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

page
ABBREVIATIONS 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 23
2. Principles of U tility 34
3. A lienation and D iscipline 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 59
2. 1927-1934 93
3. 1934-1939 112
4. 1939-1940 137
5. 1940-1945 147
6. 1945-1956 162
7. Four Themes: 197
1. N ationalism
2. Anti-Semitism?
3. Colonialism
4. 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 261
2. History in the Making 276
3. Communism and Science 300
4. The Writers - Socialist Realism and Zhdanovism 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 369
BIBLIOGRAPHY 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.
M.L.N. Mouvement de Libération Nationale.
M.R.P. Mouvement Républicain Populaire.
P.C.F. Parti Communiste Français.
R.D.R. Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire.
R. P.F.Rassemblement du Peuple Français.
S. F.I.O. Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière.
U.D.S.R. Union Démocratique et Socialiste de la Résistance.
U.F.F. Union des Femmes Françaises.
U.N.E.F. Union Nationale des Etudiants Français.

Abbreviations used in Footnotes

B.C. Bulletin Communiste.
C.B. Cahiers du Bolchévisme.
C. C. Cahiers du Communisme.
D. N. Démocratie Nouvelle.
D.P. Défense de la Paix.
L.L.F. Les Lettres Françaises.
L.N.C. La Nouvelle Critique.
L.N.L. Les Nouvelles Littéraires.
L.N.R.F. La Nouvelle Revue Française.
L.T.M. Les Temps Modernes.

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 1918-
1919 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 ‘Bolsheviza-
tion’ 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 1914-
1960. 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
T he 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 camp-
followers 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
•

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 sabre-
rattlers’ 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.

30
 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.
31
 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.

32
 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 B
 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.

34
 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
35
 THE PARTY AND INTELLECTUALS

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

36
 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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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 ., September-
October 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.
37
 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.

38
 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’, non-
Marxist 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.

40
 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.
41
 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).

42
 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.
43
 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.
44
 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 Martin-
Chauffier 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.
45
 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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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.

46
 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.
47
 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 left-
wing 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.
48
 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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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.
49
 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.

50
 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 intellec-
1. 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.
51
 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.

52
 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 Vaillant-
Couturier. 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.
53
 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.

54
 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.
55
 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'Πuvre 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.

59
 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. Ibid.
2. R. Lefebvre, La Révolution ou la M ort, Paris, 1920, pp. 25-30.
3. P. Vaillant-Couturier, Poésie, Paris, 1938, p. 75.
4. Ibid., p. 83.
5. M. Martinet, La N uit, Paris, 1921, p. 14.

60
 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.
61
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

62
 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.
63
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

Improbable as such a statement may have been in the circumstances, it

gives an indication of the influences at work on Barbusse. Henri Guil-
beaux 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.

64
 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 on the
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 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 Vaillant-
Couturier, 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.

66
 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 authorita-
1. 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.
67
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
69
 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

70
 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.
71
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

72
 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). Vaillant-
1. 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.
73
 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

74
 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.
75
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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. See VHumanité, 3 February, 26 March, 16 May, 6 November 1919.

2. Quoted in J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, Berlin, 1960, p. 348.
3. G. Cogniot, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 22.
4. Humanité, 12 October 1945.
5. Humanité, 12 October 1954.
6. J. Rühle, op. cit., p. 345.
7. A. Vidal, Henri Barbusse Soldat de la P aix, p. 168.
8. 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 ‘social-
democrat’, ‘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. Humanité, 26 April 1922.
2. Clarté, 15 November 1924.
3. See Séverine’s article on bourgeois morality, Clarté, 3 December 1921.
4. H. Barbusse, Le Couteau entre les dents, Paris, 1921, p. 54.
5. H. Barbusse, Paroles d'un Combattant (1917-1920), p. 16.
6. H. Barbusse, La Lueur dans l'Abîme, p. 128.
7. Ibid., p. 68.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

Not least of the tasks the intellectuals could usefully fulfil was to
explain and defend the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Henri Guil-
beaux, 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 ‘Rolland-
isme' 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. H. Barbusse, The Soviet Union and Peace, New York, n.d., pp. 1-20.
2. M. Marx, ‘La Turquie vaincue’, Humanité, 4, 8, 10, 24, 29 November 1921.
3. Humanité, 25 April 1921.
4. Clarté, 3 December 1921.

80
 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 ‘master-
mason*. 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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 Intellectuals and the party

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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 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

84
 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. G. Duhamel, Les Espoirs et les Epreuves 1919-1928, Paris, 1953, p. 27.
2. G. Duhamel, ‘Le Voyage de Moscou’, L .N .L ., 16 July-1 October 1927.
3. Humanité, 29 November 1923.
4. G. Duhamel, op. cit.
5. L. Durtain, ‘L’autre Europe: Moscou et sa foi’,Europe, October 1927-January 1928.
6. G. Duhamel, Délibérations, Paris, 1925, pp. 57-63.
7. P. Hamp, ‘Eloge de Shylock’, Europe, January 1926, p. 18.

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 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Secretary-
General, 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, Secretary-
General 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. Humanité, 26 October 1921.

2. Humanité, 26 April 1922.
3. Humanité, 3 June 1922.
4. Clarté, 1 December 1922.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Vaillant-
Couturier, 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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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.
89
 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 ‘social-
democratization’, 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.

90
 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.
91
 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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 February-
March 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,

92
 C H A P T E R TW O

1927-1934

T he 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
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.
93
 I NTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

94
 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: Aden-
Arabie, 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.

95
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Saint-
Pol 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.

96
 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. Quoted in J. Rühle, Literatur und Revolution, p. 390.

2. R. Garaudy, L'Itinéraire d'Aragon, Paris, 1961, p. 168.
3. Clarté, 1 December 1924.
4. L. Aragon, Pour un réalisme socialiste, Paris, 1935, p. 51.
5. R. Garaudy, op. cit., p. 181.
6. Clarté, 30 November 1925.
97 D
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PA RTY

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.
99
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PA RTY

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.

100
 1927-1934

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. Commune, July 1933, p. 50. The first verse is quoted above.

2. L. Aragon, Hourra VOural, Paris, 1934, p. 137.
3. H. Barbusse, M anifeste aux Intellectuels, Paris, 1927, p. 10.
4. Ibid., p. 41.
101
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 pro-
Soviet 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.
102
 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.

103
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
104
 1927-1934

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.
105
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 anarchisti-
cally 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 Amsterdam-
Pleyel 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 self-
congratulation.
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.
107
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Secretary-
General 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 self-
styled 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 Vaillant-
Couturier 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 Grin-
goire 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. J.-T. Desanti, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Communisme’, L .N .C ., June 1956, p. 96.
2. J.-R. Bloch, ‘Le 12 Février*, Europe, 15 March 1934, pp. 409-16.
3. R. Fernandez, ‘Littérature et Politique*, L .N .R .F ., 1 February 1935, p. 286.
4. R. Fernandez, ‘Lettre ouverte à André Gide*, L.N .R .F ., 1 April 1934, p. 705.
5. Letter to the author.
6. Which soon included Picasso, Gide, Benda, Joliot-Curie et al.
113
 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 petit-
bourgeois 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 stage-
managed, 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.
115
 I n t e l l e c t u a l s a ñ d Th e p a r t y

Mann, Johannes Becher and Bertolt Brecht leading the Germans, Ehren-
burg 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.

116
 1934-T939

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.
117
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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. Vickers-
Armstrong 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.

118
 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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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 1934-1939

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.
121
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

122
 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 Wheeler-
Bennett, 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.
123
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

completely isolated, it also gained them one notable adherent - Jean-

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

124
 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.
125
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

126
 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.

127
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
129 E
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

130
 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

132
 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 ex-
communist 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

134
 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 anti-
Munich 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.
135
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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. V. Serge, Mémoires d'un Révolutionnaire, pp. 410-12.

2. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de VAge, p. 207.
3. H. Guilbeaux, La Fin des Soviets, p. 55.
4. Vorwaerts was the Socialist Party daily paper in pre-Nazi Germany.

136
 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.
137
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

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 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.
139
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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. L. Aragon, Les Communistes, 7, Paris, 1949, pp. 154-72.
2. Ibid., p. 238.
3. L. Moussinac, Le Radeau de la M éduse, Paris, 1945, p. 200.
4. P. Daix, Dix-neuvième Printemps, I l, Paris, 1952, p. 77.
5. P. Courtade, Essai sur l'Antisoviétism e, Paris, 1946, p. 49.
6. G. Willard, op. cit.t p. 118.
7. 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 long-
conceived 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.
141
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Com-

1. 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 two-
pronged 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.

143
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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

145
 In t e l l e c t u a l s 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.

146
 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.

147
 iNTELLECTUÀLS ÀND THÉ PARTY

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 com-

1. 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.

148
 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 Francs-
Tireurs 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 fellow-
travellers - 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.

150
 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 Anglo-
Saxon 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.
151
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 left-
wing 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, l9Avant-
garde, 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.

152
 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 non-
C 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Right-
wing 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.

154
 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.

155
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 ay-

June 1945, pp. 49-56.
2. Humanité, 7 April 1950.
3. P. Langevin, La Pensée et VAction, p. 308.

156
 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

158
 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.
159
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

160
 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 Nurem-
burg 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.
161 F
 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.

162
 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.
163
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
165
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

166
 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. P. C ourtade, Essai sur VAntisoviétisme, pp. 55-61.
2. P. C ourtade, Jim m y, Paris, 1951, p. 261.
3. Humanité, 26 A pril 1949.
4. A. A. Zhdanov, The International Situation, London, 1947, p. 18.
5. J. B ruhat, ‘Elections et D ém ocratie en U.R.S.S.*, D .N ., M arch 1947, p. 152.

167
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PA RTY

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 fellow-
travellers 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 Clermont-
Ferrand, 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.

168
 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 Stalinists-
admitted 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Father-
land 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

172
 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.
173
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 anti-
Soviet 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 Joliot-
Curie 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.

174
 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. L. M artin-Chauffier, ‘Le Faux Dilemme’, in La Voie Libre, Paris, 1951, pp. 99-
109.
175
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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*, January 1950,
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.

176
 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 Ranko-
vitch 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 inner-
Party 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 1948-
1950, 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 forty-
eight 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Martin-
Chauffier 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.

185
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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 Mal-
raux’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. Humanité, 17 A pril 1947.

2. R. Garaudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, p. 39.
3. A. K oestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 403.
4. J. K anapa, Le Traître et le Prolétaire, p. 19.

186
 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 non-

Party 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.

188
 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.
189
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

190
 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 .).
191
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
192
 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.
193 G
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

195
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

(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.

196
 C H A P T E R SEV EN

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.
197
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

19$
 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 Great-
Russian 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 Thael-
mann’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.
199
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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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 FOUR THEMES

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 AND THE PARTY

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.

202
 FOUR THEMES

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.
203
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Biro-
bidjan, 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.

204
 FOUR THEMES

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 Anglo-
Saxon 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.
205
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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’.123
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.

206
 FOUR THEMES

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 Indo-
China 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.

207
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.
208
 FOUR THEMES

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 pro-
communist 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
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 Indo-
China.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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 FOUR THEMBS

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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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

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 FOUR THEMES

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 Blum-
Bymes 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

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 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.

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 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.
221
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 plebeian-
ism, 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. P. E luard, op. cit., pp. 182-3.
2. P. Hervé, La Révolution et les Fétiches, pp. 117-30.
3. Humanité, 25 January 1956.
4. Humanité, 10 February 1956.
5. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le Réformism e et les Fétiches*, L .T .M ., February 1956.
6. P. Hervé, Lettre à Sartre.
223
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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.

224
 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.
225 H
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 long-
suppressed 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.
227
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PA RTY

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.
229
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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-and-
white 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
231
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 then-
country 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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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE PARTY

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 ber-
Decem 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
237
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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.

238
 THRBE CASE HISTORIES

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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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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, Novem-

ber-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 aillant-
C outurier, the D utch comm unist Jef L ast, and even by Eugène D abit.
6. Journals, p. 250.

240
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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 cultural-
political 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.
241
 THREE CASE HISTORIBS

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

242
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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 semi-
Spenglerian 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.
243
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

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 power-
seekers. 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 <TU.RJS.S., p. 194.

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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

Malraux’s heroes manifested themselves in a climate of extreme

tension, in settings entirely remote from French political life (except
during the Resistance). The often mundane and pedestrian tasks required
of the normal French communist intellectual did not interest him. His
true fatherland was that of courage. Writing in V Espoir of a Catholic
colonel and an anarchist, both of whom fought for the Republic, he
observed: *Pour Ximines comme pour Puig, le courage aussi était une
patrie.’* The existentialist aspect of his thought - man is whatever he
makes of himself in victory or defeat - was one which rendered his
transition to Gaullism comparatively easy. His fidelity was not to a single
party, but to a set of values which that party might best protect. In China
in the ’twenties, in Spain in the ’thirties, he had developed a vision of an
exceptional human type which did not leave him during the Resistance,
his collaboration on Combat, his work in the U.D.S.R. in 1946, and
finally in his capacity of Propaganda Secretary of the Gaullist R.P.F.
Les Conquérants, he later wrote, ‘presented a type of hero in whose person
aptitude was blended with action, culture with lucidity*. In the ’twenties
he envisaged this type developing within the framework of Bolshevism:
in the ’forties, of Gaullism. The image was one of strength tempered by
justice and compassion, of force employed to combat force, of both
Trotsky and Colonel Lawrence.

Jean-Paul Sartre
The political evolution of Sartre, without doubt the most perceptive and
morally responsible of the French philosopher-writers to have wrestled
w ith the problem of communism, has been less well understood in
England than his philosophical evolution.8
As a student and teacher in the early ’thirties, Sartre had regarded
literature as an end in itself. Although not unsympathetic to his friend
Nizan’s espousal of communism, he remained more a rebel than a
revolutionary, or, if a revolutionary, one of anarchist convictions who
believed ‘society could only change globally, at one blow, by a violent
convulsion’.8 The artist being a stranger in every society, tiie integmtiQn
demanded by Soviet communism was accordingly suspect; the U.S.S.R.
was merely ‘a civilization of engineers'.4 In 1936, while hoping for a
Popular Front victory, he did not even Mother to vote. ‘The political
pretensions of the Left intellectuals made him shrug his shoulders.’5
Sartre’s career in the Resistance, his collaboration with the communists12345

1. Romans: V Espoir, p. 458.

2. See, for exam ple, M. C ranston, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’, Encounter, A pril 1962, and the
subsequent correspondence. Encounter, June 1962, pp. 79-81.
3. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de I*Age, p. 34.
4. Ibid., p. 37.
5. Ibid., p. 272.
247
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

on Les Lettres Françaises and in the C.N.E., have been discussed in an

earlier chapter.1 For Sartre, as for so many other intellectuals, the
Resistance was a formative experience, crystallizing his notions of guilt
and social responsibility. Yet commitment, in itself a simple enough
impulse, assumed agonizing complexities when applied in the world of
re d political choices. He and his close colleagues emerged from the war
convinced simultaneously that historical materialism supplied the only
valid interpretation of the past and that existentialism provided the only
concrete approach to reality.* Man exists first and defines himself
afterwards. L'homme n'est rien d'autre que ce qu'il se fa it'z At this period
Sartre was resolutely opposed to any determinism; man was free, the
incarnation of liberty, alone, and without excuses. One could be sure of
nothing, even the eventual triumph of the proletariat. But the personal
freedom of choice to which man was condemned, far from providing
an excuse for a retreat into nihilism or relativism, carried with it an
immense social responsibility. The choice had to be made - the right
choice - and then fought for.
Sartre’s post-war break with the communists was in the first instance
philosophical, ánd only later overtly political. Roger Garaudy, his most
persistent adversary and denigrator, denied that man, or the worker, was
free to submit or revolt; the class factor, he argued, was largely deter­
minant. 'Between myself and freedom there is knowledge.’12345Garaudy
denied any legitimate knowledge outside of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Sartre
asked h im whether atheism was not an a priori assumption. He did not
regard himself as being less metaphysical in denying god than Leibniz had
been in discovering him.6 Marxist historical determinism, particularly in
its present corrupted Stalinist form, he rejected outright. How, he wanted
to know, could he accept both of Stalin’s statements: that ideas are
determined a) by social conditions and b) by new tasks to be accom­
plished?6 Anxious as he was to avoid an anti-communist stand, he could
not conceal his low regard for the mentality of his communist intellectual
opponents, and they in turn heaped him with every kind of abuse,
political and personal.7
Nevertheless, historical materialism, as an interpretation of social
growth, retained its validity. Sartre shared with the Catholic idealists
the premise that not only did the proletariat incarnate suffering but that
it promised, through its own emancipation, to emancipate mankind.
Literature, he wrote, could only realize its full essence in a classless
1. Seepp. 151, 153, 158.
2. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Questions de m éthode’, L .T .M ., Septem ber 1957.
3. J.-P. Sartre, V Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris, 1961, p. 22.
4. R. G araudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, p. 10.
5. J.-P. Sartre, Situations, III, Paris, 1949, p. 139.
6. Ibid., p. 159.
7. See pp. 186-87.

248
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

society, only then would the writer be aware of no difference between his
subject and his public, only then would his situation be universal.1
‘literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent
revolution.’ He was anxious not to stand on the side-lines: indeed, free
choice forbade it. In a collectivity constantly correcting and judging
itself, the written word, he was convinced, could be the essential condition
of action, the moment of reflective consciousness.123Yet an inescapable
dilemma intervened. While the fate of literature was bound up with that
of the working class, the French proletariat was separated from writers
like himself by an iron curtain, strait-jacketed into a singlé political party,
isolated by propaganda. Consequently, Sartre envisaged his function as
that of a mediator between the bourgeoisie and the working class, com­
mitted to socialist principles, yet resisting doctrines which, considered
socialism as an absolute end. For socialism was only the end of the
beginning.8 He wanted a literature equally distanced from pure propa­
ganda and pure diversion, a literature of praxis, critical andconstructive,
capable of showing the reader in each casé his power to act against
injustice. This aesthetic (or ethic) was distinct from communist, socialist-
realist theory which wished to reduce literature to its immediate social
function, according to the political tactic of the moment.
This distinction was of practical importance. Sartre’s philosophical
deviations from Marxist determinism, and his views on function in
literature, were the condition of, or restriction on, his activity as a
politically conscious intellectual enjoying a sudden and enormous prestige
in post-war France. They resulted in his subscription to the idea of a
Third Force late in 1947 and to his founding of the Rassemblement
Démocratique Révolutionnaire in February 1948. While his deep
suspicion of anti-communism divided him from Camus, and later from
David Rousset and Gérard Rosenthal, his co-founders of the R.D.R., his
differences with the communists by no means abated. The production
in 1948 of his play Les Mains Sales provoked the communist Guy Leclerc
to describe him as an ‘hermetic philosopher’, a ‘nauseous writer’, a
‘Third Force demagogue’ and an ‘understudy for Koestler’.4
He detested communist methods, the habit of discrediting an adversary
rather than answering him. While conceding that the Party represented
the interests of the majority of the French workers, its effect on intellec­
tuals struck h im as nothing short of disastrous. The intellectual entering
the P.C.F. found himself in a Kafkaesque situation, surrounded by
[unknown accusers and bound to prove his innocence. The Party was
Conservative and opportunist, whereas the function of a writer was ‘to

1. J.-P . Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 117.

2 .1 b id .,p 119.
3. Ibid., p. 206.
4. Humanité, 7 A pril 1948.
249
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

call a cat a cat'.1 Politzer, in his opinion, had been ‘the last of the great
minds of French communism'.*
Yet he insisted on his links with the communists so long as they opposed
fascism, capitalism and the Gaullist movement. He saw the possibility
of at least ‘a provisional alliance’ with the Party intellectuals and on the
radio he urged the Socialist Party to form a united front with the com­
munists. Like the idealists, he regarded the Marshall Plan as an attempt
to treat Europe as the advanced post of the Anglo-Saxon struggle
against Russia; American aid could only assume a useful and peaceful
aspect if controlled by European socialism.8 This became his central idea,
a u n ifie d Europe under socialist auspices as a Third Force for peace.
The Atlantic Alliance version of Soviet expansionist imperialism was
one he could not accept. If he had, the Third Force idea would have
been untenable from the outset. Sartre strove to maintain a delicate
balance of perspective, examining each question from first principles,
and assessing the significance of each ‘fact’ and expressed opinion within
the general political context. Thus he endeavoured to master the law of
compensation by facing it squarely, by consciously absorbing it as a
necessary evil, so avoiding the process of internal erosion suffered by so
many intellectuals who suppressed unpalatable facts by pretending they
did not exist. He supported Tito’s rebellion. Tito, he believed, had
revolted out of a simple objective assessment of a situation in which the
Russians wanted to make of Yugoslavia their private granary. Gomulka,
Rajk and Rostov had rebelled on similar grounds.1234 This was not wholly
accurate; it certainly did not apply to Rajk. Sartre, like Merleau-Ponty,
tended at this period to ascribe rational motives of an economic type to
actions in fact attributable to personal-power intrigues, thus objectively
underestimating the extent of the decomposition of the Soviet hierarchy.
The writer’s duty, he had said, was to call a cat a cat. On the other hand
he was aware of the force of the communist argument, used against the
idealists from time immemorial, that this could become a dangerous
luxury, an act of self-love. When, for many months, Sartre hesitated to
express publicly his opinion on Soviet labour camps, he attempted to
avoid simultaneously self-indulgence and self-deception. He never made
a golden idol out of truth. Finally, in January 1950, Pierre Daix’s blatant
public denial of Rousset’s charges about the camps broüght forth from
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty a joint response confirming that Soviet citizens
could indeed be deported without judgement and that the number of such
detainees could be estimated at between ten and fifteen millions. Yet the
struggle for balance, the conceptual remnant of the now defunct Third

1. J.-P. Sartre, Situations, //, Paris, 1948, p. 304.

2. What is Literature?, p. 194.
3. J.-P. Sartre, Entretiens sur la Politique, pp. 85-6.
4. J.-P. Sartre, preface to L. D alm as, Le Communisme Yougoslave, p. xxii.

250
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

Force, led them to list the recent crimes of the non-communist world,
to declare their faith in Chinese communism and to denounce Rousset’s
refusal to investigate forced-labour conditions in the colonies. Sartre
refused to subscribe to the dangerous myth of Enemy Number One.1
In the two years which followed, this myth came close to universal
acceptance. The idealists had deserted the Party in despair. The Korean
War provided an additional strain. Sartre’s original view on Korea was
that ‘the revolutionary consciousness of the Korean masses became an
objective element in the calculations of the Russian leaders’ and that
‘the Koreans were for themselves the conscious agents of history, and,
for the Russians, a tool manoeuvred from outside’.123But the communist
image became less tarnished as the war progressed and as the ultimate
aims of American military intervention came to be associated with the
mounting hysteria of McCarthyism at home. At the same time, the
domestic and colonial policies of the French government, particularly
after the 1951 elections, suggested a total and irretrievable commitment
to the Cold War and to the American world system. Observing these
trends and the decisive shift of the balance of power in Europe toward the
Right, Sartre began to abandon his delicately conceived dualism. It was
at this moment, in May 1952, that the Communist Party’s demonstration
against General Ridgway ended in complete failure and humiliation.
Sartre now rallied to the communists. In a long and protracted article.
Les Communistes et la fa ix , he asked how one could believe both in the
historical mission of the proletariat and the treason of the P.C.F. if the
one voted for the other.8 Sartre was not contradicting his earlier views;
he had always been quick to acknowledge that the Party represented the
majority of the French working class. It was a type of argument, however,
open to the objection: how could one believe in the treason of the Labour
Party’s foreign policy if the majority of British workers voted for it?
Sartre had changed his mind about the origin of the Korean War. The
Soviet Union, he said, desired peace and proved it every day. On his
estimation, the Russians could take Europe in ‘a week’ and win a war,
despite American bombs. Why, then, did they not attack while there was
still time? He could see no signs of aggression on the part of the Russians
during three decades; they merely feared encirclement and refused to be
crushed.4
The communist demonstration of May 28th had moved him deeply.
Certainly the attempted strike had been a political one; why not? The
worker who struck only for basic economic demands betrayed his
solidarity as a proletarian. Trade Unions had to act on causes, rather than

1. M. M erleau-Ponty and J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les jours de notre vie*, L.T .M ., January 1950.
2. Quoted in P. Thody, Jean-Paul Sartre, London, 1960. p. 186.
3. J .-P. Sartre, ‘Les Com munistes et la Paix*, L.T .M ., July 1952, p . 2.
4. Ibid., p. 18.
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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

effects. Syndicalism was a manner of being a man.1 (In December 1947,

Sartre had accused the C.G.T., which called strikes for October-
November, of ‘manoeuvring rather than acting’, and of betraying the true
interests of the proletariat.) As for bourgeois democracy, he simply
quoted Lenin. To send 103 communists to the Chamber one needed
2,700,000 votes; 95 M.R.P. deputies represented only 2,300,000 votes.
The change in the electoral law meant that two and a half million
communist voters were, in effect, suppressed.12 (In 1945-46, the P.C.F.
was over-represented in the Assemblies and the Radicals under­
represented. Sartre had not protested.) Similarly, the arrests of André
Stil, of Duelos and of the union leader Le Léap showed that republican
liberties had become a mere façade. (Sartre did not mention their
acquittals.) ‘The working class recognizes itself in the trials of strength
which the C.P. institutes in its name.’3
Yet the demonstrations and strikes had failed. Why? Sartre concluded
that the workers were tired of politics in general. This did not reflect on
communist policy, but on the economic history of France. ‘The world
changes and France does not budge: the French proletariat asks itself
whether it has not fallen outside history.’45 Discouragement and
disillusion were the results of historical under-production, a question
into which Sartre went in some detail. The task of the Party, a task which
he heartily endorsed, was to make the worker aware of himself as a
proletarian, through action. ‘Les classes ne sont pas, on les fa it.’ß
Close as he had come to the communists, he was careful to point out
that his purpose was to declare his agreement with them on certain precise
and defined subjects, reasoning on his own principles and not necessarily
on theirs. Sartre had by no means ‘sold out’. In August 1952, defending
himself against Camus, he asked: Why is it me they (the communists)
hate, and not you?6 Nevertheless, from the Party’s point of view, Les
Communistes et la Paix served admirably the first, second and fourth
principles of utility. Sartre’s unexpectedly proffered olive branch was
seized by his former pupil and reviler, Jean Kanapa, in La Nouvelle
Critique. Kanapa quoted Sartre’s favourable comments extensively, as if
a major event had occurred, which indeed it had. He regretted that Sartre
continued to believe in Soviet camps, to admire Tito and to believe that
the Russian politburo, like every government, was divided over foreign
policy. This, said Kanapa, was ‘unreal’.7

1. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Les Com munistes et la Paix*, L .T .M ., July 1952, p. 33.

2. Ibid., p. 38.
3. Ibid., p. 49.
4. Ibid., A pril 1954, p. 1779.
5. Ibid., Novem ber-Decem ber 1952, p. 731.
6. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Réponse à A lbert Camus*, L .T .M ., August 1952, p. 341.
7. J. K anapa, ‘J.-P. Sartre, les Com m unistes et la Paix*, L .N .C ., Septem ber-
O ctober 1952, pp. 32-7.

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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

It was at this time that Sartre’s breach with Albert Camus became
irreparable following a hostile review of Camus’ VH om m e Révolté by
Sartre’s collaborator Francis Jeanson. Camus, according to Sartre, had
made his ‘Thermidor’ and had stepped into the ranks of anti-communist.«^
as opposed to non-communists. He was attempting to stand outside
history as an arbitrary judge; this was not possible; each half of the world
reflected the other; witch hunts in America produced an increase of
forced labour in Russia.1
Convinced that the Soviet bloc ardently desired peace, Sartre set out
for the 1952 Vienna World Peace Congress and returned home more than
ever convinced. The P.C.F. was now the only major force in France
opposing the Indo-China war and Sartre had always felt passionately on
colonial questions (in the late ’forties he accused the Party of opportun­
ism over Indo-China, and in the late ’fifties over Algeria). Nobody
adopted the cause of the sailor Henri Martin more eagerly than Sartre.2
Unlike some other writers of the Left, he did not show himself anxious
to prove that Martin was not a communist. If the Party alone overtly
condemned the war, he reasoned, why should Martin not follow it?
Strictly speaking, Sartre was not, even at the height of his rapproche­
ment with the Party, a fellow-traveller. The salient aspect of his thinking
was one of repugnance for American policy, both domestic and foreign.
He pointed out that since the beginning of the Korean War, the American
Government had come to regard the struggle in Indo-China as an anti­
communist crusade. Burnham’s ‘Conspiracy Enterprise’ had been
rapidly accepted in France, with Bidault, Reynaud and Monnerot all
adroitly playing the same game.8 Yet he did not retract his earlier
criticisms of the Kafkaesque life led by the Party intellectuals; he merely
chose not to re-emphasize them. Violence was always liable to break out.
When Colette Audry reviewed favourably Dionys Mascolo’s Le Com­
munisme in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, Jean Kanapa, never reluctant
to resume open warfare with his former teacher, described Sartre as a
‘cop-intellectual’.4 In a scathing reply, Opération Kanapa, Sartre asked
angrily why, if he were indeed un flic, the communists had recently been
prepared to deal with him. Within a few days, readers of VHumanité
were offered the unique spectacle of Kanapa making a partial retraction.6
It was at about this time that Sartre described himself as being among
those ‘who are neither communists nor properly speaking communist
sympathizers.’6
The full fury of his anti-Americanism erupted after the execution of
1. ‘Réponse à A lbert Camus’, op. cit.t pp. 342-3.
2. See p. 210.
3. J.-P . Sartre, V A ffaire H enri M artin, p. 199.
4. Humanitéy 22 February 1954.
5. Humanitéy 24 M arch 1954.
6. J.-P. Sartre, op. cit.t p. 206.
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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

the Rosenbergs. In view of what he knew about Soviet police-state

methods, his declarations on this occasion can definitely be regarded as
among his least balanced. Writing in Libération on June 22nd, 1953, he
denounced the execution as ‘a legal lynching which has covered a whole
nation with blood and proclaimed once and for all your (the Americans’)
utter incapacity to assume the leadership of the western world. . . .
According to whether you spared or executed the Rosenbergs, you were
clearing the way either for peace or for world w a r . . . W hat can one say
of a country whose leaders are forced to commit ritual murders in order
to excuse themselves for stopping a war?. . . You have allowed the United
States to be the cradle of a new fascism . . . fascism is not defined by the
number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.’
It was more than a loss of balance; Sartre had momentarily lost his
head. In 1950, he had admitted that Soviet methods shared something in
common with fascist ones. Was everyone, then, fascist? What were the
executions of two people, however unjust, when set beside the arbitrary
killings perpetrated by Stalin, the liquidation of the Yiddish intelligentsia?
The following year Sartre made his first visit to the Soviet Union,
returning to write enthusiastic articles for Libération. In November 1955,
he paid a second visit to Moscow, where his plays La P... respectueuse
and Nekrassov were to be performed, and praised the speed of Soviet
material advancement and the prevailing mood of self-assurance.1 He
travelled the length and breadth of China. ‘Marxism,’ he afterwards
declared, ‘is exactly the same in China as in Europe.’ The Chinese,
benefiting from Russia’s experience, would, he was sure, keep collec­
tivization on a voluntary basis. He was ‘overwhelmed by the unity of
purpose shared by the people and their leaders’. The literacy drive and
other social projects he called ‘autodeterminism of the masses’.123
The exact balance of Sartre’s political philosophy was well brought out
in the first half of 1956, when he engaged in polemics with the ex-
communist Pierre Hervé and the Trotskyist Pierre Naville. Challenging/
the basic assumptions of Hervé’s La Révolution et les Fétiches, he argued
that the Party, as a political entity, had displayed an extraordinary
objective intelligence and immunity from self-deception, although he
regretted that no such intelligence was to be found among its intellectuals,
who behaved as if constantly under attack, the consequence being that the
books which advanced knowledge in France were never written by
communists.8 Excellent as a weapon of proletarian struggle, the Party
had failed to provide a corporate framework within which creative
intellectuals could work fruitfully. Despite his aversion to Hervé’s thesis,

1. Humanité, 1 Novem ber 1955.

2. Interview w ith K . S. K arol, New Statesman and Nation, 3 Decem ber 1955, pp.
737-9.
3. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le Réformisme et les Fétiches*, L .T .M ., February 1956, pp. 1158-9.
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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

Sartre expressed disgust at the typically brutal responses which had

greeted the book in the Party press; such dogmatism, as a substitute for a
living Marxism, could only defeat its own ends and turn intellectuals
toward reformism. Once again he called for real liberty of discussion
within the Party, the creation of a climate of confidence and security for
scholars.1
A t any time, but particularly in the years when he was regarded as a
crypto-communist, Sartre was liable to be attacked from any quarter.
What, asked Pierre Naville, was this new-found solicitude for a living
Marxism, a Marxism which Sartre had derided only a few years before?
In reply, Sartre admitted that he had shifted his philosophical position;
was it necessary to be bom an orthodox Marxist?2 The communists, too,
were not slow to intervene, Garaudy, like Kanapa in 1952, advertising
Sartre’s advocacy of the general communist position, while regretting
his continued deviations. Although Garaudy awarded him a mention in
his speech to the Fourteenth Party Congress in July, he rejected outright
the suggestion that it was communist dogmatism which forced Hervé and
his kind to become renegades.8 No concessions were forthcoming.
Sartre the ally was, in fact, always something of a liability for the
communists. Aspects of his unusually complex thought were apt to be
singled out and isolated for praise or condemnation. Thus it was in 1956,
when Sartre was arguing in the rôle of an almost fully-fledged Marxist,
that the existentialist aspect of his earlier writings had a sudden impact in
Poland at a time of political crisis and reappraisal, when questions of
individual responsibility were predominant. As a result, the orthodox
Polish communists suffered a certain amount of intellectual discomfort,4
but none so acute as that which befell their French colleagues when
Sartre responded to the Soviet intervention in Hungary by a rapid
realignment of his centre of political gravity. On November 9th, VExpress
published an interview in which he termed the Soviet military intervention
in Hungary ‘a crime*. T condemn,’ he said, ‘entirely and without reserva­
tion the Soviet aggression.’ He would regretfully sever his links with the
Soviet writers who did not, or could not, denounce ‘the massacre’ in
Hungary. L ’Humanité9s reports he called ‘repugnant lies’. While not
retracting his praise for the P.C.F.’s line in recent months, he declared
that ‘its decisions today are entirely dictated by an apparatus totally
infeudated to the most intransigent tendency of the Soviet Government
. . . with the men who at this time direct the P.C.F. it is not, it never
would be possible to resume relations.’5
1. J.-P . Sartre, ‘Le Réformism e et les Fétiches’, L .T .M ., F e b ru a r 1956, p. 1164.
2. J.-P. Sartre, ‘R éponse à Pierre N aville’, L .T .M ., M arch-A pril 1956, p. 1517.
3. R . G araudy, ‘A propos d’un article de J.-P. Sartre sur Pierre Hervé’, L .N .C ., May
1956, pp. 38-44.
4. A. Schaff, ‘M arxism and Existentialism in Poland’, Gemini, January 1960, pp.33-6.
5. V E xpress, 9 Novem ber 1956, pp. 13-16.
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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

Sartre, however, did not advocate a mass desertion of the Party by the
workers. What, after all, was the alternative? The Socialist Party had
sided with the English Tories and against even the English Labour Party
in the Suez operation. Mollet, their leader, was Prime Minister of France.
Here was the dilemma. The only answer could be de-Stalinization of the
Communist Party, a theme he developed more fully in an article in
January 1957,1 but not before he had played an active part, through the
*C.N.E. and the Peace Movement, in agitating for the withdrawal of Soviet
troops from Hungary and for guarantees for the safety of Hungarian
writers. The general tone of Sartre’s interview, and especially his conten­
tion that the French Party ought not to be faithful to the Soviet
government at all times and at all costs, brought a sharp rebuke from
Laurent Casanova in VHumanité on November 12th.
In Le fantôm e de Staline, Sartre reflected that Nagy had enjoyed a
unique opportunity for democratization which would have strengthened,
rather than diminished the influence of communism in Hungary. He saw
no evidence that a flood of émigrés had poured in from Austria; on the
contrary, they had been turned back at the frontier. Even after eight
years of tyranny, of monstrous, grotesque errors and crimes, the chances
of a national, democratic communism remained intact. Nagy should have
acted as Gomulka had, taking immediate measures to raise living stan­
dards, but it was Gerö who held the whip hand, calling in the Russians.
Then, it was true, the revolution took a turn toward the Right, toward
counter-revolution. But nobody had the right to say that Soviet interven­
tion was inevitable. Everything hinged on the triumph in Moscow of a
certain policy. The Russians had gained nothing, making the Red Army
the enemy of the workers in the eyes of the world.
Had Sartre surrendered himself to ‘bourgeois’ moralizing? It seems not.
In both Les Mains Sales and Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, he had affirmed the
need for soiled hands in politics, although certainly with more conviction
in the latter (1951) play, in which the violent revolutionary peasant leader
Nasty is shown to be strategically correct as against the pacifically-
minded, Tolstoyean Goetz, to whom he remarks: Tn a single.'day of
virtue you have caused more deaths than in thirty-five years of malice.’2
Sartre never doubted that the Left should meet force with force, violence
with violence. He continued to believe that Stalinism had, in its time,
been necessary in a backward Russia where the contradiction between
workers’ living standards and peasant profits required a rigid discipline.
It was not ends and means which disturbed him so much as means and
means. What angered him most about Hungary was the stupidity of Nagy,
Gerö and Moscow in discrediting world communism, of acting in a way
which could not serve a great and moral cause. In his eyes, the objective
1. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Le fantôm e de Staline*, L.T .M ., January 1957. **
2. J.-P. Sartre, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, Paris (Livre de Poche), 1961, p. 224.

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 THREE CASE HISTORIES

situation had called for rapid de-Stalinization in all branches of the

communist movement, if only for reasons of efficacity. This was the
essence of the accusation he had always levelled at the Party intellectuals
in France, not that their dogmatism was immoral but that it was stupid.
In the gloomy winter of 1956-57, Sartre saw few signs of hope, apart
from Togliatti’s comparatively fresh and independent statements of the
previous summer. Khrushchev’s report to the Twentieth Congress he
regarded as being merely a ‘series of malicious anecdotes’.1 Abusing
Stalin was not in itself proof of a genuine de-Stalinization. As Hungary
had shown, Stalin’s ghost remained; one would have to de-Stalinize the
de-Stalinizers. If Sartre was enjoying the luxury of his independence in
not rallying to the Party in its darkest hour, this was an independence
implicit in the existentialist position he had never entirely abandoned.
It could also become a burden which - as his brave agitation against the
Algerian war at a time when the Party was once again dragging its heels
was to show - he was fully prepared to carry. Nor was he too proud,
despite his harsh words in 1956, to seek a new rapprochement with the
Party, to advocate a popular front for the defence of French democracy
when it was most acutely challenged.
Sartre’s theoretical position as a philosopher tended to march in step
with his political evolution. There is no doubt that his estimation of the
strengths and weaknesses of modern Marxist thought constantly reflected
his opinion of the communists in action. In a major work published in
1960, he wrote: ‘j e considère le marxisme comme Vindépassable philosophie
de notre tem ps.. .’12 Dialectical reason, he claimed, absorbs and supersedes
all other forms of reason; the great discovery of dialectical experience
was that man is conditioned by things in the degree that things are
conditioned by man.3 Existentialism, he now conceded, was only an
ideology, a parasitic system existing in the margin of knowledge, whereas
Marxism was a philosophy, the most advanced and comprehensive mode
of explanation of which the present generation was capable. He did not,
however, abandon existentialism entirely. Its mission had been to discover
the point where the individual man could be inserted in his class, the
point where the particular family mediated between the single man and
the universal social class to which he belonged.4 Universal concepts were
incomplete without a sense of the singularity of the human adventure.
Marxism was in perpetual danger of degenerating into an inhuman
anthropology which forgot the importance of man himself. Nor had he
abandoned some of his earlier doubts about the orthodox Marxist view
of necessity, and about the decisive rôle of contradictions: the negation

1. V E xpress, 9 November 1956, p. 15.

2. J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Paris, 1960, p. 9.
f. Ibid., p. 165.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
257 I
 THREE CASE HISTORIES

of the negation was not necessarily an affirmation.1 On points such as

these, Sartre was soon to be challenged by Garaudy and other keepers of
the seals.
To conclude. The prestige of Sartre, his stature not only as a writer
and philosopher, but as a Marxist writer and philosopher able to embody
his political views in a variety of persuasive literary forms, his personal
and moral influence among his colleagues and students, his activities in
left-wing organizations, his willingness to employ his pen on every
occasion of importance, all these factors and qualities implied a unique
potential for serving the communist cause according to the criteria of
what we have called the five principles of utility. So the question remains:
was he a greater asset to the Party outside it than inside? The question, in
a sense, is self-destructive. Sartre the communist would have been a
different man. Even so, the answer is probably, Yes. To have joined the
P.C.F., to have endured the silences and sublimations which discipline
demanded, would have marred his reputation, and consequently his
utility. Yet there was always an obtuse element in the old Rollandist-
idealist assertion that the intellectual could best serve the Party by freely
criticizing it. Even before 1952, Sartre did not believe that. If he was never
a communist, much less was he an idealist.

1. J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Paris, 1960, p. 137.

258
 PART FO U R

Intellectuals and the Intellect

 CHAPTER ONE

Marxism and
Communist Intellectuals

T h i s chapter must begin with a reservation, or apology, which is very

far from being a mere formality. The central problem - the motive force
of the Idea, as opposed to the Emotion, in determining the political
affiliations adopted by intellectuals - is one of the utmost complexity.
The appalling volume of self-confident literature produced on the subject,
particularly with regard to communism, may tend to obscure this. The
fundamental difficulties which the student encounters are three; the
question of evidence (only communists and ex-communists, after all, can
speak from personal experience): the observer’s own philosophy, or point
of view, from which he cannot escape; and the meaning of the word
‘reason’ (if two intellectuals reach different conclusions from a given set
of evidence, does this mean one is more ‘rational’ than the other?).
The present chapter, representing a small section of a larger design,
can only hope to skirmish with the problem, particularly as all examples
are here drawn from France alone. But the main thing to remember is
that the evidence of both active communists and of ex-communists on the
motive rôle of the Marxist Idea has built-in traps. If this alone can be
illustrated, something will have been achieved.

Here are two apparently conflicting statements, both made by non­

communists:
‘Certainly no single ideology or spiritual force in the twentieth century
has come close to rivalling the prestige of Marxism among European
intellectuals.’1
‘In studying the reasons why western intellectuals were attracted to
Soviet communism and the reasons which made so many of them break
with communism, what is striking is that the part played by Marxist
theory is practically insignificant.*1
2
1. V. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, New York, 1961, p. 139.
2. K. A. Jelenski, ‘The Literature of Disenchantment*, Survey, April 1962, p. 109.

261
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

According to this second view (K. A. Jelenski’s), moral and psycho­

logical factors, as opposed to distinctly rational ones, have proved
decisive. Jelenski supports^his argument on the ‘god that failed’ principle,
relying almost exclusively on the testimonies of former communists,
notably Max Eastman, Arthur Koestler and Edgar Morin, implicitly
discounting not only the ‘scientific’ validity of Marxism, but, more
important, the genuinely ‘scientific’ appeal it might exercise for rational
intellectuals. Thus if a communist intellectual declares, ‘between myself
and freedom there is knowledge’, he is, by this theory, guilty not only of
an error of judgement, but of total self-deception about the workings of
his own mind. Jules Monnerot, in his well-known study of the generative
forces of the communist mentality, has insisted on this point. He writes:
‘All the constituent elements of an ideology may, in theory, be intellectual,
but the law which organizes them into a system and the dialectic by which
the ideology “wins” the individual and proliferates in society are of a
different order.’1 He further explains: ‘The ideology can be regarded as
the systematic organization of the conscious content and of the exag­
gerated value attached to it.’ Therefore, ‘the motivating dynamism is
sheltered from ordinary argument.’12 The communist, whether an
intellectual or not, is the victim of an obsession, and he will therefore
remain a communist. Thus the communist intellectual, by this argument,
invariably suffers from a delusion about his own motivation; he and
Monnerot belong to different psychic species. Communism is an
‘ideology’; anti-communism, presumably, is not. The ‘dialectic’ which
wins the intellectual to communism cannot be of an intellectual order;
but the ‘dialectic’ which wins Monnerot to a passionate anti-communism
presumably can be, and is. The communist will remain true to his obses­
sion; but will he? Monnerot, unfortunately, does not interrupt the flow
of his argument by references to specific intellectuals or to concrete
instances of their delusions.
Nor are the two statements quoted earlier really in contradiction, as it
might at first sight appear. The first one (Victor Brombert’s), by inserting
the words ‘spiritual force’ and ‘prestige’, comes close to the second
(Jelenski’s) in maximizing the emotional factor at the expense of the
rational one.
Any arbitrary separation of the multiple elements, cerebral, rational,
environmental, psychological, moral, of an ideology’s appeal is, of course,
fraught with dangers. We are by no means concerned to prove here that
it is by the path of pure reason alone that the intellectual comes to
Marxism, and then communism. But the ex-communist, having rejected
Marxism as a myth, with little relevance to the real facts of economic life
1. J. Monnerot, Sociology and Psychology o f Communism, trans. by J. Degras and
R. Rees, Boston, 1953, p. 137.
2. Ibid., p. 136.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

in the twentieth century, and having decided that in any case the Com­
munist Parties in practice show little regard for Marxist theory, is inclined
to conclude that intelligent intellectuals cannot, therefore, have come to
communism by way of ‘reason’, whatever beliefs they hold to the
contrary. Hence the inclination to play down the motive force of Marxist
theory. Two principal fallacies become obvious at this juncture. Firstly,
the notion that ‘reason’ is indivisible, i.e. that there can be only one
‘rational’ response to any given set of empirically gathered data; and,
secondly, the belief that the data presented by the general political,
economic and social structure at any given time is comparable to that
observable under a microscope. In reality, economic or political ‘facts’,
which the communist intellectuals are commonly accused of blindly
disregarding, exist only in a limited degree of independence apart from a
sense of purpose, a sense of what is morally desirable, of what ought to
be done for one section of the community at the expense of other sections.
If this is remembered, we may be on our guard against the view that
communist intellectuals in the West have found in Marxism primarily
an opium, a solution to their personal dislocations, their frantic angst
in the face of the real world, a palliative for their absolutist frame of mind,
and so forth. Such a view is by no means unusual. Monnerot writes: ‘The
victims of collective passion form a social group, an ensemble, and not a
collection of “cases” , like the general types of delusions classified by
psychiatrists.’1 The whole approach which the historical evidence leads
us to distrust finds its essense in the following passage of Monnerot’s:
‘Thus a secular religion can be analytically resolved into a number of
myths each of which corresponds to a certain psychological need or
function, and also, as used to be said, to a certain “category of souls” .’123
It is sometimes said, ‘doctor, heal thyself.'

The first generation of communist intellectuals in France were con­

spicuously immature Marxists. Avidly as they absorbed Marxist-Leninist
precepts, theirs was a Marxism diluted by such influences as Jaurès,
Sorel, Tolstoy, Proudhon and even Rousseau. The existence of the
Guesdist wing within the pre-war S.F.I.O. notwithstanding, French
schools and universities had remained resolutely resistant to a philosophy
which the academic establishment regarded as both ridiculous and
pernicious. Sartre recalls that when he was a student in the mid-1920s, the
communists of his generation took care to exclude any sign of Marxism
from their dissertations. The dialectic was condemned, historical material­
ism was ignored, Aristotelian logic and logistics reigned supreme.8
The emergence of a dynamic and advanced school of Marxist philo-

1. Ibid., p. 135.
2. Ibid., p. 146.
3. J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, p. 22.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

sophy in France may be dated from the mid-’twenties and associated with
the Philosophies group led by Henri Lefebvre, Georges Politzer, Georges
Friedmann and Pierre Nodier. Attacking subjectivism and irresponsi­
bility, they maintained that philosophy could not be separated from the
revolution in which lay man’s final hope. At first, however, they were less
interested in politics and economics than in ‘the sense of being’ which
they believed capitalism to have destroyed in modern man. The logic of
communist militancy was not yet fully accepted.1
Politzer, for example, who wanted to make known in France the fruits
of German psychological research, argued that ‘in the interests of truth,
historical materialism is not inseparable from revolution’.123By the end
of the decade, however, he had joined the Party and was calling Sartre
a petit-bourgeois.8 Friedmann’s Marxism also hardened into com­
munism; Lefebvre was to become the most renowned and influential of
the Party’s philosophers. Important as the moral revulsion this group felt
toward capitalist society was, it was as instrumental in orientating them
toward Marxism in the first instance as it was in persuading them to join
the Party. Friedmann had joined Clarté by 1920. He later recalled that
Raymond Lefebvre’s journey to Russia had represented a pilgrimage to
them all and had been intimately bound up with Friedmann’s own ‘first
steps toward the U.S.S.R.’. But, ‘after this period of sentimental
adherence, there came a more conscious, more rational need to know.'
It was then that the serious study of Marxism began, and it was only later,
in the years 1932-1936, that he made his three journeys to Russia, to set
the reality against the ideal.45
The importance of ideas and concepts in orientating young intellectuals
toward the extreme Left is well illustrated by the remarkable influence
exercised by different institutions of higher learning, particularly by the
Ticole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, which is designed to train the best
minds of the nation for humanistic teaching. Compared to the relatively
conservative, or moderate Ecole libre des Sciences Politiques, the Ecole?
Normale built up a distinctly radical tradition from the time that Lucien
Herr, an Alsatian Marxist and a friend of Jaurès, became librarian
in 1886. Herr died in 1924, but the tradition persisted. In 1955, Raymond
Aron complained that ‘normaliens’ still viewed political problems in terms
of Marxist or existentialist philosophy, without any real (i.e. empirical)
knowledge of capitalism or the proletariat.6
It was from the Ecole Normale, for example, that Paul Nizan graduated
1. S. de Beauvoir, Memoirs o f a Dutiful Daughter, pp. 349-50.
2. Ibid., p. 350.
3. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de l'Age, p. 25.
4. G. Friedmann, De la Sainte Russie à V U.R.S.S., pp. 15-16. The Philosophies group
were later associated with the journal VEsprit, not to be confused with the Catholic
Esprit.
5. R. Aron, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, p. 213.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

through Marxism and the Philosophies group to membership of the

P.C.F. Nizan, Sartre has written, made of Marxism a second nature, or a
Reason. The doctrine legitimized his hatreds and reconciled within him
the contrary discourses of his parents.1 This analysis, which brings out
the interplay of the idea, the emotion and the personal factor, does not
detract from the importance of Marxist doctrine as a preparation for
communist militancy. The idea alone, academic and detached, made few
communists. Marxism describes class oppression; the student, once
convinced of the reality of this oppression and of the accuracy of the
Marxist formulation, is bound to experience an emotional response, a
hatred for the oppressors. But such a response should not be regarded as a
psychological factor existing apart from the doctrine and detracting from
its rational basis, for the doctrine itself points out that where there is
oppression there will be struggle through emotion. Sartre implicitly
distinguishes between an academic Marxism and a living doctrine
springing from concrete social conditions, when he writes of his own
evolution: ‘It was not the idea which overthrew us; no more was it the
condition of the workers . . . . no, it was the one linked to the other, it
w a s. . . the proletariat as the incarnation and vehicle of an idea.’12
The important point is that Nizan came to the Party as a convinced
Marxist. If he was affected by his parents, as Sartre suggests, who, one
way or the other, is not? He expressed disgust at the change in atmosphere
at the rue d’Ulm since Lucien Herr’s death. It was, he said, a place
inhabited by transparent entities, where hypocrisy was now queen, where
most ‘normaliens’ thought of themselves as an élite and where many swam
in the ‘dirty waters’ of the Socialist and Radical Parties.3 Nizan, however,
exaggerated: the Ecole Normale was destined to turn out many other
intellectuals for whom its teachings had been a first step on the road to
the Party.4
The great expansion of Marxist scholarship and speculation in France
resulted from the impact of the Soviet Five Year Plans at a time of world
capitalist depression. The most active, as well as comprehensive, Marxist
study group was the Cercle de la Russie neuve, rechristened in 1936 the
Association pour l’étude de la culture soviétique. A survey of the
membership and activities of the Cercle confirms the obvious, namely
that it was within certain academic disciplines, particularly in philosophy
and the sciences, both natural and social, that membership of or collabora­
tion with the Communist Party was most likely to be intimately related
1. J.-P. Sartre, Préface à ‘Aden-Arabiç\ p. 49.
2. J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, p. 23.
3. P. Nizan, Aden-Arabiey p. 67.
4. For example, Henri Mougin who entered the Ecole Normale in 1930, emerging a
communist. Under the name of Jacques Bartoli he wrote on philosophy and history for
Commune. A friend of Politzer, he collaborated in the first numbers of La Pensée in
1939. Five years a prisoner of war in Germany, he died in July 1946, aged 34.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

to a thorough appreciation of Marxist theory. Max Eastman has written

o f‘those anxious about efficiency and intelligent organization - a cerebral
anxiety capable of rising in times of crisis to a veritable passion for a
plan/1 Despite his use of the word ‘cerebral’, here again an ex-communist
invests an intellectual process with the overtones of a psychological
aberration, as if Marxism could only mirror the dislocated individual’s
personal angst when confronted with the real world, rather than be an
explanation - albeit an imperfect one - of the contradictions in that real
world.
Setting aside for the moment the natural sciences, the range of Marxist
studies being pursued by the communist, or fellow-travelling scholars
of the Cercle was impressive. The philosopher René Maublanc spoke on
philosophie et technique, the linguist Marcel Cohen2 on linguistique et
société. Linguistics, he argued, was a science of man in society and was
not directly linked to the technique of production or the progress of
instruments; but the relevance to the study of social mechanisms, and
therefore to the revolutionary struggle, was a close one. Another linguist,
Aurelien Sauvageot,8 criticized some of the conclusions of the Soviet
philologist N. Marr, but praised his stress on the perpetual formation and
reabsorption of contradictions as the basis of the destruction and
reconstruction of linguistic systems. We must try, Sauvageot urged, to
verify in linguistics the principal dogmatic affirmations of Marxism,
dialectic and class struggle.4 Other speakers at this particular session
included the ancient historian Charles Parain, the historian Jean Baby
and Georges Friedmann, the latter two stressing that the history of the
U.S.S.R. was the best vindication of historical materialism.6
Thus the interaction and cross-fertilization of theory, social conditions
and political action was a close one. Yet Marxist theory which, according
to Jelenski, played so insignificant a part in bringing intellectuals to
communism, does not claim to be an idea alone, existing in a vacuum,
but also a praxis, a fusion of thought and action. The Marxism of the
Philosophies group and of the Cercle developed from its often tentative
and unorthodox beginnings in a climate of acute tensions, both in Russia
and in western Europe.
It was during the ’thirties that were published the first works of the
most influential of the Party philosophers, Henri Lefebvre. His studies
of Rabelais, Pascal and Musset measurably developed the technique of
Marxist literary analysis. In 1939, there appeared the first of his key
works, Le Matérialisme Dialectique, in which he began by explaining the
1. Quoted by K. A. Jelenski, op. cit., p. 109.
2. Professeur à l’Ecole des langues orientales.
3. Ibid.
4. A la Lumière du M arxisme (Essais), Paris, 1935, p. 168.
5. A. Cornu, A. Cuvillier, Nizan, Cassou and F. Armand were among others
associated with the Cercle.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

difference between formal and Hegelian dialectical logic, proceeding then

to criticize Hegel’s system in terms similar to those formulated by Marx
and Engels in the period 1843-1859. The theoretical and philosophical
origin of dialectical materialism, wrote Lefebvre, was not to be found in
Hegel’s logic, but in phenomenology. Feuerbach’s materialism he gave its
due, while warning against the myth of pure nature, the tendency to
regard man as a thinking object rather than as a thinking activity.1
Lefebvre taught the value of dialectical materialism as a method of
analysing each concrete stage of development and each totality. Far from
being an internal movement of the mind, the dialectic existed and was
real before the mind, imposing itself on the mind. Thus praxis (i.e. the
total activity, work, thought and knowledge of man) was the point of
arrival and departure for dialectical materialism. Knowledge and creative
action were inseparable.123'Le déterminisme social, c'est la nature dans
Vhom m e' It permitted liberty to man, and limited it. It was the continua­
tion of natural struggles and biological realities in man. 'C 'est Vhomme
encore non réalisé.*
Lefebvre avoided polemics. The absence of any mention of communism
or the Party was perhaps the book’s strength. Edgar Morin later recalled
that it revealed to him a side of Stalinist communism radically different
from that suggested by its ritual propaganda.8 Roger Garaudy, when
debating with Lefebvre in 1955, remarked that Lefebvre had been
instrumental in introducing him to Marxism ‘some twenty years before’.4
Garaudy had joined the Party in 1933. In Morin’s view, Lefebvre was the
only true dialectician in the Party; Jean Duvignaud called him the only
French Marxist philosopher; Pierre Hervé spoke of him as a genius.
Lefebvre’s work, in fact, was the incarnation of the second principle of
utility.
But the second principle of utility, at its highest level, depended on
individual creative genius, a flower inclined to wither or die in the arid
soil of Stalinism. Post-war France witnessed a rapid proliferation of
Marxist philosophers of inferior calibre who were inclined to show a
greater regard for the Party line than for creative Marxism. The second
and fourth principles of utility clashed; Marxism became the second
cousin of pragmatism. Offering what amounted to a masked apology for
this tendency, Lefebvre explained in 1947 that the Party intellectuals had
ceased to pose problems ‘in religious terms’. Convinced of a basic truth,
that the world ought to be transformed, they did not expect a ridiculous
perfection in doctrine and in the individuals trying to bring about this

1. H. Lefebvre, Le M atérialisme Dialectique, Paris, 1939, pp. 11-49.

2. Ibid., p. 95.
3. E. Morin, Autocritique, p. 34.
4. C.C., October 1955, p. 1216.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

change.1 Jean Desanti and René Maublanc would acknowledge no

possibility of schism between Marxism and communism, Maublanc easily
dismissing the problem of liberty in a socialist society as unreal.123Other
philosophers new to the Party’s ranks included Maurice Caveing (who
belonged to a Christian progressive group and joined the Party in 1946)
and Jean Domarchi, a professor at Lyons and author of several economic
and philosophical works. Meanwhile La Pensée?, first founded in 1939
by Langevin and Cogniot, reappeared in the winter of 1944, fostering and
guiding the study of Marxism in all fields along lines considered useful
by the Party. What was lacking in quality was atoned for in quantity;
forty-seven philosophers took part in the Party’s study days in March
1953.
It was not Lefebvre the Party wanted now, but Garaudy the philo­
sophical gendarme and heresy-hunter. Explanations gave way to violent
assertions. ‘History exists,* Garaudy declared, ‘and we are at the end of
its sharply defined trajectory.’45Logical objections, often Marxist ones,
to Party policy were greeted by a crude, bullying pragmatism. ‘If there is
no scientific knowledge of history, there can be no effective technique in
politics.’6 For those intellectuals who continued to waste their time
making decisions, Garaudy had no patience. *1 have not chosen to be a
communist. . . because it does not depend on me to deny the reality of
the inner contradictions of capitalism.’6
This was scarcely likely to persuade. Yet Garaudy’s exploits as a
virtuoso Marxist were constantly advertised by the Party press. In June
1953, headlines in /’Humanité announced that he had ‘brilliantly sup­
ported his doctoral thesis’ entitled ‘Contribution à la théorie marxiste de
la connaissance’ before a committee of bourgeois professors at the
Sorbonne. His ‘mention très honorable* evidently reflected a victory for
Marxism rather than a proof of the liberalism of the professors.7 Ten
months later, Garaudy again featured in the pages of /’Humanité, this
time for having supported, in Russian, a thesis on Liberty before the
Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Again,

1. ‘Questions du Communisme*, Confluences, 18-20, 1947, p. 139.

2. Ibid., p. 189.
3. Directing Committee: Langevin, Joliot-Curie, Wallon, Teissier, Cogniot. Comité
de Patronage: Aragon, L. Barrabé, J.-R. Bloch, M. Bloch, G. Bourgin, C. Bruneau,
D. Chalonge, J. Chapelon, A. Chevalier, A. Chollet, M. Cohen, A. Cotton, E. Cotton,
H. Daudin, R. Debré, R. Desormière, Dr. Ducuing, Eluard, A. Jolivet, Jourdain,
C. Koechlin, G. Lefebvre, J. Lurçat, C. Manguin, A. Peloquin, E. Vermeil, Vildrac,
Willard, J. Wyart.
These intellectuals included 17 professors, 9 of them at the Sorbonne and 3 at the
Collège de France.
4. R. Garaudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, p. 9.
5. Ibid., p. 10.
6. Ibid„ p. 56.
7. Humanité, 26 June 1953.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

success crowned his efforts.1After a year’s sojourn in Russia as the paper’s

Moscow correspondent, he returned home and explained to the Sociétés
Savantes how the existence of only one party in Russia was compatible
with liberty.2
The study of the application of Marxism to various scholarly fields,
primarily an act of voluntary association in the ’thirties, had, twenty years
later, become an area for strict Party organization and control, under the
aegis of the Central Committee. In March 1953, six hundred communist
intellectuals took part in study days at Ivry on ‘problems of the objectivity
of the laws of nature and of society’.3 La Pensée also held frequent col-
loquia. In the spring of 1955, for example, a meeting took place at the
Sociétés Savantes on the subject of Engels’ The Origin o f the Family,
Private Property and the State, drawing intellectuals from a wide variety
of fields.
And yet, as Sartre observed, out of all this there emerged virtually
no communist scholarship of any distinction.

The perceptible deterioration which Marxist scholarship suffered in the

embrace of the Stalinist Party is well illustrated in the field of philosophi­
cal polemics. In Nizan and Politzer the pre-war Party possessed two
polemicists whose devotion to the Party was not allowed to mar the
freshness and individuality of their work.
In his Les Chiens de Garde (1932), Nizan struck out with considerable
power and in a number of directions. He assailed the ‘pure’ philosophers
who claimed that the history of philosophy amounted merely to the
development of ideas. L. Brunschvicg, who had spoken of ‘the naive
arrogance’ of Marx, provided his primary target. Nizan was fed up with
hearing about the Platonism of Spinoza and the Kantism of Plato. He
castigated Bergson, Lalande and Benda. Bourgeois philosophy, in
practice, worked against the great, universal aims it claimed to pursue.
It was now time to ask the philosophers about their specific views on
colonialism, unemployment, politics, suicide, the police and abortion.
Let the inbred, rarefied gentlemen of the Société française de Philosophie
declare their party. As for Brunschvicg: ‘Carrière heureuse. Malgré la
guerre'* Whether deliberately or not, his philosophy objectively protected
the Comité des Forges and the Comité des Houillères. The University was
1. Humanitéy 26 April 1954.
2. Humanité, 18 December 1954.
3. Including 60 doctors, 47 philosophers, 42 linguists, 36 psychologists, 35 physicists,
19 lawyers. Among the professors present were J. Lévy, Aubel, C. Cahen, M. Cohen,
Orcel, Snyders, E. Kahane, Perus, Lyon-Caen, Zazzo. The principal speakers included:
J. Desanti for the philosophers, E. Cotton for the physicists, C. Willard for the his­
torians, G. Lazare for the linguists, V. Lafitte for the doctors, M. Vergnaud for the
chemists, H. Lefebvre for the sociologists, L. Langevin for the professors of science,
A. Lurçat for the architects, M. Prenant for the biologists. Humanité, 30 March 1953.
4. P. Nizan, Les Chiens de Garde, p. 64.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

disseminating the same so-called spiritual values as the state defended.

In this respect Brunschvicg and Bergson were the bishops. Benda taught
that the philosopher best served men by deserting them. Thus he recon­
ciled prestige with his secret conformism.1 All this had a direct relevance
to the political struggle, as Marx and Lenin had shown.8
It was a brilliant polemic, vital, satirical, cutting and deeply serious.
With equal justice the same adjectives could be attached to Politzer’s
Le Bergsonisme - Une Mystification Philosophique (1929).s
Bergson, Politzer reminded his readers, had been a patriot in 1914 and
an opponent of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was a direct result of his
philosophy, his false ‘psychologism’. His conception of liberty was an
affair between man and himself; his distinction between political and
metaphysical liberty was merely an ignoble abstraction. He served the
bourgeoisie; his idealism gave a modem mask to an ancient deception;
his ‘champions of life’ were badly concealed black reactionaries, turning
now to fascism as dialectical materialism gained strength. Politzer, like
Nizan, insisted that the philosophical struggle was an integral part of the
political one.4
In the following twelve years Politzer pursued, with considerable
virtuosity, the job of demonstrating the relevance of ideological tenden­
cies, however specialized, to the political arena. Particularly did he attack
‘Freudo-Marxism’ as a counter-revolutionary diversion,6 and also the
racist theories being developed by the Nazis. Willingly as he threw
himself into Party work, especially in the economic sector, it is true to
say that he, like Nizan, Friedmann and Lefebvre, rarely forgot that
assertions and dogma are poor substitutes for argument. The work of
these Marxists, even at its most tendentious, avoided the dry, repetitive
sterility, the automation of the mind, which came to characterize their
post-war successors, Garaudy, Desanti, Kanapa, Caveing.
An example of the new technique was provided by the Party’s response
to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Les Aventures de la dialectique, a criticism
of the pro-communist stand adopted by Sartre in Les Communistes et la
Paix. Six philosophers were mobilized, Cogniot, Garaudy, Desanti,
Caveing and Kanapa, with Henri Lefebvre, now on the verge of breaking
with the Party, a misfit sixth. They delivered their orations as a team, and
published them as a team.6 Kanapa quickly heaped on Merleau-Ponty’s
shoulders responsibility for the exhaustion of textile workers, the corpses
1. A reference to Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs.
2. P. Nizan, op. cit., p. 127.
3. Politzer launched his attack on the renowned Bergson under the name of
François A rouet
4. G. Politzer, Le Bergsonisme. Une M ystification Philosophique, Paris, 1947, pp.
1- 110.
5. G. Politzer, ‘Un faux contre-révolutionnaire. Le ' ‘Freudo-Marxisme” ’, Commune,
November 1933, pp. 284-304.
6. M ésaventures de VAnti-M arxisme, Paris, 1956.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

in Algeria and the execution of the Rosenbergs.1 Cogniot substantially

contented himself by listing the great names who had offered their
support to the Party in the past.123Garaudy tried to prove by circum­
stantial evidence that the North had not begun the Korean War2 and that
Merleau-Ponty was nothing short of a modem Eugen Dühring.45Constant
references were made to Thorez’s infallible authority on matters ideo­
logical; Caveing pointed out that in 1935 Thorez had brilliantly
distinguished between the progressive Left and the bourgeois Left; there
could be no doubt into which department Merleau-Ponty fell.6 In the
course of the discussion there were few reactionary philosophers with
whom his name was not confidently linked. Nizan and Politzer, of course,
had not shrunk from the ‘guilt by association* technique, but they had
done so with greater spontaneity, conviction and, above all, relevance.
Sartre, on this occasion, had embarrassing friends.

The cases of Friedmann and Lefebvre illustrate a further tendency. The

communist intellectual who has come to the Party via a serious study of
Marxism, who is measuring the reality against the ideal, may ultimately
find Soviet and P.C.F. policies harder to tolerate than one whose basic
lessons in Marxism have been fashioned by and adapted to the Party
itself.6 Friedmann, after three visits to Russia in the ’thirties, could not
conceal his disquiet at the ‘official doctrine’ of Marxism with its sterilizing
polemical atmosphere, its habit of drowning science in a pitiless war of
partisans, its lazy taste for easy formulas.7Lefebvre showed more stamina,
more self-abnegation. In 1949, still the most widely respected Party
philosopher, he submitted to a public autocritique, regretting that he had
formulated Marxism as a theory of knowledge when it was in fact a
praxis, and so had tended to sacrifice historical dialectic to a formal
dialectic, with its attendant danger of Hegelianism. This was a curious
admission, for it was precisely against these errors that his Le Matérialisme
Dialectique had warned.8 This act of humiliation, in fact, coincided with
the height of Casanova’s campaign to minimize the initiative of the
intellectuals and their independence in relation to the Party. Lefebvre’s
‘neo-Hegelianism’ signified his failure to make of Marxism an abject
instrument of Party policy, to sacrifice the second principle of utility to
the fourth. By October 1955, he was in public dispute with his ex-pupil

1. Ibid., p. 146.
2. Ibid., pp. 149-50.
3. Ibid., p. 87.
4. The victim of Engels’ polemic, Anti-DUhring.
5. Mésaventures de VAnti-Marxisme, p. 139.
6. Pierre Naville, for example, had resigned from the Party in 1927 on the ground
that membership was no longer compatible with true Marxism.
7. G. Friedmann, De la Sainte Russie à V U.R.S.S., pp. 129-142.
8. See pp. 266-67.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Roger Garaudy on the rôle of philosophers and the problems of unity on

the ideological plane.1 Privately, he received ultimatums. Clearly loath to
break with the Party, it was only after the stubborn refusal to de-
Stalinize assumed the aspect of a permanent condition that he allowed his
revisionist ideas sufficient publicity to make his expulsion from the Party
inevitable. Expelled in June 1958, he was charged with factionalism and
with being among the founders of the Club de la Gauche which united
communist and non-communist intellectuals of the Left. He had, in
addition, contributed to non-Party journals like Voies nouvelles, founded
in April 1958, on which the ex-Stalinist philosophers Desanti and
Caveing also collaborated. In the post-Twentieth Congress years the
falling away among philosophers was exceptionally heavy.
It was in the year of his expulsion that Lefebvre published a work123
revealing the basis of his mounting antipathy to Stalinism. The root of the
trouble, Stalin’s personal failings as a Marxist, he traced back to
Anarchism and Socialism (1905). Stalin had not analysed the human
conscience in itself to see whether it had a concrete function in anticipating
history, but, instead, deduced the law of the retard de la conscience from a
simplified rationalization. According to this theory, consciousness
awaited the facts of life. Only a privileged consciousness could see ahead.
Therefore, to realize historical necessity, an intervention entirely exterior
to the masses was required; hence the rôle of the state which alone could
maintain the economic and social structure, rather than the reverse. In
place of the Marxist emphasis on the motive rôle of contradictions and
on the need to criticize existing conditions, the established moral criteria
became fidelity, confidence, and unconditional devotion. Dogmatism
became ultra-dogmatism: discussions were reduced to a purely formal
ceremony.8

There is a considerable corpus of evidence to suggest, therefore, that the

statement with which we began - Tn studying the reasons why western
intellectuals were attracted to Soviet communism and the reasons which
made so many of them break with communism, what is striking is that the
part played by Marxist theory is practically insignificant’ - calls for
drastic modification, particularly with regard to intellectuals engaged in
the academic disciplines.
There are enormous, probably insuperable, difficulties to be faced in
achieving any exact composite picture of the delicate, interacting
influences of ideas and social situations on the mind. The uniqueness of
each case, for one thing; for another, the subjectivism of the personal

1. C.C., October 1955. Lefebvre had already been warned in August 1955 that his
deviations were causing concern.
2. H. Lefebvre, Problèmes Actuels du M arxisme, Paris, 1958.
3. Ibid., p. 115.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

testimonies which necessarily comprise an important element of evidence.

Each retrospective verdict is apt to be conditioned and distorted by its
author’s present political frame of mind. It is not only to the opinions
of ex-communists that this applies; the Stalinist, or crypto-Stalinist
appraisal has its own axe to grind. Take, for example, the interesting
reflections made by Jean Desanti in 1956, when he was still a communist.1
It is extremely rare, wrote Desanti, for intellectuals who begin by being
‘doctrinaire’ Marxists to come to communism to verify the doctrine. The
decisive moment usually arrives when communist militant action reveals
to the intellectuals the convergence of their basic interests with those of
the working class. (Comment: There is much truth in this. But the last
phrase savours o f Party jargon. Gide came to communism largely as a
result o f guilt-feelings that his personal interests, as a wealthy and cultured
man, were not, under the present social system, synonymous with those o f
the workers. Friedmann was anxious to set the reality against the ideal.
Sympathy fo r the oppressed need not imply identity o f interests. Desanti's
emphasis diverges from the M arxist theory that alienation follows from a
comprehension o f the scientific laws o f history, from an awareness that the
proletariat is the class o f the future. Thus Desanti under-emphasizes the
preparatory rôle o f M arxist theory.) For us, he continued, the realization
of identity of interests occurred in 1934, in the struggle against fascism.
But we still believed in two Marxisms, one practical and empirical, that
of the Party, the other fundamental, the affair of the philosophers.
{Comment: Only too true.) But it was events, Spain, Munich, the Resis­
tance, which gave us the living example of the communist idea. Life itself
brought us to Marxism. {Comment: ‘M arxism' has here shifted its meaning
and is being implicitly equated with a rationalization o f the Party line. The
events Desanti mentions would certainly encourage admiration fo r the
Party, but would they inevitably, or even logically, verify dialectical
materialism, the classless society o f the future, etc? More accurate to have
said, life itself brought us to the Stalinist praxis. This is confirmed by
the fa c t that after 1956 Desanti and his colleagues quit the Party fo r a *true
M arxism ', the affair o f the philosophers.)
Here, then, the rôle of Marxist theory is once again obscured by
subjectivism, by the attempt to exalt the Stalinist Party as the embodi­
ment of the Marxist praxis in its purest form. Against the palpably
distorted generalizations of the ex-communists and of certain Stalinists,
it may be well to conclude by drawing attention to a number of personal
testimonies which suggest a different balance of motivation and which put
a greater emphasis on the Idea as the original germ of conversion. On the
eve of his execution Gabriel Péri wrote: T came to the Revolution by way
of passionate study and meditation. I walked entirely alone most of the
I. J.-T. Desanti, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Communisme’, L .N .C ., June 1956, pp. 93-
102.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

time . . . I joined on an intellectual - perhaps a cerebral - basis.*1

Marxism, he insisted, had taught him the sham of the League and of
Versailles, rather than the reverse. But: T could not content myself with
the intellectual satisfaction which socialism had procured me. It seemed
to me I had a service to render, a task to fulfil, to accomplish; that it was
impossible to discriminate between what the philosophy of socialism had
taught me and the great conspiracy toward which I have felt myself
drawn.’123
In 1946, the journal Esprit held an inquiry on the subject of communism
and young intellectuals. While by no means all those questioned allocated
to Marxism a decisive rôle in their development (the novels of Malraux
were frequently mentioned), and while there was a noticeable tendency
to view the Party in a pragmatic light, as the only organization with the
power and cohesion to break the grip of the ruling classes,8 nevertheless
Marxist theory emerged as surprisingly influential. One intellectual traced
his conversion to early discussions with Marcel Prenant and in the Cercle
de la Russie neuve. But it was Spain and Munich which revealed to him
the weakness of the Socialist Party as a trustee of Marxism, while the
leading rôle of the P.C.F. in the Resistance overcame his scruples as a
Christian and led him to join in September 1943.45A ‘normalien’ listed
as his first steps the discovery of Hegel, then of Marx, although in 1939
he still distrusted Party policy. In 1940 he was for Marxism as a ‘method’
but not as a ‘doctrine’. The Resistance showed him the strength of the
workers, the weakness of the ruling classes. Returning from a concentra­
tion camp to find the old system still intact, he joined the Party.6 A young
woman teacher was already a Marxist when she joined the Party after the
Liberation. However, she was also a romantic hoping to find within its
ranks the spirit of Malraux’s novels; finding only rigidity and lack of
spontaneity, she quit.6
A further example of the interaction of ideas and events in the forma­
tion of intellectual militants is afforded by the case of Professor Henri
Denis, of the Faculté de Droit at Rennes, who in September 1954 sent a
letter to Thorez explaining his decision to join the Party. At home and in
the colonies he saw the increasing domination of capital; journeys in
Russia and eastern Europe had left him favourably impressed. Con­
sequently, he was now convinced that ‘at this time it is clear that the
explanation of social evolution given by Marx and Engels is completely
valid.’ He felt compelled, he wrote, to make a gesture of overt solidarity.7
1. G. Péri, Toward Singing Tomorrows, p. 21.
2. Gabriel Péri - un grand Français, p. 112.
3. ‘Enquête sur le Communisme et les Jeunes*, Esprit, February 1946, p. 196ff.
4. Ibid., pp. 198-201.
5. Ibid., pp. 203-4.
6. Ibid., p. 216.
7. Humanité, 13 September 1954.

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 MARXISM AND COMMUNIST INTELLECTUALS

Confronted by such a typical action, how are we to explain it? Sup­

posing, for the sake of argument, that we believe that the present
situation in the colonies or in eastern Europe directly refutes the
prognostications of Marx and Engels; should we then be reluctant to
admit that Professor Denis, as an intelligent man, could have reached
his decision to join the Party on such grounds as he claimed? If so, then
we shall be forced to seize upon his confessed impulsion to make a
gesture of solidarity, emphasizing this ‘psychological’ factor as the
determinant one, whatever his own beliefs to the contrary. Jules
Monnerot would evidently follow this course. The communist, he writes,
‘systematically deceives himself about the motivation and origin of his
passion and represents himself, when he talks ideology, as a man of
intellectual and rational impulses and motives.’1 But if we follow Denis’s
specific career, we find that for a decade or more before he joined the
Party he had been writing rationally on many aspects of Marxist philo­
sophy and economics, in La Pensée and elsewhere. In this case, as in
many others, the evidence is plain; the decision to join the Party was
preceded by a long period of intellectual reflection within a Marxist
framework.
A certain relativism is essential for the historian of ideas and intellectual
movements. Opinion should not colour analysis; the student’s own beliefs
should not distort his understanding of the motives and mental processes
of those whom he studies; the rational process should not be regarded
as indivisible, as a straight line leading inexorably from a given set of
evidence to a given conclusion. Above all, a generalization, to have any
value, must be founded on an examination of numerous specific cases.
These are elementary rules, but in no field have they been less frequently
observed than in the field of communist studies.

1. J. Monnerot, op, c i t pp. 137-8.

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 C H A P T E R TW O

History in the M aking

I n 1945, Georges Cogniot remarked that the younger generation of

historians had recently furnished the Party with ‘tens’ of members, while
Roger Garaudy, on a cautious note, listed among the communist
intellectuals ‘some’ teachers of history. The situation was apparently
less than satisfactory. Active in Party work as these historians might be,
in their professional capacity they too often resembled their non-Marxist
colleagues. ‘Marxism commands their actions, but not their thoughts.’
The Party, Garaudy added, did not demand of them that their history be
partisan, but merely scientific.1
In 1949, Jean Bruhat, perhaps the most stalwart Stalinist among the
professional historians, reflected that for many years the principles of
historical materialism had been poorly understood in France. Guesde
and Lafargue had too often over-simplified their Marxism, while Jaurès,
as a historian of the Great Revolution, had attempted an impossible
synthesis between the materialist and idealist conceptions. It was only
with the essays published in the 1930s by the Cercle de la Russie neuve
that historical materialism had properly come into its own.12
If we turn to these essays, and particularly to Jean Baby’s Le
Matérialisme Historique, with the expectation of finding a living develop­
ment of Marxist historiography in the light of the fifty years that had
elapsed since Marx’s death, we are likely to be disappointed. Of twenty-
six distinctly banal pages, Baby devoted no less than twelve to quotations
from Marx and Engels. The argument was familiar. Production relations
are basic; juridical, political and religious institutions arise to sanction
and stabilize existing production relations. Economic growth leads to
contradictions, class conflicts, and ultimately to social revolutions. The
infrastructure dictates to the superstructure. But economic forces are
determinant only ‘in the last analysis’. (Engels had written to J. Bloch and
H. Starkenburg that ‘. . . the ultimate determining element in history is
the production and reproduction of real life’, and that this became the
1. R. Garaudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 5.
2. J. Bruhat, Destin de VHistoire, Paris, 1949, p. 6.

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 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

more apparent the longer the time-span examined. But historians studying
any given moment may find no more comfort in this formula than in
Baby’s repetition of it.) Finally, concluded Baby, historical materialism
is not merely a method of investigation; it is a doctrine, and a guide to
revolutionary action.1 Is it possible to believe that a generation of scholars
had suffered for lack of this basic enlightenment?
After the war, Jean Bruhat, himself an extensive quoter of Marx,
Engels, Lenin and Stalin, proceeded to a lively defence of the doctrine,
criticizing G. P. Gooch for emphasizing geographical factors in history,
Paul Valéry for mistrusting history, and Arnold Toynbee for perverting
history, as well as the hagiographers of great men and those inclined to
lay stress on chance factors, or on differences of national temperament.
It is quite true, as Bruhat argued, that one can only explain Napoleon’s
career within the context of the balance of social forces on which his
power rested. But the question of the man’s unique contribution to an
epoch was not one which Bruhat felt to be of primary importance, beyond
the general statement that ‘historical materialism places each individual
in his place in the class which is his, each class in its place in a given class
struggle, each epoch in its place in a given human evolution’.12 But to state
the problem in these terms is by no means to resolve it. Some of Marx’s
remarks on the subject carry a disturbing ambiguity. When, writing of
Louis Bonaparte’s coup d'état, Marx claimed to demonstrate ‘how the
class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that
made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part’, stating
that France now had ‘the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he must
appear in the middle of the nineteenth century’, he posed a difficulty (and
an apparent contradiction) which is not solved by Engels’ assertion that
‘if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place . . .’3
As with other fields, the most fruitful efforts to inject an element of
living controversy into the application of Marxist principles to historio­
graphy were associated with group colloquia marked by lively, and often
uninhibited, discussion. In May 1953, for example, La Pensée organized
a colloquium on a number of topics, including ‘Marxism and the History
of France’, with contributions from Bruhat, Jacques Chambaz, Maurice
Caveing, Pierre Vilar, Claude Mossé, E. Bottigelli, Charles Parain and
Claude Cahen. A school teacher, M. Varain, intervened to demand on
behalf of his colleagues a more precise historical guidance, particularly
on the pre-1789 period, where the instituteur was at present compelled
to resort to a sort of do-it-yourself Marxist empiricism. A scientific
explanation o f the Wars of Religion was badly needed. The session

1. A la Lum ière du M arxisme, pp. 286-310.

2. J. Bruhat, op. cit., p. 58.
3. K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected W orks, Moscow, 1962, vol. I, pp. 244 and 249;
vol. II, p. 505.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

became controversial when Pierre Vilar complained of the paucity of

original works from Marxist historians, their tendency to ignore tech­
niques such as the use of statistics, and their inclination to superficiality
when criticizing their bourgeois colleagues.1
The c o m m u n is t historian, like other intellectuals, works to a lesser or
greater extent, depending on his field, within the limits imposed by the
contemporary political situation and by the vicissitudes of the Party line.
Soviet trends are always in evidence. It was Georges Cogniot, for some
years secretary of the Internationale rouge de l’Enseignement, and director
of its bulletin, who was entrusted with the production of the French
edition of the 1938 History o f the Communist Party {Bolshevik) o f the
U.S.S.R. Jean Bruhat, recalling that Stalin himself had supervised the
final text, recommended it as a work of incomparable educative and
historical value.123The collection of essays marking the Party’s tribute to
the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Great Revolution was
saturated with laudatory references to this work, even Georges Politzer
referring to it as the best source for a grasp of historical materialism
and for an exposition of the Marx-Engels development of the Hegelian
standpoint.8
Admiration for Soviet historians among their French counterparts was,
of course, often perfectly genuine.45Pierre Angrand believed that Soviet
historiography was characterized by its abundance and variety, its high
quality, and by its progressive educational value. He mentioned, as
examples, the French Revolution (1941), by V. P. Volguine and E. V.
Tarlé, Volguine’s work. The Egalitarian and Socialist Tendencies in the
French Secret Societies, 1830-34 (1947), as well as the same writer’s
editions of Morelly, Saint-Simon, Buonarroti and Cabet. Angrand,
himself a devoted Stalinist, paid tribute to Alpatov’s study of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois theorists, the articles of Molok and
Zastenkov on the Revolution of 1848, and, reaching further back, to
Porchnev’s Les Emeutes populaires en France avant le Fronde, 1623-48.
Soviet historians, he added, teach us to avoid the major errors of objec­
tivism, subjectivism and 'fixisme* (interpreting the past from a narrow
contemporary point of view).6
1. La Pensée, November 1953, p. 127.
2. Humanité, 31 December 1938.
3. Essays on the French Revolution, trans. by W. Zak, London, 1945, p. 177.
4. However, Georges Lefebvre, who was certainly a friend of the U.S.S.R., had a
poor opinion of Soviet historians like Porchnev, Volguine and Tarlé who claimed to
be authorities on French history but who rarely put a foot inside the French archives
and who, according to Lefebvre, failed to understand the complexity of the French
land system, the fluidity of social divisions, and the conservatism of the poorer
peasants in the late eighteenth century. Shortly after the war, at the Société d*histoire
moderne, he openly accused some Russians of confusing history and propaganda.
See R. C. Cobb, ‘Georges Lefebvre*, Past and Present, November 1960, p. 56.
5. La Pensée, September-October 1950, pp. 94-9.

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 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

Yet the painful process of criticism and self-criticism frequently

emanated, not from individual historians, but from official Soviet bodies,
and pejorative adjectives such as these served to define the errors of a
concept or Party line now abandoned. It was the Central Committee
which in 1938 attacked Pokrovsky for judging the past in terms of the
present, but the real issue concerned this historian's failure to interpret
Russian history in the light of the national-patriotic line at that time
being infused into all sectors of Soviet literature and life. Eisenstein was,
presumably, also guilty of ‘fixism e’ in his film Ivan the Terrible, which
portrayed what Jean Bruhat called Ivan’s ‘armée progressiste’ as a band
of degenerate thugs. Again, the Central Committee intervened.1
The way in which the apparatus of Stalinism and of the cult of per­
sonality, in their French variants, could permeate historiography was well
illustrated in 1950 by a report composed by a Commission of the Circle
of Communist Historians, including Agulhon, Biard, Bruhat, Hamelin
and Soboul, on the theme of Maurice Thorez’s contribution to historical
scholarship. Thorez, 'un historien d’un type nouveau*, was, evidently,
a valuable lesson in modesty with his constant references to the works
of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. In 1939, he had ‘scientifically’
demonstrated why some historians rested content with the achievements
of 1789; their opinion ‘simply reflects the interests of the bourgeois
capitalists which the Revolution carried to power*.1 2 Thorez was not
content with what Stalin had derided as ‘paper documents’. His docu­
mentation, on the contrary, was remarkable for its diversity and its
4caractère toujours profondément humain’. Furthermore: ‘Maurice Thorez
is an historian because he is a political man of the working class. And in
his capacity as a political man of the working class, he indicates the path
to follow because he is an historian’. It was Thorez who had unravelled
the primary lessons of 1789 and 1848. Ultimately, wrote the historiens
de métier, ‘we are able, thanks to Maurice Thorez, to oppose to bourgeois
history the scientific conception of history which is ours’.3 That Thorez
has, in fact, always been a keen student of French history, there is no
denying; the absurdity of this public utterance remains unmitigated.
The effect of the thaw following the Twentieth Congress of the C.P.S.U.
in French historical circles is difficult to judge although, as we shall see
later, a number of cords binding controversies about the Great Revolu­
tion were now unwound. In November 1957, a conference of Historical
Institutes and Commissions was held at Prague, with delegates from the
communist states and from the French, Italian and Austrian Parties.
It was agreed that in the past, communist historians had fallen into
‘schematization’ in their efforts to justify a particular démarche of the

1. J. Bruhat, op. cit., p. 56.

2. J. Bruhat, ‘L’Apport de Maurice Thorez à l’Histoire*, C.C., April 1950, p. 36.
3. Ibid., pp. 42 and 36.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Party; facts had been found relevant only in so far as they supported
preconceived theses. Documents made available since 1956 by the open­
ing of the archives of the Third International should, and would, be more
widely used. At the same time, several notes of caution were sounded.
Rejection of dogmatism need not be taken to imply any concession to
bourgeois objectivism, or to a sort of positivism, a mere detailed narrative
of events. To criticize the sectarian errors of the Party in the years
following the Sixth (1928) Congress of the Comintern was not to justify
the opportunism of social democracy; to ‘re-evaluate’ Stalin’s life was not
to question the leading rôle of the Party.1 The general tenor of the report
suggested a hazardous route through mine-strewn countryside, but the
appearance in 1960 of the first contribution to a projected History of the
P.C.F. indicated a reluctance among the French to countenance even the
tentative revisionism of the Prague Conference. For Germaine Willard’s
La Drôle de Guerre et la Trahison de Vichy, dealing with the most
sensitive period in the life of the Party, reverted to the old, familiar
formulas, while totally ignoring the detailed documentary indictments
of the Party previously brought to bear by A. Rossi and others.12 One
cannot repudiate what one fails to acknowledge.

Historical materialism is not simply a view of the past. It is a call to

action, a weapon in the struggle, for written into its pages is the necessity,
as well as the inevitability, of proletarian action. Men make their own
history; the final outcome may be preordained, but the rapidity with
which capitalist society is to be surpassed depends on a number of
contingent factors, not the least of which is a truly scientific under­
standing of the present situation in its full historical perspective. That
history can have its practical uses few historians, communist or otherwise,
would be inclined to deny. Real parallels exist, and present dangers have
their precedents. But a problem arises when the historian allows himself
to be guided by a schematic formula dictated less by events themselves
than by the exigencies of preconceived doctrine. An early example of the
type of dogmatism condemned by the Prague Conference is to be found
in two articles about the Paris Commune of 1871, by Jean Bruhat, which
appeared in the Cahiers du Bolchévisme, the official organ of the Central
Committee. On the first occasion,3 Bruhat was writing during the
left-sectarian phase characterized by its extreme hostility to social
democrats, or ‘social fascists’, whereas the second article4 was conceived

1. J. Poperen, ‘Après la Conférence des Instituts et Commissions d’Histoire*, C.C.,

April 1958, pp. 642-51.
2. See pp. 138-48.
3. J. Bruhat, 'La Commune de Paris première Dictature du Prolétariat*, C.B.,
15 March 1932.
4. J. Bruhat, 'Actualité de la Commune de Paris’, C.B., 1 April 1936.

280
 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

under radically changed circumstances, on the eve of the elections which

brought the Popular Front to power.
The 1932 analysis opened with an attack on modem socialists who
claimed that the Commune had been essentially a democratic movement
of the broad Left. On the contrary, argued Bruhat, the Louis Blancs of
nineteenth-century ‘social fascism’ had proven themselves the worst
enemies of an essentially proletarian revolution.1The 1936 version, on the
other hand, followed the Eighth Congress of the P.C.F. in claiming
paternity for the Party in the broad stream of nineteenth-century
socialism.8 In 1932, Bruhat defined the Commune as a dictatorship, not
a democracy; not a pure dictatorship of the proletariat, but one in which
the workers held the petit-bourgeois elements under control. It was,
indeed, the first time in world history that the workers had seized power.
However, a real revolutionary party was lacking, hence the errors and
hesitations.8 But in 1936 Bruhat explained that it was through the alliance
of the workers with the peasants, small traders, artisans and intellectuals
that bourgeois domination had been broken and a workers’ and peasants'
government set up. But, bearing in mind the P.C.F.’s new electoral alliance
with the Radical Party, he was prepared to go still further. The middle
classes, hostile to the workers in 1848, had been so duped and violated
by the Second Empire that they were apparently willing to co-operate in
the ‘new popular state organs’ which marked the Commune.12345 ‘The
Commune, in effect, had carried with it the middle classes of Paris.’
Despite the basic contradiction between these two accounts, support
might be found for either, in its general trend, in certain statements of
Marx and Engels. In 1891, Engels described the Commune as the
‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. But the existence of universal suffrage,
which communist historians have elsewhere castigated as a petit-
bourgeois legacy, seems incompatible with the notion of a single-class
dictatorship, and Marx himself wrote to the effect that working-class
initiative gained the support of ‘the great bulk of the Paris middle classes
. . . the wealthy capitalists alone excepted’.6 However, Bruhat’s second
article was obviously inspired by motives other than a mature reappraisal
of The Civil War in France.
The period from the riots of February 1934 until the outbreak of war
was one in which communist historians were unusually active in drawing
historical parallels. Bruhat explained that Doumergue’s thwarted attempt
to endow the Senate with the right to dissolve the Chamber recalled the
challenge to the Republic posed by President MacMahon in 1877. The

1. Op. cit., 1932, pp. 395 and 399.

2. Op. cit., 1936, p. 369.
3. Op. cit., 1932, pp. 395-8.
4. Op. cit., 1936, p. 377.
5. K. Marx and F. Engels, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 485 and 524.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

doctrine and tactics of the ‘moral order’ demanded by Doumergue and

Flandin corresponded closely to the slogans of MacMahon’s hobéreaux
defending their privileges against the republican bourgeoisie in the
1870s.1
Following the strike wave of the summer of 1936, which threatened to
dissolve the precarious unity achieved by the Popular Front, the com­
munist historian Paul Bouthonnier reminded the readers of the Cahiers
that in February 1848 the industrial bourgeoisie had succeeded in allying
itself with the financial aristocracy and in isolating the workers from their
natural allies, the peasants and the petite-bourgeoisie. The disastrous
proletarian uprising of the June days had followed. This must not happen
again. Once the Republic turned against the workers, a Bonapartist-style
coup would be imminent, and it was precisely to this end that the ‘two
hundred families’ and their press were now working.123A year later,
confronted with a fast-disintegrating Left, Bouthonnier recalled the lesson
of August 10th, 1792, when the Revolution had entered a new phase
through vigilant mass action under the leadership of the Jacobins, with
their clearly defined programme and their ability to organize the Paris
sections through their Central Committee.8 The moral was plain: only
the Communist Party could fulfil a similar function today.
These were the years of intensive patriotism, of the appeal to national
feeling against international fascism and the fifth column within France.
But, when the Party launched the slogan 7a France aux Français’, Marx
Dormoy, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, and himself a Jew,
objected that the anti-semites had exploited just such a slogan during the
Dreyfus affair. Jean Bruhat came to the Party’s defence with 'quelques
rappels historiques’ designed to prove that the best defenders of the French
nation had always been the working class. Had not many seigneurs
sided with the enemy during the Hundred Years War? Philippe le Bon,
Duke of Burgundy, had allied himself with Henry V of England, a
treason which resulted in the English annexation of France in 1420. Had
not many nobles intrigued with England and Spain during the Civil Wars
of the sixteenth century? After 1789, had the émigrés shown any compunc­
tion about appealing for foreign intervention against their own
compatriots? And as for Thiers, had he not preferred Bismarck to the
Communard workers?4* Much of this was more than plausible and
certainly valid in emotional terms, yet the cost was to ignore the entire

1. J. Bruhat, ‘Notes sur “l’Ordre moral*', le Seize Mai et Mac-Mahon*, C.B.,

1 December 1934, pp. 1378-86.
2. P. Bouthonnier, *La Révolution de 1848 et l’Actualité*, C.2?., October 1936, pp.
1041-5.
3. P. Bouthonnier, ‘La Journée du 10 Août 1792’, C.B., September-October 1937,
p. 842.
4. J. Bruhat, ‘Le peuple, champion de l’indépendance nationale’, C.2?., November-
December 1937, pp. 876-8.

282
 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

problem of feudal pre-nation sovereignty, the nature of dynastic wars

and the degree to which lower-class patriotism constituted, in Marxist
terms, a retrogressive factor.
The pursuit of historical parallels was renewed with energy after the
Liberation. At a time when the armed forces of the popular Resistance
had been absorbed into the regular army, or disbanded, Pierre Angrand,
reviewing Albert SobouTs V Armée nationale sous la Révolution, drew the
lesson - and it was a bitter lesson to many communists - that an army
could have no civic sense, and therefore no value, unless it were intimately
linked with the people.1 But if de Gaulle the soldat de métier appeared
as an obstacle in 1945, de Gaulle the aspiring politician and leader of the
R.P.F. evoked the darkest fears by the end of the decade. Editing certain
texts of Henri de Saint-Simon, the communist historian Jean Dautry
warned against the falsifications of the 'fascist* de Gaulle and his
auxiliaries who dared to trace their 'slavish corporatism’ back to the great
Utopian socialist.123Bruhat marked the centenary of Louis Bonaparte’s
coup of December 1851 by linking de Gaulle with the Bonapartes,
Boulanger and Hitler, all masters of the strategy of seizing power under
the guise of legality. He further implied that, just as Louis Blanc and
Proudhon had betrayed the workers in the years 1848-51 (which they had
not), so Herriot and certain socialist leaders were today negotiating in
bad faith with the leaders of the Gaullist R.P.F. But there was a dif­
ference. In 1851 the workers found themselves uncertain because
disorganized; in 1951 they had confidence in the leadership of the
P.C.F.8 This was true.
The events of May 1958 and the advent of de Gaulle to power evoked,
in historical terms, yet another call for the defence of the democratic
heritage, with a series of articles in Europe on the theme of Jaurès the
republican, Jaurès the democrat, Jaurès the enemy of the professional
army. Sensitive to the fragmentation of the French Left, Roger Garaudy
recalled that, while Jaurès had always recognized in the working class
the decisive democratic force, he had, like Marx, been careful to avoid
lumping together all other classes as a single, reactionary mass.4 Leo
Figuerès described Jaurès’s reactions to the Dreyfus affair and his
realization of the dangers inherent in an army increasingly obsessed by
its own sectarian aims, and prepared to impose them by force on the
nation. Himself a student of Carnot’s Revolutionary Army, and
appreciating the inadequacy of the minor reforms and purges within the
officer corps enacted after the affair by General André, Jaurès had

1. La Pensée, January-February 1947, p. 147.

2. Saint-Simon, Textes Choisis. Préface par J. Dautry, Paris, 1951, p. 44.
3. J. Bruhat, ‘Le Coup d’E tat du 2 Décembre 1851’, C.C., December 1951, pp.
1402-9.
4. Europe, October-November 1958, p. 52.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

conceived the solution of the popular militia, with officers drawn from all
classes, which he described in V Armée Nouvelle. And if, in 1958, France’s
existence was again imperilled by an army of mercenaries, then the lesson
was clear.1 But while the army appeared now as the most immediate threat
to democracy, the collapse of the Fourth Republic obviously stemmed
from the contradictions of a colonial war in Algeria incapable of a
victorious solution. Jaurès, wrote Jean Bruhat, had at first adopted a
somewhat equivocal position about colonialism, partly due to his
admiration for the anti-clerical Jules Ferry, and partly due to his hopes
for the peaceful penetration of French enlightenment into backward
Africa. But the early years of the present century had fully brought home
to him the ugly economic foundation of imperialism, and against this
he had never ceased to protest. The Communist Party, which now called
for Algerian independence, thus proved itself the only faithful disciple
of Jaurès’ teaching.2

The communist intellectuals, as we have said before, regard themselves

as the legitimate trustees of an ideological, or scientific development
which absorbs and transcends not only pre-Marxist socialist thought but
also the whole field of rationalist materialism. To question this view
would be to question Marxism itself, to enter, in short, into an intricate
and contentious debate beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, the
terms in which the claim has been upheld certainly merit a brief examina­
tion.
Engels had traced the theoretical roots of Marxism to the bourgeois
enlightenment, to the French Revolution and to the Utopian socialists
Saint-Simon, Owen and Fourier (as well as to obvious German and
English philosophical and economic theories). But the first generation
of communist intellectuals in France, anxious to substitute the relatively
concise doctrine of Marxism-Leninism for the haphazard medley of
socialist and anarchist currents which prevailed on the Left, were
naturally inclined to minimize their debt to the bourgeois enlightenment.
The heterodox Barbusse was an exception; but, on the whole, it was
Rolland and the idealists who were the more prone to invoke this broad
heritage in the name of a pure esprit.
With the period of left-wing rapprochement which began in 1934 a
marked shift in the communist attitude toward the history of ideas
became apparent, and this trend endured and fortified itself after the
Liberation. Aragon recalled that for Jacques Decour, and for himself,
two great French traditions merged in the Party; that of the Cartesian
method, and that of the Revolution. The Party, according to Garaudy,
had ‘resurrected* the rationalist-materialist qualities of the Great
1. Europe, October-November 1958, pp. 83-4.
2. Ibid., pp. 76-8.

284
 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

Revolution.1 Henri Lefebvre devoted a book to the study of Descartes,

a dialectician in his ability to analyse (break down the object studied
into its component elements) and to synthesize (reconstruct the whole),
while J.-R. Bloch boldly affirmed that no one was more ‘Cartesian’ than
Stalin. Georges Politzer defined eighteenth-century materialism as the
fusion of two currents, the English (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke) and the
French (Descartes). With the Discours de la Méthode (1637), science was
on the verge of breaking completely with theology; Pierre Bayle’s
Dictionary o f History and Criticism consolidated the advance; then came
the final victory of Reason over God, of materialism over metaphysics.
Henri Lefebvre discerned a partial dialectic at work with Diderot, whose
conception of nature was dialectical while his view of man remained
‘metaphysical’ in the sense that he saw in man only the forces of nature,
and not those of society. The eighteenth-century materialists shared with
their successors, the Utopian socialists, the fallaciously idealistic hope
that humanity could be regenerated as a whole, without internal social
conflicts. It was with the purpose of tracing and elaborating on this
distinctively French tradition, that the whole project of the Encyclopédie
de la Renaissance Française, directed by Paul Langevin, was launched
after the Liberation.123
Communist historiography of the nineteenth-century socialist pioneers,
Utopians or otherwise, was generally conceived in a spirit of praise rather
than blame, of appropriation rather than rejection. And while claims
tended to be extravagant, criticisms rarely exceeded the inescapable
minimum. It is true, as Pierre Angrand wrote, that Etienne Cabet failed
to grasp how or why under capitalism the worker finds himself alienated
from the process of production, and it is no less true that Cabet, who
committed his hopes to the power of human reason and the spirit of
fraternity, relying on methods of persuasion and abhorring the use of
violence or constraint, thereby placed himself squarely among the
Utopians.8 The same was no less true of Fourier, and Jean Dautry
directed the obvious charges of Utopianism against Saint-Simon’s vision
of a socialist world ordered by engineers, bankers, industrialists, scientists
and philosophers,4 although the degree to which Saint-Simon was a

1. R. Garaudy, Les Sources Françaises du Socialisme Scientifique, Paris, 1948.

2. See on this theme: P. Nizan, Les Matérialistes de i*Antiquité; J. Luc, Diderot;
J. Duval, Victor Hugo; G. Friedmann, Spinoza; L. Prenant and P. Labérenne,
Descartes; E. Vermeil, Heine; H. Lefebvre, Diderot; H. Lefebvre, Descartes.
See particularly the Socialisme et Culture series published in the 1930s by Editions
Sociales Internationales; the Grandes Figures series published after the war by Editions
Hier et Aujourd’hui; and the Classiques du Peuple series launched in 1950 by Editions
Sociales. By 1957, its thirty titles included edited texts of Montaigne, Descartes,
Diderot, Holbach, La Mettrie, Voltaire, Rousseau, Morelly, Marat, Robespierre,
Saint-Just, Babeuf, Buonarroti, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Blanqui, Hugo and Maupassant.
3. P. Angrand, Etienne Cabet et la Républic de 1848y Paris, 1948, pp. 16-18.
4. Saint-Simon, op. cit.t p. 32.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

utopian, in any but the technical sense, has become in recent years
increasingly questionable. With the appearance of works on Jules Guesde
and Jean Jaurès, this evaluative historiography entered the passionately
disputed terrain of pre-contemporary politics, particularly in the case of
Jaurès, whose name has been invoked by every socialist and neo-socialist
faction in France since the First World War. Guesde’s faults, according
to communists, were a tendency to rely on a superficial, over-schematized
Marxism, sectarian tactics, a fatalistic certainty about the coming of the
revolution, and an inability to analyse concretely specific French
conditions.1 Jaurès, on the contrary, is rebuked for his semi-idealist view
of history, a failure to maintain an independent working-class policy
during the Dreyfus affair, and an inclination to rely on universal suffrage
as a means of transforming the bourgeois Republic into a socialist one.1234
The Communist Party, so the argument runs, by defining these two
contrary deviations, and by learning from Soviet practice, has achieved
a just synthesis of Guesde’s Marxism and Jaurès’ humanistic socialism.
Criticisms such as these, however, serve only as a prelude to a con­
structive evaluation of the more positive achievements of the pioneers.
It was not of Cabet the Utopian creator of the Icarian paradise, or of
Cabet the founder of the secluded American communistic colony that
Pierre Angrand mainly spoke, but of Cabet the political activist, the
founder of Le Populaire, the revolutionary of 1848. Even more attention
has been paid to the tradition of communist revolutionary activism
running from the Babouvist conspiracy of 1796, through Buonarroti to
Blanqui, and finally to Jules Guesde. BabeuTs own failure is explained
in terms of historical inevitability, as an anachronistic, if praiseworthy,
putsch doomed to disaster at a time when the bourgeoisie had only begun
to find its full strength, and when no composite proletariat as yet existed.
If, like Thomas Muenzer and the English Levellers, Babeuf appeared as a
revolutionary thrown up ahead of his time, his appreciation of the
economic basis of the true revolution, and his non-Utopian activism,
are regarded by communist historians as an invaluable heritage trans­
mitted through Buonarroti to the less mystical hero of the Paris
proletariat, Auguste Blanqui.8 Blanqui, despite his divergences from
Marxism, his élitism and his disregard for organized trade unionism,
emerges in communist accounts as the authentic and incorruptible hero
of nineteenth-century revolutionary Paris. It was, wrote Bruhat, Blanqui
who understood in 1848 that the Republic would be a fraud if it merely
changed one form of government for another. ‘7/ ne suffit pas de changer
les mots: ilfa u t changer les choses.'* Albert Soboul, also, regarded Blanqui

1. J. Guesde, Textes Choisis, Préface de C. Willard, Paris, 1959, p. 37.

2. R. Garaudy, 'Jaurès et Démocratie', Europe, October-November 1958, p. 55.
3. J. Lépine, Gracchus Babeuf\ Paris, 1949, pp. 244-7.
4. J. Bruhat, Les Journées de Février 1848, Paris, 1948, p. 75.

286
 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

as the most advanced revolutionary leader of the time, praising his

realism in demanding an indefinite postponement of the elections to the
Constituent Assembly, whereas Cabet asked only for a brief delay.1 From
the ageing and imprisoned Blanqui of the 1870s the laurel passed,
despite confusions, to Guesde the defender of the Commune who, despite
his early anarchist period, had by the end of that decade passed over to
Marxism and thence, as Claude Willard wrote, to his place in the front
rank of those who prepared the way for the victory of socialism in France.123
Given a broad, Marxist perspective, there is little to cavil at in all this.
The main problem arises - and it arises often - when a particular theorist
is credited with views more modem, or more close to the Marxist view,
than the facts suggest. J.-L. Lecercle’s contention, for example, that what
Proudhon, the petit-bourgeois, felt compelled to reject in Rousseau was
the idea of a real liberty, government by the people and suppression of the
power of the rich, could hardly strike any dispassionate scholar favour­
ably. Lercercle associates Rousseau’s ideas with the Jacobins; Proudhon
did the same. But what Proudhon abhorred in the Jacobins was ‘bloody
struggles and deceptions’, yet another despotic state power as bad as the
last. Rousseau was by no means an economic egalitarian and Proudhon,
far from discerning in the Contrat Social an effective formula for sup­
pressing the power of the rich, saw only an exclusive concentration on
political solutions and a corresponding disregard for work, production,
economic rights, the real relations of men in society.8 Lecercle’s claim
that the Contrat Social possibly transcended the framework of bourgeois
thought, 'Car il vise à empêcher les riches d'acquérir la puissance réelle’4
only solves the fundamental contradiction in Rousseau’s thought - the
reconciliation of private ownership with unlimited popular sovereignty -
by ignoring it. Angrily as he fulminated against the treatment accorded
the poor by the rich, it was Rousseau who wrote, ‘It is certain that the
right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship, and
even more important in some respects than liberty itself’, and that
‘nothing is more fatal to morality and to the Republic than the continual
shifting of rank and fortune among the citizens: . . . neither those who
rise nor those who fall are abl e. . . to possess themselves of the qualifica­
tions requisite for their new condition, still less to discharge the duties
it entails.’5*
Engels had paid tribute to Saint-Simon and Fourier in his Anti-Dühring,
while Marx compared these Utopians, who had ‘the presentiment and

1. A. Soboul, The French Revolution o f1848, London, 1948, pp. 22-3.

2. J. Guesde, op. cit., p. 38.
3. P.-J. Proudhon, Idée générale de la Révolution, Paris, 1923, pp. 191-2.
4. J. J. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, Préface de J.-L. Lecercle, Paris, 1956, p. 48.
5. J. J. Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, trans. by G. Cole, London,
1955, pp. 254 and 255.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

imaginative expression of a new world’, favourably to Proudhon. But

dubious was the attempt of F. Armand and R. Maublanc to present
Fourier as the precursor of modem communism, rather than of the
co-operative movement, and as an enemy of reformism. *Ainsi Fourier,
malgré les apparences, est en réalité le contraire même d'un réformisteV
And why? Because Fourier had called for a reform of society as a whole.
But, while Fourier envisaged a transformation of society which would be
ultimately a radical one, his chosen means, his rejection of violence, his
expectation that model communities would multiply through the force of
example, all this was thoroughly reformist, bearing in mind the fact that
the revolutionary-reformist dichotomy has generally concerned means
rather than ends. Fourier, according to Armand and Maublanc, would
have recognized a modem version of his phalanstères in the sovkhoz
and kolkhoz of Russia. But what of his emphasis on the importance of
inequalities, of the private-profit motive? An answer is available: the
Stakhanovite teams are inspired by high wage differentials, and thus
‘individual cupidity becomes a true social virtue’.1 234The authors agreed
that while in the U.S.S.R. this was only a temporary situation, Fourier
regarded it as an enduring one, but they refused to draw the logical
inference, namely that Fourier’s ethics on this question were closer to
those of traditional capitalism than to those of Marxian socialism.
Jean Dautry’s analysis of Saint-Simon presents similar difficulties.
The quest for damaging parallels becomes strained when the Saint-
Simonians are accused of betraying the master by idolizing him in the
same way as the social-democrats of the Second International betrayed
Marx.8 Nor is it at all clear that in the ‘last resort’ Saint-Simon endorsed
proletarian democracy and the self-emancipation of the workers. Rather
he believed that the people had neither the knowledge nor the leisure to
govern, except in moments of ‘brief delirium’, and he summed up the
situation under the Jacobin Convention as ‘complete anarchy’. Saint-
Simon was an exponent of enlightened paternalism, and if, in this respect,
he had certain affinities with Stalin, Dautry discerned others:

E ntre la confiance dans VH om m e de Saint-Sim on e t la fo rm u le de

Staline T H om m e le capital le p lu s précieux' . . . entre le cartésianism e
de Saint-Sim on e t le rationalism e des m arxistes du m ilieu d u X X e siècle,
le f il rouge est solide A

In marked distinction to these benevolent reappraisals, a mood of

unrelenting hostility has characterized communist references to the one
figure whose influence in the French workers’ movement continued to

1. F. Armand and R. Maublanc, Fourier, Paris, 1937, p. 169.

2. Ibid., p. 191.
3. Saint-Simon, op. cit., p. 43.
4. Ibid., p. 40.

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 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

challenge seriously that of Marx until 1918, and even beyond. For the
federalist, mutualist teachings of Proudhon, the anti-socialist anarchist
against whom Marx directed his Poverty o f Philosophy, can be seen at
work in the French section of the First International (Tolain, etc.), in the
Paris Commune itself, in the co-operative movement of the late 1870s, and
finally, although with important collectivist modifications, in the revolu­
tionary syndicalist movement. ‘Proudhon,' wrote Marx to Kugelmann in
1866, ‘has done enormous mischieF, and Engels stated, somewhat prema­
turely, that ‘the Commune was the grave of the Proudhon school of social­
ism’ (sic). Since that time, Proudhon’s ghost has been mercilessly harried
in the pages of communist literature. For Proudhon, wrote Armand
and Maublanc, ‘¿/ suffira à la société de penser pour s'organiser'. (Yet
Proudhon was often in prison for his activities while Fourier, their hero,
waited all his life for a king or a millionaire to put his dream communities
on to living soil.) A lengthy article by Armand Cuvillier, M arx et
Proudhon, published in 1937, investigated his petit-bourgeois fallacies in
detail (and that he was a petit-bourgeois Proudhon was the last to deny),
while a year later Henri Mougin asked whether it was pure coincidence
which lay between the Proudhonist forms taken by the workers’ move­
ment after 1848 and *la faveur dont Proudhon a bénéficié aux Tuileries
dès les débuts de l'Empire'.1 Jean Dautry wrote that Proudhon’s La
Révolution sociale démontrée par le Coup d'Etat du 2 Décembre had been
put on sale by Louis Bonaparte’s police authorities, while recalling that on
the evening of the coup Proudhon had told Victor Hugo, *Cessez de
résister, croyez-moi\ a A more far-reaching and systematic demolition
was attempted by Jean Bruhat in a work published under the patronage
of the communist C.G.T., and which challenged the generally sympathetic
view of Proudhon expressed in Edouard Dolléans’ Histoire du Mouvement
Ouvrier. Bruhat relied less on tarring Proudhon with the brush of Louis
Bonaparte’s favour than on explaining his influence by the reformist
corruption of the workers’ aristocracy and by Stalin’s formula of
‘delayed consciousness’, according to which workers new to factories are
inclined to adhere to their petit-bourgeois, artisan, or peasant mentality
until prolonged experience of the proletarian condition produces a
natural class consciousness.8

Behind the communist historians of the revolutionary movements of

modem France lies a tradition of scholarship whose gradually changing
perspective, if it owes most to exhaustive scholarship, owes not a little to
modem political currents. Setting aside the socialist writers Louis Blanc
and Jean Jaurès, the work of the major historiens de métier, from 123
1. H. Mougin, Pierre Leroux, Paris, 1938, p. 133.
2. J. Dautry, 1848 et la Ile République, Paris, 1957, p. 335.
3. J Bruhat, Histoire du Mouvement Ouvrier Français, vol. I, Paris, 1952, pp. 16-27.

289 K
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Alphonse Aulard to Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre and Maurice

Dommanget has been marked by the transition from an almost exclu­
sively political view of the Great Revolution (as was Aulard’s) to a
Marxist, or neo-Marxist, emphasis on the determining rôle of social
movements and social antagonisms.
It was under the guidance of Georges Lefebvre that many younger
historians came to devote increasing attention to the social aspects of the
Revolution. An ardent republican, and an admirer of Guesde the
politician and Jaurès the historian, Lefebvre succeeded in 1937 to the
Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, a position
he held until 1945. By no means an orthodox Marxist, he tended
increasingly to apply Marxist criteria as a method of analysis, and there
was never any doubt of his hostility to contemporary capitalism and of his
friendly attitude toward the Soviet Union. But Lefebvre’s evolution - and
we are here concerned with the climate in which the first notable com­
munist historians came to maturity - should be seen in the wider context
of the renewal of interest in socialist historical themes after the First
World War. Maurice Dommanget, a Marxist, and regarded with respect
by communists, had two of his works published in Leningrad in the
’twenties, and one in Moscow. The Annales, founded by Mathiez in 1908,
began after the war to devote more attention to Babouvism, and in 1923
Dommanget published his Uhébertisme et la Conspiration des Egaux.
Mathiez’s opinion of Babeuf remained, however, cautious and in a lecture
course delivered at the Sorbonne in 1928-29 he argued that Babeuf was
to be seen as essentially an instrument of the amnestied Montagnards.
In 1935, Lefebvre endorsed this opinion; seriously though Babeuf had
doubtless taken his own doctrine, it could have been of little moment to
many of his fellow-conspirators. But in July 1957, he remarked that ‘it is
not forbidden to ask oneself whether Buonarroti’s book [about the
conspiracy of 1796] did not provide Lenin, like Blanqui, with some food
for thought.’1
Lefebvre’s teaching doubtless influenced some of the younger com­
munist historians, particularly the most distinguished of them, Albert
Soboul,12 whose important thesis on the revolutionary sans-culotterie he
supervised. But although he had a number of disciples (not all of them
Marxists), it would be inaccurate to describe him as the leader of a
‘school’. As a teacher, Mathiez had been more influential. Although much
courted by the Party on account of his prestige, Lefebvre was always
1. Hommage à Georges Lefebvre (Société des Etudes Robespierristes), Nancy, 1960,
pp. 47-56.
2. Soboul has been one of the Party’s few university historians. Tersen, Angrand
and Bruhat have taught at lycées. In this respect, the Party only has itself to blame.
In 1954, eight agrégatifs d'histoire out of twenty-four were communists. Of these eight,
only two are still in the Party. The bureaucratism of the Stalin era, and the refusal to
listen to complaints, drove the rest out.
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 HISTORY IN THB MAKING

careful to maintain his independence and to base his history on the

evidence alone.

Before approaching the complex debates revolving around the Year II

and the rôle of the Jacobins, something should first be said about the
communist historiography of the Paris Commune and of the Revolution
of 1848.1 The Commune has been the subject of numerous studies by
communists, o f polemical essays like those of Bruhat already mentioned,
and of more detailed research as embodied in a recent study by Jean
Dautry and Jean Scheler,2 which traces the activities of the Central
Republican Committee on key days, such as October 31st, 1870, and
January 22nd, 1871, during the elections to the National Assembly, and
up to the Commune itself. In 1960, there appeared a weighty co-operative
general study of the Commune by Bruhat, Dautry and Emile Tersen,
supported by other collaborators, which carried the general conclusion
that the Communards had been at fault in their excessive moderation,
their failure to attack Versailles at the opportune moment, and in their
respect for formal democracy, ‘a petit-bourgeois’ heritage. (Marx had
made the same points in The Civil War in France). Timidity had been
manifest in the failure to expropriate the Bank of France and in the
omission to nationalize any of the larger private enterprises, except those
abandoned by their owners. Instead of exterminating their enemies, the
proletariat had hoped to win them over by moral persuasion. The authors
agree that the badly needed alliance with the rural proletariat was at that
time extremely difficult to achieve, but they stop short of committing
themselves to a recognition of its complete impossibility.3 Were this to be
admitted, then other factors, such as the domination of the Commune by
Blanquists and Proudhonists, which communist historians like to make
inseparable from its collapse, would naturally diminish in significance.
In 1905, when a not dissimilar balance of forces between town and
country prevailed in Russia, the Bolsheviks had not been able to save
the Revolution from a defeat as crushing as that inflicted on the Com­
mune by Thiers.
1. Although communist attention has been predominantly focused on the period
since 1789, it has been by no means exclusively so. In May 1955, for example, an
interesting colloquium was held on the theme of Engels’ The Origin o f the Family,
Private Property and the State, with papers by Henri Lefebvre, on village communities,
Jean Varloot, on Homeric society and the patriarchal family, André Haudricourt, on
d a n languages, Claude Mossé, on the formation of the slave state in Greece, Jean-
Pierre Vemant, on the psychological aspects of labour in ancient Greece, and Charles
Parain, on the transition from ancient to feudal society. La Pensée, March-April 1956.
N or have studies of proletarian movements been confined to 1793, 1848 and 1871.
Claude Willard’s La Fusillade de Fourmies is a brief, but interesting, account of the
social struggles in the textile areas of the Nord in May 1891. See, in general, the series
Pages d'Histoires Populaires (Editions Sociales).
2. Le Comité Central Républicain des Vingt Arrondissements de Paris, Paris, 1960.
3. J. Bruhat, J. Dautry, E. Tersen, La Commune de 1871, Paris, 1960, pp. 356-60.

291
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

If the communist historians of the Revolution of 1848 have in general

followed the classic expositions made by Marx in The Class Struggles in
France and in The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte, an interesting
divergence (although not an acknowledged one) is worth considering.
Marx, having described the bourgeois agitation for an electoral reform,
relates how, when the situation turned to violence in February 1848, the
army ‘was disarmed by the passive conduct of the National Guard’. This
Guard was bourgeois in its composition and sympathies. Marx continues:
‘The Pro visional Government which emerged from the February barricades
necessarily mirrored in its composition the different parties which shared
in the victory. It could not be anything but a compromise between the
different classes which together had overturned the July throne, but
whose interests were mutually antagonistic.’ And he sums up: ‘In common
with the bourgeoisie, the workers had made the February Revolution.*1
According to Jean Dautry, however, once the Banquet campaign had
opened up the breach through which the Revolution was to pass, the
Revolution itself was the work of the proletariat, organized by the
militants of the secret societies.123And Albert Soboul, while agreeing that
the National Guard was hostile to the Government, wrote in a similar
vein that 'It was in fact the masses, artisans and labourers, who made the
Revolution of February 1848. The bourgeoisie played no part in it.’8
True though it is (and February 1848 was no exception) that the French
workers have many times undertaken the rough and dangerous work only
to see the bourgeoisie reap the benefit, Marx’s account appears the more
credible when one considers, in the light of the June days, what would
have befallen the men of the February barricades had not the bourgeoisie,
and especially the National Guard, been prepared to let events run their
course. A possible explanation of this historical ultra-leftism may be
found in the political climate of the year 1947-48 (when these centenary
works were presumably written), and in the bitterness which followed the
renewed isolation of the Communist Party, the violent political strikes
and the hardening of the Cold War.
Another interesting centenary publication, by Emile Tersen, might be
taken as a justification of post-war Soviet policy in eastern Europe, did
it not at the same time implicitly condemn a policy of peaceful co­
existence with reactionary social systems. Tersen’s targets were Lamartine
and the timidity of the Provisional Government in offering no material
aid to the contemporaneous revolutionary movements in Germany,
Austria, Italy and Hungary. The peace had profited the monarchies in
their desperate need for breathing space. It is undeniable, as Tersen
contended, that a revolutionary war in the spring of 1848 would have
1. K. Marx and F. Engels, op. ci/., vol. I, pp. 144 and 147. Marx’s italics.
2. J. Dautry, H istoire de la Révolution de 1848 en France, Paris, 1948, p. 61.
3. A. Soboul, The French Revolution o f1848, p. 9.

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 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

depended on the full mobilization of popular energy, and that the middle
classes preferred to turn their troops against their own workers,1 but it is
equally a lesson of history that such a war might be inclined to unite in
patriotic fervour against the French the warring classes of the other
countries, so quenching their revolutions. And, bearing in mind the
dangers of associating a new régime with exceptionally high taxation,
could such a war, however idealistic its initial intentions, have escaped
transformation into a war of plunder?

It remains, finally, to approach the principal controversies (in so far as

they concerned communist historians) surrounding the Great Revolution,
with particular reference to the Year II. What was the nature of the
Robespierrist dictatorship and what was its relationship to the popular
movement of the Paris sections? Was there in existence a proletariat in
the modem sense? Did the sans-culottes of Paris form a coherent social
class? Were they within reach of their own dictatorship? These are the
basic questions with which we shall be concerned.
The appearance in 1946 of a strongly argued thesis by Daniel Guérin,2
not himself a professional historian, posed a wider problem than many
of the left-wing historians were at first prepared to acknowledge. If
Lefebvre had been moving gradually to the left of Mathiez, and the
communists had begun to depart from Lefebvre on certain points, the
arrival of an extremist Trotskyite argument was bound, in the long run,
to produce a chain-reaction of controversies. Guérin quoted Marx and
Engels to the effect that, from the viewpoint of the internal mechanism
of the Revolution, one could discern a succession of uninterrupted steps
leading to power increasingly advanced sections of the people. Momen­
tarily, the bourgeois revolution had been surpassed. Trotsky (whom
Guérin quoted often), the leading modem protagonist of the permanent
revolution, believed such a process to have been at work in 1793-4.
Guérin agreed with Marx, and with the majority of historians, that
objective economic conditions had doomed at that time all but the
bourgeois revolution, but - and here lay the significance of the Year II
for the present century, when conditions were ripe for proletarian
revolution - it was instructive to uncover the moment at which the
reaction had set in, the point at which an avowedly revolutionary group
had in practice checked and frozen the springs of popular action. Guérin
stopped short of the analogy between Robespierre and Stalin, but the
implication was beyond doubt.
Communists had long since extolled Robespierre and the Jacobins.
The source of attraction is not hard to trace. Paul Bouthonnier praised
their effective suppression of the Girondins, while arming and uniting
1. E. Tersen, Le Gouvernement Provisoire et VEurope, Paris, 1948, pp. 70-6.
2. La Lutte de Classes sous la Première Républic (1793-97), 2 vols., Paris, 1946.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

the people against the external enemy,1 and Jacques Duelos quoted
Lenin’s dictum that the Jacobins ‘gave France the best models of a
democratic revolution*.123456On the other hand, communists had also lain
stress on the rôle of the masses, organized through the societies and
sections, who had provided the motor power for the Jacobin-led Govern­
ment. But no antagonism between the masses and the Committee of
Public Safety was suggested, although Thorez had produced a formula
which Guérin might well have quoted in support of his theory of per­
manent revolution. ‘At an unknown depth’, wrote Thorez in 1939,
‘Mirabeau felt Robespierre moving; Robespierre felt M arat; M arat felt
Hébert; Hébert felt Babeuf.’8 This was indeed a classic, if unwitting,
exposition of the permanent revolution theory, but it took Guérin to
turn it in a sense unreservedly hostile to Robespierre.
Robespierre, according to Guérin, was ‘aw fond un modéré'* a ‘petit
bourgeois m é fia n twho assumed the part of an ‘endormeur joué avec tant
de virtuosité . . .’• The charges brought by him against the Hébertists
were merely a ‘roman feuilleton', the Committee of Public Safety simply
‘a step in the formation of the monstrous state machine through which
the bourgeoisie were to enslave the proletariat in the following centuries
. . . the centralized, bureaucratic, police state . . .’7 This corresponded,
in some respects, to Proudhon’s view, but Guérin, despite his partial
sympathies for Kropotkin’s account of the Revolution, and for the
Enragé leader Jacques Roux, was not an anarchist. His central argument
led to the conclusion that it had been an error among historians to date
the reaction from the overthrow of Robespierre, from 9 Thermidor.
On the contrary, the reaction had begun as early as November 1793. The
Montagnard leaders like Carnot, Barère and Cambon had been linked
to the aristocracy and to the Girondins by a thousand ties of interest and
friendship. Robespierre was hostile to direct democracy, to the concept
expressed by a deputation from the faubourg Saint-Antoine which came
to the Convention on May 4th, 1794, on behalf of ‘membres du souverain
qui venait dicter ses volontés à ses mandataires'* The revolutionary
bourgeoisie wanted a dictatorship from above, the popular avant-garde
a dictatorship from below, ‘the dictatorship of the sans-culottes in arms,
democratically organized in their clubs and in the Commune’.9 It was
1. P. Bouthonnier, ‘Les Jacobins’, C.B., November-December 1937, pp. 896-902.
2. Essays on the French Revolution, p. 54. There is a huge bust of Robespierre in a
small square of St Denis, a communist stronghold. Busts and portraits of Robespierre
and Saint-Just are also to be found in the mairie of Montreuil.
3. Ibid., p. 42.
4. D. Guérin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 387.
5. Ibid., vol. II, p. 234.
6. Ibid., p. 353.
7. Ibid., p. 1.
8. Ibid., vol. I, p. 28.
9. Ibid., p. 40.

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 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

the measure of Robespierre’s reactionary policy that he had thwarted

them.
Guérin’s thesis was quickly answered by Georges Lefebvre. The people,
he wrote, may have saved the Revolution, but they could only do so
under bourgeois leadership. If Hébert or Babeuf had triumphed, their
first care would have been to recreate the Committee of Public Safety.
But they could not have formulated any consistent social programme
simply because, in social-class terms, the sans-culotterie represented a
popular front, and not a single class.1
Although Guérin had not specifically attacked the communist his­
torians, confining his attentions to Lefebvre and his predecessors, a
communist answer, in the shape of a strong vindication of Robespierre,
was obviously called for. But when one of the first major works by a
communist to appear after Guérin’s book failed, in the eyes of the Party
leadership, to provide an effective refutation, a sharp rebuke, a censure,
was delivered in the pages of the Cahiers by the historian Jean Poperen.8
Albert Soboul’s main fault - and it was the leading communist historian
who had erred - according to Poperen, had been his failure to emphasize
the reactionary policy of all but the Robespierrist bourgeoisie, to show
how, for example, only M arat and Robespierre had fought the loi de
sûreté générale, the ‘first attempt to break the popular revolution’, to
show how close had been the links between the Girondins and the
supporters of Lafayette early in 1792. Higher authority was invoked in
the form of a Pravda issue of September 22nd, 1951, which had stressed
the treason of the Girondins. Soboul had failed to describe the rearguard
action put up by the Girondins within the Committee of Public Safety
to keep out Robespierre; he had failed to break radically with the Mathiez
school of historiography; he had failed both to counter effectively social-
democrat attempts to appropriate Robespierre, and to expose the errors
of Guérin’s picture of him as the avant-garde of the Thermidorian
reaction.
Although Soboul’s book was by no means the eulogy of the Girondins
that Poperen’s rebuke seemed to suggest (and how could it be?), he was,
up to a point, prepared to provide the required autocritique. His book
had been ‘ambitious perhaps’; he had not reflected enough on certain
questions and had not based his work ‘solidly enough on a truly scientific
method’. He thanked his critics, particularly the Party leader François
Billoux for his ‘penetrating letter’ of February 2nd, 1952.8 And he now
turned his pen on Guérin.123*

1. Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, vol. 19, 1947, pp. 175-6.

2. J. Poperen, ‘ “ La Révolution Française (1789-99)” par Albert SobouT, C.C.,
February 1952.
3. A. Soboul, ‘Classes et Luttes de Classes sous la Révolution Française’, La Pensée,
January-February 1954.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Had a proletariat existed in 1793-4? Guérin had answered ‘Yes and

No*. There was, he agreed, no mass of workers concentrated in large
factories, but there was a marked distinction within the sans-culotterie
between the petite-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, artisans), and the manual
workers, the wage-earners. The strikes of the winter and spring 1793-4
had been specifically proletarian movements.1 Soboul contended that
Guérin had mistaken for a proletarian avant-garde what was in fact only
an arrière-garde defending the traditional economy of small production
units. The progressive political position adopted by the sans-culotterie
should not be confused with their economic position, which was doomed
by the advent of large-scale capitalism. The poor peasantry, also, had
been as hostile to the agents of capitalist agricultural transformation as
to the old landlords, the seigneurs.123There had been no possibility of a
sans-culotte dictatorship; the internal social contradictions of the social
category (as opposed to class), which simply united the humblest factions
of the Third Estate, made such a development unreal.
The task of fully vindicating Robespierre, however, had its difficulties
for an historian whose reverence for the evidence was as great as his
reverence for Stalin. Several points could be made. In imposing requisi­
tions and taxes, the sans-culottes had not thought only of national
defence but, more narrowly, of their own subsistence level. Contrary to
the law, the Hébertist Commune did not tax them. The value of the
assignat was threatened, and the Government had to intervene.8 Else­
where, Soboul denied implicitly the existence of a coherent revolutionary
ideology challenging Robespierre, when he described the Babouvist
movement as ‘the first shape of the revolutionary ideology of the new
society born from the Revolution itselF.45This was, perhaps, to attach
undue weight to the appearance of a communistic economic doctrine.
But the strongest argument on behalf of Robespierre remained that of the
need for a sound policy of national defence, a viable war economy, when
these had been threatened not only by a calculating bourgeoisie, but also
by an unthinking populace. *Ils*agissait defaire la guerre'*
But difficulties remained. Soboul agreed that the sans-culotte concep­
tion of direct democracy through the general assembly of the Paris
sections was ultimately incompatible with Jacobin centralism. The
Government had never accepted the social aims or political methods of
sans-culotte democracy; the Cult of the Supreme Being had been the last
resort of a man incapable of analysing economic and social conditions,
a man of cabinet and club, without direct experience of the masses. When

1. D. Guérin, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 11-13.

2. A. Soboul, op. cit.y pp. 55-6.
3. A. Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en U An IIt Paris, 1958, p. 1027.
4. A. Soboul, Précis d'Histoire de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1962, p. 522.
5. A. Soboul, ‘Maximilien Robespierre', C.C., May 1958, p. 820.

296
 HISTORY IN THE MAKING

the opposition of the Cordeliers Club threatened its equilibrium, the

Government resorted to repression, although Hébert’s paper, Le Père
Duchesne, and the Cordeliers Club had come to express the aspirations
of the masses. Hébert’s demands had included the assurance of work for
all citizens, assistance for the old and infirm, and the prompt organization
of public education.1 Indeed, Soboul’s comment, in a work published in
1962, that the degeneration of the sans-culotte movement was bound up
with the absorption of the youngest and most active elements into the
army, and with the way in which revolutionary militants had become
docile servants of the state, the bureaucratic state,2 far from putting the
Robespierrists in an objectively progressive light, bore a remarkable
resemblance to aspects of Guérin’s thesis, and to Trotsky’s familiar
critique of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
While Soboul by no means endorsed Guérin’s position in its entirety,
there is no doubt that, with de-Stalinization as a backcloth, and with the
publication in 1958 of his massive work on the sans-culottes of the Year II,
Soboul was able to place his former critics on the defensive, and some­
times on the run. Emile Tersen, an ardent Stalinist, and before the war a
member of the Action Française, agreed that Soboul had demonstrated
that the arrest of the popular Hébert had led to a not very discriminate
repression, the dissolution of the sectional societies, the paralysis of all
initiative from below, ‘an irremediable degeneration of the popular
movement’. Poperen had rebuked Soboul in 1952 for failing to break
radically with the Mathiez school; Tersen now acknowledged that
Soboul’s proven view that the Jacobin Government became an ‘édifice
suspendu dans le vide des lois’ corresponded to that of Mathiez.8
But Robespierre was never in danger of complete desertion. Fair
enough was Jean Dautry’s reminder that ‘The grandeur of Robespierre
and his friends . . . consisted in their attempt to repulse in a supreme but
vain effort, the triumph of the bourgeoisie’,4 although this was to
transpose unduly modem categories of thought into the Jacobin mind.
But some Stalinist historians, evidently, while forced to acknowledge
the importance of Soboul’s major work, were not entirely reconciled
to recent developments. Jean Bruhat wondered whether there might not
be value in a further study of the persistence of the sans-culotte mentality
in the workers’ movement, as seen in Proudhonism (which, as we
remember, he had elsewhere attributed to a workers’ aristocracy!), and
he felt it to be within the bounds of possibility that the rôle of the ardent
m in o ritie s in the Paris sections had foreshadowed the élitist aspects of
Blanquism and the (perverse and retrograde) theory of the rôle of

/ . A. Soboul, Précis <THistoire de la Révolution Française, pp. 311-13.

/ 2. A. Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en L'An //, pp. 1031-3.
3. C.C., February 1960, p. 291.
4. J. Dautry, ‘L’Année Robespierre*, La Pensée, March-April, 1949, p. 122.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

conscientious minorities prevalent in the pre-1914, syndicalist C.G.T.1

This was a curious twist, to describe the leaders of the sections as the
élitists, and not the Robespierrists or Stalinists. But, as Brecht said, when
the people loses the confidence of the Government, it is simplest if the
Government dissolves the people and elects another.

Communist contributions to French sociological studies have been on the

whole both few and disappointing. Work has been done on economics,
economic history and political economy by writers such as Politzer, Jean
Baby, André Baijonet, Henri Denis and Pierre George.123 Maurice
Agulhon and Pierre George contributed interesting studies on the socio­
logical development of Paris suburbs,8 and Georges Friedmann’s
independent-minded writings on the anatomy and psychology of labour,
and the problems of workers’ control, have a high international
reputation.
The best of the Marxist sociologists to have joined the Party is
undoubtedly Henri Lefebvre. After the war, describing two ‘idealist’
strands in French sociology, one creating metaphysical social entities
exterior to men’s actions and will, the other reducing social facts to the
level of individual psychological traits, Lefebvre called for a sociology
grounded in Marxism and at the same time utilizing every available
technique of research. Outlining a possible research plan, he suggested a
division of the past into the fields of ethnography (the study of pre­
capitalist society), and political economy (the study of capitalist society),
with history as such concerning itself with the examination of institutions,
events and men within the context of this pre-defined social categoriza­
tion. Thus the categories of political economy (commercial, industrial
and finance capitalism) would delineate in advance the fundamental
characteristics of an historical period.45And these categories would be
Marx’s.
Of the communists, perhaps Lefebvre alone evolved a satisfying method
of integrating sociology and history within the perspective of dialectical
materialism. A single illustration must suffice.6 Drawing attention to
the lack of serious thought devoted to the peasant world, he pointed to
two ‘axes of complexity’ confronting the scholar. By the horizontal
complexity, he referred to the existence of agrarian structures at the same
technical level but with markedly different characteristics, the American
capitalist farm and the Soviet kolkhoz being obvious cases. By the vertical
1. La Pensée, March-April 1959, pp. 35-6.
2. See P. George, Géographie économique et sociale de la France, Paris, 1937.
3. Etudes sur la Banlieue de Paris, Paris, 1950. See also P. George, ‘La Ville’, Cahiers
Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 13,1952.
4. H. Lefebvre, ‘Marxisme et Sociologie’, ibid., vol. 4,1948.
5. H. Lefebvre, 'Perspectives de la Sociologie Rurale’, ibid., vol. 14,1953. See also
his ‘Les Classes Sociales dans les Campagnes’, ibid., vol. 10,1951.

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complexity, he referred to the apparent similarities among agrarian

organisms of different ages and origins. Consequently, penetration of the
problem along one axis alone would be insufficient. The American
school, for example, ignored the historical (vertical) axis, confining itself
to a purely descriptive empiricism, to horizontal comparisons, or to a
statistical formalism. The important historical developments separating
American from European farming were ignored. The true sociologist
must take from the economist an analysis of productive forces, and from
the historian an account of what actions, events and régimes had retarded
or accelerated rural developments, and then synthesize the two sets of
information.
Lefebvre’s example was not followed by other communist intellectuals.
Sociology as a whole has been viewed with decidedly mixed feelings within
the ranks of the Party. Like psychology, it has developed a tendency,
unless delicately handled, to cut across and thence break down the
categories and inter-connections on which dialectical materialism was
founded. Death intervened between Marx and the full definition of a
social class, and the mainstream of modem sociology, from Weber
onward, has been occupied with examining the distinctions between
classes and strata, with building recurring models, examining the rôle
of élites, etc, much of which has been regarded by communists as a
desperate bourgeois diversion from the scientific perspective. Modem
experience suggests that the relations between social classes and large
social organizations are more complex than Marx imagined, and that
ownership is only one factor to be considered among several. Problems
remain; what sort of classes are those officially declared to be non-
antagonistic, although distinct, in the Soviet Union? And in precisely
what circumstances should economic criteria of definition be modified
by psychological ones, such as class consciousness? What problems are
posed by the fact that in pre-capitalist society, Marx’s landowners,
owners of capital and labourers are defined by their relation to the various
means o f production, whereas in capitalist society, his capitalists, petite-
bourgeoisie and proletariat are defined by their various relations to the
means of production? Does the declaration of the existence of non-
antagonistic classes in the Soviet Union entail a return to a definition
similar to that employed by Marx with regard to feudal society? Com­
munists have approached such problems indirectly, as in the dispute
over the nature of the sans-culotterie, but any systematic exploration
has been regarded as a dangerous concession to an ever-menacing
revisionism at a time when HI s'agissait défaire la guerre’.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Communism and Science

The relevance of theoretical Marxism to research in the physical sciences

is a question which the layman cannot hope to examine competently, let
alone resolve. Yet the problem is immediately posed: have French
scientists joined or supported the Communist Party primarily on the
strength of the conviction that Marxism provides the most fruitful method
of study in their specialized fields?
With each major scientific discovery, wrote Engels, materialism must
change its ground. At the same time, he insisted that philosophy super­
sedes science in the sense that although data can be collected empirically,
the field of theory must transcend mere empiricism since the dialectic
alone affords an explanation for evolution and its inter-connections.1
Faced with a mass of data, the scientist should proceed on the basis of
the three cardinal laws of dialectics, the transfer of quantity into quality,
or vice-versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, and the law of
the negation of the negation.2 Induction alone did not suffice; induction
and deduction belonged together like analysis and synthesis.3
Engels, too free with his analogies, stepped in where Marx had feared
to tread. Tn the same way, every organic being is at each moment the
same and not the same.’4 In nature, he argued, growth could be observed
to follow the pattern of the negation of the negation, from the seed to the
plant to the seed. Similarly in mathematics: —a X —a = a 2.6 Engels,
in fact, tried to illustrate the validity of the dialectical concept of nature
by imposing formal analogies drawn from the social sciences on the
empirically obtained discoveries of scientific inquiry. His dialectics of
nature were therefore deduced by non-dialectical methods, by com­
parison, abstraction and induction. This operation was to prove in the
long run a doubtful blessing for communist scientists. In 1949, Julian
Huxley remarked that at the time of writing there was no sign of a
1. F. Engels, Dialectics o f Nature, London, 1954, p. 59.
2. Ibid., p. 83.
3. Ibid., p. 302.
4. F. Engels, Anti-Diihring, trans. by E. Burns, London, n.d., p. 28.
5. Ibid., pp. 152-3.

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specifically Marxist approach, let alone of a Party line, for chemistry,

biochemistry, geology, ecology, taxonomy or paleontology.1 How is it,
then, that so many reputable communist scholars in France have managed
to reconcile the dialectic with their scientific research?
The Scientific Commission of the Cercle de la Russie neuve claimed
that its own meetings provided the first occasion on which scientists
outside the Soviet Union had met as a group to discuss the application of
dialectical materialism to their respective fields.123But a study of the
reports made to the Cercle in 1933-34 reveals little evidence of Marxism
being employed as a method for current research. On the contrary, its
application was almost exclusively confined to historical analyses of
earlier scientific developments. Thus Paul Labérenne spoke of how the
content of early mathematics had been defined by economic needs such
as the measuring of parcels of land, and how local political influences
had affected Newton’s work.8 His discourse contained numerous
references to Marx, Engels and Lenin as well as attacks on the ‘mechanis­
tic, right-wing deviation’ of Bukharin in the theoretical field and on the
‘idealistic tendencies of camouflaged Mensheviks’,45but little of immediate
creative interest. Similarly, Henri Wallon’s paper on psychology was
limited to a historical survey of nineteenth-century eclecticism which,
he argued, was the psychological counterpart of economic liberalism.
While criticizing American pragmatism and Bergson’s mystifications, he
failed to make clear in which direction lay the path ahead.6 Again:
far from explaining what the application of Marxism to astronomy might
be, Henri Mineur, astronomer at the Paris Observatory, contented
himself with yet another historical survey and some vague generalizations
about the bourgeois struggle against science.6
The case of Paul Langevin’s gradual conversion to Marxism also raises
certain doubts. ‘The more I progress in my own science,’ he declared,
‘the more I feel myself becoming a Marxist.’ Langevin was sixty-six
years old and with the best part of his career behind him, when, in
December 1938, he testified that ‘in this great doctrine, illustrated by
Marx, Engels, Lenin, I have found the clarification of things that I would
never have understood in my own science.’7 Langevin’s integrity was
never open to doubt. It was not, however, during his years of active
research as a colleague and friend of Einstein, but at the end of his life
that he confessed in 1945: ‘The history of all our sciences is pegged on
similar dialectical processes which mark out the essential moments. I
1. J. Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science, London, 1949, p. 172.
2. A la Lumière du M arxisme (Essais), introductory note.
3. Ibid., p. 30.
4. Ibid., p. 255.
5. Ibid., pp. 128-48.
6. Ibid., pp. 103-4.
7. P. Langevin, La Pensée VAction, p. 301.
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am conscious of not having understood that of physics until the time

when I had a knowledge of the fundamental ideas of dialectical material­
ism.’1 Joliot-Curie, in acknowledging his debt to Langevin’s teachings,
made no mention of Marxism. In fact, both he and Irène Joliot-Curie,
whose joint work on radio-activity won them the Nobel Prize, maintained
a conspicuous silence on the subject o f Marxism and physics, though not
on Marxism and politics. According to Edmund Wilson, Einstein himself
recorded the opinion that the writings of Engels did not have ‘any
special interest either from the point of view of present-day physics or
from that of the history of physics’.2 The external evidence points to the
conclusion that it was his social and political evolution, rather than his
development as a physicist, which led Langevin to an acceptance of the
universal validity of the teachings of Marx and Engels.8
Convincing proof that Marxism was being applied to creative scientific
research along the dialectical lines suggested by Engels is hard to find,
with the possible exception of the field of biology, although even here
most of the work done has been positivistic and analytical in method.
Marcel Prenant, Professor of Zoology at the Sorbonne, claimed to have
been the first in France to have studied biology in the light of dialectical
theory.4 In the ’thirties, he had taught weekly at the Université Ouvrière,
and this experience, he said, only strengthened his belief in the utility
of the Marxist approach. After the war, as Professor of Comparative
Anatomy and Histology at the Sorbonne, he was largely responsible for
the extension of the scale of Marxist studies in the sciences in Paris.
J. B. S. Haldane, the English Party’s leading biologist, who had at one
time mapped out the processes of biological mutation and selection as
dialectical triads, expressed pleasure and surprise at finding himself,
with Prenant and Georges Teissier, discussing present theories of evolu­
tion before an audience of 2,000 in the main amphitheatre of the
Sorbonne.5
But Prenant’s espousal of communism remains another matter. We
have it on his own authority that he knew little about the works of Marx
and Engels when, at the age of twenty, he joined the Socialist Party in
1911.6 Prenant was inclined to emphasize that his approval of the
Bolshevik Revolution and his decision to join the Communist Party in
1920 demonstrated the soundness of his youthful instincts, instincts
which his later theoretical studies fully vindicated.7 Therefore the general
1. Ibid., p. 173.
2. E. Wilson, To the Finland Station, p. 192.
3. For a Marxist interpretation of Langevin*s early development, see R. Huard’s
article in La Pensée, June 1963.
4. M. Prenant, Biology and Marxism, trans. by C. Desmond Greaves, London, 1938,
p. xxii.
5. Daily Worker, 26 April 1948.
6. M. Prenant, ‘De la Biologie au Marxisme’, La Pensée, January-M arch 1946, p. 5.
7. Ibid.

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proposition remains, that the adoption of dialectical materialism as a

creative method in current research has not been a force of any con­
sequence in guiding French scientists toward communism and the Party.
Many scientists, of course, have been moved by the same general social
and political considerations as other intellectuals, and for none of them
have such considerations proved entirely irrelevant. But in the attempt
to isolate any particular thought-processes as being peculiar to, or at least
more heavily applicable to natural scientists, another line of inquiry
yields positive results. Two fundamental and interdependent factors
emerge: the scientist’s position in society, and the attitude of different
social systems to scientific research and its practical application.
The new scientist, wrote Maxim Gorky, has rejected the idea o f‘science
for science’s sake’. He takes his part in a changing world; he feels
responsibility to the collective body, to his party and his class.1 The
noble ideal behind this partisan jargon was one which the scientists of the
Cercle de la Russie neuve had taken thoroughly to heart. Fascism, which
not only exiled great scientists but seemed to challenge the very principles
of modem science itself, was abhorred not simply as a brutal dictatorship
but also as a violent expression of the reactionary solution to the contra­
dictions inherent in capitalist societies in general, contradictions which
were fast making of the bourgeoisie enemies of science. Prenant was
content to define Nazi racism as the ideology of the dominant class. He
pointed out that no ’pure’ races now existed, and that in any case the
closest approximation to one was to be found among the peoples of
central Australia. Remarking that Goebbels looked like a small Jew
and that Hitler had no Aryan qualities, he ridiculed Giinther’s elaboration
of the physical characteristics of the so-called Nordics. Prenant, who later
narrowly escaped death in a Nazi camp, denounced the process of
sterilization which, according to a German authority, had already been
applied to 80 per cent of the inmates of Dachau, as a terrible perversion
of the uses of science and as a manœuvre designed, by its emphasis on
heredity, to detract from the correct emphasis on the importance of
environment and economic conditions in determining behaviour.2
It was soon obvious that science and scientists, of however high a
calibre, were not to be immune from persecution. The brilliant young
Jewish physicist Jacques Solomon wrote in October 1938 that, by 1936,
1,684 professors and scholars had been expelled from German universi­
ties, and that Berlin University had lost one-third of its original members.
Of ten Nobel Prize winners for physics, only five remained in Germany.
Of five Nobel Prize winners for psychology and medicine, three had lost
their positions. Solomon spoke for a growing number of French scientists
when he described fascism as a reversion to medievalism and communism
1. Quoted in G. B. de Huszar (ed.), The Intellectuals, p. 233.
2. M. Prenant, ‘Science et racisme*, C.B., 20 February 1937, pp. 211-18.

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as the surest rampart for the intellectual values on which modern civilization
was based.1 The fake-biology of the racists was regarded as mere pretence
to rationalism; hypocrisy, as Politzer said, was the homage vice rendered
to virtue. Through racism the whole capitalist system stood indicted.2
This theme - the comparison between Soviet and capitalist attitudes
toward science and its social applications - was the one which most
influenced the political orientation of French scientists who later became
communists. In 1933, Henri Wallon, a professor at the Sorbonne,
claimed that the organization of institutes for research in Russia and the
testimonies of visiting foreign scientists overwhelmingly demonstrated
that the most rapid theoretical advances were made in a society where
they were linked to the solution of practical social problems. If production
were controlled in each aspect within a general plan, theoretical problems
would automatically be posed. In capitalist society there was a tendency
toward exclusive specialization, intellectual cloistering, isolation, dis­
equilibrium. Industry was often threatened with ruin by scientific
inventions; over-production led to under-consumption.8
That narrow scientific scholasticism was the inevitable product of
economic anarchy was an idea which united the members of the Cercle.
Both Labérenne and Mineur supported Wallon’s thesis on this.
Labérenne spoke of ceaselessly expanding laboratory facilities in Russia
and of the stimulating work of the botanist Vavilov, the biologist
Zavadorski, the physicists Joffe and Hessen and the mathematician Col­
man.4 Paul Langevin had visited Russia in 1928 and 1931. In 1936, he
expressed the opinion that ‘an important characteristic of Soviet con­
struction, which places it in the great line of human progress, is the
confidence it inspires in scientific effort and in its organization, in close
harmony with technique’. Soviet science, he said, permitted the domina­
tion of natural forces, putting itself at the service of the material,
intellectual and moral liberation of man.6
Prenant was convinced that the absurdity of the capitalist system
became daily more obvious. In the U.S.S.R. man was master not only of
nature, but of his own social forces. The Soviet Government had financed
numerous expeditions, directed by Vavilov, to discover species of
cultivable plants. 100,000 had already been collected from many areas
of the world, while as a result of the work of Lysenko, Michurin and
others, crops had been sown in regions hitherto thought unsuitable for
any life. Prenant went so far as to claim that Marxism knew how to
dominate all known physical and biological laws so as to increase
1. J. Solomon, ‘Pour le libre développement de la science’, C.Ä, October 1938,
pp. 663-71.
2. G. Politzer, ‘Race, nation, peuple’, Commune, June 1939, pp. 702-3.
3. A la Lumière du M arxisme, pp. 12-16.
4. Ibid., p. 257.
5. P. Langevin, op. cit.t p. 151.

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human happiness.1 Frequently a reasonable enthusiasm produced

excessive claims of this type. The ‘domination of a law* can be a decidedly
unscientific activity, as Prenant himself was painfully to discover ten
years later when Lysenko, with Stalin’s approval, decided to dominate
the laws of heredity.
For the scientists, as for other intellectuals, Russia’s ultimate victory
in the war seemed to validate the claims made for the Soviet system in the
’thirties. The Soviet Union, wrote Prenant in 1946, was a living example
of the verity of dialectical materialism. Scientific discoveries, added
Joliot-Curie, could be put to good or bad uses; they were not good or bad
in themselves. Leading a French mission to Moscow in June 1945, he
had found evacuated scientists already back at work in an atmosphere
of efficient co-ordination, with the Academy of Sciences distributing tasks
to the specialized institutes. Fourteen institutes, for example, were
tackling the problem of the spoliation of grain harvests. Despite efforts
and lobbying, the French National Centre of Scientific Research was still
a long way from having the same co-ordinating influence on research as
the Sodet Academy.123In 1949, the communist biologist Georges Teissier
posed the choice as being one between ‘two dvilizations’. With its mission
fixed, its responsibilities defined, science had refound its unity in the
socialist states.8
The contrast between the two systems was not merely drawn in general
terms. The critique of the situation in France made by communist
sdentists and those being carried toward communism was insistent,
predse, detailed and, one might add, usually better founded than the
corresponding laurels bestowed upon Soviet science. According to figures
provided by Prenant in 1937,0-05 per cent of British national income was
spent on scientific research, compared with 1-0 per cent in Russia.4
Jacques Solomon criticized the deflationary polides of the Laval and
Doumergue Governments which had dealt a blow to higher teaching
and research. The University of Paris alone had lost seventy-three of its
staff.5 The Popular Front Government made a determined effort to check
1. M. Prenant, Biology and M arxism , p. 50. It is this type of extravagant optimism
which, in retrospect, has occasioned derisive comments by laymen about naive and
utopian beliefs inherited from the eighteenth century enlightment and even from
Bacon. From what historical standpoint such derision can safely be levelled it is hard
to say. The Marxist scientists of the ’thirties certainly ignored many of the negative
aspects of Russian life during the Five Year Plans, showing little understanding of the
hardships involved or the dictatorship being imposed. But the capitalist world was in
a veritable chaos; laissez-faire was finally discredited. The Keynesian recipe, that some
planning is vital but that too much planning is harmful, does not provide a particularly
Olympian height from which to cast stones.
2. F. Joliot-Curie, ‘Note sur la Science Soviétique', La Pensée, April-June 1946,
pp. 29-32.
3. G. Teissier, ‘Choisir entre deux Civilisations’, D .N ., December 1949, p. 673.
4. M. Prenant, Biology and M arxism , p. 50.
5. J. Solomon, op. cit., p. 664.
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this decline, establishing an under-secretariat for scientific research first

under Irène Joliot-Curie, then under Jean Perrin.1Although the allocation
of funds for research had increased in the 1937 budget, the later, Radical-
dominated Governments had, in the opinion of Solomon, given way to
the capitalist oligarchies, and all the increased credits were swallowed
up in the increased costs of research. Chairs at the Collège de France
stood vacant for lack of money.
Before science, Teissier complained in 1949, capitalism equivocates,
denigrating it, awarding it meagre credits, leaving research under the
patronage and control of the monopolies for whom the profit motive
alone counts.2 In January 1955, Prenant observed that many scientists
had hoped that the Mendès-France Government would give greater aid,
but such a hope revealed ignorance of the workings of the bourgeois state
and of its impotence before the vicissitudes of the economy. Only in the
periods of maximum communist influence, under the Popular Front
and after the Liberation, had real advances been made. The Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, first set up under the Popular
Front, had, with its 2,400 members, latterly ignored the advice of Joliot-
Curie and Teissier that it should establish wider, co-ordinating relations
with the universities. Joliot-Curie, Teissier, and others had been evicted
from their posts on political grounds, while the large capitalist enterprises
exerted influence to ensure that money was channelled into applied,
profit-making research.8 Only one student in six now had a scholarship.
According to Prenant, professors at the Faculté des Sciences frequently
could not obtain laboratories for their work. In the library of the
University of Paris, there were only 2,000 places for 50,000 students.
The Mendès-France budget in this respect corresponded closely to that
of Laniel, Pinay and Bidault. However, he concluded, ‘despite the trusts,
science will not die in France’.4
The precise balance of personal conviction and of calculated propa­
ganda in each statement of this type is difficult to decide. While the twin
questions of the scientist’s ideal rôle in society and the attitude of different
social systems to science emerge as politically determinant factors, certain
scientists, once they had joined the Party, were no more reluctant than
other intellectuals to observe the various principles of political utility.
Joliot-Curie’s well-publicized message to the Thirteenth Party Congress
in 1954 on the healthy condition of science in China and the Popular
Democracies, though doubtless sincere, was obviously delivered with a
keen regard for the value of his personal prestige (first principle of
1. Mme Joliot-Curie resigned in September 1936, in order to continue her research.
She expressed full confidence in the Government. Le Temps, 27 September 1936.
2. G. Teissier, op. cit.y p. 671.
3. M. Prenant, ‘Mendès-France, la Science et les Trusts’, L .N .C ., January 1955,
pp. 61-72.
4. Ibid., p. 81.

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utility).1 In time, the serious deficiencies in the French governments4

patronage of scientific research generated a certain satisfaction, as proving
a general political point. The intellectual, once a convinced and com­
mitted revolutionary, can scarcely cherish the reforms for which he so
loudly clamours.
While it is true that the majority of communist scientists in France
appear to have adopted Marxism as a credo, this Marxism must be
carefully defined. The initial starting point was not the discovery, within
specialized fields, that the dialectical principles elaborated by Engels
could at once be applied to current theoretical research. This may have
been the doctrine, but not the reality. Rather it was the fusion of political
considerations common to other intellectuals and of the social obsessions
peculiar to scientists which led them to accept the general historical
Marxist analysis of class, party, the inter-relationship of life and con­
sciousness, of substructure and superstructure, of freedom and necessity.
Their present situation and the social possibilities of their work fitted
more easily into a Marxist framework of explanation than did the
microbe, the orbit of Venus, calculus, the sexual impulse and the
population problems of the north Canadian rabbit. But the acceptance
of one aspect of avowedly indivisible Marxist theory tended to lead to the
acceptance in principle of the other, the result being that communist
scientists often proceeded on the lines of inquiry traditional to their
subjects while advertising the virtues of the Marxist method.
Equally apparent was the tendency to equate Soviet patronage of the
sciences with ‘Marxism*, much as the Five Year Plans were held up by
intellectuals of the Left in general as a vindication of ‘Marxism*. Exactly
how Vavilov’s collection of new cultivable plant species was in itself
Marxist is hard to say, even if his political patrons had by no means
shed their original Marxist convictions. Even were we to grant the point
that only a state no longer controlled by the private profit motive could
channel such resources into socially useful research, then it would be
the social structure itself which emerged as Marxist, and not science. The
Lysenko affair was later to throw this distinction into sharp relief.

Confusion, however, does not preclude action. The French Party

assiduously fostered the ideals (and confusions) of the scientists, gradually
absorbing them into its ranks. Jacques Duelos, in his 1938 address at the
Centre Marcelin-Berthelot, before an audience including Joliot-Curie,
Wallon and other scientists of the Left, declared: ‘We cannot accept that
the activity of the scientist should be made dependent, for any reason
whatsoever, upon the generosity of a wealthy patron.’ While Stahn
expressed ‘all the solicitude of Soviet democracy for science and its
pioneers’, French science was notoriously under-financed. Duelos thought
1. F. Joliot-Curie, ‘Message au 13e Congrès’, L.N .C ., July-August 1954, p. 31.

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that ‘steps should be taken to shelter scientists from material cares.’1 This
theme was to be pursued remorselessly in the future. Eighteen years later»
Garaudy, addressing the Fourteenth Party Congress, reiterated that the
profit system benefited applied, as opposed to pure research. The labora­
tories of the Faculty of Chemistry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
were, he said, financially dependent on Rhône-Poulenc, Roussel and other
monopolies. The credits for the working of Joliot-Curie’s cyclotron at the
Collège de France had been suppressed in 1955. Higher teaching and the
C.N.R.S. received only 15 per cent of the credits allocated for research,
and only a third of the money allocated to war researches.123
From the mid-’thirties onward, the Party employed its normal
expedients to bring non-communist scientists under its wing. The Maisons
de la Culture were active in this respect. In February 1939, for example,
the Maisons commemorated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of the Revolution by a series of conferences including one on La Révolu­
tion et les sciences, presided over by Lucien Febvre, Langevin, Halbwachs
and Georges Lefebvre. Lectures on mathematics, physics, biology,
astronomy, teaching and research were given by M. Chapelon, J.
Solomon, M. Prenant, H. Mineur, H. Wallon and others.8 After the
Liberation, beside its distinguished array of physicists, the Party could
claim the allegiance of the biologists, Prenant and Teissier, the bio­
chemist Aubel, the agronomist Chevalier, as well as Nitti and Jeanne
Lévy in the field of medicine.
The older generation of physicists who eventually became communists
or fellow-travellers comprised a brilliant and tightly-knit group originally
united by ties of scholarship, family and marriage and by the progressive
political tradition of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. As with the
surrealists or the Philosophies group, the extent of their mutual per­
suasion should not be underestimated. Irène Curie, daughter of the
physicists Pierre and Marie Curie, around whom young scientists like
Langevin, Jean Perrin and Aimé Cotton gathered, married Frédéric Joliot
whom Marie Curie had taken on as a pupil on Langevin’s recommenda­
tion. Together they adopted the name of Joliot-Curie and their joint
work on radio-activity won them the Nobel Prize in 1935. Frédéric
Joliot-Curie later recalled how Langevin’s teaching on space, time,
mechanics and the structure of matter at the Ecole de Physique et
Chimie and at the Collège de France had exercised on himself and on
many of his colleagues a profound influence. It was Langevin who had
directed him toward his work at the Institut du Radium.4 At the same

1. J. Duelos, Communism, Science and Culture, pp. 20, 25, 28.

2. R. Garaudy, ‘Défense de la Culture Française et Position de Parti dans les
Sciences’, C.C., July 1956, pp. 130-3.
3. Commune, March 1939, p. 404.
4. P. Langevin, op. cit., p. 8.

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time, Aimé Cotton’s wife and scientific collaborator Eugénie Cotton had
been a close friend of Irène Joliot-Curie since 1902.
After the death of her mother Marie Curie in 1934, Irène Joliot-Curie
took up her work at the Institut du Radium, of which she became director
after the Liberation. Here she guided the training of hundreds of
scientists. Despite her political beliefs, her professional prestige grew
constantly. In 1953, the French Academy of Science unanimously voted
its Albert of Monaco prize to her as a ‘feeble homage of gratitude’,1 and
in 1956 her death was marked by a state funeral. A victim of leukemia,
contracted in her years of research on radio-active material, she was
succeeded in the Chair of Nuclear Physics and Radio-Activity at the
Sorbonne by her husband.
The totality of operative factors already mentioned in this study had
moved this group of mature scientists in a steadily leftward direction
throughout the ’thirties, and particularly after 1934. Late in 1938
Langevin, in a message to the Communist Party Congress at Genne-
villiers, declared: ‘It is the honour of your Party to unite tightly thought
and action . . . it has been said that a communist ought always to teach
himself; but I wish to say to you that the more I am taught, the more I
feel myself a com m unist. . . your Party is the only one to have clear
ideas; it is a sort of expansion of the French Revolution as the doctrine
of Marx-Lenin-Engels is an expansion of the thought of the great
French thinkers of the eighteenth century.’123But for Langevin, Perrin,
Basch, the Joliot-Curies and other scientists, the Nazi-Soviet Pact
marked a distinct set-back, a violation of national interests of which they
could not approve. The new schism, however, did not run deep. In
March 1940, Langevin testified on behalf of the imprisoned communist
deputies, finally joining the Party after the Liberation. Joliot-Curie, who
became a communist in 1942, remained thereafter a staunch activist,
expressing his honour at being elected a delegate to the 1954 Party
Congress by the Federation of the Seine with the words, 'je suis fier
(Tappartenir à ce Parti*.*
Marcel Prenant also took a more active part in communist politics
after the Liberation, being elected Deputy for the Marne. Describing his
‘successive activities’ in the struggle against fascism and against Vichy,
he wrote: T believe myself to have obeyed the moral obligations which
flow simply from the scientific results attained by the Marxist method.*4
Although this is a perspective which, in its general application, there is
every reason to reject, its relevance to Prenant and possibly to other
biologists is, as already mentioned, more feasible.

1. M anchester Guardian, 8 July 1953.

2. P. Langevin, op. cit.t p. 301.
3. F. Joliot-Curie, op. cit., p. 32.
4. M. Prenant, ‘De la Biologie au Marxisme’, La Pensée, January-M arch 1946, p. 6.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

The physicist Eugénie Cotton (b. 1881) also joined the Party, becoming
President of the communist-sponsored Women’s International Demo­
cratic Federation, founded in Paris in December 1945. Her friend Irène
Joliot-Curie, who never joined the Party, confessed when detained on
Ellis Island in March 1948 that she was sympathetic to communism ‘in
many things . . . but not always and not in all things’.1 Such reserves
assume something of a Brechtian calculation when it is remembered that
she joined numerous c o m m u n is t front organizations like the France-
U.S.S.R. and the France-Vietnam Associations, and the Union des
Femmes Françaises. On the eve of the 1951 elections, she made a public
statement to the effect that all parties save the Communist were pursuing
policies which could lead the country to ruin and to war. The P.C.F. alone
ensured the rational use of national resources and of industrial and
scientific development.123At Budapest in 1953 she was elected president
of the communist-controlled World Federation of Scientific Workers,
founded in 1946. Nor was Aimé Cotton’s failure to join the Party of
substantial political significance. A Dreyfusard and a defender of Sacco
and Vanzetti, he, like Langevin, had moved sharply to the Left in the
face of the fascist threat. Imprisoned at Fresnes by the Nazis, after the
war he joined a number of communist front organizations, including the
Comité d’aide à la Grèce, the France-U.S.S.R. Association and the
Union Nationale des Intellectuels. Before the elections of 1946-47, he
made it known that he intended to vote communist.8
The tensions of the Cold War put the communist scientists whose
work could in any way be connected to national defence in a highly
invidious position, although it should be stressed that there is no evidence
that the Party was unwise enough to encourage its members to exploit
their positions in order to sabotage or betray government policy in this
field. On the other hand, these scientists made it perfectly plain where
they stood. From the time of his return from Moscow in 1945, Joliot-
Curie delivered numerous speeches in France, America and other
countries warning against the danger of atomic war and of retaining
atomic secrets.45Aimé Cotton, a member of the Conseil Scientifique du
Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, declared more than once that he
would not be a party to the use of science for aggression.6 Langevin,
Prenant and Teissier also shared the belief that war could only be
launched by the West.

1. Quoted in the New York Times, 15 February 1954.

2. Humanité, 5 June 1951.
3. Humanité, 17 April 1953. Cotton’s major work had been on magnetic fields. He
discovered the laws of the transformation undergone by polarized light when it crosses
coloured liquids. This led to important progress in knowledge of the structure of
molecules.
4. See, for example, VHumanité, 14 November 1945, 16 June 1946.
5. Humanité, 5 May 1949.
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 COMMUNISM AND SCIENCE

Although France was not yet in sight of manufacturing her own atomic
weapons, her involvement in the Western Alliance caused increasing
agitation for the removal of communists from key research positions. In
March 1948, there were violent debates in both the Chamber and the
Conseil de la République about the composition of the Commissariat à
l’Energie Atomique.1 The signing of the Atlantic Pact in 1949 and the
creation of N.A.T.O. resulted inevitably in increased American pressure
for a salutary purge. Finally, in May 1950, Frédéric Joliot-Curie was
removed from his post as High Commissioner of the Commissariat for
Atomic Energy by the Bidault-Schuman-Moch Government. In January
of the following year, Irène Joliot-Curie was expelled from the Com­
missariat by the Pleven Government. Other communist scientists were
methodically purged, Lacassagne, Barrabé and Orcel being among the
most distinguished.8 According to Dorothy M. Pickles, at the time of
Joliot-Curie’s dismissal 65 per cent of the personnel of the Commissariat
were communists. These were subsequently ‘weeded-out’.8 This astonish­
ing statistic can be taken to reflect not only Joliot-Curie’s partisanship
but also the very extensive influence of the Party among the nation’s
leading nuclear physicists. Joliot-Curie himself continued to agitate
against the manufacture of nuclear weapons through the World Federa­
tion of Scientific Workers and the Peace Movement, calling insistently
for wider cultural exchanges, freedom to publish the results of research,
and the exclusive use of science for peaceful social purposes.1234 In 1955,
Prenant publicly refused his services (which had not been solicited) for
the manufacture of germ-weapons and for the policy of ‘genocide* which
the Pentagon and the French High Command, he claimed, were pursuing
among the peoples of Asia.5 Unilateral and tendentious as much of this
propaganda was, it provides a lucid example of leading scientists support­
ing the Party by observing the familiar principles of political utility.

Even in the field of science the second and fourth principles of utility
were apt to clash. The most advanced theoretical conclusions of leading
specialists, even those working on avowedly Marxist principles, might
suddenly conflict with a new Party line whose inspiration lay solely in
political factors exterior to the subject in question. As in literature and
art, the Party’s intervention on such occasions was apt to be brutal and
dogmatic.
The first major intervention took place in the field of psychology and

1. Aube, 22 March 1948.

2. R. Garaudy, op. cit., p. 131.
3. D. Pickles, ‘The Communist Problem in France*, International Affairs, April 1952,
pp. 167—8.
4. See F. Joliot-Curie, ‘L’Action des Travailleurs Scientifiques pour le Bien-être
et pour la Paix*, La Pensée, M ay-June 1951, pp. 9-15.
5. M. Prenant, ‘Nous ne serons pas complices’, L .N .C ., April 1955, pp. 6-9.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

psychoanalysis. Pressure began to be exerted on the Party’s specialists

and even on Henri Wallon, whose De VActe à la Pensée was taken
officially as a model of scientific psychology and whose commentaries
on the application of Pavlovism to child behaviour in Russia, stressing
the inseparability of reflexes - considered as the basis of behaviour - and
of the circumstances producing them, were likewise regarded as sound
from a ‘Marxist’ point of view.1 The Cold War brought psychoanalysis
into official disrepute; it was suddenly found to be guilty by association.
Granted that Politzer had regarded it, especially as taught by Jung and
Adler, as an idealism incompatible with Marxism, and that he had
vigorously combated ‘Freudo-Marxism’, he was nevertheless in a position
to guide the Party’s thinking on so specialized a subject, whereas the
autocritique made by eight communist psychologists in 1949 was clearly
only an aspect of the Zhdanovist policy of maximum Party interference
in all intellectual fields.2
Psychoanalysis, the autocritique began, born at Vienna in the environ­
ment of the decadent, bourgeois, paternalist family, is being used by the
ruling classes in their attempt to prove the morbidity of those who wish
to change the social structure. The so-called ‘unconscious’ of Freud had
turned out to be a mystification, although his emphasis on the sexual
factor and the importance of early infancy were, it was admitted, useful
contributions. But all such ideas should be viewed within new concrete
conditions; there could be no ‘pure’ science independent of the real
world. In America psychoanalysis was the privilege of the rich, an opium
which attempted to explain each individual’s relationship to society on an
entirely personal, as opposed to social, basis. It was being used, in
addition, as a weapon to prepare the world for a new war against the
democratic countries.
To what extent each of the eight signatories fully endorsed these
strictures it is impossible to say. The tone and attitude, however,
suggested a Party diktat and this conclusion is reinforced by the
coincidence of the autocritique’s publication with the height of the Party’s
much more serious intervention in the field of biology.
Briefly, the theoretical background to the controversy associated with
the name of Lysenko was as follows:3
Mendel (1822-84) had put forward the unit theory of inheritance, by
which the existence of certain unit factors corresponding to what came
to be called genes was taken as determinant. Later, the discovery of
mutations suggested that genes were subject to chance variations. Muller
1. H. Wallon, ‘Pavlovisme et Psychologie*, L .N .C ., July-August 1955, pp. 213-20.
2. ‘La Psychoanalyse Idéologie Réactionnaire*, L .N .C ., June 1949, pp. 57-72. The
psychologists in question were: Dr. Bonnafe, Dr. Follín, Dr. J. Kestemberg, Dr. E.
Kestemberg, Dr. S. Lebovici, Dr. L. Le Guillant, Dr. Monnerot, and S. Shentoub.
3. This account is drawn mainly from J. D. Bernal, Science in H istory, London, 1957.
pp. 664-9.

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 COMMUNISM AND SCIENCE

demonstrated this in 1927 with X-rays and subsequently other agents,

such as atomic radiation and specific chemicals, were shown to produce
mutations. From the turn of the century the practical inspiration for
advances in the theory of heredity and evolution came from agriculture.
The greatest advance was the development by T. H. Morgan and his
colleagues of the hypothesis that characters found to be regularly
inherited together were associated with genes lying in a definite order
in a chromosome. The process of selective breeding consequently reduced
itself theoretically to finding different methods of shuffling and dealing
out the genes to the offspring.
Michurin (1885-1935) belonged to the pre-Morgan school of plant
breeding. He worked on the improvement of fruit trees by a combination
o f distant hybridization and grafting methods, so producing new and
successful varieties. Michurin discovered that young or unstable organ­
isms were susceptible to environmental modification, while old or
pure-bred organisms remained resistant. This approach appealed to
Lysenko who developed a process of vernalization, or training, of crops
by, for example, heating or cooling seeds to change winter into spring
wheat or vice-versa. Lysenko’s experiments coincided with violent Soviet
attacks on Mendelian genetics which, with their emphasis on the fixed
unit and their consequent lack of emphasis on environment, were
associated with Nazi race theories. Lysenko’s approach also proved
attractive to the Soviet Party which, after the war, was more than ever
inclined to insist that nothing was impossible for the new Soviet man.
But his extreme theoretical conclusions drawn from his essentially
practical or technical work, namely that specific acquired characteristics
could deliberately be inherited, met with opposition from many Russian
geneticists by no means all of whom were dogmatic Mendelists. A long
dispute between two rival schools culminated in the July-August 1948
‘victory’ of T. D. Lysenko at an open session of the All-Union Academy
of Agricultural Sciences. The Central Committee of the Party, headed
by Stalin, declared Lysenko and his supporters to be one hundred per cent
correct. Thereafter teaching methods were altered and scientists who
refused to acknowledge their errors were demoted or transferred. Twelve
professors and academicians were dismissed from their posts for
intransigence.1
Soon after the announcement of these Soviet decisions a flood of
criticism broke loose in the West, directed both against Lysenko’s theory
and the manner in which his ‘victory’ had been consecrated. Thus a
question of genetics was at once inextricably involved in the Cold War.
The ball which the French and British Parties sent bouncing to the feet
of Prenant and Haldane was one slippery in the extreme.
It is possible to trace some of Prenant’s earlier conclusions on this
1. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, p. 531.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

question. In 1937, he had written that scientists would only know what
was purely hereditary in man in a classless society where equal conditions
prevailed for all. Then would come the question: what can be done to
change human hereditary qualities?1 He was strongly opposed to any
tendency to apply Malthusian laws to social man, as opposed to primitive
man deprived of techniques. Darwin, he said, had not satisfactorily
explained the rapid transformation of primitive man into thinking man.2
Evolution was a fact, but heredity was also a fact, and apparently its
antithesis. Weighing up the arguments for and against the inheritance of
acquired characteristics, he gave his own provisional summing up: ‘The
complexity of the structure of living matter is so great . . . that these
external influences do not decide the mutations; they simply throw the
cell into a state of crisis in which these changes have a certain chance
of taking place . . . all attempts to produce a desired given mutation
have, however, failed.’8
Prenant, then, regarded with an open mind the possibility that at a
future date the inheritability of acquired characteristics would be
demonstrated. As a Marxist, he was bound to regard such a development
as socially desirable. So far, however - and this was the point which
impressed Haldane as well - there was no proof. Haldane, while ready
to believe that Lysenko had converted spring wheats into autumn wheats,
confessed himself ‘sceptical of the claims that in general “acquired
characteristics are inherited’’,’ adding: ‘It must be realized that the results
of experimental work are not available until they are published in such
a form that they can be repeated.’4
Prenant's long, detailed and tortuous assessment of Lysenko’s thesis
was published in La Pensée from January until July 1949.5 He again
carefully reviewed previous theories within the context of their social and
political significance, particularly those of Lamarck and Weismann.
Eventually he came to the point. If the methods of Michurin and Lysenko,
based on actual socialist agronomic practice, could prove the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, it would be a great success for science. But it
was a theory which laboratory science could not confirm. In this situation,
the communist scientist in France could only express his reserve, wishing
that he had the opportunities for practical experiments open to his more
favoured Soviet colleagues.
Thus Prenant made every effort to sugar the pill. It still tasted sour,
but his integrity remained. Another leading rebel, Professor Claude
Cahen, of Strasbourg University, demanded evidence of the strictly
1.M. Prenant, ‘Science et racisme*, C.A, 20 February 1937, p. 218.
2.See P. Labérenne’s review of Prenant’s Darwin in VHumanité, 27 March 1938.
3.M. Prenant, Biology and Marxism, pp. 144-5.
4.Quoted in J. Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science, p. 227.
5.M. Prenant, ‘L’Influence du milieu et l’hérédité des caractères acquis*, La
Pensée, January-February, M arch-April, July-August 1949.
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 COMMUNISM AND SCIENCE

scientific data on which Lysenko had elaborated his theories, and even
suggested that he was under the impression that Lysenko’s ideas had been
accepted because of their accord with a preconceived theory.1
The ferocity of the Party’s reaction can be understood only in the light
of the intensely political climate in which Lysenko’s theories had been
upheld in the Soviet Union by the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.
At the close of the decisive session of the Academy of Agricultural
Sciences, Lysenko concluded the debate thus:

Progressive biological science owes it to the geniuses of mankind,

Lenin and Stalin, that the teaching of I. V. Michurin has been added
to the treasure house of our knowledge . . . Long live the Party of
Lenin and Stalin, which discovered Michurin for the world (applause)
and created all the conditions for the progress of advanced materialist
biology in our country. Glory to the great friend and protagonist of
science, our leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin! (A ll rise. P rolonged
applause.)*

As a result of this performance, three ‘neo-Mendelians’, Zhukovsky,

Polyakov and Alikhanyan, who had opposed Lysenko earlier in the
course of an apparently open discussion, quickly produced autocritiques.
Zhukovsky confessed that his previous speech ‘was unworthy of a
member of the Communist Party and of a Soviet scientist’, but he
promised that it would be ‘my last speech from an incorrect biological
and ideological standpoint’.8 This grotesque charade left the French
Party in no doubt as to what position it must speedily and wholeheartedly
adopt.
Already, before the publication of Prenant’s article, other voices had
been heard. Jean Triomphe wrote in Les Lettres Françaises that ‘the
entire Soviet people has applauded Lysenko because he refuses to abdi­
cate before nature, because he believes in science, because he has
confidence in man.’1234 Another ‘expert’, the writer Pierre Daix, listed
several reasons why Lysenko must be correct. His practical results were
proof enough; and, on the level of Marxism, his theory allowed him to
take direction of the evolution of species. Lysenko had freed genetics
from the grip of reactionary politics. Daix, quoting Aragon, even con­
trasted the treatment accorded to Lysenko with that suffered by Galileo,
arguing that Lysenko had upset the theories commonly accepted in the
Soviet Union. He made no reference to the ‘Galileos’ who had opposed
Lysenko and to their fate.5
The official line had been laid down by Casanova in his speech of

1. L. Casanova, Responsabilités de VIntellectuel Communiste, p. 19.

2. Q uoted in J. Huxley, op. cit., pp. 56-7.
3. Ibid., p. 58.
4. L .L.F ., 7 O ctober 1948.
5. L .L.F ., 4 November 1948.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

February 28th, 1949, at the Salle Wagram. He began by reminding his

audience that it was the C.P.S.U., the Party of the working class, and not
an ordinary party, which had intervened in the field of biology. However,
there had been no ‘argument from authority in the Soviet Union’. The
discussion had been freely conducted.1 It was at this point that Casanova
introduced a thesis which, some years later, was to be disowned and
regretted, the thesis of two conflicting sciences, one bourgeois, one
proletarian. Engels had demolished English empiricism, but the struggle
continued. The Lysenko question had served as a pretext for ‘political
aggression’ by certain bourgeois men of science. Between traditional
genetics and dialectical materialism a permanent rupture now existed.
Whatever comrade Prenant might say to the contrary, no synthesis was
possible. And, as if to reassure his listeners on the free climate in which
these conclusions had been reached, Casanova warned communist
scientists that from that time onward the results of their research must
be interpreted in the perspective of Michurin and Lysenko, for no fruitful
work or useful debate was possible outside this perspective.123
Thus encouraged and guided, the ‘experts’ again pressed forward into
the attack. Aragon declared that opposition to Lysenko within the
U.S.S.R. merely signified the lingering traces of bourgeois ideology;
Pierre Daix saw in Lysenkoism the scientific counterpart of socialist
realism, although Marxism was, he said, on less sure ground in aesthetics
than in the sciences.8 And André Wurmser, the most misinformed
intellectual of the epoch, made it known that all of Lysenko’s opponents
continued to enjoy full facilities for their work.4 But it was not until the
publication of an article by the journalist Francis Cohen in November
1949 that rock-bottom was finally struck.
The bourgeois scientists who opposed Lysenko, he began, had lost all
liberty of spirit in their fear of socialism and its ability to transform the
world. However, ‘the communists will make paradise on earth’.5 Prenant
had failed to apply dialectical materialism to the problem and to
appreciate that ‘an active theory of evolution is necessary in a socialist
country*.6 In any case, Lysenko had presented his case before the whole
Soviet people. ‘To put in doubt an affirmation made in such circum­
stances, is to put in doubt, against the evidence, the efficacity, the justice,
the unity of Stalinism.’ And, for a communist, ‘Stalin is the highest
scientific authority in the world.’7

1. L. Casanova, op. cit., p. 14.

2. Ibid., pp. 15-21.
3. P. Daix, ‘Une Littérature de Parti*, L .N .C . , June 1949, p. 77.
4. A. Wurmser, Réponse à Jean Cassou, p. 22.
5. F. Cohen, ‘Mendel, Lyssenko et la Rôle de la Science*, L .N .C ., November 1949,
p. 104.
6. Ibid., p. 107. My italics.
7. Ibid., February 1950, p. 62.

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 COMMUNISM AND SCIENCE

In the months that followed, Prenant and Claude Cahen were made to
feel their isolation, although a report that Cahen had been ‘scourged’
was doubtless exaggerated.1 Aragon replaced Prenant on the Central
Committee of the Party. The Party scientists as a whole failed to rally to
his support, either championing Lysenko or keeping silent. But, unlike
Haldane, who, under the weight of the Lysenko affair, withdrew first
from the editorial board of the Daily Worker, and then from the Party
itself. Prenant remained loyal and discreet and his articles continued to
appear in La Pensée, although on other subjects. It was not until after
the Twenty-second Congress of the C.P.S.U. more than a decade later
that he finally resigned and founded a club for ex-commünist Marxists.
Time, with the consent of the Soviet authorities, was to prove
Lysenko’s errors. While admitting that the original distinction between
bourgeois and proletarian science had been a mistake, the French Party
shed few tears of contrition in the face of this humiliation. Autocritiques
were not forthcoming from Casanova, Aragon, Francis Cohen and the
other lay interventionists. In May 1955, Garaudy wrote in the Cahiers:
‘If, in the fire of a political battle conducted from outside against the
Soviet Union and the Party, under the mask of science, some comrades
have been led to fight with inadequate formulas, then “they were right
and not those who were silent,” as Laurent Casanova said in a letter to
Michel Lazard.’12 In April of the following year, Marcel Servin rejected
the notion that the Party in any way regretted the manner of its inter­
vention; it had been necessary to defend Soviet science against an
aggression of the bourgeoisie.3
Here was as bold an affirmation of the ultimate supremacy of the fourth
principle of utility over all others as could be expected. Yet it is as an
agent of this principle that the intellectual descends to his lowest level,
that of a well-conditioned siphon. If his task is, and it must be,
primarily to convince non-communist members of the educated com­
munity by methods of rational persuasion, how can he expect to do so
in so grotesque and unreflecdve a manner? The idea that Soviet science,
like some besieged stone fortress, had to be defended at all costs and
by all methods, seems to rest on the hypothesis that affirmation, even on
a highly technical subject, is a substitute for reason. By shouting in
chorus that a new theory about which they knew little or nothing was
correct, a) because it would be useful if it were correct, and b) because
Stalin said it was, the intellectuals could only devalue their own cur­
rency and help to make of their Party an object of deep suspicion and
even contempt.

1. News Chronicle, 20 April 1949.

2. Quoted in P. Hervé, Lettre à Sartre, p. 121.
3. M. Servin, ‘A propos de l’Activité du Parti parmi les Intellectuels’, C.C., April
1956, p. 399.
317
 CHAPTER FOUR

The W riters-Socialist Realism

and Zhdanovism

The communists have made it an article of faith that culture and politics
are indivisible. To no field has this dogma a more obvious relevance than
to that of literature, or belles-lettres. On the literary front, above all
others, the Party has felt itself duty bound (and competent) to intervene,
taking its cue, as always, from the current Soviet orthodoxy. Con­
sequently, the comparative absence of such an orthodoxy in the ’twenties
left the communist writers in France with a wider latitude of initiative
than they have enjoyed at any subsequent period.
The early Bolsheviks, of course, were not liberals. In 1920, Lenin
ordered the subordination of Proletkult to the Commissariat of Education
and in May of the following year Lunacharsky wrote: ‘We in no way
shrink from the necessity of applying censorship even to belles-lettres,
since under this banner and beneath this elegant exterior poison may be
implanted in the still naive and dark souls of the great mass of the
people.’1 But 1921 was the year of the great retreat; literature too was
granted its ‘N.E.P.’. Victor Serge’s report on the literary situation in July
1922 made, from the communist point of view, gloomy reading.
Andreyev, Kuprin and Bunin had deserted the Revolution; Gorky had
gone abroad. Only among the poets - Biely, Essenin, Mayakovsky - did
he see more hope.2 Just as the Party had to retreat reluctantly before
private enterprise, so it had to make a virtue out of a necessity in
cultivating the leftist writers whom Trotsky called ‘fellow-travellers’. The
‘new Soviet populism’ of these writers he vigorously defended against the
attacks of the literary avant-garde, the October group and the futurists.
While insisting that ‘he who is outside the October perspective is utterly
and hopelessly reduced to nothing,’8 Trotsky, like Lenin, believed the
idea of breaking completely with the old literature to be historically
1. Quoted in E. H. Carr, Socialism in one Country, 1924-1926, vol. I, London, 1958,
p. 65.
2. V. Serge, ‘Les Ecrivains Russes et la Révolution*, Clarté, 15 July 1922.
3. L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Michigan, 1960, p. 25.

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 THE W R I T E R S - S O C I A L I S T REALISM AND ZHDANOVISM

meaningless, simply because the Russian proletariat did not as yet know
that old literature; it still had to master, absorb and overcome Pushkin.
Marxist thought, he argued, did not make a virtue of novelty; it was
steeped in the culture of the past.1
Down to 1924 or 1925, the fellow-travellers continued to dominate
Soviet literature, enjoying what E. H. Carr has called ‘the virtually
unqualified confidence of the Party leaders’.123The Thirteenth Congress
of the C.P.S.U. in May 1924 was the last occasion on which the Party
formally reserved its neutrality before the different literary trends and
schools of the Left. In June 1925, the Central Committee called for a
‘tactful and careful attitude’ toward the fellow-travellers and for tolerance
for ‘intermediate ideological forms’.8The ensuing three years were marked
not by a reversal of this official neutrality but by a sharp rivalry between
the Left Literature Front (consisting predominantly of futurists) and the
RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). As the latter became
increasingly dominant, their doctrines began to be accepted throughout
the communist world as a much-needed substitute for an official ortho­
doxy. The First International Conference of Proletarian Writers was held
at Moscow in 1927, attended by Becher, Barbusse and other foreign
writers. In the years 1928-1932, the RAPP, led by Averbach, gained a
virtual hegemony over other groups, demanding, with Party support, that
writers orientate their work toward the production and labour themes
most pertinent to the Five Year Plan. With Averbach and Fadeyev acting
virtually as literary commissars, dissenting writers found themselves
censored and banned, or even driven to suicide. In 1930, a second
International Conference was held, during which the International
Association of Revolutionary Writers was founded. When, in 1932, the
Party finally stepped in, dissolved the RAPP and created a single Union
of Soviet Writers, it was not, as many apologists claimed, to nip a harsh
dictatorship in the bud, but rather to bring the dictatorship under full
Party control. And when, in the same year, Stalin made his famous
pronouncement at Gorky’s house about writers becoming ‘engineers of
human souls’, a new era had begun, the era of complete and ruthless
Party intervention in the field of literature.
The first generation of communist writers in France, therefore, wrote
and published in a spirit of complete independence, expressing their
revolutionary ardour according to personal inspiration and subscribing
to no single orthodoxy. Barbusse’s early novels, Le Feu (1916) and Clarté
(1918), with their combination of plain prose and weighted message,
resembled the style later to be associated with the school of socialist
realism. Le Feu was a novel of bitter realism, evoking all the horrors of a
1. Ibid., pp. 130-1.
2. E. H. Carr, op. cit., p. 64.
3. Ibid., vol. 2, London, 1959, p. 85.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

war stripped of its metaphysical glories. Aware as he was of the in­

coherence and ignorance of ordinary soldiers, Barbusse could not resist
thrusting into their mouths tendentious statements of an implausible
clarity. But as a socialist epic Le Feu was, without doubt, a tour deforce.
Clarté, on the other hand, in carrying the description of social alienation
a stage further, proved an artistic failure. Starting well with a faithful
portrait of the petit-bourgeois, patriotic values o f a small provincial
town, Barbusse finally surrendered himself to a long and tedious sermon,
a monologue for the future, a tract. Like many later socialist realist
writers, he found himself unable to fashion an action from which the
ideas, however tendentious, might seem to spring naturally.
It was, perhaps, in Marcel Martinet, that French communism dis­
covered its first writer of genuine originality. Martinet’s theories
resembled in an interesting way those developed by Trotsky in Literature
and Revolution. Convinced that all art was class art and always had been,
he, like Trotsky, considered it essential that the proletariat be given the
opportunity to absorb the best and reject the worst of past culture on a
selective socialist basis. Ideally, the poet should combine a real knowledge
of the individual with an ability to understand the inherent connection
between things and events, a quality he shared with the scientist.1
In 1921, Martinet published a five-act verse play, La N uit,12 which was
truly socialist in content and experimental in form. As the war ends, a
group of revolutionary soldiers gathers to discuss their course of action.
One of them warns: ‘It’s vital that we should not be drunk with the force
at our command, vital that we regard it coldly in its just proportions and
its exact limitations’.3 The movement gathers momentum. Peasants,
metal and mine workers and the intellectual avant-garde join in. Ledrux,
the revolutionary leader, denounces the Provisional Government and its
profiteer supporters. But Dupatoy, the envoy of the Government, then
arrives on the scene. Full of honeyed phrases and strong promises, he
finally wins over the soldiers with the result that they turn against Ledrux
and kill him. Dupatoy then joins up with the reactionary generals.
‘Friends, be content,’ he tells the soldiers. ‘The war continues until total
victory.’ The soldiers, like sheep, cheer.
A sombre ending. Martinet, of course, was by no means a fellow-
traveller, but an embittered communist living in a France where the
revolution had clearly failed. Indeed he insisted that in the future writers
would be judged according to the attitude they had adopted toward the
revolutionary movement. Yet when La Nuit was translated into Russian,
it came at once under the fire of the leftist groups who charged Martinet
with patriotism, pacifism and defeatism. Trotsky defended him against
1. Humanité, 7 February and 30 April 1921.
2. See also his Les Temps maudits (poems) and La M aison à Vabri (novel).
3. M. Martinet, La N uit, Paris, 1921, p. 51.
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what he called the ridiculous ‘narrowness’ of the leftists who did not
recognize an authentic drama of the French people at the present stage
of their struggle.1 If the ending was a pessimistic one, Trotsky wrote in
his preface, then this reflected the real situation in France. The important
thing was, in his view, that Martinet was fully committed and had left
behind the hesitant, sceptical school of Romain Rolland.123
The climate of the communist movement in the early ’twenties, then,
was one which allowed or encouraged a genuine Marxist revolutionary
art, an art which simultaneously avoided the wild dogmatism of the
leftists, the idealism of the fellow-travellers and the sterile, mechanized
optimism of socialist realism. Or so Martinet’s case suggests. But France,
too, had its fellow-travellers, if not precisely its new populists. The novels
of Pierre Hamp, impregnated with ouvriérisme and dealing with the lives
of urban workers, may be counted within this school. The works of
another writer of working-class stock, Louis Guilloux, echoed the pre­
war socialist idealism of a section of the proletariat, and were all the
more idealistic because of the author’s sympathies for ‘Rollandisme\
During the period of RAPP domination, the impact of the doctrine
of ‘revolutionary dynamism’ - a literature socialist in content but
experimental in form - was felt less keenly in France than in Germany,
where the powerful and highly organized K.P.D. attempted to guide and
occasionally coerce the writers of the Linkskurve group. Barbusse, who
attended the 1927 International Conference of Proletarian Writers at
Moscow, subscribed to the view that proletarian literature must concern
itself with the new man, the factory, with all those who were building
socialism. Technique apart, there was nothing, he insisted, to be learned
from the current bourgeois conception of literature.8 Yet as the semi-
mystical apostle of Jesus Christ and as editor of Monde, Barbusse went
in practice his own way, drawing a sharp criticism from Aragon at the
1930 Kharkov Conference.
Aragon was one of the few surrealist writers at this time to attempt to
make of communism not only a symbol of allegiance but also a conceptual
framework within which avant-garde writing might acquire an added
dimension. Praising Fadeyev’s speech at Kharkov, Aragon declared that
‘proletarian literature will be national in form and socialist in content’.4
Returning home, he wrote Front Rouge, a poem which owed a debt both
to the RAPP and to Mayakovsky, and which can be taken as the climax
of a somewhat undistinguished pre-socialist realist literature in France.
In 1934, there took place at Moscow the First All-Union Congress of
Soviet Writers, attended by Aragon, Malraux, Nizan and Bloch. Socialist

1. L. T rotsky, op. cit., pp. 237-8.

2. Humanité, 7 O ctober 1922.
3. H . Barbusse, One Looks at Russia, p. 125.
4. R . G araudy, V Itinéraire d*Aragon, p. 218.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

realism, now officially consecrated before the world, was defined in the
statutes of the Union of Writers as ‘the basic method of Soviet belles-
lettres and literary criticism’ which demanded of the artist a ‘truthful,
historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary develop*
ment’.1 In practical terms, this was to mean a literature impregnated with
'partimos?. Lenin’s Party Organization and Party Literature (1905) was
vigorously invoked, despite the fact that he had not envisaged a situation
where the Party would systematically control all literary production,
including belles-lettres. A. A. Zhdanov, a Secretary of the Central Com­
mittee, denying that there could be any non-tendentious, non-political
literature in an epoch of class struggle, called for a new type of romanti­
cism, ‘revolutionary romanticism’, specifically designed for the task of
the ‘ideological remoulding and education of the toiling people in the
spirit of socialism’.2 Maxim Gorky, the symbol of the new movement,
whose Mother (1906) was now regarded as the first work of socialist
realism, indicated what themes would best illustrate ‘the path from the
realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’, listing, among others, the
regeneration of peasants in factories, the transformation of members of
national minorities into communist internationalists and the project
for an Institute of Experimental Medicine.8 Despite Bukharin’s plea that
socialist realism need not be anti-lyrical and could encompass a wide
range of styles,4 the general mood of the Congress was one of ominous
dogmatism and was far removed in mood from Trotsky’s view that ‘the
Party has not, and cannot have, ready-made decisions on versification,
on the evolution of the theatre, on the renovation of the literary
language . . .’, and that the Marxist conception of the objective social
utility of art ‘does not at all mean a desire to dominate art by means of
decrees and orders’.6
To this situation French communist writers could respond on two
levels; by vindicating the new trend in Russia, and by attempting to
translate the doctrine, in creative terms, into one relevant to a country
where Institutes of Experimental Medicine bore no particular socialist
significance and where the call to revolt must precede the call to build.
Aragon at once proved himself the most ardent of French apologists
for socialist realism, elaborating on the close social and political ties
which writers like Fadeyev, Gorky and Alexis Tolstoy were forging with
the masses and lauding, with little regard for the possible sensitivities of
1. H. Swayze, Political Control o f Literature in the U.S.S.R. 1946-1959, H arvard,
1962, p. 113.
2. A. A. Zhdanov, Soviet Literature - the Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced
Literature, New Y ork, 1935, p. 21.
3. M. G orky, T h e Responsibility o f Soviet Intellectuals*, in G . B. de H uszar (ed.).
The Intellectuals, p. 237.
4. N. Bukharin, ‘Poetry and Socialist Realism*, Partisan Review, N ovem ber-
Decem ber 1934, p. 14.
5. L. Trotsky, op. cit., pp. 139 and 170.

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his French readers, the most outrageous declarations of Soviet writers,

such as the one made by Avdeenko to the Seventh Congress of Soviets,
in January 1935. ‘I am strong. I cultivate in myself the best human
sentiments: love, devotion, honesty, abnegation, heroism, disinterested­
ness - all this thanks to you, great teacher Stalin . . . I write books . . . I
am h ap p y . . . I will live a hundred years . . . all this thanks to you, great
teacher Stalin.’1 When Stalin praised Mayakovsky in 1935, Aragon urged
French writers to follow his example.123But in 1935 Aragon still regarded
Mayakovsky as essentially a futurist; twenty years later he coupled his
name with Gorky’s as the twin founders of socialist realism.8
The French Party officially endorsed the policies laid down at the
Soviet Writers’ Congress, particularly the aspects relating to Party
direction of literature.45In France, however, there were mitigating factors.
For one thing, the Party could not command, it could only persuade;
for another, a harsh line would have conflicted with the United and
Popular Front tactics and the desire to win over non-communist intellec­
tuals under a ‘liberal’ banner. Thorez is reputed to have told Barbusse,
‘there is no question of sacrificing artistic value to the theme, nor of
replacing reasoned conviction by automatic orders. . . we don’t want any
formalism, even under a revolutionary appearance.’6 Communist writers
were at pains to emphasize the spontaneous, unregimented nature of
socialist realism. Quoting Lenin, Jean Fréville explained that a ‘really
free’ literature was one which sided with the proletariat, for ‘art belongs
to the people’. Naturalism had not gone far enough; it depicted misery,
but not solutions to misery.6 Léon Moussinac defined socialist realism
as ‘gathering the living flower’, and urged writers to explore every method,
tragic or comic, of portraying the class struggle. Why, he asked with
seeming innocence, insist that socialist realism is a discipline imposed
from above when the committed writer would scarcely write otherwise?7
The voice was persuasive. While some writers like Gide and Malraux
remained critical, believing that socialist realism tended to ignore the
interior life and individual psychology, others, like Rolland and Bloch,
were able to overcome their scruples. The real issue, said Rolland, was
‘the rôle of the artist in a society in a state of war’. Bloch had told the
First Congress of Soviet Writers that the writer must, in a sense, always
be in opposition and that he made himself ridiculous if he acted as an
official minstrel for work accomplished. Inevitably, he said, some writers
wrote for a million readers, and some for only five thousand; both were
1. L. A ragon, Pour un réalisme socialiste, p. 120.
2. Ibid., p. 86.
3. L. Aragon, Littératures soviétiques, Paris, 1955, p. 39.
4. G R , 15 Septem ber 1934, pp. 1072-9.
5. Quoted in J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, II, p. 222.
6. J. Fréville, Sur la Littérature et l'A rt: Karl M arx et Friedrich Engels, p. 19.
7. L. M oussinac, ‘Réalism e Socialiste*, Europe, 15 June 1936, pp. 183-5.

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equally valuable.1 Courageous as he showed himself in Russia, Bloch

nevertheless returned home under the false impression that his reserva­
tions had been not only understood but applauded and taken to heart.
Either suppressing or ignorant of the steady liquidation of almost the
entire Russian literary avant-garde of the ’twenties, French communists
made every effort to sugar the pill. In 1937, Aragon went out of his way
to stress that socialist realism was not a peculiarly Russian creation, but
took a different form in each country, ‘plunging its roots’ into local and
national realities, the soil from which it sprang.12
What form did it take in France? In the years before the war, the harvest
reaped was neither very prolific nor remarkable for its quality. The older
generation, Barbusse, Rolland, Gide did not respond. The content of
Malraux’s Le Temps du Mépris and UEspoir was pro-communist, but
the style and outlook remained his own. It was primarily with Aragon
and Nizan that the doctrine showed signs of taking positive shape.
Although Aragon claimed that Les Beaux Quartiers had been written
as one of the tasks prescribed to him by the Party, both this novel and its
predecessor, Les Cloches de Bâle, ‘plunged their roots’ into an earlier,
pre-1914 era, when no Communist Party existed. The last of Le Monde
Réel series to be written before 1939, Les Voyageurs de /’Impériale, set
out to show how the bourgeoisie’s efforts to preserve its liberty and
individuality led to the degradation of the individual and to collective
crime. Almost all the characters were saddled with the Marxist equivalent
of original sin, warped in one way or another by life in capitalist society.
Aragon, there can be no doubt, is a better poet than novelist. The
first three novels of Le Monde Réel achieve an aggregate length of no
less than 1,570 pages, while the reader of Les Communistes must remain
faithful for more than 2,000 pages. The effort, for writer and reader alike,
is disproportionate to the result. All these novels are characterized by
three basic tendencies; concentration on the upper and middle classes,
interminable political discussions, and a final resort to crude polemics
when, as invariably is the case with Aragon, the moral of the story cannot
be conveyed by artistic means alone.
In Les Cloches de Bâle, we immediately enter a world of big industrial­
ists, deputies, diplomats, ministers and bankers. In Les Beaux Quartiers,
we first meet the chocolate manufacturer Barrel in the course of his
attempt to break a strike at his factory. In Les Voyageurs de /*Impériale, it
is the tum of the Mercadier family, servants of state by tradition, and
particularly Pierre Mercadier, a professor who has married into an
aristocratic family, and who later develops into an anti-Semite during

1. J.-R . Bloch, T aróles à un Congrès soviétique', Europe, 15 Septem ber 1934,

pp. 105-6.
2. L. A ragon, ‘Réalisme Socialiste et Réalism e Français*, L .N .C ., May 1949, p. 39.
R eport of a speech m ade in O ctober 1937.

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 THE W R I T E R S - S O C I A L I S T REALISM AND ZHDANOVISM

the Dreyfus affair. Attacks are sometimes crude: Wisner, the omnipresent
motor manufacturer, remarks to the self-made man, Brunei (who had
also married into the aristocracy), ‘Quand je dis la France, c'est une
façon de parler très simple, pour dire nous, un certain groupe d'intérêts
communs,'x Elsewhere, the industrialist Joseph Quesnel, in calling upon
his colleagues to oppose the social legislation of 1908, claims that such
legislation imposes derisive frontiers on the development of human
activity.* This at least strikes a note of greater probability.
Even the social rebels are drawn from the upper classes. The heroine
of Les Cloches de Bâle, Catherine Simonidzé, is a beautiful Georgian
exile whose political development receives its decisive impulse from a
chance encounter, during a rural holiday, with a violent strike in the
small town of Cluses. She returns to the world of anarchist and socialist
agitators in Paris and throws herself into the fray. Similarly, Armand,
the emergent hero of Les Beaux Quartiers, and the future communist
militant of Les Communistes, is the younger son of a Radical mayor.
Each novel ends on a note of rhetoric. Aragon chooses the meeting of
the Second International at Basle in 1913 as the moment to abandon
both the form of the novel. Les Cloches de Bâle, and also the story of its
heroine, in favour of an exposition in the first person singular. T can
speak no more of Catherine. Hesitant, vacillating Catherine, as she slowly
approaches the light!’8 Instead, he writes of Clara Zetkin, one of the
future leaders of German communism, but not a central character in the
novel. *Je te parlerai sans fin des yeux de Clara.. .’4 Hitler and the Soviets
work their way into the passage, but Clara Zetkin more or less holds her
own: ‘She is the woman of tomorrow, or better, let us dare to say it, she
is the woman of today . . . she in whom the social problem of woman is
resolved and surpassed.’6 In the second novel, which also ends before the
First World War, the author nevertheless contrives to make the point
that Jaurès, despite his errors, had heralded by his activities the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Black Sea mutiny, the communist army of China, the
republican soldiers of Catalonia and the Asturias, and the metal
workers of Vorochilov.6 Finally, in Les Voyageurs de VImpériale, lest the
lesson of Professor Mercadier’s degeneration remain unclear at the end
of 627 pages, Aragon concludes on the final page: 'Le temps de tous les
Pierre Mercadiers était définitivement révolu, et quand . . . on pensait
à leur vie absurde de naguère, comment n'eût-on pas haussé les épaules
de pitié?'1
1. L. A ragon, Les Cloches de Bâle, Paris, 1934, p. 102.
2. L. A ragon, Les Beaux Quartiers, Paris, 1936, p. 197.
3. Les Cloches de Bâle, p. 426.
4. Ibid., p. 427.
5. Ibid., p. 440.
6. Les Beaux Quartiers, p. 344.
7. L. A ragon, Les Voyageurs de l'Impériale, Paris, 1947, p. 627.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Thus Aragon, the most outspoken advocate of socialist realism in

France, had in essence produced a series of novels in which the negative
aspects dominated and in which the ‘positive hero’ scarcely emerged at all.
Far from contributing to what Zhdanov had called ‘the ideological
remoulding and education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism’,
Le Monde Réel merely added to the already formidable pile of novels
written by members of the middle class for the middle dass against the
middle class.
In contrast, the reviled Paul Nizan, whose works were erased from the
official Party historiographies of socialist literature after his disgrace in
1939, came much closer to achieving a genuine French socialist realism,
although his last and best acclaimed novel, La Conspiration, belonged to a
different genre. Here the focus was narrowly concentrated on the Parisian
anarchist-revolutionary intellectuals of the late ’twenties, and the climax
was a pessimistic one. Following the publication in 1934 of Antoine Bloyé
(which Aragon hailed as a work of socialist realism), Nizan reached the
height of his powers as a communist writer in Le Cheval de Troie9 set in
the town of ‘Villefranche’, somewhere between Central France and the
Midi. In the face of unemployment, poverty and desperation, a character
remarks: ‘The enterprises that matter are those in which death is the sole
stake upon which their execution rests. Nothing can be changed except
at the risk of death.’1 The communists organize the workers, gradually
breaking down the deep-seated anarchist tradition of contempt for all
political parties. Nizan, in accordance with the socialist realist precept
of illustrating the current Party line, showed the Popular Front policy
reaping dividends, with the local peasantry helping to feed the urban
workers. Nizan’s ‘Villefranche’ was a town sharply divided between the
poor and upper classes friendly or apathetic toward fascism. The climax
comes with a brilliantly described Popular Front counter-demonstration
against a fascist rally, during the course of which the left-wing demon­
strators are mowed down by hired guards on horseback. But the fight,
Nizan made it plain, would continue.2

After the war, the climate of brutal and dogmatic terrorism associated
with the name of A. A. Zhdanov was renewed in Russia with a new zeal.
As Stalin’s agent in cultural affairs, Zhdanov deliberately resorted to
‘shock-tactics’ to reverse unhealthy trends, and set about manipulating
artificially from above the dialectic of the intellectual superstructure.
‘At the same time as we select Soviet man’s finest feelings and qualities
and reveal his future to him, we must show our people what they should
1. P. N izan, Trojan Horse, trans. by Charles Ashleigh, London, 1937, p. 83.
2. Jean Cassou’s Les Massacres de Paris (about the 1871 Commune) and Edith
Thomas* Le Refus (the story o f a bourgeois girl’s deepening sym pathy for the w orking
dass) both bore resem blances to socialist realism , although neither author was a t th at
tim e a comm unist.

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 THE W R I T E R S - S O C I A L I S T REALISM AND ZHDANOVISM

not be like and castigate the survivals from yesterday that are hindering
the Soviet people’s progress.’1 In the course of his attack on the literary
journals Zvezda and Leningrad in 1947, Zhdanov spoke of the satirist
Zoshchenko’s work as ‘the venom of bestial enmity toward the Soviet
order . . . only the scum of the literary world could write such “works”,
and only the blind, the apolitical could allow them to appear.’12 As for
Zoshchenko himself, ‘Let him change; and if he will not, let him get out
of Soviet literature.’
M. Djilas has recalled his personal impressions of Zhdanov at this
time. ‘He was well-educated and was regarded in the Politburo as a great
intellectual. . . I would not say that there was a single field that he knew
thoroughly___He was also a cynic, in an intellectual w ay. . . I remember
how that evening Zhdanov told as if it were the latest joke how his
criticism of the satirist Zoshchenko had been taken in Leningrad: they
simply confiscated Zoshchenko’s ration coupons and did not give them
back until after Moscow’s magnanimous intervention.’3
Zhdanovism seemed to suit well the French Party in its bitter, post-
Republican unity mood of 1947-48. Gone were the gentle persuasiveness,
the liberal professions of the ’thirties. In 1947, Thorez told the Party
Congress at Strasbourg: ‘To decadent works of bourgeois aesthetes,
partisans of art for art’s sake, to the pessimism without solution and the
retrograde obscurantism of the existentialist “philosophers” . . . we have
opposed an art which should be inspired by socialist realism . . . an art
which would aid the working class in its struggle for liberation.’45
Laurent Casanova, the French ‘commissar for culture’, was quick to
castigate ‘certain comrades’ who wished to abandon the rules announced
by Fadeyev and Zhdanov on the ground that they could not be applied in
France. This was dangerous nonsense. There could be no deviation from
Zhdanov’s ‘lucid analysis* of the writer’s duties which did not entail a
political attack on the Party.6 In the ensuing years the Party leaders
exerted every pressure to universalize the flat style perfected by Stil in
literature and André Fougeron in painting. A speech made by Auguste
Lecœur, a leading member of the Political Bureau, in 1951 consecrated
the triad of Fougeron-Stil-Aragon as the summit of intellectual attain­
ment. A year later virtually the whole Party leadership turned out for a
reception to mark the occasion of the award of a Stalin Prize to Stil.6

1. A. A. Zhdanov, On Literature, Music and Philosophy, London, 1950, p. 49.

2. Ibid., p. 20. Zhdanov's interventions in the fields o f philosophy and music were
no less violent. See A. W erth, Musical Uproar in Moscow, London, 1949.
3. M . D jilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 135.
4. Quoted in Le Monde, 24 A pril 1952.
5. L. Casanova, Responsabilités de VIntellectuel Communiste, pp. 23-4.
6. Including: D uelos, M arty, Frachon, Cachin, M onm ousseau, Tillon, G uyot,
Fajon, L ecœ ur, M ichaut, Casanova, W aldeck R ochet, Bonte, Cogniot, Servin,
G araudy and m any leading intellectuals. Humanité, 21 M arch 1952.

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From 1948 down till 1953 at least, the Party supervised the translation,
publication and acclaim for Zhdanov’s numerous and varied ex cathedra
pronouncements on matters cultural. Pierre Daix had no doubt that
Zhdanov's works contained the answers to all the essential questions on
the arts and sciences,1 while the Cahiers du Communisme credited the
Russian with a remarkable enrichment of Marxism-Leninism.123Roger
Garaudy entered upon an autocritique of his Sources françaises du
Socialisme scientifique in the light of an article by no less a person than
Zhdanov. Garaudy, like the Russian philosopher Alexandrov, at once
was made to realize that he had given too much credit to the contributions
of bourgeois philosophers of the past.89
The French Party, of course, had no state machinery at its disposal,
no means of withdrawing Sartre’s ration card or kicking him out of
French literature pending the magnanimous intervention of the rue de
Châteaudun,45and there would have been no means of effectively impos­
ing Zhdanovism on the whole body of communist intellectuals without
the enthusiastic support of the hard-line Stalinists. Elsa Triolet called
for a truly new art expressed in clear language and comprehensible to the
crowd, while Garaudy defined a good book as ‘a force, a tool or weapon,
to make the dreams of today become the reality of tomorrow.’6 André Stil
demanded an end to the idealist conception of a fragile, mysterious
artistic inspiration. Life appeared as a mass of contradictions and
difficulties; the task of the communist writer was to clear a path through
such contradictions in immediate political terms.6 In the same spirit,
Aragon defined socialist realism’s guiding principle as ‘Write the
Stalinist truth!’7 Eluard, too, had steeled himself to a voluntary accep­
tance of the overriding need for political utility in literature; Eluard who,
according to Edgar Morin, had remarked at the height of the Zhdanovist
period, ‘Without the Party, I should have no choice but to turn on the
gas.'8 In a poem entitled La Poésie doit avoir pour But la Vérité pratique,
he wrote:
Car vous marchez sans but sans savoir que les hommes
Ont besoin d'être unis d'espérer de lutter
Pour expliquer le monde et pour le transformer.•
Yet the persistency with which the Stalinist intellectuals pleaded,
explained and enforced their view could only reflect the extent of the
1. Humanité, 24 February 1950.
2. C.C., February 1950, p. 117.
3. L.N.C., A pril 1949.
4. Seat of the C entral Com mittee. L ater the rue Le M etier.
5. R . G araudy, Literature o f the Graveyard, p. 64.
6. A. Stil, ‘M ilitant et Ecrivain’, L.N.C., M ay 1952, pp. 18,24.
7. L. Aragon, Littératures soviétiques, p. 25.
8. E. M orin, Autocritique, p. 113.
9. P. E luard, Poèmes Politiques, p. 42.

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shock and resentment with which many Party intellectuals greeted the
importation of an alien dogma which seemed to deny the very principles
on which western artistic creation was based. Supported by Casanova,
Aragon led the assault on the rebels who had been scandalized by
what he called Zhdanov’s ’advanced, forceful* theses. Apparently more
in sorrow than in anger (although Aragon was never far from anger),
he could only wish that they had grasped the hand held out to them, a
hand which would have helped them to escape from their own contra­
dictions, enabling them to put a foot on the ladder of the new world,
a ladder built by the ‘persuasive and melodious’ engineers of singing
tomorrows.1 In an article, Jdanov et nous, published in September 1948,
Aragon characteristically supported his case with a blend of anecdotal
patriotism and sentimentality. He recalled how, at the 1934 Writers’
Congress at Moscow, Zhdanov had approached Aragon who was
standing alone at a reception while all attention was focused on Malraux,
and gave a toast, ‘To the French Communist Party! To France!* This,
said Aragon, ‘showed his understanding of our country.’123
‘We don’t impose a dogma,’ declared André Wurmser, defending
Zhdanovism, ‘we cry aloud a truth.’ Who, he asked, could reasonably
call the Party a ‘church’ simply because, like a football club, it needed
discipline and cohesion?8 Aragon, Daix, Stil, Courtade, Hervé, Guillevic,
Garaudy and Renaud de Jouvenel would doubtless have agreed. There
remained, however, a core of intellectuals who saw themselves neither as
well-drilled members of an équipe de football, nor as soldiers, for
Zhdanovism at its peak assumed some of the qualities of a military
psychosis, with all literary problems ultimately reduced to terms of
obedience and discipline.
That opposition was stiff few denied, despite the ostensible preservation
of unity. Casanova complained that the Party had had ‘a certain diffi­
culty’ in getting Zhdanov’s texts thoroughly assimilated, and added
menacingly that Thorez had noted the presence in the Party of young
intellectuals who, though sincere, were animated by a vague romanticism
and who showed resistance in the face of accepted doctrines.4 Clearly a
number of writers fell back on the compromise view that Zhdanovism
might be necessary in Russia, but not in France. In the spring of 1948
a meeting of communist intellectuals was held to hear a report on the
work of Jean Kanapa made by Robert Antelme who, with Morin and
Dionys Mascólo, was in the vanguard of the young opposition. According
to Morin’s account, Aragon came to Kanapa’s aid, wielding the argument
of authority, although the majority of interventions had favoured the

1. L.L .F ., 9 Septem ber 1948.

2. Ibid.
3. A . W urmser, Réponse à Jean Cassou9 p. 22.
4. L. Casanova, Le P arti Communiste, les Intellectuels et la Nation, pp. 16-19.

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opposition’s critique. After this there were no more plenary sessions of

intellectuals, only meetings of specialized groups whose carefully chosen
secretaries could be relied upon. But agitation and rebellion continued to
be fostered through private channels, until finally Claude Roy, Jean
Duvignaud, Pierre Käst, J.-F. Rolland, Mascólo, Morin and Antelme
(all of whom ultimately quit the Party) prepared a letter to Casanova,
supported by the signatures of Clara Malraux, Marguerite Duras, Edith
Thomas, Atlan, André Verdet, Louis Francis, Francis Ponge, Allix
Guillan, Muriel Pontremolli and Henry Thimonnier. Averting a crisis,
the Party quickly intervened, Etienne Fajon warning Roy that such a
letter of protest would be contrary to the statutes of the Party, which
insisted that the views of all militants be expressed through the normal
channels of cell, section, etc. The signatories shrank from a trial of
strength; Roy withdrew the letter and the opposition disintegrated into
smaller groups.1
Claude Roy’s position at this time was of the utmost interest, revealing
the conflicting emotions to which a loyal communist might fall prey in
such a situation. Answering in a frank manner questions put to him
by Esprit, he confessed that he disagreed with the tone of a good many
contemporary communist articles, although this had not undermined his
confidence in Marxism. When Gerassimov (one of the most praised
Russian socialist realist painters) attacked the work of Picasso or Matisse,
or when political officials (in this case Zhdanov again) reproved great
musicians like Prokofiev or Shostakovich for formalism, he, Roy,
could appreciate the difficulties of formulating a cultural policy for one
hundred and eighty million people who had awakened to culture at one
blow. The trouble was, Gerassimov appeared to Frenchmen a very bad
painter indeed.123
If Roy, contenting himself with the thought that what really mattered
was to open art up to the mass of consumers, remained loyal to the Party
for a further eight years, other intellectuals connected with the abortive
letter of protest found in Zhdanovism one aspect of the Stalinist complex
too many. Within the space of a year or two, Morin, Mascolo, Antelme,
Duvignaud, Ponge, Clara Malraux, Edith Thomas and Marguerite Duras
had left the Party. Edith Thomas complained that only a handful of
reliable intellectuals had been allowed to express themselves on socialist
realism and the Lysenko controversy in the Party organs, and that so-
called autocritiques meant, in practice, direct submission to a diktat.8
But in none of these cases was Zhdanovism the only, or even the primary
factor causing disaffection: it merely added to the strains created by the
trials, camps and executions. The communist intellectual acquires a
1. E. M orin, op. cit., pp. 95-6.
Z ‘Y-a-t-il une Scolastique Marxiste?*, Esprit, M ay-June 1948, pp. 750-3.
3. Combat, 16 Decem ber 1949.

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certain suspicion of himself and of his personal interests as an intellectual;

to succumb to self-interest, to put cultural considerations above others,
he sees as a reversion to his petit-bourgeois original sin. Having placed
himself at the service of another class (the proletariat) in the first instance
of joining, he is inclined, when the complex of tensions become un­
bearable, to rebel, or to believe he is rebelling, on behalf of some other
persons, social groups or ethnic communities.
The intellectual, once withdrawn, is inclined to search for deeper causes
of degeneration, to regard the hectoring of commissar-types as merely
symptomatic of a more fundamental error in doctrine and perspective.
Whereas earlier socialist theories of literature were based on the idea
of direct contact between the revolutionary consciousness of the writer
and the activities of the toiling masses, socialist realism, as developed
since 1932, explicitly assigned to the Party the rôle of intermediary, of
interpreter both of the needs and aims of the masses and of the correct
response of the writer. The fourth principle of utility mutilated the second
and fifth; creative writing was reduced to the level of thinly fictionalized
journalism. Consequently Zhdanovism - extreme and relentless Party
interference - could be seen as an inherent potentiality of socialist
realism, one might almost say an inevitable one. Not surprisingly, there­
fore, writers who, despite their defection, remained loyal to the ideal of
communism and to the cause of the workers, began to revise their
conceptions of the possible rôle of the intellectual with regard to the
revolutionary movement. Dionys Mascólo came to the conclusion that
the adherence of the intellectual could not and ought not to bear the
same meaning as the adherence of the worker. The proletariat was a
means to itself; it could only liberate itself by suppressing itself. But the
intellectual, by his very nature, was not so adaptable. If he tried to be,
he became a parasite, a juggler, a clown. ‘The artist as a man of action,’
wrote Mascolo, ‘can only be a false artist and a false man of action.’1
His ultimate conclusion, despite the paradox, was less absurd than it
might at first sight appear. ‘There is no communist intellectual. But there
can be no possible non-communist intellectual. It falls to each one to
try and sort out this contradiction by his own means.’2
This, of course, was the problem to which Sartre had devoted so much
thought.
The French communists retreated from the advanced Zhdanovist
position slowly and reluctantly, in the climate of uncertainty which
prevailed between the first ‘thaw’ after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s
denunciation in 1956. An account of the second Soviet Writers’ Congress
in 1954 written by Léon Robel illustrates this dilemma. It was at this
Congress that Sholokov spoke of ‘the dreary torrent of colourless,
1. D . M ascolo, L e Communisme, p. 549.
2. Ibid., p. 550.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

mediocre literature which in recent years has been gushing from the
pages of the journals and flooding our book market’,1 and it was also at
this Congress that Fadeyev reasserted orthodoxy to the point of
declaring that Soviet writers ‘naturally acknowledge the guiding rôle of
the Party in literary affairs’. Caught between such contradictions, and
faced with a possible liberal resurgence, Robel fell back on a distinction
between Party guidance and Party control. Displaying a defensive
sensitivity to the charge of Party control, he even went to the extent of
quoting the 1925 Central Committee resolution that ‘no group, school or
literary movement can or ought to act in the name of the Party’, as proof
that the legend of brutal Party interference was a myth.2 Thus the whole
Stalinist period vanished in a sentence. The French Party, however, and
its official scribes had changed their ways only imperceptibly, if at all.
It was in the following year, 1955, that Aragon defined socialist realism
as ‘Write the Stalinist truth!’
We have dealt so far with a theory and with the imposition of that theory.
But what, in terms of creative production, did Zhdanovism yield down
to 1956? There is no denying that the quantitative, if not the qualitative,
aspect of the balance sheet was impressive. In June 1949, Pierre Daix
could point to the publication within a few months of Courtade’s
Elseneur, Stil’s Le mot Mineur, camarades, Wurmser’s Interdiction de
Séjour and the first volume of Aragon’s Les Communistes. The orthodoxy
of the works of Courtade, Daix, Stil, Pierre Gamarra, Paul Tillard and
Jean Laffitte was acknowledged and rewarded by translations into Russian
and the languages of eastern Europe, and it was the same authors whose
stories and articles were most heavily patronized by the Party’s literary
journal. Les Lettres Françaises.3
Aragon’s principal contribution was Les Communistes (the climax to
Le Monde Réel series), a six-volume novel peopled by more than two
hundred characters and taking as its theme the decadence of bourgeois
France and the heroic struggle of individual communists during the
Phoney War period. Roger Garaudy has written that in this novel each
hero reacts to events according to the impulses of his heart, and that if
each of these reactions finally coincides with the Party’s directives, it is
an experimental confirmation of the humanity of its policy and of the
fact that there can be no discord between the morality of the private
individual and the morality of his class.4
1. H . Swayze, op. cit., p. 110.
2. L. Robel, 'L ittérature et politique en U .R.S.S.’, La Pensée, M ay-June, 1955, p. 74.
3. Com munist fiction was published m ainly by Les Editeurs Français Réunis.
Leading novelists on their list included: Jean Laffitte, Pierre G am arra, Pierre C ourtade,
Denise M oran, Jean Sabartes, C lara M alraux, René Blech, Paul T illard, Jean Viollis,
René Jouglet, Jean M arcenac, Pierre Daix, Elsa T riolet, Jean-Pierre C habrol, Simone
Téry, Pierre A braham , André W urmser.
4. R. G araudy, V Itinéraire <TAragon, p. 422.

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The quality of the comment is an apt reflection of the quality of the

novel. But Les Communistes is not really a novel: it is a panoramic tract
giving the effect of an aggregate of newspaper reports and editorials
copied out on a Chinese scroll, an unreadable anniversary gift to the
already converted. Here, as in the earlier novels of the series, Aragon
shows himself more at ease with the upper classes in the posture of
violent critic than with the workers in the rôle of animator. Many of his
Party militants serve as officers, not as private soldiers. The author is
nowhere more at home than in depicting the conferences of Churchill,
Reynaud and Weygand, the fixing of a deal by bankers, or the incom­
petence of French generals during the military collapse of France. Despite
the passionate retrospective defence of the Party line, the constant
references to Thorez and the existence of a few positive heroes striving for
air in the midst of an interminable text, Les Communistes emerges as
half-hearted socialist realism.
Perhaps for this reason it was Stil, not Aragon, who received the Stalin
Prize. Le Premier Choc, which appeared in three volumes,1 took as its
theme the struggle of dockers in an Atlantic seaport against the American
‘occupation’. The immediate relevance to the Party line is everywhere
clear. The Americans rape, dispossess peasants and small owners of their
fields and houses, produce unemployment, incorporate ex-Nazis into
their forces and stock France with arms in preparation for a war against
the U.S.S.R., all with the support and connivance of the French upper
classes and their hired agents, the police.
Artistically, the first volume was the most effective. Stil knew his
dockers and their language. His detailed and compassionate accounts of
unemployment, poverty and suffering ring true. Certain scenes remain in
the mind: Lucien and Georgette, humiliated by poverty, sending their
twelve-year-old daughter to Paris where a schoolteacher had offered to
take care of her. They watch the girl go while the whole street looks on
in sympathy. The father, ashamed, weeps.
In the docker Henri and his wife Paulette, Stil achieves the prototype
of the positive hero and heroine. Both are communists. Henri is proud
yet humble, scornful yet loving, intelligent yet practical and shrewd.
He is for ever asking questions; he has an instinctive dialectical sense.
Secretary of the ‘Dimitrov’ cell and a member of the section bureau, he
is rarely behind on his reading of the Cahiers, France Nouvelle and, of
course, ‘/*Huma9. The temper of Party life among the dockers is interest­
ingly, if calculatingly, depicted. At a section meeting an argument takes
place, private jealousies are exposed. A docker complains that they are
obsessed by foreign affairs, that meetings have come to resemble
geography classes instead of dealing with the ‘dog’s life’ they have to lead

1. Au Château d'eau (1951), Le Coup du Canon (1952), Paris Avec Nous (1953).

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

at home. The inter-connection and interdependence of domestic and

foreign affairs is then patiently explained to him.
In the second and third volumes, however, a marked artistic and literary
deterioration is evident. The author surrenders himself to an interminable
fare of naked political argument. Despite vivid descriptions of passages
of the class struggle and of the violent clashes between dockers and the
riot police (the C.R.S.), the journalist in Stil clearly asserts himself over
the novelist. The fifth principle of utility, vindicated in the first volume,
is abandoned for the fourth principle.
A thorough examination of the artistic potential of socialist realism is
beyond the scope of this study. But a few remarks may be in order. The
novelist in the communist country has generally been compelled to
encourage admiration for the state, fidelity, even conformity. The non­
socialist country, on the other hand, encourages the novel of protest,
the nonconformist spirit, the mood of rebellion. The communist writer
ought, in theory, to be able to avoid the rôle of court jester and to draw
on the critical spirit which is inseparable from true art. Yet all too often
this opportunity is lost. The Soviet state, Stalin, loom as ideals on the
horizon; more immediately, the French Party is introduced as the
omniscient benefactor, the guide to be followed at all times; its Cahiers
are the Bible. Far from enjoying his freedom, the writer eagerly hunts
down and embraces conformism.
Communist writers, however, are in search of praxis. Conformity,
if not conformism, may prove the indispensable prerequisite of action on
a collective scale. The historically proffered alternative has been the novel
of ideas, novels in which actions take place in a spirit of experimentation,
as attempts to resolve the ideological problems torturing the isolated
individual conscience. If there is some truth in Marcel Aymé’s claim, that
‘communism itself, for our bourgeoisie, is only a literary climate in which
disappear the most threatening and most immediate realities*, if the
workers appear only as an allegorical force, a symbol, with the dictator­
ship of the proletariat assuming the guise of a remote Wagnerian
holocaust of which everyone approves in principle, assured of its
remoteness,1 then the left-wing novelists have helped to bring such a
situation about. But any such illusions would be quickly dispelled by Le
Premier Choc. Stil’s dockers were real, and the threat they posed was real.
The critical violence and denigration which greeted his novel was moti­
vated by more than aesthetic considerations. Behind the novel lay the
discomforting fact that the Communist Party was far and away the most
popular among the workers of France.12 Their collective action was

1. M. Aymé, Le Confort Intellectuel, p. 74.

2. In the 1951 elections, 47*8 per cent o f French workers voted com m unist. The
R .P.F ., in second place, gained only 15*9 per cent o f workers’ votes. M. Duverger
(ed.), Partis Politiques et Classes Sociales en France, p. 33.

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generally communist collective action; their potential for revolution,

however remote a contingency it might be, remained a communist
potential. Sartre was quick to understand the gravity of the problem this
posed for the Marxist writer. Ultimately, much depended on one’s
conception of literature, whether it be an end in itself or only a means to
an end. And if so, what end? It was in a climate of urgency and class
struggle that so many communist writers made the mistake of permitting
journalistic propaganda to intrude on the Marxist content and the
artistic form of their work, thus sacrificing respect among the educated
community in the effort to carry by every means the Party line to the
workers, and to raise their general political consciousness. Put in other
words, the second, and most important, principle of utility was violated
by the fourth in the supposed interests of the fifth.

335
 C H A P T E R F IV E

Politics and Painting

A h i g h l y developed programme for guiding and controlling a school

of socialist realist painting was first evolved by the Party after the
Liberation. The beaux-arts now came into their own as a political weapon.
If the communist ethic could be conveyed to the intelligentsia and to the
workers by way of a Marxist aesthetic, then the visual arts, no less than
other media, could serve the second and fifth principles of utility. Before
the war, on the other hand, communist activity among artists was
conducted primarily with an eye to the prestige of, say, a Paul Signac
(first principle), or to the possibilities of general agitation through front
organizations (third principle).
At the time of the Popular Front, an academy of painting, design
and sculpture was founded under the aegis of the Union des Syndicats
of the Seine, with courses directed by Frans Masereel.1 The Maisons de
la Culture listed among their members artists such as Masereel, Georg,
Gromaire, Léger, Lhote, Lipchitz and J. Lurçat,12 while the Maisons*
Association of Painters and Sculptors played an active part in organizing
assistance for Republican Spain.3 Later, the Union des Arts Plastiques,
founded during the Resistance and under firm communist control,
served both as a trade union for artists and as an organ for disseminating
the Party line on art. Frequent and well-attended meetings and debates
were arranged by the Union on predictably orientated themes such as
‘For whom do you paint?’45
After the Liberation, the Party lost no time in launching a campaign
for a socialist art. Garaudy complained to the Tenth National Congress
in 1945 that the Party’s painters still painted for snobs and decadents;
they need not feel obliged to portray Thorez or a barricade, but they must
learn to express the passions of the people.6 In 1947, Thorez himself, in

1. M. Thorez, La M ission de la France dans le Monde, p. 34.

2. Humanité, 22 January 1937.
3. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, /, p. 90.
4. Humanité, 17 February 1949.
5. R . G araudy, Les Intellectuels et la Renaissance Française, p. 5.

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calling for an art which would aid the working class in its struggles,
denounced ‘the formalism of the painters for whom art begins where the
picture has no content*.1 Addressing the Twelfth Congress in 1950, he
again denounced obscurantism, formalism and pessimism in painting.8
The previous year, Casanova had equated criticism of the work of André
Fougeron, officially the leading socialist realist painter, with a direct
political attack on the Party. Sanctions were imposed on several offending
intellectuals.8
The work of the ‘new realists’, so the official theory ran, was not only
socialist but deeply French, restoring the epic character of the early
nineteenth-century artists Delacroix, David and Chassériaux. Modem
socialist art evidently clashed with the values of bourgeois society just
as ‘the battle for classicism during the Revolution, led by David, had
clashed with aristocratic, court art’.4 Whatever the merits of such a
theory, there is no doubt that the new style, first developed by pioneers
such as Fougeron, Amblard and Taslitzky, made rapid headway, its
standards ranging from the excellent to the grotesque. It was, of course,
intensely, obsessively political. A deliberately limited number of motifs
were repeatedly exploited. A recurring image, for example, was that of a
worker either dead, mutilated or exhausted, lying prostrate while his wife
wept on his breast, their children clinging anxiously to her skirts and the
worker’s comrades standing behind in static, classical postures. And,
being political, it was also an art which seized on the topical element;
there was scarcely a communist painter worth his name who did not
find occasion for a portrait in the sailor Henri Martin’s stand against
the war in Indo-China.
The central development of socialist realist painting in France was
clearly reflected in the annual Salon d*Automne exhibitions which the
Party leaders invariably attended and to which the Union Nationale des
Intellectuels arranged collective visits, with one of the exhibited painters
in attendance. At the 1944 Salon it was Picasso, Pignon and Fougeron
who stole the limelight. In 1948, the communist art critic Jean Marcenac
drew particular attention to the sculpture of Marcel Gimond and to
Fougeron’s picture Parisiennes au Marché, which depicted a group of
expressionless working women looking at fish on a stall while the fish
glassily stared back.5 The 1949 exhibition included work by Amblard and
Zambaux, as well as Fougeron’s U Hommage à Houllier, another picture
remarkable for its immobility, representing the death of a miner.6 In
1951, there were portraits of Henri Martin by Picasso, Julien Sorel and
1. Le M onde, 24 April 1952.
2. J. D uelos, ‘Le Parti et les intellectuels’, L .N .C ., July-A ugust 1954, p. 7.
3. L. Casanova, Responsabilités de Vlntellectuel Communiste, p. 29.
4. Daily Worker, 14 Novem ber 1951.
5. L .Z .F., 23 Septem ber 1948.
6. LJj.F.y 29 Septem ber 1949.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

others, besides Pierre Dupont’s La M ort de Vouvrier, in the style and mood
of Fougeron.
It was on this occasion that socialist realist painting proved its worth
as a weapon in the class war, if only with relevance to content, and not to
form. On the eve of President AurioFs visit to the exhibition, seven
paintings by communist artists were removed by the police, at the request
of the Secretary of State for the Fine Arts, M. Cornu, and with the
approval of the Minister of Education and the Prefect of Police. The
paintings involved were: Le défilé au Premier M ai, by Marie-Anne
Lansiaux; Maurice Thorez va bien, by Jean Milhau, showing happy
buyers of VHumanité-Dimanche grouped around a vendor, with
Thorez, at that time convalescing, portrayed on the front page of the
paper; Henri Martin, by Julien Sorel; Riposte, by Boris Taslitzky, showing
strikers on the quays of Marseilles fighting off police dogs; Le 14 février
1950 à Nice. by Gérard Singer, in which a huge case containing part
of a V-2 rocket was being heaved over the dockside at Nice by angry
workers; M anifestation, by Ordavazt Berberian, an extremely hostile
representation of the Paris police; and Les Dockers, by Georges Bauquier,
showing a docker addressing his comrades under the slogan ‘No
departures for Indo-China’.1
Protests followed, from Cogniot and other communist deputies in the
Chamber, and from the Party’s leading artists. On the Saturday, five
of the offending seven were returned, but three of these were again
removed. The two which the authorities ultimately found themselves
unable to tolerate were those by Singer and Berberian, the attacks on the
Atlantic Alliance and the Paris police.123Incidents such as this, and the
arrest of André Stil in 1952, did a good deal to rescue the Party from its
isolation vis-à-vis the left-wing intellectuals.
The painters bent their energies not only to the political themes
proclaimed most urgent by the Party, but also to the regular task of
furthering the cult of personality in plastic terms. Having protested in
1945 that portraits of Thorez were not required of communist painters,
Garaudy proceeded to rejoice that portraits of Thorez, Duelos and
Cachin by Picasso, Pignon and Fougeron were under active preparation.
In subsequent years Fougeron not only painted Thorez several times, but
even Thorez’s mother, a character perhaps harder to introduce plausibly
into literature. Duelos’ arrest in 1952 inspired a drawing by Pignon as well
as a painting by Vénitien so unflattering as to amount almost to sabotage,
Jacques Duelos à la Tribune, showing a white-faced, aggressive Duelos
thrusting forward a rigid, puppet-like arm.8 In April 1953, the sculptor
Damiano displayed a bust of Thorez, and the Lyons sculptor Georges
1. Humanité, 7 Novem ber 1951, Le M onde, 8 Novem ber 1951.
2. Manchester Guardian, 14 Novem ber 1951.
3. L.L.F ., 28 O ctober 1952.

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 PO LITICS AND P A IN T IN G

Salendre, who had done a head of Barbusse in 1936, produced a number

of busts of Party leaders in these years. In May 1953, the Party sponsored
an exhibition ‘from Marx to Stalin’ at the Maison des Métallurgistes in
which artists like Karl Longuet, Mercier, Gimond and Françoise Salmon
ardently elaborated the cult of personality. Boris Taslitzky showed
Thorez in conversation with Stalin; Stalin was making the point.1
In the course of time the majority of the members of the Political Bureau
visited the exhibition to inspect their own portraits, the main charac­
teristics of which, if one can generalize, was a certain archaic morbidity.
At the 1952 Salon, for instance, Fougeron had displayed a picture of
Cachin being honoured by flower-laden children; executed on an oval
canvas, it resembled an enlarged photograph from a nineteenth-century
family album.
Within the Party a certain amount of carefully limited discussion and
even dissent was permitted on the applicability of socialist realist doctrine
to a r t André Wurmser, a rock of orthodoxy as always, challenged
Francis Jourdain’s contention that a work of art should be judged less
by its content than by its formal quality of beauty. Jourdain quoted the
case of Paul Signac, a communist, and of the communard artist Gustave
Courbet who did not allow his revolutionary sentiments to infringe upon
his art. Wurmser answered that Courbet was a communard and not a
communist. René Maublanc intervened in this rather elementary dis­
cussion to stress the importance of the audience factor; progressive
artists could only survive with the patronage of progressive publics.12 In
this context one should add that the Party made every possible adminis­
trative effort to introduce the work of its artists to a working-class
audience, taking exhibitions to industrial suburbs and, on occasion,
into the factories themselves, and subsidizing cheap bus excursions to
the Salons d’Automne. The C.G.T. and local communist-controlled trade
union federations also played a rôle in this work of distribution and
education, as well as in patronizing by commission leading painters like
Fougeron. But whether or not the enthusiastic responses among the
working classes claimed by the Party were real is hard to gauge.
Inevitably, the tensions generated by the Zhdanovist policy in literature
were duplicated in the sphere of art. If many intellectuals were able to
come to terms with the new French classicism, communist painters like
Pignon and Léger made it clear that they could not accept as art the work
of the Gerassimov school in Russia. In 1952, a long-awaited crisis was
set off by a series of articles in which Aragon praised Soviet sculpture,
including neo-classical enormities like Topuridze’s Victory. Aragon

1. O ther artists exhibited included: Bauquier, R ival, Chevalier, G il, M ittelberg, Roc,
W eill, M ireille M iailhe, M adeleine G uiberteau, O dette Elina. Humanité, 14 May 1953.
2. R . M aublanc, ‘Les Devoirs des Peintres progressistes’, La Pensée, July-A ugust
1951, pp. 137-9.
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 INTELLECTUALS and the in t e l l e c t

singled out for his special admiration the most extreme examples of a
style, group compositions and collective efforts like We Demand Peace,
which won a Stalin Prize in 1951, and the painting Sitting o f the Presidium
o f the Academy o f Sciences o f the U .S.S.R., by the ‘Gritsai Brigade*.1
Aragon complained of opposition and Casanova summoned a meeting
of communist painters and sculptors in April. According to one source,
‘about two-thirds of France’s 200 communist painters and sculptors’
were absent, including Picasso and Léger.’123On this occasion few converts
were made and VHumanité's report spoke discreetly of a fraternal
discussion which ‘allows us to hope for new successes in the domain of
art’.8 The meeting's final resolution in fact substituted a condemnation
of bacteriological warfare in Korea for any specific endorsement of
Soviet art.45
The possible range of individual responses to the aesthetic and profes­
sional problems raised by a Party-guided and utilitarian theory of art
is illustrated by the cases of six painters of repute, Fougeron, Taslitzky,
Pignon, Léger, Picasso and Signac, all communists. Listed in that order,
their work represents a descending scale of political consciousness, from
the totally committed and orthodox (Fougeron) to the generally apoli­
tical and personal (Signac).
André Fougeron’s family and background were thoroughly pro­
letarian.6 Increasingly exhibited by the Maisons de la Culture in the
years 1936-39, he joined the Party in the latter year, although his full
development as a socialist realist had to await the Party’s whole-hearted
intervention in the field of art, after the war. In 1946, Fougeron held
his first personal exhibition, and won the Prix National. If we are to
accept his own testimony, it was Casanova’s speech at the Eleventh Party
Congress in 1947 which precipitated in him a crisis of conscience and a
new conception of pictorial problems. The search for a genuinely popular
style resulted in the frozen postures of his highly lauded Les Parisiennes
au Marché (1948) and La Matinée du 1er M ai (1949). Encouraged and
elevated, he began to theorize in print, urging younger painters to
emulate the new orthodoxy,6 and in February 1949 Casanova went out
of his way to impress upon intellectuals that an attack on Fougeron was
an attack on the Party. Fougeron, endorsing Casanova’s strictures
against certain artists,7 evidently relished a ‘hard-line’ position.
1. Sec L .L.F ., January, February 1952.
2. Daily Telegraph, 25 A pril 1952.
3. Quoted in the M anchester Guardian, 26 A pril 1952.
4. Le Monde, 26 A pril 1952.
5. Bom 1913. H is father was a m ason. He worked as a m etallurgist a t R enault and
Rosengart.
6. A. Fougeron, ‘Le Peintre à son Creneau*, L .N .C ., Decem ber 1948, pp. 96-8.
7. A. Fougeron, ‘Le Rôle du “Sujet” dans la Peinture*, La Pensée, July-A ugust 1949,
p. 71.

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In the spring of 1950, the Syndicat des Mineurs du Nord et du Pas-de-

Calais extended to him an invitation; he settled at Lens and began to
p a in t The resulting œuvre, exhibited in January 1951 under the title Le
Pays des Mines, marked the peak of Fougeron’s personal development,
vindicating in both aesthetic and moral terms the potentialities of a fully
committed art. Among the more distinguished works of this collection
(all of which were remarkable for their sensitivity to local colour) was
Le Pensionné, showing a retired miner sitting alone in a small room, his
strength long since surrendered to the coal owners. He is prematurely
aged and under-weight, and his mantlepiece bears small portraits of
Thorez and Duelos. In Terres Cruelles, miners mourn a dead comrade
following an accident; the dead man’s eyes are fixed and glassy with
hatred. Notable for its use of colour and sense of movement was Défense
Nationale, in which miners and their wives battle with police and their
dogs. In La Trieuse, a young girl with the face of a Florentine virgin
stands calm and courageous before her grim existence in the black
country. Best of all, perhaps, was Le Retour, in which the impressionist
legacy intrudes on the ‘new classicism’, portraying a group of miners,
bowed and resigned, moving across the red earth to a distant colliery
under a lowering grey sky.
In December 1952, Fougeron exhibited a series of paintings taking as
their theme the life of peasants of the Loire countryside and the defence
of the national soil. Here again the immediate inspiration of the Party
line was evident. Areas of small peasant proprietors had, since the war,
provided a high proportion of new Party members. Approximately 30 per
cent of the total membership was comprised of peasants,1 a class
particularly responsive to propaganda against foreign (American or
German) incursions on to French soil. Yet peasant themes continued
to occupy only a minor and incidental place in communist painting, as
in communist literature. For one thing, the peasant was not an avid
patron of the arts; for another, the proletarian orientation died hard
among intellectuals anxious to divest themselves of all ‘petit-bourgeois’
traits.
In the early ’fifties, the work of Fougeron and the orthodox school ran
into increasingly heavy criticism within the Party, forcing a theoretical
retreat and the renaming of the style as ‘new French realism’, evidently
only a provisional ‘guide-post* to full socialist realism. The interventions
of Auguste Lecœur in aesthetic questions and his subsequent political
disgrace caused further turmoil. When Fougeron displayed his Civilisa­
tion Atlantique at the 1953 Salon, Aragon accused him o f ‘coarse painting,
hasty, scornful’ of those whom he painted. Fougeron, conceding that
he had made mistakes, rejected these charges.2 Cultural controversies
1. M. Duverger (ed.). Partis Politiques et Classes Sociales en France, p. 182.
2. A. Fougeron, ‘Sur la Peinture*, L .N .C ., May 1954, pp. 177-81,

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at this period were taking on increasingly intricate and personal overtones

not unconnected with the rise and fall of certain political leaders.
More spontaneous and less doctrinaire was the impression created
by the work of Boris Taslitzky. Arrested in 1941 by the Germans and
deported to Buchenwald, his paintings on themes of Resistance and
deportation won him the Prix Blumenthal in 1946. A student at the
Beaux-Arts, Taslitzky’s first political painting had been inspired by an
incident in 1934 when a policeman killed a fifteen-year-old communist,
Henri Villemin, and was subsequently acquitted.1 In 1949 he wrote:
‘For me, realism is the sum of three conditions: the content of the work,
the love of the content, technique used to express this content, these three
being raised to the ideological level of the working class, which rises
ceaselessly.’123One of the best displays of communist painting and drawing
was the Algérie 1952 exhibition, in which Taslitzky collaborated with
Mireille Miailhe, whose conversion to communism had been a com­
paratively recent one, and whose first political painting, La réunion de
cellule, was shown at the 1951 Salon. Taslitzky’s name was for a long
time coupled with that of Fougeron as the twin masters to be emulated,
and his painting Les Délégués, shown at the 1948 Salon, was officially
pronounced a key work in its influence over younger painters. Although
he laboured ceaselessly and ardently on Party themes, with portraits of
Danielle Casanova, Henri Martin and numerous political leaders, his
draughtsmanship never lost a certain freshness and spontaneity which
distinguished it from Fougeron’s more ponderous classicism.
Standing in the centre of the spectrum, finding a middle path between
the orthodox and the apolitical, were two artists who managed, in widely
differing ways, to evolve a style which was socialist in content and
intention, but individualistic in form: Edouard Pignon and Fernand
Léger. Pignon, like Fougeron, came from a working-class home.8 A
northerner, his distinctly rationalist and revolutionary temperament was
always apparent. Marxists claimed that he, like his friend Picasso, saw
shapes, contours and colours at a profound level of ‘objective reality’.
In 1939, Georges Besson, art critic of VHumanité, remarked that the
public could not be expected immediately to penetrate Pignon’s new
style which, in leaving behind Cézanne-like construction and cubist
geometry, was moving not toward abstractionism but into the realm of
‘a new, constructive lyricism, realist and human’.4 In 1946, Pierre

1. Humanité, 3 January 1953.

2. Humanité, 6 O ctober, 1949.
3. Bom 1905, at Bully, Pas-de-Calais. The son o f a m iner, Pignon worked in the
mines. From 1925 until 1927 he was in the air force. Subsequently he worked at
C itroën, while attending evening classes. U ntil 1934 he followed a num ber o f trades.
In 1934 he came into contact with Léger, M asereel and Adam through the M aison.
In 1940 he joined the Resistance, and later the Party.
4. E. Pignon Documents, Geneva, 1955, p. 11.

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 PO LITICS AND PA IN T IN G

Descargues described Pignon as ‘the best of this new school’,1 while Henri
Lefebvre wrote enthusiastically of his political convictions and of his
attempt ‘to transform experience dialectically’.12 But his interpretations
both of miners of the North and of peasant life (as in Les Paysans de
Sanary) remained highly personal in style and, content apart, not readily
identifiable as communist art. Pignon was known to be in revolt against
the Gerassimov school of Soviet painting and the attempts of Casanova
and Aragon to popularize it in France, and in 1956 he, with Picasso,
spoke up against the Soviet intervention in Hungary, although not
carrying his rebellion to the point of rupture.
The political development of Feraard Léger3 can, in the main, be
traced in terms of profound rather than immediate causes, although it
was the First World War and his experiences in the trenches which
changed his attitude toward workers and peasants and which fostered
his interest first in machines and later in factory life. In 1935, he hailed
the formation of the Popular Front, joining the Maison the following
year. Not long after, he sent a telegram from America to his friend
J.-R. Bloch signifying his adherence to the Party.4
Léger in later years produced a number of directly political paintings
such as his fresco for the International Democratic Federation of Women,
his portrait of Henri Martin and his work of homage to the Rosenbergs.
He was a delegate to the Wroclaw Peace Congress in 1948, and his
exhibitions were well attended by Party leaders,56 his death in 1955
occasioning a proclamation by the Central Committee. But his evolution
was not determined by immediate political events and his eccentricities,
his habit of bending figures to the necessity of his composition, marked
him down as a possible source of corruption, sometimes muting official
praise to the point of silence.
In 1938, Léger volunteered a coherent credo which can be safely taken
as the basis of his philosophy in later years. He realized that collective
forces were on the march and that the individual ought to realign himself
accordingly. But, he insisted, in the marvellous sphere of creativity,
where genius was individual, it was vital to leave open a free road for
artists, a road leading to the work of art above social and economic
battles. ‘The work of art ought not to participate in the battle, it ought
to be, on the contrary, a repose after the combat of your daily struggles.’8

1. Ibid., p. 13.
2. H . Lefebvre, Pignon, Paris, 1956, p. 54.
3. Léger (1881-1955) m oved to Paris in 1898 from N orm andy. H is first works,
dating from 1905, were strongly influenced by Cézanne.
4. G . Bauquier, ‘Fernand Léger Peintre*, L .N .C ., Septem ber-O ctober 1955, p. 134.
5. H is Í954 exhibition a t the M aison de la Pensée Française, for exam ple, was
attended by D uelos, Billoux, Casanova, W aldeck Rochet and other leaders. Humanité,
10 Novem ber 1954.
6. F. Léger, ‘C ouleur dans le Monde*, Europe, 15 M ay 1938, p. 112.

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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

In essence, Léger’s revolt against capitalist society and his decision

to join the Party sprang from his growing awareness that art was a
minority privilege, enjoyed by the leisured classes alone. Once liberated,
he believed, the masses would develop a sensibility for modem art, since
the people was a natural poet, perpetually inventing verbal and poetic
images around modem objects which it admired, such as cars, planes,
machines. Yet the non-representational painter could not be grasped by
the masses in the foreseeable future; here was the dilemma. The struggle,
he concluded, must begin in the primary schools, with education, and
this in turn would require a profound change in the social system.1
Léger had been prompted to these reflections by personal experiences.
In 1936-37, he had spoken on aesthetics to workers’ and peasants’
centres and had been accused of working for the rich. This stung. And
yet, never a true Marxist, he could not accept the view, as Gide could not,
that real cultural values sprang essentially from the working class. Léger
was one of those who turned to communism in his anxiety to elevate the
working class rather than to submit to its values. After the Liberation he
pressed ever more insistently that the doors of education, galleries and
museums be opened to the workers.123Henceforward he regarded the
communists as the guardians of civilization, the only group showing a
genuine desire to donate the great cultural legacy to the masses.8 He was
always happiest when in direct contact with factory workers, as when, in
1953, he exhibited and explained his pictures on the theme of Les
Constructeurs at the Renault works.
Picasso, bom in the same year (1881) as Léger, likewise had little time
for socialist realist theory. He shared Léger’s view that the artist under­
stands and evolves the laws of his art and that the primary task was to
bring the workers to accept them through education.45But his attitude
toward politics and theory was less intellectual than Léger’s; he was more
susceptible to immediate political emotions. The rise of fascism, the
Spanish Civil War and the bombing of Guernica awakened in him the
desire to speak out on certain public issues. ‘The Spanish struggle,* he
said in 1937, ‘is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom*/
and he spoke of his ‘abhorrence of the military caste’.6 In October 1944,
interviewed by Pol Gaillard, he explained his position:
‘My adherence to the Communist Party is the logical outcome of my
whole life. For I am glad to say that I have never considered painting

1. Ibid., p. 106.
2. F. Léger, La Forme Humaine dans VEspèce, M ontreal, 1945, p. 72.
3. See his pre-election declaration in VHumanité, 16 June 1951.
4. According to Ilya Ehrenburg, Fadeyev asked Picasso in 1948 why he chose form s
which people did not understand. Picasso asked whether he had been taught to read at
school. Fadeyev said he had. But, inquired Picasso, had he been taught to understand
painting? See M. Futrell in Time and Tide, 18 May 1961, p. 829.
5. R . Penrose, Picasso: H is Life and W ork, p. 283.

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 PO LITICS AND PA IN T IN G

simply as a pleasure-giving art, a distraction.. . . These years of terrible

oppression have proved to me that I should struggle not only for my art
but with my whole being. . . I was so anxious to find a homeland again,
I have always been an exile, and now I am one no longer; until Spain
can at last welcome me back, the French Communist Party has opened
its arms to me, I have found there all those whom I esteem the most,
the greatest scientists, the greatest poets and all those faces, so beautiful,
of the Parisians in arms which I saw during those days in August, I am
once more among my brothers.’1
Over a decade later, after the events of 1956 which drew from him a
single protest, he is reported as having explained to an American art
critic: ‘Look, I am no politician. I am not technically proficient in such
matters. But communism stands for certain ideals I believe in. I believe
communism is working toward the realization of those ideals.’123
L'Humanité announced Picasso’s adherence in banner headlines.
Duelos and Cachin personally welcomed him to the Party’s premises
in Paris. But Picasso’s function remained strictly limited to the first
principle of utility, despite his occasional attendance at meetings, his
peace dove and his rare political paintings like Massacre en Corée. The
benign silence which he maintained with regard to socialist realism and
his unrivalled influence over younger painters made of him something
of a thorn in the flesh; as a Party member his style could not so easily be
attacked, although Fadeyev and the Russians made no effort to conceal
their contempt. Some of the latent resentments and frustrations rose to
the surface following the appearance in Les Lettres Françaises of his
sketch of Stalin, in March 1953. Picasso’s conception, that of a youthful,
ardent and almost naïve Stalin, bore no resemblance to the benign
father-figure long since standardized by the Party. On March 19th
Aragon, as editor, published a communiqué of the Secretariat ‘categori­
cally condemning’ the portrait. Also under orders, Aragon began on
March 26th to print extracts from the letters of militants who expressed
horror and disgust. One of these came from Fougeron. ‘With other
painter comrades,’ he wrote, T know the difficulties we have in positioning
ourselves on the firm Party line for literature and art as defined by our
Secretary-General Maurice Thorez.* How, he asked angrily, could
comrades be expected to make the necessary effort in their art, if drawings
like Picasso’s were permitted publication? It merely amounted to an
encouragement to continue a sterile, aesthetic formalism.8
This letter was of the utmost significance. Picasso’s portrait could not
reasonably be termed ‘formalist’. Eyes, ears, nose were all in the
appropriate place. Indeed the drawing indicated a deep affection for

1. Q uoted ibid., p. 316.

2. Ibid., p. 364.
3. L L F ., 26 M arch 1953.
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 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

Stalin in whom the artist obviously discerned the eternal spirit of youth.
More important, Fougeron implicitly admitted the weak and precarious
hold which socialist realism had acquired among communist artists.
One drawing, if not repudiated, could open the floodgates. Later in the
year, when the Political Bureau decided that the Secretariat’s original
response had been ‘inopportune’, it began to appear as if a rewarding
liberalism had triumphed over an unrewarding orthodoxy. The Party
did not wish to create the impression that it proceeded on the basis of
orders, rather than relying on free commitment and individual convic­
tion.1 Soon after, the tables were further turned when Aragon launched
his attack on Fougeron’s recent work as ‘coarse, hasty, scornful*. How­
ever, when dog eats dog, the world is not necessarily made safe for cats.
At the extreme, apolitical end of the spectrum of painters stood the
first of the major artists to have joined the Party, Paul Signac, whose
serious work gave little or no indication of his political sympathies.
Aragon might argue that the lesson of the sea for Signac was that of
independence and liberty,2 but for whom is it not? Signac (1863-1935) had
been one of a group of Neo-Impressionists for whom the anarchist
movement had exercised a considerable attraction before the First World
War.8 His colleague Maximilien Luce, who collaborated in the papers
of the anarchists Jean Grave and Emile Pouget, helped to organize
lotteries for the benefit of anarchist workers and their families, while
Camille Pissarro twice generously paid off* the debts of Grave’s Temps
Nouveaux. The paintings of Signac, who had been a sympathizer since
1888 or earlier, revealed, like Pissarro’s, a nostalgia for peasant life and
the countryside, and a proportionate horror of the effects of industrializa­
tion. Occasionally he provided frankly propagandist work for Temps
Nouveaux, but he and the other Neo-Impressionists were at pains to
insist on the need for art for art’s sake. The subject, he said, did not really
matter: ‘justice en sociologie, harmonie en art: même chose'* The pictures
that Grave was offered for his paper were frankly didactic and journalis­
tic, and not intended as serious art. Such, for example, was Signac’s
watercolour. Collapse o f the State (c. 1905-8).
The First World War separated Signac politically from these old
colleagues. In August 1916, he wrote to Grave expressing sadness that he
had not protested against the war, despite the teachings of Reclus,
Kropotkin and other anarchist leaders. (Kropotkin, in fact, had supported
the Entente.) How, Signac wanted to know, could one distinguish
between good and bad wars?6 Maximilien Luce, on the other hand, wrote
1. F. Billoux, ‘Sur les Intellectuels’, L .N .C ., Decem ber 1953, p. 5.
2. Humanité, 5 M arch 1938.
3. See R. and E. H erbert, ’A rtists and Anarchism : unpublished Letters o f Pissarro,
Signac and others’, Burlington M agazine, Novem ber, Decem ber 1960.
4. Ibid., November 1960, p . 479.
5. Ibid., December 1960, p. 520.

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 PO LITICS AND PA IN T IN G

to Grave in the same year: *Je préfère Joffre à Von------ et autres

Allemands.’ Despite his continuing affection for Grave, Signac naturally
found in the Communist Party the embodiment of organized protest
against the war, although its doctrines were scarcely compatible with the
rural nostalgia that had marked his earlier anarchist drawings. He
continued to distinguish between his politics and his serious art, and he
died before the school of socialist realism took root. The spectre of
fascism renewed his energy in his last years; like Langevin, he sat in
1932 on the Organizing Committee of the World Congress against War,
and in 1933 he wrote:

B efore h er (th e R ev o lu tio n ) I d o n o t w ish

to exam ine th e sm all repro ach es. I d o n o t
p erm it m yself to discuss them .
A ll m y h e a rt goes to th e R ev o lu tio n .1

The following year, in a speech to the Comité d’Action antifasciste

et de Vigilance, he warned of the unprecedented threat to free thought
inherent in fascism and of the dangerous tendency of artists to ignore
social questions. Bourgeois society, he said, had always betrayed,
abandoned and perverted the artists. The proletariat alone represented
life.12

The communist temper has attracted a number of book illustrators,

satirists and cartoonists of quality. The drawings of A. Galbez for
Victor Cyril’s Les Crucifiés evoked poignantly the misery of the First
World War. Théophile Steinlen (1859-1923), a former anarchist and a
friend of Jean Grave, contributed illustrations to communist journals
and papers until his death. In 1926, Barbusse wrote an introduction to
Dans Venfer du vrai, a collection of talented polemical drawings by the
communist G. de Champs. After the Liberation, the cartoonists H. P.
Gassier and Mittelberg, particularly the latter, developed a ‘no holds
barred’ style. Mittelberg’s banned bust, Monsieur S . . ., presented for
the 1951 Salon and obviously aimed at Robert Schuman, took the form
of a grotesque caricature of a wicked, scowling old man. Jean Effel’s
cartoons, in contrast, were gentler and more satirical in mood.

1. Commune, July 1933, p. 95.

2. Commune, June 1934, pp. 1035-8.
347
 CHAPTER SIX

Vanguard and Rearguard:

Education and the Law

A t t e n t io n has so far been mainly focused on the ‘articulate’ intellec­

tuals, on those who communicate their belief in communism as writers,
historians, scientists and painters. But there are other professional groups
who properly belong to the intelligentsia by virtue of their social function
and their level of education. They are the disseminators and advocates,
rather than the originators, of the ideas by which a cause justifies itself.
The struggle waged by communist teachers and lawyers in classrooms
and law courts takes the form of a direct confrontation, of an immediate
personal contact with those who are not yet communists or those who
will remain implacably hostile to communism. In this sense, their daily
working experience bears similarities to that of the ordinary Party militant
agitating through his trade union or factory cell. The teachers, whose
task is perhaps the most vital of all, and who have constituted the largest
single professional group among the communist intellectuals, have as
their prize the minds of the young. They stand in the vanguard of the
campaign to make of the coming generation a communist generation.
The lawyers, on the other hand, make few or no converts; it is not their
main task. They defend, so to speak, the rear, protecting the Party in the
courts from the consequences of its actions and from the harrying of a
hostile régime. Both groups work, for the most part anonymously,
within the great structure of French society and its administrative
machinery. They share in common a further quality. While the ‘articulate’
intellectual can write or paint as he or the Party chooses, the teacher
and the lawyer must work within the framework and the rules laid down
by the ‘bourgeois* state. Otherwise, these two groups are presented here
in conjunction in order to point a contrast, to suggest something of the
variety of rôles by which the educated and professionally qualified man
or woman can serve the communist cause.1

1. Education and the Teachers

The Communist Party has consistently levelled two main charges against
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 VANGUARD AND REARGU ARD: EDUCATION AND THE LAW

the French educational system. First, that it favours the upper and middle
classes, while penalizing the poor; secondly, that it teaches the values of
the bourgeois republic. Both criticisms have been given concrete sub­
stance by a persistent advertisement of the advances made in the
U.S.S.R.
In the early ’twenties, the French Party publicized the pioneer work
of Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar for Public Instruction, describing
the Bolshevik campaign against illiteracy, the principles of pedagogy
elaborated by Krupskaya, Blonsky and others, and advances made in the
field of coeducation. Huge editions of scientific works were being printed,
lecturers were travelling to remote villages, the libraries were full of books
confiscated from the rich, and new schools were everywhere springing
up.1 In the eyes of a large section of the western public, and not of
communists alone, the Soviet Union was to become permanently
associated with the democratization of a rapidly developing educational
system. In the ’thirties, Jean Fréville translated the principal declarations
of Lenin and Stalin on the subject,12 and Paul Nizan, with his passionate
resentments against the French system, visited Soviet Asia and found
evidence of communist schools and teachers overcoming the centuries-old
inertia of a feudal society. He recalled watching collective farmers reading
the works of Lenin and Gorky in the large new library at Tadjikgiz.3
On the eve of the war, Marcel Cohen reported that the third Five Year
Plan was designed to raise the number of students at High and Technical
schools to 650,000, and that the total number of students had increased
from 125,000 in 1917 to about 550,000 in 1938. In the same interval 700
schools had been founded. Education was mainly free and for the benefit
of the lower classes; in 1934, about 40 per cent of the students were of
proletarian origin, while another 40 per cent came from peasant families.4
On this terrain, the battle of statistics suited the communists well.
Whether precisely accurate or not, Soviet figures were usually im­
pressive in the extreme and indicative of real achievement. In 1954
Cogniot, one of the Party’s leading authorities on education, revealed that
in the administrative region of Rostov a school had been built by new
techniques in forty-five days. Despite the war and the scale of Nazi
destruction, in the Ukraine the number of schools had doubled in the
period 1924-1954, and the number of pupils quadrupled.5 Three years
later Kanapa came out with some sensational statistics showing that the
number of trained engineers in Russia had increased sixteen-fold in the
1. See Clarté, 1 February 1923.
2. J. Fréville, Sur la Littérature et l'A rt: V, /. Lénine et / . Staline, pp. 112-26.
3. P. N izan, ‘Sindobad Toçikston*, Europe, 15 May 1935, pp. 78-80.
4. M . Cohen, ‘Aspects de l’Enseignem ent supérieure en U nion soviétique*. Commune,
July 1939, pp. 853-64.
5. G . Cogniot, ‘Vers de nouveaux Succès à l’Ecole soviétique’, La Pensée, N ovem ber-
Decem ber 1954, p. 95.
349
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

period 1928-1957. The Soviet Union was evidently producing twice as

many scientists, engineers and technicians a year as the U.S.A.1
The communist intellectuals (and many non-communists) had every
reason to be impressed. It would be a mistake to regard the constant
relating of these odious comparisons as mere propaganda; there was a
genuine belief that French education was not only decadent but the
ultimate bulwark for bourgeois class rule. Yet it was not until the time
of Blum’s Popular Front Government that the Party was able to exert
any effective pressure for changes at a national level. Even then, time was
short and other questions were more pressing. In 1937, Cogniot reported
that the plan to democratize education according to merit was still only a
project and would prove expensive. Meanwhile, he suggested the forma­
tion of more lycées ouvriers and lycées populaires to provide evening or
week-end classes for the talented young whose education had been cut
short due to poverty.*
The second opportunity for reform came after the Liberation, when
communist influence was at its height. In 1945 Cogniot, on behalf of
the Party, demanded that a sixth of the national budget be devoted to
education and teaching. Leading Party intellectuals were moved into key
positions. In August-September 1944, Henri Wallon was for one month,
until replaced by a nominee of de Gaulle, Secretary-General of the
Ministry of National Education. Paul Langevin presided over a Com­
mission for the reform of teaching and Marcel Prenant was elected
President of the Education Commission of the Constituent Assembly. But
in 1949, Garaudy complained that the projects and recommendations
of the Reform Commission, although adopted by the Communist
Parliamentary group, had as yet not been realized.8 The children of 80 per
cent of French families, he said, still stopped their education at the age
of fourteen. In the mid-’fifties, figures provided by Kanapa, although
revealing a slight improvement, demonstrated a disturbing stagnation
in the social distribution of students. At the University of Rennes, in
1953, 13*9 per cent of the students were of ‘bourgeois’ origin, 75*1 per
cent came from the ‘middle classes’ and only 3-7 per cent from the
proletariat. In France as a whole the proportion of students from in­
dustrial and agricultural working-class homes had risen only from 2*3
per cent to 4*2 per cent in the years 1950-1956.1234*
In 1955, Guy Besse explained the official Party programme for national
educational reform. It envisaged obligatory schooling from the age of

1. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, //, p. 117.

2. G . Cogniot, V avenir de la culture, pp. 4-5.
3. R. G araudy, ‘Sur la C ondition m atérielle et m orale des A rtistes plasticiens’,
L.W .C., January 1949, p. 55.
4. J. K anapa, Critique de la Culture, /, pp. 35-6. K anapa took these figures from
statistics provided by the Bureau U niversitaire de Statistique.

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 VANGUARD AND RE A RG U A RD : EDUCATION AND THE LAW

six to sixteen, with an ultimate extension to eighteen. There were to be

three stages: the cycle élémentaire (six to eleven), the cycle d'observation
et d'orientation (eleven to fifteen), and the cycle de détermination (fifteen
to eighteen). The last was to be divided into three sections: the practical
section, concentrating on trades apprenticeship; the professional section;
and the theoretical section. There were to be no more than thirty-five
pupils per class after September 1955, no more than thirty after September
1958, and no more than twenty-five after September 1961. For those who
left school at the age of sixteen, there would be obligatory adult education
courses in general and professional subjects, to be attended during normal
hours of work and to be paid for by the employers. All education was to
be absolutely free.
It was an attractive programme, as opposition programmes tend to be.
The attempt to balance practical and theoretical studies reflected Soviet
trends, and was in any case an idea long since held precious in syndicalist
circles. Besse mentioned a further point. Obviously thinking of the
independent clerical schools, the écoles libres, he insisted that all teaching
establishments, with a few exceptions in higher education, should come
under the control of the Ministry of National Education. Furthermore,
‘rigoureusement laïque, l'école doit viser à la formation d'une pensée
rationelle et critique'.1 Here, perhaps, was a measure hostile to freedom
of thought.
The question of the écoles libres and of state subsidies to clerical
schools has been a lively and contentious one in France for over a century.
But, simply because the demand for laïcité had constituted a dominant
Republican theme since the passing of the Loi Falloux in 1850, and one
enthusiastically adopted by the Radical and Socialist Parties, the com­
munists tended to regard it as a minimum demand and one to be
emphasized mainly at times of reactionary resurgence.
The first generation of communist intellectuals, for whom memories
of the pTS-Ralliement days and of the Dreyfus affair were still fresh, felt
particularly strongly on this question. Marcel Martinet complained of
the grip of clerical schools which taught obedience to the existing social
order, while Séverine despaired of the many free-thinking workers who
allowed their children to be baptized, mainly to please their womenfolk,
over whom clerical influence was most marked. At school the children
were taught the mystery of life, the need for servitude and passive
obedience.2
After the war, the Party and the Conseil National de la Résistance were
able to secure the reversal of the decision by Vichy to subsidize once
again confessional teaching. An ordinance of April 17th, 1945, annulled
the subsidies to the écoles libres. Cogniot wrote that 7a laïcité de l'école
1. G . Besse, ‘La Réform e de rEnseignement*, La Pensée, July-A ugust 1955, pp. 6-7.
2. Humanité, 13 February 1922.
351
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

est m principe d*union\ Appealing to the great lay tradition of Jules

Simon, Condorcet and Hugo, he relied on the familiar argument that
those who wished to open private schools should pay for them.1 But after
the 1951 elections the Catholic M.R.P. were able, through the Barangé
law, to secure a limited state aid to clerical schools, despite the unanimous
opposition of the Socialist and Communist Parliamentary groups. The
Party and its intellectuals made periodic protests in subsequent years,
but it was not an issue which engaged their attention on any consider­
able scale. The religious question they saw as an intermediary.
Republican demand and one subordinate to the great campaign for social
justice.

If communist agitation for reforms at a national level met with almost

complete failure, the Party must have known that, short of a total election
victory, this would be more than likely. Two supplementary and obvious
courses have therefore been pursued: to win converts among the
teachers, and to create independent educational institutions.
In 1929, Le Temps estimated that 78,000 teachers were affiliated to the
C.G.T. (independent, but sympathetic to the Socialist Party) and 16,000
to the communist-dominated C.G.T.U.2 Elsewhere, the same paper
reported that the Fédération unitaire de renseignement, with perhaps
14-15,000 members (approximately one-eighth of the total body of
primary teachers) was communist-affiliated.3 A storm of criticism was
aroused at this time by an address presented to the Congress of the
Syndicats unitaires de l’enseignement by M. Husson, professeur at the
Lycée Pasteur, calling on its members to teach children to admire the
ideal of the dictatorship of the proletariat.4 In April 1930, Senator Léon
Bérard drew the attention of the Minister of Public Instruction to the
continued use in primary schools of a history of France which had
already been denounced in 1928 to the Minister of the Interior. Written
by a group of teachers of the Seine Department, the book was called
Nouvelle Histoire de France and laid great stress on past passages of the
class war. In the Deux-Sèvres Department, certain teachers persisted in
using this volume, despite its condemnation by the local Education
Commission.6
In 1937, Cogniot claimed, without precision, that hundreds’ of young
teachers were joining the Party, and there is evidence that after the
Liberation the Union Française Universitaire could be counted among
the Party’s most effective intellectual front organizations. In 1959, Marcel
1. G . Cogniot, 'L es Subventions à l’Enseignem ent confessioneT, La Pensée, A p ril-
June 1945, pp. 94-5.
2. Le Temps, 21 August 1929.
3. Le Temps, 8 Septem ber 1929.
4. VH om m e Libre, 18 Septem ber 1929.
5. Le Temps, 3 and 5 A pril 1930.

352
 VA NGUARD AND REARGU ARD: EDUCATION AND THE LAW

Servin told the Fifteenth Party Congress that teachers comprised 2*7 per
cent of the Party’s total membership.1 While this percentage would
represent no advance on the figure of 14-15,000 given by Le Temps in
1929, it should be noted that this earlier figure related only to the
Fédération unitaire de l’enseignement at a time when the Party could
claim no more than 15,000 members in all. Thus the 1959 report reveals
a considerable increase of pro-communist sentiment among teachers, since
at any one time Party members represent only a minority proportion of
the active sympathizers within any social group. The causes of this
orientation are not mysterious. As ardent advocates of laïcité, French
teachers have found consistent political champions only within the
Republican Left. As an underprivileged class dependent on a fixed and
meagre wage-rate and, in the ’thirties, subject to chronic unemployment,123
they have naturally responded to the P.C.F.’s campaigns on their behalf
and to the constantly pointed contrast with the favoured status of their
Soviet colleagues. Finally, the teachers themselves have, by and large,
resented the inequitable distribution of educational opportunities and
facilities among the social classes. At the same time, the decline of the
Socialist Party, to which teachers gave their allegiance for at least three
decades, has necessarily benefited the communists.
But if the Party has achieved marked successes in permeating and
penetrating the ranks of the teaching profession, it has not been without
a struggle and without resistance. Victimization of teachers on political
grounds, particularly at times of communist weakness, has been not
uncommon. Measures taken to prevent the use of Marxist textbooks
in the late ’twenties have already been mentioned. In August 1929, Jean
Baby, a history teacher at a Toulouse lycée, was arrested on a charge of
conducting communist propaganda among his pupils at a state institution.
On July 17th, prior to his arrest, his new appointment at the Lycée'
Condorcet in Paris had been confirmed. Claiming that Baby had been
a Party organizer at Toulouse for three years and that he had urged the
workers of Lavelanet to ‘make their employers afraid’, Le Temps called
his nomination ‘scandalous’.8 Pending an investigation, the Ministry of
Education suspended Baby and explained that he had been promoted
on the basis of the excellent reports on his teaching made by government
inspectors of education. It soon became clear, in fact, that Baby had not
allowed his political views and his teaching to overlap. The socialist
paper Le Populaire supported his case on principle. Nevertheless, after
an inquiry, Baby was ‘condemned’ by the academic council of Toulouse
and suspended, without payment, for a fifth of his tenure. This blatantly
partisan action elicited a protest from the executive commission of the
1. Le M onde, 27 June 1959.
2. See p. 31.
3. Le Temps, 21 August 1929.
353 M
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

national union of lycée teachers which called for a change in the scope of
the jurisdiction of academic councils.1 In these years the ruling classes
and the governments created an atmosphere in which the teacher could
only exert his rights as a citizen, to support privately whatever political
cause he chose, at the risk of losing his job. Paul Nizan, teaching at
Bourg, received an ultimatum from the inspecteur d’Académie when it
became known that he was organizing a committee of the local unem­
ployed and urging them to join the C.G.T.U.123
The onset of the Cold War inaugurated a new phase of victimization
directed against communist teachers and intellectuals holding positions
under the state. In October 1949, Guy Boureau, Principal of the College
of Saint-Yrieix, was dismissed by Delbos following his statement that
Frenchmen would never fight against the Soviet Union.8 The massive
purge of the Atomic Energy Commissariat, starting with the dismissal of
Joliot-Curie, began in 1950.45In March of that year, Georges Teissier,
the communist biologist, was removed from his post as director of the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and a thorough purge of
other communists within the organization ensued. In September 1953,
Henri Lefebvre was dismissed as a directeur de recherches from the socio­
logical department of the Centre National. According to VHumanité,
the immediate cause of this was a speech that he had made during the
Party’s study days at Ivry in March,6 but there are grounds for believing
that personal factors were also taken into consideration. According to
Marcel Prenant, the research workers Michel Vacher and Barbaron were
also evicted for political reasons.8
It would seem, then, that Raymond Aron's claim that in France the
opposition seldom suffers and that participation in minority agitation
does not damage ‘the career of even a servant of state’,7 requires some
modification. Nevertheless, the communists have often exaggerated
their case, and it is perhaps not a case which comes well from those
who, if given power, would be unlikely to show a liberal attitude toward
their academic opponents. At both a local and a national level, and
particularly in the period 1945-6, the Party made every effort to pack
with its members or sympathizers every organization of consequence
from university faculties to the hated security police, the C.R.S. In
certain areas of France, it has been a positive advantage, when applying
for a teaching position, or even for a job as a fonctionnaire, to be a Party
member. Communist scholars are everywhere to be found in the uni-
1. Le Temps, 28 December 1929.
2. S. de Beauvoir, La Force de VAge, p. 112.
3. Humanité, 3 February 1950.
4. Seep. 311.
5. Humanité, 22 September 1953.
6. M. Prenant, ‘Mendès-France, la Science et les Trusts’, L.N .C., January 1955, p. 67.
7. R. Aron, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, p. 212.

354
 VANGUARD AND R E ARGU ARD: EDUCATION AND THE LAW

versities; in 1962, Roger Garaudy was appointed by the state to a chair

at Clermont Ferrand despite protests from the faculty.

Generally thwarted at the level of national policy-making, the second

alternative open to the Party has been to build up its own private
educational institutions. One of the earliest champions of the independent
approach was Marcel Martinet who recommended in 1921 the multiplica­
tion of workers’ cultural and educational organizations like the Savoir
group, formed recently in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. He realized
that the proletarian child must step through the eye of a needle in order
to receive higher education and that the almost inevitable price of success
was to become a traitor to one's class with an acquired contempt for
manual labour. In many spheres, in commerce, in industry, and even
occasionally in the professions were to be found those who had sprung
from the working class - and deserted it.
But since the administrators of the future proletarian state had to be
proletarians, and since revolution could not be successfully accomplished
without technical knowledge, it was vital, so Martinet argued, to teach
workers not only theory but also the interrelation of a particular trade to
the ensemble of national production.1 Strongly influenced by his former
syndicalist associations and by the work of Albert Thierry, who had
stated categorically that ‘integrated education in the bourgeois state is
impossible or criminal’,123Martinet’s conceptions diverged sharply from
the more centralized, étatist line of approach normally favoured by
communists. He was convinced that the idea of workers’ universities
was moribund and that both general and professional culture must be
learned in the workshop and trade union. But Soviet practice and com­
munist doctrine, which regarded the decentralizing tendencies of
syndicalism with grave suspicion, rendered such a course out of the
question. By 1927-28, there were over 40,000 Party schools and study
groups active throughout Russia, as well as nineteen communist universi­
ties with an enrolment of 8,400 students.8 Although French communism
had no state machinery or funds at its disposal, education of workers
under the aegis of the Party was the policy it was bound to pursue.
A ‘Party school’, of course, is not necessarily an educational estab­
lishment in the generally accepted sense of the term, and a distinction
must be made between institutions where the social sciences were taught
with a Marxist bias, and those whose main purpose was to train dedicated
and efficient Party militants. In the latter category was the first Party
school in France, which was founded at Bobigny in 1924, with sixty

1. Humanité, 24 September 1921.

2. M. Martinet, ‘Préface aux “Réflexions sur l’Education” d’Albert Thierry’,
Europe, September 1923, p. 469.
3. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, p. 343.

355
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

students enrolled for a ten-week course. Two further schools at Clichy

and Ivry were set up soon afterwards. The International Leninist School
at Moscow had a French section from 1926 until 1935, to which were
sent groups of some twenty students for a year’s post-graduate schooling.
In June 1936, a Party school with facilities for forty pupils was begun at
Arceuil, under the directorship of Etienne Fajon. By 1950 there were 284
Party schools on the departmental federation level, with 4,000 students
enrolled for two-week instruction periods.1
But the training of Party militants represented only one aspect of a
much wider task. Considerably more far-reaching in cultural and social
significance was the foundation in 1932 of the Université Ouvrière at
Paris, under the direction of Georges Cogniot, the objective being to
bring Marxist teaching in history, languages and literature to the working
masses. Elementary science courses were soon included, with communist
intellectuals like Prenant, Solomon, Politzer and Decour running part-
time classes. Just as Marxist study groups like the Cercle de la Russie
neuve had established close contacts with the Université Ouvrière, so its
successor, the Université Nouvelle, founded after the Liberation, came
under the wing of the directors of La Pensée* Cécile Angrand,3 secretary-
general of the Université Nouvelle, outlined its purpose as being to give
working-class militants a revolutionary method of thought and action
through the assimilation of dialectical materialism as developed by
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Three basic courses were offered in
philosophy, political economy and the history of the workers’ movement,
with additional specialized courses in languages, industrial design, etc.4
By 1953, courses in the history of literature and the philosophy of the
sciences were included. According to the Party’s statistics, in the academic
year 1952-53 nearly one thousand workers and students took the basic
courses. Of those who successfully completed the course, 26 per cent
were workers, 21 per cent ‘employees’ and 27 per cent were students in
the vocational sense. Statistics for the year 1953-1954 listed 72 per cent
of the students as being under thirty years of age and 40 per cent as
being under twenty-five, with women comprising 35 per cent of the total
enrolment.5 Branches of the University had been progressively established
in the Parisian suburbs of Montreuil, Villejuif, GentiUy, Issy-les-
Moulineaux and Gennevilliers.6
9
1. C. A. Micaud, ‘Organization and Leadership of the French Communist Party’,
World Politics, April 1952, pp. 342-4.
2. The 1945 Comité de Patronage o f the Université Nouvelle consisted of: J. Billiet,
J. Chapelon. A. Chevalier, A. Chollet, M. Cohen, B. Frachon, F. Joliot-Curie, A.
Jolivet, F. Jourdain, E. Hanaff, P. Labérenne, P. Langevin, G. Lefebvre, R. Maublanc,
M. Prenant, H. Wallon.
3. Wife of the historian Pierre Angrand. She later left the Party.
4. Humanité, 25 October 1946.
5. Humanité, 1 October 1954.
6. Humanité, 2 October 1953.

356
 VA NGUARD AND REARGU ARD: EDUCA TION AND THE LAW

The teaching at the University conformed rigorously to the Party line.

The ‘objective’ laws of history and of economics were illustrated by
overwhelming evidence of capitalist decay and of the successes of the
socialist states in the East. With regard to the instructor, the intellectual
engaged in teaching, this particular pedagogic activity can be regarded
as a subsidiary of the fifth principle of utility, by which the intellectual
works through his chosen medium to bring a Marxist-communist culture
to the workers. While the fifth principle (like the second) was always
liable to mutilation by the fourth, that is by the intervention of the
immediate Party line, this was less likely to occur at an institution like the
Université Nouvelle, simply because the basic, or elementary, nature of
the teaching rendered it less likely that the teacher would find himself in
serious conflict with the Party’s point of view. Serious conflicts were more
inclined to arise over advanced problems of philosophy, historiography
and science, or over experimentation in the arts, than on points of basic
Marxist teaching. Indeed, work of this kind may prove both the most
rewarding and least frustrating for the intellectual, affording him, through
direct contact with the section of the working class most hungry for
knowledge, a sense of purpose and usefulness by no means universal
among those who deal mainly in words and ideas.

2. Lawyers and the Law

The communist lawyer, like the communist deputy, carries the Party’s
voice and struggle into the heart of the enemy camp, the one into the
courts, the other into the Chamber and Senate. And, just as the deputy
professes to have little faith in parliamentary democracy, so the lawyer,
if he be a true Marxist, regards all law as class law. His function is
nevertheless to extract the last ounce of tolerance from the ‘ruling class’
and from the system, claiming each legal victory as a victory for com­
munism and each legal defeat as a vindication of communism. This,
of course, is not to suggest that his function begins and ends as a
propagandist; the acquittal of militants or Party leaders may be a task
of the utmost urgency. French law, it should be noted, puts a premium
on political consciousness. As compared to English law it inclines to
restrict its attention less to the deed committed and to impute more
importance to motivation. A display of didactic historical argument and
an adroit use of the impassioned testimonies of intellectuals may carry
considerable weight: hence the importance to the Party of lawyers with
an intellectual cast of mind.
The cases of the c o m m u n is t intellectual defectors of the First World
War, Sadoul, Guilbeaux, Pascal, Marchand and others, were dealt with
in the main by military tribunals. The first important civil trial of com­
munists took place in 1920, when Loriot, Souvarine, Monmousseau and
Monatte were imprisoned for five months without specific charges being
357
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

brought.1 It was Maître Henri Torrès, most prominent of the Party’s

lawyers during its first two years of existence, who rose to ridicule the
idea of a Moscow plot against the French state and to complain about
the irregular imprisonment of Souvarine and his comrades. In March
1921 they were released. Torrès, like many later Party lawyers, showed no
desire to confine his radical enthusiasm to the courts. He wrote a regular
Polémiques column for VHumanité, attacking, among other things, the
police, the meagre resources of Paris University and the way in which
foreign students living with French communists found themselves
expelled from the country without appeal.2 But in December 1922,
Torrès’s defence of some strikers imprisoned at Le Havre ended in partial
failure and within a few weeks he had quit the Party in disgust at the
Comintern’s tactics. In February 1923, Manuilsky referred to him dis­
paragingly as a millionaire lawyer and wandering meteor whose departure
could not be regretted.8 By 1947, Torrès had joined the Gaullist R.P.F.
and was engaged in defending the General against the attacks of Jean-
Paul Sartre.4
The persecution of communists in the ’twenties was relentless. Me
André Berthon defended Jacques Sadoul on his return to France in 1924,
but Sadoul’s reprieve owed more to the arrival in power of the Cartel
des Gauches Government and to the re-establishment of diplomatic
relations with Russia than to Berthon’s virtuosity.6 In 1923, Marcel
Willard - the greatest of the Party’s lawyers - defended the communists
charged with subversion on account of their opposition to the occupation
of the Ruhr, and again in 1925 when the Moroccan war gave rise to a
similar situation. In 1927, Willard defended militants charged with revolt
and treason; two years later he denounced as illegal the arrests made by
the Tardieu-Chiappe régime.6 The seriousness of the problem led the
Party to found the Secours Rouge, a private legal assistance bureau
renamed after the war the Secours Populaire de France.
The ’thirties, and particularly the Popular Front period, naturally saw
a diminution of political persecutions directed against the Left, and it was
rather on the international stage, as in the case of the Reichstag fire trial,
that communist lawyers exercised their virtuosity and acumen. The trial
of thirty-five communist deputies by a Paris Military Tribunal in March
1940 - the first political trial to be held in camera since that of Dreyfus -
brought a galaxy of communist lawyers to the scene, led by Maîtres
Willard, Lévine and Vienney. Willard called upon Daladier and Bonnet
to appear as witnesses, but they declined the offer. It was rather on
1. Humanité, 3 September 1920.
2. Humanité, 27 February 1921.
3. B.C ., 15 February 1923.
4. Combat, 22 October 1947.
5. The Times, 5 December 1924.
6. M. Willard, La Défense Accuse, Paris, 1955, p. 8.

358
 VANGUARD AND REARGU ARD: EDUCATION AND THE LAW

intellectual support, the testimonies of Langevin, Bloch, Wallon,

Maublanc and others on behalf of the integrity of the accused, that the
lawyers had ultimately to rely.1 The military judges, however, were not
impressed. In the next few years lawyers were to feature among the
intellectuals liquidated by the Nazis. On June 27th, 1941, at Paris, the
communist lawyers Pitard, Hajje and Rolnikas were arrested and
executed as hostages on September 19th. Pitard, who had fought in both
wars, had put himself as a lawyer at the service of the trade unions.12
The onset of the Cold War was marked by several libel actions of a
directly political nature. In the Kravchenko trial, Claude Morgan and
André Wurmser were defended by Maîtres Joë Nordmann and André
Blumel, a fellow-traveller. Nordmann defended the editors of Les Lettres
Françaises when David Rousset brought a libel action on the question of
Soviet Labour Camps. On both occasions the defence was skilfully
conducted and the defendants escaped with small damages awarded
against them. Nordmann was also one of the most active lawyers called
into action during the wave of arrests which struck the communists in
1949.3
Clearly the lawyers were no less marked down for systematic organiza­
tion than other categories of intellectuals. Nineteen lawyers, led by
Maîtres Willard, Nordmann, Ledermann and Matarasso (editor of the
communist Revue Progressiste du Droit), were present at the study days
held by the Party in March 1953.45In September, the Party arranged two
further study days for Party lawyers and jurists, attended by over sixty
from the Paris region alone, as well as representatives from provincial
centres.6 On behalf of the Party leadership, Etienne Fajon outlined the
rôle the lawyers must play ‘in the struggle for peace and national
independence’ (third principle of utility) and in fighting violations of the
constitution by decree-laws and the subordination of the judiciary to the
police. Later, Willard, Vienney, Matarasso, Ferrad, Ledermann, Braun
and Schliessinger, all advocates of the Paris Bar, called on the Procureur
of the Republic and expressed their concern at the growing number of
physical attacks on Party organizations and buildings. They urged that
such attacks should be considered not as misdemeanours {délits) but as
crimes, and that the culprits be consequently tried before an assize court
rather than a correctional tribunal.®
The function and technique of a communist lawyer in a bourgeois state

1. Ibid., p. 209.
2. L. Aragon, V Homme Communiste, /, p. 153.
3. Humanité, 6 May 1949.
4. Humanité, 30 March 1953.
5. Among those present were Maîtres Willard, Vienney, Nordmann, Renée
Mirande, Marie-Louise Cachin, Aubertin, Matarasso, Ferucci, Manville, Guillemot,
Schwartzemberg, Kaldor, Lyon-Caen. Humanité, 28 September 1953.
6. Humanité, 19 October 1954.
359
 INTELLECTUALS AND THE INTELLECT

was succinctly explained by Marcel Willard in his autobiography. La

Défense Accuse (1955). Willard, bom in 1890, had joined the Party at its
foundation in 1920. Demobilized in October 1919, he entered the Paris
Bar, joined Clarté and got to know Vaillant-Couturier, Bloch, Moussinac
and other writers of the Left, contacts which helped to inspire his own
volume of poems, Le jour ríest pas loin.1 With his reputation already
established on an international level by his defence of Dimitrov at the
Reichstag fire trial in 1933, he became a lieutenant in the F.T.P. and took
part in the Paris rising of August 19th, 1944. At a time of maximum
communist influence, he was given the temporary post of Secrétaire
général à la Justice, when he was able to hand out lessons in political
justice to collaborators and Vichyites.123In 1952, he defended Jacques
Duelos, arrested on a trumped-up charge following the anti-Ridgway
demonstration.
Willard’s general conclusions were these. In all cases, it is the working
class in the dock. Never be afraid. Keep your courage, equilibrium, sense
of humour. Be discreet and circumspect: do not furnish the enemy with
information he lacks or desires. Always make the defence political rather
than personal. Almost invariably the prosecution wishes to present the
case as one of common law and so the political character of the case must
be restored at once. The best strategy is to take the offensive, the initiative,
like Marx at Cologne, Blanqui at Paris and Dimitrov at Leipzig. By all
means ridicule the police, the opposition, and the press, but never the
court.8
Willard’s principles corresponded closely to those which French
communist lawyers practised, or attempted to practise. If their sense of
justice was strong, it was a political sense. No communist lawyer in
France spoke up against the Moscow trials, or those of Rajk and Kostov.
On the contrary, those who entered the public debate expressed their
confidence in the infallibility o f ‘popular justice’. Here we find yet another
of the tragic aspects of west European communism.

1. L. Moussinac, ‘Marcel Willard*, La Pensée, May-June 1956, p. 102.

2. M. Willard, op. cit., p. 9.
3. Ibid., pp. 319-37.

360
 Conclusion

‘W i t h relentless selectivity,’ wrote R. H. S. Crossman in 1949, pointing

to the cases of Gide, Silone, Koestler, Wright, Spender and Fischer, ‘the
Communist machine has winnowed out the grain and retained only the
chaff of western culture.’1 Applied to France, such a judgement emerges
as but a half-truth, a generalization supported by many individual
instances but equally denied by many others.
By the time The God That Failed was published. Martinet, Souvarine,
Séverine, Serge, Gide, Rappoport, Nizan and Malraux, all decidedly
‘grain’, had quit the P.C.F. This, of course, was serious. And the next
decade or so was to be marked by further desertions or expulsions
affecting such important figures as Morin, Mascolo, Edith Thomas,
Claude Roy, Henri Lefebvre, and Marcel Prenant.
On the other hand, by no reasonable stretch of the imagination could
the term ‘chaff’ be applied to a number of those who, often after many
years in or close to the Party, had died as convinced communists:
Barbusse, Signac, Vaillant-Couturier, Solomon, Politzer, Decour, Péri,
Rolland, Langevin, Bloch, Aimé Cotton, Eluard, Léger, Marcel Willard,
Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. And this, without prejudging future
developments, is not to mention the intellectuals who have remained
loyal through fat years and lean: Aragon, a poet estimable by any
standard; Picasso, Fougeron and Taslitzky, who require no apologies
as painters; Eugénie Cotton, Teissier and Wallon, respected scientists
behind whose names has lain a greater strength in numbers; Albert
Soboul, a leading historian of the Great Revolution; Louis Daquin, a
film director of talent. No one would deny that many of the best intellec­
tuals who have come to the Party full of hope have been ‘winnowed out’,
by one means or another, and have departed disillusioned. But among
those who have stayed, much wheat is to be found among the chaff. To
mention such names as Brecht, Laxness, Neruda, Bernal and Hobsbawm
is to remind ourselves that this has not been true of France alone.

1. R. H . S. Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed, p. 9.

361
 CONCLUSION

There is no doubt that the historiography of west European com­

munism, and particularly of its intellectual sympathizers, has been
too long and too firmly in the hands of certain ex-communists and of
those who have tended to rely on their evidence and attitude of mind.
Their inside knowledge of men and situations and the intensity of their
experiences provide evidence among the most valuable that the historian
can lay his hands upon. But their retrospective judgements too often
converge on a type of explanation we have already encountered, the
^aberrational’ explanation which is willing to meet communism (and
indeed Marxism) on any terms but their own. There have been, of course,
exceptions; Whittacker Chambers’s Witness is perhaps the most notable,
and Morin’s Autocritique is full of valuable insights. In any case, our
quarrel is not with a category of men but with a way of thought in which
two parallel processes tend to occur. On the one hand, advocates of this
approach stage a limited retreat from pure reason in so far as they argue
that those who worship a cold, ruthless ‘Reason’ end up by worshipping
the work of their own hands, hands covered in blood. Koestler is a case
in point. At the same time they expose, or attempt to expose, the weakness
of Marxism as a rational historical explanation and as a rational guide
to political action. By regarding ‘reason’ as an indivisible entity, as a
straight line leading from a given body of established evidence to a given
conclusion, they are forced to conclude that communist intellectuals,
whatever their professions to the contrary, cannot have come to the Party
on rational grounds. At this point the ‘opium’ or ‘aberrational’ explana­
tion intervenes. The ex-communist adopts the same attitude toward the
communist as the Marxist does toward the Christian, charging him with
mistaking for an objective reality what is in fact only a compensation
for some personal or social anxiety, an inability to come to terms with
the real world. The possibility of conflicting sets of evidence and of
conflicting lines of deduction is in both cases discounted. In either case
the analysis thereby cripples itself.
According to some, indeed, communism is a substitute for a religion
it aims to destroy. The fact that the communist movements have been
strong in France and Italy, that is in Catholic Europe, gives a superficial
force to this theory. The more mystical writings of Aragon come to mind.
But Aragon wrote as an opportunist, mystical and sentimental when he
chose to be. Communism has displayed a vigorous natural growth among
intellectuals in many countries not normally associated with a dominantly
religious ethos. In France the struggle against the Church was historically
an affair for Freemasons, Radicals and socialists; it had more than a
half-century of successful encounters behind it before the Communist
Party saw the light of day. Rolland never fully shed his mystical element;
Barbusse spoke of Jesus Christ; Péri compared his nightly article for
VHumanité to a religious sacrament; Gide claimed to be substituting a
362
 CONCLUSION

political for a religious cause; but on the whole it was the rationalist
temperament, albeit a rationalism of an almost religious fervour, which
brought intellectuals to the Party.
Again, we are told that the intellectual’s gravitation toward the
‘Marxist myth’ can be attributed largely to the ‘quest for holiness by
means of martyrdom*.1 The word ‘myth’ here implies more than an error;
it has deliberate metaphysical overtones, once more denying the possibi­
lity of rational adherence to communism. But who of the French
communist intellectuals have sought either holiness or martyrdom?
Malraux, perhaps, in a vague sense. Yet Malraux was typical only of
himself. The communist victims of the Gestapo certainly did everything in
their power, short of cowardice, to avoid capture and death. Victimized
school teachers or a Joliot-Curie, a Teissier, dismissed from their state
posts, have made no claims to holiness. Who was more cunning than
Brecht in avoiding trouble from any quarter? Whether or not *les
lendemains qui chantent’ was merely futurist euphoria, communists have
shown no unusual predilection toward morbidity.
A further variation on the ‘opium’ theme is the assertion that the
C.P.s are mainly composed of types who do not belong. Therefore, ‘the
foundation of the Party is made up by those products of modem society
. . . which over-socialize their anxiety for belongingness and integration.’2
It is true that Picasso spoke in 1944 of having always been an exile, of his
desire to find a new homeland. And Aragon referred to the Party as ‘Za
Famille’. The image presented by the Party of close and comradely
cohesion undoubtedly exercised a considerable attraction for intellectuals,
particularly during the Resistance struggle. The Communist Party, said
Thorez, was not a party like others. But when one considers the long
hesitations of Rolland, Bloch, Langevin, Jourdain and of numerous other
intellectuals, their scruples and self-examinations, or when one reflects
on the constant flow of intellectuals in and out of the Party, on Souvarine,
Martinet, Magdeleine Marx and Serge who were prepared to quit 7a
Famille’ on a question of ideology, then any generalization about types
who over-socialize their desire for belongingness should provoke extreme
scepticism.
In this study we have observed intellectuals rallying to communism
under various historical influences, the First World War, the Bolshevik
Revolution, anti-colonialism, the Five Year Plans, unemployment, the
6th of February, Spain, appeasement, the Resistance, the desire to dis­
pense with the system of the Third Republic, anti-Americanism. In some
cases conversion was preceded by an absorption of Marxism, in other
cases, not. What emerges, the overwhelming impression, is that of
cerebral, empirical, judgements made within the framework of certain
1. V. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, p. 154.
2. Z. Barbu, Democracy and D ictatorship, London, 1956, p. 188.
363
 CONCLUSION

social and moral beliefs. The communist, like others, makes an empirical
judgement. If he is wrong, it is an error of judgement. But what, it may
be asked, of faith and the dialectic; how are they to be squared with
empiricism?
The meaning and validity of the ‘dialectical', as opposed to the
‘empirical’, method of reasoning is obviously a question of the utmost
complexity. But even if, as Marxists claim, men naturally think dialecti­
cally, conversion to the specifically determinista materialist and M arxist
philosophy of dialectical materialism can follow only from self-realization,
from a more or less ‘empirical’ judgement that dialectical materialism
is in fact the most advanced and ‘scientific’ approach to reality. Thus,
in a sense, ‘mere empiricism’ can be transcended only by a series of
‘empirical’ judgements, as a result of which the intellectual believes
himself to have progressed within his own life to dialectical maturity
just as society itself, or the most ‘advanced’ part of it, did in the
nineteenth century.
To speak of ‘dialectical maturity' in this way is not necessarily to
endorse Marxism, it is merely to formulate an obvious point within
Marxist terms of reference and to establish a time-pattern, a definite
sequence of mental events, just as one might trace the growth of religion
out of magic without subscribing to either. If the intellectual joins the
Party without a preliminary Marxist training, his decision is apt to be, if
anything, more obviously empirical, a weighing-up of the pros and cons
of the immediate political and social situation. The romantic urge, the
desire to fight, hatred, passion, all these may be factors contributing
toward the final decision, but this is only to say that there is bound to be
an emotional basis for political action and that radical action particularly
is rarely approached in cold blood. The emotional quota in communism
often appears to be abnormally high owing to the Party's extremist and
rebellious posture, but a situation like that which developed after the
victory of the Popular Front quickly reveals the potential of the sup­
posedly stable and conserving classes for violent emotional reactions.
To establish a balanced view is not necessarily to retreat into the neutral,
or relativist, comer. But it is essential, in appraising the actions of
communist intellectuals, not only to avoid regarding them as psycho­
logical misfits, strangers to reason, but also to accept, for the purposes
of discussion, left-wing premises, or at least those shared not only by
communists but, broadly, by Trotskyists, idealists, the advocates of a
Third Force. Otherwise the essential problem of ends and means is lost
sight of in a welter of technical and indecisive arguments. Thus M. Aron
has attempted to explain (or ridicule) the behaviour of Marxist intellec­
tuals while denying all their premises, while discarding as myths the
basic ideas of the Left, of the Revolution and of the Proletariat. M. Aron
believes in a guided capitalism, in technical adjustments, in reforms. The
364
 CONCLUSION

logic of his complete demolition of Marxism as a doctrine relevant to the

mid-twentieth century, and his refusal to regard his opponents as com­
plete fools, leads inexorably to the ‘opium’ theory. He refuses to set one
‘reason’ against another. Consequently he tells us more about Marxism
than about Marxists.
Secondly, there is the question of faith. The intellectual, once he has
made his original empirical judgement, once he has come to accept the
communist praxis, may indeed rely on a certain amount of faith.
Stalinism, which turned Marxist doctrines upside down and which
substituted dogma and acceptance for a real, critical appraisal of existing
conditions, was bound to encourage this tendency unless the intellectual
had the strength to effect a speedy withdrawal. It is also true that a
Communist Party, whether Stalinist or otherwise, can never be a debating
society. The intellectual has to accept this in the name of a greater good.
But ‘faith’, as most commonly manifested among communist intellec­
tuals in France, can be more accurately described as the law of
compensation. This has taken two principal forms. Either adverse reports
on conditions in Russia were discounted as coming from hostile sources,
or acknowledged defects were deliberately offset against the greater
good, the present against the future. The first aspect is one which
distinguishes the communists from their opponents, the defenders
of the bourgeois-liberal-reformist state, few of whom regard criticisms
of particular aspects of life in western Europe as an indication of a total
hostility to the system as such. Also, and this is equally important, such
intellectuals, and much of the press, display a persistently critical attitude
toward the sins and omissions of their own society. The communists
do not. But the second aspect of the law of compensation is not unique
to c o m m u n ists alone. The French intellectual, in accepting broadly the
Third or Fourth Republics, has had to do so despite Versailles, the
domestic policy of the Bloc National, Morocco, Syria, Indo-China, the
régime of Chiappe, unemployment, parliamentary corruption, the aban­
donment of Republican Spain, Munich, McCarthyism, Suez, Algeria.
The intellectual may have opposed all these things, and he may have
openly criticized them. But when weighing up his final allegiance between
the Communist Party and those parties which defend the status quo (in
its most general sense), when deciding whether or not to approve France’s
commitment to a power bloc, to the western alliance, to one of two great
opposing systems, he will, if he finally opts for the western system, have
to do so despite its defects. This is an elementary point, but one often
ignored. Merleau-Ponty raised it against Koestler. This aspect of the law
of compensation is everywhere at work.
Undoubtedly the law of compensation - or the need to compromise -
exercised a marked change on the character and outlook of communist
intellectuals. The expectations of the first generation were boundless.
365
 CONCLUSION

A sizeable group quit the Party in January 1923 merely because the
Comintern had succeeded in enforcing its United Front policy. Soon after,
others left because they believed Trotsky, or Souvarine, to have been
badly treated. Such sensitivity would have been inconceivable to the
‘Bolshevized’ intellectuals of later years who accepted the abrupt change
from the left sectarian to the Popular Front line, then the Nazi-Soviet
pact, considerable post-war equivocation on colonialism and finally
the hard line developed after 1947 in the cultural field. As a class, the
communist intellectuals hardened, restricted their immediate expectations,
relied increasingly on the principle of compensation. There were even
signs that this evolution was reflected among the idealists; Vercors’
remark in 1947, that he and his friends knew very well that politics was
not an affair of saints and poets, could scarcely have been made by the
Rollandists in the ’twenties, with their faith in a pure esprit.
A t the same time, a hard core of Stalinist intellectuals grew up close
to the Central Committee and the Secretariat, giving a prompt lead on all
questions and drilling the recalcitrant. It could plausibly be argued that
the real gulf, in terms of temperament and character, was not between
the mass of communist intellectuals and the idealists, but between the
hard Stalinists and the rest. It was through these men, the editors of Party
journals and cultural organs, that the leadership coerced and disciplined
the majority. With the Stalinists it was not a question of coming down on
one side or another of a delicately balanced argument; they were a new
breed, an army of scribes and literate sergeant-majors.
If we accept left-wing premises, it becomes clear that the tragedy of
French communism was not the intellectuals it seduced or those it lost,
but rather those it maimed. In an increasingly oppressive atmosphere the
fourth principle of utility, the least creative, gradually stifled and over­
whelmed the second and fifth, the most creative. Nonentities told
Prenant what to think; Lefebvre was ostracized and humiliated by his
own pupils; Picasso, Léger and Pignon kept silent while Fougeron laid
down the law; writers concerned with form and style, as well as content,
abandoned the struggle under the shadow of the Zhdanov-Casanova
régime. Malraux, Koestler, Gide, Sartre and Camus were attacked not
by men of their own calibre, in intellectual terms which might have
commanded respect, but by ‘hatchetmen’ resorting to personal slanders,
aspersions, insults. In public only one voice was heard, the voice of the
Stalinist minority. The rest, tougher than in the ’twenties, hung on,
suppressed their resentments and stretched the principle of compensa­
tion to its limits. Stunted as creators, unable to risk the experimentation
necessary for a living Marxist literature or scholarship, they suffered the
double burden of appearing to the outside world guilty by association.
Intellectual Stalinism was founded on a triad of errors. First, it denied,
connived at or justified atrocities. Secondly, it abandoned the normally
366
 CONCLUSION

accepted rules of debate and argument which the communists themselves,

with their stress on Descartes, the Enlightenment, the new rationalism,
all the ‘spiritual dimensions* of France, etc, nominally subscribed to.
Dialogue became impossible. Finally, it defeated its own long-term aims,
the principles of utility which were its raison d'être.
The last point emerges out of the first two. The communist intellectual
in a non-communist society must be an apostle, an evangelist among the
unconverted. He must place himself in the vanguard of the scouting
parties exploring unconquered territory. But the Stalinist intellectuals
debased their own currency, and that of all communist intellectuals, as
evangelists. By defending blindly all aspects of Soviet life, the trials,
anti-Titoism, by denying against all the evidence the existence of forced
labour, by elevating mortal political leaders into the guise of saints and
geniuses, by demanding in practice, if not in theory, the acceptance of a
dictatorial approach to art and culture, they violated the sensibilities
of a potentially sympathetic audience. The argument, so typical of this
robot-like mentality, that it was necessary to defend Lysenko against a
bourgeois attack on Soviet science by all possible means, ignored the
essential point that the methods and arguments employed could only
confirm, by a process of direct reflection, the worst suspicions about the
conditions under which Soviet geneticists were working. An intellectual
position, especially a technical one, cannot be defended like a stone
fortress, with slings and arrows. And when, ultimately, the error has to be
admitted, the Stalinist intellectual stands doubly discredited, not only
because he was wrong, but because of the noxious manner in which he
was wrong.
Suppose it be argued otherwise, that it was to the workers and peasants
that the intellectuals directed their arguments, that the overriding
necessity was to preserve the unity and morale of the proletariat in the
face of the propaganda of the anti-communist press. Here several points
arise. The Party is supposed to draw its values from the working class,
not to deceive it. But there is a more practical objection. While intellec­
tuals have generally shown themselves interested primarily in international
affairs, in cultural questions which cross national boundaries, it has been
the domestic political and economic situation which has brought the
Party mass support. Indeed, many an intellectual has found himself
criticizing the proletariat in exasperation for its lack of interest in trials,
forced labour, anti-semitism and even the Hungarian Revolution. A
question of genetics or an Hegelian over-emphasis on the rôle of ideas
have not caught proletarian imaginations. It was not necessary to tell the
peasants who provided approximately 30 per cent of the Party’s member­
ship in the early ’fifties that Camus’ L'Homme Révolté had been financed
by Wall Street or that not a single healthy woman appeared throughout
Koestler’s writings; they had never heard of Camus or Koestler. If the
367
 CONCLUSION

cult of personality had its ‘uses’ among the masses, it nevertheless

revealed an un-Marxist contempt for the popular mentality. It may be
true that Stil’s novels or Fougeron’s paintings increased the class-
consciousness of urban workers. Even so, these works could surely have
been conceived without the sterile dogmatism in the realm of theory,
the suspicion of experimentation which silenced all muses except the
most orthodox.
It is clear, then, that the communist intellectuals as a class cannot be
charged with what one critic called ‘a nearly pathological humility in the
face of the Proletariat’.1 Rolland, Barbusse, Bloch, Gide, Léger and
Langevin shared the ‘passion’, the suffering of the exploited, but their
main concern was to create a social system whereby the workers would be
able to master and then transcend bourgeois prosperity and culture.
If these intellectuals were educators in spirit, the Stalinists were even
more so, despite their lip-service to proletarian values. Ultimately,
however, it was not a case of the intellectual guiding the worker, or the
worker the intellectual, for between them arose a massive barrier, the
Party - the Stalinist filter. The worker was carefully walled off from all
but the scribes and minstrels. Given the premises of the extreme Left, it
was, as Mascolo said, no more possible for the intellectual to remain
true to his vocation as a Communist with a capital ‘C* than it was for
him to desert the ideal of communism with a small ‘c’. Here was the
dilemma.

1. V. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, p. 154.

368
 N otes on the Cinema

LEON MOUSSINAC published his Naissance du cinéma in 1925. He

brought Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin to Paris in 1926. The
following year he returned from a visit to Russia highly impressed by the
Kino-Technikum of Leningrad and by Trauberg’s Soviet Institute of
Scenic Arts. In 1932, he founded the Théâtre d’Action International in
the proletarian quarter at the Bouffes du Nord, with Thorez’s moral
support. The venture soon collapsed financially. He also founded Les
Amis du Spartacus, a cinema club with 50,000 members. He shared in the
direction of Ciné-Liberté, which sponsored left-wing films and arranged
for their distribution, and which came under communist influence.
Ciné-Liberté specialized in militant documentaries like Jacques Lemaire’s
Les Métallos, and in showing films banned by the authorities. Jean
Renoir’s La Vie est à nous, censored by the Sarrault Government, was,
according to Thorez, given ‘to our Party’. Thorez likewise acclaimed the
film Temps des Cerises, made by the communist director Dreyfus. Faithful
to the Party after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Moussinac became after the war
a nationally respected authority on the cinema.

GEORGES SADOUL, a critic and historian of the cinema, a professor

at the Ir'ritu t de Filmologie de la Sorbonne, and an ardent communist,
had accompanied Aragon to the Kharkov Writers’ Conference in 1930.
He campaigned against the widely resented Blum-Bymes quota agree­
ment, which contributed to the closing down of a number of French
studios in the late ’forties. Sadoul was led to describe Garbo’s humorous
film Ninotchka as ‘une provocation à la guerre’ (Humanité, 17th March,
1949).

LOUIS DAQUIN, the leading communist film director, was during the
occupation a member of the clandestine Comité de Libération du Cinéma
Français. His first film, Nous les gosses (1941), emphasized the need for
comradeship among the poor. His major work was La Point du Jour9
about the life of the northern miners. Hostile to commercialism in the
369
 NOTES ON THE CINEMA

cinema and to the influence of large concerns like Gaumont and Pathé,
he praised the state of the cinema in the Popular Democracies. At this
time actors like Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Gérard Philippe and
Noël-Noël often lent their support to causes advanced by the Party.
When Daquin made Bel Ami, adapted for the screen from Maupassant’s
novel by Roger Vailland and Vladimir Pozner, the film was approved by
the censorship commission but banned at a ministerial level on the
ground that Maupassant's original conception had not been a politico-
social one. Daquin remained faithful to the Party after the Hungarian
Revolution.

JEAN-PAUL LE CHANOIS entered the film industry in 1930. He was

founder and director of the Fédération des Théâtres ouvriers de France.
His film La Vie d'un Homme (1939) was dedicated to the life of Vaillant-
Couturier. Active in the Resistance, his Au Ccmr de l'Orage traced the
struggles of the maquis. In 1955, he was awarded the Grand Prix du
Cinéma for his film Les Evadés, made with Pierre Fresnay.

370
 Bibliography

SEC O N D A R Y SO URCES
So wide a range o f background m aterial has a bearing o n this subject th a t no
com prehensive bibliography o f secondary sources is possible. T he histories
o f the Soviet U nion, o f F rance, o f international relations and o f the E uropean
M arxist m ovem ent over a period o f m ore th an forty years cannot be covered
adequately here. I have therefore selected a few w orks which have an im m ediate,
as opposed to general, relevance to this study. N o t all o f them are q uoted in the
text o r notes.
N o te: T he editions listed below are those q uoted in the text, and n o t always the
original ones. Useful translations and A m erican o r English editions o f shorter
pieces n o t available in F rench are also listed.

IN T E R N A T IO N A L C O M M U N IS M
BOOKS
The A n ti-S ta lin Cam paign and International Com m unism . A selection o f
docum ents, C olum bia U .P., New Y ork, 1956.
B arbu, Zevedei, D em ocracy and D ictatorship, Routledge, L ondon, 1956.
B orkenau, F ranz, The C om m unist International, F aber, L ondon, 1937.
B orkenau, F ranz, European C om m unism , Faber, L ondon, 1953.
C arew H u n t, R . N ., ‘W illi M uenzenberg’, in International Com m unism (ed.
D avid F ootm an), St. A ntony’s Papers N o. 9, C h atto & W indus, L ondon,
1960.
C arr, E. H ., The S o viet Im pact on the W estern W orld, M acm illan, L ondon,
1946.
C arr, E. H ., A H isto ry o f S o viet R ussia. Socialism in one C ountry, 1924-1926,
M acm illan, L ondon. Vol. I, 1958, vol. 2, 1959.
C attell, D avid C ., Com m unism and the Spanish C ivil W ar, C alifornia U .P.,
Berkeley, 1955.
C ohen, E lliot E. (ed.), The N ew R ed A n ti-S em itism , Beacon Press, B oston, 1953.
D allin, D avid J., an d Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Forced Labour in S o viet R ussia,
H ollis & C arter, L ondon, 1947.
D egras, Jane, ‘U nited F ro n t Tactics in the C om intern 1921-1928*, in In ter­
national Com m unism (ed. D avid F ootm an), St. A ntony’s Papers N o. 9,
C h a tto & W indus, L ondon, 1960.
D eutscher, Isaac, T ro tsky: the P rophet Unarmed 1921-1929, O .U .P., L ondon,
1959.
D jilas, M ilovan, C onversations w ith S ta lin , H art-D avis, L ondon, 1962.

371
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer, Louis, Men and Politics, D uell, Sloane, N ew Y ork, 1941.

Flem ing, D . F ., The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960, 2 vols., A llen and
U nw in, L ondon, 1961.
G ankin, O. H ., an d Fisher, H . H ., The Bolsheviks and the World War. The
Origin o f the Third International, S tanford U .P., 1940.
Huxley, Julian, Soviet Genetics and World Science, C h atto & W indus, L on d o n ,
1949.
Joli, Jam es, The Second International, 1889-1914, W eidenfeld & N icolson,
L ondon, 1955.
K rivitsky, W . G ., I was Stalin's Agent, R ight B ook C lub, L ondon , 1940.
L abedz, L eopold (ed.), Revisionism, A llen & U nw in, L ondon, 1962.
L azitch, B ranko, Lénine et la Ille Internationale. B aconnière, Paris, 1951.
Lazitch, B ranko, Les Partis Communistes d'Europe, 1919-1955, Les Iles d ’O r,
Paris, 1956.
Paloczi-H orvath, George, The Writer and the Commissar, Bodley H ead,
L ondon, M ay 1960.
Schapiro, L eonard, The Communist Party o f the Soviet Union, E yre & Spottis-
w oode, L ondon, 1960.
The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute, R oyal Institute o f In ternational Affairs, L ondon,
1948.
T hom as, H ugh, The Spanish Civil War, E yre & Spottisw oode, L ondon, 1961.
U lam , A dam , Titoism and the Cominform, H a rv ard U .P ., C am bridge, 1952.
V áü, Ference A., R ift and Revolt in Hungary, H arv ard U .P ., Cam bridge, 1961.
W erth, A lexander, Musical Uproar in Moscow, T urnstile Press, L ondon, 1949.
W ood, N eal, Communism and British Intellectuals, G ollancz, L ondon, 1959.
A R T IC L E
D ew ar, H ugo, ‘H ow they saw it. T he M oscow T rials’, Survey, A pril 1962.

P O L IT IC S IN F R A N C E
BOOKS
A ron, R obert, The Vichy Regime. 1940-1944, trans. by H um phrey H are,
P utnam , L ondon, 1958.
B audoin, M adeleine, Histoire des Groupres Francs ( M . U.R.) des Bouches-du-
Rhône de Septembre 1943 à la Libération, Presses U niversitaires de F rance,
Paris, 1962.
Beloff, M ax, ‘T he Sixth o f F ebruary’, in Decline o f the Third Republic (ed.
Jam es Joli), St. A ntony’s Papers N o. 5, C h atto & W indus, L ondon, 1959.
C hastenet, Jacques, Histoire de la Troisième République, 1870-1931, vol. 6,
1931-1938, H achette, Paris, 1962.
D uverger, M aurice (ed.), Partis Politiques et Classes Sociales en France, C olin,
Paris, 1955.
E arle, E. M . (ed.), Modem France, P rinceton U .P ., 1951.
E hrm ann, H enry W ., French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation, O .U .P .,
N ew Y ork, 1947.
Fauvet, Jacques, Les Forces Politiques en France, L e M onde, Paris, 1951.
F auvet, Jacques, La IVe République, L ibrairie A rthèm e F ayard, Paris, 1959.
G oguel, F rançois, Le Politique des Partis sous la Troisième République, E ditions
du Seuil, Paris, 1946.
Joli, Jam es, ‘T he M aking o f the P opular F ro n t’, in Decline o f the Third Republic,
St. A ntony’s Papers N o . 5, C h atto & W indus, L ondon, 1959.
L igou, D aniel, Histoire du Socialisme en France ( 1871-1961), Presses U ni­
versitaires de F rance, Paris, 1962.

372
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

M arcus, Jo h n T ., French Socialism in the Crisis Years, 1933-1936, Praeger,

N ew Y ork, 1958.
M ichel, H enri, Histoire de la Résistance, Presses U niversitaires de France,
Paris, 1950.
M ichel, H enri, a n d M irkine-G uetzévitch, Boris, Les Idées Politiques et Sociales
de la Résistance, Presses U niversitaires de France, Paris, 1954.
W erth, A lexander, France 1940-1955, R o b e rt H aie, L ondon, 1956.
W illiam s, Philip, Politics in Post-War France, Longm ans, L ondon, 1954.
A RTICLE
G irard et, R aoul, ‘N otes sur l’E sprit d ’u n Fascism e Français, 1934-1939’,
Revue de Science Politique, July-Septem ber 1955.

P O L IT IC S A N D F R E N C H IN T E L L E C T U A L S
A ron, R aym ond, The Opium o f the Intellectuals, trans. by T erence K ilm artin,
Seeker & W arburg, L ondon, 1957.
B rom bert, V ictor, The Intellectual Hero, L ippincott, N ew Y o rk , 1961.
C ruikshank, John, Albert Camus and the Literature o f Revolt, O .U .P., L ondon,
1959.
LUthy, H erbert, ‘T he F rench Intellectuals’, in The Intellectuals (ed. by G eorge
B. de H uszar), F ree Press o f Glencoe, 1960.
M aitro n , Jean, Histoire du Mouvement Anarchiste en France ( 1880-1914),
Société U niversitaire d ’E ditions et de L ibrairie, Paris, 1951.
M axence, Jean-Pierre, Histoire de D ix Ans, 1927-1937, G allim ard, Paris, 1939.
R oussot, V ictor, La Condition Economique et Sociale des Travailleurs Intellec­
tuels, U niversité de Paris, Paris, 1934.
Sachs, M aurice, La Décade de l'Illusion, G allim ard, Paris, 1950.
Sérant, Paul, Le Romantisme fasciste , Fasquelle, Paris, 1959.
T hody, Philip, Jean-Paul Sartre. A Literary and Political Study, H am ish
H am ilton, L ondon, 1960.

F R E N C H C O M M U N IS M
N o com prehensive w ork o n F rench com m unism exists. G é rard W alter,
Histoire du Parti Communiste Français, Som ogy, Paris, 1948, is well docu­
m ented, b u t it stops sh o rt a t 1940 an d confines its a ttention m ainly to the
Party, to w ard w hich it a dopts a friendly attitude. A lso friendly is A lexandre
Zévaès, Histoire du Socialisme et du Communisme en France, 1871-1947,
France-E m pire, Paris, 1947. Perhaps the m ost perceptive account is Jean-M arie
D om enach, ‘T he F rench C om m unist P arty’, in Communism in Western Europe
(ed. M . E inaudi), Cornell U .P., N ew Y ork, 1951.
O n the w ar years, useful inform ation is to be found in A lfred J. R ieber,
Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941-1947, C olum bia U .P ., N ew
Y o rk , 1962. T he m ost detailed studies o f this period are three (very hostile)
w orks by A . R ossi: Physiologie du Parti Communiste Français, Self, Paris,
1948; Les Communistes Français pendant la Drôle de Guerre, Iles d ’O r, Paris,
1951; L a Guerre des Papillons, 1940-1944, Iles d ’O r, Paris, 1954.
O n com m unism a n d th e w orkers, see particularly: H enry W . E hrm ann,
French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation, O .U .P ., N ew Y ork, 1947,
V al R . Lorw in, The French Labor Movement, H arvard, U .P., Cam bridge, 1954,
a n d C harles A. M icaud, Communism and the French Left, W eidenfeld a n d
N icolson, L ondon, 1963.
O n com m unism an d the peasants, see: G o rd o n W right, ‘T he Com m unists
a n d the P easantry’, in E. M . E arle (ed.), Modern France, Princeton U .P ., 1951,

373
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

a n d H enry W . E hrm ann, ‘T he F rench P easant a n d Communism*, American

Political Science Review, M arch 1952.
Useful, though hostile, general studies are: Pierre Fougeyrollas, ‘F rance’,
Survey, June 1962, H erbert L üthy, ‘W hy Five M illion Frenchm en V ote C om ­
m unist’, Socialist Commentary, D ecem ber 1951, D o ro th y M . Pickles, ‘T he
C om m unist Problem in F rance’, International Affairs, A pril 1952.
O n Party organization an d the P arty press etc, see: A lain Brayance, Anatomie
du Parti Communiste Français, D enoël, Paris, 1952, a n d C harles A . M icaud,
‘O rganization an d Leadership o f the F rench C om m unist P arty ’, World
Politics, A pril 1952.

C O M M U N IS T IN T E L L E C T U A L S IN F R A N C E
T he best (b u t brief) study to d ate is Jean-M arie D om enach, ‘Le P arti C om ­
m uniste F rançais et les Intellectuels’, Esprit, M ay 1959.
Useful biographical inform ation is contained in Jürgen R ühle, Literatur
und Revolution. Die Schriftseller und der Kommunismus, K iepenheuer & W itsch,
Berlin, 1960. F o r a broad perspective o n intellectuals a n d ideas, see G eorge B.
de H uszar, The Intellectuals. A Controversial Portrait, F ree Press o f G lencoe,
1960.
Interesting, b u t challengeable, theoretical argum ents o n the subject are to
be found in: Jean D uvignaud, ‘France: T he N eo-M arxists’, in Revisionism
(ed. L eopold Labedz), Allen & U nw in, L ondon, 1962, K . A . Jelenski, ‘T he
L iterature o f D isenchantm ent’, Survey, A pril 1962, a n d C harles A . M icaud,
‘F rench Intellectuals and C om m unism ’, Social Research, Sum m er 1954.
F o r hostile polemics, see: W . D rabovitch, Les Intellectuels Français et le
Bolchévisme, Les L ibertés Françaises, Paris, 1938, a n d F ernand Vial, ‘F rench
Intellectuals an d the Collapse o f Communism*, Thought, Septem ber 1940. O f
the tw o, D rabovitch is the m ore inform ative.
O n specific writers, see:
Brachfield, G eorges I., André Gide and the Communist Temptation, D roz,
G eneva, 1959.
D ubourg, M aurice, Eugène Dabit et André Gide9 Plaisir du Bibliophile, Paris,
1953.
Frohock, W . M ., André Malraux and the Tragic Imagination, S tanford U .P .,
California, 1952.
G araudy, R oger, VItinéraire d'Aragon, G allim ard, Paris, 1961.
H ow e, Irving, Politics and the Novel, M eridian Books, N ew Y o rk , 1957.
P arro t, Louis, an d M arcenac, Jean, Paul Eluard, Seghers, Paris, 1960.
Penrose, R oland, Picasso: H is Life and Work, G ollancz, L ondon, 1958.
P utnam , Sam uel, ‘A ndré G ide a n d C om m unism ', Partisan Review, N o v em b er-
D ecem ber 1934.
Vidal, A nnette, Henri Barbusse Soldat de la Paix, Les E diteurs F ran çais
R éunis, Paris, 1953.

P R IM A R Y S O U R C E S
D A IL Y N E W S P A P E R S
Aube, Combat, Daily Worker, Humanité, Figaro, Libération, Manchester
Guardian, Le Monde, New York Times, Observer, L'Œuvre, Le Populaire,
Le Temps, The Times (London).
374
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOU RN A LS AND PERIODICALS
Bulletin Communiste, Cahiers du Bolchévisme, Cahiers du Communisme,
Clarté, Commune, Confluences, Défense de la Paix, Démocratie Nouvelle, Esprit,
UExpress, Europe, Horizons, Les Lettres Françaises, Les Lettres Françaises
Clandestines, La Lutte des Classes, Monde, New Statesman and Nation, La
Nouvelle Critique, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, La Nouvelle Revue Française,
Partisan Review, La Pensée, La Revue Européenne, Les Temps Modernes,
Vendredi, La Voie Communiste.
B O OK S
A la Lumière du Marxisme (Essais), Editions Sociales Internationales, Paris,
1935.
A la Lumière du Marxisme, II, E ditions Sociales Internationales, Paris, 1937.
A la Mémoire de Raymond Lefebvre, Lepetit, Marcel Vergeat, E ditions de
l’Internationale C om m uniste, Petrograd, 1921.
A ngrand, Pierre, Etienne Cabet et la République de 1848, Presses U niversitaires
de F rance, Paris, 1948.
A ntelm e, R o b ert, Vespèce humaine. M arin, Paris, 1947.
A ragon, Louis, The Red Front, trans. by E. E. Cum m ings, C ontem po, N .
C arolina, 1933.
A ragon, L ouis, Hourra VOural., D enoël, Paris, 1934.
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A ragon, L ouis, Pour un réalisme socialiste, D enoël, Paris, 1935.
A ragon, L ouis. Les Beaux Quartiers, D enoël, Paris, 1936.
A ragon, Louis, Le Crève-Cœur, P antheon, New Y ork, 1943.
A ragon, Louis, Les Yeux d'Eisa, E dition H orizon, L ondon, 1943.
A ragon, Louis, Le Crime contre l'esprit. Les E ditions de M inuit, Paris, 1944.
A ragon, Louis, Comme je vous en dorme l'exemple. Textes de Jacques Decœur,
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A ragon, Louis, L'Homme Communiste, I, G allim ard, Paris, 1946.
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A ragon, Louis, La Culture et les Hommes, E ditions Sociales, Paris, 1947.
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on our Age, W ingate, L ondon, 1948.
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1951.
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1938.
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388
 Index

Abd-el-Krim, 206 Angrand, Pierre, 278, 283, 285, 286,

Abraham, Pierre, 121n, 332n 290n
Abramovitch, R., 204 Antelme, Robert, 154, 161, 182-4,
Abyssinia, 121,124, 208, 243 232, 330
Action, 46, 170 Anti-semitism, see Jews
Action Française, 93, 112, 113, 154, Aragon, Louis, 28,29,36,37,40,45-
238, 297 47, 55, 108n, 114-17, 119, 124,
Action Française, 154n 160, 163, 164, 166, 178, 185, 186,
Actors, 31n 195, 203, 206, 209, 246, 284, 315-
Adam, George, 152 317, 361-3
Adam, Paul, 96 as surrealist, 92, 95,98, 321
Adler, Alfred, 312 as anti-communist, 97
Adler, Friedrich, 107 conversion to communism, 96-9,
Adler, Victor, 50 221
Agulhon, Maurice, 279, 298 visits U.S.S.R., 98, 109, 321, 369
Alain, 114,115,121n and left sectarianism, 94, 100,
Alberti, Rafael, 188 101
Albrecht, Berthie, 160 praises Stalin, 129, 218
Alexandrov, G., 328 praises Thorez, 26, 220-2, 333
Algeria, 207-8, 342 on Moscow trials, 129, 130
Algerian revolution, 41, 210-12, and Maisons, 44n, 108
253, 257, 271, 284, 365 and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 137,139-46
Alikhanyan, 315 slanders Nizan, 139, 140, 144
Alleg, Henri, 212 in Resistance, 44, 150, 151, 157,
Alliance du cinéma indepéndant, 159, 186
44n and cult of heroes, 161-4
Allied intervention, 1918-20, 70, 71, anti-Americanism of, 194, 213
72, 88 as model communist, 39, 56
Alpatov, 278 patriotism of, 144, 199-200, 212
Alsace-Lorraine, 73, 148, 242 and Hungarian revolution, 45,
Amblard, 337 231,233
Amicales, 54,150 novels of, 139,140,144,198,221,
Amis de l’U.R.S.S., 106 332, 333
Amis du Spartacus, 369 as poet, 94,98,101,109,110,144,
Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, 26,43, 146, 157, 222, 321
106,114, 115 and socialist realism and Zhdano-
Anarchism, anarchists, 59,63,94,95, vism, 321,323-9,332,333,339-
96,99,105,106,119,121,135,154, 341, 343, 345, 346
247,289,294, 325, 346, 347 Die Arbeiterpolitik, 63
André, General, 283 Architects, 269n
Andreyev, 318 Arcos, René, 82,84,206n
Angrand, Cécile, 356 Armand, Félix, 288, 289
389
 IND EX

Aron, Raymond, 34, 45, 129, 213, and First World War, 59,60,62-
264, 354, 364 67, 88
Art Français, 150 and Bolshevik Revolution, 67,68,
V A rt Libre, 81 70, 135
Asher, Serge, 149 and P.C.F., 36, 73-6, 79, 93
Association des Ecrivains et Artistes and Clarté, 42, 43
Révolutionnaires, 44,46,108,114, as novelist, 59, 63, 65, 102, 319,
115,240 320
Association France-U.R.S.S., 310 on literature, 98, 101, 319, 321,
Association France-Yougoslavie, 178 323,324
Association Républicaine des An­ attitude toward masses, 73, 77,
ciens Combattants, 66,74,88 368
Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel d \ cast of mind, 65, 67, 77-9, 102,
149, 150, 168 105, 238, 239, 284, 362
Astronomy, astronomers, 301, 308 disputes with idealists, 80-2,84
Atlan, 330 defends U.S.S.R., 80, 109
Atlantic Alliance (Pact), 175, 188, director of Monde, 46, 98, 102,
250, 311, 338 103, 107, 321
Atomic weapons, 41,167,188-9,192, praises Stalin, 102, 216
310,311,338 anti-fascist, 36, 43, 103, 104, 108,
Attlee, Clement, 178 114
Aubel, Prof., 269n, 308 on nationalism, 197-8
Aubertin, Me., 359n on colonialism, 121, 206, 207
Audin, Maurice, 211-12 Barère de Vieuzac, B., 294
Audry, Colette, 120, 232, 253 Barjonet, André, 298
Aulard, Alphonse, 290 Barrabé, L., 311
Auriol, President, 338 Barrault, J.-L., 188
Austin, Warren, 192 Barrés, Maurice, 212, 221
Autant-Lara, Claude, 188-9 Barthou, Louis, 77, 80
Avant-Garde, 46, 79n, 152 Basch, Victor, 106,114,123,137,198,
Avdeenko, 323 206,309
Aveline, Claude, 116n, 121n, 151, Bassis, Henri, 219
158,176,179,181,184,187,232 Baudoin, Madeleine, 149, 154
Averbach, L., 319 Bauquier, Georges, 338, 339n
Aymé, Marcel, 96, 164, 334 Bayet, Albert, 123,150
Azaña, M., 118 Bayle, Pierre, 285
Bazalgette, Léon, 82
Babel, Isaac, 108 Beauvoir, Simone de, 93, 108, 126,
Babeuf, François (Gracchus), 13, 131, 173, 227
286, 290, 294-6 Becher, Johannes, 116, 319
Baby, Jean, 108n, 168,171,173,174, Béguin, Albert, 243
177, 181, 234, 266, 276, 277, 353, Beigbeder, Marc, 226
354 Belgium, invasion of (1914), 63
Bacon, Francis, 151, 173, 285 Beloyannis, 172
Barbé, Henri, 25,97 Benda, Julien, 36, 105, 106, 116n,
Barbusse, Henri, 25n, 26,27, 30, 37, 121, 123, 137, 176, 189, 239, 269,
70n, 73,92, 93, 101,108,115, 185, 270
339, 347, 361 Benes, E., 170
390
 INDEX
Bérard, Léon, 352 Blum, Léon, 83-5,100,114,116,118,
Berberian, Ordavazt, 338 166, 174, 350
Bergeron, R., 187n Blum-Byrnes Agreement, 213, 369
Bergson, Henri, 140, 226, 269, 270, Bhimel, André, 204, 359
301 Bodin, Louise, 89
Beria, L., 180 Boer War, 63
Berlioz, Joanny, 32n, 180, 213, 230 Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, 13, 24, 62,
Bemal, J. D., 361 68, 69, 71-73, 77, 80, 88, 105, 127,
Bernanos, Georges, 117, 153 128, 130, 155, 216, 246, 247, 291,
Bernard, Tristan, 96 318, 349
Bemier, Jean, 92, 97, 206n Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon (UI),
Bernstein, Eduard, 16, 207 277, 283, 289
Berthon, André, 358 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 277
Besse, Guy, 223, 224, 350, 351 Bonnafe, Dr., 312n
Besson, Georges, 115n, 228, 229, Bonnet, Georges, 123, 141, 142, 358
342 Bonte, Florimond, 143, 208, 327n
Bevin, Ernest, 167, 172 Borel, Prof., 159
Biard, Roger, 230, 279 Borodin, M., 246
Bibliothèque Française, 47 Bottigelli, E., 277
Bidault, Georges, 253, 306, 311 Boulanger, General, 283
Biely, A., 318 Boulangism, 112
Billiet, J., 356n Bourdet, Claude, 151, 211-12, 232
Billoux, François, 37, 55, 56, 295, Boureau, Guy, 354
343n Bourgeoisie, 17, 41, 50, 51, 94, 96,
Biology, biologists, 269n, 302, 303, 109, 180, 182, 197, 249, 282, 286,
308, 309, 312 292,294-6, 324, 334
genetics, 312-17, 367 Bourgin, G., 268n
Bismarck, Otto von, 148, 282 Bourse du Travail, 32
Blanc, Louis, 281, 283, 289 Bouthonnier, Paul, 282, 293
Blanqui, Auguste, 13, 286, 287, 290, Brandes, Georg, 42n, 82
291, 360 Brasillach, Robert, 199
Blanquism, 297 Braun, Me., 359
Blech, René, 108n, 115n, 150, 332n Brecht, Bertolt, 96, 115n, 116, 298,
Bloc National, 23, 43, 365 361, 363
Bloch, Jean-Richard, 61, 65n, 82, Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 71
115n, 121n, 164, 189, 206n, 343, Breton, André, 92, 94-9,181
360, 361,363, 368 Briand-Kellogg Pact, 80, 105
as idealist-sodalist, 65, 84, 102 Brombert, Victor, 262
anti-fasdst, 36, 106, 112, 113, Bruhat, Jean, 115n, 129, 167, 168,
116-18 194n, 198, 211
and P.C.F., 68,124 as historian, 276-82, 284, 286,
and U.S.S.R., 106,124,126,129 289, 290n, 291, 297
praises Stalin, 129, 217-18,285 Bruneau, G., 268n
during Second World War, 143, Brunschwicg, L., 140,269, 270
147, 155, 359 Bruyère, Georges, 66
and socialist realism, 321, 323, Bukharin, Nikolai, 72, 86, 90, 127,
324 129,131,133,226,301,322
Bloch, M., 268n Bulganin, Marshal, 180
391
 INDEX

Bulletin Communiste, 25, 46, 89, 90 28,37-41,49-56,176,179,185,

Bunin, I., 318 188, 226, 271, 316, 317, 327,
Buonarroti, Filippo, 13, 278, 286, 329, 330, 337, 340, 343, 366
290 Cassou, Jean, 45, 112, 116n, 118,
Burnham, James, 178,193,245,253 125, 150, 151, 153, 159, 166, 173,
Byrnes, James F., 173 177,179,182, 184, 185, 187,232
Catelas, Jean, 146,160
Cabet, Etienne, 278, 285-7 Caveing, Maurice, 268,270,271,272,
Cachin, Marcel, 23,25,30,36,37,73, 277
86, 87, 108, 222-3, 327n, 338,339, Céline, L.-F., 99
345 Celor, 25, 97
Cachin, Marie-Louise, 359n Centre Européen de la Recherche
Cagoulard conspiracy, 113 Nucléaire, 41
Cahen, Claude, 269n, 277, 314, 317 Centre National de la Recherche
Cahiers du Bolchévisme, 46,103,142, Scientifique, 41,155, 306,354
152,280 Cercle d’Art, 47
Cahiers du Communisme, 46, 211, Cercle de la Russie neuve, 147n, 265,
328, 333 266, 274, 276, 301, 303, 356
Cambon, P. J., 294 Césaire, Aimé, 211
Camelots du Roi, 112 Ce Soir, 4 6 ,115n, 124, 141
Camps, Chabrol, Jean-Pierre, 332n
Nazi, 151,156,160,161,163,182, ChaUaye, Félicien, 106, 107, 121n,
183, 184, 202, 303, 342 132
Soviet, 28, 125, 175, 177, 178, Chalonge, D., 268n
182-4, 193, 250, 252, 253, 359, Chambaz, Jacques, 277
367 Chamberlain, Neville, 123, 139, 140,
Camus, Albert, 175, 192, 366, 367 142
and P.C.F., 207 Chambers, Whittacker, 362
on Moscow trials, 128 Champs, G. de, 347
in Resistance, 151, 158n Chamson, André, 108, 112, 116n,
on Soviet camps, 182,253 117, 118, 120, 121, 126
breaks with communism, 184,187 Chant du Monde, 47
quarrels with Sartre, 249,252,253 Chapelon, J., 268n, 356n
Candide, 112 Chapelon, M., 308
Capitalism (anti-), 30-34, 50, 53, 62, Char, René, 154
65, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 83, 102,104, Chassériaux, T., 337
105, 110, 121, 130, 148, 153, 163, Chautemps, Camille, 112
166, 175, 176, 183, 198, 201, 264, Chemists, 3ln, 269n, 300, 308
303-6, 324, 325, 344, 357 Chennevière, André, 160
Carnot, L., 283,294 Chennevière, Georges, 84, 206n
Carr, E. H., 319 Chevalier, A., 268n, 308, 356n
Carrefour, 54 Chevalier (painter), 339n
Cary, Edouard, 213-14 Chiang Kai Shek, 195
Casanova, Danielle, 158n, 160, 161, Chiappe, Jean, 93, 358, 365
163,212,342 Chicherin, V., 136
Casanova, Laurent, 28n, 37, 158n, Chilton, Sir H., 118n
160, 213, 223, 229, 233 Chinese Peoples’ Republic, 179,195-
Party spokesman on intellectuals. 196, 209, 254, 306
392
 INDEX
Chollet, A., 268n, 356n Comité National des Ecrivains, 44-
Churchill, Sir Winston, 118,143,152, 47, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 199,
166, 167, 172, 174, 178, 217, 243, 203, 213, 231, 233, 248
333 Comité National Des Juristes, 44n,
Chvemik, 108 150
Ciné-Liberté, 369 Comité National des Médecins Fran­
Cité universitaire, 29 çais, 44n, 150
Clarté, 42,43, 66n, 70, 74-6, 84, 94, Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels
115, 264, 360 Antifascistes, 113,114, 347
Clarté, 43,46,47,69, 77,79n, 92, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique,
97, 102, 206 310, 311, 354
Claudel, Paul, 152 Commission Scientifique du Cercle
Clemenceau, Georges, 73,80 de la Russie neuve, 147n
Club de la Gauche, 272 Committee for Adhesion to the Third
Cocteau, Jean, 95 International, 67n, 74
Cogniot, Georges, 28n, 29, 37n, Committee for the Defence of the
47n, 76, 130, 193, 194n, 202, 214, French Cinema, 39
218, 220, 231, 268, 270, 271, 278 Commune, 46,108, 111, 115,121, 207
as Party spokesman, 27, 28, 41, Commune of Paris (1871), 13, 15,
49, 54, 55,178, 212, 276, 327n, 64, 148, 280-2, 287, 289, 291
338 Communist Front Organizations, 42,
on education, 349, 350, 351, 352, 43, 44n, 45, 46, 79, 106-8, 114,
356 115, 149,150,152,160, 310, 352
on nationalism, 200 C ommunist P arties:
Cohen, Francis, 147n, 220, 316, 317 British (C.P.G.B.), 11, 86,141
Cohen, Marcel, 32, 107n, 115n, 266, French (Parti Communiste Fran­
269n, 349, 356n çais), 11-14, 16, 18, 24, 27, 29-31,
Cold War, 28,54,167-71,174-6,251, 33-36,38-40,42-56,59,68,69,75,
292, 310, 312, 313, 354, 359 76, 79, 83, 84, 89, 94-99, 101, 113,
Cole, G. D. H., 86 124, 131, 134, 141, 150, 153, 159,
Colin, Paul, 42n 173,175,176,181-92,198,215,220,
Collaborators, 45, 83n, 85, 151, 360 223, 225, 237, 238, 241, 245, 251,
Collège de France, 133n, 156, 189, 253-5, 258, 265, 268, 271, 273-6,
306, 308 279-81, 283, 284, 286, 292, 302,
Colman, E. G., 304 307,309-12,315, 317, 323, 327-40,
Colonialism, 83, 121, 205-12, 253, 343-70
257,284, 363, 366 foundation, 14, 23, 73, 74, 83
Combat, 151,152 internal conflicts 1920’s, 25, 26,
Combat, 48n,54,153,175,182,247 86-92, 366
Combattants de la Paix et de la policy in 1930’s, 100, 108, 112.
Liberté, 44n 114, 115, 122, 135, 148, 207,
Cominform, 167, 168, 175, 177, 179 280, 282
Comintern, see International (Third) policy 1939-41, 136-9, 141-6
Comité d’aide à la Grèce, 310 trial of deputies (1940), 143
Comité de Libération du Cinéma and Resistance, 11, 28, 147-62,
Français, 369 243
Comité mondial contre le fascisme abandons revolution (1944-5), 15,
et la guerre, 106 163-5, 178, 222
393
 INDEX

Communist Parties, French (<coni.) 13th Congress of, 89, 319

isolation of (1947), 165-6, 359 20th Congress of, 18,56,169, 215,
and Cold War, 28, 166-71 223, 224, 231, 257, 272, 279
reaction to 20th Congress of 22nd Congress of, 317
the C.P.S.U., 56, 226-8, Spanish, 11, 119, 121
233, 257, 272 Yugoslav, 171, 177-80
and Hungarian revolution, Communist opposition,
227-234, 255 Russia, 63n, 89, 90, 92, 102, 127,
electoral strength of, 14, 15, 130, 132, 133
93, 114, 164, 165, 252 France, 88, 90-2, 110, 111, 131,
membership of, 14,15, 25, 93 132, 135, 136
number of intellectuals in, 23, Comnène, N. Petrescu, 123n
29, 92, 353 Condorcet, A.-N. de, 49,352
class composition of, 15, .17, Confédération des Travailleurs Intel­
25, 49n, 249, 334, 341 lectuels, 3ln
nature of leadership, 25, 46, Confédération Générale du Travail,
53, 223, 226, 337, 343 70, 73, 74, 165, 175, 231, 252, 289,
inner-Party democracy, 16, 38, 298, 339, 352
52.55.56.223.224, 229,233, Confédération Générale du Travail
234 unitaire, 352, 354
Political Bureau, 37, 42,55,75, Confédération International des Etu­
207, 224, 226, 327, 339, 346 diants, 31n
Secretariat, 42, 47, 55, 56, 90, Congress of Writers for the Defence
223.224, 227, 345, 346, 366
of Culture, 44, 115, 116, 124, 241
Central Committee, 25, 29, 37, Conseil National de la Résistance,
39, 55, 89, 90, 145,159, 163, 351
177, 195, 204, 224, 228, 229, Constituent Assembly (Russian), 72,
233,269, 280,317,328n, 343, 88
366 Cordeliers Club, 297
Com m ittee for Ideological Cornu, Marcel, 228
Supervision, 42 Cosmopolitanism, 201, 212
Party press, 35, 41, 45-48, 89, Cot, Pierre, 47, 118n, 168, 189
177, 187, 195, 255, 366 Cotton, Aimé, 113, 137, 159, 308-10,
Party schools, 355, 356 361
colonial policy, 15, 205-12, Cotton, Eugénie, 44n, 113, 159,
284, 366 188-9, 269n, 309, 310, 361
nationalism of, 15, 122, 198- Courbet, Gustave, 96, 339
201, 211 Courtade, Pierre, 29, 38, 166-8, 173,
and Jews, 201-5 177, 178, 193, 329, 332
pride in French culture, 212-14 on communist trials, 131, 181-2
German (K.P.D.), 11, 13,14, 26, on Nazi-Soviet pact, 140, 143
86, 103,104,115,186,199, 321, on Korean war, 190
325 on Indo-China and China, 195,
Italian (P.C.I.), H , 14, 86, 103, 209
115,164,178,199, 279 on Hungarian revolution, 229,232
of the Soviet Union (C.P.S.U.), defends Stalin, 224, 225
91, 98, 109, 167, 177, 179, 218, Crémieux, Francis, 202, 204
279,313,315,316,318, 332 Croix de Feu, 112
394
 INDEX

Crossman, R. H. S., 361 Déry, T., 233

Cult of personality, 215,220,279,368 Desanti, Dominique, 177, 185, 229
of Stalin, 105, 155, 178, 215-21, Desanti, Jean-T., 113, 220, 226, 229,
238, 278, 279, 285, 288, 307, 233, 268, 269n, 270, 272, 273
315, 316, 323, 339, 345, 346 Descargues, Pierre, 343
of Lenin and Trotsky, 216 Descartes, René, 285, 367
of Thorez, 220-2, 271, 279, 333, Cartesianism, 77, 105n, 219, 284,
334,338,339,341 285,288
of others, 222-3, 338, 339, 341 Desormière, Roger, 268n
Curie, Marie, 308, 309 Desprès, Fernand, 66
Curie, Pierre, 308 Diderot, Denis, 49,285
Cuvillier, Armand, 289 Dien, Raymonde, 210
Cyril, Victor, 42n, 70n, 92, 347 Dimitrov, George, 40, 103, 104, 106,
129,181,198,241,245,360
Dabit, Eugène, 108,110,121,125 Djilas, Milovan, 129,172,177, 327
Dadaism, 96 Dolléans, Edouard, 289
Daily Worker, 317 Domarchi, Jean, 268
Daix, Pierre, 140,143,145, 146, 161, Domenach, J.-M., 40
163, 169, 170, 180, 183, 187, 194n, Dommanget, Maurice, 290
217, 225, 231, 250, 315, 316, 328, Doriot, Jacques, 25, 100, 136, 160n
329, 332 Dormoy, Marx, 282
Daladier, Edouard, 114,123,138-42, Doumergue, G., 281, 282, 305
358 Dreyfus case, 12, 16, 63, 64, 88, 112,
Damiano, 338 143, 181, 283, 286, 325, 351, 358
Danton, G. J., 131 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 151
Daquin, Louis, 188-9, 192, 194n, Droit Français, 47
229, 361, 369, 370 Duelos, Jacques, 27, 29, 32, 36, 37,
Darwin, Charles, 314 41, 49, 50, 52, 53, 135, 139, 164,
Daudet, Léon, 99 169, 192, 195, 222, 224, 252, 294,
Daudin, H., 268n 307, 327n, 338, 343n, 345, 360
Daumier, Honoré, 96 Ducuing, Dr., 268n
Dautry, Jean, 283,285,288,289,291, Dudach, Georges, 160n
292, 297 Duhamel, Georges, 42n, 69, 81, 82,
David, J.-L., 337 84, 85, 102, 107n, 110, 153, 206n
Davies, Joseph, 129 Dujardin, E., 206n
Déat, Marcel, 100 Dulles, John Foster, 190,191,223
Debré, R., 268n Dunois, Amedée, 23n, 29, 59, 65,
Debû-Bridel, Jacques, 151 66,76, 87,91
Decour, Jacques, 115n, 147, 150, Dupin, Gustave, 63, 82
151, 160,162,284,356,361 Dupont, Pierre, 338
Défense de la Paix, 4 7 ,151n, 189 Duras, Marguerite, 154, 330
Delacroix, J. F., 96, 337 Durkheim, Emile, 147n
Delbos, Y., 354 Durtain, Luc, 36,82,84,85,102,111,
Dell, Robert, 43 121n, 125,137
Demain, 63 Duvignaud, Jean, 154, 179, 232, 267,
Démocratie Nouvelle, 47, 169, 171 330
Denikin, Anton, 81
Denis, Henri, 274,275,298 East Berlin rising, 194
395
 INDEX

Eastern Europe, see Popular Demo­ praises Stalin and Thorez, 219,
cracies 221, 222
Eastman, Max, 262,266 Emmanuel, Pierre, 232
Ebert, Friedrich, 83 Encyclopédie de la Renaissance
Eckhoud, 42n Française, Al
Ecole de Physique et Chimie, 83, 308 VEndehors, 96
Ecole laïque, 150 Engels, Friedrich, 50, 51, 79, 110,
Ecole libératrice, 147n 119, 164, 200, 267, 269, 274, 275,
Ecole libre des Sciences Politiques, 309, 316, 356
264 on science, 300, 302, 307
Ecole Nationale d’Administration, as historian, 276-9,281,284,287,
41 289, 291n, 293, 301
Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29, 94, Engineers, 25, 31n, 38, 350
95n, 147n, 207,264,265,308 Les Entretiens politiques et lit­
VEcran Français, 47 téraires, 96
Les Ecrivains Réunis, 47 Esprit, 48n, 165, 175, 187, 194, 211,
Eden, Anthony, 119 232, 274, 330
Editeurs Français Réunis, 47, 332n VEsprit, 264n
Editions d’Hier et Aujourd’hui, 47 Essenin, S., 318
Editions de Minuit, 158 VEtincelle, 234
Editions Rieder, 47 Etoiles, 150
Editions Sociales, 47 Europe, 46, 47, 52, 115n, 283
Editions Sociales Internationales, 47 European Defence Community, 41,
Education, 348-57 200
in U.S.S.R., 349,350,355 Existentialism, existentialists, 175,
P.C.F. programme, 350, 351 176, 247, 248, 255, 257
religious issue, 351, 352 VExpress, 211, 228, 255
Effel, Jean, 347
VEffort Libre, 65 Fadeyev, A., 185,188, 319, 321, 322,
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 96, 103, 108, 116, 327, 332, 344n, 345
155, 201, 204, 246, 344 Fajon, Etienne, 37, 55, 164, 208,
Einstein, Albert, 36,83,184,301,302 223, 327n, 330, 356, 359
Eisenstein, S., 94, 279, 369 de la Fare, 69
Elina, Odette, 339n Farge, Yves, 28,191
Eliot, T. S., 185 Farkas, M., 181
Eluard, Paul, 37, 45, 162, 163, 167, Fascism, fascists, 31, 40, 41, 44, 50,
195, 206n, 361 53, 101, 103, 104-6, 108, 117, 119,
as poet, 97, 116, 151, 157, 167, 120, 130, 171, 174, 178, 181, 186,
171, 172, 210, 219, 221, 328 194, 197, 227, 230, 243, 246, 250,
as surrealist, 92, 95, 99 254, 273, 303, 309, 326, 344
and P.C.F., 96, 97, 156, 328 in France, 27,93, 112,113, 114
and Spanish Civil War, 97, 116, Fast, Howard, 188
117 Faulkner, William, 213
in Resistance, 150, 151, 157 February (1934) riots, 112, 113, 116,
and Popular Democracies, 171, 363
177,181 Febvre, Lucien, 308
and Greek Civil War, 171-2 Fédération des Théâtres ouvriers de
and Peace Movement, 188-9 France, 370
396
 INDEX

Fédération musicale populaire, 44n Francis, Louis, 330

Fédération unitaire de renseigne­ Franco, General, 118n
ment, 352, 353 Franco-Soviet Pact (1935), 122, 198
Feix, L., 37n Le Franc-Tireur, 153
Fejtô, Francis, 181 Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français,
Feldmann, Valentin, 160 149, 151, 152, 156» 161, 360
Fellow-travellers, 19, 47, 107, 113, Franquistes, 112
149, 150, 168, 253, 318, 319, 321, Freikorps, 83
359 Fresnay, Pierre, 370
Fernandez, Ramon, 113, 136, 151, Freud, Sigmund, 312
239, 240, 241 Fréville, Jean, 76, 108n, 194n, 323,
Ferry, Jules, 284 349
Ferucd, Me., 359 Friedmann, Georges, 32, 108, 122,
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 115n, 126, 215 123, 127, 130, 131, 139, 150, 168,
Feuerbach, L., 267 175, 176, 206n, 215, 264, 266, 270,
Fifth (French) Republic, 18, 245 271, 273, 298
Le Figaro, 54, 71, 99, 111 Front National, 149, 150, 154, 242
Figuerès, Leo, 283 Front National des Arts, 44n, 150,
Films, 108, 220, 361, 369, 370 159n
Finland, Soviet attack on, 142, 143 Front National des Intellectuels, 150
First World War, 16, 59-65, 67, 68, Front National Universitaire, 44n,
70-73, 199, 286, 290, 325, 343, 150
346, 347, 357, 363 Front patriotique des Jeunes, 149
Fischer, Louis, 102, 109, 123n, 128, Frossard, L.—O., 23n, 73, 86, 87,
242, 361 100
Flandin, P.-E., 282
Foissin, Robert, 146 Gafencu, G., 123n
Follin, Dr., 312n Gaillard, Pol, 344
Force Ouvrière, 174 Galbez, A., 347
Forster, E. M., 116 Gâli, J., 233
Fougeron, André, 194n, 361 Gamarra, Pierre, 332
in Resistance, 159n Gamelin, General, 145
and P.C.F., 55, 340, 345 Gandhi, Mahatma, 81, 85, 104
as painter, 337-42, 368 Garaudy, Roger, 28n, 29, 108, 168,
and socialist realism, 327, 337, 171, 173, 198, 270, 283, 329, 332,
340, 345, 346, 366 354
Fougeyrollas, Pierre, 229 as Party spokesman, 28,33,36-39,
Fourier, Charles, 284, 285, 287-9 41, 51, 53, 164, 255, 276, 308,
Fournier, E., 121n 317, 327n, 328, 336, 338, 350
Fourrier, Marcel, 43, 77, 92, 97, on phoney war, 141
206n on Hungarian revolution, 228
Fourth (French) Republic, 18, 209, as polemicist, 132, 133, 186, 187,
284, 365 224,248,258,271
Frachon, Benoît, 222, 327n, 356n as philosopher, 248, 267-9, 272,
France, Anatole, 26, 36, 40, 42n, 65, 328
70n, 75-77, 82 Garbo, Greta, 369
France Nouvelle, 47, 333 Gamier, Noël, 42, 73, 88
France-Observateur, 211, 232 Gassier, H. P., 88, 174, 347
397
 INDEX

Gaulle, General Charles de, 15, Groussard, Serge, 203

144, 147, 148, 152, 164, 174, 185, Guatemala, 195,227
186, 208, 242, 243, 245-7, 250, Guéhenno, Jean, 68, 84, 93, 107n,
283, 350, 358 108,109,120-2,132
Genoa Conference (1922), 80 Guérin, Daniel, 120, 293-7
Georg, 336 Guesde, Jules, 13, 50, 75n, 263, 276,
George, Pierre, 298 286, 290
Gerassimov, Sergei, 188, 330, 339 Guiberteau, Madeleine, 339n
German rearmament, 41 Guilbeaux, Henri, 59, 60, 63n, 64,
Gero, E., 181, 230, 256 65, 67-69, 71, 80, 105n, 128, 135,
Gestapo, 120,130,132,147,150,151, 136, 216-17, 357
161, 177, 184, 363 Guillan, Allix, 330
Giap, General, 209 Guillemot, Me., 359n
Gide, André, 36, 65, 108, 113, 115, Guillevic, 162, 174, 191, 219, 223,
121n, 152, 237, 242, 245, 273, 361, 329
368 Guilloux, Louis, 121n, 321
visits Congo, 207, 238 Guyot, Raymond, 37n, 41, 138, 234,
and U.S.S.R., 121, 125, 127, 132, 327n
134, 135, 238-41
attacked by communists, 51,121, Hadamard, Jacques, 135
185-7, 238, 366 Hajje, Me., 159, 359
and Spanish Civil War, 120, 125 Halbwachs, Maurice, 308
mentality, 105, 238-41, 362 Haldane, J. B. S., 302, 313, 314, 317
independence, 238, 240, 241 Hamelin, Prof., 279
and socialist realism, 40, 240, Hamilton, Alexander, 151, 152, 173,
244, 324, 344 213
Gide, Charles, 42n, 85, 206 Hamp, Pierre, 83-85,206, 321
Gil, 339n Hanafif, E., 356n
Gimond, Marcel, 188, 337, 339 Hardy, Thomas, 42n
Ginollin, Mme, 145, 146 Harel, Dr., 228, 229
Giono, Jean, 114n Haudricourt, André, 291n
Giraudoux, Jean, 153 Hày, G., 233
Girondins, 84, 109, 293-5 Hébert, J. R., 294-7
Goebbels, J., 132, 174, 303 Hegel, Friedrich, 95, 97, 267, 274
Gomulka, W., 180, 182, 228, 256 Hegelianism, 49, 96, 271, 278, 367
Gooch, G. P., 277 Hemingway, Ernest, 117, 222
Gordey, Michel, 173 Henry-Jacques, 42n, 70n
Gorky, Maxim, 36, 64, 98, 109, 134, Hepburn, Katharine, 174
135, 159, 216, 303, 318, 319, 322, Herbart, Pierre, 121
323, 349 Hernández, Jésus, 119
Grave, Jean, 346, 347 Herr, Lucien, 264, 265
Greco-Turkish war, 78,80 Herriot, Edouard, 283
Greek Civil War, 166, 171-3, 193 Hervé, Pierre, 165n, 172, 174, 267
Grenard, 71 in Resistance, 150, 153
Gringoire, 112,113 as post-war rebel, 165, 173, 208
Gromaire, 336 as Stalinist, 28, 178, 181, 186-7,
Groupe ouvrier et paysan, 138 195, 329
Groupes Francs, 149 and Jews, 202, 204-5
398
 INDEX

Hervé, Pierre (cont.) 132, 137, 138, 140, 168, 175, 176,
expelled from P.C.F., 223-4, 184, 185, 187, 189, 251, 258, 284,
234, 254, 255 364, 366
Hesse, Herman, 134 Iglesias, Pablo, 50
Hessen, B. M., 304 Independent Socialist Party
Hewlett Johnson, Dr., 168 (German), 83
Historians, 266, 276-98 Indo-Chinese war, 193, 207-10, 253,
and P.C.F., 222, 269n, 276, 278, 337, 338, 365
279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, Institut du Radium, 308, 309
290n, 292, 295 Institut pour l’Etude du Fascisme, 114
Soviet, 278, 279, 295 Internationals:
historiography, 47, 55, 278-98, First, 289
356, 357 Second (Socialist), 23, 50, 61, 62,
historical materialism, 248, 276, 73, 107, 206, 288, 325
277, 280, 284, 290 Third (Communist, Comintern),
Hitler, A., 103, 104, 106, 112, 121-3, 13, 23, 30, 42, 63n, 64, 65, 67n,
130, 138, 140, 142-5,147,149,158, 73, 89,100,104,107, 246, 280
171, 178, 185, 186, 204, 207, 217, Twenty-one conditions, 73, 74,
240, 283, 303, 325 86
Hobbes, Thomas, 155, 285 1st Congress, 63n, 68,136
Hobsbawm, E. J., 361 2nd Congress, 69, 205
Ho Chi Minh, 209-10 3rd Congress, 86
Horizons, 47, 15In, 234 4th Congress, 87, 89
Hugo, Victor, 26, 289, 352 5th Congress, 50, 89, 90
Humanité, 23, 25, 27, 28n, 35, 36, 6th Congress, 25, 100, 102, 280
45, 46, 62, 63n, 71, 74-6, 80, 82, 7th Congress, 44, 197
84, 88, 89, 93, 94, 100, 118, 121, and the P.C.F., 30, 84, 86, 87,
135,141,145,146,150,152,160-3, 91, 138, 358
180, 189, 191, 193, 195, 208, 213, anti-war line (1939-41), 138,
229, 230, 233, 238, 255, 268, 333, 140, 143
340, 342, 345, 362 International Association of Revo­
Hungarian revolution (1956), 18, lutionary Writers, 319
46, 56, 227-34, 367 International Conferences of Pro­
Petöfi Circle, 227, 228, 231 letarian Writers (1927 and 1930),
fate of writers, 232-3 98, 319, 321, 369
Radio Free Europe, 232 International League of the Fighters
effects in France, 154n, 211, for Peace, 104
227-34, 255-7, 343, 370 International rouge de l’Enseigne­
Husserl, E., 226 ment, 278
Husson, M., 352 Izvestia, 72n, 120, 121, 131, 139, 218
Huxley, Aldous, 116
Huxley, Julian, 300 Jacobins, 101, 282, 287, 288, 291,
Hyndman, H. M., 50 293,294,296,297
Montagnards, 290, 294
Ibanez, Vincente Blasco, 42n Committee of Public Safety, 13
Ibarurri, Dolores, 119, 120 Jaurès, Jean, 50, 64, 65, 74, 75n, 76,
Idealist intellectuals, 18, 47, 65, 68, 84, 263, 264, 276, 283, 284, 286,
70, 80-5, 95, 105-7, 110, 121, 125, 289,290,325
399
 INDEX

Jeanson, Francis, 211-12, 253 Kahane, E., 269n

Jefferson, Thomas, 151, 152, 173, Kaldor, Me., 359n
213 Kamenev, Lev, 89, 90, 130
Jelenski, K. A., 262, 266 Kanapa, Jean, 33, 34, 37, 166, 169,
Je Suis Partout, 112, 154n 170, 177, 180, 181,194n, 199, 226,
Jeunes Filles de France, 160 270,329,349,350
Jeunesses Communistes, 44n, 79n, as polemicist, 132, 186, 187, 224,
160 252, 253, 255
Jeunesses Patriotes, 112 and P.C.F., 29, 39
Jews, 160, 180, 201-5, 282 Kant, E., 226
Union of Jewish Socialist Kardelj, E., 177
Workers (Bund), 201, 204 Käst, Pierre, 330
Israel and Zionism, 201-5 Kautsky, Karl, 30, 50
anti-semitism, 105,113,193,201- Kayser, Jacques, 106, 121n
205, 225, 254, 282, 367 Kazakievich, Emmanuel, 204
Joannès, Victor, 29, 194n Kestemberg, Dr. E., 312n
Joffe, A. R , 304 Kestemberg, Dr. J., 312n
Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 37, 161, 168, Keynesianism, 85, 169
184, 199, 231, 306-8, 356n, 361, Khrabrovitski, M. D., 189
363 Khrushchev, Nikita, 180
anti-fascist, 115 on Stalin, 56, 127, 129, 202, 215,
and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 137, 309 217-18, 220, 224-6, 257, 331
and P.C.F., 36, 156, 309 Kino-Technikum, 369
and Resistance, 44, 147 Kirov, S., 129
and Peace Movement, 188-9 Koechlin, C., 268n
praises Stalin, 220 Koestler, Arthur, 23, 26, 133, 185-7,
and Atomic Energy Commis­ 249, 262, 360, 362, 365-7
sariat, 311, 354 Darkness at Noon, 128, 132-4,
on bacteriological warfare, 191-2 186, 225
on atomic weapons, 41, 310, 311 Kol, H. Van, 207
as physicist, 302, 308, 309 Kolchak, A., 81
and Soviet science, 305 Kollontai, Alexandra, 67
and Marxism, 302 Korean war, 162, 163, 179, 189-93,
Joliot-Curie, Irène, 37,44n, 137, 156, 195, 204, 251, 253, 271
170, 174, 302, 306, 308-11, 361 bacteriological warfare, 191-2,
Jolivet, A., 268n, 356n 195, 340
Jouglet, René, 332n Rostov, T., 128, 177, 180-2, 250,
Jourdain, Francis, 32, 36, 45, 106, 360
107, 135, 147, 156, 206n, 207, 219, Koudachova, Maria, 105n
228, 233, 339, 356n, 363 Kravchenko, V., 168, 182-4, 359
Journalists, 31n, 35, 48, 79, 151, 162, Kriegel, Annie, 233
163,191,213 Krivitsky, W. G., 128, 132
Jouve, P. J., 65, 82, 85 Kronstadt mutiny (1921), 91, 180
Jouvenel, Renaud de, 177, 180, 329 Kropotkin, Peter, 294, 346
Julien, A., 88 Krupskaya, N., 349
Jung, Carl, 312 Kun, Bela, 70
Kuprin, A., 318
Kádár, J., 180,229-33 Kuusinen, O., 142
400
 INDEX

Labérenne, Paul, 115n, 231, 301, Lebanon, 208

304, 356n Lebovici, Dr. S., 312n
Laboratories, 31,306,308 Lecache, B., 88
Labourbe, Jeanne, 69 Lecercle, J. -L., 287
Labour Party, 61, 100, 175, 188, 223, Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 194n, 370
251,256 Leclerc, Guy, 249
Lacan, Pierre, 160n Lecoeur, Auguste, 14, 15, 51, 52,
Lacassagne, Prof., 311 55, 327, 341
Lafargue, Paul, 13, 276 Le Corbusier, 36
Laffitte, Jean, 183, 332 Ledermann, Me., 359
Lafitte, V., 269n Leduc, Victor, 29, 170, 182, 187,
Lalou, René, 121n 200, 233
Lamarck, J. B., 314 Lefebvre, Georges, 278n, 290, 293,
Lamartine, Alphonse, 96, 292 295, 308, 356n
Langevin, Hélène, 147n Lefebvre, Henri, 98, 115n, 155, 156,
Langevin, Luce, 269n 206n, 343, 354
Langevin, Paul, 37, 47n, 121n, 199, as Marxist, 264, 266-8, 270-2,
268, 285, 308, 310, 350, 356n, 361, 285
363, 368 as sociologist, 269n, 291n, 298,
defence of Marty, 83 299
and Bolshevik Revolution, 83 influence of, 267
anti-fascist, 36,104,106,107,112, and P.C.F., 233, 272, 361, 366
114,115,310 critique of Stalinism, 272
anti-appeasement, 118, 123, 135 Lefebvre, Raymond, 42n, 59, 66n,
and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 137, 140, 70n, 73, 74, 78, 92, 198
143, 309, 359 and First World War, 60, 61,63,
in Resistance, 147, 156, 159 66, 78, 88
and P.C.F., 36, 68, 83, 140, 156, and Bolshevik revolution, 66,68,
309 69, 71, 264
and U.S.S.R., 304 Left Communists, 87, 88
as physicist, 30, 308 Left Literature Front, 319
and Marxism, 301, 302 Legay, Kléber, 131
Laniel, J., 306 Léger, Fernand, 36, 188, 336, 339,
Lansiaux, Marie-Anne, 338 340, 342-4, 361, 366, 368
Largo Caballero, R , 117 Le Guillant, Dr. Louis, 202, 312n
Lattre de Tassigny, General de, 209 Leins, Michel, 232
Latzko, Andreas, 42n LeLéap, A., 252
Laval, Pierre, 31, 181, 207, 305 Lemaire, Jacques, 369
Lawrence, T. E., 243,247 Lenin, V. I., 24, 50, 68, 70-2, 74,
Lawyers, 3In, 159, 269n, 348, 357- 76, 81, 84-7, 90-2, 131, 138, 215,
360 216, 223, 224, 226, 245, 252, 270,
Laxness, H., 188, 361 277, 279, 290, 294, 301, 309, 315,
Lazard, Michel, 317 318, 322, 323, 349, 356
Lazare, Bernard, 96 and First World War, 60-65,
Lazare, G., 269n 67, 68, 72, 199
Lazzo, René, 228 on ideology, 49, 50
League of Nations, 80,104,107,130, Leninism, 54, 56, 59, 63, 65,128,
274 208
401
 INDEX

Leonov, L., 218 Lurçat, Jean, 36, 206n, 336

Les Lettres Françaises, 47, 52, 55, Lussy, Charles, 88
150-4,168,173,174,180,183,193, La Lutte des Classes, 92
203, 226, 227, 231, 248, 315, 332, Luxemburg, Rosa, 70, 179
345, 359 Lycées ouvriers, lycées populaires,
Levellers (English, 1649), 286 350
Lévine, Me., 358 Lyon-Caen, Gérard, 228
Lévy, G., 23n Lysenko, T. D., 220, 226, 304, 305,
Levy, Hyman, 205n 307, 312-17, 330, 366
Lévy, Jeanne, 194n, 269n, 308
Lhote, 336 MacArthur, General Douglas, 193
Libération, 149,152 McCarthy, Joseph, 193
Libération, 47, 254 McCarthyism, 193, 195, 251, 365
Librairie de l’Humanité, 47 MacMahon, President, 281, 282
Libraries, 31, 49 Madagascar, 208-9
Liebknecht, Karl, 63, 64, 70, 77 Maisons de la Culture, 44n, 46, 115,
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 50 120,161, 308, 336, 340, 342n, 343
Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 83, Majority Socialists, 70
88, 89, 104, 106, 114, 123, 132, Malik, Joseph, 190
308 Mallarmé, Stephen, 96
Linguistics, 266, 269n Malraux, André, 29n, 36, 105, 108,
Linkskurve group, 321 115, 193, 237, 242-7, 363
Lipchitz, 336 and Chinese revolution, 186, 207,
Li Seung Man, 190 246, 247
Literature, belles-lettres, 55, 95, 96, anti-fasdst, 112, 241, 243, 245,
222,247-9, 318-35, 356 246
communist attitude, 213, 318, and Spanish Civil War, 116n,
323, 327-30, 332 118n, 186, 246, 247
Soviet policy, 105, 124, 218, 318, breaks with communism, 242,
319, 321-3, 326, 327, 331, 332 243-5, 361
Littérature, 95 in Resistance, 150, 151, 242
Litvinov, Maxim, 122, 123, 136 influence of, 154, 163, 242, 274
Lloyd George, David, 73 and U.S.S.R., 242-5
Locarno treaties, 80 as Gaullist, 242-3, 245-7
Locke, John, 151, 173, 285 attacked by communists, 185-7,
Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 71 336
Lois scélérates, 93 on colonialism, 121, 243
Longuet, Jean, 83 on western culture, 243, 244
Longuet, Karl, 339 as aesthete, 244
Loriot, F., 23n, 91 his novels, 242, 244, 246, 247
Loubet, President, 65 and socialist realism, 244, 321,
Louis, Paul, 23n 324, 328
Louvre, 41 Malraux, Clara, 179, 232, 330, 332n
Luce, Maximilien, 346 Man, Henri de, 102
Lukács, G., 232 Mandel, Georges, 202
Lunacharsky, A., 24, 49, 67, 105, Manguin, G , 268n
318, 349 Manier, St., 88
Lurçat, A., 269n Mann, Heinrich, 115n
402
 INDEX

Manuilsky, D., 88, 358 Marxist study days, 29, 55, 268,
Manville, Me., 359n 269, 277, 354, 359
Maquis, 165, 370 and historiography, 248, 276,
M arat, J.-P., 13, 294, 295 277, 280, 284, 290
Marcenac, Jean, 332n, 337 and science, 300-5, 307, 309, 312,
Marchand, René, 71, 72, 357 314-16
Margueritte, Victor, 107, 112, 206n Marx, Magdeleine (Paz), 42n, 61,
Marion, Paul, 100, 160n 70n, 78, 80, 91, 92, 102, 103, 110,
Maritain, Jacques, 117, 239 111, 116, 131, 132, 216-17, 241,
Markos, General, 172, 173,177 363
Marr, N., 266 Marzin, Madeleine, 147n
Marrane, Georges, 149 Mascolo, Dionys, 154, 169, 182, 253,
Marshall Plan, 166, 173-5, 187, 188, 329, 330, 331, 361, 368
200,214,250 Masereel, Franz, 336, 342n
Martin, Henri, 83, 210,253,337,342, Matarasso, Me., 359
343 Mathematics, mathematicians, 300,
Martm-Chauffier, Louis, 45, 121n, 301, 308
150, 151, 161, 166, 168, 175, 179, Mathiez, Albert, 290,293,295,297
185, 187-9, 192, 232, 233 Maublanc, René, 107n, 115n, 143,
Martin du Gard, Roger, 107n 147, 185, 187, 191, 206n, 231, 266,
Martinet, Gilles, 232 268, 288, 289, 339, 356n, 359
Martinet, Marcel, 59, 73, 75, 102, Mauriac, François, 45, 117, 149, 152,
110, 185, 206n 185, 195
and Bolshevik Revolution, 68 Mauvais, Léon, 37
and First World War, 60, 61, 63, Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 98, 154, 318,
65,66 321, 323
and P.C.F., 87, 91, 92, 95, 97, Mayer, Daniel, 166, 174
361, 363 Medicine, 33, 55, 303, 308
attacks idealists, 82 doctors, 31n, 33, 164n, 189, 269n
on education, 351, 355 Médecine Française, 150
as writer, 66, 320, 321 Mendel, G., 312
Marty, André, 25, 36, 55, 83, 165, Mendès-France, Pierre, 134,210,306
208-9, 222, 327n Mensheviks, Menshevism, 25, 69,
Marx, Karl, 30, 33, 49-52, 77, 79, 102, 301
95, 105, 119, 155, 200, 221, 223, Mercier, 339
239, 267, 270, 274-9, 281, 283, Meren, Pierre, 233
287-9, 291-3, 298-302, 309, 339, Meric, V., 23n
356, 360 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38, 133,
Marxism, 39, 47, 51, 52, 54, 64, 68, 134, 176, 183, 225, 226, 250, 270,
84, 102, 110, 134, 175, 202, 211, 271, 365
234, 254, 255, 257, 269, 328, 355, Mesnil, Jacques, 82, 110
356, 362 Meyerhold, V., 78
influence on communist intel­ Miailhe, Mireille, 339n, 342
lectuals, 96, 106, 261-75, 363, Micaud, C. A., 48n
364, 365 Michael, Georges, 92
development of in France, 263, Michaut, Victor, 37, 327n
264,276 Michel (ed. of Tocsin), 69
distorted, 127, 215, 255, 269-71 Michel, Henri, 161
403
 INDEX

Michurin, I. V., 304, 313-16 188-90, 211, 233, 234, 253, 311
Middle dass, 17, 28, 51, 52, 281 Stockholm appeal, 189, 192
Mikoyan, A., 224 Mouvement de Libération Nationale,
Milhau, Jean, 338 149, 150, 242
Millán Astray, General José, 246 Mouvement Républicain Populaire,
Miller, Arthur, 174 174, 200, 252, 352
Miller, Henry, 187 Mouvements Unis de Résistance,
Millerand, A., 23, 73, 74, 80 149,153
Mindszenty, Cardinal, 173 Muenzenberg, Willi, 43, 106-8, 114
Mineur, Henri, 115n, 301, 304, 308 Muenzer, Thomas, 286
Mirabeau, Octave de, 131, 294 Muller, H. J., 312
Mirande, Renée, 359n Munich agreement, 121-4, 135, 142,
Mirbeau, Octave, 96 273, 274, 365
Mittelberg, 339n, 347 Musée d’Art Moderne, 150
Moch, Jules, 165, 166, 174, 311 Musée de l’Homme, 147
Mocquet, Guy, 160 Musicians, 3ln, 32
Mollet, Guy, 210, 256 Mussolini, B., 85, 113, 134, 177, 185,
Molok, 278 208, 243
Molotov, V., 138, 139, 144, 148
Monatte, Pierre, 357 Nadeau, Maurice, 232
Monde, 46, 98, 102, 103, 110 Nagy, Imre, 227, 256
Monmousseau, Gaston, 222, 327n, National Guard, 292
357 Nationalism, 105, 197-201, 211, 245
Monnerot, Dr., 312n N.A.T.O., 195, 311
Monnerot, Jules, 253, 262, 263, 275 Naville, Claude, 241
Monnet, Georges, 103 Naville, Pierre, 97, 110, 254, 255
Montand, Yves, 45, 189, 370 Nazis, Nazism, 26, 27, 41, 85, 103,
Moran, Denise, 332n 113, 115n, 125, 126, 136, 137, 139,
Morel, E. D., 42n, 43n, 64 142, 144, 148, 155, 158, 160, 174,
Morgan, Claude, 45, 47, 115n, 151, 176, 193, 199, 310, 313, 333, 359
152, 168, 174, 184, 189, 199, 223, Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 14, 28, 137-
225-9, 234, 359 143, 145, 146, 242, 243, 245, 366,
Morgan, T. H., 313 369
Morhardt, M., 102n Neruda, Pablo, 154, 188, 361
Morin, Edgar, 99,154, 155, 170, 181, New Economic Policy, 25, 78, 86,
182, 190, 199, 213, 225, 242, 262, 100, 318
267, 328-30, 361, 362 Nietzsche, R , 221, 243
Moroccan war (1925), 79, 80, 97, Nikulin, Lev, 99
206-7, 358, 365 Nin, Andrés, 120, 135
Mossé, Qaude, 277,291n Nitti, Prof., 308
Mougin, Henri, 265n, 289 Nizan, Paul, 95n, 98, 108, llOn, 121,
Mouillard, M., 187n 354, 361
Mounier, Emmanuel, 121n and colonialism, 207
Mounin, G., 187n and P.C.R, 95, 139, 247, 265
Moussinac, Léon, 36,45,75,93, 103, visits U.S.S.R., 126, 321, 349
107, 108n, 115n, 129, 140, 142, and Moscow trials, 131
150, 159, 160n, 188, 323, 360, 369 in Spain, 117
Mouvement de la Paix, 28, 41, 44n, and Munich, 122,123
404
 IND EX
Nizan, Paul (cont.) Parijanine, Maurice, 83, 84, 92
and Nazi-Soviet pact, 139, 140, Parmelin, Hélène, 163, 191, 228, 229
144, 242, 326 Parti Populaire Français, 100, 136,
übelled, 139, 140, 144, 185-6 160n
as novelist, 94, 139, 324, 326 Pascal, Pierre, 71, 72, 80, 135, 357
as philosopher, 239, 264, 265, Pasternak, Boris, 218
269-71 Pastor, Joseph, 149-50
N.K.V.D., 127, 182 Pauker, Anna, 203
Nobel prizes, 75, 185, 220, 303, 308 Paul, Louis, 108n
Nodier, Pierre, 264 Paul-Boncour, J., 100, 198
Noël-Noël, 189, 370 Paulhan, Jean, 151
Nordmann, Me. Joë, 359 Peace Movement, see Mouvement de
Noske, Gustav, 74, 83 la Paix
Nouvel Age, 46 Peasantry, 15, 49n, 72, 107n, 111,
La Nouvelle Critique, 30, 47, 52, 194, 119, 139, 191, 212, 241, 256, 281,
226, 229, 230, 233, 252 282, 296, 341, 343, 344, 346, 349,
La Nouvelle Médecine, 47 367
La Nouvelle Reforme, 234 Péguy, Charles, 65
Nowa Kultura, 230 Peloquin, A., 268n
La Pensée, 47, 52, 147n, 211, 231,
Obersovsky, G., 233 268, 269, 277, 314, 317, 356
OGPU, 119, 120, 130 People’s Democracies, 28, 169, 170-
Orcel, Prof., 231, 269n, 311 172, 174, 177, 178, 226, 274, 275,
Organisations de Rapprochement 292, 306, 369
avec les Pays Démocratiques, 44n trials in, 127, 131, 177, 180-2,
Orlando, V., 73 184, 193, 225, 250, 360
Orwell, George, 120 Albania, 171
Ouvriérisme, 51, 52, 321 Bulgaria, 170, 171, 172, 180
Owen, Robert, 284 Czechoslovakia, 170, 171, 175
Hungary, 171, 180, 181, 227-34
Painters and artists, 33, 37, 38, 96, Poland, 170, 171, 180, 182
159n, 161, 191, 210, 336-47 Rumania, 170-2
and P.C.F., 336-40, 343, 345, Le Père Duchesne, 297
346 Péret, 96
Painting and sculpture, 336-47 Péri, Gabriel, 29, 93, 162, 361
on contemporary themes, 338- conversion to communism, 79,
345 273,274
of poütical leaders, 338, 339, 341, as journalist, 79n, 362
342, 345, 346 on foreign affairs, 79n, 118, 119,
Soviet, 330, 339, 340, 343 122,141
censorship of, 338 in Resistance, 79n, 148, 160
and anarchism, 346, 347 Perrin, Jean, 3 6 ,121n, 137,184, 306,
and socialist realism, 336, 339- 308, 309
342, 346, 347 Penis, Jean, 168, 269n
Paix et Démocratie, 123 Pesqué, Dr., 160n
Panama scandal, 112 Pétain, Phiüppe, 133, 152, 158, 181
Parain, Charles, 266, 277, 291n Petit, General, 217
Pares, Sir Bernard, 129, 130 Petkov, N., 245
405
 INDEX

Petrograd: French communist group Polyakov, 315

at, 69 Ponge, Francis, 154, 330
Philip, André, 150 Pontremolli, Muriel, 330
Philippe, Gérard, 189, 370 Poperen, Jean, 295, 297
Philosophers, philosophy, 55, 97, 98, Le Populaire, 68, 174, 353
113, 122, 226, 239, 261-75, 356, Popular Front (France, 1935), 38,53,
357 114, 116, 120-2, 126, 130, 141,
Philosophies, 97, 11On, 206, 264-6, 142, 150, 153, 187, 198, 212, 247,
308 280, 282, 305, 306, 326, 336, 343,
Phoney War, 28, 137-46, 150, 221, 350, 358, 364, 366
332 Populists, Narodniks, 13, 19
Physics, physicists, 269n, 301-3, 308, Porchnev, 278
309 Post-Impressionists, 96, 346
Picard, Edmond, 42n Pouget, Emile, 346
Picasso, Pablo, 36, 37, 40, 45, 55, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unifi­
56, 99, 117, 156, 159, 188-9, 191, cación), 119, 120
194-5,228,244, 330, 337, 338,340, Pozner, Vladimir, 108n, 370
343-6, 361, 363, 366 Pravda, 99, 197, 201, 215, 218, 295
Pickles, Dorothy M., 311 Prenant, Auguste, 33, 34
Picon, Gaëtan, 242 Prenant, Marcel, 34, 36, 115n, 135,
Pierre-Quint, 114n 206n, 231, 303, 350, 354, 356
Pignon, Edouard, 159n, 195, 228, and P.C.F., 234, 317, 361
337-40, 342, 343, 366 in Resistance, 149, 161, 309
Pilniak, Boris, 108 on capitalism, 303, 306
Pilsudski, J., 74, 79 on war, 310, 311
Pinay, A., 192, 200, 306 on bacteriological warfare, 191-2
Pioch, Georges, 59, 64, 67, 68, 80, as biologist, 274,302,304,308,309
85, 88, 97, 104, 107n, 131, 132, on Soviet science, 304, 305
206n and Lysenko, 305, 313-17, 366
Piscator, Erwin, 96 Principles of utility, 34-48, 76, 79,
Pissarro, Camille, 96, 346 108, 115, 132, 149, 151, 157, 169,
Pitard, Georges, 159, 359 185, 188, 189, 220, 258, 267, 306,
La Plèbe, 66 311, 317, 331, 334-6, 345, 359
Plekhanov, George, 50 Professors (university), 34, 189, 268,
Pleven, R., 311 306
Plisnier, Charles, 241 Prokofiev, S., 330
Poincaré, R., 23, 71, 75, 79, 80, 199 Proletariat, 66, 70, 103, 104, 107n,
Pokrovsky, M. N., 279 119, 139, 144, 146, 149, 170, 197,
Poli, Charles, 154 198, 200, 230, 231, 252, 264, 282,
Politzer, Georges, 98, 108n, 110, 286, 321, 355
115n, 130, 140, 160, 206n, 220, and P.C.F., 15, 17, 49n, 51, 212,
250, 298, 312, 356, 361 228, 251, 283
as philosopher, 264, 269, 270, and intellectuals, 48-51, 54, 84,
271, 278, 285 88, 91, 113, 195, 210, 229, 246,
anti-racist, 199, 304 248, 249, 323, 331, 341, 343,
in Resistance, 142, 147, 148, 150, 344, 356, 357, 367-9
162 cult of, 26, 52, 76, 175, 265, 342,
Politzer, Male, 160,161 347, 364, 368
406
 INDEX
Proletariat (cont.) 231, 242, 247, 273, 274, 283, 342,
dictatorship of, 68, 94, 97, 126, 363, 370
238,281,334, 352 R evolutions:
in U.S.S.R., 25, 32, 67, 92, 133, 1789-94 (France), 64, 276, 278,
135, 204, 244, 256, 319, 349 279, 282, 284, 290, 293-8, 308,
in nineteenth century, 288, 289, 309, 337, 361
291n, 292-4, 296, 297 1848 (France), 13,16,64, 278,279,
Proudhon, P. -J., 13, 64, 263, 283, 282, 286, 287, 291, 292
287-9, 291, 294, 297 1848 (elsewhere), 292
Psychology, psychologists, 264,269n, 1905 (Russia), 87, 291
270, 299, 301, 303, 311, 312 February 1917 (Russia), 67
psychoanalysis, 312 October 1917 (Bolshevik), 36,
Pucheu, Pierre, 160 59, 64-67, 69, 83, 86, 87, 91,
92, 102,131,139,270,302,318,
Racism, 193, 199, 303, 304, 313 325, 363
Radical Party, 112, 113, 114, 116, 1918-19 (Germany and Hungary),
121, 141, 252, 265, 281, 351 70, 83
Radek, Karl, 63, 244 1956 (Hungary), see Hungarian
La Raison, 47 revolution
Rajk, L., 128, 177, 180-2, 225, 227, Révolution surréaliste, 96
250, 360 Revue Communiste, 46
Rákosi, M., 180, 181, 227, 230 Revue Progressiste du Droit, 359
Ramadier, Paul, 165 Reynaud, Paul, 200, 253, 333
Ramzin, Prof., 25 Rhee, Syngman, 190-1, 195
Rankovitch, A. M., 177 Ribbentrop, J. von, 138, 141
Rappoport, Charles, 23n, 29, 131, Richet, Charles, 42n
361 Ridgway, General, 29, 192, 195, 222,
Rapport Chardon, 153 251, 360
Rassemblement Démocratique Révo­ Rimbaud, Arthur, 97
lutionnaire, 175,182,184,249 Rio Tinto mines, 118n
Rassemblement du Peuple Français, Rival, 339n
174, 245, 247, 283, 358 Rivet, Paul, 112, 114, 120
Rassemblement populaire, see Popu­ Robel, Léon, 331, 332
lar Front Robeson, Paul, 174, 193
Reader's Digest, 213 Robespierre, M., 293-8
Rebatet, Lucien, 199 Roc, 339n
Reclus, Elisée, 346 Rochet, Waldeck, 327n, 343n
Red Army, 80, 94, 151, 155, 156, Rocque, Colonel de la, 112
158, 200, 217, 218, 225, 232, 256 Rodinson, Maxime, 202, 204
Reed, John, 154 Rolland, J.-F., 154, 181, 227, 228,
Reichstag trial and counter-trial, 330
106, 130, 358, 360 Rolland, Romain, 26, 27, 29n, 36,
La Relève, 147 37, 40, 64n, 69, 74, 83, 101, 108,
Rémy, Tristan, 108 115, 124, 159, 176, 185, 206n, 207,
Renaudel, Paul, 66,74,77, 83 238,239,284,321, 323,324,361-3,
Renoir, Jean, 36, 369 368
Resistance movement, 38, 44, 45, and First World War, 64, 65
54, 147-66, 177, 210, 227, 229, and Bolshevik Revolution, 68, 70
407
 INDEX

Rolland, Romain (<tont.) Salon d*Automne, 337, 338, 339, 347

dispute with Barbusse, 80-2, 84, Salvemini, Gaetano, 116
104 Sampaix, Lucien, 141, 160
anti-fascist, 36, 43, 104, 107, 112, Sans-culottes, 290, 293-7, 299
117 Santé prison, 63n, 66, 75, 79, 156
and U.S.S.R., 80, 81, 104, 105, Sarrail, General, 207
134, 135, 216 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 99, llOn, 131,
and Moscow trials, 130 133n, 139, 163, 195, 204, 223, 224,
and political prisoners, 104, 105, 237, 247-58, 263-5, 269-71, 358,
134,135 366
and P.C.F., 104, 134, 135, 159 in 1930’s, 247
and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 138 on Nazi-Soviet Pact, 144
Rolnikas, Me., 159, 359 in Resistance, 151, 153, 158, 247,
Romains, Jules, 36, 42n, 121n, 153 248
Roosevelt, F. D., 174 and R.D.R., 175, 182, 184, 249
Rosenberg, Alfred, 148, 193, 199 and Yugoslavia, 179, 250
Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 194, and Soviet camps, 182-3, 250,
210, 227, 254, 271, 343 252
Rosenthal, Gérard, 175, 249 and P.C.F., 37, 152, 185-7, 248-
Rossi, A., 103, 141, 142, 146, 280 258
Rouge-Midi, 150 and Peace Movement, 189, 253
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 77, 128, on Korean War, 251, 253
263, 287 anti-Americanism of, 194, 250,
Rousset, David, 175,182-5,249,251, 251, 253, 254
359 on U.S.S.R. and China, 176,250,
Roussot, Victor, 31 251, 252, 254
Roux, Jacques, 294 break with Camus, 249,252,253
Roux, Saint-Pol, 96 on colonialism, 83, 210, 212, 253,
Roy, Claude, 154, 165, 173, 181, 257
195-6, 227-9, 232, 242, 330, 361 on Stalin, 256, 257
Rühle, Jürgen, 76 on Hungarian Revolution, 227,
Rumanian policy before Munich, 228, 233, 255-7
122, 123n on proletariat, 248, 249, 251, 252
Russell, Bertrand, 64, 65, 82, 104 as philosopher, 248, 249, 255,
Russian Association of Proletarian 257, 258
Writers, 319, 321 on literature, 247-9, 328, 331,
335
Sabartes, Jean, 332n as playwright, 189, 249, 254, 256,
Sacco and Vanzetti, 194, 310 258
Sadoul, Georges, 108n, 115n, 206n, as novelist, 144, 258
369 Sauvageot, Aurelien, 266
Sadoul, Jacques, 72-4, 139, 357, 358 Scheidemann, Philip, 83
Saint-Prix, Jean de, 65 Scheler, Jean, 291
Saint-Just, L., 166, 294n Schickelé, René, 42n
Saint-Simon, Henri de, 278, 283, Schliessinger, Me., 359
284, 285, 287, 288 Schlumberger, Jean, 121n
Salendre, Georges, 339 Schrodt, Mme., 145, 146
Salmon» Françoise, 339 Schuman, Robert, 174, 200, 311, 347
408
 INDEX
Schwartzemberg, Me., 359n Singer, Gérard, 338
Scientists, Science, 47, 53, 55, 210, Slovès, Haim, 205n
300-17, 350, 356, 357, 367 Slansky, Rudolf, 202-3
and Marxism, 40, 300-5, 307, Snyders, Prof., 269n
309, 312, 314-16 Soboul, Albert, 115n, 279, 283, 286,
anti-capitalism of, 303-8, 310 290, 292, 295-7, 361
and U.S.S.R., 304, 305 Sodal-democrats, 100,101,103,107,
Soviet science, 304, 313-17 119, 120, 170, 174, 200, 201, 280,
victimized politically, 311 288, 362
and war weapons, 310, 311 Sodalist-Communist Union Party,
and the P.C.F., 300, 306-9, 311- 87
313, 315-17 Socialist Parties, 16, 61, 62,175
Sebag, Luden, 233 French (S.F.I.O.), 12, 13, 15, 23,
Second World War, 99, 129, 217 49n, 61, 62n, 70, 73, 74, 79,
Secours Ouvrier International, 79, 83, 90, 93n, 103, 112-14, 123,
106 166, 174, 204, 207, 224, 250,
Secours Rouge (Secours Populaire 256, 263, 265, 283, 302, 351,
de France), 358 352, 353
Sémard, Pierre, 25 German (S.P.D.), 13, 16, 62, 83,
Sembat, Marcel, 66, 75n 136n
Serge, Victor, 24, 59, 63n, 101,206n, Socialist realism, 39,54,98,124,194,
318, 361, 363 240,244,319, 321-36,339-42,346,
and First World War, 63 347
and Bolshevik revolution, 66, 68, Social Revolutionaries, 72, 105, 135
69,71 trial of, 77, 82, 87, 89
imprisoned in U.S.S.R., 63n, 92, Sodété des Gens de Lettres, 31n
102, 110, 134, 135 Sodété d’histoire moderne, 278n
supported in Paris, 110, 111, 116, Sociétés Savantes, 269
241 Sodologists, Sociology, 55, 269n,
parts company with Trotsky, 135, 298,299
136 Solidarité Française, 112
denounces Stalinism, 130, 131, Solomon, Hélène, 156, 160
135 Solomon, Jacques, 115n, 147, 150,
Servin, Marcel, 29n, 37n, 41, 46, 56, 156, 160, 162, 303, 305, 306, 308,
226, 234, 317, 327n, 353 356, 361
Séverine, 36, 42n, 59, 74-7, 88, 89, Sorbonne, 94, 268, 290,302,304,369
206n, 351, 361 Sorel, Georges, 263
Shaw, Bernard, 143, 239, 240 Sorel, Julien, 337, 338
Shentoub, S., 312n Souvarine, Boris, 23n, 29, 59, 67n,
Sholokov, Mikhail, 108, 331 73-75, 216-17, 357, 358, 366
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 155, 330 conversion to communism, 67,
Signac, Paul, 36, 40, 96, 107, 108n, 68
336, 340, 346, 347, 361 defends Comintern line, 77, 86-
Signoret, Simone, 45, 189, 370 89
Silone, Ignazio, 103 and Bulletin Communiste, 46, 89,
Simon, André, 202-3 90
Simon, Jules, 352 breaks with P.C.F., 25, 89-91,
Sinclair, Upton, 42n 361, 363
409
 INDEX

Souvarine, Boris (cont.) international policy, 1944-5,163-

in opposition. 111, 135, 136 165, 171, 172, 179
his Staline, 90, 91 inspires loyalty, 129, 224-6
Soviet Institute of Scenic Arts, 369 on nationalism, 197-200
Soviets (Russian), 13, 91, 323, 325 anti-semitism, 201-3
Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), 13, 18, 23, as Marxist theoretician, 248, 272,
25, 30, 34, 80, 103, 105, 107, 111, 289
112, 119, 122, 137, 139, 141-5, intervenes in cultural sphere, 218,
147, 149, 155, 156, 158, 159, 164, 305, 313, 315-17, 319, 323,
166, 168-70, 174, 176, 179, 182-4, 349
187, 189, 194, 200, 201, 203, 205, denounced, 56, 127, 129, 215,
208-9, 215, 224, 226, 227, 232, 224-6, 256, 272, 280, 331
238, 240, 243, 247, 266, 290, 299, cult of personality, see Cult of
315-17, 333, 334, 354, 358, 365 personality
Five Year Plans and collectiviza­ Stalingrad, 154, 155
tion, 33,100,106,108,109,111, Stalin prizes, 155, 188-9, 194, 327,
113, 127, 133, 216, 238, 239, 333, 340
265, 305, 307, 349, 363 Stassova, E. D., 108
Purges, 53, 132, 134 Steber, Charles, 160n
trials, 127-34, 180-2, 360, 367 Steinlen, Théophile, 42n, 347
Labour camps, see Camps Stéphane, Roger, 243
(Soviet) Stil, André, 28, 29, 194n, 210
as seen by visitors, 53, 68, 71, 72, arrested, 195, 252, 338
78,85, 98,100,109,124-7,196, and Hungarian Revolution, 230
216, 241, 254, 264, 271, 274, praises Stalin, 219
349, 369 praises Thorez, 221
liquidation of intellectuals, 104, novels of, 52,163, 194,332-4,368
124, 218, 227, 324 and socialist realism, 327-9, 333-
policy after 1945,166-7,172,173, 334
175, 180, 250-2, 256, 292 Students, 29, 31, 46, 147, 211, 212,
admired by scientists, 304, 305, 349, 350, 356, 358
307 Suez, Anglo-French intervention,
Spanish Civil War, 44, 116-21, 124, 1956, 227,230-2,256, 365
186, 199, 222, 273, 274, 336, 344, Surrealism, surrealists, 92, 94-100,
363, 365 106, 206, 321
Spartacus League, Spartacists, 13, Syndicalism (revolutionary), 13, 15,
70, 83, 199 18, 59, 63, 64, 107, 289, 298, 355
Spellman, Cardinal, 173 Syria, 80, 207-8, 365
Spender, Stephen, 361 Szekeres, Georges, 181
Stalin, J. V., 25, 55, 56, 89, 109, 119,
128, 131, 134, 136, 178, 180, 184, Tailhade, Laurent, 42n, 70n
196, 215, 223, 224, 277, 293, 296, Tardieu, André, 93, 358
334, 356 Tardos, T., 233
and Comintern, 13, 138 Tarlé, E. V., 278
and Trotsky, 89, 90 Taslitzky, Boris, 161,163,194n, 337-
international policy, 1930’s, 122, 340, 342, 361
123 Teachers, 31, 33, 41, 348, 352-5, 357
and Nazi-Soviet Pact, 138, 242 union of, 39, 352, 354
410
 IND EX
Teachers (cont.) Togliatti, Palmiro, 226, 257
and P.C.F., 29, 352, 354 Tolain, Henri, 289
political victimization of, 353,354, Tolstoy, A., 116, 322
363 Tolstoy, L., 262
Teissier, Georges, 191, 220, 231, 302, Torgler, Ernst, 106
305, 306, 310, 354, 361, 363 Torrès, Henri, 88, 206n, 358
Les Temps Modernes, 48n, 133n, 175, Tous les Arts, 47
194, 211, 232, 253, 310 Toynbee, Arnold, 277
Temps Nouveaux, 346 Trauberg, 369
Tenine, Dr., 160n Tréand, Maurice, 145, 146
Tersen, Emile, 290n, 291, 292, 297 Treint, Albert, 89
Téry, Simone, 117, 119, 121n, 194, Tribune, 186
332n Triolet, Elsa, 44n, 45, 98, 99, 115n,
Thaelmann, Ernst, 26, 103,104,106, 150, 158, 159, 194n, 195, 328,
199, 241 332n
Theatre, 32, 33, 189, 190, 369 Triomphe, Jean, 315
Théâtre d’action international, 369 Trotsky, Leon, 25, 30, 63, 65, 67, 69,
Thierry, Albert, 355 72,80, 89,91,92,99,102,103,110,
Thiers, Adolphe, 148, 282, 291 111, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 178,
Thimonnier, Henry, 330 186, 196, 216, 217, 226, 246, 247,
Third Force, 166, 175, 176, 179, 184, 293, 297, 318, 320-2, 366
245, 249, 250, 251, 364 Trotskyism, Trotskyists, 18, 25,
Third (French) Republic, 80, 112, 41, 43, 86, 89, 92, 94, 96-8,
152, 164, 286, 363, 365 103,107,110,111,120,129-31,
Thomas, Albert, 72 140,225,241,254,293,364
Thomas, Edith, 115n, 119, 154, 158, Truman, Harry S., 167,174,194
168, 182, 212, 232, 330, 361 Tsaldaris Government, 172
Thorez, Maurice, 26, 28n, 33, 37, Tunisia, 208, 210
69, 124, 135, 140, 159, 164, 166, Tzara, Tristan, 99, 116n, 227, 230
181, 182, 205n, 274, 336, 363, 369
political career, 26, 108, 221 Ugarte, M., 102n
and United and Popular Fronts, Unamuno, M. de, 246
27, 31, 43, 114, 163 Unemployment, 326, 354, 364, 365
and Phoney War, 137, 139, 141, of intellectuals, 17, 31, 32, 353
144, 146 Unik, Pierre, 96, 98, 108n
and Hungarian revolution, 229 Union Civique, 83
on colonialism, 211-12 Union de la Jeunesse Républicaine de
cult of his personality, see Cult France, 44n
of personality Union Démocratique et Socialiste
on the role of intellectuals, 36,51, de la Résistance, 247
54, 56, 234, 329 Union des Arts Plastiques, 34, 336
as historian, 279, 294 Union des Femmes Françaises, 44n,
on art, 323, 327, 337, 345 163, 209, 310
Tillard, Paul, 228, 332 Union des Intellectuels Français, 137
Tillon, Charles, 55, 149, 165, 327n Union des Théâtres Indépendants de
Tito, J., Titoism, 28, 129, 175, 177- France, 44n
180, 182, 184, 201, 202, 222, 232, Union Française Universitaire, 44n,
250, 252, 367 352
411
 INDEX

Union Internationale des Artistes arrested, 66, 93

Dramatiques, 3ln patriotism of, Í98, 212
Union Nationale des Etudiants Fran­ in Spain, 117, 118
çais, 46, 212 and A.E.A.R., 44,46,108, 115
Union Nationale des Intellectuels, as poet, 60,70,109
44, 310, 337 Valéry, Paul, 96, 152, 277
Union of Soviet Writers, 319, 321 Vallès, Jules, 77
First Congress (1934), 124, 126, Varloot, Jean, 172, 210,291n
240, 244, 321-3, 329 Vavilov, N. I., 304, 307
Second Congress, (1954), 331,332 Vendredi, 120, 121, 123, 161
United Fronts, 41, 87 Vénitien, 338
1921-8, 30, 86, 87, 100, 205, 366 Vercors (Jean Bruller), 45, 147, 151,
1934-9, 26, 27, 44, 103, 114, 207 157-8, 168, 176, 179, 182, 187-9,
United Nations, 179, 190-2, 195 203, 227, 233, 366
United States, 34, 103, 167, 173-5, Verdet, André, 330
177, 188, 203, 205, 224, 243, 251, Vergnaud, M., 269n
253, 310-12, 350 Vermeersch, Jeanette, 37n
anti-Americanism, 45,173-6,185, Vermeil, E., 268n
190-6, 200, 250, 251, 253, 254, Vemant, Jean-Pierre, 291n
333, 341, 362 Versailles Treaty, 73, 148, 199, 206-
Université libre, 147, 150 207, 274, 365
Universities, 31, 305, 306, 350, 358 Vichy régime, 99, 100,146,148,149,
communist, 355 157, 160, 210, 309, 351, 360
workers’, 355 Vidal, Annette, 102
Université Ouvrière, 25n, 302,356 La Vie du Parti, 152
Université Nouvelle, 356, 357 Vienney, Me., 358, 359
Uribe, Vicente, 119 La Vie Ouvrière, 63, 152
Utopian socialists, 283-5, 287 Vigier, J.-P., 29
Vilar, Pierre, 277, 278
Vacher, Michel, 354 Vildrac, Charles, 82, 84, 107n, 121n,
Vailland, Roger, 96, 99, 154, 166, 125, 126, 151, 189, 206n, 231
192-3, 195, 227-9, 370 Villefosse, Louis de, 227
Vaillant, Auguste, 93n Villon, Pierre, 147n, 149
VaiUant-Couturier, Marie-Claude, Viollis, André, 120
29, 44n, 160, 184 Viollis, Jean, 332n
Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 27n, 29, Voguet, André, 147n
37, 59, 66n, 70n, 73, 75, 88, 100, La Voie Communiste, 233
103, 130, 163, 206n, 238, 246, 360, Voies Nouvelles, 233, 272
361, 370 La Voix du Peuple, 145
as Party spokesman, 24, 27, 30, Volguine, V. P., 278
36, 41, 49, 50, 53, 110, 163 Vorwaerts, 136
and Bolshevik Revolution, 68, Vyshinsky, A., 183
70,78
and front organizations, 42, 43, Wallace, Henry, 174
107, 116n Wallon, Henri, 36, 115n, 135, 143,
and First World War, 60, 61, 63, 147, 156, 188, 219, 228, 229, 231,
66, 74, 88 301, 303, 307, 308, 312, 350f356n,
in 1920*s, 78, 79, 87, 92, 93 359, 361
412
 INDEX

Webb, Sidney & Beatrice, 25,217 Wurmser, André, 115n, 121n, 130,
Weber, Lt., 145 132, 168, 173, 177, 178, 181, 183,
Weber, Max, 299 185, 187, 227, 316, 329, 332, 339,
Weill, 339n 359
Weismann, A., 314 Wyart, E., 268n
Weissberg, Alex, 184
Wells, H. G., 42n, 239 Yugoslavia, see C. P. of Yugoslavia
Welzeck, Count, 141 Yvon, M., 135
Werth, Léon, 110, 111, 206n
Weygand, General, 142, 145, 333 Zambaux, 337
Willard, Claude, 269n, 287, 291n Zangwill, Israel, 42n
Willard, Germaine, 138, 140, 142, Zastenkov, 278
145, 146, 148, 280 Zavadorski, M. M., 304
Willard, Marcel, 108n, 171, 183, 188, Zazzo, Prof., 269n
219, 358-60, 361 Zetkin, Clara, 50, 53, 325
Wilson, Edmund, 302 Zhdanov, A. A., 124, 167, 170, 173,
Winterton, Lord, 123 185, 202, 223, 322, 326-30, 366
Women’s International Democratic Zhdanovism, 28, 40n, 54, 188—
Federation, 310, 343 189, 227, 312, 326-32, 339
Working class, see Proletariat Zhukovsky, 315
World Congress of Intellectuals Zilliacus, K., 168
(1948), 185, 188, 343 Zimmerwald movement, 62, 63, 66n,
World Federation of Scientific Wor­ 68, 72
kers, 310, 311 Zinoviev, Gregory, 63n, 69, 71,
Wright, Richard, 361 89-91, 130, 131
Writers, 31n, 32, 45, 95,96,106,124, Zionism, see Jews
157-8, 159n, 219, 221,227, 230-3, Zoshchenko, M., 327
240, 241, 244, 249, 318-35, 365 Zweig, Stefan, 42n