive atmosphere in the Party under the narrow, sectarian and fundamentally anti-intellectual leadership of Barbé and Celor. Breton began to lead a surrealist counter­ revolution against the Party and even to make ‘excommunications’. Although Eluard had no taste for such gestures, his poems, La Vie immédiate, showed little harmony between poetry and politics and it was only later, when Spain and then the Second World War had reorientated him toward communism, that he was able to describe the path to political poetry as coming ‘from the horizon of one man to the horizon of all.’1 Aragon, on the other hand, stayed on to become French literature’s staunchest and most orthodox communist, although the principal political events which had precipitated his conversion applied equally to the other surrealists. Aragon, bouleversé by the Congress of Tours in 1920, had in fact applied for membership, but Georges Pioch, Secretary of the Seine Federation, was sceptical of his reliability and turned him away.123Apparently wisely, for in November 1924 Aragon wrote to Clarté announcing his distaste for the Russian Government and for communism in general, with the familiar explanation that he put the ‘spirit of revolt’ above politics. It was, he maintained, only through an abuse of language that the Communist Party could be called revolutionary.8 For Aragon, 1925 was the turning point; the war of the Riff, the massacre of the Moroccans, was the ‘great shock*.45This colonial war brought together the surrealists, the young Marxists of the review Philosophies and other groups who issued a joint manifesto, La Révolution (Tabord et toujours, in which they stressed the social nature of true revolution.6 Hegel began to replace Rimbaud as a formative influence in Aragon’s thinking, and by November 1925 he had firmly committed himself to the dictatorship of the proletariat as an absolute necessity.6 In June 1926 the Trotskyist directors of Clarté, Jean Bernier and Marcel Fourrier, solicited and received contributions from Breton, Eluard and Aragon. As I have already suggested, surrealism, Trotskyism and communism were not easily reconcilable, the less so as a conflict of generations was also involved. A good deal of internecine warfare was in evidence. Ex-communist Trotskyists like Marcel Martinet and Pierre Naville continued to regard the surrealists with suspicion, while the Party leaders regarded all but the most loyal intellectuals with contempt and little interest. In his La Révolution et les Intellectuels (1926), Naville challenged 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Quoted in J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, p. 390. R. Garaudy, L'Itinéraire d'Aragon, Paris, 1961, p. 168. Clarté, 1 December 1924. L. Aragon, Pour un réalisme socialiste, Paris, 1935, p. 51. R. Garaudy, op. cit., p. 181. Clarté, 30 November 1925.

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the persisting surrealist belief that one could liberate the mind before the social structure had been changed, although he regarded his own mind as liberated. In September 1926, Breton, while protesting his attachment to the P.C.F. programme, insisted on its limitations and could not resist an attack on Barbusse’s literary work.1 The deeply divergent conceptions of literature and its function which had separated Barbusse from the surrealists for nearly a decade could not be glossed over, and it was in August 1928, over a year after he had joined the Party, that Aragon was assailed in Barbusse’s new journal Monde as *Aragon nihiliste\ 123By 1930 Aragon had moved into a position sufficiently orthodox to feel himself able to criticize Barbusse severely at the International Conference of Proletarian Writers at Kharkov. Possibly his meeting with Mayakovsky late in 1928, and with Elsa Triolet, the Russian pupil of Gorky’s whom he later married, gave an added impetus to his rejection of surrealism, which others were still trying vainly to reconcile with communism. From his speech at Kharkov it is clear that he was already fully converted to the Party’s political and literary line before he set out for Russia, although he later maintained that direct contact with the Soviet Union and the Congress had humiliated ‘the surrealist Aragon, his head full of lyrical images . . . sceptical and superior. . .’8 But it is probably true, as he said, that he returned animated by a new energy, not the same man, ready to sever a thousand links.4 It was now that he wrote Front Rouge. Intellectually, it was a curious period. Intellectuals abandoned the Party before 1927 as Trotskyists. Surrealists joined the Party in 1927 often as semi-Trotskyists, while the Trotskyists denounced them as irresponsible idealists. One generation had come to understand the trends within the International and the meaning of Stalinism, while another was ready to disregard such questions in its attempt to find a social solution to essentially personal problems. A few, like Aragon and Pierre Unik, came to terms with Stalinism - which could still, at th^t-time, be said to represent the majority opinion within the Bolshevik P arty-joining forces with young philosophers like Nizan, Georges Politzer and Henri Lefebvre. Over and above this mêlée was a Party more or less indifferent as to whether the intellectuals came or went. If there was intellectual turbulence and confusion, it was partly because at this time left-wing doctrines, ideas and trends still retained some of their original speculative qualities, as subjects for genuinely personal discussion and decision. Stalinism - and its cultural satellite of socialist realism - had not yet hardened to the extent of imposing a rigid ‘for us or against us’ choice on the intellectuals. It was not unsymptomatic 1. R. Garaudy, op. cit., p. 189. 2. Monde, 11 August 1928. 3. L. Aragon, op. cit., p. 16. 4. Ibid., p. 54.

98

1927-1934 of this climate that the first novel of an unknown and politically unafiiliated writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (1932), could be acclaimed by anarchist students, by Léon Daudet on the extreme Right, by Trotsky in America and by Lev Nikulin in Pravda. Four years later Céline, returning from Russia, wrote of all intellectuals: ‘They are the parasitic coat of filth on the hide of the herd.’1 The notion that this pacifist, anarchist, semi-fascist anti-Semite was ‘disillusioned* by Russia is absurd. Céline was the victim of a deepening derange­ ment. To digress for a moment from the years under discussion. Many of the surrealists who had survived the first communist temptation of the late ’twenties succumbed during the second, and larger, migration of the early ’forties. For Roger Vailland, for example, the puritan, ascetic, disciplined aspects of communism ultimately overcame the surrealist ethos.123'The war,* he wrote, ‘obliged us to revise many of our conceptions.’ One could no longer deride all generals as a class after Stalingrad. Whether this was logical or not, Vailland was justified in pointing to the fact that between 1939 and 1944 many of the older surrealists, Picasso, Eluard and Tristan Tzara being the most notable, had found in communism a new meaning in the world, turning their rebellion away from the general human predicament to specific social conditions.8 Among other things, Vailland saw in communism an escape from solitude.45Yet he did not join the Party until 1952. According to Edgar Morin, his overriding sense of guilt for his ‘libertine’ life as a surrealist made him feel unworthy to enter a pure and austere fraternity.6 In the light of Vailland’s own statements, this view seems plausible and leads to speculation as to whether a similar sense of regeneration may have led Aragon into his excessively austere and even mechanical attitude as a communist. For the dwindling group of surrealists whose loyalty survived the Second World War, there could be little chance of future reconciliation. André Breton remarked in 1946 that communism was 'a system of thought which I have not succeeded in making integrally mine, despite the temptation that I have on many occasions undergone.’6 Elsa Triolet sealed the new rupture by pointing out that Breton was now published by Le Figaro and that everyone knew why Vichy had exalted ‘pure’ poetry.7 And Sartre reiterated that the destructive aspects of communism a n d surrealism could never lead to a lasting alliance, since for the one 1. L.-F. Céline, Mea Culpa, trans. by Robert Allerton, Boston, 1937, p. 8. 2. See his Drôle de Jeu. 3. R. Vailiand, Le Surréalisme contre la Révolution, pp. 44-6. 4. See Questions du Communisme*, Confluences 18-20, 1947, pp. 290-2. 5. E. Morin, Autocritique, Paris, 1959, pp. 114-5. Some of Morin’s blunter remarks about Vailland’s character are not as politically significant as he suggests. 6. R. Vailland, op. cit.t p. 15. 7. E. Triolet, V Ecrivain et le Livre, pp. 48-9.

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negation was only a means to a positive end, while for the other it remained an end in itself.1 In 1921, the International had abruptly adopted the United Front policy, precipitating crises in the European parties and a temporary loss of control in the French one. In 1928, the Sixth Congress of the International equally abruptly abandoned the United Front tactic, proclaiming the end of capitalist stabilization and a move to the left on all fronts. This change of line coincided with the substitution of the First Five Year Plan for the N.E.P. Under the ‘class against class’ slogan, the European communists were now bound to brand social-democrats as ‘social-fascists’ and to refuse to co-operate with them at elections. The response of the French communist intellectuals was a mixed one. Vaillant-Couturier, who had staunchly defended the United Front policy in 1921, remained loyal, but his editorship of /’Humanité, which had been marked by a relatively sane attitude as well as by improved standards of journalism, was temporarily terminated late in 1929.12 The most conspicuous defector was the writer Paul Marion, a communist since 1922 and a former chief of the Party’s propaganda section, who resigned in August 1929 following a fifteen-month visit to Russia which coincided with the change of line. The leaders of the U.S.S.R. and of the Comin­ tern, Marion was now convinced, had a totally false picture of the economic and political evolution of the world. Russia was under the absolute dictatorship of a caste of bureaucrats. As a gesture of rebellion against the new left sectarianism, he proclaimed his sympathy for the British Labour Party,3 which, however, did not prevent him from later becoming, after a varied career as a neo-socialist and then as a member of Doriot’s P.P.F., Vichy Minister of Information and a violent persecutor of the communists in the unoccupied zone. A t the other extreme, the most zealous exponent of ultra-leftism was the new convert, Louis Aragon. His Front Rouge by no means confined its attacks to the Right, the major class enemy: F ire o n L éon Blum F ire o n B oncour F ro ssard D é at F ire o n the trained bears o f social-dem ocracy.4

As a consequence of this and other passages, he was convicted in January 1932 of inciting soldiers to mutiny and of provocation to murder, and given a suspended five-year prison sentence. Undeterred, he continued 1. J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature?t trans. by Bernard Frechtman, London, 1950, pp. 140-2. 2. Manchester Guardian, 8 October 1929. 3. Le Temps, 22 August 1929. 4. L. Aragon, Red Front.

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his violent attacks on the 'social-fascists’, although his intransigent temper did not always transform itself into great poetry. In July 1933 he published his La Prise du pouvoir: A llo A llo R adio P aris P rolétaires de tous les p a ys unissez-vous A llo A llo. L a parole au représentant du P a rti Com m uniste Cam arades A u nom du P a rti C om m uniste.1

In another poem equally carefully geared to the official Comintern line. Réponse aux Jacobins, he repudiated the Marseillaise as representing social-democracy, and urged the French workers to adopt the Inter­ nationale.12 In a France where the communists had only ten seats in the Chamber and in a Europe where the only people seizing power were fascists, Aragon’s work at this time amounted to wild nonsense. In fact, from the viewpoint of European communism, the policy laid down by the International in 1928, despite its correct forecast of an economic crisis in the West, was far more dangerous and irrelevant than that of 1921. If the veteran Party intellectuals appreciated this, they had already weathered too many storms to be thrown off balance. Resigna­ tions were few; silence, discreet and flexible, was more common. Barbusse, on the other hand, by now the doyen of the club, felt strong enough to go his own way, saying one thing and doing another. In March 1927, he produced a conventional enough polemic, Manifeste aux Intellectuels, reminiscent in tone and style of Le Couteau entre les dents. He continued to make the obvious point that ‘the first duty of intellectuals and artists is to discern and to undertake the clear social rôle which is incumbent upon them’.3 In urging intellectuals to lead the communist movement toward a new, popular art which would come with the liberation of the masses, he raised an acute logical problem; he solved it by ignoring it. Instead, still shadow-boxing with the ghost of Rolland the idealist, he fell back on the time-honoured slogan: ‘He who is not with me is against me.’4 Not only in words but also in actions Barbusse could still be outwardly orthodox and conventional when he chose. Victor Serge recalled that when Barbusse came to stay at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow he took good care to avoid compromising 1. 2. 3. 4.

Commune, July 1933, p. 50. The first verse is quoted above. L. Aragon, Hourra VOural, Paris, 1934, p. 137. H. Barbusse, M anifeste aux Intellectuels, Paris, 1927, p. 10. Ibid., p. 41.

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himself by meeting Oppositionists. When Serge spoke to him of the oppression inside Moscow, he feigned a migraine and talked of ‘the tragic destinies of revolutions’.1 Later, according to Serge, Barbusse sent him embarrassed letters excusing himself for having erased his name from the list of contributors to Monde when he heard of his arrest.12 On the whole, however, Barbusse went his own way. This was the period of his Jésus and Les Judas de Jésus9 a literature impregnated with mysticism and certainly not the popular art he advocated in his Mani­ feste aux Intellectuels. Louis Fischer, a resident in Moscow, wrote that ‘Henri Barbusse . . . talked to me chiefly about Jesus Christ’.3 Yet as a Stalinist he was careful not to be out-done. Trotsky, he claimed, had wanted to prevent the October Revolution and had ‘always remained a Menshevik’. Himself an apostle of Jesus Christ, he blandly declared that Trotsky did not possess ‘really strong Marxist convictions. He was afraid. He had always been afraid.’45Orthodox or heterodox according to his inclinations, Barbusse, who professed to believe that ‘he who is not with me is against me’, nevertheless distributed bouquets of praise not only to idealists like Duhamel, Durtain and Bloch, but also to ex-communists such as Martinet and Magdeleine Marx.6 This paradox ran through the whole venture of Monde, which he founded in July 1928 with the object, according to Annette Vidal, of countering the hostility shown by the press and professional bodies to left-wing writers. Clartéf, long since lost to him, he naturally wished to replace. But why did he sustain the new journal on principles diametrically opposed to the leftist policy laid down by the Comintern in 1928? And why was he himself the only communist among Monde's directors?6 In his first editorial he promised: ‘Monde will not take part in political polemics’, although, on a broad level, it would be a ‘journal of combat’. This was no more meaningful than his earlier apologies on behalf of Clarté. While he himself contributed violently anti-capitalist and proSoviet articles, he flagrantly violated the Party’s left-sectarian policy by incorporating the widest possible range of left-wing opinion, sponsor­ ing heresy after heresy. Even Henri de Man, whose Au Delà du M arxisme (1927) constituted a totally revisionist critique of the whole Marxist position, was invited to contribute, while the editorial, by way of apology, mentioned the need for a ‘non-dogmatic’ approach in view of 1. V. Serge, Mémoires d'un Révolutionnaire, pp. 258-9. 2. Ibid., p. 262. 3. L. Fischer, Men and Politics, New York, 1941, p. 200. 4. H. Barbusse, Stalin, trans. by Vyvyan Holland, London, 1935, pp. 176-7. 5. H. Barbusse, One Looks at Russia, trans. by W. B. Wells, London, 1931, p. 139. 6. The original directors were: A. Einstein, M. Gorky, U. Sinclair, M. Ugarte, M. de Unamuno, L. Bazalgette, M. Morhardt, L. Werth. Werth later became editor.

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1927-1934 the ‘crisis in doctrine*.1 Barbusse seemed to have a passion for ex-com­ munists. A. Rossi (formerly A. Tasca), who had only recently broken with the Italian C.P., was given a regular political column in which to advance his crypto-Trotskyist views. Ignazio Silone, another Italian defector, also contributed, as did Magdeleine Marx who henceforward marked her cleavage from her communist past by reverting to her husband’s name, Paz. In 1933, when the communists were casting the whole responsibility for Hitler’s seizure of power on the German ‘social-fascists’, Rossi, in Monde, was apportioning to the communists their share of the blame and acclaiming the first volume of Trotsky’s History o f the Russian Revolution as a Marxist classic, while Georges Monnet was demanding that the communists abandon their sectarian policy as meaningless in western Europe.8 In June 1932 a thundering attack on Monde was delivered in the Cahiers du Bolchévisme} The writer, who was particularly incensed by Rossi’s articles, declared the journal to have clearly ranged itself on the side of the enemies of the U.S.S.R. and of the revolutionary proletariat. Barbusse was referred to only once, as having placed himself *dans le cadre de Vordre bourgeois’. Although a few Party intellectuals in secure positions, such as Hya Ehrenburg, Vaillant-Couturier and Moussinac, made occasional contributions to Monde, it is not surprising that the majority steered safely clear until after the United Front pact with the socialists in 1934 had transformed a heresy into an orthodoxy. The truth was, the dangers of fascism and of war were already begin­ ning to foster a dominant anxiety among French intellectuals of the Left. And Barbusse was quick to realize that in such circumstances the only effective tactic, particularly for intellectuals, was that of a broad alliance of all strongly anti-fascist elements. According to his secretary, he was by 1932 ‘obsessed’ by fear of a new war.12345In 1933 and 1934 he organized international youth congresses against fascism and war; in September 1933, he led the campaign for the defence of Dimitrov and his comrades, travelling in the same month to the United States to raise funds and support. Detained on Ellis Island, he was greeted by hundreds of admirers on his release.6 With equal vigour he threw himself into the campaign for the liberation of Ernst Thaelmann, the German Communist Party leader imprisoned by the Nazis, about whom he wrote: ‘The idea of social justice was riveted to his body. He had a red spirit just as one has blood.*6 Yet, willing as he was to permit attacks in Monde on the sectarian 1. Monde, 16 November 1929. 2. Monde, 11 February and 11 March 1933. 3. B. Jasienski, 'Comment "M onde" combat le social-fascisme’, C.&, 15 June 1932, pp. 824-30. 4. A. Vidal, Henri Barbusse Soldat de la Paix, p. 239. 5. Manchester Guardian, 30 September 1933. 6. H. Barbusse, Do you know Thaelmann?, New York, 1934, p. 5.

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tactics of the German communists, he could not resist blaming the socialists for Hitler’s seizure of absolute power in tones so aggressive as almost to repel in advance any socialist support for Thaelmann.1 In the early 'thirties, the sectarian line of the Comintern and the absence of any diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and the western democracies put Barbusse and other Left intellectuals in the paradoxical position of having to cry, simultaneously, 'A bas le fascisme!9 and ‘Désarmement!9. Barbusse, like his new ally Romain Rolland, saw the real conspiracy as lying between fascism, capitalism and the churches against the international working class.12 Thus a heavily armed France, they argued, was a step nearer to being a fascist France. But Rolland, who also appealed for the release of Dimitrov and Thaelmann,3 had' travelled a long way from his former semi-pacifist idealism, rejecting Gandhism in the western context and ridiculing the idea of passive resistance to Black Shirts. Too many French intellectuals, in his view, were content to sign non-violence petitions, and he criticized Georges Pioch, President of the International League of the Fighters for Peace, for arguing that armed revolt against fascism would be mere romanticism. Equally, he registered his absolute disagreement with Bertrand Russell’s contention that anything was better than war.4 In a speech delivered on March 15th, 1933, Rolland declared there could be no neutrals in the face of oppression; one must choose to fight with the workers or go under.56 Astonishing metamorphosis. Pioch the communist and Rolland the idealist had exchanged rôles. Rolland, who now criticized Pioch in the same terms as he had once been criticized by Barbusse, was if anything even more prepared to take up arms in defence of freedom than was Barbusse. Rolland, in fact, was now a communist in all but name. How did this occur? The starting point, as with most intellectuals, was less a change of philosophy on the question of ends and means, than a reappraisal of the international situation and, consequently, of the avenues open for effective action. In February 1927, he had taken part in the first of the major anti-fascist meetings with Barbusse and Paul Langevin, vice-president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. This was the start of the anti-fascist united front of intellectuals. Europe, Rolland believed, was dying; the League of Nations had betrayed its future by making itself the servant of two or three great powers.6yi l l changes in his thinking on Russia and communism followed from this reappraisal. In a letter to Libertaire apropos of the imprisonment of writers in the Soviet Union, Rolland, while recalling his opposition to the use of force, 1. Ibid., p. 19. 2. R Rolland, Quinze Ans de Combat 1919-1934, p. 99. 3. Monde, 23 December 1933 and Humanité, 9 May 1934. 4. R. Rolland, Par la Révolution la Paix, Paris, 1935, pp. 73-85. 5. Ibid., pp. 121-2. 6. Ibid., p. 147.

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struck a new note by explaining the Soviet dictatorship in terms of the formidable and hostile coalition of powers led by the British. While urging the Bolsheviks to open their prisons and the anarchists and S.R.’s to make common cause with them,1 he emphasized that for all its mistakes, crimes and stupidities, the Russian Revolution represented the most powerful and fruitful social effort of modern Europe. Rolland had turned the comer. Lunacharsky, quickly seizing the opportunity, wrote inviting him to contribute, uncensored, to the journal La Révolution et la Culture, Rolland was impressed. ‘La barrière, dès lors9 était rompue'* The Kellogg Pact of 1928 he regarded as a ‘comedy'. He suspected the formation of a Franco-Polish-German bloc against the U.S.S.R. Marx he now praised for his ‘pitiless lucidity' in piercing bourgeois ideology. The ‘rights of the spirit’, in his view, were best defended by the ‘firm and supple hand of Stalin’.8 In a prolonged autocritique he spared neither his own past errors nor those of other idealists. A great noise had been made about a book by the ‘sophist’ Julien Benda1234 who elevated Vesprit to a mere abstraction and forgot that religion is not for empty stomachs. But Rolland had not adopted the Marxist determinism en bloc. Like Barbusse, Gide and Malraux, he made his own peculiar fusion, arguing with Soviet literary critics who claimed that individual liberty as such could not exist and that the intellectual had never been and never would be free. Rolland reminded them that his whole life proved the contrary. The Russians, he concluded with disarming charity, were the true individualists without realizing it.5 No other idealist writer leapt as abruptly into the arms of Bolshevism as did Rolland.6*But a distinct trend to the left was already visible. Julien Benda, in his book on the ‘betrayal of the intellectuals’, showed himself primarily antipathetic to Italian fascism and German nationalism. The dangerous combination of capitalism, nationalism, anti-Semitism and authoritarianism drew from him the complaint that the egoisms these 1. R. Rolland, Quinze Ans de Combat 1919-1934, p. 80. 2. Ibid,, p. xlv. 3. Ibid., p. xxviiL 4. Julien Benda (1867-1956). A Parisian Jewish writer of a rationalist, or Cartesian outlook. He moved sharply to the left during the ’thirties. In La Trahison des Clercs, Benda castigated modem intellectuals for espousing nationalist and partisan causes, so abnegating their proper rôle. 5. R. Rolland, op. cit., p. 129. 6. A few observers regarded Rolland’s change of outlook as suspiciously precipitate. Henri Guilbeaux, in his La Fin des Soviets (1937), argued that the Kremlin had engineered a mariage d'état between Rolland and Maria Koudachova, who had formerly been Guilbeaux’s secretary in Russia. He claimed that she had ousted Rolland’s sister as his constant companion and that she alone translated the Soviet press for him, since he knew no Russian (p. 34 ff.). Whether she influenced Rolland or not, Mme Koudachova certainly did not take possession of his mind in the way Guilbeaux suggested. In any case, Guilbeaux was by now a crypto-fascist.

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creeds produced were coming to be regarded as sacred egoisms.1 J.-R. Bloch too was alarmed by Hitlerism, but believed its rise eould not adequately be explained by classical Marxist categories or by social determinism. Hitler had carried the political game into the sphere of elementary passions.123 As yet both Benda and Bloch refused to be stampeded into a pro-Soviet stand. Others, like the architect Francis Jourdain and Paul Langevin, found the logic of anti-fascism to be leading them gradually toward communism. Jourdain,8 who had been a delegate to the Moscow Congress of the Secours Ouvrier International in 1927, assisted Barbusse in founding the Amis de 1’ U.R.S.S. while Langevin, who castigated the ‘cowardice’ of Paris and Washington for failing to protect China against Japanese aggression in 1931, joined Barbusse and Rolland on the Comité mondial contre le Fascisme et la Guerre and gave his support to the campaigns on behalf of Dimitrov and Thaelmann. ^ W£ j^ The political orientation of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, of which Langevin was vice-president, was symptomatic of the general leftward trend among idealists in the early ’thirties. While the Ligue occasionally rebuked Moscow for neglecting human rights, it directed the full force of its moral prestige against fascism, and certain of its members such as Victor Basch, Langevin, Félicien Challaye and Jacques Kayser are reputed to have played down the Ligue’s findings on the methods employed in Soviet collectivization.4 The 1922 communist ban on membership had been raised. These were the idealists of an older generation. Neither in their lives nor in their outlook did they have much in common with the anarchistically inclined young students and ex-surrealists who were coming to c o m m u n ism in these years. Sceptical as Marxists, the older generation took a pragmatic view of the Soviet Union, seeing in it the only vigorous antidote to what they feared most - black reaction. They were dry tinder for communist front organizers, the greatest of whom, the German Willi Muenzenberg, ensured the efficient administration of the AmsterdamPleyel movement, the Writers’ Organization for the Defence of Culture and the Reichstag Counter-Trial which took place in London and Paris in 1933. This last manœuvre went a long way toward ensuring that the acquittal of Dimitrov and Torgler came to be regarded as the acquittal of communism in general on the charges of conspiracy and violence. The Dimitrov of Muenzenberg’s creation became, in the eyes of the Left 1. J. Benda, The Treason o f the Intellectuals, trans. by Richard Aldington, New York, 1928, p. 36. 2. J.-R. Bloch, Offrande à la Politique, Paris, 1933, p. 82. 3. Francis Jourdain. Bom 1876, artist, architect and writer, he joined the P.C.F. in October 1944. 4. W. Drabovitch, Les Intellectuels Français et le B olM vism e, pp. 36-43.

106

1927-1934 intellectuals, merely a good anti-fascist.1 The activities of Muenzenberg at a time when the Comintern had officially declared war on pacifists, reformists and social-democrats remain something of an enigma. It certainly indicates the enduring pragmatism of communists even in the face of current doctrine, besides illustrating the importance attached to the function contained in the third principle of utility. Even so, too Machiavellian an explanation might be misleading; there were certainly grave doubts, rifts and confusions among communists at this time. It seems possible that Muenzenberg, who established wide contacts with French intellectuals of the Left, using Barbusse and Rolland as figure­ heads, may have encouraged Barbusse to persevere with his editorial policy on Monde. This is speculation; one doubts whether Barbusse needed any encouragement. Certainly there was confusion. Rolland, who complained of the official boycott of the Amsterdan Congress by the Second International and its Secretary, Friedrich Adler,12 blandly ignored, in his indignation, that the socialists were now the object of continuous vilification by the Comin­ tern. The operation, however, proved successful. Of 2,200 delegates, 830 were Communists, 291 Socialists, 24 Independent Socialists, 10 Trotskyists, 412 trade unionists, 602 from the Syndicalist movement and 58 from women’s organizations.3 The Committee of Initiative contained, besides Barbusse and Rolland, a few communist intellectuals like Vaillant-Couturier, Moussinac and the painter Paul Signac, but care was taken to include considerably more idealists like Langevin, Victor Margueritte, Challaye and Jourdain, none of whom, at this stage, could properly be called fellow-travellers.4 The Congress ultimately produced a Manifesto denouncing aggressive capitalism and the lie of so-called pacific institutions like the League of Nations, while proclaiming the duty of defending the Soviet Union and calling for the organization of the masses against war. Obviously the communists had reason for selfcongratulation. This successful initiative was quickly followed up by a second Congress which met in April 1933 at the Salle Pleyel, in Paris. A third of the delegates were communists and Barbusse was again at the centre of things, with Muenzenberg running the show from behind the scenes. 1. See R. N. Carew Hunt, ‘Willi Muenzenberg*, International Communism, St Antony’s Papers No. 9, and A. Koestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 200. 2. R. Rolland, Par la Révolution la Paix, pp. 42-3. 3. Ibid., p. 56. The major nationalities represented were: 75 Germans, 458 Dutch, 318 British, 585 French, 55 Czechoslovaks, 42 Belgians, 37 Americans, 35 Italians. Social categories: 1,865 workers, 72 peasants, 249 intellectuals or members of liberal professions. It should be noted that communist statistics tend to classify as a ‘worker’ anyone of working-class origins. 4. Other French intellectuals of the non-communist Left present included: Duhamel, Vildrac, Bloch, Guéhenno, Roger Martin du Gard and Pioch. Among the communists were René Maublanc and Marcel Cohen.

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The work begun at Amsterdam was carried on by a wide range of co­ ordinated groups, particularly by the World Committee for the Struggle against War, on whose bureau sat Muenzenberg, Barbusse, the French c o m m u n ist leader Marcel Cachin and the Russians Chvemik and Stassova. On a domestic level, Thorez’s leadership saw the foundation in March 1932 of the A.E.A.R., with Vaillant-Couturier as its SecretaryGeneral and Aragon, Nizan and Malraux among its most active members. It was Aragon and Nizan who became editorial secretaries of the A.E.A.R.’s monthly journal Commune, which first appeared in July 1933 with a directing committee of Barbusse, Rolland, Gide (first principle of utility) and Vaillant-Couturier, only the last of whom was at all important in policy making.1 In the words of a communist (Roger Garaudy), the A.E.A.R. ‘guided across9 writers like Tristan Rémy, André Chamson and Eugène Dabit who were moving toward ‘a clear historical perspective*. Dabit’s journal provides an illuminating and apparently unselfconscious account of the attraction such a purposeful organization could exert over a young and hesitant idealist. Condensed and paraphrased, a section of the journal gives the following picture: 15th November 1932, went to the A.E.A.R. to see Nizan, who was not there. Found Georges Friedmann, who had joined. Visited Vaillant-Couturier, whose words inspired me. 9 o’clock, confused discussion. 25th November, talk with Malraux, who gives me confidence. 23rd March, meeting with Gide, Vaillant-Couturier, Malraux, Guéhenno and others . . . Warmed as he was by such contacts, and unable to break free from communist circles, Dabit remained reserved, reflecting sadly after receiving a harsh letter from Barbusse: T may make a good writer perhaps: a politician, an agitator, a public man, no.’2 But the Party’s policy was bound to reap ample dividends. It was not merely a question of fascism. There was Russia too, the Russia of the First Five Year Plan, of the ‘great leap ahead’. Soviet films and books were making an increasingly vigorous impact on western intellectuals - films such as Mother, The End o f S t Petersburg, The General Line, Storm over Asia, Earth. Simone de Beauvoir recalled going with Paul Nizan in 1930 to see Storm over Asia, on the Champs Elysées, as well as reading translations of Ehrenburg, Babel and Pilniak. Sholokov she found impressive, although her attitude toward ‘man meets tractor* novels ‘oscillated from admiration to distrust’.8 Others, ignorant of or disregarding the high human cost of forced collectivization (usually the 1. Communist intellectuals who contributed to Commune in 1933 included: René Blech, Pierre Unik, Jean Fréville, Aragon, Vladimir Pozner, Paul Nizan, Georges Sadoul, Jean Baby, Marcel Willard, Léon Moussinac, Louis Paul, Georges Politzer, Paul Signac. 2. E. Dabit, Journal Intim e ( 1928-1936), Paris, 1939, pp. 87, 90, 146, 181. 3. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de I9Age, p. 52.

108

1927-1934 former), were less inhibited in their enthusiasm, echoing the mood of Louis Fischer: ‘The entire Soviet Union felt inspired in the presence of this spectacle of creation and self-sacrifice. I too was swept away by i t . . . A whole nation marched behind a vision.’1 Jean Guéhenno, the selfstyled Girondin and petit-bourgeois, spoke of the Plan in 1931 as the most important fact of contemporary economics, driving the bourgeoisie to anti-Bolshevik desperation. Stalin’s report to the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. in May 1930 he found impressive and modest.123Two years later he reflected that although human nature had not as yet changed in Russia, the acquisitive impulse was bound to diminish in a planned and secure society. The young Russians, in his eyes, were gaining in dignity every day.8 In all this, Guéhenno merely reflected the general mood on the Left. It was in fact on the idealists that the construction of a seemingly planned and rational society exercised the most far-reaching influence, for the communists needed little convincing. Yet even for them it was a welcome tonic after the years of retreat and defeat. Barbusse went to Russia in September 1927, travelled widely and had an interview with Stalin for whom his admiration was genuine. Late in 1928 he paid a second visit, remaining for nearly a year, deeply impressed by the economic advances, the statistics, the virility of Soviet society. Gorky returned to Russia. Those intellectuals like Barbusse and VaillantCouturier who had remained loyal to the Party through thick and thin felt themselves more than ever vindicated. Vaillant-Couturier, with an ardour far from contrived, did not allow his organizational duties to dull his lyricism. In 1933 he wrote: Adieu beaux sourires forcés des femmes fortes . . . Adieu, mains qui saviez jouer de la guitare et du fusil, mains pour chérir et pour tuer . . .4

Aragon was less lyrical and less diffident about the necessary rigours of the great leap forward: T hose are engineers, doctors th a t are being executed D e ath to those w ho endanger the conquest o f O ctober D e ath to the traito rs to the Fiveyearplan T o y ou Y oung C om m unists Sweep o u t the h u m an debris where lingers th e m agical spider o f the sign o f the cross . . . 1. L. Fischer, M en and Politics, p. 189. 2. J. Guéhenno, ‘A propos du “Plan Quinquennal*’ \ Europe, 15 February 1931, pp. 262-4. 3. J. Guéhenno, ‘La Nature Humaine est-elle en train de changer en Russie?*, Europe, 15 July 1933, pp. 438-9. 4. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Poésie, p. 151. (Extracts from Adieu Moscou.)

109

INTELLECTUALS AND THE PA RTY T he blue eyes o f the R evolution shine w ith a necessary cruelty . . -1

At the same time, the contrast with the economic predicament of the capitalist world was constantly pointed. Aragon wrote of Russia: N obody here know s w hat unem ploym ent was like the noise o f the ham m er the noise o f th e sickle . . .*

The Left intellectuals found themselves increasingly defenceless before Marxist economic determinism. The facts seemed to point all in one direction from which there could be no evasion. Engels’ predictions took on a new poignancy for those who previously disregarded economic questions. ‘The expansion of the market,’ he had written, ‘cannot keep pace with the expansion of production. The collision becomes inevitable . . . it becomes periodic. Capitalist production brings into being a “new vicious circle” . . . We have now experienced it five times since 1825, and at this moment (1877) we are experiencing it for the sixth time.’3 Idealists like Eugène Dabit, distraught at the spectacle of proletarian suffering, read the modem Marxist glosses of Georges Politzer4 and their other communist contemporaries, and could find no answer. The most familiar cartoon figure in Monde in these years was that of a bloated, cigar-chewing capitalist standing astride a poverty-stricken town. Although the move to the left in the Soviet economy and the declaration of war by the towns on the peasantry had originally been advocated by Trotsky, the Trotskyist opposition which had begun to form among French intellectuals after 1924 was no more reconciled to the new Stalinism than was Trotsky himself. Pierre Naville wrote that despite the Plans, Soviet policy remained conservative, bureaucratic. Victor Serge, arrested in Russia in 1928, was released on his promise not to engage in any ‘anti-Soviet activity’. Vaillant-Couturier wrote condescendingly in VHumanité that Serge had been well treated in prison.6 From Paris Serge received encouragement from the ex-communists Magdeleine Paz (Marx), Marcel Martinet and Jacques Mesnil, as well as from the idealists Werth and Duhamel who assisted with the publication in France of his Littérature et Révolution, which was banned in Russia.6 When Serge was again arrested in 1933, Duhamel wrote a series of articles on the Affaire 1. L. Aragon, The Red Front (extracts). 2. Ibid. 3. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, trans. by Emile Bums, London, n.d., pp. 303-4. 4. See G. Politzer, in C.B., 15 October 1932. Politzer joined the Party in the late ’twenties. His father was a Jewish lawyer. A friend of Nizan and Sartre, he had been a member of the Philosophies group and published in 1928 the first volume of his Critique des Fondements de la Psychologie. 5. V. Serge, Mémoires dyun Révolutionnaire, p. 262. 6. Ibid., pp. 285-6.

110

1927-1934 Victor Serge, while pressing the Soviet ambassador for his release. Durtain, Werth and the ex-communists joined the campaign, led by Boris Souvarine in his Critique Sociale, provoking the new communist organ Commune to a heated reply. The affair, in Commune's view, merely revealed again that there were those for and those against the dictatorship of the proletariat. Magdeleine Paz was mocked for her ‘verbiage* about *la flam m e révolutionnaire’ in Le Populaire. ‘Serge,’ continued the edi­ torial, ‘has found in the U.S.S.R. a hospitality that only the Revolution could give to an anarchist placed in the situation he was in.’ He had betrayed the confidence accorded to him for twelve years. ‘Patience has its limits.’1 Rigid and dogmatic as the communists were when under attack, they were scarcely more so than the Trotskyists who developed their own rigour from the inexorable logic of opposition. Souvarine, for example, derived satisfaction from pointing out that the demand for planned industrialization had first been voiced by Trotsky and the Opposition in the years 1924-27, but so compulsive was his urge to denigrate the Stalinists that he argued a) that the condition of life in Russia was so low that the first stages of the Plan could make little difference and b) that the struggle with the peasants entailed grave perils at a time when material conditions were not ready for collectivization.2 Souvarine did not make it clear whether conditions had been more favourable in 1924. Indeed, so extreme did his attitude become that he fell out with Trotsky who accused him of treating the Communist Parties like corpses. Trotsky, Souvarine replied, had a bad memory and a shocking ability to contradict himself.8 Within a few years Souvarine was working for Le Figaro.

1. Commune, July 1933, p. 96. 2. B .C ., February 1930. 3. A C , July 1933.Il

Ill

CH A PTER TH REE

1934-1939

I t is more than arguable that the ‘fascist* riots of February 6th, 1934, were not in fact a threat to the existence of the Republic, or even intended to be.1 It is equally true that the French Left used the term ‘fascist’ in an extremely elastic manner, covering all groups from de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu to the collaborators of Gringoire, Candide and Je Suis Partout, forgetting that the Leagues had a fifty-year-old nationalist tradition, the tradition of Boulangism, of Panama, of anti-Dreyfus.2 But for our purposes such considerations are immaterial. With Hitler’s seizure of complete power less than a year old, the intellectuals (and even the parties) of the Left were generally convinced that fascism had been within a hair’s breadth of devouring the Republic. Nor did memories of Boulangism and of Dreyfus afford much comfort. The riots had been touched off by the Stavisky scandal and by the subsequent resignation of Premier Chautemps. The right-wing bands turned out in force: the Action Française, the Camelots du Roi, the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Solidarité Française, the Croix de Feu, the Franquistes. The Chamber of Deputies was besieged. The intellectual Left mobilized. Malraux and Bloch were among the many intellectuals who took part in the counter-demonstration organized by the Radical, Socialist and Communist Parties on February 12th. In March a giant meeting was held in the Latin Quarter, presided over by Jean Cassou. Paul Langevin, with Paul Rivet, launched an Appel aux Travailleurs, urging solidarity between workers and intellectuals. Rolland issued an appeal to the people of Paris. The diffidence felt by writers like Victor Margueritte and André Chamson toward communism began rapidly to wither away. Chamson wrote of his ‘growing anguish before the rise of totalitarian régimes’ (the U.S.S.R. not included) and of the ‘decisive shock of February 6th’.8 Veteran scientists like Aimé and 1. See M. Beloff, T h e Sixth of February’, in J. Joli (ed.), Decline o f the Third Repub*

lie, London, 1959. 2. See R. Girardet, 'Notes sur l’esprit d’un Fascisme Français 1934-9’, Revue

française de science politique, July-September 1955. 3. A. Chamson, Devenir ce qu'on est, Paris, 1959, p. 59.

112

1934-1930 Eugénie Cotton were impelled into the anti-fascist organizations, while young 4normalien* philosophers like Jean-T. Desanti found themselves subscribing to militant communism.1 Bloch, who only a year previously had preferred the Socialist to the Communist Party, now blamed the Radical and Socialist Parties in a mood of high emotion for not having encouraged the revolutionary situation which might have developed in February, leading to the ‘Fourth Republic’. But the socialists had been more afraid of the communists than of the police.8 For once, the intellectuals felt close (and relevant) to the workers. Ramon Fernandez related that a building worker had declared on February 12th: ‘We ought to have rifles and go down to the rich quarters . . . then we need a man to march at our head, a leader . . . a fellow of Gide’s type.’8 As a result of these experiences Fernandez himself with­ drew many of his anti-communist criticisms: liberalism was dead; not to be in the proletarian camp was almost to be in the camp of its enemies.4 February 6th tended to snap the idealists’ fine line of reasoning which put the Five Year Plans, Hitlerism and the French tradition of liberty into separate, if not watertight, compartments. The universalism of the Marxist argument appeared even more formidable. One was safe no­ where; the inherent intellectual tendency to be engagé at a distance was modified. The thugs of the Leagues on the Concorde personified in physical terms certain abstractions of thought in a way that the miners of the Pas de Calais or the workers of Billancourt never could. An English historian living in Paris at that time recalls that ‘My first sight of France was an Action Française strong-arm team in full spate, beating up a Jewish student. And this was a daily occurrence. It is difficult to convey the degree of hate that any decent person would feel for the pimply, cowardly ligueurs. Anti-fascism was the most important element in our lives. . . France was living through a moral and mental civil w ar. . . one had to choose between fascism and fellow-travelling*.6 Gringoire, whose sales rose to 700,000 by 1939, disseminated anti-republican, anti­ socialist, pro-Nazi, pro-Mussolini, anti-Semitic propaganda, and Gringoire was not alone. Not only the Cagoulard conspiracy, but any foreign affairs debate in the Chamber or Senate revealed the extent of such influences in high places. Stimulated by a new sense of urgency, the intellectuals proceeded to play an important rôle in clearing the path toward left-wing unity of action of formidable obstacles, doctrinal, historical and temperamental. The Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes (C.V.I.A.),4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

J.-T. Desanti, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Communisme’, L .N .C ., June 1956, p. 96. J.-R. Bloch, ‘Le 12 Février*, Europe, 15 March 1934, pp. 409-16. R. Fernandez, ‘Littérature et Politique*, L .N .R .F ., 1 February 1935, p. 286. R. Fernandez, ‘Lettre ouverte à André Gide*, L.N .R .F ., 1 April 1934, p. 705. Letter to the author. Which soon included Picasso, Gide, Benda, Joliot-Curie et al.

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INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

founded on March 5th, 1934 by Paul Rivet, Paul Langevin and Alain (the former two becoming joint presidents), organized a second Mani­ feste aux Travailleurs signed by more than 1,200 intellectuals.1 The C.V.I.A. enjoyed rapid success. In the provinces it stirred opinion among the liberal petite-bourgeoisie and fonctionnaires; in Paris it provided an informal forum at which political personalities could confer without committing their respective parties.123In 1935 Rivet was elected deputy for the 5th arrondissement of Paris on a United Front, anti-fascist platform.8 Intellectuals and their organizations continued to oil the wheels of political intercourse. On January 18th, 1935, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the C. V.I. A. were both present at a large meeting organized on communist initiative at the Salle Bullier, and it was Langevin who presided over a meeting of representatives of all left organizations on June 8th, in the course of which it was decided to create a Comité du Rassemblement populaire and to prepare a vast demon­ stration.45 This plan materialized in the shape of a giant rally at the Buffalo Stadium on July 14th. Here the Popular Front was formerly consecrated in the presence of the three political parties, the two trade union confederations, the Amsterdam-Pleyel Committee, the Ligue, the C.V.I. A., the A.E. A.R. and other intellectual groups. The major decisions leading to the United and Popular Fronts had, of course, been taken by the political leaders; nevertheless it was symbolic of the prestige enjoyed by intellectuals at this time that Thorez, Blum and Daladier were to be seen standing arm in arm with Barbusse and Langevin.6 Equally symbolic was the election of an intellectual, Victor Basch, as president of the Rassemblement populaire. No party benefited more from these developments than the Com­ munist. By 1936 membership had increased from 25,000 (in 1932) to 350,000. In the 1936 elections the Party’s representation in the Chamber leapt up from 10 to 72 seats (14*9 per cent of the votes cast). The Socialist Party obtained 146 seats and the Radicals 116; Blum became Premier with communist support, although his offer of participation was refused. The Party’s front organizations proliferated, their objective being not only to foster unity of purpose among left-wing intellectuals but also to channel that unity into direct support of the Party. Muenzenberg’s Institut pour l'Etude du Fascisme listed among its collaborators Aragon, 1. Including: Langevin, Rivet, Benda, Cassou, Breton, Fernandez, Friedmann, Gide, Guéhenno, Pierre-Quint, Wurmser, Vildrac, Giono, Roger M artin du Gard, Spire. 2. D. Ligou, Histoire du Socialisme en France ( 1871-1961), Paris, 1962, p. 403. 3. Ibid., p. 407. 4. J. Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisième République, vol. 6, Paris, 1962, p. 145. 5. Ibid.

114

Ï 9 3 4 -I9 3 9 the physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Paul Langevin.1 The ostensibly cultural bodies like the A.E.A.R. and the Maisons de la Culture served equally well for political agitation and recruitment. By 1937 the Maisons and their affiliated professional or vocational groups claimed 70,000 members throughout France. Never before and never again was the third principle of utility, with its blend of shrewd calculation and sweet persuasion, to be so much in evidence. A simple example of the technique employed was provided by Vaillant-Couturier in 1934. The communist organ Commune published a letter from the novelist Edith Thomas* asking whether she should really join the A.E.A.R. in view of her petitbourgeois background. Ts it not better,’ she asked of this class, ‘despite their good will, to abandon them as incurables to their petit-bourgeois individualism - or to their egoism -w hen, after all, a revolutionary association is not an enterprise for personal salvation?’ In the same issue Vaillant-Couturier replied graciously and magnanimously, ‘without any doubt, comrade, you can join the A.E.A.R.’8 Thus adroitly stagemanaged, small incidents of this sort were bound to have a reassuring effect on the more hesitant intellectuals. Indeed this, the third principle of utility, deserves to be named the Vaillant-Couturier principle in honour of its greatest exponent. The errors of the Clarté era had not been forgotten, and in Aragon, the editor of Commune, he had a skilful lieutenant.1234* With the Italian and German Parties liquidated, the P.C.F. became by far the most powerful and highly organized Party outside Russia, and naturally assumed the initiative in mobilizing intellectuals on an inter­ national, as well as a national level, with Muenzenberg still the guiding genius. Following the Amsterdam-Pleyel Congresses of 1932-33, there took place in June 1935 at Paris the First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, with Alain, Barbusse, Rolland, Malraux, Gide and Aragon to the forefront among the French, Heinrich 1. A. Koestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 247. 2. Edith Thomas, novelist, essayist, historian. Before the war she collaborated on Ce Soir and Commune (both communist) as well as on Regards and Europe. She joined the Party in September 1942 and left it in December 1949. Author of La Mort de Marie, VHomme criminel (novels), Jeanne d’Arc and other political and historical works. 3. Commune, May 1934, p. 867. 4. Aragon’s successor as editor was Jacques Decour (1910-42). From a wealthy Parisian family, author of the novel Les Pères, and a student of German, his conversion to communism sprang directly from his aversion to Nazism. In February 1939 he produced a number of Commune devoted to German humanism, with contributions from H. Mann, Brecht, Feuchtwanger and other anti-Nazis. In the years 1934-6, communist or pro-communist contributors to Commune included: Jean Bruhat, René Maublanc, Marcel Prenant, Rolland, Bloch, André Wurmser, Georges Besson, Henri Wallon, Henri Mineur, Elsa Triolet, Claude Morgan, Georges Sadoul, Moussinac, Henri Lefebvre, Paul Labérenne, Marcel Cohen, Jacques Solomon, Albert Soboul, Georges Politzer, René Blech. The general intellectual level was extremely high.

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Mann, Johannes Becher and Bertolt Brecht leading the Germans, Ehrenburg and A. Tolstoy the Russians, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley the English. Although the case of Victor Serge (still in prison) was raised by Gaetano Salvemini and by Magdeleine Paz in denouncing all persecu­ tions, Aragon and Ehrenburg manoeuvred the proceedings well and the total effect was as the communists desired. The Second Congress was held during the Spanish Civil War in July 1937, at Valencia, Madrid, Bar­ celona and finally Paris. By this time, in the context of Russia’s unilateral assistance to Republican Spain, while the democracies refused to intervene, communist prestige was overwhelming and exercised with little restraint.1 The Spanish situation, more than any other single factor, sustained the unity of the French intellectual Left in the two or three years which followed the foundation of the Rassemblement populaire. The earthquake of February 1934 having subsided into mere tremors, and with a Popular Front Government in power for the first time, the intellectuals once again returned to their more familiar exercise of committing their consciences and their emotions beyond the borders of France. While Blum (reluc­ tantly) and the Radicals (adamantly) refused to countenance official French intervention in the Civil War, the intellectuals came down heavily in its favour. If liberty, and even civilization itself, were at stake, and if the com­ munists, with Soviet support, proved themselves indispensable to the defence of the Republic, then many found it hard to resist the conclusion that the communists were the stoutest defenders of civilization. Reserva­ tions and scruples were a luxury that J.-R. Bloch, for example, found he could no longer afford. In Russia, Spain and Mexico, he wrote, the image of a new man, no longer divided against himself, had begun to appear. It was for this man that the war was now being fought.123The same vision set the ex-communist Paul Eluard back on the road to communism, though cautiously. SM y a en Espagne un arbre teint de sang C'est rarbre de la liberté.* For Eluard, as for others, the European situation now appeared indi­ visible; the preservation of French and Spanish liberty were intimately connected. 'M ais que l'Espagne crie victoire . . . La France aura gagné sa 1. At Valencia France was represented by Tristan Tzara, at Madrid by Cassou and Malraux, at Paris by Chamson, Benda, Claude Aveline and Vaillant-Couturier. Only Malraux and Vaillant-Couturier were communists. 2. J.-R. Bloch, ‘Espagne! Espagne!', Europe, 15 August 1936, p. 524. 3. P. Eluard, Poèmes Politiques, Paris, 1948, p. 31.

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guerre.91 So also, for Romain Rolland: *Au secours de VEspagne! A notre secours! A votre secours!92 André Chamson wrote: ‘The Spanish war was a shock still more profound than that of February 6th. We saw there the symbol of liberty in peril and the préfiguration of our future.’8 Fascist atrocities deepened this conviction, particularly the bombing of Guernica in 1937. Eluard responded with his La Victoire de Guernica and his friend Picasso with his famous painting. Catholic writers like Mauriac, Maritain and Bernanos joined in denouncing the act. Louis Aragon described the horrors perpetrated by Franco’s troops in certain towns, while the writer Simone Téry, who had taken up a communist position on most questions, provided eye-witness accounts of physical suffering and of the massacre of Malaga where fascism had surpassed itself. Fifty Fiat pursuit planes had again and again strafed the refugees leaving the town. ‘If you suspected a tenth of what occurs in Spain, you would heave up in horror.’4 Vaillant-Couturier and Nizan reported directly from the front. This reportage, of course, was not only tendentious but highly selec­ tive. A recent authority has given ‘a very approximate figure of 40,000 Nationalist executions during the whole war’ as likely. On the other hand, pro-Republicans killed 7,937 religious persons and had been responsible for about 75,000 killings in all by September 1936.5 That the balance these figures suggest is not merely the perspective of hindsight is shown by Hemingway’s contemporary picture of the mutuality of the slaughter. In the reports of French communist and left-wing writers, no such balance appeared. However, there may be a distinction. The Republican killings, coming as they did mainly in the first weeks of the war, were to a con­ siderable extent spontaneous, the vengeance of the oppressed on their oppressors. Nationalist massacres, on the contrary, tended to be calcu­ lated, ordered, mechanized and to a large degree perpetrated by foreign troops and foreign machines. The distinction may not have counted for much to the victims, but it is worth remembering. The intellectuals found French non-intervention doubly frustrating, following so closely as it did the victory of the Popular Front in both countries. J.-R. Bloch wrote with some justice on August 7th that the French Council of Ministers would have allowed Spain to buy arms had England not prevented it. And his explanation, that England, far from fearing general war, as she claimed, distrusted Largo Caballero’s leftism,12345 1. Ibid., p. 36. (The first and last lines of a verse of Veneer Juntos). 2. Quoted in A. Dumeix, ‘Le Parti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Paix’, L.N.C ., December 1950, p. 32. 3. A. Chamson, Devenir ce qu'on est, p. 61. 4. S. Téry, Front de la Liberté, Espagne 1937-1938, Paris, 1938, p. 75. 5. H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, London, 1961, pp. 169 and 173. These statistics will continue to be a matter of controversy.

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has much circumstantial evidence to support it.1 In any case, as Bloch pointed out, the idea that an Anglo-French sale of arms to Spain would have provoked such a war, at a time when neither Germany nor Italy was prepared for it, was quite absurd.* This general interpretation was energetically canvassed in the Chamber of Deputies by Gabriel Péri, the Party’s spokesman on foreign affairs, an editor of /’Humanité, a member of the Central Committee, and one of the most politically influential intellectuals in the Party. Péri stressed that the so-called non-intervention policy of August 8th was in fact hostile to the Republic and abrogated the Franco-Spanish treaty of 1935. He quoted The Times’ correspondent at Hendaye on the new Junkers being supplied to Burgos, despite the nominal Italo-German adherence to the agreement.8 Jean Cassou,4 who was Spanish born, and never more than close to the communists, recalled Azafla saying that he needed only fifty planes in the first weeks of the rebellion, yet could not get them from France.5 Vaillant-Couturier wrote from Spain demanding that at least the blockade of the Republican ports be forcibly lifted, while Paul Langevin travelled to London and even appealed to Churchill, knowing that if English resistance could be broken down, the French would quickly follow. Péri speculated in the Chamber on who would be the ‘next Spain’, reminding the deputies that the cause of peace would not have been advanced on the day when France had three frontiers to defend against fascism.6 Bloch urged Blum to halt the ridiculous Hitlerian waltz danced by Anglo-French diplomacy since 1933, and André Chamson had no doubts that the Spanish conflict would decide the outcome of any future European war. It may be asked: ‘what about Russian intervention?7 What were the 1. Bloch believed that England was afraid for her investments in the mines of the Rio Tinto, and elsewhere. It is often difficult to prove a direct correlation between economic interests and political actions. The Left assumes such a correlation, the Right may deny it. The British Rio Tinto Company possessed some 32,000 acres of mining land in the copper region of Huelva, valued in 1930 at £3,750,000. VickersArmstrong indirectly controlled Constructova Naval, a Spanish company that for a time enjoyed a monopoly of warship construction in Spain. Sir Henry Chilton, the last British ambassador to the Republic, apparently said on May 31st, 1938 that a victory for Franco would be better for Britain. See D. A. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 1936-41, New York, 1962, pp. 18-19 and 100. That many Conservatives believed Britain would regain her influence in Spain, regardless of the German and Italian aid received by Franco, is well known. 2. J.-R. Bloch, op. ci/., 15 October 1936, p. 254. 3. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 29. 4. Jean Cassou. Bom 1897. Essayist, poet, novelist, art critic, later Director of the Paris Museum of Modem Art. President of the C.N.E. 1946-8, he was close to the communists until 1949. 5. J. Cassou, La Mémoire Courte, Paris, 1953, p. 10. In fact the Republic received a limited supply of planes not only through the activities of private sympathizers like Malraux, but also from Pierre Cot, the Popular Front Air Minister. 6. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 41. 7. See David C. Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy in the Spanish Civil War, Berkeley, 1957.

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1934-1939 communists really up to in Spain? The activities of the OGPU and the repression of the anarchists and the POUM were bound to raise serious doubts about the cause of liberty in communist hands. Gabriel Péri argued that the Soviet Union had not violated non-intervention in the same spirit as Germany and Italy, whatever Eden had said to the con­ trary in the Commons. This was certainly true; the Russians decided to intervene only when the extent of fascist intervention rendered defeat for the Republic otherwise inevitable. The Soviet initiative, in Bloch’s eyes, had given hope to millions; in any case, the Spanish C.P. was not trying to sovietize Spain but merely striving to bolster a left-orientated Republic ‘for some time’.1 Naturally the reformist image which the Spanish Party was fostering proved most congenial to the French intellectuals, both communist and non-communist. It was in this spirit that Simone Téry praised the work of Jésus Hernández, the communist Minister of Public Instruction, and of Vicente Uribe, the Party’s Minister of Agriculture. The C.P., she wrote, had understood the heart of the agrarian problem, giving legal blessing to the will of the peasants, three million hectares of land having been redistributed at the expense of Nationalist landowners.2 This raised a problem which the French intellectuals were apt to avoid. What Simone Téry reported may have been accurate in itself, but the sins of distortion are often the sins of omission. Who were the ‘Nationalist’ landowners, and who were the ‘Republicans’? How many ‘Republicans’ merely found themselves in the wrong half of Spain? The Spanish C.P., in fact, was pursuing a policy the conservatism of which the French intellectuals were loath to admit. It was through the left-socialist Federation of Land Workers that mass agricultural discontent had to be channelled, forcing Uribe, in the summer of 1937, reluctantly to recognize collectives seized from so-called ‘Republican’ landlords. So indulgent had the Party been that 76,700 small landowners, peasant proprietors and tenant farmers joined it within a few months, seeking protection against the genuine radicalism of the anarchists and left-socialists. The problem of both satisfying the Spanish masses and appearing respectable to the British Government presented an acute dilemma to the Spanish communists and to their friends in France. But there was a war to be won against fascism, and that, for many French intellectuals, was the beginning and the end of the problem. An intense, emotional fervour was directed toward the heroes of Spanish anti-fascism, particularly Dolores Ibárruri (la Pasionaria), whom Aragon described as the symbol of the Spanish proletariat taking its example from Marx, Engels and Stalin. Edith Thomas, not yet a Party member, wrote: 1. J.-R. Bloch, op. cit., 15 September 1936, p. 121. 2. S. Téry, op- cit.f p. 112.

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Pasionaria, Pasionaria, ii riest plus temps que les hommes t'aiment ils t'écoutent comme ils écoutent le vent chanter, ils te regardent comme ils regardent la flamme monter, ils t'entendent comme s'ils s'entendaient eux-mêmes.* Ferocity itself became an endearing quality. It was Dolores Ibárruri who declared on June 5th, 1937, that ‘no measures will ever prove excessive that are taken to purge the proletarian camp of the poisonous growth of Trotskyism . . and, on August 9th, that ‘the Trotskyists must be exterminated like beasts of prey*. Many intellectuals believed then, and some believe still, that Trotsky was serving the fascist cause, that his followers were doing their best to wreck Republican unity in Spain, and that anyone who drew attention to the astonishingly rapid and thorough purge of Soviet personnel in Spain, or to the murderous campaign waged by the OGPU against the anarchists, the POUM, and even the left-socialists, was nothing short of a villain. Colette Audry (a French Trotskyist who had visited Barcelona in 1936 and met the POUM leader Andrés Nin), Daniel Guérin, André Gide, and Paul Rivet protested against what had happened in Barcelona in the first week of May 1937, but the French communists, apart from occasional scathing references to Trotskyism as the agent of the Gestapo, ignored the question, and even the strictly non-communist editorial board of the Popular Front intellectual weekly Vendredi refused to publish Gide’s polemic with Izvestia on the subject, in the interests of the ‘Popular Front mystique*. The Barcelona events do not appear to have touched off any sudden revulsion; there was no French Homage to Catalonia, even among the idealists, and Gide had already broken with the communists in 1936. Possibly Orwell’s experiences in Barcelona had no counterpart among any of the major French writers, and reports of the fighting were so distorted and contradictory that they could be quietly discounted by those for whom the fascist threat and the need for Republican unity remained the over­ riding considerations. The mounting tensions within the French intellectual Left were reflected in the history of the paper Vendredi, founded in November 1935 by Guéhenno, André Viollis and André Chamson. Chamson, who was in his own words ‘more and more devoured by political passions’,2 had moved sufficiently far to the Left to be able to tell an audience at the Maison de la Culture, according to l'Humanité's report, that French peasants would ultimately find satisfaction in a régime analogous to the 1. Commune, October 1936, p. 135. 2. A Chamson, Devenir ce qu'on est, p. 61.

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Soviet one.1 Vendredi, which was specifically designed to embrace all strata of opinion within the Popular Front, and whose funds, according to Guéhenno, came from ‘Radical sources*, soon ran into difficulties. Late in 1936 Chamson, who had only recently returned from Russia himself, decided to publish the Avant-Propos of Gide’s scathingly critical Retour de V U .R.S.S .a Later, by way of self-justification, Gide forwarded for publication a letter from the young communist writer Pierre Herbart, who had accompanied him to Russia, in which he conceded the truth of many of Gide’s criticisms, while disputing his general perspective.8 This, as Chamson said, was the beginning of the long protracted death of Vendredi. Clearly communist pressure on the editors was considerable. Guéhenno recalled that first the socialists and then the communists tried to take over the paper.12345In January 1937, Vendredi printed a strongly worded attack on Gide by Paul Nizan67and eleven months later the editors refused to publish Gide’s argument with Izvestia over the relation­ ship between the Spanish communists and anarchists. Gide, suspecting communist pressure, accused the editors of not being free. Guéhenno replied, reproaching him for putting his personal quarrels above the common cause of the Popular Front to whose mystique Vendredi would remain faithful.6 But this mystique was fast disintegrating as the Radicals and the communists moved into positions of mutual enmity, and after Munich Vendredi abandoned politics entirely and called itself Reflets. Until the Czechoslovak crisis blew up to its Munich climax, the general international situation and the Spanish Civil War had operated as unifying factors on the intellectual Left. Communist prestige and leader­ ship were enhanced. When sixty-four intellectuals signed a letter protesting against the condemnation of Italy’s Abyssinian adventure, heated replies came not only from Barbusse and Malraux, but from idealists like Julien Benda. Benda had moved so far to the left under the stress of the international situation, that he expressed his disgust in VHumanité and Commune.1 Abyssinia and Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 left Eugène Dabit with the impression that nothing could be adjusted peacefully under capitalism.8 Stalin, in 1. Humanité, 12 January 1936. 2. Vendredi, 6 November 1936. 3. Vendredi, 20 November 1936. 4. J. Guéhenno, La Foi Difficile, p. 216. Contributors included: Benda, Cassou, Giono, Martin-Chauffier, Nizan, Schlumberger, Alain, Bloch, Kayser, Aveline, Dabit, Fournier, Simone Téry, Romains, Perrin, Wurmser, Vildrac, Abraham, Challaye, Langevin, Durtain, Guilloux, Lalou, Gide, Mounier. 5. Vendredi, 22 January 1937. 6. Vendredi, 17 December 1937. 7. Humanité, 5 January 1936 and Commune, December 1935. 8. E. Dabit, Journal Intim e (1928-1936), p. 313.

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signing the Franco-Soviet Pact, had accepted the necessity of French rearmament, and the communists were gradually able to convince many of their left-wing colleagues that the two slogans, *A bas la Guerre', and ‘Désarmement’, so frequently juxtaposed before 1934, were no longer compatible. Jean Guéhenno produced an autocritique in the summer of 1937, finally conceding that ‘one must accept the eventuality of war to save the peace’.1 This statement was of the utmost significance. It was the attitude the communists strove most ardently to foster. Yet when the Munich crisis arrived they stood almost alone on the Left in being as good as their word. On the eve of Munich Gabriel Péri wrote urging that Britain and France hold fast to the line of resistance established after Godesberg, and reject the new ultimatum. After Munich, and the subsequent debate in the Chamber, only the seventy-three communists, one socialist and one conservative voted against the Agreement. Again Péri spoke. France had sacrificed a friend, and peace was no nearer. Hitler, he pointed out, had hesitated after September U th, when mobilization measures had been taken in London and Paris. He did not believe it had ever been a choice between capitulation and war.2 On this occasion the communists were not pleased to score debating points. Although the Party had not followed a patriotic line in the ’twenties and was to abandon it in 1939, the nationalist line of the Popular Front interlude coincided with the deepest instincts of the majority of communist intellectuals. They realized that France, by iso­ lating the Soviet Union, could only deal a mortal injury to the two countries they most cherished.8 Two agrégés in Philosophy who had turned their attention to foreign policy, Paul Nizan and Georges Fried­ mann, analysed the policy of appeasement which had led to Munich in terms both identical and accurate.4 They drew attention to Litvinov’s statement of March 17th, made three days after the Anschluss, to the effect that Czechoslovakia could count on the U.S.S.R. provided that France lived up to her engagements by the 1935 Pact. Litvinov repeated this promise on June 24th.6 Both Nizan and Friedmann made the claim (which, if valid, constitutes an important element in the communist case) that on September 9th, Litvinov negotiated a passage for Soviet troops across Rumania with the Rumanian Foreign Minister when they met at 1. Quoted in S. de Beauvoir, La Force de VAge, p. 309. 2. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, pp. 55-8. 3. The theory that Stalin, having already abandoned collective security in favour of a pact with Germany, was ordering the P.C.F. to sabotage French learmament through strike action, is not viable. Varied arguments supporting the theory are to be found in F. Borkenau, European Communism, London, 1953, Ch. 7, and W. G. Krivitsky, I was Stalin's Agent, London, 1940. 4. P. Nizan, Chronique de Septembre, Paris, 1939, and G. Friedmann, *L*U.R.S.S. et le Drame Tchécoslovaque’, Europe, 1 January 1939. 5. Nizan, p. 179, and Friedmann, p. 48.

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1934-1939 Geneva. Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, had been aware of this, but was resolutely bent on appeasement.1 Thirdly, on September 23rd, Litvinov, although disapproving of the concessions already made to Hitler, urged a firm stand, pledging Soviet support for France and warning Poland against any incursion into Czech territory.12 Nizan’s final hypothesis was that on September 26th and 27th, Chamberlain and Daladier had shrunk from the possibility of a diplomatic humiliation for the dictators. And both he and Friedmann regarded Lord Winterton’s remark of October 10th, that the U.S.S.R. had been content with vague promises due to its military weakness, as adding insult to injury.3 Only one socialist, however, had voted against Daladier in the Chamber. Deeply as they lamented the capitulation, the intellectuals of the non-communist Left were bound to share the general mood of relief. Vendredi was divided to the extent of self-dissolution. For a few intellectuals, on the other hand, Munich merely strengthened the com­ munists' claim to moral leadership. Julien Benda had asked early in August whose fault it was if they led the anti-fascist movement and had proved themselves for three years to be the only party consistently advocating measures consistent with the interests of France.45Nor did Paul Langevin retreat from his pro-communist position. In July he had prophesied that the Czechs would constitute the next victims of ‘the egotistical attitude of continual disownment, of the continual acceptance of what leads most surely to war’.6 After Munich, he, with Albert Bayet and Victor Basch, eminent scholars and members of the Ligue, founded the Paix et Démocratie group to unite anti-Munich intellectuals and to continue the pressure for a firm Anglo-French-Soviet alliance.6 If the international situation did not leave the communist intellectuals 1. Nizan, p. 180, and Friedmann, p. 50. On this important point, see M. Beloff, The Foreign Policy o f Soviet Russia 1929-41, vol. 2, London, 1949: J. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich, Prologue to Tragedy, London, 1948: H. Ripka, Munich, Before and After, London, 1939: G. Gafencu, Derniers Jours de VEurope, Paris, 1946. According to Ripka, ‘every arrangement for the passage of Soviet troops over Rumanian territory on their way to Czechoslovakia* had been made (pp. 338-9). Louis Fischer heard of the agreement from Litvinov himself. According to WheelerBennett, Petrescu-Comnène, the Rumanian Foreign Minister, agreed to the transit of Russian troops as soon as the League of Nations had pronounced Czechoslovakia a victim of aggression. Litvinov urged Bonnet that they make a joint démarche to the League, but Bonnet refused (p. 100). Beloff agrees that Bonnet may have misled his colleagues (p. 146). On the other hand, Gafencu, who succeeded Petrescu-Comnène in December 1938, says that Rumania had not undertaken in advance to allow the transit of Soviet troops (p. 148). It is clear that the Rumanians were reluctant, but the French attitude was doubtless decisive. 2. Nizan, p. 183, and Friedmann, p. 52. 3. Nizan, p. 206, and Friedmann, p. 63. 4. J. Benda, ‘Anti-communisme et Patriotisme’, L.N.R.F., 1 August 1938, p. 306. 5. P. Langevin, La Pensée et VAction, p. 294. 6. A. Bayet, ‘Paul Langevin et la Défense des Droits de l'Homme’, La Pensée, M ay-June 1947, p. 61.

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completely isolated, it also gained them one notable adherent - JeanRichard Bloch. Bloch, who had been a socialist of idealistic tendencies since before the war, had sustained a suspicion of communism until the events of February 1934 realigned his whole outlook. In 1934 he was one of the French delegates to the First Congress of Soviet Writers (although he quite frankly voiced his doubts about the question of liberty in Russia). By June 1935, he was telling the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture that a communist society upheld the writer’s independence and pride, whereas both western liberalism and fascism were gripped by an agonized, deathlike culture.1 Abyssinia, and his reading of Mein Kam pf wherein a first assault on Russia was prophesied, led him to write: ‘Communism, place of refuge, the proletariat, bastion of hope, such are the colours of this autumn of 1935.’2 Bloch’s orientation, like that of Rolland before him, is of con­ siderable interest, illustrating as it does what one might term ‘the law of compensation*. It will be noted that nothing had occurred in the U.S.S.R. between 1933 and 1935 to invalidate the fears of an authoritarian and dogmatic approach to literature which Bloch had repeatedly expressed. On the contrary, the proclamation by Zhdanov of the new official cultural orthodoxy of socialist realism merely confirmed such fears. But Bloch’s case, like that of Rolland, shows how, when the individual is moved strongly on one front (in both cases the international one) to the pragmatic conclusion that the communists must be supported, so he will tend to bring himself rapidly into line on other, more dubious fronts. This is less the result of calculated opportunism than of an almost unconscious process of compensation springing from the intellectual’s desire to have a coherent, integrated and comprehensive philosophy o f political and social life as a praxis. Some call it self-deception. Thus in 1936 Bloch, while forced to admit to himself that the numbers of writers the U.S.S.R. had ‘consumed’ in twenty years was ‘unimaginable’, yet pleaded that it was better to die on the field of battle, full of vigour and effort, than to finish one’s days in the refuge of the Académie.8 The possibility of a third and better alternative to which he had clung for thirty years had been finally dislodged. Reporting on the Spanish Civil War, working on Ce Soir with Aragon,4 addressing the P.C.F. Congress at Arles in January 1938, Bloch was a communist in all but name. It took the final blow of Munich to induce him to send his formal adhesion to Thorez, in October. Once committed, he never looked back. To western eyes, Soviet Russia in the late ’thirties was two things: a 1. 2. 3. 4.

J.-R. Bloch, Naissance d'une Culture, Paris, 1936, pp. 93 and 105. J.-R. Bloch, ‘Anniversaire d’Octobre’, Europe, 15 November 1935, p. 403. J.-R. Bloch, Naissance d'une Culture, p. 85. Ce Soir was a communist evening paper founded on 1st March 1937.

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1934-1939 symbol; and an observable reality. And one is forced at once to the conclusion that for both left- and right-wing intellectuals the first took priority over the second. The literary battles of statistics and personal observations which waged round Gide’s Retour de VU .R.S.S. were on the whole conducted within the context of wider political beliefs, and not with too scrupulous a regard for the empirical evidence provided by the Soviet Union. When one fact must be set against another, an excellent kindergarten against a labour camp, and each fact against a moral, and each moral against a social belief, and each belief against a view of history, dialectical, static or otherwise, then ‘empirical evidence’ can be an elusive thing. Perhaps Gide alone (and this is not necessarily to endorse all his verdicts) went through a genuine change of outlook on the basis of the evidence before him. The idealists’ view of Russia, as well as the communists’, was affected by the international situation. For Charles Vildrac, Russia in 1935 appeared as ‘a great free road on firm soil, toward distant perspectives, dong which a whole people audaciously advances.’1 In the same year Luc Durtain returned from a long tour of Russia with the judgement: ‘Yes, the statistics are fine! The density of matter created is splendid. . . But the most beautiful achievement of the U.S.S.R. is still the quality of its new men.’123Both Vildrac and Durtain had visited Russia in 1929 and produced reports considerably more reserved in tone. It is unlikely that their shift of emphasis was due to economic advances alone; the pioneer­ ing days of 1929 had marked a zenith of enthusiasm among Russia’s ‘new men’. But six years later the ugly shadow of Nazi Germany hung over all judgements. Eugène Dabit’s Journal is revealing in this respect. Dabit, who accompanied Gide to Russia and died there, recorded on July 25th, 1936 that he was ignorant of statistics, examples and com­ parisons and that Russia was in any case too vast for the tourist to produce a sound judgement. If anything, his journey had inspired in him certain reserves. But: between the several systems, and especially between fascism and communism, he did not hesitate; he chose communism.8 No single fact could be considered in isolation. Each situation must be examined in relation to others. Gide’s criticisms of the Soviet Union were at once greeted with the charge that he was stabbing Republican Spain in the back. Jean Cassou (not a communist) remarked that Gide showed an ‘abstract spirit’, that he was ‘in quest of his own incarnation’, that he saw reality ‘under a religious form’, that he showed no awareness of fascism, of the war in Spain.4*Gide was forced to protest his devotion 1. C. Vildrac, Russie Neuve, Paris, 1937, p. 206. 2. Commune, January 1936, p. 573. 3. E. Dabit, Journal Intim e ( 1928-1936), p. 342. 4. J. Cassou, ‘De la Sainte Russie à 1TJ.R.S.S.*, Europe, 15 September 1938, pp. 82-3.

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to the Republican cause. Above all, there was much in Russia to convert the converted. It would have been surprising if Paul Nizan’s attendance at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress and his subsequent journey to Soviet Asia had resulted in anything but the panegyric on Soviet education and construction he did in fact produce.1 Simone de Beauvoir recalls that even among his friends Nizan spoke of the physical luxury in which he had travelled and that ‘his negligent tone suggested that this luxury reflected the enormous prosperity of the country.’123If Nizan was not deluding himself, he was deluding nobody. Yet Russia remained an observable reality. It was not Mecca, nor Lourdes. By 1937 her total production had quadrupled since 1928. The German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s sympathies were predetermined not only by his horror of Nazism, but also because ‘I sympathized with the experiment of basing the construction of a gigantic state on reason alone’.8 The rationalist, or even Platonic, appeal Russia exercised on western intellectuals pre-dated 1933. If J.-R. Bloch’s ultimate conversion to communism was intimately bound up with the international situation, his admiration for the Soviet philosophy of work also pre-dated 1933, or February 1934.45Nor was his admiration for Soviet primary education, voiced at the 1934 Writers’ Congress, generated by the spectacle of the violent ligueurs on the Concorde. Yet diese thugs may have affected his decision to attend the Congress. The law of compensation was at work. It did not take fascism to convince Charles Vildrac that the reduction of illiteracy in Russia to 2 per cent was admirable, or that the contrast with the illiteracy figure of 49-5 per cent in the Basses-Pyrénées pointed to certain virtues in communism.6 But in a different world climate he might not have accepted such Soviet statistics so eagerly. The ‘extraordinary movement of spirits toward culture’, which André Chamson saw in Russia in 1936,6 was a reality, not a delusion, yet his newly awakened interest in Russia, the fact that he made the journey, might be traced to the ‘decisive shock’ of February 6th and to die subsequent formation of the Popular Front in France. Russia was an observable reality. Even now, the idealist writers felt bound to voice serious reservations which their communist colleagues ignored or suppressed. Vildrac realized that Russia still had its bureau­ cracy and its secret police, that it still remained a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat rather than of the proletariat. And Vildrac could still raise the time-honoured idealist objection, that in France where the 1. P. Nizan, ‘Sindobad Toçikston’, Europe, 15 May 1935, pp. 73-99. 2. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de I*Age, p. 212. 3. L. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, London, 1937, p. 8. 4. J.-R. Bloch, Thilosophie Soviétique du travail', Europe, 15 January 1934, pp. 98-104. 5. C. Vildrac, op. cit., p. 247. 6. Humanité, 18 October 1936.

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1934-1939 people were mature» critical and democratic» some other road to socialism would have to be found.1 As one French communist writer demonstrated, a general subscription to dialectical materialism did not preclude the possibility of striking a just balance. Georges Friedmann, who visited Russia three times between 1932 and 1936, balanced his admiration for the productive achievements of the Five Year Plans, and for the Stakhanovite ideal, against the price paid, the lowering of the standard of living, the shortage of consumer goods, the rising prices and the low wages.8 The heavy differentials favouring specialists, technicians and intellectuals at the expense of the workers, which the majority of French communist intellectuals not only accepted but greeted with something like glee, Friedmann sharply criticized. Orthodox in attacking both the Trotsky Left and the Bukharin Right, he did not shrink from branding Soviet Marxism and scholarship as sterile and dogmatic. The gist of his argument was the absurdity of expecting a perfected Marxism in backward ‘Holy Russia’, and it was for this reason that his book appealed so strongly to the young and un­ committed who felt deep sympathy for Russia but who could not stomach the paeans of undiluted praise which rang from communist mouths. In communist eyes, however, Friedmann was a far more dangerous critic than Gide, simply because he showed himself a sound and devoted Marxist. Consequently he was ostracized.8 The Moscow Trials did not materially alter the balance of opinion on the French intellectual extreme-Left. In fact the anti-Titoist trials of the late ’forties produced greater ruptures and more defections. The degree to which tempers boiled on the second occasion perhaps reflected the degree to which doubts had been painfully suppressed on the first. In 1956 Khrushchev dwelt at length on the ‘cruel and inhuman’ tortures of the NKVD, on how a victim could be brought to a state of un­ consciousness, deprived of his judgement and his dignity in order to obtain a confession.1234 But he did not specifically indicate that these methods had been employed on some or all of the leading Old Bolsheviks, nor, except perhaps by implication, has he at the time of writing officially repudiated the Stalinist version of their guilt. Thus even today certain doubts remain. But we are not here concerned with a further analysis of the trials in view of present knowledge. We are concerned with the reactions of French intellectuals at the time, and with what might then have feasibly appeared to be the truth to intellectuals who, on account of certain preconceptions, regarded a socialist state as the least likely of 1. C. Vildrac, op. cit., p. 238. 2. G. Friedmann, De la Sainte Russie à VU.R.S.S., Paris, 1938. 3. But Friedmann was no more inclined to dwell on the enormous price of collecti­ vization - the deportation of the peasantry - than were other communist writers. 4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, New York, 1956, p. 40.

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all to permit injustices on a massive and planned scale. Without these terms of reference, any discussion is meaningless. The first thing to notice is that neither then nor since has any single explanation of how the confessions were obtained gained credibility to the exclusion of others. To the extent that no single explanation was obvious, the view that the confessions were genuine gained feasibility. The complex of apparent contradictions caused Louis Fischer, who was in Moscow at the time, temporarily to suspend judgement. Others were less reticent. Henri Guilbeaux, no longer a communist, argued that the accused had been promised their lives and had grasped the opportunity in the hope of later overthrowing Stalin and restoring Leninism.1 The range of reasonable hypotheses was apparently limitless. According to the version advanced by W. G. Krivitsky and later, with some slight modifica­ tions, by Arthur Koestler, the accused had confessed as a final service to the Revolution which, in Krivitsky’s words, ‘contained the last faint gleam of hope for that better world to which they had consecrated themselves in early youth*.1 23However, he also listed torture, bargains and frame-ups as methods used to reduce the Old Bolsheviks, explana­ tions which, though perfectly tenable, might seem to dilute, if not contradict, the fundamentally idealist aspect of his hypothesis. Louis Fischer, on mature reflection, came to regard any metaphysical explana­ tion as absurd since, in his view, the Old Bolsheviks must have known that the trials were damaging, not assisting the communist cause. Even armed with a longer perspective, and with the additional evidence of the post-war trials of Rajk and Rostov, perceptive men could arrive at no agreed solution. Albert Camus, in his VH om m e Révolté (1951), recalled Rousseau’s conception of knowing how to die if the sovereign commands and knowing how to concede that he is right. ‘Suitably developed,’ wrote Camus, this would explain the enthusiasm of the defendants at the trials.8 The relevance of such theories to the present argument hinges less on their plausibility than on the state of intricate confusion and mystery they reveal. At the time of the trials a single, comprehensive explanation alone could satisfy both communist intellectuals and their opponents. It was difficult to believe that each of the perfectly sane-looking men whose confessions synchronized so well had succumbed to pressures and persuasions peculiar to himself. Consequently, it should not occasion surprise or suspicion that many found in the simplest answer the best. ‘They confessed because they were caught red-handed and there was no way out.’ This logic suggested itself to many observers who were by no means communists. The Moscow correspondent of the Observer wrote 1. H. Guilbeaux, La Fin des Soviets, Paris, 1937, pp. 73-6. 2. W. G. Krivitsky, I was Stalin's Agent, p. 211. 3. A. Camus, The Rebel, trans. by Anthony Bower, London, 1957, p. 89.

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1934-1939 on August 23rd, 1936: ‘It is futile to think that the trial was staged and. the charges trumped up. The Government’s case against the defendants is genuine.’ Sir Bernard Pares wrote in the Spectator, on September 18th, that ‘the guilt of the accused is completely brought home.’1 And the God-fearing, Republican U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies,' was convinced that those who confessed and the generals tried in camera had been conspiring with Germany and Japan. Bearing these ‘bourgeois* opinions in mind, it should be remembered that we are concerned with the reactions of intellectuals who regarded a socialist state as the least likely of all to permit injustices on a massive and planned scale. According to Raymond Aron, the orthodox com­ munists in France knew, on the whole, that the facts were invented, but submitted themselves to a linguistic discipline in the interests of the cause.123This is to invest ‘orthodox’ communists with a special, inside knowledge. M. Djilas, writing after he had come to see the trials and purges as completely fabricated, recalled that he had believed that the Trotskyists and Bukharinists were indeed spies and wreckers, and that if the measures were harsh, ‘it was cutting into good flesh in order to get rid of the bad’.8 These words were used by Dimitrov to Tito after the war. Who was deceiving whom? The essence of the Stalinist police-state superstructure was to deny not only power, but also information, to all but a few chosen communists. Foreign communists were the least likely of all to have access to inside knowledge. For them, Stalin remained the embodiment of a just society. Khrushchev implied that the murder of Kirov in 1934 had been framed.45But that was in 1956. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Aragon, Bloch and the communist historian Jean Bruhat in their earlier belief that Kirov’s murder was the alarm signal for the Second World War. Aragon, in Moscow at the time, remembered ‘Stalin helping to carry the mortal remains of him in whom he had placed so many hopes’.6 Bloch and Léon Moussinac had watched the funeral from the Hotel Metropole. The following day Bloch found himself four steps from Stalin as he passed carrying the funeral urn with three others. T will never forget the picture of rigid sorrow expressed on the face of this man, falsely reputed to be impassive.’6 Jean Bruhat also traced the trials to the conspiracy uncovered by the murder of Kirov.7 With regard to the trials themselves, there was little hesitation among 1. Quoted in H. Dewar, ‘How they saw it. The Moscow Trials’, Survey, April 1962, p. 87. 2. R. Aron, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, p. 125. 3. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, London, 1962, p. 57. 4. The A nti-Stalin Campaign, p. 26. 5. L. Aragon, ‘Jdanov et nous’, L .L.F ., 9 September 1948. 6. J.-R. Bloch, L ’Homme du Communisme. Portrait de Staline, Paris, 1949, p. 19. 7. J. Bruhat, H istoire de l’U .R.S.S.t Paris, 1946, p. 100.

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communists. Vaillant-Couturier and Aragon accepted absolutely the complicity of Trotskyists with the Gestapo (as did Sir Bernard Pares)/ Aragon wrote: ‘How silent are the scandalous advocates of Trotsky and his accomplices! They know very well that to claim innocence for these men is to adopt the Hitlerian thesis on all points. By doubting this point or that point, they imply at the same time . . . that it was not Hitler who burned the Reichstag . . . they reprieve Hitler and the Gestapo of the Spanish rebellion, they deny fascist intervention in Spain . . . in fact they are the advocates of Hitler and the G estapo/1 In 1938 Georges Cogniot adopted the same line of reasoning. ‘Whoever protected the accused at the Moscow trial rendered himself an accomplice of all the attacks which are hurled by fascism at the present time against peace and against the existence of the workers of the whole w orld/12 Georges Politzer described the universal capitalist conspiracy which lay behind both Hitler and the Russian Opposition.3 André Wurmser, launching a career as one of the most pugnacious of French communist intellectuals, amplified the theme in a book, Variations sur le Renégat, which covered the relevant ground from Judas Iscariot to Trotsky. Romain Rolland wrote to an English friend in October 1938: T have no occasion to doubt the condemnations which strike, in Kamenev and Zinoviev, persons long despised, twice renegades and traitors, on their own word. And I do not see how one can reject as invented or extorted the declarations made publicly by the accused . . . I regret not being able to share your con­ fidence in the vindictive diatribes of Victor Serge . . / 4 Georges Friedmann explained the situation in terms of the Opposition’s hostility to the League of Nations and the Popular Fronts, and its inclination to cling to the old Russo-German alliance. These intellectuals struck three distinct notes. Aragon, Cogniot and Wurmser, particularly Aragon, cast the dark shadow of the OGPU across France, denying, in the name of their own infallible objective reasoning, the right to doubt or question. The tone was hectoring, strident, unpleasant. Rolland also accepted the Stalinist version abso­ lutely, but implicitly conceded the necessity for individual inquiry. This was perhaps the distinction between faith and blind faith. Friedmann went furthest in attributing to the Opposition, the substance of whose guilt he accepted, motives rationally comprehensible within the history of Bolshevism. But the refusal of Aragon and his colleagues to permit doubts about even details of evidence need not suggest a lack of confidence, but rather an extreme subscription to the ‘for us or against 1. Commune, 1937, pp. 804-5. 2. Communey 1938, pp. 63-4. 3. C.B., May-June 1938, pp. 184-5. 4. M. Brandie, ‘Le Vrai Romain Rolland*, La Pensée, January-February 1952, p. 49. Rolland*s friend, Mrs. Feara, gave a copy of the letter to Mme Brunelle.

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1934-1939 us’ principle which always distinguished the hard-core Stalinist intellec­ tuals from the others. The majority of communist intellectuals doubtless approached the problem in Friedmann’s way, in terms of historical logic. Pierre Courtade, the chief intellectual apologist in France for the anti-Titoist trials, has given an interesting account of how a communist’s mind might have responded to the Moscow trials. Tt was then that he came little by little to convince himself not only of the guilt of the accused, but, what was at first more difficult, of the psychological credibility of the treasons imputed to them. He told himself that if Mirabeau had been able to deal with the Court after he had launched the slogan: “We are here by the force of bayonets. . . ” , that if Danton himself had let himself be bought Danton whose revolutionary genius Lenin had recognized . . . it was not surprising that the Russian Revolution had been betrayed by men who had at first served it but who, in the course of the years, in the exaspera­ tion of internal struggles, had ended by degrading themselves to the point of seeking, externally, support and complicity.’1 How many intellectuals managed to convince themselves in this way it is impossible to say. Simone de Beauvoir had a conversation with Nizan about the trials. He was apparently ‘profoundly disconcerted* and did not hide his doubts in private.2 According to Sartre, the trials shook Nizan without uprooting him. He merely kept silent.8 Rare exceptions were the defectors. Charles Rappoport, one of the founders of the Party, resigned from the P.C.F. and as Paris correspondent for Izvestia in protest against the trials and the execution of Bukharin.4 The Trotskyist, or Oppositionist, intellectuals in France naturally harboured no doubts that the trials were rigged. Victor Serge formed a committee of inquiry in Paris, including Magdeleine Paz and Georges Pioch. Magdeleine Paz wrote actively in defence of the accused, gathering evidence from Kléber Legay, secretary of the National Federation of Miners, and others, on how previous Soviet trials of specialists and engineers had been manipulated. Serge traced in detail the inconsistency of the evidence. He knew many of the accused and considered that both Trotsky and Zinoviev were too mature politically to believe that the assassination of Stalin would benefit them.5 Serge ultimately explained the confessions as the inner, and distorted, logic of opposition in a society where even mental reservations were taken to lead objectively to acts of treason. Between these two fires, between the intransigence of both Stalinist and Oppositionist intellectuals, the pro-Soviet idealists tended to retreat 1. P. Courtade, La Place Rouge, pp. 128-9. 2. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de l'A ge, p. 297. 3. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à *Aden-Arabie9, p. 56. 4. Le Temps, 18 March 1938. 5. V. Serge, Destin (Tune Révolution, Paris, 1937, p. 271.

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into a discreet, if unhappy, silence. A hard battle was fought within the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme whose Cahiers refused to publish an article by Magdeleine Paz denouncing the trials. A motion of censure brought by Paz, Pioch and other Oppositionists was voted down by 1,088 votes to 255.1 Three months later, in November 1937, seven members of the Ligue’s central committee, including Paz, Pioch and Félicien Challaye, resigned in protest against what they took to be cowardly subservience to Stalinist tyranny. Obviously there was acute discomfort among the cohorts of the Left. Some reasoned that Goebbels and the Gestapo being what they were, it would be surprising if some plot were not fomented against the first and only socialist state. Jean Guéhenno, the classical idealist, wrestled in vain with the dilemma. ‘It seems impossible,’ he wrote in February 1937, ‘to doubt the guilt of the accused, the condemned.’ The thirteen already executed had, on their own avowal, sabotaged the people. On the other hand, one could not believe all they had said: it had been too theatrical. And where were those who had not confessed? And what ‘intolerable constraint* could have forced the Opposition to treason? Guéhenno could do no better than call for an end to bloodshed.2 At once he was set upon from all sides, by Gide, by Wurmser for the communists. In calling for a sort of Popular Front of all Bolshevik factions within Russia he worked himself into an untenable position which pleased nobody. He drifted steadily away from the communists. After the war, with the publication of Koestler’s Le Zéro et VInfini (Darkness at Noon), which not only proved a best-seller but evidently turned a number of young intellectuals toward communism, the battle of words began afresh. Koestler’s theory, which closely resembled Krivitsky’s, was less narrow and exclusive than many of its critics assumed. In the novel, Gletkin, the Stalinist interrogator, explains to Rubashov, the composite Old Bolshevik, that Russia is backward, needs scapegoats and must be kept going by any means to survive until the next revolutionary wave in Europe. But Gletkin also concedes that not all the accused had succumbed to this approach; some were susceptible to torture while others were promised their heads, or those of their relatives. The communist intellectuals, who, acting on the fourth principle of utility, arose to combat Koestler, put up a poor performance. Jean Kanapa and Roger Garaudy pointed to the absence of a fifth column in Russia during the war as proof of the efficacy and justice of the trials and purges. This, of course, did not follow.8 Garaudy used the argument, 1. W. Drabovitch, Les Intellectuels Français et le Bolchévisme, p. 62. 2. Vendredi, 5 February 1937. 3. Claude Morgan suggested that Stalingrad showed how dangerous the liquidated Opposition would have been in the war. These writers ignored the existence of a real Russian fifth column.

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1934-1939 which gained nothing from its simplicity, that if Koestler had only assumed the accused to be guilty, instead of innocent, all would have become clear to him. Garaudy’s technique of quoting from Bukharin’s confession to the effect that he had come out against and been defeated by ‘the joy of the new life’ was likewise liable to convince only the convinced.1 It fell to a non-communist to raise the most formidable challenge to Koestler. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,123far from being an idealist, was bound to embarrass even the communists by his revolutionary intransigence and lack of sentimentality. Nor did he claim that the charges made in 1936 were subjectively true. The crimes committed, he argued, were political, not factual, and they were crimes only in a certain historical perspective, the Stalinist one. There could be no objective justice, divorced from politics, in such matters. The Moscow trials, in this respect, were not unlike that of Pétain in 1945. Bukharin, in his estimation, really did appreciate the historical motive of his condemnation, really did appreciate the objective links between the Right Opposition and the pro-kulak struggle against collectivization. Possibly the condemned' would one day be rehabilitated when a new phase of history had changed the meaning of their conduct. This was the dialectical approach, the only sound one.8 Merleau-Ponty further criticized Koestler’s essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1942) as abstract logic-metaphysics, the work of an excommunist trying to rid himself of his own guilt complexes. Koestler, in his new-found sympathy for the capitalist democracies, forgot that such nominally liberal régimes were often more oppressive in the sphere of human relations than apparently totalitarian ones, fostering poverty, creating wars and oppressing the colonial peoples. This criticism was not unjust. The trouble was, the Soviet trials had not merely struck down a few men in the interests of the many; on the contrary, they were sympto­ matic of a system which carried terror very much into the sphere of mass human relations, purging or deporting millions of innocent victims. Merleau-Ponty’s notion that violence exists, and that the only question was whether some violence is progressive and tends to suppress violence, looked exceedingly abstract when set beside his admission that the dictatorial apparatus in Russia was constantly being strengthened at the expense of the workers.4 Merleau-Ponty, whose explanation of the confessions closely resembled 1. R. Garaudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, trans. by Joseph M. Bernstein, New York, 1948, p. 54. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Professeur de lycée 1931-45. Professor of Philosophy at Lyons 1945-9, at the Sorbonne 1949-52, thereafter at the Collège de France. He was co-founder, with Sartre, of Les Temps Modernes. 3. M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur, Paris, 1947, p. 74.

4. Ibid., p. xvii.

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Koestler’s, differed from him in ascribing dialectical-historical motives to the Stalinists, rather than power-pathological ones. Yet Merleau-Ponty believed himself to have refuted Koestler, to have shown him a ‘stranger to Marxism’, lacking any sense of the dialectic in history.1 Ultimately the difference lay in that the one considered the ‘dialectic’ to be a necessary and even moral thing, while the other saw it as the rationalization of a basically pathological species of men called commissars who believed in change from without and who had ‘completely severed relations with the subconscious’.1 2 Merleau-Ponty, however, was soon to discover that the dialectic had been betrayed and that in M. Mendès-France was to be found the best possible solution to the problem of Humanisme et Terreur. To return to the ’thirties, to the question of Soviet trials, purges and prisons. It has been suggested that after 1938 Romain Rolland, repelled by developments inside Russia, moved away from the communists.3 Rolland had always felt keenly on the subject of political prisoners. In September 1934, he appealed eloquently on behalf of those dying in Mussolini’s prisons, bringing as evidence a good deal o f statistical research. He was not unaware of the Soviet situation. Victor Serge reported that in 1935 Rolland had personally interceded with Stalin for his release.4 Outwardly, however, he maintained an orthodox attitude, praising Stalin and dismissing Gide’s Retour with Hobbesian inventive­ ness as ‘mediocre, poor, superficial, puerile and contradictory’.56In 1937 he addressed a letter to the National Conference of the Party assuring it of his ‘entire sympathy’ for its activities. By the logic of history and by its own wisdom it had become the true representative of the French people.8 In December of the same year, addressing the Ninth Congress, he declared himself linked to the Party ‘by reason and by the heart’.7 On what evidence has Rolland’s subsequent disaffection been induced? In 1938, evidently, he was asked by Herman Hesse what he thought of the Stalinist terror. He described how for eight months a friend of his, a Leningrad doctor whom he had known for twenty years, had been arrested without explanation. He had written twice to Stalin, but received no reply. This experience had been duplicated over the previous two years in the cases of other arrested friends. His power to intervene had ceased with Gorky’s death.8 But this in itself is not evidence of a break with communism, only of frustration and grief. If Rolland had been in the 1. Ibid., p. 25. 2. A. Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, London, 1945, p. 14. 3. J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, p. 353. 4. V. Serge, M émoires d'un Révolutionnaire, p. 347. 5. Humanité, 18 January 1937. 6. C.A, 20 February 1937, p. 228. 7. Humanité, 25 December 1937. 8. J. Rühle, op. cit., p. 353.

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1934-1939 habit of interceding through Gorky, that, with the Serge case, only confirms that he had remained aware of Soviet injustices without his political attitude being affected. Indeed at the very time when he had first embraced communism, in 1927, he had simultaneously urged the Bol­ sheviks to release anarchist and S.R. prisoners. Rolland remained popular in the pages of VHumanité. In August 1938, Jacques Duelos dedicated a new stadium at Clamecy to him with a speech of fulsome praise.1 He fully associated himself with other antiMunich intellectuals such as Langevin, Jourdain, Wallon, Hadamard and Prenant who rallied behind the P.C.F., and in January 1939 he once again sent a letter of friendship to the Party’s National Congress. Rolland - to leap ahead to the end of his life - was quick to send a telegram welcoming Thorez back from Russia late in 1944. His sense of (and need for) solidarity with the communists remained potent until the end, despite the deeply pessimistic thoughts, the partial return to mysticism, which seized him in the sadness and enforced isolation of 1940. The moral leader of the French intellectual Opposition was the man for whose release Rolland had interceded and whose Vindictive diatribes’ about the Moscow trials he so much deplored - Victor Serge. Arrested for a second time in October 1933 and accused of contact with Trotsky and the Spaniard Nin, Serge spent months in the surgical hospital at Orenburg while charges and counter-charges were hurled over his name in Paris. On reaching Paris in 1936, he threw himself into the task of denouncing Stalinism. Tt is untrue, a hundred times untrue that the end justifies the means,’ he wrote with the passion of one who had spent eighty-five days in a GPU cell without reading matter or occupation.12 He ridiculed the 1936 Soviet Constitution which the Party intellectuals were upholding as a final proof of Soviet democratic superiority, much as Barbusse had quoted the 1918 Constitution as evidence that the workers were in power. Other former communists of the first generation like Henri Guilbeaux and Pierre Pascal equally regarded the 1936 Constitution as a joke in poor taste.3 Guilbeaux, Gide, Pascal and other intellectuals seized upon the testimony of M. Yvon, who had lived as a manual worker and as an active communist in Russia from 1923 until 1934, and whose denunciations of the low level of life among the Soviet masses had the support of grass-roots experience. For Serge, as for Souvarine before him, ultimately even Trotsky became a tarnished idol. Serge’s first book to be published after his return gave unmitigated praise to ‘the Old Man’, but it was not long before he 1. Humanité, 10 September 1938. 2. V. Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 56. 3. P. Pascal, preface to M. Yvon, Ce qu'est devenue la Révolution Russe, Paris, n.d., p. 4.

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began to see in Trotsky’s intransigence certain Stalinist qualities, and ultimately defects in the Marxist dialectic itself had to be faced.1 Serge reached Mexico. Souvarine became a contributing editor to Le Figaro. Ramon Fernandez, who had come close to communism after February 1934, joined Jacques Doriot’s fascist Parti Populaire Français in 1937, with the reported rem ark,1F aime les trains qui partent\ a In the immediate pre-war years, under the stimulus of panic, there was an intellectual drift to the extreme Right on the principle, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. Those who most feared war felt compelled to grovel before the makers of war. Henri Guilbeaux, who had returned to France in 1932 with the sentence of death pronounced by a military tribunal in 1919 still hanging over him, had been reprieved under heavy pressure from the intellectual Left. When, in 1937, he published his La Fin des Soviets, it became clear that an astonishing metamorphosis had taken place. He abused the German émigré victims of Nazism, ‘Israelites for the most part’, who wanted only to excite France to a new war against Germany. He denounced Stalin for having discarded Chicherin *de race patricienne’, in favour of Litvinov *un bureaucrate israélite\z Guilbeaux exulted in the false appraisal of Nazi strength made by the German socialists and communists. ‘Where, in any case, is it now, VorwaertsT* ‘Anti-fascism,’ he concluded, ‘is only a booby-trap.’ Guilbeaux, still as ever a pacifist, and terrified of war, felt compelled to lick the hand of the bully. He died in 1938. It was a sombre ending for the only Frenchman to have attended the founding Congress of the Comintern, in 1919.1234

1. 2. 3. 4.

V. Serge, Mémoires d'un Révolutionnaire, pp. 410-12. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de VAge, p. 207. H. Guilbeaux, La Fin des Soviets, p. 55. Vorwaerts was the Socialist Party daily paper in pre-Nazi Germany.

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CHAPTER FOUR

1939-1940

T h e Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23rd, 1939 shattered what remained o f the unity of the French intellectual Left. The c o m m u n ists, taken by surprise and as yet unaware of the full implications of the Pact, soon found themselves isolated. The Party, it should be remembered, had not deviated from its ardently patriotic line, adopting the Polish thesis that any attempt to change unilaterally the status of Danzig should be con­ sidered as an aggression. Poland, declared VHumanité on July 5th, ‘is in a state of legitimate defence’. On August 22nd, on the eve of the announcement of the Pact, Aragon wrote in Ce Soir that the existence and policy of the U.S.S.R. would undoubtedly prevent war.1 The follow­ ing day he found no cause to abandon this line. In an editorial entitled Le triomphe de la politique stalinienne, Aragon maintained that the Franco-Soviet Pact remained valid, and that Paris and London should hasten to reach agreement with Moscow.123Two days later Thorez called for national defence against the Nazis and on September 2nd the Party’s parliamentary group voted for the war credits. This was neither bluff nor hypocrisy; the French communists continued to deceive themselves on the logic of the situation. In such circumstances the Party intellectuals, whatever their private opinion of the Pact, found no difficulty in remaining loyal. Their idealist friends, however, were outraged. On August 29th, the Union des Intellectuels Français published a manifesto expressing ‘stupefaction before the volte-face which has reconciled the leaders of the U.S.S.R. to the Nazi leaders at the very hour when the latter simultaneously threaten both Poland and the independence of all the free peoples’. The signatories included Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin, Victor Basch and Aimé Cotton.8 On September 1st, Luc Durtain con­ demned Stalin’s tactics in V Œuvre, while Julien Benda, for whom the 1. Quoted in G. Walter, H istoire du P arti Communiste Français, p. 357. 2. Quoted in A. Rossi, Les Communistes français pendant la Drôle de Guerre, Paris, 1951, pp. 18 and 22. 3. Ibid., p. 31.

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Party’s foreign policy had been its primary attraction, now considered the P.C.F. was proceeding to its suicide by supporting the Pact. Rolland remained silent. Thus at one blow the Party had lost the invaluable support of the veteran Dreyfusard idealists. It was not until September 20th that Raymond Guyot returned from Moscow bearing the International’s denunciation of the Allied war effort, forcing the Party abruptly to abandon its patriotic line. On September 26th, a Government decree dissolved all communist groups and publica­ tions. Two days later a joint Ribbentrop-Molotov declaration confirmed the dissolution of the Polish state, placing the onus for the continuance of the war on France and Britain. On October 1st, the hastily reconsti­ tuted parliamentary ‘Groupe ouvrier et paysan’ called for an immediate peace. Stalin had dealt the French Communist Party an almost lethal blow by imposing upon it a policy which it has never subsequently been able to explain away. As the leader of the Soviet state, Stalin may have been tactically correct in signing the Pact, but it was always his tendency to establish an immediate connection between the crudest factual data and the most general theoretical propositions, abolishing all intermediate factors and, unlike Lenin, making no distinction between theory, strategy and tactics. Germaine Willard, in her official Party history of this period, significantly makes no reference to this sudden and brutal imposition by the Comintern of the theory of the imperialist war. Apparently, ‘The Communist Party was banned because it did not have the same opinion as the Government on Soviet Foreign Policy’.1 Her account of the Party’s change of line is a masterpiece of evasiveness: So long as there existed a possibility o f transform ing the w ar in to a w ar o f defence against H itlerism , the C om m unist P arty h a d em ployed all its forces to m ake it so. B ut from the end o f Septem ber 1939 this possibility no longer existed. T he banning o f the P arty opened the way to the ra p id emergence o f internal reaction a n d anti-Sovietism .123

But in 1939 self-deception was no longer possible and the choice was clear-cut. No less than twenty-one of the seventy-two communist deputies broke with the Party in the early weeks of the war. Passivity in the face of the new Nazi conquests was more than a number of funda­ mentally pro-communist intellectuals could stomach. Rolland wrot^ to Daladier expressing his ‘entire devotion to the cause of the democracies, of France and of the world, today in danger’.8 This followed the Soviet advance into eastern Poland. Writing to a young communist friend in March 1940, Rolland stated that Hitler must be beaten at all costs, and on 1. G. Willard, La Drôle de Guerre et la Trahison de Vichy, Paris, 1960, p. 40. 2. Ibid., p. 64. 3. A. Rossi, op. eit., p. 48.

138

1939-1940 May 12th he declared that the future of humanity lay in the balance.1 But he avoided any open attack on the persecuted communists. In much the same spirit, Jacques Sadoul, the veteran of the Bolshevik Revolution and at that time Paris correspondent for Izvestia, continued to urge national defence while not formally breaking with the Party. It was not the Pact but the change of policy a month later which caused certain intellectuals to leave the Party. Georges Friedmann, for example, found the Pact, in the context of the Daladier-Chamberlain policy, legitimate from the Soviet viewpoint, but Molotov’s embellishments to the effect that one could take Hitlerism or leave it, as with any other system, and that notions of the aggressor and of aggression itself had taken on a new concrete meaning since September, were more than he could tolerate.2 It was in Paul Nizan that the Party lost one of its most prominent and respected intellectuals. Immediately after the announcement of the Pact, Nizan, like Aragon, demanded in Ce Soir a Franco-Soviet rapprochement. None came. Conscripted, and convinced that the national interests of Russia and France were temporarily divergent, he wrote to Duelos: ‘I address to you my resignation from the French C.P. My position as a mobilized soldier dispenses me from adding more.’3 His last letter to Sartre, dated December 8th, declined to explain in detail his reasons for quitting the Party. According to Sartre, Nizan’s old friends accused him of moralism, while he in reply reproached them for not being Machiavel­ lians. He claimed to approve of the cynicism of the Soviet leaders on the grounds that all means were legitimate to save the U.S.S.R., but the French communists, in his opinion, should equally have chosen a valid tactic for France. Nizan wished to avoid the impression that he had resigned through blind passion, but his letters evidently failed to conceal his heart-felt anger at the thought that a French army of workers and peasants would be exterminated with Soviet consent. Isolated, he fell back on his own counsel, trying to avoid ‘idealism’, until he was killed at Dunkirk. An English soldier buried his documents and his almost completed novel La soirée à Somosierra.4 Nizan died a ‘national com­ munist’. The prominence and significance of the Nizan case led to a vicious smear campaign against his name. In an article in Die Welt (March 1940), Thorez described him as a police informer.5 The rumour was circulated that he had worked for the Ministry of the Interior, a story which Louis Aragon, despite his close professional association with Nizan, happily amplified in his novel Les Communistes (1949). Here 1. R. Rolland, Lettres à un Combattant de la Résistance, Paris, 1947, p. 32. 2. G. Friedmann, ‘Forces Morales et Valeurs Permanentes*, in V H eure du Choix, Paris, 1947, p. 88. 3. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de l'A ge, p. 417. 4. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à 'A den-Arabie', pp. 58-62. 5. A. Rossi, op. cit., p. 40.

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Nizan appears as the despicable Patrice Orfilat, a vain man who thinks of Thorez with rage, believing him to have prevented his nomination as a candidate for the elections of 1936. Orfilat, seeing war approaching, is afraid and determines not to make a false step, concentrating his energies on securing a job in the government. Guilty and isolated, he visits a communist friend, Michel Felzer, who had encouraged him in his polemics against the philosophers Bergson and Brunschwicg. (Aragon’s fictional Felzer bears strong resemblances to Georges Politzer.) Hearing Orfilat’s doubts, he tells him coldly: ‘Trotskyists are flics, that’s all. They don’t constitute a philosophical problem.’ Orfilat departs crushed and humiliated.1 This particular episode, conceived and written as it was ten years later, when it could serve no immediate political purpose, enriches our understanding of Aragon, not of Nizan. In contrast, Aragon’s portrait of Langevin as ‘Professor Baranger’, the eminent chemist, at the time of his signing the anti-Pact Manifesto of the idealists, was suitably re­ strained, more in sorrow than in anger, on account of Langevin’s subsequent adherence to the Party.12 All in all, the main body of Party intellectuals remained remarkably loyal and cohesive under the almost unbearable tensions generated by the Comintern line. Léon Moussinac not only applauded the Pact but even went so far as to repent his belief, held privately in the first weeks of the war, that a true anti-fascist struggle was possible without Soviet participation.3 It was emotional loyalty rather than any single clear line of reasoning which induced this frame of mind. Indeed the baffling complexity of the problem in terms of political logic was revealed both by the anxiety of the intellectuals after the war to justify their attitude in 1939-40, and the wide variety of explanations they offered. Pierre Daix, in his novel Dix-neuvième Printemps, quoted approvingly Moscow Radio’s June 1941 apology, that no pacific state can refuse a peace agreement with a neighbour.4 Pierre Courtade, who, like Aragon, argued that Daladier and Chamberlain had driven Russia to sign the Pact protested in 1946: ‘No, Russia has never, at any moment, made common cause with Hitler.’56Germaine Willard produced a tortuous argument to prove that in 1940 Russia had in fact been pursuing an anti-Hitlerian policy, and that she had delivered to Germany no corn or copper and very little petrol.® Elsewhere Courtade pleaded that the Pact was vital in order to gain time before Hitler attacked.7 While these explanations are not strictly compatible, they share the common assumption that the 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

L. Aragon, Les Communistes, 7, Paris, 1949, pp. 154-72. Ibid., p. 238. L. Moussinac, Le Radeau de la M éduse, Paris, 1945, p. 200. P. Daix, Dix-neuvième Printemps, I l, Paris, 1952, p. 77. P. Courtade, Essai sur l'Antisoviétism e, Paris, 1946, p. 49. G. Willard, op. cit.t p. 118. P. Courtade, La Place Rouge, p. 95.

140

1939-1940 primary Anglo-French intention, both before and during the war, was to destroy the Soviet Union and the western Communist Parties. The Radical Party had officially broken with the Rassemblement populaire on November 2nd, 1938. When Ribbentrop visited Paris the following month he expressed satisfaction during an interview at the way the Government (headed by the Radicals Daladier and Bonnet) was handling the P.C.F.1 When Daladier announced on June 27th, 1939 that treason threatened the country, it was against the communists that his remarks were directed, and it was communist intellectuals like Lucien Sampaix who were the first to be prosecuted under the new decree laws. Gabriel Péri, always an ardent supporter of a collective security policy, pointed out in Sampaix’s defence that the proceedings against him coincided with a visit of the German ambassador Count Welzeck to the Premier.12 The aspersion was obvious. Developing this theme, the Party intellectuals have since insisted that the Pact merely served as a pretext for the Government to enact its longconceived plan of suppressing communism in France. It is true that the Government banned VHumanité and Ce Soir on August 25th while these papers (and Thorez) were still calling for national defence against Germany. It is equally true that the official Livre Jaune (document 749, page 168) showed that on July 1st Bonnet had promised (or warned) Welzeck that in the event of war over Danzig or Poland public meetings would be suppressed, elections suspended and the communists ‘mis à la raison\ Aragon made much of this in Les Communistes3 and as late as 1961 Roger Garaudy cast the same interpretation on the event, namely that international big business had only one aim - the suppression of communism.45 The historian A. Rossi has pointed out that Bonnet, far from promising collaboration with Germany, was in fact warning her that France would take a tough line in case of war. Bonnet had told Welzeck that ‘the discipline and spirit of the French people could not be put in doubt by anyone’.6 While it is true, as Rossi says, that the communists have invariably omitted to quote this part of Bonnet’s statement, a number of important questions remain. It may be asked why, at a time when the P.C.F. was vigorously endorsing all measures of national defence and the French Government was supposed to be pursuing serious military and political consultations with Moscow, Bonnet should feel inclined to assure the representative of Germany that the communists would be ‘mis à la raison*. Two things are clear: Ribbentrop and his 1. Le Temps, 6 December 1938. 2. Gabriel P éri - un grand Français, p. 74. 3. L. Aragon, Les Communistes, I, pp. 205-7. 4. R. Garaudy, V Itinéraire d'Aragon, p. 404. 5. A. Rossi, up. cit., p. 127.

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German colleagues knew that in suppressing the communists the French Government would be suppressing the most active opponents of appease­ ment as well as turning its back on an alliance with Russia: it is equally clear that a fascist was at any time more palatable to Bonnet than a communist. In judging the statements of certain communist intellectuals, these factors should not be forgotten. Georges Politzer wrote in 1940 that the Munich policy was part of a wider Franco-British ‘offer’ to Germany of annexations at the expense of Russia, but that Germany having recoiled before the power of the socialist state, the rival imperialisms were forced to battle it out.1 Aragon argued that the western governments had hoped that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union on their behalf and that even after September 1939 they were less interested in fighting Hitler than in preparing for a war of their own against Russia.123A state of war had the added advantage of enabling the upper classes to liquidate the social gains made by the Popular Front.8 Moussinac claimed that the western reactions to the Soviet-Finnish war had opened his eyes to the fact that enemy number one for Chamberlain and Daladier was not Hitler, but Russia.4 These statements add both substance and consistency to the justification of the communist indictment of the Daladier Government’s motives. Rossi admitted that Daladier and Weygand entertained the idea of a war against Russia which was not abandoned until February 1940. On February 5th, the Allied Supreme War Council decided to send troops to Finland and was only prevented from doing so by the attitude of Norway, Sweden and Turkey.5 The strength of anti-Bolshevik feeling among the French and British upper classes did not spring from the Pact alone; the Pact, in fact, followed from the anti-Bolshevik feeling. Yet none of this explains away the fact that a war had been declared on Germany and the communists were not only boycotting it but casting the balance of blame on the avarice of Anglo-French capitalism. It is quite fruitless to argue, as Germaine Willard has done, that the communists did not ‘lose sight’ of the Nazi intention to enslave the conquered peoples, and that it was ‘recognized’ that for Germany the war had a more reactionary and aggressive character.6 Nor was the Finnish war easy to justify. The clandestine Cahiers du Bolchévisme quickly subscribed to the fiction of the independent Kuusinen Government struggling against the ‘Finnish bandit White Guards'.7 A character in Aragon’s Les Com1. G. Politzer, Révolution et Contre-Révolution auX X e Siècle, Paris, 1947, p. 90. 2. L. Aragon, op. cit., p. 223. 3. L. Aragon, Les Communistes, VI, Paris, 1951, p. 302. 4. L. Moussinac, op. cit., p. 200. 5. D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960, vol. I, London, 1961, p. 102. 6. G. Willard, op. cit., p. 66. 7. C. B ., January 1940, p. 60.

142

1939-1940 munistes explains that for twenty years Finland and the Baltic states had served as bases for operations ‘of a certain kind’, and that there existed within Finland a powerful organization planning to share Siberia with Japan.1 Pierre Courtade claimed that the capitalist states had exploited Finnish reaction in order to gain the opportunity to deliver a twopronged attack on Russia,123while Pierre Daix’s fictional hero Mathieu dismissed the annexation of the Baltic states with the observation that these territories had been stolen from Russia by Churchill twenty years before and that in any case they were ‘liberating themselves’.8 It is not without significance that the most active apologists for this difficult period were the hard-core Stalinist intellectuals who put their usual mixture of cant, fiction and opportunism at the service of Soviet aggression. Nevertheless the Party had built up a balance of credit among intellec­ tuals in the ’thirties which was not easily dissipated. The Government and its old-school generals continued to be distrusted by many who found the P.C.F.’s anti-war line impossible to subscribe to. This state of affairs was well illustrated at the trial of forty-four communist deputies which began on March 20th, 1940, in camera, before the Third Military Tribunal of Paris. That this was the first political trial to be held behind closed doors since Dreyfus’ in 1894 perhaps reinforced the impression that the militarist anti-Dreyfusards were at last exacting their revenge. J.-R. Bloch, the philosopher René Maublanc, the psychologist Henri Wallon and Paul Langevin were among the intellectuals who came forward to put the prestige of their names and callings at the service of the defen­ dants. The text of Langevin’s testimony on March 29th is lost, but one of the deputies, Florimond Bonte, recalled the great physicist affirming that the communists stood for a superior form of life, a living social truth.45 Langevin’s previous denunciation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was, however. Something of an embarrassment which the prosecution exploited. Bloch expressed the wish that the French press might enjoy the liberty of its English counterpart where, he said, Shaw and others were free to demonstrate that c o m m u n ism was not the root cause of the trouble.6 Bloch himself was able to escape from Paris on June 14th, 1940, apparently with the connivance of the police, reaching Moscow a year later, on the eve of Hitler’s attack. Unreserved as the Party’s subscription to the Comintern line was, the activities of the c o m m u n ists during the Phoney War were paradoxica 1 1. L. Aragón, Les Communistes, ///, Paris, 1950, pp. 137-40. 2. P. Courtade, Essai sur 1*Antisoviétisme, p. 49. 3. P. Daix, Classe 42, Paris, 1951, p. 307. 4. P. Langevin, La Pensée et VAction, p. 305. 5. J.-R. Bloch, ‘Témoignage’, La Pensée, September-October 1947, p. 10.

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in the extreme. Ideology and orthodoxy were constantly contorted by a burning patriotism and hatred of Nazism. Thus while denouncing the war, they argued that the anti-communist laws which had been passed since they adopted that line proved that the Government did not wish to win the war and was therefore treasonable. Although Thorez deserted from the army in October, the majority of mobilized communists remained with their military units on the instructions of the Party. Nor was the motive primarily sabotage. Aragon, for example, served as an ‘auxiliary doctor* with warrant officer rank, assigned at first to a labour regiment of Czech and Spanish refugees and then to a light, motorized division. Evacuated from Dunkirk, his division quickly returned to Brest and fought on the lower Seine. Taken prisoner at Angoulême, Aragon escaped with thirty men. He twice received the Croix de. Guerre and once the Médaille Militaire: Je me souviens des yeux de ceux qui s'embarquèrent Qui pourrait oublier son amour à Dunkerque,l Thus Nizan, who died at Dunkirk believing in the cause for which he fought, was reviled by a man who was three times honoured for his services to a cause in which he did not believe. In Aragon’s novel, the militant communist Lucien Cesbron asks his captain why, if they really wanted to fight the Nazis, they began by muzzling those who had been the only effective opponents of Hitler. The question would seem more foolish, and less paradoxical, if the majority of militants, intellectuals included, had not remained loyally at their posts. Aragon the communist and Aragon the patriot alternate with confusing rapidity throughout the length of Les Communistes. A quite different, but more convincing, account of the communist soldier’s predicament was later provided by Jean-Paul Sartre.2 In Sartre’s novel, the conscripted communist militant Brunet is captured and immediately sets about instilling the spirit of resistance into his fellow prisoners. He does not believe, he cannot believe, that Russia is in any sense allied with Hitler, and he is convinced that the French Party will act on its own initiative. They are deported to a camp in Germany. But when Chalais, a former communist deputy, arrives, he takes Brunet to task for spreading the word that Russia will eventually crush Germany and that a defeat of the Axis will be a victory for the proletariat. Brunet, says Chalais, sounds like a Gaullist iñ the pay of the City of London. Chalais quotes approvingly Molotov’s declaration to the Supreme Soviet on August 1st, 1940, that Russia and Germany have the same basic interests. In despair, Brunet tries to escape with another prisoner, Vicarios, who 1. L. Aragon, Les Yeux d'Eisa, London, 1943, p. 6. 2. J.-P. Sartre, Iron in the Soul, trans. by G. Hopkins, London, 1957, and ‘Drôle d*Amitié’, L.T .M ., November, December 1949.

144

1939-1940 had quit the Party after the Pact. Vicarios is killed. Brunet walks back toward the guards: 'sa m ort vient seulement de commencer\ Fact, as well as fiction, leaves no doubt as to the essence of the Party line on the eve of the fall of France. Germaine Willard’s claim that on May 17th the P.C.F. ‘elaborated’ a programme to transform the war into one of popular national defence1 is not reinforced by the two editions of /’Humanité which appeared on May 15th and 17th and which made no concessions to the idea of defending the nation.2 The Party, she writes, did not sabotage war materials; but cases of sabotage at the Renault and Farman works certainly occurred. Desperate retrospective efforts have been made by communist intellectuals to salvage the Party’s good name in these last, vital weeks. Aragon’s hero, Armand Barbentane, declares in May that the war no longer belongs to the Gamelins and Weygands, but to the people, for it was now a national war, as in 1793. Weygand (and there was some truth in this) only wanted to conclude an armistice with the Germans in order to turn his troops against a possible communist uprising. Aragon’s fourth volume, which deals in scrupulous detail with the political and military collapse of France, constantly equates inefficiency with upper-class lack of patriotism, and even treason. Defamed at one moment, the war is morally expropriated the next. The tension inherent in this dichotomy comes to the surface in Pierre Daix’s novel, when Mathieu argues at the time of the fall of Paris: ‘The Party was against the war without the U.S.S.R., that is to say the war against the U.S.S.R., but not for peace at any price.’3 Scarcely less amazing is Germaine Willard’s explanation, which runs as follows: on the one hand, the Party called for peace. On the other, it called for resistance to Hitler. Was this a contradiction? No. The Party appreciated the weakness of the French forces, and the strength of the Germans. It was, therefore, best to call a halt. But not at any price. ‘7/ ne peut donc s ’agir d ’une capitulation qui m ette la France à la m erci de H itler .’4

A capitulation which would not have put France at Hitler’s mercy some may find hard to envisage. But there is no doubt that the Party, relying on Germany’s Pact with Russia, hoped that it could reach an arrangement with the occupation authorities. Maurice Tréand, of the Central Committee, returned from Lille, where the Belgian communist paper L a Voix du Peuple was appearing with German authorization, and ordered Mme Ginollin and Mme Schrodt to contact the Kommandantur in Paris. On June 18th, Lt. Weber, the German press officer, gave approval for the appearance of l ’Humanité ,6and on the following day the paper appeared with the remarkable slogan: Prolétaires de tous les pays, 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

G. Willard, op. cit., p. 88. A. Rossi, op. cit., pp. 208-10. P. Daix, Classe 42, p. 175. G. Willard, op. cit., p. 90. R. Aron, The Vichy Regime 1940-44, trans. by H. Hare, London, 1958, p. 141.

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and

the

party

Unissez-vous! Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!1 Tréand and the two women having been arrested by the French police, they were released on June 25th on the intercession of the Germans. On the same day, Tréand, assisted by the communists Jean Catelas and Robert Foissin, a lawyer, sent a letter to the Nazi Councillor of State, Turner, promising that VHumanité, if allowed to appear, would pursue a policy of European pacification, defending the friendship between Germany and Russia. However, the negotiations finally failed, perhaps because of intervention by Vichy.12 The communists remained bent on appeasement. On July 1st, a first clandestine number of VHumanité appeared, and on the 4th the paper expressed pleasure at having seen so many Parisian workers talking amiably to German soldiers. The fraternity of peoples would become a living reality.3 For these quotations we are dependent on the work by Rossi. The relevant copies of VHumanité have been removed from the Bibliothèque Nationale, and by whom it is not difficult to guess. Rossi’s documentation has been ignored, rather than denied, by communist apologists. In his novel, Pierre Daix creates a discussion as to whether or not the Party should enter into contact with the Germans, only to dismiss the idea as immoral. Germaine Willard evades the whole question, confining herself to the observation that sanctions were taken against militants ‘tombés dans les pièges de Vennemi\ 4 The probability is that Tréand’s initiative in contacting the Germans was taken on the instructions of Thorez in exile. For the moment, the scattered communist intellectuals could only share the despondency of France herself. The poet Aragon wrote: Tout se ta it V ennem i dans V O m bre se repose On nous a d it ce soir que P aris s'e st rendu Je n'oublierai ja m a is les lilas n i les roses E t n i les deux am ours que nous avons perdus.5

1. A. Rossi, op. cit., p. 330. 2. R Aron, op. ci/., p. 142. 3. A. Rossi, op. cit.y p. 330. 4. G. Willard, op. ci/., p. 102. 5. L. Aragon, Le Crève-Cœur, New York, 1943, p. 38.

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CHAPTER FIVE

1940-1945

I n February 1955, the left-wing writer Vercors addressed an open letter to General de Gaulle challenging his accusation that the communists had not been active in the Resistance until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. What is the truth of the matter? A distinction should be made from the outset between the activities of individual communists and the attitude of the Party itself. Soon after the armistice, the reappearance of La Relève heralded the beginning of a wave of agitation among students and jeunes intellectuels. The internment of Paul Langevin on October 30th sparked off student riots in Paris and inspired his young admirers, Jacques Decour, Georges Politzer and Jacques Solomon1 to found in November /’ Université libre,123of which one hundred issues were to appear under the occupation. The first message Vercors received calling upon him to join a Resistance group came in August 1940 from Jean-Richard Bloch, and two months later he had a meeting with Maublanc,8 Joliot-Curie, Wallon and Jourdain to discuss the possibilities of intellectual resistance.45 The first major conspiracy discovered by the Gestapo centred round the Musée de FHomme and was the work of communists.6 Whatever the activities of individual communists during the first year 1. Jacques Solomon (1908-42). A communist physicist and radiologist of outstand­ ing talent, he had pursued his researches at Cambridge, Vienna, Moscow and other cities. A frequent contributor to VHumanité and other Party organs, he was married to Langevin*s daughter Hélène. Demobilized in 1940, he took up Resistance work until his arrest and death at the hands of the Nazis. 2. After the deaths of Decour, Politzer and Solomon, Francis Cohen and others took over V Université libre. Late in 1943, René Maublanc became editorial secretary, with Pierre Villon as director. André Voguet who, with Madeleine Marzin, was active in the teachers' union and launched UEcole libératrice, undertook the dangerous work of liaison between the editor, director and production team of V Université libre. 3. René Maublanc (d. 1960). A pupil of Durkheim, a student at the Ecole Normale, one of the founders of the Commission Scientifique du Cercle de la Russie neuve, he joined the Party in 1943. A Marxist philosopher, he taught after the war at the Lycée Henri IV, and became editorial secretary of La Pensée. 4. Although none of them were, as yet, Party members. 5. Vercors, For the Time Being, trans. by J. Griffin, London, 1960, p. 160.

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of the occupation - and many of the most active militants were intellec­ tu a ls-th e position adopted by the Party through its clandestine propaganda remained equivocal. In July 1940, the P.C.F. put out an Appel according to which the nation *montre sa réprobation de voir la France enchaînée au char de Vimpérialisme britannique . . .’* De Gaulle remained a ‘tool of the City of London’; Vichy, rather than the Germans, received the brunt of communist invective. Germaine Willard’s official explanation of the twelve months which elapsed before the attack on Russia certainly does not enhance the legend that the P.C.F. threw itself instantaneously into the work of the Resistance: ‘This war,’ she writes, ‘in which elements of national defence appeared increasingly clearly, conserved, however, numerous imperialist traits.’123 Two works written by leading intellectuals and published illicitly early in 1941 revealed a distinct shift of emphasis, but it is difficult to judge, despite the loud applause bestowed on them after the Liberation, to what extent they reflected the official Party position at the time. Gabriel Péri (who is known to have opposed the ‘imperialist war* line) assailed both the ‘charlatans of the National Revolution’ at Vichy, and also the Nazis who had turned the real grievances emanating from Versailles into open aggression. Péri ended with a call to the French people to begin their struggle for liberty and independence.8 Georges Politzer’s Révolution et Contre-Révolution auXXe Siècle, written in January-February 1941, similarly went a long way beyond Molotov’s opinion, recorded in October 1939, that Nazism was merely ‘a question of political opinion’, merely one ideology among many.4 Politzer, whose essay was occasioned by the visit to France in November 1940 of the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, now ridiculed the notion of a Nazi anti-capitalist war, provided a statistical summary of German despoliation of French resources to date, and complained of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. ‘The new Euro­ pean order’ was merely a shabby rationalization for the victory of German imperialism and the transformation of other nations into semi-colonies. But Politzer, in continuing to describe the war aims of the British and French as imperialist, and in paralleling the present situation to the struggle of the Communards against both Thiers and Bismarck, stopped a long way short of the fully patriotic line of the Popular Front and Resistance periods.5 From June 1941 all reservations were cast aside. The British imperialists were reincarnated into devoted democrats; de Gaulle, the crypto-fascist, became overnight the embodiment of Republican virtue. The com1. G. Willard, op. cit., p. 108. 2. Ibid., p. 106. 3. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 105. 4. See C.B., January 1940, p. 49. 5. G. Politzer, Révolution et Contre-Révolution auX Xe Siècle, p. 98.

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1940-1945 munists were certainly opportunists, but no more so than their new allies who for the first time embraced the Soviet Union. The principles of utility on which the Party might use its own intellectuals and their sympathetic colleagues crystallized and magnified as they had never done before. The first principle, prestige, was largely ruled out from the start: neither in the occupied nor the Vichy zones could great names be safely advertised. But with the Party leadership working under restrictive conditions, with the trade unions smashed and the working class effec­ tively dispirited by the police and by deportations, the intellectuals, with their ability to move about France and to live independently, at however humble a level, and their willingness to write and agitate regardless of the personal consequences, assumed an importance of the first magnitude. The communists set about creating their own front organizations, besides penetrating other multi-party Resistance groups. The communist Front National was founded in May 1941 (before Hitler’s attack on the U.S.S.R.) under the leadership of Pierre Villon in the northern zone and of Georges Marrane in the south. Its military organization, the FrancsTireurs et Partisans Français (F.T.P.F.) came under the direction of Charles Tillon, assisted by Professor Marcel Prenant, who also sat on the National Military Committee which co-ordinated the military under­ ground. The Front National eventually attracted into its ranks not only communist and socialist intellectuals, but also Catholic writers like François Mauriac. Party intellectuals were also active in the southern zone in Libération, led by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie (first a Gaullist and later a fellow-traveller), and in the all-party Mouvements Unis de Résistance (M.U.R.) and Mouvement de Libération Nationale (M.L.N.). The leader of the Groupes Francs of the M.U.R. after June 1943 was the young communist Serge Asher, who took the name of ‘Ravanel’,1 and who had organized the Resistance among students at Lyons. Three times arrested, he three times escaped.2 Another activist in the southern zone was Madeleine Baudoin (‘Marianne Bardini’), who was assigned the task of translating the technical instructions on Anglo-American arms and explosives parachuted to the Groupes Francs.3 A member of the communist Front patriotique des Jeunes in 1941-2, but later dis­ illusioned by certain communist methods, she survived the war only at the cost of serious injuries. The type of communist action which caused her disaffection is illustrated by the case of the engineer Joseph Pastor, a devoted Party militant since about 1930, who reorganized the Party at 1. Serge Asher. Bom 1920. Educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole Polytechnique. 2. M. Baudoin, H istoire des Groups Francs (Af. U.R.) des Bouches-du-Rhône de Septembre 1943 à la Libération, Paris, 1962, p. 27. 3. Madeleine Baudoin. Bom 1921. Docteur ès-Lettres of the Université de Caen. Professeur au Lycée.

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Marseilles in July 1940 and then worked on the clandestine Humanité régionale} Arrested in September 1940, he escaped on October 23rd. This was the beginning of his troubles with the Party, which tended to regard the ability to escape as tantamount to collaboration with the authorities. On May 5th, 1941, the first ‘mise en garde’ against Pastor appeared in the local Humanité. Although, at great personal risk, he now edited his own paper, Rouge-Midi, and continued to produce pamphlets calling fo r sabotage of goods destined for Germany, he was regarded as a Gestapo agent and condemned to death by the P.C.F. After the war, hé* spent years fruitlessly trying to clear his name with the Party, but it was so much wasted effort. In January 1945, the M.L.N. finally split on the issue of whether or not to fuse with the communist Front National. Communists like Pierre Hervé and fellow-travellers such as d’Astier de la Vigerie and Albert Bayet - a rare example of the dying species of ‘Jacobin’, Radical fellowtravellers - pressed for fusion, while André Malraux, André Philip and others who feared the possibility of a communist seizure of power opposed the move.2 On this occasion communist activity on the basis of the third principle of utility fell short of complete success. On the specifically intellectual level, the principal communist-controlled body was the Front National des Intellectuels, which in 1941 already included in its ranks Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Politzer, Decour, Solomon, René Blech, Eluard and Moussinac. As in the Popular Front period, multiple specialist organizations were created within which the intellec­ tuals were grouped into amicales, as a substitute for the cell system. Located in the northern zone were the Front National Universitaire, the Comité National des Médecins Français, the Comité National des Juristes, the Front National des Arts, supported by clandestine papers and journals such as /’ Université libre, VEcole laïque, la Médecine Française, VArt Français, les Etoiles and Les Lettres Françaises. All in all, these bodies claimed 100,000 members by the end of the war.2 Most effective, and durable, of these front organizations was to prove the Comité National des Ecrivains (C.N.E.), which soon grouped the majority of the writers of the Left, including those who, like Jean Cassou, Georges Friedmann and Louis Martin-Chauffier, had found the com­ munist attitude during the Phoney War untenable, if not repugnant. Cassou, relieved of his post as conservateur of the Musée d’Art Moderne in September 1940, later recalled his willingness to fight beside the com­ munists when they ‘entered the fray’. Arrested in 1941, he spent a year in prison where he wrote his 33 Sonnets Composés au Secret. As leader of a 123 1. Joseph Pastor. Bom 1893. An engineer from the Ecole d'ingénieurs de Marseille. Licencié ès sciences. 2. A. Werth, France 1940-55, London, 1956, p. 243. 3. G. Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 20.

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1940-1945 Southern zone Resistance network, Cassou was later badly beaten up in Lyons by the milice. It was Aragon at Lyons who drew Martin-Chauffier and Claude Aveline into the C.N.E. in 1942, while Eluard and Vercors joined the Comité in Paris in the same year. Albert Camus returned to France from Algeria late in 1942 and joined the southern zone network called Combat. The following year he moved to Paris where he came into contact with Malraux, Claude Bourdet and Sartre, and where he joined the C.N.E. Sartre had attempted an early rapprochement with the com­ munist intellectuals in 1941, but was told that if he had been released as a prisoner of war by the Germans it must have been for services rendered. But early in 1943 he was invited to join the C.N.E. with apologies for what had been said earlier. The C.N.E.’s organ, Les Lettres Françaises clandestines, became one of the most influential and widely respected voices of the intellectual Resistance. Founded in 1942 by the communist Jacques Decour, assisted by the non-communists Jean Paulhan, Jacques Debû-Bridel and Charles Vildrac, the paper soon lost Decour who was arrested in February 1942, with the result that the texts of the first number had to be burned. Another communist, Claude Morgan,1 took over on his own, being temporarily cut off from Paulhan and other members of the C.N.E., and produced the first roneo-typed number on September 20th. Hailing the achieve­ ments of Timoshenko and the Red Army in the East, Morgan at once began a campaign for a second front in the West which he was to pursue remorselessly for the next eighteen months.123The January 1943 edition was held up when the printing workshop was discovered by the Gestapo, but the following number more than atoned for this with Eluard’s poem Courage, a biting attack on the collaborationist writers Ramon Fernandez and Drieu la Rochelle written by Sartre, and poems by Aragon. Morgan, holding up as an example the Francs-Tireurs, who had killed 650 Germans and wounded 4,000 others in three months, called for remorseless physical action against the régime of Auschwitz.8 Supported by a brilliant galaxy of contributors, impassioned yet flexible, sincere yet opportunistic, Les Lettres Françaises in these months carried the fourth principle of utility, the art of political journalism, to the point of perfection. Every possible shade of opinion on the Resistance Left was appeased. In October 1943 there appeared a eulogy of AngloSaxon liberalism by ‘Argonne’, in which American soldiers were shown to be the spiritual sons of Hamilton(!) and Jefferson, the English of Bacon and Locke. At the same time the C.N.E., casting aside its liberal 1. Claude Morgan. Bom 1898, Charles Lecomte, son of the permanent secretary of the Académie. He worked as an electrical engineer 1922-8. Director of L.L.F ., 1942-50. Editor of Défense de la Paix and Horizons, 1950-8. He broke with the Party in 1958. 2. L.L.F . clandestines, 20 September 1942. 3. Ibid., July 1943.

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inhibitions, began to prepare for the Liberation with the demand that, assisted by a commission of jurists, it be empowered to examine the work of every editor and publisher working under the occupation with the power to deprive, fine and exact indemnity from ‘offenders’.1 The com­ munist intellectuals and their friends were preparing for a day of rough justice. The first legal edition of Les Lettres Françaises appeared on September 9th, 1944, with Morgan as director and George Adam as editor-in-chief. The communists, acutely conscious of the danger of isolation now that the war was virtually won, made every effort to extend the new Republican Front to writers like Mauriac, Duhamel, Romains, Bernanos and Giraudoux. Even Paul Claudel, who had penned odes to both Pétain and de Gaulle, was proudly announced as a member of the C.N.E. Pictures appeared in the Party press of smiling American soldiers (still the heirs of Hamilton and Jefferson) surrounded by delighted French jeunes filles. Les Lettres Françaises, in a moment of carefully calculated emotion, was moved to declare: ‘The choice of Churchill in May 1940 was a new proof of the prodigious instinct which has constantly guided England in the decisive hours of her history.’123But the inevitable tide of desertions could only be delayed, not prevented. Valéry, Claudel and Gide were not long in recovering their equilibrium. More important, Mauriac, and even Sartre, fell away. In a November 1945 article, ‘Where are you going, François Mauriac?’, Claude Morgan regretted that Mauriac’s recent statements, sincere as they might be, were making an increasingly unfavourable impression in communist circles.8 The main body of leftwing idealists, however, continued to appear in the pages of Les Lettres Françaises for some years to come. Les Lettres Françaises was only one of several communist papers and journals which, written and edited mainly by intellectuals, continued to appear under the hazardous conditions of the occupation. Despite the arrests of several editorial teams, VHumanité, La Vie du Parti, l9Avantgarde, the Cahiers du Bolchévisme and La Vie ouvrière circulated with admirable regularity. More than three hundred clandestine numbers of VHumanité, for example, had appeared by the time of the Liberation.4 But here an interesting divergence of tone between the communist and non-communist Resistance organs should be noted. For many of the left-wing militants of Combat, Franc-Tireur and Libération, the three largest Resistance movements of the southern zone, the system of parliamentary democracy associated with the Third Republic was permanently discredited. While this was obviously true, and had long 1. L.L.F. clandestines, March 1944. 2. L.L.F ., 11 November 1944. 3. Ibid., 17 November 1945. 4. H. Michel, H istoire de la Résistance, Paris, 1950, p. 84.

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1940-1945 since been true, for the majority of communist intellectuals as well, the latter, disciplined to accept a tactical view of the situation, and conscious that the Party was always suspected of dictatorial designs, showed themselves markedly more restrained in print on the subject of the ideal future society. Jean Cassou did not conceal his hope that the Resistance Committees would become the leading cadres of a new, post-war régime,1 while Sartre favoured a movement more disciplined than the Popular F ro n t-a n d more revolutionary.2 Two passages may be quoted to illustrate the intensity of the revolutionary fervour prevalent among intellectuals of the non-communist Left. In September 1942, Combat wrote: T he revolution th a t we are bringing ab o u t will be socialist because the tim e has com e, n o longer in w ords b u t w ith acts, to w rest from a pow erful oligarchy the control a n d exploitation o f the econom y and to restore im p o rta n t sectors o f the econom y to the natio n o r to the com ­ m unities o f producers a n d consum ers, as the case m ay be.8

In January 1943, Le Franc-Tireur declared that the future society will place un d er the control o f the dem ocratic state all the industrial, com m ercial a n d agricultural enterprises w hich ought to function only fo r the benefit o f the collectivity.4

These statements stand in striking contrast not only to the general tone adopted by Les Lettres Françaises clandestines, but also to the important Rapport Chardon, written in 1943 by the communist Pierre Hervé, who became Secretary-General of the Mouvements Unis de Résistance in May of that year. According to Hervé, T he R esistance, as it is now constituted, w ould n o t know how to transform itself . . . o r becom e a m ovem ent fighting capitalism effectively a n d w ith consequence . . . T oday, Capitalists o r nonC apitalists, Liberals o r Socialists, R eactionaries o r Com m unists, we are in agreem ent in conducting o u r n ational struggle.6

Bearing in mind that Hervé was a particularly ardent advocate of a radical transformation of the whole French political structure, and that after the Liberation he was no longer able to conceal his anger and frustration at the lost revolutionary opportunities, the degree of discipline and calculated restraint lying behind his Rapport Chardon emerges as truly remarkable. Yet the insistence on patriotism, on a broad movement 1. J. Cassou, La M émoire Courte, p. 91. 2. J.-P. Sartre, Entretiens sur la Politique, Paris, 1949, p. 71. 3. Combat, no. 34, printed in H. Michel & B. Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les Idées Politiques et Sociales de la Résistance: Documents Clandestins 1940-44, Paris, 1954, p. 144. 4. Ibid., p. 146, Le Franc-Tireur, 20 January 1943. 5. Ibid., Rapport Chardon, January 1943.

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o f all classes and creeds against the national oppressor, and the conse­ quent playing down of social questions, cannot always be attributed to calculated restraint. Singers of the Internationale from 1928 until 1934, of the Marseillaise until the war, of the Internationale in 1939-40, and of the Marseillaise again under the occupation, a certain breed of Party militant defended each new phase with extreme self-righteousness and without a hint of irony. This point is illustrated by an incident at the Chave prison at Marseilles, whence a group of communists escaped leaving two anar­ chists behind. In 1960, Charles Poli, the leader of the communists con­ cerned, was interviewed by Madeleine Baudoin: M .B.: W hy did the tw o im prisoned anarchists n o t escape? C .P.: I refused to open their cell d o o r so th a t they could escape w ith us. T hey weren’t patriots. B ut they w anted to escape. M .B.: W ere they in the Resistance? C .P.: T hey did serve the Resistance . . . B ut they w eren’t p atriots. W hen we com m unists p u t u p the tric o lo re . . . they p u t u p the black f l a g . . . I w ould have opened the d o o r fo r a royalist, b u t n o t for a n anarchist. M .B.: D id you sing the Internationale? C .P.: N o . W e were in the F ro n t N a tio n a l.1

The Resistance proved to be one of the most fertile recruiting periods in the Party’s history. Prominent among the younger generation of intellectuals to join in these years were Claude Roy, Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, J.-F. Rolland, Dionys Mascólo, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras and Edith Thomas, while Roger Vailland, René Char and Francis Ponge were among those who became close sympathizers. Edith Thomas joined the Party in September 1942, entering fully into the work of the C.N.E. and of Les Lettres Françaises in the southern zone. Claude Roy,2 one of the Party’s most subtle and fertile minds, later described his rejection of his apprenticeship in the Action Française, and the new sense of the meaning of words, particularly of the word ‘Revolution’, which the pressure of events provided. He came to the Party in a mood of exultant romanticism, his head full of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, the novels of Malraux, the poems of Mayakovsky and Pablo Neruda.8 For the young intellectuals finding themselves for the first time in a society committed to violence, Malraux’s novels, and his life, assumed a deep and invigorating relevance. Equally romantic were the passions engendered by Stalingrad. Edgar Morin, who joined the Party in the spring of 1942, recalled that ‘Stalingrad washed away all the crimes of the 1. M. Baudoin, op. cit., p. 119. 2. Claude Roy. Bom 1915, the son of an artist. Educated at the Universities of Bordeaux and Paris, he wrote for Je Suis Partout, Action Française and other Rightwing journals before his conversion to communism. His rift with the Party followed the Hungarian Revolution. 3. ‘Y-a-t-il une Scolastique Marxiste?’, Espritt May-June 1948, p. 747.

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1940-1945 past when it did not justify them. The cruelty, the trials, the liquidations found their finality in Stalingrad’.1 The war in the East appeared as a sort of grand plebiscite, a unanimous vote of confidence bestowed by the Russian people on their leaders. The voice of Russia was Moscow Radio. No single communist intellec­ tual rendered greater service to his country than did Jean-Richard Bloch whose fifteen-minute French language broadcasts from Moscow con­ tinued, with a few interruptions, until October 1944. Much of what he said, particularly in the early days of the war, was not strictly true. As early as July 19th, 1941 he described German morale as low, and throughout August and September he insisted, against the obvious facts, on the slowness of the German advance.123But if ever the end justified the means, it was then. Bloch constantly gave his French listeners a sense of the importance of their own partisan struggle and, by providing facts and figures on German losses in France, he confirmed the great impor­ tance attached to the Resistance in Moscow. Frequently his appeals were aimed at intellectuals. Soviet cultural life could not be extinguished: Shostakovitch was composing his seventh symphony in besieged Lenin­ grad, Ehrenburg was publishing his The Fall o f Paris* The Stalin prizes revealed the vitality of the new intellectual élites: Soviet man had proved himself the best as engineer, scientist and director. Bloch provided detailed information on Nazi crimes in Poland and on the concentration camps, at the same time fostering the legend that Stalin’s genius presided over the whole war effort. To the French intellectual Left the war in the East assumed the form of an immaculate synthesis, a justification through action of certain social and political principles. At a single stroke the victory of the Red Army vindicated twenty-eight years of Bolshevik rule. Yet communism, like Hobbes, professed to abhor the state of war; it was as if Leviathan were to be hailed as a manual for expansionist princes. The rapid construction of Russian heavy industry (which might arguably have been achieved without Stalinism) was equated with the moral victory of Marx’s com­ munism. As Edgar Morin said, the stains of the past were ‘washed away’ or ‘justified’. The early defeats of the Red Army were not attributed to the purges of officers in 1937-38. On the contrary, Stalingrad was taken as vindication of the timely liquidation of inefficient and traitorous elements. Henri Lefebvre,4 the Party’s most distinguished philosopher and sociologist, brought a Marxist analysis to bear on recent military 1. E. Morin, Autocritique, p. 46. 2. J.-R. Bloch, De la France Trahie à la France en Armes, Paris, 1949, p. 41. 3. Ibid., pp. 130-4. 4. Henri Lefebvre. Bom 1906, the son of a fonctionnaire. A member of the Philoso­ phies group, he became a teacher in the ’thirties. Artistic Director of Radiodiffusion Française at Toulouse, 1944-9. A Directeur de recherches at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique until 1953. Expelled from the Party in June 1958.

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history when he argued that the dogmatic belief in defensive fortifications held by the French generals in 1939 was a direct reflection of a decadent social system forced to rely on appeasement. He further claimed that the cadres of the German army were recruited almost exclusively from among the ‘leisured classes’, whereas the high morale of the Red Army could be attributed to its broad social basis.1 The judgement on the French generals seems plausible, but the argument fails to explain why the Ger­ man army (by Marxist analysis also an agent of a decadent capitalism) had, given competent leadership, proven itself among the most efficient in European history. But the appeal that the Party presented to intellectuals in these years had less to do with the potentialities of the dialectic than with an irresistible emotional appeal generated by the Soviet Union. Nor was it the younger intellectuals alone who were swept by this mood of enthusiasm. In Eluard, Picasso, Wallon, Jourdain, Joliot-Curie and Langevin, the Party came to possess some of the most esteemed names in French culture. Eluard rejoined in the spring of 1942 because the communists were ‘the Party of France’. Frédéric Joliot-Curie joined the same year reputedly saying: T have become a communist because I am a patriot.’123In 1943-44, he was able to use his position at the Collège de France to manufacture incendiary bombs for the Francs-Tireurs, while his wife Irène, also active in the Resistance, had to escape to Switzerland. It was, similarly, the fierce social-patriotism of a veteran Dreyfusard which inspired Paul Langevin, at the age of seventy-two, to join the Party in September 1944. Arrested on October 30th, 1940, Langevin was the first of the eminent French intellectuals to suffer in this way. He spent thirty-eight days in the Santé prison. On November 25th, he underwent a detailed interroga­ tion to which he responded with a judicious blend of prudence and defiance. He stressed his admiration for German culture, but argued that any collaboration between the two countries should be based on respect and the basic moral laws. He signed a statement to the effect that he did not subscribe to the point of view of any single political party.8 In January 1942, he was arrested for a second time, but soon released. Under the assumed name of Léon Pinel, engineer, he began to work in the Resistance until, finally exhausted, he escaped over the Jura frontier in May 1944 carried by two francs-tireurs. Doubtless his later decision to join the Party was influenced by the execution of his son-in-law Jacques Solomon and the deportation of his daughter Hélène Solomon to Auschwitz. Both were communists. 1. H. Lefebvre, ‘La Pensée militaire et la Vie nationale’, La Pensée, A prü-M ayJune 1945, pp. 49-56. 2. Humanité, 7 April 1950. 3. P. Langevin, La Pensée et VAction, p. 308.

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1940-1945 N ot least of the functions of the intellectuals was to write creatively on the themes of war, patriotism and the Resistance. In so far as such literature was politically or socially tendentious, the fourth principle of utility was involved; in so far as effectiveness was bound up with creative skill and imagination, so was the second principle, and even the fifth. In Aragon and Eluard the Party found its two wartime poets of real stature. Eluard was seized by defiance, scorn and fury. Courage was written in 1942: F rères ayons du courage N ous qui ne som m es p a s casqués N i b o ttés n i gantés n i bien élevés Un rayon s'allum e en nos veines . . -1

A calm fury marks his poem T u er : I l tom be cette n u it D ans le silence Une étrange lueur sur P aris S u r le bon vieux cœur de P aris L a lueur sourde du crim e P rém édité sauvage e t p u r D u crim e contre les bourreaux C ontre la m ort,*

Aragon, who was forced ‘underground’ when the Italians invaded Nice in November 1942, wrote songs and ballads for the partisans, publishing in all six volumes of poetry during the war, besides organizing the C.N.E. in the southern zone, often under dangerous conditions. As a writer, he displayed a wide range of form and style, terse and utilitarian in his short story T h e G o o d N eig h b o u rs , a cutting satire on the methods of Vichy thugs of interrogating civilians, which was turned out by the clandestine press on coarse grey paper, in the shape of a small pamphlet; elsewhere eloquent and defiant: A h s i Vécho des chars dans m es vers vous dérange S 'il grince dans m es d e u x d'étranges cris d 'essieu C 'est qu'à l'o rg u e l'orage a détru it la voix d'ange E t que je m e souviens de D unkerque M essieurs.8

The first creative work of Resistance literature to make a notable impact was L e S ile n c e d e la M e r. Published in France in February 1942, it was written by a then unknown author, Jean Bruller (b. 1902), who took the pseudonym of Vercors. A lieutenant in an Alpine regiment in123* 1. P. Eluard, Au Rendez-vous Allemand, Paris, 1946, p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 28. 3. L. Aragon, Les Yeux d'Eisa, London, 1943, p. 37. The verse quoted is from Plus Belles que les Larmes (December 1941).

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1940, Vercors, who helped found the clandestine publishing house Les Editions de Minuit, remained close to the communists until 1956. Far from being a tale of brutality and violent resistance, Le Silence de la M er constituted a subtle fable about a highly civilized, republican German officer billeted on an old Frenchman and his daughter. The officer loves France and dreams of reconciliation; he talks endlessly, but always to a brick wall, for the two French people employ against him the deadly weapon of total silence.1 The book was received badly by French émigré groups abroad; it even savoured of collaboration. But, as Sartre has pointed out, in the occupied zone, where people faced the dilemma of finding German soldiers to be ordinary human beings, the moral of the story was widely appreciated. Not only did it advocate passive resistance in preference to none, but it was also designed to combat the comforting effect of Pétain’s interview with Hitler at Montoire. But, as the active military resistance gathered momentum in 1942-43, this moral naturally lost much of its relevance.2 It is a difficult, unjust and perhaps impossible task to select and summarize the best or most effective of the Resistance writing, but mention should be made of the work of Elsa Triolet and Edith Thomas, both communists, and of Claude Aveline, an essayist, novelist and art critic of the Left.8 Elsa Triolet’s Les Amants d'Avignon was published illegally in October 1943, under the pseudonym Laurent Daniel.4 Far from the style of socialist realism, this love story nonetheless cleverly embraces a vivid picture of the Resistance in the South, while discreetly expressing admiration for the Soviet Union and communism. Her collection, A Fine o f Two Hundred Francs, which described the atmos­ phere at the time of the Normandy landings, was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1945. The horror of arrest, interrogation and deportation was vividly portrayed by Claude Aveline in his Le Temps M ort, written under the pseudonym of Minervois and also published by Les Editions de Minuit, in 1944. Rather more didactic and socialistic were Edith Thomas’ Contes d'Auxois, published in 1943. La Relève tells of the predicament facing young workers being asked to ‘volunteer’ for work in Germany, while Le Tilleul captures something of Vercors’ mood in its probing of the problems raised by the existence of likeable, anti-Nazi German soldiers. Veillée consists of a eulogy of the Red Army, while F.T.P., a story of railway sabotage, ends on a highly didactic and rhetorical note about those struggling for liberty in Europe.6 In these ways, and many more, 1. Vercors, Le Silence de la M er, London, 1943. 2. J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 53. 3. N ot to mention the plays of Camus and Sartre which were sufficiently veiled in their political meaning to permit performance on the Paris stage. 4. In tribute to Laurent and Danielle Casanova. 5. E. Thomas, Contes d'A uxois, Paris, 1943.

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1940-1945 did writers search for a mode of imaginative expression which would inspire and activate those who were indeed struggling for liberty in Europe.1 But these achievements were hard-won. The toll on communist lives, particularly those of intellectuals, was heavy. A few men of international prestige lived unmolested. Picasso, despite his Guernica, worked freely in Paris. But Romain Rolland’s house was watched, his mail was opened, and he lived in constant fear of arrest or assassination.2 Late in 1943, the British, French and American press mistakenly announced that he had been committed to a concentration camp, and later that he had died. Constant anxiety led him to burn his correspondence with Gorky. Despite his bitter reflections in 1940 that as doctrines neither dialectical materialism nor the class struggle could compensate for the lost religious spirit, and despite his partial return to the language of mysticism,3 Rolland’s affection for the U.S.S.R. and the P.C.F. revived to the extent of his sending Thorez a letter of welcome on his return to France in November 1944. In January 1945, the Central Committee rendered him homage and Thorez travelled to Vézelay to salute his remains.4 Some of those arrested early in the war were released, as was the case with Langevin and Cassou. In October 1941, the Germans arrested in Paris the veteran physicist Aimé Cotton, President of the Academy of Science. His wife Eugénie Cotton, also a distinguished scientist, became an active communist. Professor Borel, the left-wing mathematician, was arrested at this time but, like Langevin, he was eventually released. The Germans in France were by no means insensitive to world opinion where famous cultural figures were involved. More surprising was the good fortune enjoyed by Léon Moussinac, an active Party member since 1924, who was arrested in April 1940 yet released the following November. Moussinac, who travelled at once to visit Aragon and Elsa Triolet, with whom he spent ‘five unforgettable days’, became prominent in the Resistance.6 It was in 1941 that the systematic execution of hostages began. The graph of repression mounted steadily from October 1940 until June 1941. In Paris special tribunals were set up to sentence communists to death, many of the victims being intellectuals. Three communist lawyers, Pitard, Hajje and Rolnikas, arrested on June 27th, were shot as hostages, without 1. Attention naturally focuses on the writers, but the Resistance work of other ifitellectuals in their professional capacities was im portant Communist painters like Fougeron and Pignon sold their work for the benefit of the Partisans. Fougeron became secretary-general of the communist-led Front National des Arts in 1943. Scientists used their laboratories to manufacture explosives. 2. R. Rolland, Lettres à un Combattant de la Résistance, p. 18. 3. See J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, pp. 353-4. 4. Humanité, 3 January 1945. 5. L. Moussinac, Le Radeau de la M éduse, p. 273.

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trial, on September 19th. All three had served in the army.1 On December 15th, 1941 Gabriel Péri was shot. According to Aragon, it was Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy Minister of the Interior, who was most anxious for his head,123since Péri was a symbol of the Party’s pre-war anti-appease­ ment policy which had now been revived in its new, resistant form. Péri had worked underground until betrayed in May 1941. Since May of the previous year his wife had been interned in a concentration camp. A month before his execution he was interrogated and tortured, and later offered his freedom if he would renounce the Party. On the eve of his death he wrote: *J'ai souvent pensé, cette nuit, à ce que mon cher Paul Vaillant-Couturier disait avec tant de raison, que le communisme était la jeunesse du monde et qu'il préparait les lendemains qui chantent'* Two other communist intellectuals with whom he shared imprisonment, Jean Catelas and Lucien Sampaix, an editor of l'Humanité, soon shared his fate. In March 1942, Jacques Decour, Jacques Solomon and Georges Politzer were arrested and handed over to the Nazis by Vichy. Pierre Daix, a twenty-year-old communist also in Romainville prison, later recalled how Politzer was chained and savagely beaten.45But he shouted defiance at his tormentors and was shot on May 27th. Decour and Solomon survived him by a few days. There were other victims: Guy Mocquet, son of the communist deputy for the Seine, and later Valentin Feldmann, a teacher of philosophy at Dieppe, who was shot for sabotage. The Jews suffered heavily. A further victim was the young poet André Chennevière, formerly director of the literary page of l'Humanité.6 Equally tragic was the fate of the young communist women sent to Auschwitz: Hélène Solomon, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Berthie Albrecht, Danielle Casanova and Male Politzer. Only the former two survived. Danielle Casanova, wife of Laurent Casanova, later the principal Stalinist cultural ‘commissar’ in France, was a dental surgeon in her early ’thirties. In 1935 she became leader of the Jeunesses Com­ munistes, but her most important work was to found the Jeunes Filles de France, a communist front organization with 20,000 members. Few of the leading members of the Jeunes Filles survived the war. Having worked in collaboration with Decour, Politzer and Solomon in the 1. L. Aragon, Le Crime contre Vesprit, Paris, 1944, p. 33. 2. L. Aragon, VH om m e Communiste, /, Paris, 1946, p. 199. Although it can be argued that Pucheu saved many French lives by handing over a few chosen militants to the Germans, he never spared communists who fell into his clutches. It was Pucheu who created the ‘service de police anti-communiste*. Another detested agent of the Vichyite repression was the anglophobic ex-communist Paul Marion, who had quit Doriot’s P.P.F. in 1939 while openly declaring himself a fascist. 3. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 126. 4. L.L.F ., 27 May 1948. 5. Moussinac mentioned Dr. Pesqué, Georges Dudach, Pierre Lacan, Dr. Tenine and Charles Steber as victims.

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1940-1945 Resistance, she, like they, fell victim in February 1942 to a well-prepared Gestapo dragnet. In January 1943, she was one of 231 women deported to Auschwitz, only forty-nine of whom returned. Like Maie Politzer, she died later that year of typhus.1 Among the men, a number survived the camps. The Catholic idealist Louis Martin-Chauffier, formerly an editor of Vendredi, was freed from Bergen-Belsen by the British, very weak from typhus. Marcel Prenant, a member of the National Military Committee, a founder of the Front National and, with Joliot-Curie, the Party’s most distinguished scientist, was also liberated by Allied forces from the camp of Neuendamme, near Hamburg, where men died like flies. Prenant, a leading anti-racialist of the pre-war years, had been plunged into cold water by the Gestapo to obtain information.123Another survivor was the communist painter Boris Taslitzky, formerly secretary of the Union des peintres et sculpteurs de la Maison de la Culture, who had been sent to Buchenwald from Riom. Pierre Daix lived to write of Mauthausen, while Robert Antelme’s experiences in the Gandersheim kommando of Buchenwald formed the basis for his brilliantly perceptive V espèce humaine* How many communists lost their lives during the war? The official c o m m u n ist figure provided by Aragon claims 75,000 shot or executed.4 This claim cannot be upheld. The official figure for atrocities committed in France presented by the Bureau of Research on War Crimes at Nuremburg was 26,000.5 According to Henri Michel, at least 30,000 French men and women were shot, while 75,000 died in concentration camps.6 Bearing in mind that these figures do not include those killed fighting for the maquis and the F.T.P., and remembering also the part played by communists in every sphere of the Resistance, then a figure of 60,000 communist dead may not be an exaggerated one. Approximately half the staff of VHumanité had died, and it was with a justifiable pride that the Party faced the future under the slogan Le Parti des Fusillés.

1. T his sum m ary o f D anielle Casanova’s life is taken from S. Téry, Danielle, trans. by H elen Simon Travis, New Y ork, 1953. 2. Humanité, 6 June 1945. 3. Paris, 1947. 4. L. A ragon, V Homme Communiste, I, p. 38. 5. A . J. R ieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party 1941-1947, New Y ork, 1962, p. 144. 6. H . M ichel, op. cit., p. 124.

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C H A P T E R S IX

1945-1956

Adhérez au Parti des Fusillés! The Resistance record of the P.C.F. was second to none. In the turmoil of party politics the facts are not always sovereign; some advertisement may be necessary. But the communist intellectuals carried the cult of their martyrs to extreme lengths, in a manner at once ritualistic, repetitive and bombastic. Over each fallen head was erected a minor mausoleum of words. Nor did the requiem abate with time; a tactic became a habit. Aragon was the arch-priest of the new cult. His tributes to Politzer, Decour and Solomon were perhaps no more than their heroism war­ ranted, but Gabriel Péri, the Péri of the lendemains qui chantent, he elevated into the incarnation of a new species, Communist man’.1 Others took up the theme. Eluard wrote of Péri: Un homme est mort qui n'avait pour défense Que ses bras ouverts à la vie . . .12 Party poets who had scarcely known Péri found his loss unbearable. Guillevic (b. 1907) wrote of him: — Mais c'est vrai que des morts Font sur terre un silence Plus forts que le sommeil.3 Péri’s dictum on journalism became holy writ: T have held my profession to be a kind of religion, of which the drafting of my daily article each night was the sacrament.’4 According to one documentary novel, these words were still plastered over the walls of the offices of /’Humanité at the time of the Korean War. Perhaps the most extreme adulation was bestowed on the victim of 1. L. A ragon, L'Homme Communiste, /, p. 49. 2. P. Eluard, Au Rendez-vous Allemand, p. 39. 3. P. D aix, Guillevic, Paris, 1954, p. 139. 4. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 114.

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1945-1956 Auschwitz, Danielle Casanova, after whom a street was named in Paris and whose name came constantly to be linked by the communists with that of Joan of Arc. Homages to her memory were organized by the Union des Femmes Françaises at the Salle Pleyel and elsewhere, and as late as 1955 her enlarged portrait was still displayed alongside Joan of Arc’s. In André Stil’s Stalin Prize-winning novel Le Premier Choc, a provincial centre of the U.F.F. is described with the usual pretentious sentimentality: 'E t le grand regard de Danielle, dès Ventrée, vous saisit, vous éclaire. U autres portraits a u ssi. . .n Tasteless bombast tended to take the edge off the genuinely effective tributes such as Boris Taslitzky’s painting La M ort de Danielle Casanova (1950). Even natural deaths assumed a tragic significance. Vaillant-Couturier, who died in 1937, had, according to Aragon, worked himself to death. The fact that he liked hunting, archaeology, aviation and jokes was endlessly exploited to prove the full human potentialities of Vhomme communiste. After the war, Eluard wrote a poem in his memory; in 1954 Central Committee members paid homage at his tomb. The young Resistance students in Daix’s novel Classe 42 never allowed themselves to forget Vaillant-Couturier’s dictum that *le communisme est la jeunesse du monde*. In Hélène Parmelin’s Noir sur Blanc, the editors of VHumanité, busy describing how South Korea attacked the North, reverently recall Vaillant-Couturier’s slogan, ‘Presse qui ment, presse qui tue*.123 Nor did the eulogists shrink from eulogizing one another. Aragon wrote that Eluard’s communism ‘is not distinct from his grandeur’,8 while Eluard responded, ‘Of all the poets I have known, Aragon is the one who has been most r i ght . . . he has shown me the way.’45As Sartre later commented, the Party intellectuals elevated themselves into an order of chivalry, naming from their own ranks the ‘permanent heroes of our time’. One of Sartre’s former pupils told him with suave irony, ‘We communist intellectuals suffer, you see, from a superiority complex.’6 Revolutionary romanticism, the cult of the hero, as popularized by Malraux, had become stilted, sterile, self-satisfied. The more senior of the Party intellectuals emerged from the Resistance speaking of family, religion, morality and patrie. La main tendue to the Catholics, first explored by Thorez in 1936, was tried again. Aragon wrote of ‘he who believed in heaven and he who did not’. Similarly, the theme exploited by Vaillant-Couturier in 1936 - ‘capitalism destroys the family, disperses it, sabotages it’ — was now taken up with new vigour. Aragon, who advertised the respectable family life of his colleagues, anxiously explained 1. A . Stil, Paris Avec Nous, Paris, 1953, p. 217. 2. H . Parm elin, Noir sur Blanc, Paris, 1954, p. 299. 3. L. A ragon, V H om m e Communiste, II, p. 125. 4. P. E luard, Poèmes pour Tous, Paris, 1959, p. 204. 5. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à 'Aden-Arabie', p. 11.

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that Engels’ analysis of the social origins of the family did not imply an attack on it as such.1 Indeed, he continued, we in France often call the Party la Famille. Praising the life of J.-R. Bloch some years later, he let it be known that Bloch was not only a patriot, but also a grandfather. Roger Garaudy, flattering the Republican Christian masses, as distinct from the Church hierarchy, promised that communists did not wish to deprive France of any of its ‘spiritual dimensions’.123Although the Party would pursue an all-out ideological crusade against religious belief, it would never resort to force.8 Garaudy, like Aragon, revered family life, denied that in the Soviet Union children were parted from their parents and, with an eye to his Catholic readers, described the Soviet system of tax-reliefs for large families.4*As Marcel Aymé sardonically remarked, the communist writers were becoming the most expert purveyors of ‘intellectual comfort’, mixing their occasional dialectical tirades with a pervasive sense of spiritual and material security. For each communist social attitude there is a political explanation. The intellectuals were making the best of a bad job. Despite the unprecedented strength of the Party (over five million votes in the 1945-46 elections, and 161 seats in the Chamber in October 1945), despite the fact that it had become for the first time the largest parliamentary party, it was nevertheless committed to watch helplessly the return of the old evils of the Third Republic. Moscow had embraced de Gaulle and consequently Thorez had endorsed the dissolution of the armed Resistance units in January 1945. That was the end of revolution. In June, Etienne Fajon denounced ‘ “revolutionary” chatter and gestures, which can only divide the masses at the present stage’, while Duelos frankly admitted that ‘we do not intend to establish communism in France in the next few weeks. . . Our goals are more m odest. . .’6*The Party discouraged strikes, called for higher productivity and took five seats in the Government, although denied any of the key positions such as the Interior or Foreign Affairs. When the socialists rejected Thorez’s proposal for a single great workers’ party, and the national referendum rejected the call for a sovereign Constituent Assembly, the Party’s chances of gaining power by legal means and of turning France into a ‘popular democracy’ were virtually concluded. French and Italian communism, in the eyes of many militants, had been sacrificed to the Soviet desire to stabilize spheres of influence. The degree of angry resentment seething within the Party at what was regarded (probably wrongly) as a wasted opportunity was fully revealed 1. L. A ragon, VH om m e Communiste, 7, p. 31. 2. R. G araudy, V Eglise, le Communisme et les Chrétiens, Paris, 1949, p. 199. 3. R. G araudy, Le Communisme et la M orale, Paris, 1945, p. 114. 4. The Central Com mittee later condem ned fam ily planning and the use o f contra­ ceptives by m arried women as ‘neo-M althusianism ’. Com munist doctors protested in vain; the U .F.F. did not protest. 3. Q uoted in A. J. Rieber, op. cit., p. 212.

164

1945-1956 only during the Marty-Tillon purge of 1952. Yet bitter frustration, particularly among the younger intellectuals and the new recruits, was evident at the time. An inquiry held by Esprit in February 1946 among students revealed many cases of disappointment that the revolutionary potential of the Resistance had been thrown away. The Party gained members from among the intellectuals at an impressive rate in 1944-45, but the losses were also impressive.1 Frustration tempered by loyalty characterized two books published by Pierre Hervé12 at this time. Despite his work for the Party press, and as a deputy, he could not conceal his fury at the ‘liberation betrkyed’, although he avoided damaging references to Party leaders. In place of a union of all ‘democratic’ forces to take over the keys of power, he found only another coalition of privileged interests. Hervé, like Claude Roy, despised the current fashion by which everyone was a communist by sentiment and a bourgeois by action. The maquis and the Liberation Committees had considered that the old pattern of electoral democracy ought not to be revived; not only had their hopes been dashed, but in Gaullism they were now menaced by a new Napoleonic bureaucracy disguising its paternalism with talk of ‘socialism’. The Resistance had been expro­ priated by Washington, London and Moscow. Hervé wanted action, effort, the conquest of power, and not too many scruples about ends and means.3 A year later he again called for the suppression of the old classes and the organization of a rational economy.45In October 1946, the Party gained 183 seats in the Chamber, and was still powerless. What the recipe of Hervé and his friends for a new democracy was, was not made clear; the issue had deliberately been left vague during the Resistance in the interests of cohesion among all Left groups.6 For the communists, 1947 brought an enforced isolation; it was the year of no return. Having voted against the Government on a vote of con­ fidence, they were thrown out of office by Premier Ramadier, an action applauded by the American press. Finding that it could not effectively check a strike at the Renault works, the communist C.G.T. launched a nation-wide, and essentially political, strike wave. Three years of mount­ ing frustration found an outlet in violence; intellectuals, among many of whom there was an element of the barricadier, threw themselves into street fights with the C.R.S. and the police. The socialist Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch, reacted strongly and the strikes were smashed. The 1. ‘Enquête sur le Communisme’, Esprit, February 1946. 2. Pierre Hervé (b. 1913). He joined the Jeunesses Communistes in 1932 and was active in the Resistance. A fter the war he was deputy for Finistère, until 1948, and a leader-w riter for l'H um anité. He edited Action, 1949-52. A philosophy teacher a t the lycée o f Chalons-sur-M am e, he was expelled from the Party in February 1956. 3. P. Hervé, La Libération trahie, Paris, 1945, pp. 166-7. 4. P. H ervé, La Politique et la M orale, Paris, 1946, p. 22. 5. See p. 153.

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rift widened: Russia rejected the Marshall Plan while the socialists, guided by Blum, Moch and Daniel Mayer moved toward a distinctly pro-American alignment. The communist intellectuals quickly reverted to a sectarian position, ridiculing the idea of a Third Force, insisting that there could be only two parties in the struggle of man with his history: those for liberation and those for mystification. The ‘intellectual comfort* of the immediate post-war period was discarded. With Saint-Just, Jean Kanapa warned: ‘No liberty for the enemies of liberty.’1 Those who had loyally supported Thorez and the policy of accommodation now openly proclaimed their regrets over the lost illusion of the quasi-revolution of 1944. In his poem M CM XLVI, Aragon wrote: (T est la nouvelle duperie Q ui se m ène à grandes clam eurs L es m ots sont ceux p our qui Von m e u r t. . .123

The frustrated mood of Aragon’s satirical Chanson du Conseil Municipal, which jibed at 'M es beaux messieurs de poudre et de rapine . . .’ and his opinion that 'une folie a soufflé sur la France*,8 were shared not only by Party members but also by fellow-travellers like Roger Vailland and friendly Catholic idealists like Jean Cassou and Louis Martin-Chauffier who had inherited the revolutionary mystique of the Resistance. Vailland, who attributed the expulsion of the communists from the Government to the machinations of Anglo-Saxon capitalism working through the French ruling classes, prophesied a situation in France parallel to that in Greece, where the Party was banned.4 Most communists were agreed that the fiercest struggle of all was at hand. Defence of the Soviet Union, both as a social system and as a force in world affairs was, in the circumstances, the primary task for intellectuals and the one toward which they gravitated most readily. It was not until at least three years after the Liberation that the enormous credit the U.S.S.R. had accumulated during the war began to be dissipated among the intellectuals of the Left. In 1945, Vailland criticized the lack of imagination of the western leaders, their habit of dividing the world into commercial spheres of influence, their failure to appreciate and accept the new strength of the Soviet Union. The following year Pierre Courtade, one of the rising generation of intellectuals close to the Party leadership and one of the most influential among students, embarked on a long apology for Soviet foreign policy, emphasizing the suspicious delay in opening up a second front and pointing to Churchill’s Fulton speech as an 1. J. K anapa, V existentialisme rCest pas un humanisme, Paris, 1947, p. 44. 2. L. A ragon, Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur, Paris, 1948, p. 16. 3. Ibid.y p. 27. 4. R. V ailland, Le Surréalisme contre la Révolution, p. 62.

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1945-1956 open declaration of war by the West. Britain was his particular bête noire: Bevin was little better than Churchill. All arguments against Russian behaviour in eastern Europe he dismissed as malicious or inspired by commercial motives.1 There were a good number of facts to support the view that Russia desired only peace. But, as in pre-war discussions of the U.S.S.R., facts tended to become the instruments rather than the inspiration of argu­ ments. The communists had their own logic. In Courtade’s novel Jimmy, an American visitor to Paris, having been told that one hundred million Russians had signed an anti-bomb manifesto, asks a French communist whether they had not been forced to do so. The communist replies conclusively: T don’t believe it, but even if it were true, it would mean that the U.S.S.R. was against the bomb, wouldn’t it? It isn’t Truman who is forcing people to sign.. .’a The Soviet Union was defended not only by a special logic, but also by a lyrical assertion the passion of which few pro-American intellectuals in France could rival. Eluard wrote: F rères V U .R S .S . est le seid chem in libre P ar où nous passerons pour atteindre la p a ix Une p a ix favorable au doux désir de vivre L a n u it se fa it toute p e tite E t la terre reflète un avenir sans tache.8

The official communist view of the Cold War was laid down by A. A. Zhdanov at the first meeting of the Cominform in September 1947. ‘The U.S.A.,’ he said, ‘has proclaimed a new, openly predatory expansionist orientation’, with the aim of world-wide domination. He warned of plans for an atomic, preventive war against Russia. Western propaganda was entirely fraudulent, especially ‘the assertion that a system of many parties and the existence of an organized opposition of the minority are symp­ toms of genuine democracy’.4 The U.S.S.R., he concluded, never en­ croached on the independence of other states. Doctrinally, Zhdanov said little that was new. Communist intellectuals in France were already at work on these themes. The previous March, the historian Jean Bruhat, quoting the almost unanimous support received by c o m m u n is t candidates in the 1946-47 Soviet elections, answered the old question, Why only one party? with the familiar answer that the rôle of the C.P.S.U. against Tsarism had been ‘decisive’, and that Article 126 of the Constitution quite clearly stated that the most active workers united in the C.P.5 Communists had been dealing out this type of nonsense for thirty years. The importance of Zhdanov’s speech as a 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

P. C ourtade, Essai sur VAntisoviétisme, pp. 55-61. P. C ourtade, Jim m y, Paris, 1951, p. 261. Humanité, 26 A pril 1949. A. A. Zhdanov, The International Situation, London, 1947, p. 18. J. B ruhat, ‘Elections et D ém ocratie en U.R.S.S.*, D .N ., M arch 1947, p. 152.

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guide lay rather in its mood, its intransigence, its refusal to compromise on any level. This was the cue which the more devoted Party intellectuals were quick to follow. Only two months after the Cominform meeting, an article appeared in Les Lettres Françaises in which Claude Morgan charged that Krav­ chenko’s book I Chose Freedom had been written for him by American Intelligence. Morgan, who claimed to have received his information from a certain Sim Thomas, a pseudonym for an American agent, also blackened Kravchenko’s personal record and character.1 This amounted to a direct challenge, not only to Kravchenko, but to the whole anti­ communist movement. The ensuing case (Kravchenko, a Russian official in America who had defected in April 1944, claimed damages) was soon transformed into a huge propaganda forum in which two armies of intellectuals indicted the other’s social and political system. By a master stroke, Morgan had mobilized and unified the communist intellectuals and their friends on the broadest possible basis against the common enemy. The defendants, Morgan and André Wurmser, contrasted Kravchenko’s treason with their own Resistance records. ‘Whoever attacked Russia,’ said Wurmser, ‘sided with Hitler.’123Into the witness box came idealists and fellowtravellers like Martin-Chauffier, Vercors, d’Astier, Pierre Cot, K. Zilliacus and Dr Hewlett Johnson, alongside communists such as Courtade, the historian Jean Baby, Jean Perus, a lecturer in Russian at ClermontFerrand, Edith Thomas, Bruhat, Garaudy and Joliot-Curie. Jean Baby said of Russia: ‘Personally, I am of the opinion that there never were any persecutions.’8 Perus, a linguist, made telling grammatical points to prove that the book could never have been written by a Russian. When judge­ ment was given on April 4th, the President of the Court said the flagrant contradictions about Russia could not be resolved by the Court, and that Morgan and Wurmser had not brought sufficient proof of the lies they accused Kravchenko of. Yet in many ways the case benefited the com­ munists: Kravchenko was awarded a mere 50,000 francs damages, a small price to pay in return for the impressive spectacle of so many notable intellectuals avowing their faith in the Soviet Union. For these men Russia continued to possess a unique quality, the quality of hope, which transcended any amount of evidence as to its temporary concrete defects. In 1946 Georges Friedmann, whose pre-war critique of Russia had been so incisive and had given considerable offence, described the Soviet Union as ‘the most magnificent effort toward the rational transformation of institutions (and beyond them of the renovation of a 1. L.L.F ., 13 Novem ber 1947. 2. Kravchenko versus Moscow, London, 1950, p. 26. 3. Ibid., p. 66.

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1945-1956 whole people) that humanity has ever attempted’.1 Gradualism, reform­ ism, even Keynesianism, were regarded as powerless in the face of capitalism’s original sin, its emphasis on the acquisitive motive. Dionys Mascólo, a writer who had already broken with the Party, wrote in 1953 that, even granting as valid all the criticisms of the U.S.S.R. made by its enemies, it remained a society founded on absolute respect for the necessary conditions for the satisfaction of men’s material needs. It was to this that Russia had sacrificed everything. The Soviet Union remained the only hope that man had historically been able to conceive of, and the only one to which he had been able to give body. It was nothing to be proud of; bu**there was nothing to oppose to it.123 Defensive and qualified as it was, Mascolo’s statement is probably as representative as any of the basic communist case. Defence of the Soviet Union implied defence of the Popular Democracies. These provided a novel and awkward problem, one which intellectuals had not previously had to face. In accordance with the fourth principle of utility, tiie Party provided in Duelos’ Démocratie Nouvelle a regular organ in which intellectuals might be employed defending the Soviet record in eastern Europe, regardless of their private reservations. That these reservations existed is beyond doubt, for a number of them came out in the post-Twentieth Congress wash. Pierre Daix confessed in 1957 that he had harboured ‘a certain anguish’ about the weakness of the communist governments several years after they had taken power. He had not doubted that repression was being exercised against innocent victims as well as culprits, but he had kept silent because of the amazing advances in Russia which appeared to him as an entirely healthy and hopeful body.8 Jean K an ap a-m o st dogmatic of French Stalinistsadmitted to having noticed a certain schematization of thought, a certain attraction for the cliché and easy formula, in the Popular Democracies. (In fact nobody in France traded more eagerly in these items than Kanapa himself.) But these, he claimed, had a provisional, positive significance, since formulas assisted the understanding of ‘scientific thought’ in the ‘early stages of cultural democratization’.4 Both these statements have a significance extending beyond the issue under discussion. That of Daix illustrates the law of compensation to which we have already referred. But this law can act in two distinct ways. On the one hand, the intellectual overcomes or internally suppresses his doubts in the interests of a wider conviction, on the other he retains the 1. G . Friedm ann, ‘Forces M orales et Valeurs Perm anentes’, in V H eure du Choix, Paris, 1947, p. 87. 2. D . M ascolo, Le Communisme, Paris, 1953, p. 488. 3. P. D aix, Réflexions, Paris, 1957, pp. 183-5. 4. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, II, p. 77.

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doubts but externally suppresses them, as in Daix’s case. Kanapa’s confession has a different implication. Here the ‘philosopher king’ approach is apparent, the belief in enlightened authoritarianism which was the essence of Stalinism. Progress, socialization and even democracy are seen as necessarily being imposed from above: the proletariat, supposedly the instrument of its own liberation, receives an implicit vote of no confidence. Only its symbolism remains. In varying forms one or both of these attitudes motivated Party intellectuals whose accounts of Russia and the Popular Democracies left no room for reservations. Again, Zhdanov provided an official formula in September 1947: ‘. .. a new type of state was created - the people's Republic - where power belongs to the people, where big industry, transport and the banks belong to the state and where the leading force is the bloc of all classes of the population engaged in useful employment headed by the working class.’1 For some of the more independent-minded intellectuals this seemed too glib. Edgar Morin wrote a theoretical article on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the domination of the proletariat for Action, but the editor, Victor Leduc, rejected it as ‘revisionist’.123In the Party press there was room only for orthodoxy. Yet even Morin was not troubled morally by the Czech coup in 1948, which caused very little disturbance among the communist intellectuals. It was his belief that the Cold War, brought on by western imperialism, had made Kerenskys of the Czech socialists and of Benes.8 Thus a thriving and advanced democracy was dismissed with a poor historical analogy. It was curious how mature intelligences formed in western society accepted so alien a use of the word ‘democracy’. In April 1948, Irène Joliot-Curie declared in New York that the shift to communism in eastern Europe was the result of a ‘democratic process’.4 Yet by no stretch of the imagination could it be claimed that the promise of Yalta ‘free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot’ - had been fulfilled. In Poland, the Peasant Party was defeated by repression and the manipulation of the 1946-47 elections. In Bulgaria, all the parties were dragooned into a single Fatherland Front in November 1945. A relatively free election in Hungary gave the C.P. only seventeen per cent of the votes. In Rumania, a free election could not have resulted in a government friendly toward the U.S.S.R. But the French intellectuals evidently regarded such fetiches as irrelevant. As Kanapa had said, ‘no liberty for the enemies of liberty’. The com­ munists acknowledged different criteria which had the advantage of being concrete and historically, rather than abstractly, conceived. Forty per 1. A. A. Zhdanov, op. ci/., p. 4. 2. E. M orin, Autocritique, p. 67. 3. Ibid., p. 119. 4. New York Times, 1 A pril 1948.

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1945-1956 cent of the land in Hungary had been owned by great landlords, including the Church; the Rumanians had massacred 200,000 Russians in Odessa, under Hitler’s flag; ten Hungarian divisions had fought at Stalingrad. An American historian has agreed that, with the exception of Czecho­ slovakia, there was no tradition of real democracy in eastern Europe and that in the years 1945-47, before the Cold War hardened, communism showed there ‘its more benign and humane face’.1 There was also the spheres-of-influence argument: Stalin questioned whether the govern­ ments of Greece and Belgium were truly representative, but pointed out that he had not interfered, appreciating the strategic importance of these countries to Britain.12 An impressive and relatively honest argument might have been made out of such factors, but the policy of Démocratie Nouvelle remained one of bland distortion. Garaudy wrote of the liberal attitude of the Polish Government toward the Church3 while Jean Baby insisted that the U.S.S.R. had made no incursion on Polish independence because ‘the Soviet Union is not a country like others*.4 Marcel Willard, the Party’s leading lawyer, celebrated the triumph of the Bulgarian ‘Patriotic Front’ in October 1946 without reference to the methods used.5 The distribution of the great estates, educational advances, the smashing of monopolies and of fascist elements were the cause of justifiable pride: but the cost was never mentioned. Until 1956 no hint of serious errors, let alone of unjust repressions, was voiced. Meanwhile the Party presses kept a large team of willing and doubtless sincere intellectuals employed in advertising the sensational advances made by the Popular Democracies.67In these countries the French intellectuals travelled with the status of honoured guests. To some extent such a climate breeds its own response. Eluard travelled in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Albania, Rumania and Russia. In Warsaw, 7a ville fantastique’, he wrote, 7’ homme en terre fa it place à Vhomme sur la terre'1 A visit to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1952 resulted in his poem Prague un soir de printemps, in which he declared, ‘Ses portes sont fermées au doute . . .’8 ‘Doubt’ had grown into the major bogey of western communists defending their beliefs in a hostile society. Eluard also visited Greece, first in 1946, and again in June 1949 when he addressed Government soldiers through a megaphone, appealing to 1. A. Ulam , Titoism and the Comirtform, Cambridge (M ass.), 1952, p. 65. 2. H. Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Princeton, 1957, p. 579. 3. R . G araudy, V Eglise, le Communisme et les Chrétiens, pp. 232-5. 4. J. Baby, ‘La D ém ocratie Polonaise*, D .N ., January 1947, p. 35. 5. M. W illard, ‘La D ém ocratie populaire Bulgare’, D .N ., May 1947, pp. 257-9. 6. See, for example, J. K anapa, Bulgarie d'H ier et d'Aujourd'hui, P. C ourtade, L'Albanie, and J. D ucroux, Roumanie, Un des Chantiers de la Vie Nouvelle. 7. P. E luard, Poèmes Politiques, p. 52. 8. P. E luard, Poèmes pour Tous, p. 230.

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them to stop fighting the partisans. That his affection for Greece was not mere opportunism is shown by a poem written in December 1944, on the morrow of her liberation: P euple grec p eu p le roi peuple désespéré Tu rCas p lu s rien à perdre que la liberté Ton am our de la liberté de la ju stice E t V infini respect que tu a s de toi-m êm e.*

In the eight years which followed he wrote poem after poem of grief and rage as the war ran inexorably against the partisans of Markos and Beloyannis. The rights and wrongs of the Anglo-American intervention in Greece will continue to be a subject of enduring controversy. According to some, the aspirations of a dictatorial minority were thwarted by a timely firmness; according to others, a mass democratic movement was crushed by a British imperialism intent on restoring an unpopular monarchy and the crypto-fascist régime which had prevailed before the war. When all the historical facts are counted, the final verdict remains a matter of political sentiment. With so much western criticism directed against Soviet policy in eastern Europe, the communist intellectuals in France regarded the Greek civil war with an indignation which, although genuine, had its compensatory aspects. Few of them would have dis­ agreed with the judgement of an American historian who, whether with justice or not, has written: Tt is essential to remember that Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Chur­ chill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, first in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.’2 But perhaps the moral relativity implicit in the last line would appeal as little to communists as to their opponents. It was not to fight the Germans that the British landed in Greece, wrote the communist Jean Varloot, but to smash ELAS and EAM and to support the terror of the Tsaldaris Government.3 In 1945, Pierre Hervé assailed Bevin for continuing the policy of repression begun by Churchill. Markos’s resistance to the Anglo-American forces in 1947 inspired great hopes. Eluard dedicated his poem La Grèce en Tête to Markos. Jean Varloot professed to believe in 1948 that Markos would ultimately win.4 But the intellectuals were betrayed, albeit in ignorance. M. Djilas recalls that in 1948 Stalin pronounced the verdict that since Markos had no chance of success at all, the uprising should be stopped 1. P. E luard, Poèmes Politiques, p. 30. 2. D . F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960, vol. I, p. 182. 3. J. V arloot, ‘En Grèce Fascism e e t Démocratie*, La Pensée, M ay-June 1948, pp. 76-7. 4. Ibid., p. 86.

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1945-1956 as quickly as possible.1 Early in the following year, finally defeated, the Greek communist leaders escaped to the East where they were declared traitors and disappeared, Markos included.123Eluard and his colleagues refused to believe this. When Jean Cassou charged that the U.S.S.R. had liquidated Markos and the whole Greek Resistance, Wurmser replied that such an accusation was *une canaillerie\z The onslaught on the Anglo-American system, on the sons of Bacon, Locke, Hamilton and Jefferson, came in two stages. Britain was the first target, whereas the communist intellectuals were at first favourably disposed toward the U.S.A. The Party raised no objections to the French Government’s acceptance of American aid. In 1946, Courtade applauded the policy of Secretary of State Byrnes, and later that year Claude Roy produced a generous article on American life in Les Lettres Françaises.45 It was early in 1947 that the tone of this paper, the geiger-counter of and for communist intellectuals, changed with an article by Michel Gordey, ‘America is not the new World’.6 But resentments had been festering. The rebellious Pierre Hervé had asked in 1945 what this great liberty the Americans had to offer was. Was it liberty to invade French markets? Liberty to dominate the French press? Or to annihilate French civil aviation? He was not personally impressed by the ‘game’ of democracy played between Democrats and Republicans in America.6 American money was deeply resented on the French Left. In Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Les Mandarins the pragmatist Preston, by supplying newsprint at a time of acute scarcity, attempts to manipulate editorial policy on to pro-American lines. After 1947 no punches were pulled by the communists. Roger Garaudy, in the course of an attack on the Vatican and Cardinal Spellman, concluded that all roads, including religious ones, led to Wall Street. Without stating the source of his in­ formation, he claimed that Cardinal Mindszenty had been paid 140,000 dollars in America to subvert the régime in Hungary.7 The insidious power of money found its symbol in the Marshall Plan. According to Zhdanov, ‘The essence of the . . . “Marshall Plan” is to knock together a bloc of states bound by obligations to the United States of America and to grant American credits as payment for the renunciation by European states of their economic and, subsequently, also their political independence.’8 The Political Bureau of the P.C.F. declared the Plan a threat to French national independence. Jean Baby wrote that America 1. M. D jilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 164. 2. B. Lazitch, Les Partis Communistes d*Europe, 1919-1955, Paris, 1956, p. 211. 3. A W urmser, Réponse à Jean Cassou, Paris, 1950, p. 13. 4. L .L.F ., 1 Novem ber 1946. 5. L.L .F ., 10 January 1947. 6. P. Hervé, La Libération trahie, pp. 119 and 213. 7. R G araudy, op. cit., pp. 173-6. 8. A. A. Zhdanov, op. cit., p. 20.

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was creating a fifth column, including the social democrats, in all the countries she intended to vassalize.1 Although his claim that France had been forced to acquiesce in the reconstruction of a Germany where Nazis held all the principal posts was more than extravagant, it was in fact true that France was not much consulted on the creation of a West German state and on the policy of monetary reform which, though perhaps necessary, constituted a breach of agreement with the Russians. It was a commonly held belief that Truman had betrayed Roosevelt’s efforts not to divide the world or to form an anti-Soviet bloc. Truman had joined forces with the eternal enemy, Churchill. Claude Morgan put this view.123As Director of Les Lettres Françaises, Morgan launched a somewhat futile campaign in favour of Henry Wallace, whom Truman had dismissed as Secretary of Commerce shortly after his statement that, ‘On our part, we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, western Europe and the United States.’8The communist cartoonist H. P. Gassier drew a picture showing Goebbels handing antiSoviet leaflets to a grinning Uncle Sam,45and henceforth all signs of intellectual rebellion from within America, whether from Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson or even Katharine Hepburn, were vigorously exploited. The fascist analogy was constantly pointed. In May 1948, Irène JoliotCurie was held by immigration officials on Ellis Island for a single night (as Barbusse had been in 1933), then released for a fifteen-day visit. Interviewed, she voiced the opinion that Americans preferred fascism to communism because it showed a greater respect for money.6 The virtues of a society which would record and publish such remarks made little impression on communists. The poet Guillevic happily assailed the U.S. visa regulations, Tu riiras pasj En Amérique,Ä without apparently con­ sidering whether or not the Soviet Union opened its doors to its enemies. In 1945, Hervé had written that the concept of an Atlantic bloc would imply the domination of a small, French upper class.7 But a few years later Jean Baby listed de Gaulle, Schuman, the Socialist Party, the M.R.P. and the R.P.F. among the agents of the U.S. in France. Blum’s visit to Washington in 1946, his conversion to the view that America was no longer capitalistic in the full sense, the American financial support received by the socialist paper Le Populaire and by Force Ouvrière, apart from the favourable view of the Marshall Plan taken by Moch, Mayer 1. J. Baby, ‘L’Im périalism e Am éricain et la France’, C.C., January 1948, p. 86. 2. L.L.F ., 18 A pril 1947. 3. D . F. Fleming, op. d u , p. 420. 4. L.L.F ., 29 January 1948. 5. New York Times, 23 M arch 1948. 6. P. D aix, Guillevic, p. 88. 7. P. Hervé, op. cit., pp. 182-4.

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1945-1956 and other socialists, all gave substance to the communist claim that their socialist opponents were no longer as independent as they maintained, and that they had finally committed themselves to the out-and-out anti­ communism which they had previously denounced. For even if the money came nominally from the American trade unions, and not from the State Department, the one was no more likely than the other to be motivated by an affection for socialism. This is not to forget, of course, that the P.C.F. and the C.G.T. were very far from independent, and that the Czech Government itself had reacted favourably to the Marshall Plan until the Russians intervened. Between feudalism and bastard feudalism, Europe had to make its painful choice. Until 1948, at least, the communist intellectuals were by no means isolated in these preoccupations. The intellectuals as a whole were intensely politically conscious in these years, concerned with their own postures and with the striking of a rational attitude. Revolutionary idealism lived on in the face of Stalinism. Two principal groups emerged, the Catholic idealists of Esprit, and the Marxist-existentialists of Les Temps Modernes. Both groups were inclined to believe that Marxism had laid down the indispensable conditions for the humanization of society, and both believed that the proletariat, as the universal class, would emancipate mankind in emancipating itself. And both, by the very nature of their position, came to believe in the necessity of a Third Force. It was the second group which formed the nexus of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (R.D.R.), founded by Sartre, David Rousset, Gérard Rosenthal and Albert Camus in the spring of 1948, before the new revelations about Soviet labour camps and before Tito’s ex co m m u n ic a tio n from the Cominform. This was the world of Les Mandarins. Far from being self-contained, it had affinities with the Socialist Youth Movement, Esprit, Combat and other left-wing groups. It was to prove short-lived. The inevitability of choice between two dominant systems killed it. Both the Catholic idealists and the existentialist Marxists shared a common hostility to the U.S.A. Louis Martin-Chauffier expressed a widely held opinion when he said that American generals, financiers and industrialists, aided by vicious propaganda, were preparing for war, the last resort of a capitalism which could no longer resolve its own contra­ dictions. The Atlantic Pact, he said, made mercenaries of European soldiers. The Socialist Parties had passed over to the service of capitalism; the British Labour Party had pursued a reactionary foreign policy from the start.1 Georges Friedmann’s view that France alone could make the synthesis between the humanist heritage of the West and the collectivist 1. 109.

L. M artin-Chauffier, ‘Le Faux Dilemme’, in La Voie Libre, Paris, 1951, pp. 99-

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institutions of the Soviet Union, was also one dear to many intellectuals o f the Left. But Friedmann stood closer than most to the Party. In 1946, he wrote that French communism, led by men who came from the people and lived in constant contact with them, was the most likely to make this syn­ thesis and to found a society based on justice and dignity.1 Others, more reserved, maintained their critique of capitalism. By 1950, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had come to see Russian communism as ‘decadent’, and with many exterior resemblances to Nazism, but they insisted that its whole concept and sense of purpose remained hopeful and that the reality of the class struggle within the capitalist world had not abated.8 The idealists had learned, in theory at least, the errors of idealism. ‘We are not dreamers,’ wrote Vercors in 1946, ‘we know very well that politics is not an affair of saints and poets.’8 He appreciated that means could not be as pure as ends. But the question remained: ‘What is the limit we can tolerate?’ Briefly, the answer was a good deal. Threatened on all sides since 1917, Russia was bound to use the same diplomatic methods as her adversaries. But the idealists, as always, insisted on a free exercise of their critical faculties. As with Rolland and his followers in the ’twenties, they believed the highest service an intellectual could render to communism was that of friendly criticism. Claude Aveline complained that for both communists and their enemies, the least criticism of communism, however guarded, and whatever its motive, was taken to represent anti­ communism. Ve m'élève solenellement contre cette absurdité,’12345 On the other hand, before the critical rupture of 1949, the communists, while making no concessions toward the concept of a Third Force, were generally accommodating toward its more friendly exponents. These were taken to be the idealists rather than the existentialists. The latter were revisionists on a doctrinal level, with a philosophy of their own. The idealists, even when Catholics, tended to differ with the Party on the plane of action rather than of theory, although there were exceptions. Julien Benda, for example, declared in October 1947 that he had little time for the communists’ doctrines, but a great deal of time for their actions. The Party might threaten liberty, but only in order that everyone should have bread, and not for the profit of the satraps of money. Otherwise, 'Je garde le droit de les juger. Je garde mon esprit,'* But Benda was only an occasional ally; he did not share the Marxist premises of the idealists further to the left. That Casanova received his declaration with a mild 1. G . Friedm ann, op. cit., in V Heure du Choix, p. 94. 2. M. M erleau-Ponty and J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les jours de notre vie*, pp. 1162-4. 3. Vercors, ‘La Fin et les Moyens’, in V Heure du Choix, p. 151. 4. C. Aveline, ‘Les Eglises et l’Homme*, in ibid., p. 31. 5. ‘Q uestions du Communisme*, Confluences, 18-20,1947, p. 48.

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January 1950,

1945-1956 but friendly rebuke was a sign of the time, the time of the post-Resistance rapprochement fast drawing to its close. Three issues in the 1948-49 period served to precipitate a crisis of conscience about Soviet communism, alienating ¿he Left and causing a number of defections from the Party. Inevitably, they had little relevance to life in France; the questions generating maximum heat among intellectuals rarely did. The Cominform campaign against Tito, the Rajk-Kostov trials and new revelations about Soviet labour camps were the issues at stake. Following an increasingly acrimonious exchange of letters between the Soviet and Yugoslav ‘Central Committees’,1 the second meeting of the Cominform in June 1948 pronounced Tito, Kardelj, Djilas and Rankovitch guilty of various crimes, with the result that Yugoslavia, refusing to submit, was forced out of the Soviet bloc. Although the Yugoslav C.P. had shown itself highly revolutionary from the first, and although most of the Soviet charges were baseless, the accusation of authori­ tarianism within the Party might have appeared plausible, in view of the fact that no Party Congress had been held for twenty-eight years until the one of June 1948 (which turned into a triumphant display of solidarity behind Tito), if the Soviet Party itself had been more of a model of innerParty democracy. In fact, it was a case of stones and glasshouses. The French intellectuals who quickly began to slander Tito were, on the whole, the ‘hard’ men, close to the Central Committee and to the directors of the Party press. Elsewhere there was an ominous silence. Paul Eluard, for example, who had visited Yugoslavia in 1946, finding men there assured of a destiny based on full liberty, and who had described Tito as ‘strong, affable . . .*, bringing home a signed photo for his own desk,2 was evidently reluctant to renounce publicly his opinion. But Dominique Desanti wrote her Masques et visages de Tito and Renaud de Jouvenel his Maréchal des traîtres, to prove that Tito was, among other things, an American agent. Jean Kanapa suddenly discovered that Tito was the co-ordinator of all American espionage in the Popular Democracies.8 Jean Baby argued that if Tito had wished to construct socialism he would have developed a C.P. on the lines of democratic centralism, instead of using Gestapo methods. André Wurmser dismissed Jean Cassou’s claim that Tito was ‘a moment of the human conscience’ with the retort that he was in fact ‘the vilest agent of American strategy and espionage’.4 It was Tito, in Wurmser’s view, who had betrayed Markos. Pierre Courtade wrote that Tito, devoted to Wall Street, was no more a socialist than Mussolini. The Yugoslav claim that Russia 1. See The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute, London, 1948. 2. L.L.F ., 2 August 1946. 3. J. K anapa, Le Traître et le Prolétaire, Paris, 1951, p. 48. 4. A . W urm ser, Réponse à Jean Cassou, p. 3.

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exploited the Popular Democracies economically he dismissed as ‘nonsense’.1 In Courtade’s novel Jimmy, the American Bumham-figure Slaugherty declares: ‘Yugoslav Communism, or Falangism, it’s all one. The line of demarcation is not there . . . The question is between Stalin and us.’123 The idea that any opposition to Stalinism objectively constituted anti­ socialist treason was, of course, not new, and the logic of the situation led almost inevitably to the coupling of Tito’s name with that of Trotsky. This parallel was exhaustively drawn in 1953 by Pierre Hervé, who pictured Tito as a tool of, among others, Churchill and Attlee and who expressed horror at the police, prisons and concentration camps on which his régime was founded.8 Wurmser, who dismissed all talk of Soviet camps as ‘slander’, bemoaned the *30,000 communists’ languishing in Tito’s jails. Himself an assiduous cultivator of Stalin’s personality, Wurmser detected in its Titoist counterpart a clear proof of fascism. Ostensibly oblivious to the fact that most of the charges they directed against Tito would have applied far more cogently to Stalin and the Soviet system, the French Stalinist intellectuals were bound by their own logic to trace all the ‘evils’ of Yugoslavia to a single leader, or a tiny clique. Having hailed socialist construction in Yugoslavia for three or four years, they suddenly discovered in the same social structure every evidence of fascism, thus implicitly exposing what they most ardently denied, namely the superficial similarities between the communist and fascist state systems. In a key report to the Central Committee in December 1949, Georges Cogniot pronounced the Yugoslav police-state to be as cruel as Hitler’s and to be founded upon the dominant influence of kulaks and urban capitalists. The scorn that the Yugoslavs were known to have exhibited for the passive displays of the French and Italian Parties in 1944-45, and the frustration that the French themselves felt over their lost opportuni­ ties, added a sharp note of personal vindictiveness to the campaign as it gathered momentum. Aragon claimed that Tito, by calling for rash action, had hoped for the liquidation of the P.C.F. Nevertheless, the image of Tito as a genuine revolutionary hero and idealist proved difficult to dispel. Cogniot complained that although 48,000 copies of the brochure La Yougoslavie sous le terreur de Tito had been distributed, in certain departments like the Rhone and the Alpes-Maritimes Party members still obstinately adhered to the Association France-Yougo­ slavie. But he hastened to condemn as a ‘ridiculous lie’ what remained obvious, that there were strong pro-Tito elements within the Party.4 1. P. C ourtade, T ito et TInternationalism e Prolétarien*, L .N .C ., A pril 1951, p. 13. 2. P. C ourtade, Jim my, p. 179. 3. P. Hervé, ‘De Trotsky à Tito*, L.N .C ., M arch 1953, p. 70. 4. Humanité, 12 Decem ber 1949.

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1945-1956 The hard Stalinists excepted, the condemnation of Tito was not popular among the intellectuals, communists or otherwise, although the issue was one which preoccupied the intellectuals rather than the workers. In 1949, Casanova admitted that the Yugoslav situation had revealed ‘dangerous political currents’ among the intellectuals who were in any case guilty of an artificial separation of politics and culture.1 Following a journey to Yugoslavia, Clara Malraux, the novelist, and Jean Duvignaud, the philosopher, left the Party. The Party began to lose friends. Martin-Chauffier wanted to know why the Cominform leaders had not realized in 1947 that Tito had been a traitor since 1936.a Vercors shared his curiosity, while Sartre, always quick to thrust a Marxist knife into a Marxist body, commented that if Tito reigned by terror against History (i.e. against the objective Yugoslav situation), who could prove the Soviet Politburo did not do the same?3 Russia, in his view, had wanted to make of Yugoslavia her private granary. Aveline had no doubt that this was just one more case of the attempted suppression of national independence by Russian great-power chauvinism, and Cassou pointed out that Yugoslavia had voted in the U.N. in favour of the entry of China and had not joined the Western Bloc over Korea.4 Most of these writers, however, were worried by the way in which Tito’s defection had been exploited by the capitalist states. The idealists made passionate pilgrimages to Yugoslavia. Aveline’s visit convinced h im that she was building a true socialism ‘with a courage and maturity of spirit perhaps unique in the world’.6 Cassou saw in Tito a ‘moment of the human conscience’. Sartre, more reserved, nevertheless drew a parallel between the attitude of the Yugoslav leaders and that of Rosa Luxemburg. Why this enthusiasm? First of all, in the period 19481950, the Yugoslavs made an effort at democratization which was bound to impress visitors but which did not last. Secondly, with' France so dependent on American finance, the concept of national independence for the smaller states had a particular appeal for the French Left. Thirdly, the idealist, or Third Force, position was a lonely and unrewarding one: there was a strong need for a country one could wholeheartedly cham­ pion. Finally, just as the communists regarded any independence vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. as tantamount to opposing socialism, so the idealists were sufficiently infected by this logic to regard any opponent of Stalin as necessarily an enemy o f ‘Stalinism’. They tolerated the cult of Tito with a surprising indulgence. For the Stalinists, the day of reckoning came in May 1955 when 1. L. Casanova, Le Parti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Nation, p. 14. 2. L. M artin-Chauffier, op. cit., p. 131. 3. J.-P. Sartre, preface to L. D alm as, Le Communisme Yougoslave, Paris, 1950, p. xxix. 4. J. Cassou, ‘La Conscience Humaine*, in La Voie Libre, p. 89. 5. C. Aveline, ‘Réalism e et Vérité*, in ibid., p. 31.

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VHumanité published a front-page report of the arrival of Bulganin and Khrushchev in Belgrade, quoting Khrushchev to the effect that the whole rift had been engineered by the provocateurs Beria and Abakoumov. His glib explanation that ‘these materials have been fabricated by the enemies of the people . . . who had infiltrated through duplicity into the ranks of the Party’,1 provided a life-line, albeit a threadbare one, for the Stalinists in France. Jean Kanapa, hailing the diverse roads to socialism in 1957, atoned for his past slanders against Tito with the easy reflection that ‘the dialectic then reappeared in its truth, under different structures and régimes . . .’a Joanny Berlioz, another reviler, now complimented Tito on his vigilance in the years when the West was wooing him, and blamed the rift on Stalin’s abuse of personal power, an advance on the 1955 Belgrade explanation.123 Yugoslav culture, opera and films assumed a prominent place in the pages of Les Lettres Françaises. The real culprit, Soviet imperialism, was never mentioned. Inseparable from the issue of Titoism were the Rajk and Kostov trials. Rajk, a Hungarian communist of long standing, Minister of the Interior, then of Foreign Affairs, was arrested on June 8th, 1949, while still a member of the Politburo. His trial was stage-managed by Stalin and Rákosi, assisted by Kádár, who finally persuaded him to confess. Yet Rajk was neither Jewish nor in any way a Titoist; unlike Gomulka in Poland, he did not stand for greater national independence. Kostov, the Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister, was also an orthodox figure, although he was known to have opposed Soviet economic policy on certain counts. He too was victim of an inner-Party intrigue. Tried in December 1949, he was sentenced to death, despite his sensational repudiation of his written confession. Both Rajk and Kostov were executed. In May 1956, Rajk was officially rehabilitated. The same small band of Stalinist intellectuals in France again rose to the occasion. In adducing the guilt of Rajk and Kostov, they resorted to three principal lines of proof, or argument: a) the general situation would logically lead to Titoist acts of sabotage in the Popular Democracies, b) if the Hungarian and Bulgarian leaders were convinced by the evidence, it could not be questioned, and c) the accused confessed. Pierre Daix, who was confident that Rajk had been a police informer since 1931, recalled that the C.P.’s had always unmasked agents of the bourgeoisie from the time of the Kronstadt rising to the Moscow trials. There could be no mistake: Rajk had confessed.4 Renaud de Jouvenel, sent by the Party to Sofia to report on the Kostov trial, accepted all the charges, including 1. C.C., July-A ugust 1955. 2. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, /, p. 118. 3. J. Berlioz, ‘Tito à Moscou*, D .N ., A ugust 1956, p. 466. 4. P. D aix, ‘Le Procès Rajk*, L .N .C ., Novem ber 1949, p. 26.

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1945-1956 the one that Rostov had collaborated with the fascists in 1942.1 Jean Baby, who observed the Rajk trial, insisted that no pressure had been brought to bear and that Rajk had conspired to assassinate Rákosi, Gerö and Farkas, ‘the three most loved leaders of the Hungarian people’.123All these intellectuals agreed that, since the people were in power, they could have no fear of the truth. Pierre Courtade who, like Pierre Hervé, had come to enjoy Thorez’s personal confidence, returned from Budapest and set about convincing sceptics like Claude Roy and J.-F. Rolland that the evidence was genuine. According to Edgar Morin, Courtade told him: ‘I have seen Gerö in his office and spoken to him very sincerely. He has confirmed that the proofs were overwhelming. He had all the documents in his hands.’8 Yet Courtade had not been personally convinced by the Moscow trials: his appreciation of the necessity of the Stalinist phase and his conversion to communism had been relatively recent. Did he then deliberately suppress his conviction about the Rajk trial, acting on the compensation principle? Morin believed he was sincere.4 The question remains open. As with the Moscow trials, the fact that the accused had confessed struck many as conclusive. Replying to André Breton’s objections to the Rajk trial, Eluard said: T have too much to do for innocents who proclaim their innocence to occupy myself with the guilty who proclaim their guilt.’5 Wurmser added, with unconscious irony, and with the usual disregard for the virtues of democratic life, that if the trials of Laval and Pétain had been by Popular Tribunals, ‘they would have been further Moscow Trials’, and all the dirt would have come out.6 It was his opinion that if Dreyfus had confessed there would have been no Dreyfus Affair, which could scarcely be denied. Courtade and Kanapa asked why Rajk had not behaved as Dimitrov had done. But when Rostov suddenly repudiated his confession, and the court brutally silenced him, Hervé sent back despatches from Sofia claiming that this was the ultimate act of provocation of a spy. From this small élite of Stalinists, Courtade, Hervé, Ranapa, Wurmser, Baby, de Jouvenel and a few others, the Party could count on loyal service. But this was the beginning of the second freeze (the first had been in 1924-32). The glaring inconsistencies in Rajk’s confession, ably amplified by a group of recent Hungarian communist exiles led by Francis Fejtö and Georges Szekeres, were all too apparent to the majority of intellectuals. ‘Each new trial,’ wrote Aveline, ‘in copying with too 1. L .L.F ., 15 Decem ber 1949. 2. J. Baby, ‘Le Procès de Budapest*, D .N ., Novem ber 1949, p . 582. 3. E. M orin, Autocritique, p. 128. 4. Ibid,, p. 103. 5. Ibid., p. 113. 6. L.L.F ., 29 Septem ber 1949.

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much servility the preceding ones, further persuades free minds that the C o m m u n is t Church is no more than an Inquisition.’1 To Cassou the trials seemed like a dream; they were sinister fables. Vercors, who had accepted the Party line on the Moscow trials, could take no more.123In his view, Courtade was lying. The Party would have no more to do with him. The breaking point had come also for the young communist writers Edgar Morin, Dionys Mascólo and Robert Antelme. Morin failed to renew his card in 1950 and was formally expelled the following year. The others drifted away. Edith Thomas, the distinguished novelist and essayist, also quit. In a letter to Combat she explained that until recently she had felt that criticisms of the U.S.S.R. should be avoided in public. In the spring of 1948 she had been struck by the suppleness and individuality of Polish development. But since the Tito campaign had got under way, 'tout a changé*. Tito, Rajk, Rostov and Gomulka were not traitors. The only factor at work was the arbitrary power and will of the Soviet Union.8 Soon after, Thorez referred disparagingly to intellectuals who had joined in ‘easy times’ (Edith Thomas became a Party member in 1942) and Victor Leduc in VHumanité congratulated her on the fortyeight hours of celebrity which she had gained with the bourgeoisie.45 But the Party was taking note: the intellectuals were no longer reliable. The trials coincided with the explosion of another powder-keg which had long been simmering in France. The existence in Russia of forced labour inflicted by administrative decision had the supporting evidence of memoirs of former NKVD officials, the accounts of fugitives, items in the Soviet press and the testimonies of Poles released from Soviet camps after 1941. Much of the Kravchenko case hinged on the existence or non-existence of such camps. David Rousset, a former collaborator of Sartre’s on the R.D.R., began to collect evidence on the subject, show­ ing how a Special Board (OSSO) of the NKVD was given power in 1934 to sentence all persons ‘socially dangerous’ to forced labour for terms up to five years. The 52nd Volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (1947) confirmed OSSO’s powers.6 The non-communist intellectual Left was divided in its response. Camus, outspoken, wrote in October 1948 that Soviet camps were no more acceptable than Nazi ones.6 Others evaded the issue, or sustained a prudent silence. In Les Mandarins, Debreuilh (Sartre) remarks that the only relevant question was whether, in denouncing the camps, one was 1. C. Aveline, op. cit.t p. 40. 2. Vercors, ‘Points de suspension’, in La Voie Libre, p. 161. 3. Combat, 16 December 1949. 4. Humanité, 27 December 1949. 5. See D . Rousset (ed.), Police-State M ethods in the Soviet Union, trans. by C. R. Joy, Boston, 1953. 6. A. Camus, Actuelles, /, Paris, 1950, p. 202.

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1945-1956 working for mankind or against it. In addition, certain idealists had discounted the evidence as being anti-communist propaganda. On November 12th, 1949, Rousset precipitated the crisis by launching an appeal to all former political deportees to support a commission of inquiry into Soviet camps. The Party, already harried over Tito and the trials, hit back. Five days after Rousset’s appeal, Pierre Daix retorted with a long polemic in which he accused him of trying to divert attention from the injustices of the capitalist world and of fomenting a new, Hitlerian war against the Soviet Union. More specifically, Daix con­ tended that there existed in Russia only corrective labour, with a maximum sentence of one month, inflicted by a tribunal whose judges were elected and revocable by the people themselves. It was merely a question of re-education. He denied the existence of forced labour inflicted by administrative decision and reminded Rousset that he too was a former inmate of a Nazi camp. Rousset was 'un menteur éhonté*.1 Daix’s line was quickly supported by the lawyer Marcel Willard who quoted Vyshinsky to the effect that Soviet tribunals were schools of education in the spirit of socialist discipline.123 Daix’s blatant denial provoked Sartre to break silence. In January 1950, he and Merleau-Ponty declared themselves satisfied that Soviet citizens could be deported without judgement and without a time limit, assessing the probable number of detainees at between ten and fifteen million. One citizen in twenty in a camp, they pointed out, could scarcely be called socialism. Had not Wurmser, unlike Daix, previously denied the existence of Soviet camps at all? But the problem of political balance remained. Rousset’s motives, they were convinced, were bad. He had refused simultaneous inquiries into conditions in the colonies, in Spain and Greece. Consequently he was subscribing to the theory of the Enemy Number One.8 Daix’s response typified the Stalinist mentality under pressure. Ignoring their evidence and striking hard at the spot where Sartre and Merleau-Ponty showed themselves most susceptible, he asked: ‘With whom are you? With the people of the Soviet Union, who are building a new society, or with their enemies?*4 The ensuing libel action, brought by Rousset against Daix and Les Lettres Françaises, was, as in the Kravchenko case, both civil and political. It was interesting that a number of communist intellectuals who had personally suffered the horrors of Nazi concentration camps showed no sensitivity to the evidence and stoutly supported Daix. Thus the writers Jean Laffitte and Robert Antelme, both former inmates, 1. L.L.F.y 17 Novem ber 1949. 2. M . W illard, ‘L’Im posture du “Travail Forcé” D.N., January 1950, p. 26. 3. M. M erleau-Ponty and J.-P. Sartre, op. cit., pp. 1153-68. 4. L.L.F., 19 January 1950.

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denounced Rousset, although Antelme was slowly on his way out of the Party. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who had narrowly survived in Auschwitz, pronounced Rousset’s investigations ‘contrary to the interests of France’.1 Communists constantly reverted to national phobias peculiar to the war. When the Austrian physicist Alex Weissberg, formerly Director of the Kharkov Institute of Physics, who had been handed over by the Russians to the Gestapo in 1940, began to give evidence, Claude Morgan stood up to protest against a German testifying in German against the U.S.S.R.123 Weissberg proved one of the most damaging witnesses for the prosecution who were able to produce a letter written twelve years previously by Joliot-Curie and Jean Perrin, petitioning Stalin on Weissberg’s behalf. Einstein had supported the plea. The communists resorted in turn to irrelevant readings of the Soviet Constitution and to blind faith: when Mme Vaillant-Couturier was asked whether she would protest if there were camps in the Soviet Union, she replied: ‘It is un­ thinkable, they cannot exist in the U.S.S.R.’8 As in the Kravchenko case, small damages (100,000 francs) were awarded against the defendants. Appeals, which prolonged the dispute until 1953, did the Party no good, either legally or politically. Dialogue was no longer possible. The communists and the idealists moved into irreconcilable positions. Tito, the trials and the camps had, by the winter of 1949-50, consecrated a rupture long in the making. Sartre’s R.D.R. had disintegrated, the Third Force was all but dead. Albert Camus who had written in October 1944 that, ‘Anti-communism is the beginning of dictatorship’,45was by 1948 already committed to the bitter polemics with the communists which culminated in his L ’Homme Révolté (1951). Tn this New Jerusalem, echoing with the roar of miracu­ lous machinery, who will still remember the cry of the victims?’6 Disillusion and a sense of betrayal provoked idealists to discard the rôle of friendly critic. The Party’s submission to the U.S.S.R., said Aveline, was total and inhuman. Communists did not even dare to debate among themselves. How, he asked, could the P.C.F. both mimic Stalinist methods and claim to defend old liberal traditions?6 In Cassou’s view, to choose between the two blocs was to choose between two lies. The Party wanted to turn the French people into a machine, without intuition or conscience. The young went to Stalinism only as German and Italian youths had donned their black or brown shirts, for the pleasure of a 1. LJL.F., 28 December 1950. 2. T. Bernard and G . R osenthal, Le Procès de ¡a Déportation sans Jugement, Paris, 1954, p. 18. 3. Ibid., p. 21. 4. Combat, 7 O ctober 1944. 5. A. Camus, The Rebel, p. 178. 6. C. Aveline, op. cit.t p. 45.

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1945-1956 discipline which destroyed reason. T o r the first time in France, there is no a v a n t-g a rd e Martin-Chauffier declared the Party to be dominating, peremptory, solitary and malicious. To some extent the fury of the communist attacks drove the idealists into the anti-communist postures they struggled to avoid. In December 1949, Casanova warned Cassou, a writer long applauded by the communists, that he was now in the camp of Rousset and Mauriac whether he liked it or not.2 Wurmser ridiculed Cassou’s plea that he had no intention of entering the American camp: ‘That is true . . . you have already gone.’8 The communist philosopher René Maublanc echoed the Party line when he said that every honest intellectual must take one of two sides on each major issue. Under the guidance of Casanova, a relatively small élite of Stalinist intellectuals had developed an almost Maurrasian aptitude for slander and vituperation, which may be said to have served as a peculiar aspect of the fourth principle of utility, a variation on the theme of political journalism. A Barbusse, a Marcel Martinet, or even a Rolland, had not shrunk from hard words in the interests of the cause, but they worked spontaneously and on their own initiative. The new, and not con­ spicuously talented, generation set about their hatchet work in a highly purposeful, co-ordinated and militarized way, borrowing their style and idiom from the Russians Zhdanov and Fadeyev. Fadeyev, addressing the communist World Congress of Intellectuals at Wroclaw in August 1948, remarked that ‘if hyenas could use fountain pens and jackals could use typewriters, they would write like T. S. Eliot.’4 Prior to the general freeze of 1259-50, the main targets for communist vilification were Nizan, Gide, Malraux, Sartre and Koestler, although the club was by no means an exclusive one. The blackening of Nizan as a police informer had been revived after the Liberation, bringing MartinChauffier and Sartre to his defence. Gide could never be forgiven for his Retour de V U.R.S.S. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1947, Jean Kanapa declared that Gide had been disgusted by the Bolsheviks because they were not pederasts.5 Dominique Desanti, one of the most vehement of the female intellectuals in the Party, did even better in 1949 when she described him, at the age of eighty-one, his face already a death-mask, as surrounded by young admirers who derived from his works the same ‘liberation’ they obtained in the Place Pigalle. She managed neatly to associate his name with Mussolini and Hitler.6 If Malraux, as an anti-communist supporter of de Gaulle, was a fair target, Aragon’s announcement that he was indifferent on the issue of 1. J. Cassou, La M émoire Courte, pp. 103, 105. 2. Humanité, 19 Decem ber 1949. 3. A. W urmser, Réponse à Jean Cassou, p. 29. 4. Quoted in A. W erth, M usical Uproar in Moscow, London, 1949, p. 9. 5. L .L.F ., 20 Novem ber 1947. 6. D . D esanti, ‘A ndré Gide’, L .N .C ., O ctober 1949, p. 98.

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fascism was clearly belied by his whole life’s work. Pierre Hervé called him de Gaulle’s courtesan and likened his oratorical manner to Hitler’s, although in reality he was only ‘m e marionnette désaxée*.1 Roger Garaudy, another leading figure of the new school, described Malraux as ‘a soldier of fortune* who had been in part responsible for ‘the adventurist Canton Commune, which ended in the slaughter of masses of workers and democrats’. He had then returned to France ‘just in time to enter into relations with Trotsky, thenceforth his spiritual father’.12 This, of course, was wild nonsense, as was his attempt to ascribe Malraux’s activities in the Spanish Civil War to the fact that he had been paid a double salary, dollars in Paris and pesetas in Madrid. Koestler’s novel Le Zéro et VInfini sold over 400,000 copies in France. According to Koestler himself, the Party tried to intimidate the pub­ lishers, then bought up entire stocks from provincial bookshops and destroyed them.34In the opinion of Garaudy, Koestler was guilty of ‘zoological forms of anti-Bolshevik hatred* and was anxious to destroy both democracy and France. Jean Kanapa asked why he had been released from prison in Spain if he were truly an anti-fascist, and why in all his writings not a single healthy woman appeared. In any case, he had never been a member of the German Communist Party (Koestler in fact joined the K.P.D. on December 31st, 1931). Kanapa also had a good story, which he considered politically useful, about Koestler being picked up drunk on December 27th, 1949, on a pavement of Charenton, and having struck a policeman. ‘Monsieur Koestler est une canaille.** On the other hand it should be remembered that the first salvoes had come not from the communists but from Koestler, who showed himself perfectly adept at personal attacks. In his essay ‘The French Flu’, first published by Tribune in November 1943, he asked why Aragon (who was at that time active in the Resistance) was being extolled as a hero of the Left. Aragon’s contribution to the Spanish Civil War, he wrote, had been merely to tour the front in a loudspeaker van, dispensing poetry to the militia. Nor, apparently, had Aragon (who had three citations to his credit) been in any particular danger during the fighting in France. In the words of Koestler, he was only ‘one among the larger frogs of the smaller puddles’. The point that anything written in French was melting in British mouths like Turkish delight, valid or not, was scarcely a contribution to Allied solidarity and the whole article, coming when it * did, was both untimely and provocative. Sartre, unlike Gide, Nizan, Malraux and Koestler, was not an apostate from communism, nor indeed even an anti-communist in the strict sense. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Humanité, 17 A pril 1947. R. Garaudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, p. 39. A. K oestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 403. J. K anapa, Le Traître et le Prolétaire, p. 19.

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1945-1956 But the Stalinists were quick to perceive that Sartre, as a quasi-Marxist and as a writer enjoying a remarkable success among the young, posed the most dangerous threat of all to the Party on the intellectual level. Overtures to him personally alternated with violent attacks on his philosophy and politics by Maublanc, Garaudy, Hervé and others. It was his opinion that many communist intellectuals privately regretted these attacks, but were always prepared to support them in public.1 ‘Every class,’ wrote Garaudy, ‘has the literature it deserves. The big bourgeoisie in decay delights in the erotic obsessions of a Henry Miller or the intellectual fornications of a Jean-Paul Sartre.’123In 1949, the Soviet press referred to his ‘imperialist masters’ and spoke of him in all seriousness as the ‘servile executor of a mission confided to him by Wall Street’.8 Thus fortified, the Stalinists in France redoubled their attacks in the late ’forties. Kanapa, a former pupil of Sartre’s, complained of his erstwhile teacher’s ‘revolting cynicism’, which was evidently financed by the Marshall Plan. Camus, too, inspired Kanapa’s impulsion toward the absurd: ‘Camus prend place dans les bourgeois fascisants’45was his verdict long before the appearance of VH om m e Révolté, which Victor Leduc, writing in VHumanité, claimed had been paid for by the Americans. By the winter of 1949-50, the idealists connected with Esprit, Cassou, Vercors, Aveline and Martin-Chauffier, were no longer immune from violent personal attacks. In their case, however, there was a tendency to avoid the sexual, mercenary and alcoholic insinuations lavished with puritan self-righteousness on Gide, Malraux, Koestler and Sartre. The intellectuals who practised this vilification were the same men who most vehemently defended the Party line on its most sensitive fronts and who were moved into key positions of trust in the Party press, Kanapa on La Nouvelle Critique, Hervé and Leduc on Action, Daix on Les Lettres Françaises. Perhaps the most professional polemicist of all was André Wurmser, whose ‘literary’ career since the Popular Front era had been in large part devoted to engaging in narrow political disputes with other intellectuals.6* The French Communist Party rarely lost its equilibrium. Its fury was a calculated fury. Fierce as the invectives and diatribes of the Stalinist intellectuals were, they were not inclined to forget the importance of a 1. J.-P. Sartre, Entretiens sur la Politique, p. 77. 2. R. G araudy, op. cit., p. 61. 3. Quoted in Combat, 15 Decem ber 1949. 4. J. K anapa, L'existentialism e n'est pas un humanisme, p. 105. 5. La Nouvelle Critique was the m ost rigidly Stalinist o f the cultural organs. Its contributors included: V. Joannès, D aix, J. D esanti, D . D esanti, J. Fréville, V. Leduc, A ragon, W urmser, Cogniot, G. Sadoul, G . Besse, F. Cohen, G . M ounin, G araudy, G . Leclerc, M. M ouillard, J. Perus, E. T riolet, Hervé, Berlioz, R. Bergeron, R . de Jouvenel.

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perpetual intellectual united front activity to win support among nonParty elements for the causes considered most urgent by Russia and the Party. This function, with its developed techniques, we have called the third principle of utility. Even during the period of the 1949-52 freeze, the persuasive main tendue was never totally concealed by the aggressive poing brandi. Hence the Peace Campaign. The fear of a preventive atomic attack by the U.S.A. on the U.S.S.R., so widespread on the French Left, was doubtless the result of confusing the outbursts of hysterical journalists for the policies of responsible statesmen, but widespread it nevertheless remained. In the light of such fears and of an anti-capitalist perspective (which was certainly not the perspective of deliberate treason), it became logical to criticize the Atlantic Pact and western rearmament as bellicose, while explaining away its Soviet counterpart in terms of legitimate national defence. The World Congress for Peace met at Wroclaw in Poland in August 1948. The French delegation, the most powerful from the West, included communist intellectuals such as Picasso, Eluard, Joliot-Curie, Eugénie Cotton, Marcel Willard, Louis Daquin, Moussinac, Wallon, Marcel Gimond and Fernand Léger, besides representatives of the Left like Martin-Chauffier, Vercors, Claude Autant-Lara and J.-L. Barrault. From this Congress sprang the influential Mouvement des Intellectuels Français pour la Défense de la Paix, led by Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The Congress provided not only a forum for peace propaganda, but also a school in which the relatively mild westerners might be steeled to the harsh mood of Zhdanovism by direct contact with Fadeyev, Gerassimov and other Soviet cultural figures. The intellectuals were entrusted with a leading rôle in preparing for the World Peace Congress which met in Paris and Prague in 1949 and which was attended by leading foreign communist intellectuals such as Laxness, Alberti, Fast and Neruda. The P.C.F. claimed 550 million signatures in support of the Congress from throughout the world.1 Universities, professional bodies and women’s organizations were thoroughly canvassed. It was in 1949 that Stalin Peace Prizes were initiated. As Casanova made clear in September, the aims of the Move­ ment, far from being general and idealistic, were specifically designed to discredit the Atlantic Pact, rearmament, the new West German state and Marshall aid. Picasso’s white dove crowned the edifice. The 1950 Congress was due to meet in Sheffield, but the Labour Government turned most of the foreign delegates away at Dover, or refused them visas, and a general withdrawal took place to Warsaw. Picasso, who reached Sheffield unhindered, declared: T stand for life against death; I stand for peace against war.’2 At Warsaw he, with the 1. L.L.F.y 7 A pril 1949. 2. R . Penrose, Picasso: H is L ife and W ork, London, 1958, p. 329.

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1945-1956 late J.-R. Bloch and the film director Louis Daquin, received the Inter­ national Peace Prize. The Stockholm Appeal against Atomic Weapons was launched, although the Soviet Union had by then almost certainly acquired the bomb, and in June VHumanité claimed that two thousand doctors and students of medicine, as well as fifteen professors from the Collège de France, had pledged their support.1 The first principle of utility (prestige) was much in evidence, with Joliot-Curie, Eluard, Picasso and Mme Cotton being assigned prominent positions in the Movement. Eluard sent a message to the 1951 Rome Congress: Guerre à la Grèce à la Corée à VIndochine Guerre p a rto u t où se révoltent les victim es . . .123

Less obviously partisan were his lines accompanying a new series of drawings by Picasso, in which the face of a woman merged with the dove of peace: Je connais tous les lieu x où la colom be loge E t le p lu s naturel est la tête de Vhomme.*

1951 saw the foundation of the review Défense de la Paix, directed by Pierre Cot, a fellow-traveller, and edited by Claude Morgan. Produced in several languages (thirteen by 1954), the journal permitted non­ communists like Vercors to express limited criticisms of, say, the Party line on Korea, so long as they were ‘resolved to defend the peace’.4 Later in the year, Joliot-Curie was awarded a Stalin Peace Prize and the Movement in France showed signs of winning friends in the world of theatre and cinema, notably Gérard Philippe, Autant-Lara, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and the comedian Noël-Noël, who believed that the privileged classes in the West wanted to atomize the U.S.S.R.5 United front strategy on a broad emotional issue was reaping dividends as Martin-Chauffier, Benda, Vildrac and other idealists, whose breach with the Party had seemed irreparable two years before, found themselves unable to resist the appeal of the Peace Movement. Harder to measure, but equally important, was the effect within the Party on disgruntled intellectuals on whom the impact of anti-Titoism, the trials, the camps and Zhdanovism might otherwise have proved decisive. The Russians fathered the campaign with love and care. The Moscow Municipal Theatre staged a play by M. D. Khrabrovitski, Citizen o f France, whose main character was modelled on Joliot-Curie.6 Another play involved in 1. Humanité, 3 and 7 June 1950. 2. P. E luard, Poèmes pour Tous, p. 219. 3. D .P., Novem ber 1951, p. 74. 4. In Decem ber 1954 Défense de la P aix changed its title to Horizons. 5. D .P., Novem ber 1951, p. 60. 6. Le Monde, 14 February 1952.

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Peace politics in 1952 was Les Mains Sales, Sartre refusing production rights to a Viennese theatre on the ground that it was being used as cold war propaganda and as a challenge to the Peace Congress. During the previous two years he had already forbidden its production in Spain, Greece and Indochina.1 When Sartre returned from Vienna declaring, ‘What I have seen at Vienna is peace’,12 the Party had gained its most valued and intellectually influential supporter. The Peace Movement, of course, was essentially a method of canalizing anti-American feeling within a generalized, and apparently non-sectarian, ethical framework. Its success reflected the degree of fear and suspicion with which the Left intelligentsia continued to regard the U.S.A. By 1952, Americo-phobia had risen to a new peak of intensity and the Party emerged with only partially diminished credit from its period of enforced isolation. The Korean War, far from embarrassing the communist intellectuals, enabled them to pose as the champions of peace and national indepen­ dence. Much was made initially of Dulles’ visit to the 38th Parallel on June 20th, 1950, and his address to the National Assembly at Seoul on the need to dislodge the communist grip on North Korea. Reporting from New York, Pierre Courtade claimed that Joseph Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the U.N., had ‘proved’ that Rhee’s general Li Seung Man had attacked first but had been quickly routed. This, said Courtade, echoing Malik, was a civil war and the real issue was American interven­ tion.3 Rhee’s statements made over the years provided a goldmine of indirect evidence for Party intellectuals. Garaudy, for example, quoted Rhee’s declaration of October 31st, 1949: ‘If it is necessary to unify Korea by war, I will make war, but, for that, I will need American aid.’45 On June 19th, Dulles, in Seoul, had rejected any compromise with com­ munism: ‘Six days later, war broke out.’6 Edgar Morin, who had not renewed his Party card for 1950, also succumbed to this seductive line of reasoning, judging it highly improbable that the North would have attacked first. When he was later forced to change his opinion he justified the attack as necessary and preventive and continued to rejoice at victories for the North.6 All the evidence about the rival Korean social and political systems passionately committed the communist intellectuals to the cause of the North. The South lacked even the virtues of bourgeois democracy. After 1. Le Monde, 19 November 1952. 2. L.L.F ., 1 January 1953. 3. P. C ourtade, 'L ’Affaire coréenne au Conseil de Sécurité’, D .N ., O ctober 1950, p. 512. 4. Mésaventures de VAnti-M arxism e, Paris, 1956, p. 86. 5. Ibid., p. 87. 6. E. M orin, Autocritique, p. 163.

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1945-1956 the elections of May 1950, Rhee could count on only forty-seven seats in the Assembly, whereas positively hostile groups commanded 120 out of 210. According to René Maublanc, 5,700 students had been arrested and 400 professors and teachers expelled, imprisoned or killed in February, and he drew a contrast between the universal corruption reigning in the South and the advances made in the North, where land had been distributed among 724,000 peasants and where the number of schools had increased seven-fold in the years 1945-1949.1 Yet all this was indirect evidence. A dilemma remained which the Party could not ignore, namely the almost universal belief that the North had launched the first attack. Hélène Parmelin, herself a contributor to VHumanité, depicted the situation in the paper’s editorial offices in her novel Noir sur Blanc. The journalist Frédéric, as much ‘in the dark’ about the facts as everyone else, consequently begins his article with the question: ‘Who wants to die for Syngman Rhee?’ and goes on to quote Dulles’ speeches without comment. ‘Ca frappera les gens* Another editor warns his colleagues against the lies of 7a presse marshallisée\ and demands that they assemble all the facts proving that the South was the aggressor. This problem out of the way, the Party settled to the task of illu­ minating the disastrous results of American military intervention. Tales of napalm bombardments on helpless villages and the cruel evacuations of whole civilian populations led Guillevic to write of P etits enfants des Coréens Q ui désignent les assassins123*

and inspired Picasso’s painting Massacre en Corée, showing a squad of semi-robot soldiers receiving the order to fire on a group of naked women and children. The Party exhibited the picture at the 1951 Salon de Mai and elsewhere, and there is little doubt that it was the U.N. troops, rather than both armies, whom it indicted. Soon the question of bacteriological warfare arose, the truth obscured by a torrent of charges and denials. N ot only publicists like Yves Farge, but the Party’s two most eminent scientists, Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Marcel Prenant, declared themselves convinced that bacteria had been used. Late in 1952, Prenant and his fellow biologist Georges Teissier strongly endorsed the verdict of guilty brought by the six-member investigating Commission of Inquiry.8 One hundred and twenty witnesses, including four captured American pilots, had been interviewed, and five specific instances involving American 1. R. M aublanc, ‘Sur la Corée*, La Pensée, Septem ber-O ctober 1950, p. 140. 2. P. D aix, Guillevic, p. 181. 3. Consisting o f Prof. Needham (Britain), Prof. M alterre (France), Mme Andreen (Sweden), Prof. Olivo (Italy), Prof. Pessoâ (Brazil), Prof. Zhukov-Verezhnikov (U .S.S.R .).

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planes had been linked beyond doubt, in the opinion of the Commission, to the discovery of bacteria. A 600-page report, replete with photographs, had been issued.1 Joliot-Curie, who was accused of ‘prostituting science* by Warren Austin, the American delegate to the U.N., had received evidence from the President of the Peking Academy of Sciences, and from scientists whose moral integrity, he said, could not be doubted. From the Party’s point of view, Joliot-Curie’s prestige as a scientist was a huge asset on a technical question such as this, although his consistently partisan political activities were bound, in the eyes of the general public, to cast doubts on his impartiality. His explanation of the Chinese refusal to admit a Red Cross team of inquiry left something to be desired2 and his belated condemnation of the bombing of Hiroshima (it was Camus, not the communists, who had protested in 1945) appeared opportunistic, to say the least. On the literary front, the principal French communist response to Korea was Roger Vailland’s play Le Colonel Foster Plaidera Coupable. A fellow-traveller since the war, Vailland finally joined the Party in May 1952, at the time of the anti-Ridgway demonstrations and the consequent arrest of Jacques Duelos. Louis Daquin’s intended Paris production was banned by the Pinay Government amid a storm of protest from intellec­ tuals, some of whom, like Martin-Chauffier, were out of sympathy with the Party line on Korea. Vailland went instead on a four-month journey during which the play was performed in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad and at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Professionally adept, Le Colonel Foster ranks above average as propa­ ganda literature. The action takes place in South Korea, in July 1950. The local American commander, Colonel Foster, is a humanitarian caught in the vices of his social system. ‘We have come here,’ he says, ‘to protect the peasants against communism and not to kill them . . .’8 But his racialist lieutenant warns him, ‘You think too much, Harry. You’ll end up a communist.’ Enter the wealthy, corrupt Korean Cho Aodi Yang, the local mayor and a lackey of the Americans. Cho calls for brutal measures, admitting that most of the peasants are communists by convic­ tion. He reminds the shocked Foster that in South Korea a man is worth less than a mule. The communist partisan leader Masan is led in chained. He shouts defiance and even mentions the Stockholm Appeal.4 Through­ out the action no mention is made of a North Korean army, only of ‘partisans’ defying the imperialist war machine. But good causes have friends everywhere. The American radio operator Sergeant Paganel, 1. M. Prenant and G . Teissier, ‘Oui, la guerre bactériologique a commencé’, La Pensée, N ovem ber-Decem ber 1952, pp. 25-33. 2. F. Joliot-C urie, ‘Qui prostitue la Science?’, La Pensée, M ay-A ugust 1952, pp. 33-6. 3. R . V ailland, Le Colonel Foster Plaidera Coupable, Paris, 1951, p. 19. 4. Ibid., p. 53.

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1945-1956 though not a communist, turns out to be against the war and sabotages the radio. The lives of 3,000 American troops are now at stake unless Foster can convey a message by foot. Cho tells him that the only two politically reliable messengers in the whole area are thieves. Foster agrees to send them. But things go badly: American forces are on the retreat. Foster receives the order to execute all political prisoners before with­ drawing. Loyally he decides to obey orders. Before his execution, the partisan Masan holds a conversation with Cho’s daughter, who turns out to be a secret communist, about Spain, Greece, Indo-China and McCarthyism. He is executed. Fifth and final act: Partisan forces arrive and Foster, who has also burned the village, is taken prisoner. He must now face a Popular Tribunal. On behalf of himself and American imperialism he pleads guilty. America in the early ’fifties provided the communists with an easy target. This was the era of MacArthur and McCarthy. Cornered on the question of Soviet-inspired trials, of camps and deportations, the Party intellectuals were again able to resume die offensive. Georges Cogniot claimed that in 1946 there existed in America no less than 800 organiza­ tions having as their aim the incitement of nationalist, racist passions. Segregation of and discrimination against negroes provided easy am­ munition. Cogniot pointed to the trend whereby Hollywood films portrayed Anglo-Saxons as heroes, Italians as gangsters, Chinese as contraband dealers, negroes as porters and the French as artistes of the entertainer type.1 The vices of American political life at this time were skilfully portrayed in Courtade’s novel Jimmy, which was later translated by the Leningrad review Zvezda. Courtade, who had been in America in 1950 as VHumanité9s correspondent, took as his villains Governor Dewey, Judge Medina and the whole (police-state’ apparatus dedicated to smashing the meetings of progressives in which Paul Robeson was prominent. The prevalence of anti-semitism in sectors of American society afforded him the opportunity of drawing a (quite false) parallel with Nazi Germany, and elsewhere Courtade equated James Burnham’s concept of a necessary managerial élite with the ideas of Alfred Rosenberg.12*Burnham’s call for a total diplomacy against world communism, and his contacts with French intellectuals like André Malraux, made him an object of fear and detestation throughout the French intellectual Left. Soon after the appearance of Jimmy, Les Lettres Françaises began to devote exultant publicity to the Hollywood ‘witch hunts’ of 1952, and in September of the following year the same journal provided what it called an incomplete list of writers whose works had recently been ‘prescribed, destroyed or 1. G . Cogniot, Réalité de la Nation, Paris, 1950, p. 76. 2. P. C ourtade, ‘Jam es Burnham le nouveau Rosenberg de l’Im périalism e Améri­ cain*, L .N .C ., July-A ugust 1950, pp. 14-28.

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burned’ by the U.S. authorities.1 The Stalinists had once again donned their liberal clothing. The cause célèbre was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This case crystallized the mounting anti-Americanism of the entire intellectual Left, almost without exception, in a manner reminiscent of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair. Aragon, always a ready apologist for the felling of dry wood in the socialist world, greeted the execution of the Rosenbergs with a long article castigating 'cette inhumanité, cette férocité, cette injustice\ in which he linked the crime to the ‘provocations’ in East Berlin which, in his view, were intended to furnish a pretext for a second Korea.123 (The Berlin rising was on the whole evaded by communist intellectuals as unrewarding copy.) Picasso was among the numerous artists who produced portraits of the Rosenbergs, and the intellectuals of Esprit and Les Temps Modernes rose as one man to denounce American injustice. ‘Fascism,’ wrote Sartre, ‘is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them . . .’8 And worse: France, so the doctrine ran, was a country occupied by this decadent monster, the U.S.A. In 1951, Simone Téry warned that when Truman attacked Russia, France would become the battle-ground.45A year later La Nouvelle Critique called a conference of intellectuals and students to organize agitation against an Americanized Europe.6*The struggle for national independence against enemy number one comprised the obsessive theme of the classic of French socialist realist writing, André Stil’s novel Le Premier Choc, which was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1951. The first Frenchman to win this prize, Stil6 based his novel on incidents following the Twelfth Party Congress’ call in 1950 for the ‘intensification of action against the transport, handling and manufacture of arms’ and for the general sabotage of the American military assistance programme. Subsequently Party commandos had successfully sabotaged, without danger to life, jeeps, lorries and other equipment being transported by rail. Stil centred his fictional struggle among dockers refusing to unload an American boat due to berth at an Atlantic sea port, and supposedly carrying arms. His characters revel in the current slang (‘Am erlocks\ ‘jRicains9) and abound in passionate hatred of American troops with their money and their indefatigable pursuit of the local girls. In a carefully 1. L.L.F., 10 Septem ber 1953. 2. L.L.F., 25 June 1953. 3. Libération, 22 June 1953. 4. Humanité, 16 June 1951. 5. Among those a t this m eeting were: Cogniot, Joannès, A ragon, Stil, Jeanne Lévy, Elsa T riolet, Fréville, B ruhat, D aix, K anapa, P. Le Chanois, L. D aquin, B. Taslitzky, A. Fougeron. Humanité, 6 June 1952. 6. André Stil. Bom 1921, the son o f a tailor, he was educated a t the Faculté des L ettres at Lille. A teacher, he became editor o f Ce Soir in 1949. A m em ber o f the Central Com mittee, he was editor-in-chief o f VHumanité, 1950-9. A uthor o f Le mot mineur, camarades, Le Premier Choc, etc.

194

1945-1956 constructed scene, he even condoned as healthy the nationalist hostility shown by French schoolboys toward their American fellow-pupils. Children, he wrote, are in politics up to their necks.1 The ‘national independence* struggle was dramatized in May 1952 when General Ridgway, fresh from the Korean War, arrived in Paris to take up his duties as N.A.T.O. commander. A violent campaign against Ridgway was launched in the Party press which accused him of direct responsibility for practising biological warfare in Korea. On May 25th, André Stil, as editor of VHumanité, was arrested and three days later, following communist-inspired protest riots, Jacques Duelos was detained, despite his parliamentary immunity, on a ridiculous and trumped-up charge. Vailland promptly joined the Party. Protests against the Govern­ ment’s panicky actions came from François Mauriac and other anti-communists anxious that McCarthyism should not spread to France. When Stil was tried in July, Picasso, Aragon, Roy, Elsa Triolet, Eluard and Pignon were joined by many non-communists at a protest meeting at the Salle Pleyel.12 A few days later Stil was released, only to be arrested again in March 1953 and held until August. Verses dedicated to Duelos flowed from Aragon, Eluard and other communist poets, and for a while the Party revived in a number of minds (including that of Sartre) as the genuine embodiment and champion of a crucified proletariat. Crucified, of course, by America with the connivance of the unpatriotic and rapacious French upper classes and their parasitic journalist apologists whom Sartre brilliantly satirized in Nekrassov (1955). If the armistice in Korea temporarily alleviated the mood of hostility toward American foreign policy, U.S. intervention in Guatemala in 1954 easily revived it. A protest letter, signed by numerous intellectuals in and out of the Party, was sent to the U.N.3 Pierre Hervé, for some time past in the direct employment of the Central Committee, was on solid ground when he argued that the results of the elections in Guatemala had proven unpalatable to the United Fruit Company which would not tolerate the expropriation of land and its redistribution to the peasants. A body of mercenaries had been armed by the U.S. and thrown into Guatemala: it was a game similar to that played with Mossadegh in Iran.4 In the Pacific the American image remained tarnished. Rhee had not been dropped and in Chiang Kai Shek the U.S. was supporting the universally despised enemy of what was seen as a new, vital and infinitely hopeful experiment, Communist China. In 1953 Courtade, then foreign editor of VHumanité, returned from a visit to China with a glowing report which was confirmed in Claude Roy’s excellent Clefs pour la Chine 1. A. Stil, Le Coup du Canon, Paris, 1952, p. 166. 2. Humanité, 12 July 1952. 3. L.L.F ., 24 June 1954. 4. P. Hervé, ‘D e l’Iran au Guatemala*, L .N .C ., December 1954, p. 25.

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(1953). Roy saw the prevailing god in China as the god of reason: naked coercion had been replaced by discussion, criticism and self-criticism. While conceding the reality of a three-month purge begun in September 1950, he argued that by November the Shanghai People’s Court had examined 700 cases and given only twenty-nine death sentences. He did not mention the possibility of executions by administrative procedure, or by no procedure at all, and his apology for Stalin’s abortive China policy of 1926 gained nothing in stature from his failure to mention Trotsky’s opposition to it.1 But this is perhaps to quibble: what Roy saw and recorded was a reality, a new, dynamic force which was bound to inspire in visitors the same youthful ardour that had so moved French communist travellers in the Russia of the early ’twenties. China, in fact, sent fresh water flowing down a river which seemed in danger of completely silting up.

1. C. Roy, Into China, trans. by M. Savill, London, 1955, p. 203.

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Four Them es 1. NATIONALISM 2. ANTI-SEMITISM? 3. COLONIALISM 4. THE DEFENCE OF FRENCH CULTURE 1. Nationalism F or the Stalinists the nation was many things. ‘A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.’1 This was Stalin’s 1913 definition. The nation had evolved in the early stages of capitalism. ‘The market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns its nationalism . . . the struggle passes from the economic sphere to the political sphere.’12 But, because of the essentially bourgeois character of nationalist movements, he rejected the idea of national autonomy as a reactionary one: ‘The only real solution is regional autonomy . . .’ By breaking down national divisions, the way would be opened to greater class conflicts.3 Later, in Questions o f Leninism, he modified his views. In a proletarian state, so the new doctrine ran, there could be no conflict between proletarian culture and the varieties of national culture. On the contrary, the Revolution awakened dormant or suppressed national cultures and languages.45Expediency governed theory. In the late ’thirties, Peter the Great and Alexander Nevsky came into their own and Pokrovsky’s historical criticisms of Tsarist expansionism in the Balkans were attacked in Prayda.b Dimitrov told the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 that the fascists must not be allowed to claim unchallenged the legacy of past national heroes. The workers must understand that socialism implied defence of the nation. Socialism in Russia was national in form, socialist in content.6 For the French, the new line implied a radical change of emphasis rather than one of doctrine. Barbusse, in arguing that the internationalists 1. J. Stalin, M arxism and the National and Colonial Question, London, 1936, p. 8. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. Ibid., pp. 57-8. 4. Quoted in J. Fréville, Sur la littérature et Part: V. I. Lénine, J. Staline, p. 131. 5. L. Fischer, M en and Politics, p. 341. 6. G. Dimitrov, V Unité de la Classe ouvrière dans la Lutte contre le Fascisme, p. 64.

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were the true patriots, distinguished in 1920 between the hateful chauvin­ ism of the Union sacrée and the healthy patriotic pride of the workers. ‘More than all the other powers,’ he wrote. Trance had need to impose herself by her spiritual quality, by reason, by conscience, and to be a respectable moral authority.’1 The ardent internationalist Raymond Lefebvre accused the French capitalists of planning to sell out the ‘national domain’ to foreign financiers, so weakening the revolutionary movement.123But if Barbusse, Lefebvre and their colleagues conceded nothing to later communists in their pride as Frenchmen, they were nevertheless distinguished by their absolute refusal to compromise with the bourgeois nation-state. When the socialist Paul-Boncour produced a plan for an eight-month period of military service, Lefebvre, in denouncing the scheme as involving yet another capitulation of the workers to their masters, quoted Marx to the effect that there could be no concept of national defence for the proletariat under a capitalist régime.8 By 1935 all this had changed. The concept of national defence had been consecrated by the Franco-Soviet Pact; communist intellectuals rallied to the new line with evident enthusiasm. Roger Garaudy has pointed out how, soon after Dimitrov’s speech, Aragon decided that his hero Armand, in Les Beaux Quartiers, should discover in himself an exalted patriotism.4 An English witness expressed astonishment when Victor Basch, the president of the Rassemblement populaire, spoke to a predominantly communist audience in London in unashamedly patriotic tones.5 Vaillant-Couturier applied his customary zeal to the campaign when he declared: ‘It is French generosity, it is French love of independence, it is the French sense of the universal, it is French humanism which remain the best guarantees of the French will for peace.’6 If this was harmless enough, it is difficult to imagine that Lefébvre would have recognized the Vaillant-Couturier who said in 1936: ‘If France loses a great aviator like Blériot or an explorer like Charcot, we, the P.C.F., publicly hail him. We do not bother whether he is politically reactionary. We are enemies of sectarianism.*7 The Party’s theoreticians set to work to compile the most useful of Stalin’s definitions. The historian Jean Bruhat wrote that ‘it belonged to Stalin to leave behind the mists of abstractions in giving to the nation a concrete, life-like definition . . .’8 However, he carefully omitted to refer 1. H . Barbusse, La Lueur dans VAbtme, p. 55. 2. R. Lefebvre, La Révolution ou la M ort, p. 35. 3. Humanité, 31 M arch 1920. 4. R. G araudy, U Itinéraire d'Aragon, p. 324. 5. M anchester Guardian, 12 M arch 1937. 6. P. V aillant-C outurier, Au Service de l'E sprit, p. 12. 7. Ibid., pp. 14-15. 8. J. B ruhat, ‘La Question N ationale et le M arxism e’, Commune, O ctober 1937, p. 211.

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FOUR THEMES

to Stalin’s original denial of the principle of national autonomy, and insisted that in no circumstances would he tolerate the revival of GreatRussian chauvinism.1 The French intellectuals began to speak up in chorus on the question. Georges Politzer emphasized that Nazi racism was anti-national, that it tended to destroy the nation, even adducing as proof the attacks on Spain and Czechoslovakia.2 In their anxiety to monopolize nationalist virtue for themselves, the communists almost accepted the ‘European’ doctrine of Nazism at face value, as did the French fascist intellectuals like Brasillach and Rebatet. The evidence of a rampant German nationalism was ignored. In his 1941 polemic against Alfred Rosenberg, Politzer insisted that the German people were as hostile to the Nazis as were the French, and he called upon them to rise in the tradition of the Spartacists, of the Munich Commune, of Thaelmann’s Communist Party.8 As late as May 1945, Aragon could write that the Nazis were the enemies of the German people, the destroyers of its culture.4 The intemationalist-Marxist element, then, remained blended with the purely nationalist. The masses of all nations remained ‘true’ and peaceful patriots. Stalin, however, officially discarded this view after the war. Jean Kanapa, explaining Politzer’s attitude of 1941, wrote that before the German attack on Russia it was not ‘understood’ that the German people were stupid and lazy and collectively responsible.6 Aragon also changed his tone. ‘Nowadays there are people in France and elsewhere who con­ sider it stylish to look for sources of international thought in the enemy’s camp.’6 In April 1946, Claude Morgan reproached all English political parties for wanting to ‘give’ Germany the Ruhr.7 Yet in 1923 the com­ munist leaders had gone to jail en bloc for resisting Poincaré’s occupation of the Ruhr in fulfilment of the Versailles reparations policy. Communist nationalism was fast verging on chauvinism. With scarcely a nod to Lenin's condemnation of the ‘social-patriots’ of 1914, Joliot-Curie held up as an example of Paul Langevin’s patriotism his research in anti­ submarine detection during the First World W ar.8 Aragon was the leading champion of nationalism. He struck out at any ‘European* ideas, lin k in g them with Nazism and the formation of an anti-Soviet bloc. Edgar Morin has recalled a C.N.E. meeting at which Aragon complained about the Italian communists’ reservations over the 1. Ibid., p. 220. 2. G . Politzer, ‘Race, nation, peuple*, Commune, July 1939, p. 705. 3. G. Politzer, Révolution et Contre-Révolution au XXe Siècle, p. 36. 4. L. A ragon, Comme je vous en donne l'exemple, p. 6. 5. E ditor’s note to Révolution et Contre-Révolution au XXe Siècle, p. 37. 6. L. A ragon, T h e M any and the Few*, trans. by H . Shelley, in Reflections on our Age, London, 1948, p. 105. 7. L.L.F., 19 A pril 1946. 8. F. Joliot-C urie, ‘Le Professeur Langevin et l’Effort Scientifique de G uerre’, La Pensée, O ctober-D eœ m ber 1944, p. 32.

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French annexation of Brigue and Tende.1 The mood was widespread and closely linked to suspicion of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Thereafter carefully tailored statements on nationalism issued from among the intellectuals at regular intervals. In his Réalité de la Nation (1950), Georges Cogniot, once again applauding the wisdom of Stalin’s 1913 definition, insisted on a distinction between a socialist and a bourgeois nation, the former being more cohesive and united. The workers were now leading the struggle for national sovereignty in Europe against the Marshall Plan, whereas the Red Army had respected the will of the peoples whose chains it broke. Stalin had told the Finns in 1948: ‘Each nation is the equal of every other nation.’123Cogniot, who had perhaps not read Animal Farm, concluded with the irreproachable slogan, ‘N i nationalisme bourgeois ni négation de la nation\ 8 The political opportunism behind these theories was something the intellectuals scarcely bothered to try to conceal. The communist candi­ dates in the 1951 elections appeared under the guise of the ‘Republican, Resistant, anti-Fascist Union for National Independence, Bread, Liberty and Peace’. Three years later, Victor Leduc, while admitting that Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the workers have no country’, thought it would be unwise to elevate this to a ‘basic principle’ on the national question.45Instead, he devoted ten pages to proving yet again that Stalin had been right in 1913. Thus the communists stood for ‘true’ patriotism, i.e. international proletarian solidarity, defence of the U.S.S.R. and rejection of American influence. The words ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ acquired new shades of meaning within a constantly changing hierarchy of political objectives. In the ’fifties, the struggle was directed against the E.D.C., ‘Euro­ peanization’ and Anglo-Saxon hegemony. The socialists, many of whom favoured supra-national schemes, were denounced as enemies of national independence. According to Victor Leduc, Pinay, Reynaud, Schuman et al were agreed that ‘France ought to disappear as a sovereign, indepen­ dent nation’. In this they were apparently supported by the Vatican, acting through the Catholic M.R.P. Such arguments harboured a capacity for indefinite extension. It was, for example, the contention of Aragon, Cogniot, Leduc and other communists that the concept of the unity of western culture often provided the starting point in a chain of thought which ended by calling for a preventive war against Russian barbarism.6 1. E. M orin, Autocritique, p. 69. 2. On Stalin’s attitude tow ard sm all states, see M. D jilas, Conversations with Stalin. ‘You ought to swallow A lbania - the sooner the better*, Stalin is alleged to have said (p. 130). For Stalin and M olotov on Finland, see p. 140. 3. O. Cogniot, Réalité de la Nation, p. 181. 4. V. Leduc, Communisme et Nation, Paris, 1954, p. 7. 5. Ibid., p. 117.

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But ‘Europeanization’ was only an aspect of a wider threat. The composite term used to describe the whole Wall Street-financed, anti­ national conspiracy was ‘cosmopolitanism’. Here again, linguistic juggling was in order. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, wrote Cogniot, ‘which wishes to Americanize the world, is nothing other than the most aggressive expression of bourgeois nationalism.’1 It was the ideal of the man of wealth; it sprang up with free trade. Lately it had come to represent the last degree of capitalist inhumanity. Tito was its living incarnation. Two years later one of its most infamous agents emerged in the shape of Zionism. This raises the question of anti-semitism. 2. Anti-semitism? Stalin’s early teachings on the Jews are not without a certain macabre relevance to later happenings. It was not possible, he wrote in 1913, to speak of the Jews in Russia as a single nation. They lacked a common territory and only three or four per cent of them had roots in the soil. Stalin denounced Zionism, and also the Bund (The Union of Jewish Socialist Workers) for demanding national autonomy and for refusing to merge with the social-democrats (i.e. the main Marxist party). What use, he asked, were such demands under the Tsarist autocracy, with its incessant pogroms? The only viable course was united proletarian action: then, under a workers’ state, there would be no more pogroms.12 Forty years later the problem still remained. So did the Bund, in exile. In 1947 the Soviet Union recognized Israel, with the basic purpose of embarrassing the British. But, by the following year, with the influx of Jews from all over the world into Israel, a new problem arose. A mass exodus of Russian Jews - and there is no doubt that such an exodus would have taken place had not the authorities intervened - would have been unthinkable loss of face for a state which prided itself on its happy assimilation of its multiple national groups. The Jews were now seen as part of a wider conspiracy whose centre of wealth and power lay in the U.S. A. In September 1948, Pravda published an article by the Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg attacking Zionism, the state of Israel and the idea of a common bond between the world’s Jews.3 Thereafter the anti-Zionist campaign rapidly intensified, fusing with the general drive against cosmopolitanism and all American-supported supra-national schemes. But it was not until the Slansky trial and the case of the nine doctors in 1952-53 that the specifically Jewish issue forced itself upon the communist 1. G . Cogniot, op. cit.9p. 73. 2. J. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, p. 39. 3. P. M eyer, ‘Stalin Follows in H itler’s Footsteps’, in E. Cohen (ed.), The New Red Anti-Semitism, Boston, 1953, p. 14.

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intellectuals in France. Cogniot’s critique of cosmopolitanism in 1950 had ignored the Zionist question. On November 20th, 1952, there opened at Prague the trial of fourteen leading Czech politicians, eleven of whom were Jews. They were charged with a world-wide ‘Jewish nationalist-Zionist-imperialist* conspiracy against Czechoslovakia. Eleven were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment.1 In an open confession, Rudolf Slansky, the Deputy Premier, linked his cause to that of Tito, claiming that he had been a Zionist and an American agent since the early ’thirties. André Simon, a former editor of Rude Pravo, said he had ‘pledged’ himself to the Jewish minister Georges Mandel in Paris in September 1939.12 On January 13th, 1953, Pravda announced that nine Russian doctors, seven of whom were Jews, were said to have confessed to the murder of Zhdanov in 1948 and to having plotted to shorten the lives of certain leading officers. On April 4th, after Stalin’s death, the press admitted the charges were invented and the confessions obtained by torture.3 Accord­ ing to Khrushchev in 1956, Stalin told the Minister of State Security, ‘If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head.’45 In France a number of co-ordinated statements by intellectuals such as Hervé, Cogniot, Maxime Rodinson, Francis Crémieux and D r Louis Le Guillant accepted unreservedly all the charges, in the normal way. Crémieux, himself a Jew, labelled Zionism a bourgeois nationalism and pointed out that Marxism encouraged assimilation within national groups.6 Rodinson, also a Jew, argued that the Russian Jews did not want to go to Israel, which had been created so that the capitalist states need not open their doors to Jewish refugees. ‘Through Zionism, treason penetrated the socialist world.’ In any case, Israel was a capitalist, racist state supported by the Washington Export-Import Bank. ‘The Israeli Government has for a long time been simply an agent of American imperialism.’6 And Cogniot observed that to be Jewish was no more a pretext for becoming an assassin than was being a Catholic priest.7 Le Guillant warned sceptics that the allegations against the nine doctors ‘cannot be disputed’. He compared their behaviour to that of the Nazi doctors who had conducted experiments at Dachau, while not failing to bring into the argument the existence of the ‘American 1. Ibid., p. l. 2. Ibid., p, 6. 3. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, p. 543. 4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, p. 64. 5. F. Crémieux, ‘Le Sionisme et la “ Q uestion Juive” *, L.N.C., M arch 1953, pp. 10-31. 6. M. R odinson, ‘Sionisme et Socialisme*, L.N.C., February 1953, p. 45. 7. G . Cogniot, ‘Les Communistes et le Sionisme*, L.N.C., M arch 1953, p. 9.

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Association for the Amelioration of the Human Race*.1 The Stalinist intellectuals would tolerate no discussion. Vercors, as President of the C.N.E., requested Aragon to mention in Les Lettres Françaises that its members would be debating the question of the nine doctors. Aragon refused. The C.N.E. page disappeared from the journal.123 How strong was the anti-semitic element behind the campaign? Stalin was obviously fast becoming an almost pathological anti-semite. The last Jewish publication in the Soviet Union, Einikeit, a communist, not a Zionist organ, was closed in November 1948. Ernes, the Yiddish publishing house, was likewise closed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow was dissolved. Leading Jewish writers were executed. The Slansky trial was followed by a campaign in East Germany, causing the Chairmen of the Jewish religious communities of Leipzig, Dresden and Erfurt, to name a few, to leave the country.8 The Rumanian Jewess Anna Pauker, although a resolute Stalinist, had already been retired. There were many other instances to confirm that the anti-Zionist cam­ paign harboured in its bosom the viper of a mounting anti-semitism. Until the Slansky trial, the liquidation of Jews in Russia received no official confirmation and was shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. The French communist intellectuals, for the majority of whom anti­ semitism was an alien and repugnant creed, and many of whom were themselves Jews, therefore tacitly ignored the subject as one which did not exist. And even after the issue was made public in 1952, there were a number of facts which could feed the law of compensation and from which the absence of anti-semitism in Russia could be adduced. In 1955, of a total o f 223,893 higher scientific specialists, 24,620 were Jews. Yet the Jewish percentage of the total population was no more than one per cent.4 A t the Prague trial, André Simon’s rehearsed confession stressed the growth of anti-semitism in the U.S.A. and Britain, contrasting this situation with that in Russia where there was a law against racism of any kind. Communist intellectuals in the West were always eager to accept Soviet laws as tantamount to ‘facts’. Vercors’ communist friends told h im there could be no anti-semitism under a Soviet régime, just as there could be no camps or fixed trials.5 When Serge Groussard submitted to Vercors, as President of the C.N.E., a motion ‘against Soviet anti­ semitism’, the communist majority rejected it, and as a result a number of non-communists resigned.6* 1. L. Le G rillan t, ‘Les M édecins Crim inels ou la Science Pervertie’, L .N .C .t M arch 1953, p. 50. 2. Vercors, For the Time Being, p. 31. 3. P. M eyer, op. cit., p. 20. 4. L. Schapiro, op. cit., p. 538. 5. Vercors, op. cit., p. 22. 6. Including Aveline, P. Bost, Cham son, M artin-Chauffier, V ildrac, R . Laporte, L e M onde, 20 M arch 1953.

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All the indirect evidence points to the fact that the communists were in ignorance, or were deceiving themselves rather than their friends. Maxime Rodinson, calling attention to the autonomous Jewish territory of Birobidjan, to the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theatre, dismissed the idea of Soviet anti-semitism as ‘grotesque’. Yet there was no Yiddish press, there was no Yiddish theatre. In the Soviet Union, said Francis Crémieux, the roots of anti-semitism were ‘totally extirpated’. As Hitler had shown, it could only divide the workers. This was deductive logic: Crémieux ignored the possibility that it was the Jewish workers who wanted to ‘divide’ the workers, and that to prevent this an anti-semitic campaign might be necessary. And in drawing attention to the honours heaped upon Ehrenburg and the Yiddish novelist Kazakievitch, he showed no embarrassment before the corollary - where were all the others?1 There was surely a genuine ignorance of the facts here. The same, after all, was generally the case over the camps and the trials. Hostile reports about the Jewish press and theatre in Russia were dismissed as lies. In view of the ‘Zionist conspiracy’, such lies were only to be expected. Even in the hysterical atmosphere of 1952-53, communist intellectuals con­ stantly stressed the evils of anti-semitism, and without evident hypocrisy. When Pierre Hervé broke with the Party in 1956, he expressed the view that the doctors’ plot had revealed anti-semitism in the U.S.S.R., ‘not theoretical certainly, but diffused in certain sectors of social life’.12*Sartre, in reply, reminded Hervé that he had ‘at the time signed the most regrettable articles of the communist press’.8 Hervé now explained that he had written the articles because he had been ordered to do so by the Central Committee and because the principle of solidarity with the Soviet Union prevented refusal. On January 27th, 1953, he had written in Ce Soir of the subversive activities of the ‘Joint’ and other Jewish inter­ national organizations and now, in 1956, he was still prepared partially to justify his actions. He quoted from Unser Stimme, the Bund’s Yiddish daily paper, edited in Paris and affiliated to the S.F.I.O. In November 1951, this paper had evidently applauded the heroism of young Jews fighting in Korea against Soviet imperialism. He also quoted from Forward, organ of the New York Jewish Labour Committee, in which, on May 2nd, 1950, the Menshevik Abramovitch had urged that the U.S. deliver an ultimatum to Russia to accept certain demands on the pain of a limited atomic attack. Hervé pleaded that André Blumel, in an article ‘Attention à Vantisémitisme, Pierre Hervé!9in VObservateur, had admitted that certain Zionist organizations backed by American Jews and the F.B.I. were dangerous.4 1. F. Crémieux, op. cit., p. 24. 2. P. Hervé, La Révolution et les Fétiches, Paris, 1956, p. 104. *3. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le Réformisme et les Fétiches’, L .T .M ., February 1956, p. 1153. 4. P. Hervé, Lettre à Sartre, Paris, 1956, pp. 12-15.

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Clearly, a vicious circle was in operation. Foreign Jews, seeing the fast worsening plight of their brothers in Russia, looked to the U.S.A. to prevent a new massacre. But since western communists insisted on regard­ ing all talk of Soviet anti-semitism as ‘grotesque’, this agitation merely confirmed their conviction that Zionists in general and the Bund in particular were anti-Soviet. There was some truth in this: how, in the circumstances, could they be otherwise? It was only after 1956 that western communists, who for the main part had defended the U.S.S.R. with blind faith, began to appreciate the full horror of what had been perpetrated under Stalin.1 In Hervé’s case, however, there was a suspect element which his critics appear to have overlooked. In his La Révolution trahie (1945), he had denounced what he called the ‘Israelites’ of AngloSaxon finance, and the following year he had written that the Church, ‘stripped of its Jewish mysticism’, was only a moral and social gendarmerie.8 It could hardly be argued that at that time the Central Committee or the international situation had forcibly dictated such remarks. They leave behind a residue of suspicion. 3. Colonialism Although a strongly anti-colonialist policy was pursued during the nominal United Front period of 1921-28, the Communist Party’s colonial attitudes have generally been regulated in accordance with the fluctuations in its general line toward other parties of the Left. By nature and sentiment hostile to all forms of colonialism, the communist intellec­ tuals gave proof of their discipline in allowing themselves to lapse into a politique silence on the subject from 1934 until the late ’forties when, with the Party irrevocably isolated, nothing was to be lost by reverting to a more traditionally Marxist posture of opposition. The evidence suggests that the closer it has come to power, or to a real influence over govern­ ment policy, the more equivocal has the P.C.F. become about France’s overseas territories. Few and far between were the intellectual voices raised in protest. The communist intellectual, unlike most others, tends to speak his mind only within the framework of a wider, corporate mind. The Second (1920) Comintern Congress left no scope for equivocation. All nationalist, anti-colonial movements were to be supported, even when temporarily under bourgeois control. On no other question did the first generation of French communist intellectuals feel more strongly.12 1. In 1956 some English Jewish comm unists, led by Hyman Levy, returned home appalled by evidence o f anti-sem itism in the U .S.S.R. In 1958 three Jewish members o f the P .C .F ., headed by the lawyer Haim Slovès, returned from Moscow equally depressed. Slovès, defying a Party ban, published his report in a Y iddish m onthly. E. Taylor, ‘Crypto-G aullism on the French Left’, The Reporter, 2 M arch 1961, p. 24. B ut the French Party leadership cannot be charged with anti-sem itism . Thorez particularly has been a friend to the Jews. 2. P. Hervé, La Politique et la M orale, p. 25.

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Raymond Lefebvre who, in common with all other communists, could see no redeeming feature in the colonial provisions of the Versailles Treaty, described the slow, cumulative hatred of the enslaved peoples of Egypt, India, the Middle East and China for their exploiters.1 Barbusse, who played a dominant part in the Brussels World Congress against colonial oppression in 1927, and who never wavered in his opposition to the imperialist tradition, angrily denounced Britain’s ‘national plan’ of expansion and her assumption of the ‘splendid isolation of the un­ contested master’.1 23 If England was now enemy number one, the communist intellectuals remained throughout the ’twenties as good as their word with regard to France’s own colonial problems. The Moroccan crisis was set off by the rebellion in the Riff under the leadership of Abd-el-Krim who, following his defeat of a Spanish army in 1921, was encouraged to launch a general attack up to the gates of Fez. Pétain was despatched to supervise the repression and in 1926 a joint Franco-Spanish army ended the rebellion. In November 1925, 105 communist militants were imprisoned for their active opposition to the Moroccan war, and in June of that year Barbusse launched an Appel aux travailleurs intellectuels, posing the question: yes or no, do you oppose the war? The Appel was signed by the editors of Clarté, the surrealist group, the Philosophies group of Marxist philo­ sophers, and by 106 writers in all. A number of non-communists equivocated. Pierre Hamp spoke of ‘the European, without whom Africa would only be a place of misery and ringworm . . .’, Charles Gide regarded Abd-el-Krim’s intentions as ‘a little suspect’, while Victor Basch found himself ‘insufficiently informed’.8 But the war and the consequent persecution of communists had a formative, if not decisive influence in bringing the young intellectuals round La Révolution surréaliste into sympathy with Marxism-communism.45It was Aragon, a former sur­ realist, who wrote: Listen to the cry of the Syrians killed with darts by the aviators of the third Republic Hear the groans of the dead Moroccans . . .6 The communists alone condemned all colonialism without reservation. From the time of the Strasbourg Congress of the Second International in 1. R. Lefebvre, La Révolution ou la Mortt p. 11. 2. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans l'Abîme, p. 35. 3. Intellectuals who came out unequivocally against the w ar included: R olland, V ildrac, D uham el, M argueritte, Chennevière, Séverine, H . Lefebvre, Politzer, D ujardin, M aublanc, Jourdain, J. L urçat, A ragon, E luard, Bem ier, Bloch, Fourrier, Friedm ann, Serge, V aillant-C outurier, A rcos, M artinet, Pioch, Prenant, O . Sadoul, Torrès, W erth. Clarté, 15 July 1925, and Commune, Decem ber 1933. 4. Clarté, 30 Novem ber 1925. 5. L. A ragon, The Red Front.

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1907, if not earlier, the line of thought elaborated by Van Kol and Bernstein, that the mission of the advanced countries was to develop their colonies as humanely as possible before granting them independence at some distant and unspecified date, had steadily gained ground among the Socialist Parties. The French socialists even found themselves committed to a limited defence of the Radical General Sarrail who bombarded Damascus in 1926 in the course of crushing the Syrian revolt. André Gide’s criticisms of the French administration in the Congo were applauded by the socialists; only the communists attacked Gide for not going far enough, for not advocating immediate independence. The ruthless suppression of the rebellions which broke out in IndoChina in the wake of the Chinese revolutionary movement, vividly described by Malraux, led to revived communist agitation. Rolland had denounced French policy in Indo-China in 1926. In 1930, Barbusse and Paul Nizan led the campaign to publicize the new massacres and the methods being used to subdue the revolutionaries.1 Nizan mocked those who complained of bad colonial administrators but could see no fundamental crime in colonialism itself, particularly the socialists‘derniers inventeurs des pensées bourgeoises’ - masters of ‘subtle nuances’.12 It was colonialism, viewed at first hand, which made of the Marxist student Nizan an active communist. Having taken a year off from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he returned from Aden aware that his enemies were ‘real men’, not simply philosophical abstractions, and that he must no longer be afraid of hatred, of being on certain questions a fanatic.3 Aden-Arabie, written when Nizan was twenty years old, com­ prised a violent assault on the philistinism and stupidity of the British imperial classes, in whose presence, according to Nizan, any mention of the fine arts or of social questions was like uttering ‘obscenities at a bishop’s dinner’. As late as 1933, Commune could still proudly remind its readers of Barbusse’s Appel against the Moroccan war and of the equivocations of the ‘social-fascists’. And then - virtual silence. The left-sectarian phase gave way to the United Front, to the new nationalist line. Albert Camus, who joined the Party in 1934, left it early the following year after Laval’s mission to Moscow and the Party’s subsequent modification of its line on the Algerian Moslems.4 The nation which the communists were now defending embraced the overseas territories with their vast natural resources, including those expropriated by the Versailles Treaty. ‘Is it necessary,’ asked the fellow-traveller Francis Jourdain in 1936, ‘to give colonies to Hitler?’ In 1938, the Political Bureau refused to hear of any 1. P. N izan, Les Chiens de Garde, Paris, 1960, p. 132. 2. Ibid., p. 72. 3. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à *Aden-Arabie*, p. 47. 4. J. C ruikshank, Albert Camus and the Literature o f Revolt, London, 1959, p. 13.

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attack on ‘the integrity of the territorial possessions of France*.1 The intellectuals who had denounced Mussolini’s campaign in Abyssinia evidently found no cause to protest. Despite acute colonial problems in Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Indo-China, as well as in Syria and the Lebanon, the communists emerged from the war no more inclined than any other party to act on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Florimond Bonte told the Constituent Assembly in October 1944 that France ‘is and ought to remain a great African power’,123and in July 1945 Etienne Fajon declared that the interest of the North African population ‘lies in the union with the French people’.8 Independence was quite out of the question. The riots which broke out in the Constantine prefecture of Algeria in May 1945 were attributed by the Party to Vichyite provocateurs; according to a Central Committee communiqué, it was necessary ‘to crush pitilessly and rapidly the organizers of the revolt’.45The communist press in France refused to admit that the Moslem masses desired independence, or that Algeria, indeed, constituted a nation. On May 19th, 1945, VHumanité excelled itself in calling for the punishment of ‘the Hitlerite killers who took part in the events of May 8th and the pseudo-nationalist leaders who have tried to deceive the Moslem masses . . . in their attempt to create a rupture between the Algerian and the French peoples.’ Believing themselves to be within reach of power, the communists, no less than de Gaulle, feared that the Anglo-Saxons would step into any colonial vacuum left by France. As propounded by André Marty, the Party’s solution to African problems lay in ‘progressive federalism’, in the creation of a relationship between Algeria and France analogous to that existing between Kazakhstan and the Soviet Union. The P.C.F. did, however, go further than any other Party in calling for genuine reforms in Algeria, the abolition of the semi-feudal agricultural system, the creation of a real democracy, an end to racial discrimination, and the elimination of illiteracy. Whatever their private feelings about this blatant abandonment of the Leninist position on colonialism, the Party intellectuals did not feel inclined either to protest or to pursue an independent and more enlightened policy of their own. Pierre Hervé was as radical as any in suggesting that by granting independence to Syria and the Lebanon, France would^ gain ‘advantages in the cultural and economic sphere’ through negotiation.6 Five communists still held ministerial office in March 1947 when the French army and air force massacred what one 1. Humanité, 11 November 1938. 2. A. J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party 1941-1947, p. 314. 3. Ibid., p. 318. 4. Quoted in La Voie Communiste, April 1962, p. 6. 5. A. J. Reiber, op. cit., p. 316.

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commentator estimates at between twenty and eighty thousand Madagas­ cans.1 The Party contented itself by protesting against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies in Paris. On this occasion Aragon expressed no grief at ‘the groans of the dead Madagascans’ or the crimes of ‘the aviators of the Fourth Republic’. Similarly, the intransigent demands of H o Chi Minh’s Indo-Chinese communists proved a distinct embarrass­ ment, André M arty being forced to explain in August 1946 that the Party was not in favour of the right of separation under all conditions. While it is true that the communists alone showed a serious desire to accommo­ date Ho once fighting began, nevertheless the communist deputies abstained in March 1947 on the issue of war credits for Indo-China, while the Party’s ministers in the Government voted in their favour in the interests of ‘Republican unity’.12 If communist intellectuals experienced any acute moral discomfort at such a situation, they were careful not to express it in public. But once out of office and isolated, the communists felt themselves free to mount a campaign against the war. By 1949, fairly extensive propa­ ganda was being conducted through the Union des Femmes Françaises and intellectual front organizations,3 but it was not until Russia and China officially recognized Ho’s Government in January 1950 that the Party felt free to unleash the full resources at its disposal. After a long and uncomfortable period of compromise verging on abdication, the intellectuals once more came into their own on the colonial question. An effective example of the roman à thèse was Courtade’s La Rivière Noire, written after a visit to China. The communist military commander Giap appears briefly in the novel, his wife and child dead at French hands, his hopes betrayed in 1945. De Lattre, in Giap’s opinion, made the mistake of assuming he was fighting scum, and not a people’s army.4 Courtade, one of the Parisian intellectuals for whom the French Army developed a deep detestation in these years of colonial retreat, emphasized throughout the book the humanity of the Viets, drawing a contrast with the police brutality and corruption of the régime in the South. A procommunist native mayor describes how he was tortured by the French who set fire to h im and threw him into the river. Feats like this are shown to be the pride of many of the officers, and especially of the ex-Nazi German Foreign Legionaries upholding the ‘honour’ of France.5 Tenden­ tious as it was, Courtade’s novel made a powerful case. But, although the 1. A. W erth, France 1940-1955, p. 352. A nother view puts the to tal dead at under 20,000, with starvation the prim ary killer. 2. A. Rieber, op. cit., p. 346. 3. L. Casanova, ‘La C ontribution des Communistes à la Campagne de Paix*, L.N .C ., O ctober 1949, p. 14. 4. P. C ourtade, La Rivière Noire, Paris, 1953, p. 125. This is a false picture of De L attre, the m ost realistic o f the French commanders. 5. Ibid., p. 194. 209

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Sentiments behind it were doubtless sincere, it was opportunistic and utilitarian in both its subject matter and its timing. It could have been written equally well at any time during the previous four years, when the intellectuals were permitting themselves a discreet silence. As with the Rosenberg case, in Vaffaire Henri M artin the intellectuals found the necessary symbol of human injustice to unite them against an unpopular cause. Martin (b. 1927) was a young sailor who had fought in the Resistance before volunteering to join the Navy for the final round of the Japanese war. Soon disillusioned by the shelling of Haiphong in December 1946, and by the governments’ refusal to compromise with Ho Chi Minh, Martin embarked on a phase of private revolutionary agitation which culminated in his sentence, in October 1950, to five years’ imprisonment for distributing leaflets among other sailors at Toulon. An earlier charge of sabotage had to be abandoned. In a speech bound to arouse the admiration of intellectuals, he declared at his trial: We are not mercenaries, but Republican sailors. The problem of disobedience does not arise when it comes to struggling against a government which betrays the interests of France. Those who opposed Vichy were not traitors. What I have seen is enough for me.1 While it is not clear whether or not Martin was a Party member, the intellectuals of the Left, both communists and non-communists, were quick to see in him the embodiment of the revolutionary proletarian. While Eluard and other poets dedicated verses to him, communist painters and sculptors reproduced him in every plastic form. Sartre devoted a whole work to his vindication, Jean Varloot called him the symbol of a whole people’s struggle and André Stil, in his epic novel, celebrated his exploits and those of Raymonde Dien, who laid herself across a railway line in protest against the shipment of arms to IndoChina.12 Re-tried at Brest in July 1951 and, despite almost universal protest from the intellectual Left, again condemned, Henri Martin was finally pardoned by the President of the Republic. It was Mendès-France who brought peace to Indo-China and indepen­ dence within the grasp of Tunisia. From November 1954, the main centre of colonial conflagration was Algeria. The Party, still burdened by the equivocal attitude adopted toward North Africa after the war, once again began to drag its feet, calling for ‘peace* but avoiding any precise commit­ ment to independence. On March 12th, 1956, the communist deputies in the Chamber voted in favour of special government powers in Algeria, although Premier Mollet had already capitulated to the ‘ultras’ and clearly intended to break his election pledges on the need to bring the war to an immediate close. There was no mention of Algeria in the pages 1. J.-P. Sartre, L'A ffaire Henri M artin, Paris, 1953, p. 28. M artin's statem ent is here paraphrased. 2. A. Stil, Le Coup du Canon (vol. 2 of Le Premier Choc), p. 133.

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of La Pensée in the period 1955-56, and until 1957 the P.C.F. did its utmost to evade an outright commitment to Algerian independence, although agitation among left-wing intellectuals had begun in earnest as early as January 1955. The price of this policy of abstention, in terms of respect and prestige, was brought home by the resignation from the Party of Aimé Césaire, the Negro deputy from Martinique whose poetry was infused with la négritude, the politico-cultural ideology of the black peoples and of their struggles against white oppression. In an open letter to Thorez, Césaire wrote in October 1956: W h at I d esire is th a t M arxism an d com m unism sh o u ld serve th e b lack peo p le, a n d n o t th a t th e black people sh ould serve M arxism an d com ­ m unism . D o ctrin es an d m ovem ents m ust be fo r m en, an d n o t th e m en fo r d o ctrin es an d m ovem ents . . . W e h o ld it now to be o u r d uty, o u r e ffo rt w ith w hich every tru th - an d ju stice-lo v in g m an associates him self, to create an o rg an izatio n w hich w ill su p p o rt th e b lack people in a n effective m anner in th eir struggles to d ay an d tom orrow : in th e stru g g le fo r ju stice, in th e struggle fo r cu ltu re, in th e struggle fo r d ig n ity a n d freed o m .1

Pressure, largely the work of the intellectuals associated with periodi­ cals such as Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, France-Observateur and VExpress, gradually drove the P.C.F. and its own intellectuals toward a more enlightened position, although joint action had been made no easier by the wedge driven by the Hungarian Revolution between the communists and their occasional allies. In May 1957, La Pensée at last spoke out with an editorial entitled ‘Non à la Torturer, and in the autumn Jean Bruhat not only protested against the arrest and disappearance in Algeria of Maurice Audin, but also demanded that Algeria be granted immediately the right of self-determination.2 Henceforth, editorials in the official Cahiers du Communisme generally adopted this platform. But even now the Party dragged its feet and failed to keep pace with the intellectuals of the Left. The disobedience campaign and, more extremist, the idea of giving aid to the F.L.N., which led to the arrests of Claude Bourdet, Francis Jeanson and other intellectuals, and to the famous appeal of the 121 intellectuals in September 1960, were regarded with open hostility by the Party. Thorez more than once cast suspicion on the motives of the independent groups supporting non-obedience, and if communist intellectuals lent their support to such groups, or were arrested for acts of non-obedience, they did so at the risk of denunciation and expulsion by the Party, which consistently endeavoured to channel all agitation through its own Mouvement de la Paix. ‘7/ ne fa u t pas com­ promettre le Parti* was the slogan canvassed within the Union National 1. Q uoted in J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, pp. 484-5. 2. La Pensée, Septem ber-O ctober 1957, p. 18.

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des Etudiants, but this did not prevent the Union demonstrating in October 1960 in favour of non-obedience. Thorez retorted angrily by telling communist students that ‘boycotter la guerre est une phrase stupide' and that 7es communistes doivent participer à n'importe quelle guerre réactionnaire\ 1 Although Thorez complained about the nationalism which had taken root in the French masses, the Party was, in fact, tending to sail with the anti-Moslem wind blowing with mounting strength among the working class. Consequently, the intellectual heroes of this struggle, Audin, Alleg, Bourdet, Jeanson, Sartre, the 121 and their friends, were not communists, or at least not card-carrying members of the P.C.F., as the rapidly growing communist intellectual opposition frequently pointed out. Not for the first time, the intellectuals had been in advance not only of the bourgeoisie but also of the working class on a colonial issue. Whenever this occurred, the communist intellectuals were at a marked disadvantage as compared with their independent colleagues. Moreover, in the last years of the Algerian war, the concept of the ‘Third World’, of a revolu­ tionary black and brown peasantry creating new values of its own amid the debris of imperialism, began to replace the older myth of the proletariat as the dynamic idea within the French intellectual Left. The communists were bound to regard this substitution with suspicion, and they had reason to. 4. The Defence o f French Culture As the ‘Party of France’, the communists claimed to be the guardians of the French enlightenment, the apex of a great cultural tradition. This claim they always upheld. But the extreme patriotism associated with the Popular Front period led to a further development of the theme, for was not the enlightenment itself the heir to a greater cultural glory? Vaillant-Couturier, describing the French as ‘the great makers of culture’, appropriated ancestors for the communists in Pascal and the builders of cathedrals,8 while Thorez himself extended the claim of paternity to Balzac, La Fontaine, Molière, Montaigne and Rabelais, apart from more obvious father-figures.8 Cogniot told the 1945 Party Congress: ‘Com­ munist intellectuals, we continue France and civilization.’1234 Aragon insisted that culture must be both national and universal, and in advertising his affection for Barrés and other overtly reactionary writers, particularly during the anti-cosmopolitan period, he evidently offended no canon of orthodoxy. Edith Thomas carried her researches back to Joan of Arc, to whom the martyr of Auschwitz, Danielle Casanova, was 1. 2. 3. 4.

Humanité, 1 Novem ber 1960. P. V aillant-C outurier, Au Service del*Esprit, p. 16. M. Thorez, F ib du Peuple, p. 116. G . Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la Renabsance Française, p. 23.

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constantly compared. It should be remembered that the desire to regain national prestige by extending the national language and cultural heritage was not confined to the communists in the post-war period; hundreds of lecturers were sent abroad by the government. Raymond Aron’s paradox, that Trance exalts her intellectuals, who reject and despise her; America makes no concession to hers, who nevertheless adore her,’1 appears singularly inappropriate when applied to the large fraternity of communist intellectuals and their occasional allies, unless one were to confuse ‘France’ with any single political system or govern­ ment. Fear of cultural despoliation, of American mass-culture and of the encroachments through commercial media of the crasser aspects of the English language, was shared, with varying degrees of intensity, along the length and breadth of the intellectual spectrum, from the C.N.E. to the Académie. Already in 1937 Joanny Berlioz had complained on behalf of the Party that if one wished to see the masterpieces of French modem art one had to travel to London, New York, the Hague or Moscow.* But the most acute challenge came after the Liberation, after the arrival of the sons of Jefferson and Hamilton in large numbers on French soil. In 1947 Aragon, warning against the intensification of American values, against what he called ‘cultural imperialism’, went so far as to place the widespread influence of William Faulkner in this category.8 But, com­ pared to the Reader's Digest, which Edgar Morin called *un abétisseur de poche’1234, Faulkner posed a relatively minor threat. According to Elsa Triolet, 780 American books had been translated into French in 1947 alone; a wave of obscenity, she complained, was flooding France.5 Casanova spoke of American books and films submerging and degrading the national spirit, while Edouard Cary described how the influx of sadistic children's comics, pornographic cartoons and pulp literature was driving desperate French writers to adopt American pseudonyms.6 Cogniot claimed that in the period 1938-48, the total number of annual translations from English into French had increased by nearly 300 per cent,7 although in the same period the importation of French books into America had actually dropped. The extremely disadvantageous BlumBymes agreement on the film quota only rubbed salt into the wound. The rapid intensification of popular commercialism in journalism posed an acute problem to the Party and its intellectuals: by May 1949, /’Humanité 1. R. A ron, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, p. 229. 2. J. Berlioz, ‘Les Communistes et les beaux-arts*, C.B., 20 February 1937, p. 156. 3. L. A ragon, La Culture et les Hommes, p. 62. 4. L .L.F ., 25 Decem ber 1947. 5. E. T riolet, VEcrivain et le Livre, p. 72. 6. E. Cary, ‘Défense de la France. Défense de la Langue Française', L .N .C ., February 1949, p. 15. 7. O . Cogniot, Réalité de la Nation, p. 117.

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accounted for little more than one-tenth of the total sales of the Paris morning press, and three years later the situation was even worse, leading Cogniot to remark: ‘7/ y a donc aussi un plan Marshall de Vesprit*1 It is, perhaps, difficult to see why the Marshall Plan should be blamed for the Party’s inability to make VHumanité readable. No less repulsive to intellectuals was the threat to the integrity of the national language which this invasion implied. Here again, the com­ munists shouted the loudest. Cogniot warned against the attempt to impose English on Europe as a substitute Esperanto and Cary asked why ‘tooth paste’ was suddenly considered more attractive than ‘crème dentifrice’, why France was flooded with ‘pin-ups’ and why the corrupted young greeted one another with ‘hello, boys!’. The communists had a good case, if a convenient one. Cultural domination had, in other countries, too often followed economic hegemony for this alarming trend to be safely passed off as a temporary phase.

1. G . Cogniot, Réalité de la Nation, p. 115.

214

CHAPTER EIGHT

1956-1960

To appreciate fully the implications of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. in February 1956, it is important to grasp the extent to which the P.C.F. and its intellectuals - had become implicated in defending all aspects of Stalinist policy and of the Stalinist cult of personality. The cult itself was merely the logical corollary of a deviation from Marxism which tended increasingly to stress the foresight and understanding of dialectical necessity of one or two supremely gifted individuals, and, correspond­ ingly, to minimize the effective rôle of the masses whose collective consciousness could only be en retard of events. In so far as they had explicitly or implicitly subscribed to this view, foreign communists stood fully indicted by Khrushchev’s speech. Stalin’s crimes and personal failings as they now emerged were only an incidental factor dramatizing the steady growth of a deep-seated malaise, an almost total abnegation of Marxist principles. In November 1936, Pravda described Stalin as the ‘genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of communism’.1 The anniversary number, dated November 7th, mentioned Stalin’s name eighty-eight times, Lenin’s fifty-four times and the adjective ‘Stalinist’ fifteen times.2 Surprised by such adulation, sympathetic intellectuals from the West nevertheless sought for rational explanations comprehensible within the conditions then prevailing in Russia. Georges Friedmann believed the cult could be attributed to the grave external threats menacing the U.S.S.R. and the need to focus loyalty on a single leader.8 Lion Feuchtwanger, amazed at the worship of Stalin, concluded that it must be sincere and organic. ‘Nowhere have I seen anything to indicate it is in the least artificial or ready made.’ Convinced that ‘it is manifestly irksome to Stalin to be idolized as he is,’ Feuchtwanger quoted from an interview at which Stalin suggested that ‘wreckers’ might be behind it.4 In the first instance, French communists, many of whom had scarcely 1. L. Schapiro, 7Tie Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, p. 406. 2. L. Fischer, M en and Politics, p. 58. 3. G . Friedm ann, De la Sainte Russie à V U .R .S.S., pp. 216-8. 4. L. Feuchtw anger, Moscow 1937, p. 95.

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heard of Stalin before 1924, simply followed the lead of the Russians, confident that if the majority faction of the Bolshevik Party had elevated Stalin it must have been for rational motives. If Maxim Gorky could write that ‘the iron will of Joseph Stalin, the helmsman of the Party, is splendidly coping with deviations from the proper course,’1 then it was an opinion that Barbusse and Rolland were inclined to respect. In Barbusse’s account, Stalin seems to have won the Civil War almost singlehanded, with personal resources including ‘promptitude and certi­ tude of judgement, a notion of the crucial points of a concrete situation and of the true causes and inevitable consequences of any fact whatever . . . horror of disorder and confusion . . . all this, transposed on the field of battle by a true Marxism . . .’12 Stalin, said Barbusse, was ‘impeccably and inexorably methodical*. Was this so absurd? The Five Year plans were a reality. Nor was the tendency to admire the prevailing leader of the great communist move­ ment in any sense a new one. The cult of Stalin grew naturally, organically, out of the cult of Lenin and even Trotsky. ‘Lenin,’ wrote Barbusse, ‘never lost sight of anything.’3 In 1924, Henri Guilbeaux had reported that Lenin, although no sentimentalist, was a comrade in the fullest sense of the word, possessed of superhuman energy, kindness, gaiety, pitiless inflexibility in the struggle, altogether a man for whom his followers would willingly sacrifice their lives. Yet simple and modest; a magnificent interpreter of dialectical materialism, able to canalize often contradictory forces.45The dispassionate, intensely intellectual Boris Souvarine described in 1922 how, on Lenin’s arrival at a congress, an electric current ran through the company, followed by prolonged applause. One admired him as a chief, loved him as a father.6 Magdeleine Marx enthused over the ubiquitous portraits of Lenin everywhere to be seen in Russia. ‘From the moment you set foot in transfigured Russia, you feel his presence.’ She, like Souvarine, could not forget Lenin’s arrival at a meeting. ‘He is awaited in a dead silence . . . as in a cathedral . . . At last, here he comes . . . Is it really Lenin? It i s ! . . . And th e n . . . exultation, delirium, a frenzy of handclapping.’6 Then she wrote of Trotsky. ‘He is an eagle in full flight, Trotsky of the victorious revolution. His whole personality proclaims the inevitable triumph of human justice.’7 On one occasion she heard him speak in Red Square: ‘The symmetrical ranks of soldiers held their fine, intelligent faces up to him as toward the sun.’8 1. Q uoted in O . B. de H uszar (ed.), The Intellectuals, p. 235. 2. Communey January 1936, p. 560. 3. H . Barbusse, Stalin, p. 181. 4. H . Guilbeaux, Le Portrait authentique de Lénine, Paris, 1924, pp. 59-63. 5. Humanité, 26 January 1922. 6. M. M arx, The Romance o f the New Russia, p. 172. 7. Ibid., p. 182. 8. Ibid., p. 186.

216

1956-1960

Thus the derision directed against the cult of Stalin in the ’thirties by Guilbeaux, Souvarine, Magdeleine Marx and other ex-communists could only be sustained on political grounds, not as a matter of principle. To the communists, Stalin appeared as a mild, unpretentious person when compared to the flamboyant Trotsky, let alone to the medal-bedecked fascist dictators. Not only did the cult of Stalin arise gradually out of the equally ardent cult of earlier leaders, but, paradoxically, his original attraction for western intellectuals largely rested on his apparently deliberate sublimation of his own personality. The Webbs spoke for many when they argued that Stalin was not ‘the sort of person’ to claim or desire a monopoly of power.1 In the transformation of Stalin’s cult from the plausible to the absurd among French communist intellectuals, the war proved decisive. Yet here again a wider perspective is essential. Confronted with upheavals and destruction on a huge, impersonal scale, not only communists but men of all persuasions instinctively invest their trust in a single, omniscient leader, whether a Stalin or a Churchill. In 1956, Khrushchev derided Stalin’s military efficiency. But the brilliant campaigns of the Red Army, the resolute defences and the rapid re-deployment of Soviet industrial resources behind the Urals had been associated with the name of Stalin by large segments of the western public, and not by communists alone. J.-R. Bloch, who broadcast from Moscow throughout the war, merely exaggerated a widespread feeling when he stated on May 5th, 1943 that Stalin was almost unique in history, a genius, the beloved leader of his people.8 Bloch emphasized the morale value of Stalin’s speech on November 6th, 1941, at the darkest time of the war, and quoted General Petit, of the French Military Mission, who was struck by Stalin’s intelli­ gence, precision, alertness, knowledge and surprising simplicity - ‘un bon papa\ 8 If, as Khrushchev claimed, Stalin for a time ‘gave up* after the German attack, ceasing to do anything constructive and merely bemoan­ ing ‘all that which Lenin created we have lost forever’;1234 if this is true, who, but a few select Soviet leaders, was to know? But the seeds of an aberration, of a cult of infallibility, were being sown. Pierre Daix, in his novel Classe 42, relates how communist militants in France even convinced themselves that Stalin had deliberately allowed Hitler to gain a temporary military advantage so as to unmask him as the aggressor and consequently to gain an immense political advantage.5 Thereafter, and particularly in the years 1949-53, as the aberration deepened in Russia, communist intellectuals in France pursued the golden 1. S. and B. W ebb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, London, n.d., p. 432. 2. J.-R . Bloch, De la France Trahie à la France en Armes, p. 279. 3. J.-R . Bloch, V Homme du Communisme. Portrait de Staline, p. 32. 4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, p. 50. 5. P. D aix, Dix-neuvième Printemps, II, p. 78. 217

INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

idol as if mesmerized, losing their balance as Marxists and working themselves into untenable positions. The cult developed on three main themes: Stalin the Leader of nation and Party; Stalin the father-figure and spiritual symbol; and Stalin the expert in all fields. Returned from Russia, Bloch drew the portrait of a man who, far from remaining hidden in the Kremlin, acted in full publicity before his people. (Khrushchev claimed that Stalin never travelled to meet workers or farmers, and that he had not visited a village since October 1928.)1 Bloch wrote o f‘this man who, not once since he took the responsibility of power, had flattered or lied or committed a fundamental error’.2 That Stalin was genial, wise and kindly Bloch illustrated with several anecdotes which reveal more about his own loss of balance than they do about Stalin. First example: at the height of the war the writer Leonid Leonov telephones Stalin about the censorship imposed on his new play, The Invasion. Stalin reads the play, thanks Leonov and tells him he need not change anything. Second example: some time before the war Stalin telephones Boris Pasternak in the middle of the night and asks if he has stopped writing poems. And if not, why doesn’t he, Stalin, see them any more? Pasternak answers that the journals find them insufficiently popular in style. Stalin, while admitting that he is not fully in sympathy with Pasternak’s style, declares that he does not want the public deprived of the opportunity to form its own opinion on one of Russia’s best poets. Soon after this conversation, Pravda and Izvestia begin publishing Pasternak’s poems.8 Even setting aside the sinister implications of a phone call in the night from Stalin, even forgetting the terrible toll of writers taken by the State (which Bloch himself had remarked upon in 1936 and about which he, as a resident in the Soviet Union for three years, must have come to know a good deal more,) it is surely astonishing that a writer whose hesitations in the face of communism had been intimately linked to his doubts about the liberty of the artist, should come to applaud a situation in which one man made himself the capricious arbiter of taste not only over the writers but over the whole state machinery. But, as Cogniot said proudly, the C.P.S.U. was ‘the Party of Stalin’. On the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Cogniot described him as ‘this intrepid pilot’ whom the whole of ‘civilized humanity’ took for a guide.4 And when he died, Aragon was in no doubt that ‘France owes its existence as a nation to Stalin’.6The Red Army, the C.P.S.U. and the Soviet people, evidently, could not have succeeded without him. Then there was Stalin the spiritual figure, emerging from the pens of the 1. The Anti-Stalin Campaign, p. 77. 2. J.-R . Bloch, V Homme du Communisme, p. 25. 3. Ibid., pp. 36-41. 4. O . Cogniot, ‘Staline, homme de science', La Pensée, Novem ber-Decem ber 1949, p. 13. 5. L.L.F ., 12 M arch 1953.

218

1956-1960 new French ‘Cartesians’ in semi-mystical terms. Marcel Willard called him ‘the greatest benefactor of humanity on the march*. Francis Jourdain denied that Stalin could be compared to any of the great figures of the past because he was ‘a new type of man, communist man’. The psycho­ logist Henri Wallon asked whether one man had ever united in himself all forms of genius as Stalin had.1 In a story of André Stil’s (written before he received a Stalin Prize), the father of his people takes on a Buddhist, transcendental quality. ‘It is true, they think, it is well known that everyone has a little of s t a u n at the bottom of him, which watches us from inside, smiling and serious, giving confidence. It is our consciences as communists, this internal presence of s t a u n ’1 23(Stil’s capitals). It was a sickness, a hysteria, from which nobody appeared immune. Paul Eluard, the ex-surrealist, the humanist steeped in western culture, celebrating, like Stil, Stalin’s seventieth birthday, produced a six-verse poem on the theme of the greetings offered by the Central Committee of the Party: E t S ta lin e p our nous e st présent pour dem ain E t S ta lin e dissipe aujourd'hui le m alheur L a confiance est le fr u it de son cerveau d'am our . . . Grâce à lu i nous vivons sans connaître d'autom ne L 'horizon de S ta lin e est toujours ren a issa n t. . . Car la vie e t les hom m es ont élu Sta lin e P our fig u rer sur terre leur espoir sans bornes.8

Guillevic, too, paid tribute: P arce que tu es là, depuis le début E t toujours tu sais Ce qui va venir, ce q u 'il fa u t fa ire E n ce m om ent qui n 'a tten d p a s45

But for fervour, Henri Bassis’ posthumous tribute in 1953 could scarcely be exceeded: Cam arade S ta lin e, Ton nom il e st p our nous le pain de notre vie! Cam arade S ta lin e, Ton n o m -q u i nous fa it vivre! il aidait à m ourir! Camarade S ta lin e, Tan nom - Ufleu rissa it les y eu x de nos m artyrs/B 1. G . Cogniot, op. cit., pp. 16-20. 2. LJL.F., 22 Decem ber 1949. 3. P. E luard, ‘Joseph Staline’, C.C., January 1950, p. 4 (extracts). 4. P. D aix, Guillevic, p. 166. 5. L.L.F., 12 M arch 1953.

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INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

Finally, there was Stalin the expert in all fields. It was perhaps on this question that the most remarkable abnegation of intellectual balance and responsibility manifested itself among French communists. For the biologist Georges Teissier, Stalin was ‘the guide of scientists’. Jean T. Desanti devoted his energies to proving that Stalin was ‘a scientist of a new type’. Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize Winner, praised Stalin’s contribu­ tion to science, calling him ‘a great genius’ whose theoretical works amounted to an immense contribution to Marxism.1 And Francis Cohen, apropos of the Lysenko controversy, warned dissident biologists (who were later proved correct) that ‘for a com m unist. . . Stalin is the highest scientific authority in the world’.8 Thus great men and small, notable scientists and journalists of small talent, wallowed in the same mud bath. The Party drove them on, on the pain of expulsion or disgrace, sacrificing the first and second principles of utility, those of personal prestige and vocational reputation, to the overriding need for uniformity. In 1950, the Party sponsored the production of a film on Stalin’s life. The man we love most in the world, which caused even diehards some discomfort. The exact rôles played by genuine sentiment, expediency and aberration are hard to determine, especially when a man as generally sober as Cogniot could declare, in the course of a seventieth birthday article entirely devoted to the extravagant tributes of Party intellectuals to Stalin, that ‘the exaltation of the leader is an element of the reactionary ideology of the imperialists’.8 If the cult had stopped short at Stalin, the French Communist Party might have faced Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 if not with a good conscience at least with a genuine desire to reform. But, just as every Gauleiter posed as a Führer in miniature, so the first secretary of every Communist Party was elevated to the status of a minor Stalin. The cult of personality, in short, saturated Party life and Party thought. Already in the ’thirties there was a marked tendency for even intellectuals as dis­ tinguished as Georges Politzer to support quite simple conclusions with Thorez’s authority, as if reason alone were not enough. ‘Thorez has so brilliantly identified the nation with the people’ was a typical remark. The cult of Thorez was mechanically fostered in step with the cult of Stalin. T say to myself that nothing is impossible to the communists when they are led by a man of genius,’ wrote Aragon.4 Thorez, he said, was the literary hero of the new generation, the Rastignac or Robinson Crusoe of the proletariat. ‘The great French people, and its fighting avant-garde, the proletariat, have found in Maurice Thorez the real and heroic 1. L .L .F., 12 M arch 1953. 2. F. Cohen, ‘M endel, Lyssenko et la Rôle de la Science*, L .N .C ., February 1950, p. 62. 3. G . Cogniot, op. cit.9p. 9. 4. L. A ragon, VH om m e Communiste, //, p. 251.

220

1956-1960 expression of their historical destiny.’1 The Party, for André Stil, was ‘the Party of Maurice Thorez’. As in the case of Stalin, the dialectic had been happily turned upside down. The proletariat, having got the leader it deserved, was now pictured as being dependent upon him. This was one way of rationalizing the undemocratic machinery which had long since made a mockery of ‘democratic centralism*. Thorez’s thought was apt to be perplexingly subtle. A militant in Stil’s novel remarks that when ‘Maurice’ told a Party Congress that it was necessary to ‘secouer le train-train', everyone went about repeating this without trying to understand or apply it.2 The positive-hero of Le Premier Choc, Henri, was apt to browse through Thorez’s collected works in which were to be found solutions ‘which transcend the paper’.8 But it was Aragon, the court poet of the new dynasty, who carried adulation to extremes. As one historian has remarked, Aragon’s confession of how he drew strength from the great ‘re-evaluator’, the ‘professor of energy’, Thorez, put him in the light of a disciple of Barrés or Nietzsche rather than of Marx.4 Barrés probably, for Nietzsche was not French. Recalling his conversion from surrealism (which in fact pre-dated Thorez’s assumption of effective Party leadership by nearly two years), Aragon testified that ‘the voice of Thorez had given us the force, the courage, to criticize our last and our new idols . . .’5 The indispensable leader, Thorez was hardly less genial and loved than Stalin, the top copain. Here is Eluard writing on the Twelfth (1950) Party Congress: Thorez nous parle Vaffection La vérité moule sa voix Sa violence est de bonté Sa clarté nous peint le possible . . .6 Aragon and Stil elaborated the point by carefully contrived scenes in their novels. In the second volume of Les Communistes, for example, a fictional situation on August 30th, 1939 is recreated. A communist journalist, now a mobilized lieutenant in the army, runs into Thorez by chance and asks gauchely for special directives for comrades in the army. Thorez replies: ‘Nothing special. Be the best everywhere. . . do what your conscience as a communist and as a Frenchman dictates to you.’ The lieutenant feels shamed: HI a rougi de la leçon'1 Stil’s fictional hero Henri had once had the good fortune to meet Thorez. ‘Maurice, in grasping his hand in his 1. Ibid., p. 265. 2. A. Stil, Au Château d'eau, 1951, p. 95. 3. A. Stil, Le Coup du Canon, p. 133. 4. H . Fhrm ann, ‘French Views on Com munism ', World Politics, O ctober 1950, p. 150. 5. L. A ragon, V Homme Communiste, /, p. 227. 6. P. E luard, Poèmes pour Tous, p. 178. 7. L. A ragon, Les Communistes, II, p. 38.

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own, so strong, glanced down at him in the way which sums up a man in a second. And he merely said, very quietly, for Henri alone to hear: You’re a good boy . . .’* While Thorez was never invested with Stalin’s authority in the natural sciences, Aragon pictured him as a formidable student of literature, addicted not only to Corneille but to reading Belinsky and Tolstoy in Russian.8 The intellectuals also subscribed to the view that as a historian he had few peers. A commission of Party historians in 1950 reported that ‘we are able, thanks to Maurice Thorez, to oppose to bourgeois history the scientific history which is ours’.8 It was interesting how the Party, which avowedly attached a high premium to the specialist work of its intellectuals, was, by the force of its own political logic, inclined to annihilate their reputation in this way. This is an obvious case of certain principles of utility acting in direct conflict. Yet the spirit remained willing. In 1953, Thorez returned from Russia after a protracted illness. Aragon rose to the occasion with an ode of which the last verse is here quoted: O fem m es souriez e t m êlez à vos tresses Ces deux m ots-là com m e des fleu rs, ja m a is fa n ées H revient Je redis ces deux m ots-là sans cesse Tout se colore d ’eux après ces deux années I l revient il revient il vient il va venir E n avant le bonheur de tous est dans nos m ains I l sem ble qu’a le dire on ouvre l ’avenir E t Von entend déjà chanter les lendem ains*

Naturally, other Party leaders received their due of cultivation, apportioned mainly on their position in the hierarchy. In 1946, Aragon exalted the qualities of Cachin, Monmousseau, Duelos and Frachon, while defending André Marty, against Hemingway’s denigration of him in For Whom The Bell Tolls, as ‘the glorious organizer of the Brigades, the man who, at Madrid as at Odessa, saved French honour for the second time’.6 (Seven years later, resolutely keeping pace with the Party line, Aragon described Marty as an agent of Tito who had planned to liquidate the Party after the war.8) Duelos, on the other hand, remained firmly in the saddle, and was, as acting leader, increasingly cultivated during Thorez’s absence in Russia, particularly after his arrest in May 1952 following the anti-Ridgway demonstrations. Aragon and Eluard dedicated poems to him and a number of communist artists painted him. Eluard was also the author of a poem, Au nom de Tamitié, dedicated to 123456 1. A. Stil, Paris Avec Nous, p. 94. 2. L. A ragon, L ’Homme Communiste, II, p. 249. 3. J. B rahat, ‘L’A pport de M aurice Thorez à l’Histoire*, C.C., A pril 1950, p. 34. 4. Humanité, 8 A pril 1953. 5. L. Aragon, U Homme Communiste, I, p. 24. 6. L. A ragon, L ’Homme Communiste, II, p. 302.

222

1956-1960 the veteran Marcel Cachin, in which he declared: Dear Marcel, thanks to you I am still young.1Fougeron painted Cachin surrounded by flowerladen children and it was with Laurent Casanova, the Party’s devoted disciple of Zhdanov, in mind that Guillevic wrote his poem En Ce Matin de Mai. Without losing sight of the genuine sentiment behind these eulogies, without forgetting that the communist leaders were in many cases exceptional men whose links with and sympathy for the workers were undeniable, it is easy to see that a machine and an ideology had been transferred from rock to sand. For the three years after Stalin’s death the machine ground on oblivious of what was to come. At the moment of impact, in the early months of 1956, the Party and its leading intellectuals remained unrepentantly Stalinist. A month before the Twentieth Congress, the Party suffered a minor scandal with the publication of Pierre Hervé’s La Révolution et les Fétiches. Hervé, whose individualism survived his career as a Stalinist, criticized the Party bureaucracy and what he called its vulgar plebeianism, its suspicion of intellectuals. If, he argued (as if to augment those suspicions), one were always to support the P.C.F. because it represented the working class, then, by the same token, one would have to support the Labour Party or the A.F.L. in America. Still liberally quoting not only from Marx and Lenin, but also from Stalin, he attempted to reinterpret their teachings as favouring in certain circumstances a peaceful transition to socialism.12 Inevitably, Hervé came in for his share of the treatment he had so often dealt out to recalcitrant intellectuals in previous years. Guy Besse com­ mented that ‘in truth, M r Dulles could not dream of a more docile commentator’.3 Claude Morgan, another intellectual in rebellion, wrote to Etienne Fajon, a member of the Political Bureau, expressing his ‘pained surprise’ at Besse’s insults. The Secretariat decided to publish Fajon’s reply, without printing Morgan’s original letter. Fajon told Morgan that, despite his criticisms of aspects of Hervé’s book, his letter objectively constituted an act of solidarity with Hervé, and therefore an act of aggression against the Party. At the same time he denied that there were limits on inner-Party discussion.45Stalinist logic thus still prevailed. Stung by his numerous critics, especially by Sartre, who accused him of espousing a simple reformism,6 Hervé quickly published a further book in self-justification.6 He claimed that his exclusion from the Party on February 14th had been decided upon by the Political Bureau and the 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

P. E luard, op. cit., pp. 182-3. P. Hervé, La Révolution et les Fétiches, pp. 117-30. Humanité, 25 January 1956. Humanité, 10 February 1956. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le Réformism e et les Fétiches*, L .T .M ., February 1956. P. Hervé, Lettre à Sartre.

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Secretariat alone, whereas his own cell, that of the Lycée Voltaire, had not recommended his expulsion, on the ground that he had recognized his error in publishing his criticisms outside the Party.1 Therefore Article 24 of the Party’s statutes had been violated. None of this was very con­ vincing; Hervé had committed as calculated and violent an act of indisci­ pline as was conceivable. He also denied the personal charges made against him in VHumanité to the effect that he had been relieved of his Party posts by the Central Committee because of his relations with enemies of the Party. Against Sartre, he denied that he envisaged the passage to socialism through parliamentary vote-catching as practised by the Socialist Party. In this, his second book, he was in a position to claim Khrushchev as an ally: references to the authority of Stalin, so conspicuous in his earlier essay, had been discreetly dropped. Savage as were the attacks of Kanapa, Garaudy, Besse and Suret-Canale, his former fellow-‘hatchetmen’, Hervé elicited little immediate sympathy from other intellectuals either within the Party or without. In February 1956, Khrushchev addressed the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U. Although his main indictment of Stalin was delivered in closed session, with foreign communists not admitted, Mikoyan had already initiated the anti-Stalin campaign in open session and the nature, if not the details, of the allegations were soon known in France. In the interim between the speech and its publication by the U.S. State Department on June 4th, the Party retreated very little. In March Duelos, speaking at Grenoble, said of Stalin: ‘Without his dogged struggle the U.S.S.R. would not have been able to complete Lenin’s great enterprise.’123 Pierre Courtade likewise argued that Stalin’s policy had been ‘funda­ mentally just, even if certain of its aspects ought to be revised in the light of new facts’, and he attempted to pass off most of the odium on to Beria.8 Temporarily the general in the camp of the Stalinist intellectuals, he conducted a spirited campaign in which elements of retreat were barely perceptible. In April he wrote: In the years between 1934 and 1941, when the imperialists were preparing in an ever increasing, massive manner their aggression against the U.S.S.R., a move against Stalin might have produced unrest which the enemies of communism would not have failed to exploit. Would not such a move perhaps have opened the road for aggression? Should such a risk have been taken? No honest com­ munist would dare say so. In practice, perhaps there was little to be done except what was done.4 1. Ibid., p. 248. 2. Observer, 25 M arch 1956. 3. Humanité, 23-28 M arch 1956. 4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign, p. 117.

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1956-1960 Surveying the debris of the trial of Rajk (now officially rehabilitated) which he had personally witnessed, Courtade would go no further than to insist that the trial ‘carried the conviction of all those who had been present at it’.1 As late as 1961, he persisted in the view that Stalin, despite his faults, had been a father to millions, and that his radio speech in July 1941 would never be forgotten. With more cunning than conviction, he attempted to explain away the French Party’s commitment to Stalinism by arguing that when comrades had cried Vive Staline! they had meant long live the Red Army, communism and even France.123If this were true, one can only conclude that it had been a strange manner of expression in those who professed to believe in ni dieu ni césar. Another Stalinist writer, Pierre Daix, admitted to ‘a certain disarray’ as a result of the revelations, and conceded that on a few points the Trotskyists might have been correct. But he clung no less resolutely than Courtade to the argu­ ment that Russia had been menaced by plots in the ’thirties and that Stalin had held the ship on course. Surveying the whole period, he offered no apologies. *Je n9excuse rien.9* Within the ranks of the intellectuals, the revelations elicited two distinct moods: from the ‘liberals’, shock, relief, hope; from the true Stalinists, a grudging and barely perceptible realignment. Edgar Morin described his personal reactions at the time. ‘As for myself, I knew most of the facts. N ot all of them. I could not have conceived of the genocide of minorities, the destruction of the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia. I could not have conceived that torture could have become a systematic practice, decided by Stalin in a circular in 1938. All our interior dramas, all our meditations on Le Zéro et VInfini, on Merleau-Ponty’s Humanisme et Terreur, became child’s-play.’4*And yet Morin had left the Party six years previously. Here, then, is further evidence of the workings of one aspect of the law of compensation, of the degree to which communist intellectuals in the West had refused to face facts simply because such facts had been denied by the Party and relentlessly exploited by those elements whose true enemy was the principle of socialism. By and large, however, Khrushchev’s revelations did not evoke despair; on the contrary, they awakened hopes of imminent reforms, of the self-adjusting potential of communism. Considerable expectations were pinned by the more liberal intellectuals on the Fourteenth Congress of the P.C.F. due to meet in June, but in the event delayed a month. Claude Morgan, now in the vanguard of rebellion, put forward certain propositions which the Party, suffering perhaps from a momentary loss of nerve, agreed to publish. Morgan argued that the 1. Le Populaire, 8 M ay 1956. 2. P. C ourtade, La Place Rouge, p. 280. 3. P. D aix, Réflexions, Paris, 1957, p. 180. 4. Quoted in K. Jelenski, ‘The L iterature of D isenchantm ent', Survey, A pril 1962, p. 118.

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cult of personality should not be regarded as a phenomenon limited to the Soviet Union, and that in the French Party itself the cult had led to ‘an insufficiency of the critical spirit at the base . . . extended from the base to the summit*. In reply, Marcel Servin accused him of a ‘méfiance pathologique’ with regard to the Party leadership.1 A few days later Marc Beigbeder, dramatic critic of Les Lettres Françaises, was dismissed for saying that the Party leaders must originally have known the truth about the east Europeans now being rehabilitated. ‘Our leaders,* he wrote in an open letter, ‘owe us, their victims, some explanations and excuses.*12 On June 4th, the State Department published the full text. The humiliation enraged all the western Parties. On June 17th, the Political Bureau of the P.C.F. publicly regretted the conditions under which the speech had been presented and indulged in an unusual act of indiscipline in complaining that: ‘The explanations given up to now of Stalin’s errors, their origin, and the conditions under which they developed, are not satisfactory. A thorough Marxist analysis to determine all the circumstances under which Stalin was able to exercise his personal power is indispensable.’3 Such a call, coming from Togliatti, indicated a genuine desire for inner-Party reform: from the P.C.F. it amounted to a show of rage and intransigence. Cohesive as the Stalinists in general remained, cracks in the edifice began to appear in unexpected quarters. In May, the Stalinist philosopher Jean-T. Desanti dwelt at length on the errors of Trotsky and Bukharin in an article in La Nouvelle Critique. But his contribution of July-August, following the full exposure of Khrushchev’s revelations, bore a markedly different tone. Desanti, unlike Servin and Casanova, fully repented for the brutal Party intervention in the Lysenko controversy, in which he himself, as a non-scientist, had played a prominent part. The intellectuals had tended to accept the Party’s pronouncements as infallible; behind such dogmatism he detected a laziness of spirit often reflected in the slavish repetition of Lenin’s formulas which served as a substitute for the absorption and development of the substance of his ideas. In what amounted to a thorough autocritique, Desanti conceded the error of communist philosophers like himself in grouping such disparate figures as Kant, Husserl, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty all under the same ‘idealist’ label.4 That Jean Kanapa, as editor, should have permitted the publication of such an article could not be without significance. The Fourteenth Party Congress in July was handled in an adroit manner, with much lip-service 1. Le M onde, 2 June 1956. 2. News Chronicle, 11 June 1956. 3. The Anti-Stalin Campaign, p. 169. 4. J.-T . D esanti, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Communisme’, L .N .C ., July-A ugust 1956, p. 97.

226

1956-1960 paid to reforms which were studiously avoided in practice. This generated heightened tensions among the intellectuals. By permitting rather more radical critiques in the official intellectual organs, and by simulating an atmosphere of genuine discussion and self-examination, the Party obviously hoped to retain the loyalty of intellectuals while giving away nothing of importance. This policy might well have succeeded had not the Hungarian crisis abruptly intervened. The revolt of the intellectuals in Hungary was mainly canalized through the Petöfi Circle which had been saved from dissolution by the deposition of Rákosi in June 1956. That the Circle conceived of reform within the framework of socialism was already known to a number of French intellectuals when, early in October, the communist writer Tristan Tzara returned from Budapest declaring boldly that the Circle expressed the views of the majority of the Hungarian people. A paradoxical situation at once arose when Aragon refused to publish Tzara’s opinions in Les Lettres Françaises, while the Hungarian press bureau in Paris gave them full publicity. Among other observations painful to the French, Tzara mentioned that Rajk’s widow had reproached André Wurmser for claiming that she had ‘excused’ those who, like himself, had annihilated her husband’s character and good record in 1949.1 When, on O ctober. 18th, the Party Secretariat publicly regretted the Hungarian press bureau’s action in issuing Tzara’s statement,12 it became more obvious that face-saving was to be not the least important of the obstacles standing between the Party and de-Stalinization. The full force of the intellectual rebellion within France was not felt until early November, following the second Soviet intervention and the overthrow of the Nagy Government. On November 7th, the communists Claude Roy, Roger Vailland, J.-F. Rolland3 and Claude Morgan joined Vercors, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Louis de Villefosse in signing a letter which, after a protestation of friendship for the U.S.S.R. and for socialism, strongly denounced the use of guns and tanks to break the ‘revolt of the Hungarian people and its will to independence’ even if, as they conceded, certain fascist elements had latterly exploited the revolt. Denying that socialism could ever be achieved at bayonet point, the signatories at the same time refused to grant the right of protest to those who approved of the Suez operation or the American action in Guatemala in 1954.4 Roy and Rolland, both of whom had joined the Party as young Resistance fighters, struck the most defiant posture. Roy’s longsuppressed resentment against cultural Zhdanovism burst forth in face 1. Le Figaro, 19 O ctober 1956. 2. Le M onde, 21 O ctober 1956. 3. J.-F . R olland. B ora 1922. A history teacher at the Lycée Voltaire. 4. Vercors, For thgj'im e Being, pp. 78-9.

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of the revelation that already 150 condemned Soviet writers had been rehabilitated. If he had not spared American intellectuals for their silence over the Rosenbergs, he felt he had no right to ignore the crimes per­ petrated in the socialist world.1 And Rolland implicitly resigned from the Party when he wrote in VExpress that, ‘By its attitude, the direction of the Party assumes a terrible responsibility: in continuing to lie, to dis­ simulate, in deceiving the working class . . .’ The leaders, he said, knew that ‘de-Stalinization would rapidly bring about their overthrow by younger and more healthy elements’, but for them ‘socialism must necessarily be built through terror, false information, trumped-up statistics, the enslavement of the intelligentsia. This is why they criticize Gomulka, the first communist leader in thirty years who has spoken the language of frankness and said that one must not lie to the workers.*3 Both Vailland and Morgan drew a parallel between the Anglo-French intervention in Suez and the Russian action in Hungary. Two weeks later, weeks in which the Party showed few signs of a change of heart, a second loud protest was forthcoming from ten communist intellectuals, Picasso, Besson, Marcel Cornu, Jourdain, Edouard Pignon, Paul Tillard, Wallon, René Lazzo, Hélène Parmelin and D r Harel. In a motion sent to each member of the Central Committee on November 20th, they called for an immediate extraordinary congress of the Party in view of the ‘malaise profond’ in its ranks caused by Tinvraisemblable pauvreté des informations de VHumanité sur la Hongrie'.8They complained about ‘the veil of silence, the disconcerting ambiguities, the blows to revolutionary probity’, adding however: ‘We protest in advance against any tendentious interpretation of this collective letter, against any eventual questioning of our fidelity to the Party and its unity.’4 Never­ theless, the contents of the letter were quickly revealed by the ‘bourgeois’ press. Confronted by these assaults, and by Sartre's passionate, yet curiously well-balanced article in UExpress on November 9th,6 the Party’s reflex actions were nothing if not predictable. Roger Garaudy, challenging Sartre’s view of the Petöfi writers as a ‘conscientious minority’, accused the critics of ‘proud individualism’ and of creating a climate favourable for fascist reaction.6 On November 21st, a Central Committee resolution expelled J.-F. Rolland from the Party and suspended for six months the membership of Gérard Lyon-Caen who, on November 12th, had associ­ ated himself with the views of Rolland, Roy, Vailland and Morgan. The latter three were treated to a public censure, possibly a moderate response 1. Le Monde, 1 Novem ber 1956. 2. V Express, 9 Novem ber 1956. 3. Le Figaro, 23 Novem ber 1956. 4. Le M onde, 21 Novem ber 1956. 5. See pp. 255-57. 6. Le Monde, 16 November 1956. 228

1956-1960 in the circumstances.1 As for the ten who had called for a Party congress, they were reprimanded in VHumanité and reminded that they had no right ‘to impose their point of view on the Party by illicit means’. Garaudy further accused them of forgetting class positions, of under-estimating the importance of Kádár’s interview and of trying to transform the Party into a debating society.12 Speeches by Thorez and Casanova to the Central Committee on November 22nd and 23rd adopted a threatening tone toward ‘fractional’ intellectuals, laying particular blame on Hélène Parmelin who was held responsible for having leaked the letter of the ten to the bourgeois press. There was no concession forthcoming: even Pierre Courtade was criticized for having spoken of the ‘isolation of the Party*.3 These tactics proved remarkably effective. No reply came: the unity of the ten was broken when Wallon gave assurances of his fidelity and Besson and Harel, pleading that they had not expected their letter to be published in Le Monde, rallied to the principle of Party solidarity. The Party quickly followed up this victory by publishing an impressive array of declarations of support from lawyers, scholars, novelists, musicians, painters, etc, the general theme being that, although errors had been committed, solidarity was vital. The film director Louis Daquin wrote: ‘When we join the P.C.F. we sign a contract of alliance with the working class - there can be no possible equivocation.’4 Meanwhile, a vigilant and unfriendly watch was maintained on the censured Vailland, Morgan and Roy in none of whom were there conspicuous signs of peni­ tence. In March 1957, Roy was excluded from the Party for one year by the Seine-Sud Federation, on account of various statements he had made in the intervening period. In May 1958, he reapplied for membership, and it was obviously with a painfully divided conscience that he finally drifted away from the Party entirely. By the early months of 1957 the balance sheet, taken in numerical terms, looked not at all bad from the Party’s point of view. Apart from the rebels already mentioned, the most notable defection was that of Pierre Fougeyrollas, a philosophy teacher at Paris and another of the Party conscripts of the Resistance generation. Jean Desanti terminated his collaboration with La Nouvelle Critique late in 1956 and Dominique Desanti, an erstwhile apologist for east European Stalinism, lapsed into a silence which foreshadowed total withdrawal. But what of the majority who, whatever their private agonies, remained loyal? It would be false to picture the intellectual response as uniform, loud and joyously Stalinist. Within the latitudes permitted by the Party, a by no means negligible variety of individual voices were heard, voices 1. Humanité, 22 Novem ber 1956. 2. Ibid. 3. Le Monde, 24 Novem ber 1956. 4. Humanité, 29 Novem ber 1956.

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which, if measured against the brutal distortions of André Stil’s l9Humanité, augured some hope for a saner future. V Humanité, whose offices were physically assaulted, published numerous photographs of murdered Hungarian communists, claiming that a new St Bartholomew massacre had been narrowly averted. Stil resolutely equated all opposition to Soviet forces with blackest reaction, VHumanité hailing the establish­ ment of the Kádár Government with the slogan: ‘Popular power is solidly re-established’.1 On December 2nd, he spoke on Budapest Radio, assuring Hungarian workers and students that the French workers shared their joy that things had worked out so well.123V Humanité and the Party evoked a bitter reproach from Nowa Kultura, the organ of the Polish communist writers, on the ground that they had consistently equated de-Stalinization with reaction and had taken the part of Gerö, the most servile of the Hungarian leaders.8 The deep aversion to foreign military occupation displayed by Stil in Le Premier Choc had evidently been put in cold storage. V Humanité, of course, was not an organ aimed primarily at intellec­ tuals but a mass-circulation daily paper designed to present a black-andwhite picture to the working classes who were otherwise prey to the often lurid and sensational accounts of the pro-Suez press. But one distortion does not justify another, and the workers are, presumably, as entitled to know the truth as any other social class. Elsewhere communist intellectuals showed a greater willingness to come to terms with common sense and an arguable, if not wholly tenable, historical perspective. Joanny Berlioz admitted that the Hungarian Party had placed too much emphasis on heavy industry and too little on living standards, and that stupid bureaucrats had lost contact with the masses. He also conceded that many workers had demonstrated in good faith, although he reverted to the inevitable communist argument that Soviet intervention had ultimately been justified by the rôle of fascist elements and by the 1947 Peace Treaty outlawing fascism in Hungary.45In a long, detailed and apparently sincere article in La Nouvelle Critique, the communist historian Roger Biard examined intricately the economic and political errors made in Hungary since the inauguration of the grandiose Five Year Plan in 1949. In correctly accusing Rákosi of bureaucratic schematization, Biard nevertheless revealed the typical communist trait of laying the onus of guilt for ills which were deeply rooted in communist theory and practice on the most recently disgraced scapegoat.6 It is not absurd to argue that in a climate of crisis and vituperation a 1. Humanité, 5 November 1956. 2. Humanité, 3 December 1956. 3. VExpress, 2 Novem ber 1956. 4. J. Berlioz, ‘Le Dram e Hongrois*, D .N ., Decem ber 1956, pp. 731-4. 5. R. Biard, ‘L’Epreuve Hongroise*, L .N .C ., Decem ber 1956, pp. 35-59.

230

1956-1960 practical balance or modus vivendi between loyalty and dissent can be achieved through silence. True or not, silence was the dominant mood of Les Lettres Françaises and La Pensée in the crisis weeks. Having attempted to suppress Tristan Tzara’s comments on the Petöfi Circle, Les Lettres Françaises, a weekly, first allowed itself direct involvement in the Hungarian situation on November 8th, when it associated itself with a message of the C.N.E. to Kádár calling for protection for Hungarian writers. It was a novel departure for a French communist organ to admit that writers in a socialist state were in need of protection from the authorities, and it was a departure which was perhaps officially regretted, for the following issue contained only an ambiguous article by Pierre Daix on the traditions of the Resistance and on the impossibility of submitting to threats. On November 29th, the journal published three messages from Hungarian intellectuals each of whom spoke of the dangers o f counter-revolution and of White Terror. After December 6th, the Hungarian question was dropped; orthodoxy, never in great danger with Aragon at the helm, had reasserted itself. But it is important to note that, compared to other Party organs, Les Lettres Françaises devoted remark­ ably little comment to the Suez operation, indicating a policy of calculated restraint on the part of its editors. In La Pensée, on the other hand, the Suez adventure took the expected beating. Yet here again the limitation of comment on Hungary to a brief editorial in the November-December issue (which called the events ‘tragic’ and conceded honest motives to many of the rebels) seemed to betoken a respect for the contradictory emotions prevalent among the majority of communist intellectuals. The Directing Committee respon­ sible for this discretion consisted of Joliot-Curie, Wallon, Prenant, Teissier, Orcel, Cogniot, Labérenne and Maublanc. But there was no sign of overt disaffection: a comparison of the composition of the Comité Directeur and the Comité de Patronage of La Pensée in July 1957 with that in July 1956 reveals that of fifty-five members only two had dropped out by the later date, one of them being the idealist writer Charles Vildrac. The solidarity which prevailed in the face of the Twentieth Congress and the Hungarian Revolution was, perhaps, the ultimate test of the strength and resilience of the bonds which united intellectuals to the Party. Although the French working class as a whole was by no means indifferent to the Hungarian Revolution - there were serious signs of rebellion within the C.G.T. - the intellectuals had to realize that they were more acutely, and more personally, affected by the questions raised in 1956 than were other sections of the Party. To isolate themselves now would be to verify once again their original social sin. Moreover, the greater the general hostility to the Party, the greater the impulse to remain loyal à cause des copains. The violent temper which prevailed in France

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at the time of the Hungary-Suez crisis, and the numerous physical attacks on Party offices and presses, usually perpetrated by those favouring the Suez operation, were likely to remind the communist intellectuals why they were communists and ought to remain such. Reforms could not reasonably be expected while the existence of the Party remained in jeopardy. Then there was the question of Hungary itself, of forming a view from a mass of contradictory and highly tendentious reportage. Photographs of murdered communists and the excesses of Radio Free Europe propaganda aroused a genuine fear of western military interven­ tion. When Pierre Courtade wrote on November 6th that the discontent of the masses, who were demanding a democratization of the régime, had been exploited by counter-revolutionary elements who had initiated a white terror, supported by a flood of émigrés entering from Austria,1 it was a view the balance of which many communist intellectuals broadly shared. It followed that the intervention of the Red Army, if unfortunate, was inevitable. It was on this point that the communist intellectuals differed most vehemently from their left-wing colleagues. The enduring effect of Hungary was to widen the gap between the communists and the Left. The analyses of the causes of the Revolution made by both groups were often strikingly similar; the dispute hinged on the cure for the malady. The Left saw in the Soviet intervention an inflammation of the malady, a reversion to Stalinism; the communists regarded it as the only effective shield against the gaping jaws of the weeping Western crocodile. Early in November the ex-communists Jean Duvignaud, Pierre Emmanuel, Clara Malraux and Edith Thomas joined with other ‘Titoist* intellectuals of the Left, including Cassou and Aveline, in petitioning Tito to intervene with Russia in order to secure the independence of a socialist Hungary.123Another letter sympathizing with Hungarian intellec­ tuals who were guarding the revolutionary and free traditions of thencountry was signed by Martin-Chauffier, Cassou, Claude Bourdet, Maurice Nadeau, Colette Audry, Gilles Martinet, Michel Leiris, Clara Malraux, Robert Antelme, Jean Duvignaud and Claude Roy.8 Soviet intervention evoked strong protests from the groups round Esprit, France-Observateur and Les Temps Modernes, Relations between the communists and the Left, already unbearably tense, were further worsened by news of the fate of Hungarian writers arrested in December. At the end of that month a secret session of the Hungarian Writers’ Association passed a resolution hostile to the Kádár régime and to the presence of the Red Army which alone sustained it. The Association was suspended in January and dissolved in April. Lukács 1. Humanité, 6 Novem ber 1956. 2. Le Monde, 6 Novem ber 1956. 3. Combat, 6 Novem ber 1956.

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1956-1960 had been taken to Rumania. In July 1957, Gáli and Obersovszky were sentenced to death, though not executed. In November a number of writers, including Déry, Háy and Tardos received long prison sentences. It was all as the Left had feared. In France the storm naturally centred on the C.N.E. On November 8th, 1956, the Directing Committee, consisting both of communists like Aragon and of non-communists like Sartre, publicly called on Kádár to protect the physical and moral interests of Hungarian writers, while adding that the Committee was profoundly divided over the meaning of recent events in Hungary.1 Two weeks later the annual sale had to be called off following attacks on the premises of VHumanité and of the Central Committee.12 On January 13th, an extraordinary General Meeting was held at which Francis Jourdain, who had succeeded Vercors as President, and who had associated himself with the letter of ‘the ten’ in November, attempted to play the rôle of arbiter between two sharply hostile factions. But reconciliation proved impossible: Martin-Chauffier’s resignation was followed by others, and when Aragon replaced Jourdain as President it became obvious that the communists were prepared to brook no further opposition.3 The Party kept control of the C.N.E., but its value as a front organization was severely compromised. Indeed on this occasion the third principle of utility was not working at all successfully. When another front organization, the French National Council of the World Peace Movement, called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the full exercise of Hungarian sovereignty, Laurent Casanova, the Party’s principal representative on the Council, pleaded in vain that the task was to define a common position and not to pass a political resolution.4 But no common position existed. In any case the Party had too often used the Movement for explicitly political purposes for the argument to carry any conviction. The crisis passed. The period of relative tranquillity, on which so many intellectuals had pinned their hopes, and in the expectation of which they had remained loyal, arrived, and still there was no sign of reforms, of real de-Stalinization, of the restoration of a viable inner-Party democracy. It was not in 1956 but in the years which followed that the full weight of an intellectual opposition began to be felt. Victor Leduc, Pierre Meren, Luden Sebag and Annie Kriegel quit the editorial committee of La Nouvelle Critique in November 1957. Jean Desanti had already resigned. He, Henri Lefebvre and other dissident philosophers like Maurice Caveing began to collaborate on Voies Nouvelles and on La Voie Com­ muniste, subtitled Bulletin de Vopposition communiste continuant 1. L.L.F .y 8 Novem ber 1956. 2. LJL.F.y 22 Novem ber 1956. 3. V ercors, For the Time Being, p. 47. 4. Humanité, 3 Decem ber 1956.

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VEtincelle-Tribune de Discussion. In July 1958, this latter organ, hitherto distributed clandestinely, announced its decision to publish overtly and regularly. Revisionism developed and extended its influence through La Nouvelle Réforme and V Etincelle, while Party cells primarily composed of intellectuals, particularly those of the Sorbonne, gave increasing signs of restlessness, causing Thorez to remark in June 1959 that ‘the best is not necessarily he who speaks the best or he who knows the most’.1 In 1958 Claude Morgan, one of the rebels over Hungary, failed to reapply for his Party card. The Party had invited him to resign as editor of Horizons, the Peace Movement journal, but he refused.2 The Fifteenth Congress of the Party in 1959 turned out to be as adroitly stage-managed as the Fourteenth in July 1956. Despite considerable intellectual agitation, there was a blank refusal to reconsider the errors of the Fourteenth Congress. Questions, criticisms and even autocriticisms, by a number of accounts, had been systematically thwarted and resisted by the leadership, particularly by Servin and Guyot in the rebellious Paris Federation.3 The Party continued to forget nothing and to learn nothing. Such indeed was the view of Jean Baby the historian, the publication of whose Critique de Base early in 1960 brought to a close a career of thirty-six years in the P.C.F. Baby, in withholding sympathy from those who had broken with the Party abruptly after Hungary, illustrated a tendency by which each ‘generation’ of communist rebels, like each generation of émigrés from some turbulent state, is inclined to maintain its suspicions of the previous generations. Nor was he in agreement with the revisionist philosophers who had been drifting out of the Party in the years since Hungary. What appalled him was the failure to retreat from Stalinism, the brutal manner in which all dissent was dismissed. Why, he asked, call a man of Marcel Prenant’s proven integrity a panic-monger ([paniquard)?* Why did the Party boast of its famous intellectuals while clamping down on their freedom of expression in any serious debate? Put in other words. Baby was pointing out how, as we stressed earlier, the lowest principle of utility tended constantly to mutilate the higher ones. Critique de Base was, however, in some ways a cautious document, loyal not only to the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, but to many aspects of current P.C.F. policy besides. Unlike Hervé’s essay of revolt in 1956, it attempted no fundamental revision of doctrine. A communist since 1924, Baby was no doubt genuinely reluctant to sever his links with the Party. But seniority, in the Communist Party, is not a passport to clemency. In May 1960, he was expelled by his cell, the Arène Boulanger, of the Party section of the 5th arrondissement of Paris. 1. Le Monde, 24 June 1959. 2. Le Populaire, 30 January 1958. 3. See F. d’Eaubonne, ‘Réflexions d’une Com muniste’, L .T .M ., N ovem berDecem ber 1958, pp. 949-54. 4. J. Baby, Critique de Base, Paris, 1960, p. 176.

234

PA RT TH R E E

Three Case Histories

PART THREE

Three Case Histories ANDRÉ GIDE

ANDRÉ MALRAUX

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

T h e historical, or group, approach has its inherent limitations. Its focus turns outward, giving a necessarily curtailed and inadequate impression of the wide variety of impulses, phobias and inhibitions which can govern the intellectual’s relationship to the cause, to the Party. It tends unduly to suggest a dominant determinism at the expense of the individual’s ‘free-will’. The intervention, at this juncture, of three brief case-histories may help to balance the picture. While, as intellectuals responsive to the appeal of communism, Gide, Malraux and Sartre were typical, in an exact sense, only of themselves, their political careers reveal an interesting range of mentalities at work: the elderly, outraged moralist-rationalist; the young and romantic revolutionary hero, the man of action, the aesthete; and the intensely analytical philosopher coming to communism gradually and in a spirit of cautious appraisal. Their combined case-histories have the advantage of spanning at least three of the four decades under examina­ tion in this study. None was ever a Party member; eluding absolute sublimation and absolute discipline, they revealed more of themselves than was usually the case with those who surrendered their minds to a wider, corporate mind. Each (although with qualifications in the case of Sartre) experienced the full cycle of emotions from hope and enthusiasm to despair and disgust. And yet their reactions to any single historical event or situation were rarely identical. If, with regard to other French intellectuals, no very sweeping conclusions can be drawn from these case-histories, lines of further inquiry and an awareness of the intricacy of the factors involved, perhaps, can be.

André Gide ‘I have read somewhere that the “intellectuals” who come to communism ought to be considered by the Party as “unstable elements” who can be used but who should be always distrusted. Ah! How true! There have

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been times when I have said and resaid it to VaiUant-Couturier, but he did not wish to understand.’ ‘It is to the truth that I attach myself; if the Party deserts it, at the same moment I desert the Party.’1 This was Gide the disenchanted, reflecting on his own case after his return from Russia. The essence of his complaints about the Soviet system, formulated in his Retour and Retouches, are by now familiar. Dreadful uniformity, facile conformism, idolatry of Stalin, brutal indoctrination, ignorance of the outside world, repression exercised by the dictatorship of a few men, artistic bigotry, fear of originality, exploitation of the workers, etc. The communists heaped Gide with dung. Others, eschewing insults, charged him with lack of historical perspective, with approaching a social problem as a psychologist and moralist. There was something in this. In August 1937, he reflected in his journal that future historians would examine how the communist spirit ceased to be opposed to the fascist spirit, or even to be differentiated from it.2 Gide’s perspective, devoid of any dialectical understanding, was founded on a set of moral absolutes whose relevance to the world of real politics was at best tenuous. What sort of a ‘communist’ was Gide? A former member of the Action Française, his evolution toward communism has been commonly, and correctly, traced largely to his voyage to the Congo in 1925 and the revulsion he experienced as a witness of the gross exploitation of the Africans. He returned to France a con­ vinced reformist, but was criticized in /’Humanité for failing to advocate the complete abandonment of colonial territories. Increasingly conscious of social, as opposed to purely personal, problems, his interest and imagination were stimulated by the Soviet Five Year Plan. On May 13th, 1931, he recorded in his journal: ‘But above all I should like to live long enough to see Russia’s plan succeed and the states of Europe obliged to accept what they insisted on ignoring. . . My whole heart applauds that gigantic and yet entirely human undertaking.’8 Two months later he wrote: ‘I should like to cry aloud my affection for Russia: and that my cry should be heard, should have some importance.’4 Had Gide, then, become a Marxist? By no means. Like Rolland and Barbusse, he occasionally paid lip-service to the prophetic aspects of Marxism, substituting his own moral absolutes for a dialectical teleology. In 1933, he confidently predicted that the dictatorship of the proletariat would give way in time to full communism.6 But in the same year he 1. A. Gide, Retouches à mon Retour de V U .R .S.S., Paris, 1937, pp. 67-8. 2. A. G ide, Journals, III, 1928-1939, New Y ork, 1949, p. 359. 3. Ibid., p. 160. 4. Ibid., pp. 179-80. 5. A. Gide, ‘Le communisme et le problèm e de la guerre*, L.N .R .F ., 1 A pril 1933, p. 701.

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commented : ‘W hat leads me to communism is not Marx, it is the Gospel.’1 and in 1934 he added: ‘But, I beg of you, if I am a Marxist, let me be so without knowing i t ’8 He professed himself bewildered by Paul Nizan’s Les Chiens de Garde and its call for a fully proletarian philosophy. Gide, like Julien Benda, could see only one philosophy, as one mathematics; cogito, ergo sum, he argued, applied equally to all men, whether bourgeois or proletarians.8 Nor could he find any way of fusing his art - always his primary preoccupation - with communist doctrine, the narrowness and dogmatism of which appalled him. Without doubt his Christian-Protestant heritage influenced Gide’s new political passion. According to one critic, he rejected Christian dogma and the Church, while retaining the essence of Christ’s teaching as an example of what man could accomplish without the help of any illusory divine grace.12345The same concept, it will be remembered, exercised a potent attraction for Barbusse. Jacques Maritain and Ramon Fernandez both made this obvious point about moral transference, and Gide agreed. ‘The breakdown of communism,’ he wrote in December 1938, ‘restores to Christianity its revolutionary implication.*6 If Gide’s communism shared, admittedly in different terms, a religious factor with that of Barbusse and Rolland, equally operative was his rationalism and even pragmatism. In May 1931, he spoke of his own intellectual need for scientific truth. Having read a number of works on the Five Year Plan, including Knickerbocker’s, the underlying idea seemed to him more than ever rational. And pragmatic: ‘In the abomin­ able distress of the present world, new Russia’s plan now seems to me salvation. . . the miserable arguments of its enemies, far from convincing me, make my blood boil.’6 Privilege, vast discrepancies of wealth, now struck him as harmful and stupid, much as they did Shaw and Wells. As early as 1928 he had reflected: ‘When faced with certain rich people, how can one fail to feel communistically inclined?’7 Worried by his own favoured position, he began to accept, superficially at least, the Marxist verdict on the terrible injustices, inherent contradictions and war-like character of capitalism. Gide’s revolt was certainly a moral one; at the same time a colder rationalism, an un-Marxist patrician disgust, with close affinities to Shaw’s, was always apparent. ‘You have stupefied, debased and defiled the members of it [the working class]; and yet, you have the audacity to say, Look how unclean they are! . . . What it is 1. Journals, p. 276. 2. Ibid., p. 308. 3. A . G ide, Littérature Engagée, Paris, 1950, pp. 51-2. 4. G . Brachfeld, André Gide and the Communist Temptation, Geneva, 1959, p. 68. 5. Journals, p. 409. 6. Ibid., p. 232. 7. Ibid., p . 5.

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possible for them to become - that is the thing that matters. And that is what strikes fear in you.’1 Conversely, Gide saw in the U.S.S.R. not only the flowering seeds of justice, but also the development of man’s potential for the mastery of reason. It was, in his view, the only country where the writer could achieve direct contact with his readers. *1 admire nothing so much in the U.S.S.R.,’ he wrote in July 1932, ‘as the organization of leisure, of education, of culture.’12 His was a vision of a true individualism which could serve the community, of an art both free, independent and collec­ tive, a vision which had little to do with Stalinist cultural policy and possibly little to do with life. Astonishing was the confusion and naivety inherent in Gide’s message to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, in which he prophesied: ‘If the U.S.S.R. triumphs, and she must triumph - her art will soon disengage itself from the struggle; I mean to say: will emancipate itself.’3 Shaw befriended Russia in the ’thirties, but he made no bones about his unorthodox line of reasoning. Gide, on the other hand, living in a society where many of the best minds were turning to communism under the watchful eye of a powerful political party, and lacking Shaw’s robust cynicism, spoke up in a language which could be mistaken for the bona fide communist one. In 1933, Ramon Fernandez revealed the extent of this illusion when he declared that Gide had surrendered himself to a machine which was bound to deny him, for the first time, all right to spontaneity.45With regard to Shaw, such a comment would have sounded ridiculous. Yet the difference was more apparent than real; it was merely that Gide strove harder to speak the communist tongue, to do the right thing by his new friends and their cause.6 For Gide never did surrender himself. The notion of a totally com­ mitted communist returning broken with disillusionment from Russia is quite false. He did not join the Party, and when, late in 1932, the A.E.A.R. invited him to join, he refused, protesting that he could not be expected to write according to the principles of a charter; people would believe he was writing under orders.6 In June 1933, he noted that since the Hitler crisis had become acute he had received a dozen solicitations from different groups whose objectives were the same. He had, however, systematically refused to countersign anything he had not himself written, for there had not been a single declaration of which he entirely 1. Quoted in S. Putnam , ‘A ndré Gide and Communism*, Partisan Review, November-D ecem ber 1934, p. 34. 2. Journals, p. 245. 3. Littérature Engagée, p. 58. 4. R. Fernandez, ‘N otes sur l’évolution d’André G ide', L.N.R.F., 1 July 1933, p. 135. 5. Gide’s views, on his own adm ission, were considerably influenced by V aillantC outurier, the D utch comm unist Jef L ast, and even by Eugène D abit. 6. Journals, p. 250.

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approved. He appreciated, however, or claimed to appreciate, the need for unity.1 In retrospect, the ominous warnings directed toward him by Fernandez and others appear quite superfluous. Constantly, almost obsessively, he declared himself unfit for politics. ‘Do not therefore ask me to belong to a Party,’ he wrote in June 1932, and, two years later, ‘I prefer to keep silent rather than to speak under a diktat, if it were to falsify my voice.’2 The idea of a communist régime in France was, in any case, never one he could stomach. Gide was an individualist par excellence. The delicate synthesis of the individual and communal elements, which he so ardently desired, turned to dust in his own hands. The contention that to join the many culturalpolitical bodies proliferating among the Left in these years was to write under a diktat was sheer nonsense, as many idealists, far more reserved toward communism than Gide appeared to be, could have testified. An unhappy divorce, sometimes giving the impression of hypocrisy, was manifest between his words and his actions. The personality, he wrote in August 1933, never asserts itself more than in renouncing itself.8 A year later he denounced the individualism of the Russian peasants, their ‘bitter anti-interdependence’, which was merely a caricature of true individualism. Evidently one law for the writer and one for the peasant. Gide was guilty of mere cant when he wrote: T believe the more particular the individual, the more gripping the delight he takes in being suddenly absorbed into the mass and losing his identity.’4 Of which individual he was thinking it is difficult to imagine. Although Gide endorsed the campaign on behalf of Dimitrov and Thaelmann, travelling with Malraux to Berlin in January 1934 to inter­ vene on Dimitrov’s behalf, he also supported the efforts of Magdeleine Paz and Charles Plisnier to vindicate Victor Serge’s name at the Inter­ national Writers’ Congress in June 1935. Bearing in mind that Gide believed Serge to have suffered grave injustices in Russia, and that he often expressed reservations about the spirit of communist dogma, it is reasonable to assume that he set out for the Soviet Union in 1936 with certain doubts implanted in the forefront of his mind. Prior to this journey, the young Trotskyist Claude Naville prophesied that Gide would not be pleased with Russia in the flesh, representing as he did an exceptionally humane element of the bourgeoisie pushing toward a better future, but quite incapable of grasping revolutionary materialism.5 This may be a fair note on which to conclude. One thing is certain: the only principle of utility vis-à-vis the Party which Gide fulfilled was the first, that of prestige. And even this finally turned sour. 1. Ibid. y p. 273. 2. Littérature Engagée, p. 50. 3. Journals, p. 279. 4. Ibid, y p. 325. 5. C. N aville, André Gide et le Communisme, Paris, 1936, p. 67.

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André Malraux It was not without irony that Malraux’s novels, as advertisements for the communist ethos, attained the zenith of their influence over young French intellectuals at precisely the time when their author was severing his links with the Party.1 In the heat of the Resistance struggle, Malraux’s image of man in combat, tom from his solitude by comradeship and by action, marching relentlessly toward death, yet sustained by his sense of com­ munist purpose, was bound to prove attractive. Claude Roy and Edgar Morin acknowledged their debt to Malraux; in no other writer were the romantic and rational aspects of the revolutionary spirit so satisfyingly harmonized. The apostasy of Malraux, unlike that of Gide, was slow, subterranean and imperceptible to all but the closest observers. Consequently it was often asked after the war at what moment he had broken with the Party (of which, in fact, he had not been a member). As with Paul Nizan, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had on him a decisive effect, but, unlike Nizan, he did not publicize his defection and he provoked no immediate scandal or vilification. Louis Fischer recalled a conversation in Paris during which Malraux remarked, ‘We are back at zero.’ The Left, he believed, was mortally wounded, but he was anxious to start again on a new basis.8 Many years later he gave this view of the Pact: ‘It was perfectly com­ prehensible from a Russian point of view . . . but I could not agree that Stalin had the right to pay for this logic with the blood of millions of ordinary Frenchmen whom he had doomed.’8Nizan had felt the same way. Too old for the air force, he enlisted in the tank corps. Wounded, he ended up in a POW camp at Sens from which he escaped, later reemerging in the Resistance as a maquis commander. As ‘Colonel Berger’ he commanded the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade in the Alsace campaign and in the capture of Strasbourg. Captured again, he again escaped, although the Germans were able to destroy several of his manuscripts. A strong opponent of the M.L.N. merging with the communist Front National, he emerged from the war as de Gaulle’s Minister of Information. Why Gaullism? In the course of a discussion on Malraux held in 1948, Gaëtan Picon suggested that it was not in meditating on philosophical or moral issues that he had ceased to be a communist, but rather that it was under the impact of political, economic and diplomatic events. He had sud­ denly found himself in total opposition to communist policy, but per­ haps only partially to the communist mystique.1234 This does not appear to be true. Malraux’s Gaullism was the outcome of a clearly defined shift, or development, of philosophical position. The 1. 2. 3. 4.

See E nquête sur ]e Communisme et les Jeunes’, Esprit, February 1946. L. Fischer, M en and Politics, p. 352. New York Times, 15 February 1953. Interview with Theodore H . W hite. ’Interrogation à M alraux', Esprit, O ctober 1948, p. 456.

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1939 Pact alone does not suffice as an explanation. Numerous were the intellectuals who buried that grudge at Stalingrad. Yet Malraux sustained his hostility through the years when the Soviet Union and the French Party were enjoying an unparalleled prestige and popularity, years when their interests and those of the western states were as closely harmonized as possible. Malraux’s apostasy emerges as one of fundamental conviction. The Nietzschean element in his thinking remained, while the semiSpenglerian strain was developed (‘the successive psychic states of man are irreducibly different’).1 Albert Béguin’s notion that he had become the only authentic French fascist, a revolutionary who could only despair of men, would depend on one’s definition of ‘authentic’. Malraux was well aware that he was being accused of fascism; he told Roger Stéphane, T know that I would never be a fascist'.2 But it was clear that his thought had taken a sharp turn toward the metaphysical, the geo-political, the Germanic. Lecturing in 1946 to the opening session of the UNESCO conference at the Sorbonne, he divided cultures into ethnic or geo­ graphical blocs, Russian, American and European. ‘The strength of the West,’ he said, ‘lies in its acceptance of the unknown.’8 His admiration for élites, long since apparent in novels like Les Conquérants and La Condition Humaine, was more than ever evident. He praised ‘the few’ of the Battle of Britain, lauded de Gaulle and Churchill, expressed a deep admiration for the British Empire. His plea that, ‘it doesn’t matter . . . whether you are communist, anti-communist, liberal. . . for the only real problem is to know how - above these structures - and in what form we can recreate man,’ revealed the extent of his antipathy to materialism. ‘The European heritage,’ he concluded, ‘is tragic humanism.’4 Utterances of this nature he could not conceivably have made in the ’thirties. When, in 1935, sixty-four French intellectuals defended Musso­ lini’s Abyssinian adventure in the name of Western values and Latin civilization, Malraux had replied that the West had not been a valid power- or value-concept for many years past.5 The oppressive, pedestrian and commercially avaricious British Empire of Les Conquérants had now been reincarnated as a romantic metaphysical ideal within which heroes like Colonel Lawrence (and, by analogy, Malraux himself) could pursue the infinite. Malraux the Gaullist merely conceded that Europeans had a ‘bad conscience’ about their privileges and colonies, whereas the young and naive civilizations of America and Russia still regarded their privileges as legitimate.6 1. Q uoted ibid., p. 459. 2. Ibid., p. 468. 3. A . M alraux, ‘M an and A rtistic Culture’, trans. by S. G ilbert, in Reflections on Our Age, p. 97. 4. Ibid,, 5. Commune, Decem ber 1935, p. 413. 6. A. M alraux and J. Burnham , The Case fo r de Gaulle, New Y ork, 1948, p. 11.

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Malraux’s anti-Sovietism ran deep. It had the peculiar passion engendered by a sense of betrayal, of which only ex-communists are capable. In his Sorbonne lecture he confined himself to the mild and conciliatory assertion that ‘The Soviet cultural authority holds today that three-dimensional art best meets the desiderata of the Russian proletariat. My own view is that Russian painting is bad, and Russians set little store by it.’1 The outraged aesthete in Malraux should not be underestimated. It had been a latent, and never quite dormant, factor even in his com­ munist days, when two conflicting tendencies had vied with one another in a juxtaposition which never attained a dialectical synthesis. On the one hand, he had written in his preface to Le Temps du Mépris that ‘the history of artistic sensibility in France for the past fifty years might be called the death-agony of the brotherhood of man*. Kassener, the com­ munist hero of the novel, believed that communism restored to the individual all the creative potentialities of his nature.2 Yet he himself stopped short of fully associating himself with this view. His astonishingly heterodox speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 brought a heated reply from Karl Radek. Communism, said Malraux, had shown confidence in man. But the Soviets had not always shown as much confidence in their writers. Soviet literature revealed the external facts about the U.S.S.R., but not its ethic or, more important, its psychology. In a note of warning to the Congress, Malraux’s dualism appeared with undeniable clarity: ‘Le marxisme, c'est la conscience du social; la culture, c'est la conscience du psycho­ logique.'* Was this heresy so far removed from Gide’s? Pointing to the rich heritage of the Russian classics, he warned that the rejection of psychology in art could only lead to what he called an absurd indivi­ dualism. He was convinced that man, living man, always interposed himself between doctrine and literature. The essential liberty for the artist was not liberty to do anything, but liberty to do what he wanted to do.4 Observations such as these, deliberately formulated at a time when socialist realism was being solemnly consecrated as dogma, render intelligible, if not inevitable, the acute aesthetic repugnance Malraux later came to feel toward Stalinist cultural policy and which undoubtedly affected his re-evaluation of Western, or European values. ‘It is not by chance that the Russian communists attack Picasso. His painting chal­ lenges the very system upon which they base everything: willy-nilly this painting represents the most acute presence of Europe.’6 This is not to overlook more obvious and immediate considerations of a 1. ‘M an and A rtistic C ulture’, op. cit.t p. 90. 2. A. M alraux, Days o f Wrath, trans. by H . Chevalier, New Y ork, 1936, pp. 5-7. 3. A. M alraux, ‘L’A rt est une Conquête’, Commune, Septem ber-O ctober 1934, p. 69. 4. A. M alraux, ‘L’A ttitude de l’A rtiste’, Commune, Novem ber 1934, p. 167. 5. A. M alraux, Postface to The Conquerors, trans. by J. Le Q erq , Boston, 1956, pp. 181-2.

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purely political nature. Internationalism, he believed, had been discarded in favour of Russian nationalism; the Pact of 1939 merely illustrated this. ‘We had believed that in becoming less French a man becomes more human. Now we know that he simply becomes more Russian.’1 Russia had swept aside the Internationale with a ‘vast disdainful gesture’.12 The Soviet technique in France revolved on the systematic organization of lies chosen for their efficacity and perpetrated through psychologically conditioned reflexes. The concept of revolutionary continuity had turned out to be a sham; how could the gold-braided Stalinist generals claim to be the legitimate heirs of Lenin’s companions?3 Communist injustices excited his anger. On more than one occasion he recalled how Gide and he had gone to Berlin to demand Dimitrov’s release, and how the same Dimitrov had since had the guiltless Petkov hanged. Who, he asked, had changed; Gide and himself - or Dimitrov? Europe would, must survive. The Atlantic, or American, civilization sprang from and still respected her. In the course of a conversation with James Burnham in the winter of 1947-48, Malraux elaborated his political ideas in greater detail. The Third Force in his opinion would merely combine bureaucratic control of the economy with liberalism in politics. This could not work. What was needed was decisiveness. ‘Cultural liberalism leads toward the greatest possible freedom. Political liberalism . . . leads to eternal National Fronts, that is to say, to con­ fusion.’45There was a dangerous metaphysical vagueness about all this; precise in his condemnations, he was evasive in his positive recom­ mendations. He would not tolerate communists in the government; nor would he agree explicitly with Burnham’s suggestion that the Party be suppressed. ‘Decisiveness’ he was convinced would wither the communist ranks. He was inclined to agree with Burnham that the traditional struggle between capitalists and proletarians was no longer the main issue. The old categories of left, right and centre were no longer valid. Therefore it was absurd to call Gaullism reactionary. ‘What Gaullism stands for, first of all, is the restoration of a structure and vigour to France. We do not guarantee that we will succeed, but we are certain that our opponents will not.’6 If the R.P.F. was avowedly élitist, authoritarian and contemptuous of the French party-system, the question again arises, was it not semi-fascist in character? The later history of Gaullism in power under the Fifth Republic would seem to suggest a different diagnosis, although doubts remain. Malraux pinned his faith on ‘cultural liberalism’ surviving in a 1. The Case fo r de Gaulle, p. 40. 2. Postface to The Conquerors, p. 176. 3. Ibid., p. 187. 4. The Case fo r de Gaulle, p. 61. 5. Ibid., p. 22.

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non-liberal state. Of bis sincerity and of his profound distaste for the fascist attitude toward culture there can be no doubt. This was the one legacy from his communist days (apart from his admiration for energetic élites) which endured. In a speech delivered at Harvard in March 1937 to raise funds for Republican Spain, he had denounced the fascist exaltation of race, nation and class as irreducible entities. He saw fascist ideologies as static and particular, tending constantly toward the com­ plete militarization of society and toward the struggle with other men instead of with nature.1 In V Espoir, his novel of the Civil War, he quoted disparagingly the Nationalist General Millán Astray’s slogan, ‘Death to intelligence, long live death.’123Franco had, he noted, deprived Miguel de Unamuno, Spain’s greatest writer, of his post as Rector of the University of Salamanca, although he had been the only illustrious defender of Spanish fascism. ‘Death to intelligence’ never exercised any attraction for Malraux. Idealized, and even mystical, as some of his post-war political concepts may have been, they were always formulated in highly intellectual and cerebral terms. Although the Gaullist élite had of neces­ sity to be an élite of commanders, he continued to visualize it as one of super-charged intellectuals rather than as a race of military powerseekers. The ideals of abnegation, self-sacrifice and service, the basis of his earlier communist revolutionary élites, retained their value. Malraux had always been a leading candidate for apostasy. When it occurred it occasioned more speculation than surprise. He had never embraced communist ideology or strategy in its totality in the way that, say, Aragon or Vaillant-Couturier had. For Malraux the proletariat gained significance more as a symbol of eternal humiliation than as the dialectically-ordained instrument of history. Although he defended against Trotsky aspects of the Comintern’s handling of the abortive Chinese revolution, Garine, the hero of Les Conquérants, had little faith in the ‘Roman’ mentality of the Bolsheviks and complained that Borodin, the Comintern agent in China, wanted to ‘manufacture revolutions as Ford manufactures cars’.8 In La Condition Humaine, the revolutionary heroes Kyo, Katow and Tchen lose their lives as a result of the policy of the Stalinist International. As early as 1934, Ilya Ehrenburg com­ mented that Malraux transformed the revolution of a great country into the history of a group of conspirators. Defeat was not the defeat of a class or party, but fatality weighing down on Kyo and Katow.4*This criticism was both inaccurate and unjust, but the early breach with communist orthodoxy is nevertheless significant. 1. A. M alraux, The Fascist Threat to Culture, H arvard, 1937, pp. 6-7. 2. A. M airaux, Romans: V Espoir, Paris, 1947, p. 751. 3. A. M alraux, The Conquerors, trans. by W. W hale, Boston, 1956, p. 159. 4 .1. Ehrenburg, Duhamel, Gide, M alraux, M auriac, M orand, Romains, Unamuno vus par un écrivain