Stalin's France
Richard West
Arcady it seems that 1983 may become one of the stark years of French history, like 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1958 and 1968. The French are more than just angry over the recent taxes, impositions and restrictions, like that on travel abroad; they are wondering if they will once more become the 'sick man of Europe', an object of pity and scorn to the rest of the world. It is a time of introspection, diagnosis and reappraisal of what has happened to post- w. ar France. Since what happens to France Is of more than passing interest to us her neighbours, I thought I might offer some recollections and ruminations on France as I saw it, starting in 1948, when I went there first as a schoolboy on holiday. If 1948 was no more frenzied than most of those years of constantly changing governments, France was especially caught Up in the crisis facing the whole of Europe: the rolling down of the Iron Curtain, the Russian blockade of West Berlin, the Corn- War in Greece, the imposition of Communism in Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia's break with Russia. That was • the year that Stalin unloosed on his eastern European colonies the full force of the ter- ror suffered by Russia itself in the previous forty years. It was, in fact, the height of the Cold War, with an atmosphere made worse still by the information, welcomed by the British Daily Worker: `Working people of all the world will take renewed hope from the news that the Soviet Union has just ex- ploded its first atomic bomb'.
The British may not have welcomed the news; but millions did in France and above all Paris, which then was a Red city. Food was short and wages barely a half of what the British enjoyed. If few went hungry, few were fat, and pleasure was limited to the rare horse steak, rough wine, and North African cigarettes which were even more pungent and harsh on the throat than they are today. (The British, at that time, were encouraged to save on dollar exchange by turning from smooth Virginia tobacco to `Rhodian' cigarettes from what is now Zim- babwe).
The French Communist Party then was a state within the state, getting at least a quarter of the votes, running the only real trades union — the COT — as well as its own system of welfare and even banking. Most of the party's support came from the proletariat, that is low-paid workers in fac- tories, mines, the transport system and public services. In Paris a part of the pro- letariat actually dressed in uniform blue clothes and beret. They were tough, ready to demonstrate, and hostile to those they considered the bourgeoisie: witness the har- ridans of the Postes et Telegraphes or, still worse, those women Metro workers who looked as though they wanted to punch your finger as well as the ticket. It is right to stress that these people really were 'pro- letarians'. Those in France or England to- day who talk of themselves as `working class' or 'working people' are more often than not middle-class bureaucrats, teachers, council officials or sinecure holders.
In France, in 1948, there was also a large group of Communists from the middle class but they did not ape working-class manners or speech. Instead they described themselves as 'intellectuals' — those who, like Marx, Engels and Lenin, had chosen to join 'the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands'. (That phrase from the Communist Manifesto well ex- presses the lust for power of the middle- class revolutionary.) The French Com- munist 'intellectuals' numbered some veterans such as Louis Aragon; most were opportunists, hoping to get on the winning side; others joined out of fear or shame. Most French people and certainly most in- tellectuals had not joined the resistance to German occupation. For example, Jean- Paul Sartre enjoyed success as a playwright from 1940-45, a time that also produced such classic French films as Les Enfants du Paradis. The actress Arletty, who starred in that film, was later accused of collaboration because she had taken a German officer as a lover. She answered simply, 'But I am a woman', thus proving her innocence to the court. Others were less frank and courageous.
Some artists, like Maurice Chevalier, allowed themselves to be blackmailed for years into speaking at Communist spon- sored rallies. Of course the party itself had no clean record of anti-fascism. It had op- posed the war in 1939 and contributed to the fall of France — which indeed it welcomed. The Communists would often betray their own political enemies to the Gestapo. The present Communist leader, George Marchais, is still frequently baited about his dubious war career.
This guilt or uneasiness among French Communists perhaps explains the ferocity of their support for Stalin. A Russian defector, Victor Kravchenko, who publish- ed a book called I Chose Freedom, was libelled and vilified in a disgraceful court case. I can remember French and foreign Communists of that time denouncing what they called 'that Mindzenty crap' — the protest over the torture and imprisonment of a Hungarian cardinal. Many years later, the French actor and ultra-leftist Yves Montand played in a film, Aveu, exposing tortures and show trials in Stalinist Czechoslovakia; but French 'intellectuals' at the time had nothing but praise for Czechoslovak justice and for its vigilance against the American imperialists. Subser- vience to the Russians went to lengths that now are amazing. For instance, the French Communists backed the reoccupation by France of Vietnam and the other Far Eastern colonies because Stalin hoped that France would go Communist and thereby acquire those colonies for his enrichment. It was not till the 1950s that Communist theory envisaged support for Asian and African revolutions as such.
The Socialists, in 1948, were a small, divided and compromised group. One of their leaders, Jules Moch, is credited with the founding of France's savage riot police who. were used at first against Communist demonstrators. Another, Gaston Defferre, the Mayor of Marseilles and now a Cabinet Minister, was then a particular hate of the Communists. His strong-arm men used to throw Communist dockers into Marseilles harbour. Defferre, like Moch, was admired (at least) by the US Embassy. The Socialists were never strong enough on their own to form a government but frequently joined in the fleeting 'centrist' governments of a time when nobody outside France could remember the name of her current Prime Minister.
Now all is completely changed. The Communist Party is the small and constant-
ly shrinking junior partner of Francois Mit- terrand's Socialists. The French 'working class' are better paid and less militant than the British; the CGT is scarcely able to call a strike, as it showed last week; few 'intellec- tuals' now speak out for the party. One of its ideologues has become a bigoted spokesman for France's 'New Right'. The most famous Communist intellectual went off his head and strangled his wife.
France's first left-wing President, Francois Mitterrand, is actually more anti- Soviet than any since the war — witness his kicking out of the country last week of 47 assorted Russian spies, to which his Com- munist colleagues made little protest. The collapse of the Communist Party is what one sees from looking back to 1948. Their influence was to pass to two political tendencies — less precise but nonetheless strong — that found their expression in May 1958 and then almost exactly ten years later, in the 'events' of 1968 — to both of which I shall return later.
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