Maurice Thorez: A Biography 9781350987159, 9781845117252

Citation preview

For Margaret

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2018 John Bulaitis The right of John Bulaitis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Communist Lives: Volume 4 ISBN: 978 1 84511 725 2 eISBN: 978 1 78672 368 0 ePDF: 978 1 78673 368 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

LIST OF PLATES

Plate 1 Head shaven while on the run from police, c.1929. Credit: Thorez’s personal file, Comintern archives. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of SocioPolitical History. Plate 2 Campaigning during the Belleville by-election, October 1930. Thorez is standing behind the desk. Credit: qAlbert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet. Plate 3 Centre-stage at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress, July 1935. To Thorez’s right is Georgi Dimitrov. Credit: Photo by Laski Diffusion/Getty Images. Plate 4 Saluting the crowd on 14 July 1936. To his right is Socialist leader Le´on Blum. Behind, obscured by Thorez’s waving arm, is Radical leader E´douard Daladier. Credit: Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. Plate 5 Spain, February 1937. Pictured with members of the International Brigades in Albacete. Credit: ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy Stock Photo. Plate 6 A communist view of gender roles. With Jeannette Vermeersch and their son Jean, late 1936. Credit: Photo by Keystone-France/GammaKeystone via Getty Images. Plate 7 ‘La Barbe’. Clandestine in Moscow, late 1940. Credit: Thorez’s personal file, Comintern archives. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of SocioPolitical History. Plate 8 9 September 1944. Andre´ Marty at the rostrum during the first PCF mass meeting in Paris after the city’s liberation. The banner proclaims ‘Maurice Thorez must return to Paris’. Behind the stage, the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes fly alongside the Hammer and Sickle. Credit: Photo by LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty Images.

LIST OF PLATES

ix

Plate 9 Pencil sketch by Pablo Picasso, 23 May 1945. Credit: q Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2017. Plate 10 Speaking at a PCF rally before the onset of the Cold War. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Plate 11 27 November 1946. Meeting of Central Committee and communist parliamentarians, with a banner demanding a Thorez premiership for ‘the security and renaissance of France’. Thorez’s portrait shares the platform with those of other PCF leaders. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Plate 12 Thorez in his ministerial office, 1946. Part of the PCF campaign to promote him as a statesman, worthy to be prime minister. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Plate 13 ‘The Party of Maurice Thorez’. Rally at Ivry to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, 28 April 1950. Credit: Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images. Plate 14 Le Bourget Airport, 11 November 1950. One month after a stroke, Thorez is lifted into a Soviet plane for treatment in the Soviet Union. Credit: Photo by Walter Carone/Paris Match via Getty Images. Plate 15 22 December 1955. Campaigning in Paris during the legislative elections, with lighting carefully positioned to hide his paralysed right side. Credit: Photo by Philippe Le Tellier/Paris Match via Getty Images. Plate 16 21 December 1956. At the opening of Picasso’s exhibition in Nice, a month after the artist put his name to a letter criticising the PCF’s response to the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Credit: Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo. Plate 17 2 August 1963. On the quay at Yalta, after arriving for his final summer vacation in the Soviet Union. To Thorez’s right is Mikhail Suslov. Jeannette Vermeersch is behind the two men. Credit: SPUTNIK/Alamy Stock Photo.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first started living with Maurice Thorez ten years ago, after Donald Sassoon suggested I write his biography. I thank Donald for the suggestion and for his invaluable support and advice over the years. Many people have helped this project to fruition. I am particularly grateful to Pierre Thorez, for not only opening his father’s archives but also for his hospitality and kindness. A generous grant from The Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust funded research in Moscow. Canterbury Christ Church University provided me with study leave, covered expenses during a long stay in Paris and financed a research assistant. I also received a generous grant from the late Miss Isobel Thornley’s Bequest to the University of London. Support came from many archivists, some of whom went way beyond the call of duty. I thank those at the Archives nationales and at the Archives de´partementes in Seine-Saint-Denis, Nord, Pas-de-Calais and Meurthe-etMoselle. A special word of thanks goes to Gautier at the Archives municipales d’Ivry-sur-Seine. Other collections that opened their doors with warmth include La Bibliothe`que Jean Maitron (Centre d’Histoire sociale), CEDIAS-Muse´e social and l’Office universitaire de recherche socialiste (OURS). Guy Marival helped me in the Archives de´partementales de l’Aisne; Caroline Herbelin transcribed audiotapes of PCF Central Committee meetings; Alexandre Vershinin ferreted in the Comintern archives in Moscow. Annette Wieviorka shared some of her thoughts about Thorez over a curry in Passage Brady. I thank Annette Hayton for introducing me to Sam Lerner. Unfortunately, Sam has passed away, but his entertaining retelling of his life, including the account of his meetings with Thorez, remains a vivid memory. Andrew Brown helped with some tricky French translations and Simon Pirani translated passages of Thorez’s diary from Russian. Alison Appleby ran her eye over the text and made many very sensible suggestions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

I developed and honed my ideas during many discussions and events. I am indebted to Nina Fishman, who before her untimely death challenged some of my assumptions about communist history. I thank fellow members of the panel on ‘Leadership in Western European Communism’ at the European Social Science History Conference (Ghent, 2010), including Thomas Beaumont, Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe. I learnt enormously through participation in the conference on Communist Leadership Cults organised at the University of Manchester (December 2013), most particularly from the thought-provoking papers by Kevin Morgan and Norman Laporte. The event also helped recharge my batteries after illness. I thank the Communist Lives series editor, Matthew Worley, and the team at I.B.Tauris, Joanna Godfrey, Angelique Neumann and Lester Crook. Lester’s encouragement as well as his patience during delays in delivering the manuscript are greatly appreciated. I am grateful for the constant encouragement – ‘how’s the book going’ – of Stella and Vincent. I have been enthused and energised by the arrival of Ben, Georgia, Joseph and Gemma – and their wonderful parents. Most of all, I thank Margaret. She read the manuscript, made suggestions and patiently listened while I rehearsed ideas and arguments. My relationship with Thorez lasted a few years more than anticipated. I am sure she will be glad she no longer has to share me with him.

SERIES FOREWORD

Communism has, traditionally, appeared to be something of a faceless creed. Its emphasis on the collective over the individual, on discipline and unity, and on the overwhelming importance of ‘the party’, has meant that only the most renowned (and mainly Soviet) communist leaders have attracted interest from English-speaking political historians and biographers. In particular, the party rank-and-file have tended to be dismissed as mere cogs within the organisations of which they were part, either denigrated as ‘slaves of Moscow’, or lost in the sweeping accounts of communist party policy and strategy that have dominated the historiography to date. More recently, however, historians have begun to delve beneath the uniform appearance of democratic centralism, endeavouring to understand the motivations and objectives of those who gave their lives to revolutionary struggle. The current series, therefore, has been established to bolster and give expression to such interest. By producing biographical accounts of communist leaders and members, it is hoped that a movement that helped define the twentieth century will begin to be understood in a more nuanced way, and that the millions who – at various times and in various ways – subscribed to such a Utopian but ultimately flawed vision will be given both the personal and historical depth that their communist lives deserve. Matthew Worley Series Editor – Communist Lives

‘Les hommes sont conscients de leurs actions et ignorants des causes qui les de´terminent.’ Maurice Thorez (Diary, June 1954)

INTRODUCTION THOREZ IN THE BIOGRAPHICAL MATRIX

22 April 1950: a small crowd is milling in the square outside the imposing Hoˆtel de Ville in Ivry, a working-class suburb to the south of Paris. Red, white and blue bunting festoons the building and its neighbouring streets. Inside, the main hall has been decorated with red flags and tricolours; the image of a rising sun covers one of the walls; a huge portrait of a smiling face dominates the stage and, in the centre, a model lighthouse is emblazoned with the words ‘Son of the People’. While the public waits to enter, officials put finishing touches to a display of items laid out on trestle tables. Someone places a visitors’ book by the door. It is inscribed with the theme of the exhibition: ‘The thousands of greetings and presents given by the people of France to their greatest son, the best French disciple of Stalin, the great artisan of workers’ unity, Maurice Thorez.’1 The French Communist Party (PCF) was marking the fiftieth birthday of its general secretary with a Gallic version of the celebrations around Joseph Stalin’s seventieth anniversary the previous year. As well as the exhibition at Ivry, part of the constituency represented by Thorez in the National Assembly, special meetings, dinners, dances and concerts were organised throughout the country.2 During the preceding weeks, gifts and messages had been gathered in localities and workplaces and transported to Paris. Party branches offered books, posters, banners, photo albums, postcards, commemorative stamps and medals. Individual activists sent poems, songs, drawings and paintings. Miners donated lamps and helmets; engineers fabricated models of industrial machinery, including a replica railway water tank. Pieces of pottery, decorated walnuts, sculptured chocolates, embroidered handkerchiefs, bookends embedded with the hammer and sickle, a bullet from the Spanish Civil War, a crate of wine and a tusk of a walrus: the collection was motley indeed. Gifts also arrived from ‘brother parties’ abroad:

2

MAURICE THOREZ

Chinese communists, who had established the People’s Republic seven months earlier, sent silk tapestries of Mao Zedong. More modestly, the Italians presented an inscribed leather notebook. Some presents were items of startling personal significance: an elderly couple presented the certificate announcing their son’s death during the 1914– 18 war; a mother sent the childhood toys of her son who had been executed by the Nazis as a hostage. A group of Jewish communists sent personal messages tied into a bundle with orange ribbon and a yellow Star of David with the word ‘Juif’, the cloth badge Jews were forced to wear under the German occupation. Perhaps most poignantly, a widow from Meudon parted with the last message from her husband, a member of the Resistance. Written on a tiny piece of cigarette paper hours before he faced the firing squad in October 1943, it concludes with the words: ‘hope, courage, the good times will return’.3 The Ivry exhibition illustrates in microcosm the characteristics of French communism in the period after the Second World War: the breadth and commitment of its support, its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with loyalty to Stalinism and, particularly, the cult created around its leader, Maurice Thorez. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, the cultural world of communism can seem peculiar and, perhaps, disturbing. Communism has increasingly become viewed as one of the aberrations of the last century, often alongside Nazism: the doctrine was, at best, a system that denied life opportunities and individual freedoms and, at worst, a dangerous utopia that inevitably led to the psychopathic terror of a Stalin or a Pol Pot. The history of the communist experience is more complex. Communism was the official philosophy underpinning state regimes in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, China and elsewhere. But it was also an ideal that inspired liberation movements against colonial oppression, resistance struggles against fascism and workers’ campaigns against poverty and injustice. Living a communist life meant very different things for different people: for the nomenklatura behind the Iron Curtain, it brought perks and privilege; for the South African anti-apartheid activist it risked arrest and torture; for the American writer or film director during McCarthy’s witch-hunt it invited the blacklist; for the worker it could lead to victimisation or the sack. The history of French communism combines moments of great nobility with others displaying a distinct absence of integrity. Party members campaigned against French military intervention in Morocco (1925–26), fought with the Republican camp in the Spanish Civil War (1936– 39) and died heroically as members of the Resistance. Yet, in July 1940 the party would begin negotiations with the German occupying power over the legal

INTRODUCTION

3

publication of its daily paper, l’Humanite´. In 1956, it would vote in parliament for the ‘special powers’ used to suppress the liberation movement in Algeria. The same year it opposed calls to legalise contraception and applauded the crushing of the Hungarian revolt by Soviet tanks. Maurice Thorez was the dominant figure of French communism for over thirty years. Under his leadership, the PCF emerged as a mass party during the Popular Front (1934 – 38) and extended its appeal during the Nazi occupation. The PCF became one of two west European communist parties to sink deep political and social roots (the other was the Italian). Following the war, it was the ‘le plus grand parti de France’, polling 28.6 per cent of the vote in October 1946. Party militants led the CGT trade union federation and an array of campaigns and front organisations; the print-run of l’Humanite´ reached 400,000 copies; its rural paper, La Terre, was the country’s best-selling agricultural journal. Celebrity members included painters, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Le´ger, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Fre´de´ric and Ire`ne Joliot-Curie, the writers, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, and historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul. The party remained the main force on the political left until the late 1970s (when it was reduced to junior partner by the rise of Francois Mitterrand’s rejuvenated Socialist Party). An article in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1982 mused that two French people in every five had either been members or were related to a current or former party member.4 Born in 1900 in a pit village in the country’s north, Thorez was emblematic of the second generation of French communists that provided the cadre to ‘bolshevise’ the PCF from the mid-1920s. Though too young to experience the trenches, his adolescence was marked by the Great War, during which he spent two-and-a-half years as a refugee in the rural Creuse. Radicalised, Thorez joined the Socialist Party before his nineteenth birthday and immediately sided with those fighting for affiliation to the Communist International. His rise through the communist hierarchy was spectacular: party ‘professional’ and principal leader in the Pas-de-Calais in 1923, member of the Central Committee in 1924, Political Bureau (BP) in 1925, Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1928. Like other French communist leaders during the 1920s, he was acquainted with the inside of a prison cell for opposing French military intervention in Morocco, incarcerated in June 1929 for almost eleven months. Shortly after his release, a ‘French Commission’ of the International’s Presidium (held in Moscow in June 1930) appointed Thorez ‘secretary’ of the French party and the following year the minutes of leadership committees refer to him as ‘General Secretary’.5 The cult that grew around Thorez’s leadership was part of the Stalinist phenomenon, but national episodes formed elements of its germination.

4

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez was integrally associated with the Popular Front, a ‘founding institution of the French labour movement’6 and the moment at which communists embraced the Republic, its institutions, symbols and mythology. The youthful, athletic-looking communist leader contrasted favourably with a discredited, ageing political elite. Commentators described him as ‘le beau Maurice’, even likening him to the suave singer and film star, Maurice Chevalier.7 The war was a more difficult period for Thorez’s public image. In the face of anti-communist repression following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he deserted the French army (in October 1939) and spent five years in the Soviet Union, the majority of them in secret. But despite lacking any credentials as a re´sistant, communist propaganda portrayed Thorez as ‘le grand francais’ who had called the nation to arms by an ‘appeal to resistance’ on 10 July 1940. In an age of cultism around national leaders – the idolisation of Marshal Philippe Pe´tain mirrored by the veneration of Charles de Gaulle – the propaganda was not without success. Between 1943 and 1947, the PCF deepened its symbiosis with the nation, pursuing politics described by Annie Kriegel as ‘national thorezism’.8 In 1945, Thorez became a minister and for a brief period served as vicepresident of the Council of Ministers, before the gathering storm clouds of the Cold War led to the expulsion of communists from the government (May 1947). A stroke in 1950 was a life-changing event. But, after a two-and-ahalf-year convalescence in the Soviet Union, Thorez’s authority continued to reign in the party and, consequently, he remained a key figure in French politics until his death in 1964. Thorez was also a leading player within the communist movement internationally. When the Communist International adopted its ‘people’s front’ strategy at its Seventh Congress in 1935, it was the French party that provided the model. A proud Thorez was awarded the chair of the congress Presidium. Thorez acquired A-list status in the communist bloc: his son, Paul, recalled ‘the emotional response’ amongst passengers on a Soviet cruise liner when they heard that ‘Maurice Thorez was on board with them’.9 Although he had worn the label ‘Stalinist’ with pride, and attacked Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Soviet tyrant at the Twentieth Congress in 1956, Thorez drew close to Nikita Khrushchev during his last years. The Thorez and Khrushchev families shared summer vacations in a luxury compound at Cape Pitsunda on the Black Sea.10 ***** Thorez’s biography poses two connected interpretative challenges. Readers familiar with the Hollywood film, The Matrix, will recognise the first:

INTRODUCTION

5

the characters inhabit a simulated world in which illusion appears as reality and searching for reality leads only to a reconstruction of illusion. Historians must negotiate a similar mirror of representations between the communist account of Thorez’s life and its reflection constructed by political opponents.11 Biography was always an essential element of the communist experience. Communist revolution promised not only social and economic emancipation but the opportunity for individuals to transform themselves as part of a higher humanity, ‘to work on themselves [to become] real architects of their own future’, in the words of Nikolai Bukharin.12 As Stalinism entrenched itself during the 1930s, biographical culture became institutionalised: questionnaires required activists to reflect on their political and personal trajectories – curricula vitae that were used to select, to control and, at times, to provide evidence to discipline, or even destroy, party cadres. The PCF’s questionnaire in 1933 contained seventy-four questions and further subquestions; the Commission of Cadres oversaw surveillance of activists well into the 1960s.13 At the same time, communist heroes and leaders were portrayed as ready-made models of the self to whom activists should aspire.14 Between 1948 and early 1956, the PCF described itself as ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’, and the label was more than a marketing slogan: the General Secretary’s image became the embodiment of the communist ideal. Thorez was, in the words of Louis Aragon, nothing less than ‘the image of the man to come’. According to the poet: ‘the proletariat of France [. . .] has produced in its own heart an image of itself which, incarnates its strength, its intelligence and its destiny [. . .] a real hero, Maurice Thorez.’15 Fils du Peuple, Thorez’s ghost-written autobiography, served as both the party’s official history and a training manual for activists. The first edition, published in 1937, sold 150,000 copies. A new edition appeared in late 1949 in honour of Thorez’s fiftieth birthday, together with a special run of copies with an illustration by Pablo Picasso on the cover. 450,000 copies were sold during a ‘year of studies’ around the book.16 Activists attending study circles discussed their leader’s supposed qualities: his self-education, his capacity for self-discipline, his mores – loyalty to party, class and nation, his choice of reading. A new edition of Fils du Peuple appeared in 1960 (to coincide with Thorez’s sixtieth birthday), prompting more study groups; there was even a cartoon script version for younger supporters.17 The book was translated into every major language – Russian, Mandarin, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese – and many less-spoken tongues, including Yiddish, Hebrew, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, Kazakh, Yakut and Lithuanian – to become a template for the ‘new communist man’ at an international level. Fils du Peuple narrates Thorez’s life as a seamless trajectory filled with consistent and deep meaning, an extreme example of Pierre Bourdieu’s

6

MAURICE THOREZ

biographical illusion. The ‘depersonalised’ nature of the account has often been noted: the text gives no details of Thorez’s family life, failing to mention either his first marriage or subsequent relationship with Jeannette Vermeersch (which began in 1932 and who he married in 1947) or his four children.18 Embarrassing incidents, such as a flirtation with Trotskyism in 1924, are conveniently ignored. Thorez is presented as the visionary leader who instinctively knows how to steer his party through every potential difficulty and who possesses an almost innate understanding of the lives, conditions and hopes of ordinary people. The coupling of the public image of its general secretary and the PCF’s political identity ensured that the Thorez biography would be fiercely contested. Inevitably, political opponents tried to undermine the party narrative. Some used ridicule: ‘the life of Simple More`ze, son of the people, grandson of the little father of the people, based on documents brought back by Syllog the Swede from his travels in the land of the absurd’, was the title of a pamphlet by the prominent satirist and cartoonist, Benjamin Guittonneau (Ben).19 Others questioned the legitimacy of the communist leader’s proletarian credentials: a police report in late 1929, which asserted (wrongly) that Thorez had been employed in 1919 – 20 in the offices of the mining company rather than at the coal face, probably inspired the Socialist Party’s regular description of him as ‘a false miner’.20 Socialists also touched the raw nerve of the General Secretary’s parentage by describing him (also wrongly) as ‘the adopted son of a Pas-de-Calais priest’.21 Opponents inverted almost every aspect of the communist version of Thorez’s life to construct an image of a leader lacking independence of thought, autonomy in political practice and with an ‘allegiance’ not to France but to the Soviet Union. These themes were given scholarly substance in Philippe Robrieux’s biography (1975), an explicit and not entirely unsuccessful attempt to expose Thorez’s ‘secret life’ behind his public image.22 Sensationalised in sections of the media, the work became part of the political polemic about the contemporary role of the PCF, at the time still an important component in French politics. Robrieux was criticised for the ‘futility’ of questioning Thorez’s familial background and social roots, as well as his unconvincing speculation on Thorez’s inner thoughts.23 But the main tenets of his interpretation became almost a consensus view: Thorez was as an intelligent, open-minded young militant who had undergone ‘a decisive mutation’ to become a purveyor of Stalinist policy and organisational methods. The collapse of communism as a world system in 1991 and the inexorable decline of the PCF’s influence produced a contradictory effect on the Thorez biography. Up to that point, ‘totalitarian’ interpretations of communism had tended to carry less weight in France, the wartime experience and the social

INTRODUCTION

7

roots of the PCF discouraging crude assimilations of Stalinism and Nazism. But restraints vanished in the new ideological climate: communism was declared an ‘essentially’ criminal project and revelations within the Communist International archives were viewed as ‘proof’ of the party’s total subservience to Moscow.24 Ste´phane Courtois would argue that during the Popular Front Thorez was not even ‘the real boss’ of the PCF, that position being held by the Comintern ‘instructor’, Eugen Fried.25 In a more recent biographical sketch Courtois simplistically poses the dichotomy of whether Thorez was ‘a French statesman or a stalinist apparatchik’, concluding that he was the latter, but not considering the possibility that he could be both.26 Simultaneously, the collapse of communism has allowed more sophisticated evaluations of Thorez’s life. Firstly, the availability of source material has been transformed as a result of the ‘archival explosion’. While Robrieux had been forced to rely on ‘private sources’, mainly dissident party members, the biographer now has access to two kilometres of PCF archives, the Communist International archives, as well as an array of documents in police, departmental and private archives.27 Most importantly, Thorez’s personal papers are available. Remaining in Vermeersch’s possession after her husband’s death, they were for many years treated as a kind of war trophy as friction increased between her and the PCF leadership over Thorez’s legacy.28 The archives include drafts of articles and speeches, dossiers on topics and incidents, personal and political correspondence, and a number of exercise books in which Thorez jotted notes during meetings and recorded conversations with other communist leaders, both in France and abroad. His personal library of over 10,000 books and 2,000 pamphlets can also be consulted, indicating not only Thorez’s cultural universe but useful also because Thorez annotated while reading.29 Of particular interest are the diaries that Thorez kept during two periods in his life. While living in the Soviet Union during the war, he used a number of notebooks to record aspects of his political work and family life. He began a more conventional diary in November 1952, again during a sojourn in the Soviet Union, this time recovering in a Black Sea resort after his stroke. The first one-sentence entries were written to practise the functioning of his semi-paralysed right hand;30 the final, much longer, entry would be added only hours before his death in July 1964 on a Soviet cruise ship, again in the Black Sea. The diary includes brief remarks about political events, meetings and discussions, accounts of visits and travels (within France and abroad), commemorations of familial landmarks and plenty of reminiscences about the past, including acquaintances, places and happenings.31 Secondly, the declining influence of the PCF along with the passing of time has encouraged a less partisan approach. Perhaps communism has, at last,

8

MAURICE THOREZ

become a subject of history comme les autres. Two studies of Thorez represent advances. Ste´phane Sirot (2000) emphatically refuses to get drawn into the ‘game of mirrors’ between official and oppositional representations of Thorez.32 In a series of thematic essays, he neither accepts nor rejects the ‘truth’ of the communist account, but discusses how mythology became part of the ‘real history’ of Thorez’s position as communist leader. Sirot places contradiction at the heart of the Thorez phenomenon. The General Secretary’s political behaviour and thinking was the outcome of a ‘permanent dialectic’ between the construction of a personality to serve the needs of the communist project and a range of other factors that made up his identity. These include familial and social background, the culture of the French labour movement and the practices of the French political and governmental system. Thorez adopted the roleidentity of communist leader, but these and other ‘objective elements’ conditioned the ‘exercise of this function’ and the ‘forms that it took’.33 Annette Wieviorka’s joint biography of Thorez and Vermeesch (2010) is the first to utilise the Thorez archives.34 Thorez’s trajectory is traced against a wide canvas of evolving social and cultural contexts – the interwar workers’ movement, the development of the Cold War, the milieu of sympathising intellectuals, as well as ‘the world communist movement’ based in Moscow. His response to political crises and personal dramas is well observed and convincingly explained. In short, the French leader is revealed as a recognisable human being. Wieviorka’s focus on the relationship between Thorez and Vermeersch has led some to claim that she has written a ‘roman-photo’ (schmaltzy novel).35 The criticism is not only unfair but misses an important point of her work. Wieviorka illustrates how Thorez’s devotion to the Soviet Union was not only political, but also deeply emotional. In particular, it gave meaning to his relationship with Jeannette Vermeersch. Wieviorka’s account charts the way in which the couple’s love was ‘born under the auspices of Moscow in the Hotel Lux [. . .], intertwined with politics, to the rhythm of meetings, delegations, commemorations, articles, declarations on TV or Radio [and] remained anchored in the Soviet Union’.36 Linking the Thorez/Vermeersch relationship to the pair’s relentless loyalty to Stalin and the ‘world communist movement’ leaves a disconcerting impression. Wieviorka makes good use of Thorez’s diaries, but reveals a tendency to be drawn towards acceptance of their representation of his life. She suggests that the 1952– 64 diaries were ‘written for his sole benefit [and therefore] small conscious rearrangements of the truth for ideological reasons should not be suspected’.37 Yet Thorez clearly had one eye on posterity as he wrote. His entries during the CPSU Twentieth Congress in February 1956 note the names of principal speakers and political themes, give details of an extensive

INTRODUCTION

9

social itinerary, record medical examinations, including the fact that he has ‘managed to cut and file his toenails with both hands’ (for the first time since his stroke), but completely ignore Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. It is worth recalling Paul Ricoeur’s observation that all identity is a constant reinterpretation ‘of truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself [. . .], a cloth woven of stories told’.38 ***** The second challenge posed by the Thorez biography is how to handle the relationship between the French and Soviet elements within Thorez’s politics. Generally, political biography focuses on the interrelation between an individual and a wider national context, the political, economic, societal and cultural experiences and traditions within a specific nation. But those writing communist lives must add another dimension: their subject was part of a political left functioning within a national environment but tied ideologically and materially to an international movement and regime born out of the Russian Revolution. As Eric Hobsbawm put it fifty years ago, the communist leader must be positioned within a ‘marriage of two ill-sorted partners’.39 Thorez described himself in a conversation with Stalin as a Frenchman with ‘the soul of a Soviet citizen’.40 The remark was an attempt to impress the Kremlin dictator, but it is also a fair summation of the French leader’s selfhood. Thorez internalised the republican narrative of French history and culture. He admired his nation’s most prominent writers; he was inspired by the architecture of its towns, the charm of its countryside and grace of its mountains, its traditional songs and music; and, of course, Thorez appreciated fine meals and good wine. An ability to express ‘the spirit of France’ was a crucial component of his charisma. Concurrently, Thorez was infused with the world view and culture of the Soviet elite. After his first visit in March 1925, he returned to the Soviet Union on nearly thirty occasions, totalling eleven years (that is, one quarter of his remaining life). In later years, he was accorded the privileges worthy of a visiting head of state. Holidays were occasions to renew acquaintances with ‘our home and old friends’ and to visit ‘our beach’. In his diary, he notes ‘the well-dressed people, the relaxed atmosphere and tranquillity’ and salutes ‘the pioneers of a happy life in a truly free world’.41 But Thorez remained wilfully blind to the unsavoury aspects of the Soviet bloc: an official account published in French of the show trial of La´szlo´ Rajk, the Hungarian leader executed in October 1949, remained with its pages uncut on a shelf in his library.42

10

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez personified the great paradox of French communism: the way in which, of the major communist parties outside the Soviet bloc, the PCF was the most loyal to its own nation while also one of the most faithful to Stalinism. There was, of course, nothing specifically ‘French’ about the policy of fusing communism with nationalism. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 decreed that the national interest should be highlighted within the propaganda of all affiliated parties. This prompted, for example, the Italian party to retreat from the idea of the immediate overthrow of the Mussolini regime and to appeal for the ‘reconciliation of the Italian people’ by bringing together forces ‘from within and also outside fascism’.43 Six years later, in April 1941, Stalin announced that communist parties should ‘be turn[ed] into national communist parties with various names [in order to] resolve the concrete problems they face’.44 The outcome was the decision to disband the Communist International in 1943, an episode in which Thorez participated. Yet, while ‘national communism’ was a policy conceived in the Kremlin, history ensured it had particularly deep resonance within France. At the turn of the twentieth century, the left and workers’ movement had been divided over attitudes towards the nation state. The crushing of the 1848 ‘June Days’ and bloody suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune loomed large in the collective memory. The shooting of strikers by troops, most infamously in the Fourmies massacre of 1891, and the slow pace of social reform encouraged the view that the Republic was a simple tool of the employer class. But, simultaneously, the revolutionary roots of French nationalism strengthened arguments for a more positive relationship between the workers’ movement and national state. The perceived threat of clerical and monarchist reaction at the time of the Dreyfus Affair convinced many socialists of the necessity to ally with radicals and liberals to defend the Republic. For the French socialist leader, Jean Jaure`s, the task was to transform the ‘political Republic’ into a ‘social Republic’ through organising ‘the workshop, work itself, production [and] property [. . .] according to republican principles’.45 The political ground for Maurice Thorez’s embracing of French nationalism and the republican tradition had been long prepared. Likewise, the PCF’s bond with Moscow, while not qualitatively different to those of other communist parties, possessed particularly firm roots. The decision by a majority of the Socialist Party (SFIO) to affiliate to the Communist International at the Tours Congress in 1920 was a major victory for the leaders of the Russian Revolution. But the Comintern’s new ‘French section’ was far from homogeneous, and a significant minority had reservations about the type of organisation it was expected to become. Leon Trotsky was the first in a procession of Communist International leaders to

INTRODUCTION

11

intervene in the functioning of French communism. In 1931, with the PCF facing stagnation, Moscow dispatched a team of permanent ‘instructors’, led by Eugen Fried, to work with the French leadership. Attachment to the Soviet Union and commitment to working-class struggle was the PCF’s raison d’eˆtre. But Thorez became acutely aware that his party’s ability to act relied not only on its relationship with the working class but also on its broader position within French politics and society. In this respect, his approach was similar to that of the Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, with whom he is often unfavourably compared. Both men were guided by the idea of faire la politique, literally ‘doing’ or ‘making politics’. This implied a pragmatic strategy to root communism within the national political environment through building alliances with other political and social forces.46 Thorez posed the problem explicitly at the time of the Popular Front and pursued it consistently thereafter, though he had first spoken about forging alliances and ‘doing politics’ in 1926. ‘Doing politics’ posed choices and dilemmas. When French and Soviet interests coincided, ‘national communist’ strategy became relatively straightforward. Thorez’s calls for national unity during the Popular Front, after Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and during the period immediately after the Liberation until mid-1947 resonated beyond the PCF’s constituency of support. When, however, French and Soviet interests conflicted, ‘doing politics’ became problematic (as in the Cold War years after 1947) or even impossible (as in the period after the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact). Yet, even in relatively favourable times, tensions arose between Thorez’s national communism and politics emanating from Moscow. The Popular Front would have been unthinkable without a convergence between Soviet and French diplomatic policy, as well as the encouragement by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov for national parties to ‘develop initiatives of their own’ on the basis of the International’s ‘general guidelines’.47 But Comintern leaders were often irritated by Thorez’s initiatives. These included the extension of the alliance to the Radical Party and the aim of a ‘French Front’ with sections of the centre-right. The most significant difference between Thorez and the Comintern emerged over his proposal that the PCF participate in government, which he raised on a several occasions between October 1935 and March 1938. Each time, Comintern leaders expressed opposition and, though Thorez reluctantly accepted their veto, the issue created a sore that remained with Thorez for the rest of his life. ‘Doing politics’ posed a series of other tensions: those between the PCF’s eventual aim of socialist revolution and its immediate programme of practical reform; between its role as a ‘party of working-class struggle’ and a declared status as ‘a party of government’; between its appeal for left-wing unity and its

12

MAURICE THOREZ

instinctive ideological hostility towards other political formations, especially the Socialists; between its links with artists and academics and the stifling intellectual atmosphere created by its bureaucratic and authoritarian internal regime; between its commitment to democracy and its support for oppression in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The main theme in the pages that follow is the manner in which Thorez managed these tensions, most particularly the ‘ill-sorted’ marriage at the heart of his own and his party’s identity. The view of the French leader as a simple administrator of Soviet policy within France explains neither every aspect of his politics, nor the strength of French communism nor Thorez’s personal authority amongst important sections of the population. In a classic study written forty years ago, Annie Kriegel noted how even in the period of highStalinism, a national communist leader could not ‘just be an underling carrying out orders’, but that ‘inside his own party, he had to learn to orientate, fix personal criteria of decision making and leadership, gain his autonomy and show himself capable of invention and imagination’.48 This remains, perhaps, the best approach to evaluating Thorez as a political leader. To what extent did he, within the constraints imposed by his party’s attachment to the ‘world communist movement’, succeed in ‘doing politics’ with ‘invention and imagination’, or even a certain degree of independence? There is a supplementary theme. In recent years, ‘critical communist biography’ has focused on the choices, aspirations and political commitment of activists, providing a more nuanced account of the communist experience.49 As Kevin Morgan notes in a striking analogy, if studied as an institution ‘a Communist Party is like a great goods train lumbering along, with a distant controller who every so often changes the points’, while a biographical approach views it ‘more like a passenger service, with people constantly getting on and off, and bringing their baggage with them’.50 Thorez was, however, no ordinary passenger on the PCF train: he boarded at one of the earliest stations and stayed on for a lifetime, becoming the line manager and providing the brand for the railroad company. While doing so, he began ‘to understand his own function, the role which he had to act out as leader’, as Timothy Mason commented about another more destructive leader cult.51 How, then, did Thorez live the cult so visibly on display during his fiftieth birthday celebrations? What impact did the cult have on his politics and personality? Clearly, Thorez came to believe the myths constructed around his persona and ‘transformed himself into a function’.52 Nevertheless, he also continued to carry considerable baggage from his younger days. And here exists another tension. Thorez was a towering personality in the communist world. But he was a hesitant revolutionary, prone to lapses in self-confidence and psychological unease.

INTRODUCTION

13

Thorez asked to stand down as PCF general secretary on a number of occasions, including in 1931 and 1933. After November 1958, he consistently expressed a desire to retire from his position. The episode is missing from academic studies of French communism and questions the widely held view that Thorez’s final years were ‘simply a long fight to preserve his absolute power within the PCF’.53 On other occasions, Thorez endured ‘inner turmoil’, as he put it after the signing of the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact in 1939. During the final years of his life, a sense of nostalgia permeates the pages of his diaries. Facing the impact of his illness alongside the political multi-crisis of de-Stalinisation the Algerian War, de Gaulle’s victory and internal party conflict, Thorez longed for an imagined, much simpler, past. Thorez made the choice to perform his role-identity as communist leader, and enjoyed the status, prestige and many privileges it conferred. Yet, it was not a role he always found comfortable to live. Thorez’s dominant position in French communism means that this book can be viewed as a history of the PCF through the prism of its general secretary. It is organised chronologically. Chapters are devoted to defining moments in PCF history, including the Popular Front, the war, the post-war government, the Cold War, the traumatic year of 1956 and the Algerian War. The list is indicative of the extent to which Maurice Thorez was a major actor in the history of twentieth-century France.

CHAPTER 1 YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY

At the turn of the twentieth century, the mining region of northern France stretched crescent-shaped between the edge of the Artois hills and the areas around Valenciennes on the Belgium border. The village of Noyelles-Godault was situated almost exactly in the centre of this belt, 13 kilometres east of Lens and nine kilometres north-west of Douai. With 2410 inhabitants recorded in the 1901 census,1 the old Gallic – Roman settlement had grown rapidly after the Dourges Mining Company opened its Pit No. 4 in 1867. Rows of uniformly designed, company-owned homes crammed close to mining offices, workshops and the frame containing the pit-winding gear. It was in one such house on rue Victor Hugo occupied by Cle´ment Baudry, a 39-year-old miner, and his wife Cle´mence Dutouquet that the future Maurice Thorez entered the world on 28 April 1900. The baby’s mother was the couple’s 20-year-old unmarried daughter, also named Cle´mence. The birth certificate, signed by Baudry and witnessed by two miners (one of whom signed his name with a mark), gives Cle´mence’s occupation as ‘female worker, without profession’.2 She had sometimes been hired as a domestic servant and sometimes, from an early age, worked with other girls and young women at the pithead. Thorez would recall his grandfather telling how he would carry her as a sleepy child of ten on his shoulders to the mine each morning.3 The Baudry and Dutouquet families originated in Hasnon, a small town situated around ten kilometres from Anzin. Cle´ment and Cle´mence both had grandfathers who were farm labourers and grandmothers who worked spinning yarn. Cle´ment’s mother was recorded on the census as a ‘day labourer’, a casual manual worker. His father was a miner, and Cle´ment joined him down the pit at an early age. Cle´ment Baudry and Cle´mence Dutouquet married in 1883. The year following their wedding a bitter 55-day strike gripped the Anzin region and provided much of the background for E´mile

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

15

Zola’s novel, Germinal. Radicalised by the movement, Cle´ment became an active member of the trade union led by E´mile Basly, the model for the socialist, Rassaneur, in Zola’s work. The couple moved to Noyelles-Godault in the search for work in 1891. Maurice’s father was the 21-year-old Henri Breton, a member of a longestablished Noyelles-Godault family. Through the generations, the Bretons had climbed the village’s rickety social ladder. Henri’s grandfather, a small farmer, had become a garde particulier, a guard with some police powers under French law. His father, Maurice, had opened a cafe´ and, later, ran the convenience store on the main street, which is where Henri was working when his relationship with Maurice’s mother began. The couple did not marry for reasons that are unknown, though Cle´mence followed custom by giving her child the name of her partner’s father. Maurice Baudry became Maurice Thorez almost three years later when, on 31 January 1903, Cle´mence married Louis Thorez, a 25-year-old miner – and ‘son of a miner’ – from the nearby village of Beaumont. Louis adopted Maurice as his son and the child grew up unaware of his natural father until an unspecified time in his teenage years.4 During the late 1950s, Thorez sketched on a notepad all the villages and towns he had stayed in or visited during his childhood. The list is an itinerary of mining centres – Sallaumines, Me´ricourt, Courcelles, Billy-Montigny – and industrial towns – Lens, Douai, Carvin, Seclin. His notes indicate that Louis and Cle´mence initially set up home close to Louis’s family in He´ninLie´tard, an extension of Beaumont (the town is today called He´ninBeaumont).5 Their first two children, Le´onie (1903) and Louis (1905), were born in He´nin-Lie´tard.6 At the age of five, Maurice was looked after by his aunt in Dourges and then by his great-grandmother in Hasnon. In early 1906, the Thorez family resettled in Noyelles-Godault, in a two-up-two-down company house, 6 rue E´mile Zola. Until evacuated during the opening stages of the First World War, the young Maurice lived in Noyelles-Godault and made only a few excursions beyond the region of his birth.

Childhood in a mining community Thorez’s roots in a mining community would become important elements of his authority as communist leader. French labour movement culture – heavily influenced by Zola’s Germinal – viewed the miner as the archetype of working-class labour, the dangerous, collective nature of the work engendering a deep sense of community and tradition of struggle. Even complexion suggested special qualities: faces darkened by coal dust earned miners the name les gueules noires (black mouths). Communists built a cult around the miner in tandem with the cult surrounding Thorez.7 In this

16

MAURICE THOREZ

vision, the miner defended the interests of both his class and nation: he organised strikes against the Nazi occupation in June 1941, he led the ‘battle of production’ to reconstruct the national economy after the ravages of the Second World War and he was in the front line of the social conflicts that shook the country in 1947 and 1948 at the outset of the Cold War. ‘The miner loves his profession in the same way that a sailor loves the sea’, would become a thorezien phrase.8 He – and the image was strictly masculine – was hardworking, self-sacrificing, disciplined, compassionate and loyal to friends and family; all qualities that would become part of Thorez’s constructed persona.9 Fils du Peuple begins with an account of the disaster at Courrie`res in 1906. The explosion that ripped through 110 kilometres of tunnels on 10 March led to the biggest mining catastrophe in European history: of 1664 miners in the pit at the time, 1099 were killed. Some suffered slow death through burns; others were asphyxiated by carbon dioxide fumes; many were buried alive. In grisly scenes, bodies – some horribly burnt, others missing limbs – were retrieved each day until August; some were not recovered until 1908.10 The rescue operation was poorly organised and called off too early; thirteen abandoned miners managed to reach the surface unaided after surviving twenty days on putrefied meat, bark and urine. As the funerals started in the villages, evidence grew of the mining company’s disregard of safety warnings and the mourning turned to anger. Miners began a strike that would gather strength, and eventually act as a catalyst for a nationwide strike movement covering a number of industries. The government’s response was to dispatch 20,000 troops into the northern mining region. One of the villages devastated by the tragedy was Me´ricourt, less than five miles from Noyelles-Godault. Fils du Peuple tells how the young Maurice ‘immediately galloped’ to the scene ‘through freezing mist, as fast as [his] little legs would carry [him]’. During the strike, he attends a demonstration and is charged by mounted police. The narrative describes his initiative, community awareness, courage and even an understanding of the rescue operation – all from a child who was not yet six. Yet there is no need to accept the story at face value to recognise the impact of the catastrophe on the young boy. Thorez grew up in a region of widows, orphans and men living with hidden mental scars. Some have speculated on links between the disaster and his psychology. Annie Kriegel wonders whether it prompted ‘a repugnance for physical combat linked more profoundly to a precocious fear of death’.11 Whatever its effect, Thorez’s presence at Courrie`res connected him personally to an event that came to symbolise the suffering, as well as the resistance, of French mining communities. There are no references to Courrie`res or its aftermath amongst the reminiscences in Thorez’s diaries. But his entries do reveal a deep empathy

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

17

with communities facing collective tragedy. In January 1958, Thorez closely followed the mining tragedy at the Plichon pit in Monceau, recording the ‘atrocious suffering’ of the injured men and, over a week, charting the rising death rate which eventually reached thirty-five. On 4 December 1959 (the feast day of the patron saint of miners, Saint Barbara), he was the first senior politician to visit Fre´jus after nearly one hundred inhabitants lost their lives when the town was devastated by a breach in the Malpasset dam.12 The Courrie`res catastrophe and the strike that erupted in its wake would have direct consequences for Thorez’s activity as a young communist. Miners’ trade unionism had divided into reformist and anarcho-syndicalist camps in 1902. A socialist deputy with politics that fused vehement anti-clericalism and increasingly zealous nationalism, E´mile Basly led his union towards a form of ‘business unionism’ that made a series of compromises with employers. A breakaway led by Benoıˆt Broutchoux depicted him as a ‘sound potato’ made rotten through his involvement in politics. The Jeune Syndicat led by Broutchoux gathered support from around 20 per cent of trade unionists in the northern coalfields. Conflict between the two unions intensified when Basly opposed taking strike action after the Courrie`res explosion, urging ‘calm and discipline’.13 Many of the initial recruits to the Communist Party in the region would be miners who had cut their political teeth in a struggle against ‘Basly reformism’. Thorez began working at the Dourges mine in July 1912, not long after his twelfth birthday. He was employed at the pithead as a sorter (trieur de pierres), removing dirt, stones and other impurities from the coal. Most sorters were women and children and, while legally work for under 16s was limited to eight-hours-a-day, before the First World War it was not uncommon for children to work shifts of twelve or thirteen hours.14 Thorez’s first biographer, Philippe Robrieux, created a stir by claiming that the 12-year-old Thorez had not worked as a trieur but was employed by the mining company as a messenger boy.15 Historians have failed to uncover documentary evidence that confirms Thorez’s status one way or the other. But Thorez regularly refers to this period in his diaries. During the fortnight before the feˆte of Saint Barbara, miners worked long shifts in order to earn time off for a weekend of music, dance, food and drink. In later life, Thorez would usually commemorate the feast day with a diary entry, on one occasion (1957) adding a sketch of pit-winding gear. On 4 December 1962, he recalled how ‘fifty years ago my mother gave me my first Saint Barbara bouquet plus two cigars, which I did not smoke, and a bottle of wine,’ and described how he earned 30 francs and 16 sous in the previous fortnight ‘comme trieur’. Perhaps more significantly, Thorez spoke publicly about his first job as early as 1926. During his candidature in

18

MAURICE THOREZ

the Nord by-election, he described himself as ‘a miner’s son and grandson [who] entered the Dourges mines as trieur in July 1912 [. . .] and worked there until August 1914’.16 Such a statement would have been foolhardy if untrue. The availability of witnesses in the region would have meant strong odds on a falsehood being exploited by political opponents during the campaign. By all accounts, Thorez was an exceptional school student. A photograph from the early summer of 1912 shows a young Maurice in the centre of seven boys wearing celebratory bonnets and waving national flags to celebrate their graduation. A slogan on a large poster declares: ‘Vive Averlant’, who was the teacher in the Noyelles-Godault school.17 When Thorez was imprisoned in 1929, the security police drew up a dossier on the communist leader. The report noted that Averlant ‘held him up as an example for his intelligence and diligence’.18 Thorez often returned the compliment: ‘I can never utter his name without emotion and gratitude,’ he declared in 1946. ‘Monsieur Averlant gave me the taste and the desire to learn, to learn always, through books but also through life.’19 The responsibility of young communists and young workers to ‘furnish the mind with general knowledge and develop a general culture’ would become a frequent thorezien theme. Studying literature, history and science was a means to combat capitalist society’s ‘intellectual decadence’, symbolised by the type of popular literature and films aimed at young people.20 Thorez recollected rambling as a boy across fields to witness the first aircraft flying out of La Brayelle aerodrome, near Douai.21 His notebooks reveal he was among 800,000 people to visit the international textile exhibition held in 1911 at Roubaix, ‘the city of a thousand chimneys’.22 A diary entry records how on 15 February 1961 he witnessed the total eclipse of the sun in Cannes: ‘I had seen the previous occasion on leaving the class of Monsieur Averlant at half past eleven in April 1912’, he reminisced, displaying remarkable memory. The young Thorez became an accomplished cornet player and through playing in concerts travelled to venues in the region. In 1913 he attended the spectacular World Exhibition in Ghent, his only recorded excursion outside of French territory before his first trip to Moscow in 1925. One aspect of his early life that Thorez could not hold up as a model to communist activists was religious practice. A clerical tradition persisted in parts of the northern mining belt, despite the rise of socialist ideology and the separation of the Church and State in 1905.23 It remained strong throughout the inter-war years: two months after the election of the Popular Front government in 1936, Noyelles-Godault was the venue for an open-air Eucharist attended by 20,000 Catholics.24 Thorez’s notepad records some youthful pilgrimages. In 1910, he attended a service in the chapel in the Bois

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

19

d’E´pinoy to commemorate a twelfth-century shepherd’s vision of the Virgin Mary. In 1911, he visited Notre Dame de Lorette (near Arras) to mark an eighteenth-century miracle. Four years later, the chapel would be destroyed by artillery fire and the site would, after the war, be transformed into a cemetery for 40,000 French soldiers.25 The police report of 1929 claims that Thorez ‘while young regularly assisted the parish priest during mass. [. . .] On account of his Christian fervour, he was even chosen to play the child Jesus several years in succession at Christmas.’26 Thorez’s youthful religious devotion leads to more than a hint of embarrassment in Fils du Peuple. The text stresses the voluntary nature of most of the young Thorez’s actions, while his position as a choirboy is a result of having ‘been chosen’ by the local priest. Nevertheless, Thorez’s son, Paul, later recalled how his father’s ‘Catholic boyhood [was] part of our family history – not something to be ashamed of, but something we could tease him about. He always spoke of his upbringing in the church with great affection, and he took care not to pass on to us the usual stereotyped views of priests as busybodies or enemies who should be shunned or attacked.’27 The older Thorez maintained a close interest in the evolution of Church dogma and steered his party to relate to developments within French social Catholicism. There is a remarkable absence of detail about Thorez’s family life in the first chapter of Fils du Peuple, which covers Thorez’s first twenty years in thirty-five short pages. His grandfather’s influence is stressed: ‘[Cle´ment Baudry] guided my first steps and taught me how to struggle.’28 His mother is portrayed as a leader of local women protesting against the cost of living. But his adoptive father, beyond granting the status of ‘son of a miner’, is almost totally missing from the story. Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal have commented on the ‘depersonalised’ nature of the account. The text is an archetypal ‘socialist-realist autobiography’ with ‘a focus on the positive character of the hero’.29 Yet there is the same reluctance to discuss family life in the autobiography that Thorez wrote five years earlier for the Communist International’s Cadre Commission in Moscow. This world communist human resources department helped to select and control top- and middleranking officials of national sections.30 Those writing a ‘bio’ were expected to give details of their social background, family relationships and education, so that their proletarian credentials could be verified and checks made on potentially dangerous ‘alien class influences’.31 The only information Thorez offers on his family is that all his close male relations either have been or are still employed by the Dourges mining company. He devotes just six sentences to the first fourteen years of his life and only thirteen to his first twenty. In contrast, the ‘bio’ of Jacques Duclos, who emerged as a leading communist around the same time as Thorez, reports his

20

MAURICE THOREZ

father’s drunkenness, his mother’s politics (she is a sympathiser but ‘with lots of the prejudices of an old peasant woman’) and the fact that one cousin has joined the police and others have ‘become petit bourgeois’ by becoming teachers and doctors.32 Did Thorez avoid discussion on his early life because the memories were too painful? Adjectives such as ‘dreary’, ‘sad’, ‘unhappy’, ‘monotonous’ permeate the early passages of Fils du Peuple. Relating to both the landscape and the hardship faced by the population, the representation is consistent with literary and artistic portrayals of the northern mining region.33 But it is tempting to conclude that the descriptors also give some indication of the emotional environment within the Thorez family home. Thorez’s mother, Cle´mence, was accorded a place in the cult around the General Secretary as it reached its apogee during the early 1950s. The party commissioned Andre´ Fougeron to paint her portrait and eulogies appeared in communist publications.34 An article in Regards explained how ‘at the age of twenty, the life of Cle´mence changed. She married; she had a child, a robust, fair-haired baby: Maurice.’35 It is instructive that the author felt obliged to invent a wedding to avoid the admission that his party leader was born outside of marriage. In fact, Cle´mence would not have been stigmatised for her position as an unmarried mother as, in the words of an authoritative regional history, ‘sexual relations in adolescence [and] prenuptial births [were] well accepted’.36 Cle´mence’s own mother, Cle´mence Dutouquet, had also been born out of wedlock.37 Yet Thorez’s diaries rarely mention his mother, who outlived him by almost four years. There is no recognition of her birthday or record of greetings at New Year. Paul Thorez, one of his sons, would remark on the extent to which Cle´mence remained aloof from the family compared to the ever-present me´me`re (granny), Ernestine, the mother of Jeannette Vermeersch.38 The relationship between Thorez and his adoptive father seems even more distant. We cannot know the effect of ill health on his temperament, except that this is the only part of his make-up that Thorez mentions in Fils du Peuple. According to a police report written during the 1930s, ‘Thorez’s father did not approve of his son’s opinions to such an extent that they fell out with each other.’39 Louis Thorez died on 15 March 1940 whilst Maurice was in the Soviet Union. When he heard the news almost eight weeks later, it prompted a rare reference in his diary: ‘announcement of my father’s death,’ he wrote on 9 May, ‘2,000 people at the funeral.’40 Thorez never spoke publicly of his natural father. Drawing attention to him would have confused his identity as ‘son of a miner’. Perhaps, also, thoughts of his natural father induced feelings of a sense of loss with which he found difficult to cope. Certainly, the circumstances of Henri Breton’s death

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

21

were distressing: he ended his life by slicing his throat on 14 July 1912. No suicide note was found but, according to Robrieux, Thorez as a young man expressed the belief that Breton had killed himself out of lovesickness for Thorez’s mother.41 Henri Breton seems to have increasingly entered Thorez’s thoughts during the final years of his life. ‘Half-a-century ago today, my father died’ is his diary entry on 14 July 1962.42 After Thorez’s death, a photo of Breton as a handsome moustached fellow in soldier’s uniform was found, tucked away inside an atlas in his library.43 Thorez describes in Fils du Peuple how ‘it was necessary to make himself useful’ with household chores and particularly to ‘look after his younger brothers’. His two sisters do not receive a mention. Le´onie, his oldest sister, died in her early twenties of spinal tuberculosis (Pott’s Disease).44 His other sister, Sidonie, was thirteen years his junior; the age gap, the separation of the war years and the extent of Thorez’s political activity as she grew up ensured that the two never became close. The same is true in regards to Thorez’s youngest brother, Cle´ment (born 1910). He became a bank employee and showed little interest in politics, though this did not prevent him from becoming the subject of police attention because of Maurice’s notoriety. While doing his military service in 1931, Cle´ment was included in the list of ‘conscripts affiliated to communist or revolutionary organisations’.45 The young Thorez was closest to his oldest brother, Louis (almost exactly five years his junior) with whom he shared a bedroom. At the age of sixteen, Louis would join the Noyelles-Godault section of the Communist Party, of which Maurice was the secretary.46 But the two brothers moved apart politically and personally during the time Thorez was climbing the communist hierarchal ladder. If a police report is to be believed, in the late 1920s Louis ‘shared the [negative] point of view of his father’ in regards to communism. He applied to become a gendarme in 1928, an application not helped by the fact that Maurice was on the run from a jail sentence.47 Louis rejoined the Communist Party during the Popular Front period and the two brothers became reconciled. On receiving a signed copy of Fils du Peuple on its publication in October 1937, Louis wrote to Maurice to describe his pride at having the book dedicated ‘by the hand of my beloved leader as well as my brother’.48 Louis would pay the ultimate price for his commitment to communism when he was executed as a hostage by the Nazis on 11 August 1942 in the grounds of Mont-Vale´rien Fortress.

Teenage refugee It was Thorez’s good fortune to be fourteen at the outbreak of the Great War. In August 1918, he was called before the Conseil de Re´vision, the medical

22

MAURICE THOREZ

examination for the next contingent of conscripts, but the slaughter was over before he received the call to join the army. Nevertheless, the war was a lifedefining experience, leaving its mark on his personality and politics. Thorez left Noyelles-Godault with his grandfather on 30 September 1914.49 As the German army advanced through Flanders, the authorities decreed that able-bodied men should evacuate the region. Louis Thorez and Cle´ment Baudry made plans to leave together and decided to take Maurice with them. But Louis wanted to finish some jobs around the house, so his son and Baudry went on ahead with an arrangement that the three would meet up at Pont-a`-Verdin. The Germans reached Noyelles-Godault a short time after they had left, and Maurice’s father was trapped with the rest of his family in occupied territory for the remainder of the conflict.50 Maurice and his grandfather waited at Pont-a`Vendin for three days and then headed westwards, passing through Be´thune to reach Auchel where they stayed for three weeks.51 They tried next to head back towards the east, and for several days wandered behind the conflict zone. Fils du Peuple describes how one night, while sleeping in the open near Vaudricourt, machine gun fire exploded around them and they found themselves in ‘the midst of a battle’. Reality is again fused with myth: although not called to arms, Thorez had witnessed war and according to the narrative even knew how to display a cool head under fire. In communist discourse after the Second World War, Thorez’s account of fleeing the German advance in 1914 became an analogy for France’s experience after the German invasion of 1940. Communists also drew parallels between the fate of Thorez’s relatives mobilised to work in German mines and the suffering of those drafted to work in Germany by the compulsory labour service during the Vichy regime.52 Police clearing the combat region of civilians soon picked up Maurice and his grandfather. They were put on a goods train that looped through Amiens, Rouen, Chartres and Orle´ans, before reaching Gue´ret, the administrative centre of the Creuse department. On 2 November, with around seventy other evacuees, Maurice and his grandfather were posted in the village of Clugnat. Thorez lived in or around the village until March 1917. Separation from his family immediately brought more independence: he was free from daily household chores and the monotonous work at the pithead; arrival during the agricultural dead season meant that there was little work available locally. Thorez was permitted to attend classes in the local school and became a rare example of a working-class boy able to extend his education into teenage years. In the summer of 1915 he began work as a farmhand on a smallholding in the nearby hamlet of Les Forges, where he took a small basement room. Encouragement continued from the local teacher, who lent him classics of French literature (including books by Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola and Victor Hugo).53

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

23

Thorez would look back at the sojourn at Clugnat with increasing nostalgia. He made a number of good friends amongst the local population and other evacuees.54 Fils du Peuple contrasts the ‘picturesque, wooded and undulating countryside, its pleasant hills, murmuring of birds and springs’ with ‘the melancholic and foggy plains of the north’.55 The lodging in Les Forges became an element in the Thorez cult. The PCF’s Creuse Federation bought the house and presented it to the General Secretary on his fiftieth birthday.56 Between 1956 and 1964, Thorez paid a pilgrimage to Clugnat with his children or Jeannette on no less than five occasions. The road between Clugnat and Les Forges was renamed ‘rue Maurice Thorez’ – and remains so today. Thorez became political while staying at Les Forges. His employer, Jean Me´nager, was a smallholder who travelled to work as a builder during the dead season. He subscribed to l’Humanite´, the Socialists’ daily newspaper, and Le Populaire du Centre, published by the party’s Limousin Federation. Thorez began to read both papers, which held contrasting positions on the war. French socialism’s response to the Great War was consistent with its complex relationship with the Republic. In the years before 1914, socialists developed an anti-militarist identity, encouraged by the repressive role of the army during industrial conflicts and royalist –clerical sentiments displayed by the officer caste during the Dreyfus Affair. In 1913, socialist deputies opposed the extension of conscription to three years. The political and moral authority of the SFIO’s most prominent leader, Jean Jaure`s, grew through his pronouncements in favour of internationalism and peace. Jaure`s was energetically pursuing his view that the government must attempt to resolve any potential conflict by arbitration or become a ‘traitor to France [and] public enemy of humanity’ when he was assassinated by a fanatical nationalist on 31 July 1914. But his anti-militarism had always been framed in a manner that left open the door of rallying to the cause of national defence. His influential book, L’Arme´e Nouvelle (1911), carefully distinguished between the ‘criminal’ nature of an ‘offensive war’ and the legitimacy of a conflict to defend the country’s independence and territory in the face of aggression.57 In August 1914, the French Socialist Party voted for war credits in parliament and two leaders, Jules Guesde and Marcel Sembat, entered the cabinet; a third, Albert Thomas, would join them the following year. The writer, Henri Barbusse, gave a typical socialist response to the German invasion when explaining why he was volunteering for the army at the age of 41: ‘the war is a social war [. . .] waged against our loathsome enemies of old: militarism, imperialism, the sword, the jackboot and the crown.’58 Soon, however, the military stalemate and deprivations of the civilian population fuelled support for the small anti-war minority within the socialist

24

MAURICE THOREZ

ranks. In Limoges on 9 May 1915, the SFIO’s Haute-Vienne Federation declared that it ‘was not the role of the Socialist Party to push for all-out war, to adopt a bellicose stance or to close its ears on any talk of peace’.59 The venue is significant: the Haute-Vienne and Creuse were neighbouring departments and both were components of the Socialists’ Limousin Federation, whose paper, Le Populaire du Centre, promoted the message that the party leadership had drowned the party’s soul in a sea of patriotism. Me´nager became a sympathiser of the minority and an influence on Maurice as he approached his sixteenth birthday. ‘Our discussions [. . .] and my personal reflections led me to take an increasingly forceful stand against the war,’ records Fils du Peuple. This ‘stand’ did not result in any immediate political activism, the opportunity for which hardly existed, though it did lead to a strained relationship with his grandfather. ‘[He] believed in the necessity of victory. But I protested against any continuation of the massacre,’ writes Thorez, hinting at an argument.60 The anti-war minority was politically disparate. The founding manifesto issued by the Haute-Vienne Federation attempted to raise questions in a way that would not threaten party unity. The party should ‘extricate itself from the war while still cooperating in it’, it suggested.61 The minority’s principal spokesperson, Jean Longuet, was, unlike his grandfather Karl Marx, a naturally cautious individual. A more radical ‘minority within the minority’ soon developed. Influenced by the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences (September 1915 and April 1916), trade unionists, pacifists and a younger generation of socialists coalesced around ‘Le Comite´ pour la reprise des relations internationales’ (CRRI). Exiled Russian revolutionaries, including Leon Trotsky and Alexander Lozovsky, attended its meetings in Paris. The political evolution of Barbusse indicates the shifting mood. Recovering from wounds, received after eighteen months of combat, he penned his masterpiece, Le Feu. Published in 1916, the novel’s portrayal of the horror the trenches, the ineptitude of the high command and the human – rather than nationalistic – aspirations of the soldiers caused a sensation. Soldiers passed it from hand to hand in the trenches and read it aloud in groups. Barbusse later joined the Communist Party and, after his death, the bundle of letters sent to him by soldiers in the trenches would find its way into Thorez’s possession and is now conserved in the Thorez– Vermeersch archives. ‘Your book has liberated us. It has been for us proof that despite everything the sun still exists’, is a typical comment from a soldier.62 On 17 March 1917, the French socialist press announced the ‘triumph of the Russian Revolution’.63 Five days later, Maurice and Cle´ment Baudry took a train for Paris. Fils du Peuple hints at Thorez’s displeasure when Baudry ‘decided’ to leave the Creuse. Thorez would have preferred to stay in the

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

25

region but his grandfather, probably believing that the war was entering its final stages, wanted to be closer to home and family. The pair spent a day in Paris at a refugee centre before continuing their journey to Amiens and then on to nearby Dreuil, where Baudry’s brother, an evacuee in the region, had arranged jobs in a saw mill. Cle´ment was given responsibility for the mill’s barge and for the next year he and Maurice transported wood up and down the Somme.64 Fils du Peuple describes how Thorez’s interest in politics grew. After news of the second Russian Revolution in November, he ‘eagerly searched’ for more information and ‘tried to get in touch with socialist activists’. While there is no trace of political activity by him in the region, there is no reason to doubt his enthusiasm for events in Russia. News about the Revolution in France was, however, hazy. The socialist press highlighted the ‘maximalist’ government’s publication of the secret diplomatic treaties and its proposals for an armistice. Thorez would have viewed the revolution through this optic, seeing it above all as an example of how the struggle for democracy and socialism could lead to an opportunity for peace.65 Thorez’s life as a bargeman was cut short by the German spring offensive that began on 21 March 1918. The Amiens region was threatened and young men were drafted to help prepare defences. Thorez was deployed for a month to dig trenches around Grandvilliers, forty kilometres south-west of Amiens. After this, he took a job as a baker’s boy, which continued until the armistice. On 11 November 1958, his diary recalls how ‘forty years ago, leaving the bakery, I walked the road from Amiens ahead of grandfather and my great uncle, who were harnessed to their cart’. The journey continued through the wrecked towns and countryside of northern France and crossed the Belgium border to reach Lanquesaint, where the rest of the Thorez family had been evacuated by the Germans. Thorez returned to Noyelles-Godault in early January 1919. He took a job working on the reconstruction of the Lens-Douai railway and, in April, was employed again by the Dourges mining company, this time working underground boring ventilation shafts and timbering galleries.66 In March, he joined the Noyelles-Godault section of the French Socialist Party and in May the CGT mineworkers’ union. His energy and abilities were quickly recognised and at the age of nineteen he became the assistant branch secretary of both organisations.67

The birth of French communism Thorez was part of a burgeoning labour movement in a state of ideological flux. The Socialist Party grew from 36,754 members in 1918 to 176,767 in

26

MAURICE THOREZ

1920 (pre-war membership had peaked at 74,579 in 1913).68 At the November 1919 legislative elections, the socialist vote increased by around 5 per cent to reach 21 per cent, though the party’s representation in the Chamber was reduced from 102 to sixty-eight. In Noyelles-Godault, all twenty-one members elected to the municipal council in December 1919 were Socialists, amongst whom were fifteen miners.69 The CGT trade union also advanced. As a wave of strikes spread through engineering, building, textiles, transport and the mines, membership reached 1.5 million in early 1920 (compared to a pre-war figure of around 300,000). Thorez took part in miners’ strikes in 1919 and was participating in a major conflict in March 1920 when he started his military service.70 The post-war workers’ movement faced ruling elites that were both confident and belligerent. The government’s response to the strikes was a combination of concessions (legislation on collective bargaining and working hours) and repression. Troops were mobilised into strike-bound areas and, in Paris, the May Day demonstration in 1919 was attacked by police, leaving many injured and one 19-year-old participant dead. The Bloc national won a decisive election victory in November by presenting itself as the inheritors of the wartime ‘Sacred Union’, its patriotism saturated with virulent antisocialism. The tone had been set in March at the trial of Raoul Villain, charged with the murder of Jean Jaure`s. Villain admitted killing the socialist leader but was acquitted by the jury, who accepted his plea that ‘it seemed to me that I was doing something useful’.71 In contrast, when crews of battleships in the Black Sea Fleet refused orders in protest against poor provisions and the slow rate of demobilisation, the symbolic leader of the mutiny, Andre´ Marty, was sentenced to twenty years hard labour by a military court. Pardoned in 1923, he joined the Communist Party, becoming one of its heroes and, later, entering an increasingly acrimonious relationship with Thorez. The volatile social climate sharpened ideological conflict within the socialist movement. Divisions over the war fused with controversies over the significance of the Bolshevik revolution and whether to affiliate to the Communist International, founded in Moscow on 2 March 1919. The right resisted such a move, but it had lost credibility amongst activists on account of its support for the war. The party’s centre held the majority. Led by Jean Longuet, Marcel Cachin and Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, it was enthralled by the Bolshevik revolution but opposed to unconditional affiliation to the Third International. It argued for a new international that combined the best elements of the Second (socialist) and Third (communist). But the ‘reconstructeurs’, as they became known, came under growing pressure from the party’s left grouped in the Committee for the Third International (Comite´ de la Troisie`me Internationale, CTI).

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

27

The centre and left blocs were almost equal in size at the SFIO Congress held in Strasbourg in February 1920, at which decisions were taken to disaffiliate from the Second International and to send two envoys to open negotiations with Communist International. In August, Cachin and Frossard returned from Moscow and, enthused by impressions of revolutionary Russia, recommended affiliation to Lenin’s International. An alliance between the Cachin-Frossard wing of the centre and the CTI won a decisive majority at Tours, and the French Section of the Communist International was born. The party possessed a ready-made network of activists, an organisational structure and, importantly, an established daily newspaper, l’Humanite´. For decades, the historiographical debate over the founding of the French Communist Party revolved around Annie Kriegel’s thesis that communism was a Bolshevik branch ‘grafted’ on to the trunk of the French labour movement.72 By challenging the teleological view of the PCF as the necessary outcome of France’s revolutionary and labour movement traditions, Kriegel broke the party’s hold over its own history. But by ignoring the European-wide dimension of the spread of communism following the Russian Revolution and claiming that the birth of the party was an ‘accident’ linked to the particular post-war conjuncture, she invented a new version of the ‘immaculate conception’.73 Romain Ducoulombier’s revisiting of this history traces the birth of French communism as the outcome of two interconnecting processes. The first, the deep crisis of socialist identity triggered in the summer of 1914 by the SFIO’s support for the war, predated the Russian Revolution and the growth of any ‘Bolshevik branch’. A young generation of activists searched for an alternative to a version of socialism corrupted by nationalism. For them, ‘communism’ signalled a commitment to regenerate French socialism by returning to its earlier traditions, particularly those shaped by periodic eruptions of working-class protest and the State’s violent response to them. After October 1917, this process combined with another: the Bolshevik project to extend their revolution into Europe and beyond through the creation of a ‘world party of socialist revolution’.74 This posed an entirely different type of organisation to that embodied by the Second International. Affiliates would have to ‘break completely and definitively with reformism and centrism’, prepare for the possibility of illegal work, agitate within the army, support the struggle of colonial peoples, regularly purge ‘careerist and petit-bourgeois elements’ from their ranks, establish fractions in the trade unions, operate through the principles of ‘democratic centralism’ and, above all, abide by international discipline. ‘Members of a party who reject the conditions and the theses established by the Communist International should be expelled from the Party,’ declared the final of twenty-one

28

MAURICE THOREZ

conditions of membership.75 The meeting point for the two processes was the Committee for the Third International (CTI). Formed in April 1919, the CTI was an outgrowth of the anti-war Zimmerwald minority, the CRRI. Amongst its leaders were Fernand Loriot, Louise Saumoneau, Boris Souvarine and the revolutionary syndicalists, Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte. Its membership has been estimated as at least 4,000, but possibly up to 10,000. It established branches and area committees, produced membership cards and published a weekly magazine, Bulletin Communiste, as well as a number of regional newspapers.76 In effect, the CTI had the attributes of a ‘party within a party’. The point at which Thorez joined the Committee is not clear, but he would have met its local organisers soon after joining the Socialist Party. The northern mining belt was one of the CTI’s strongest regions: the Pas-de-Calais and Nord departments both had coordinating committees, functioning branches and shared a weekly newspaper, Le Prole´taire. The driving force behind the CTI in Thorez’s Pas-de-Calais department was Rene´ Froissart, the party secretary in He´nin-Lie´tard, only five kilometres from Noyelles-Godault (and where Thorez had lived as a toddler after the marriage between his mother and Louis Thorez). Aged twenty-nine in 1919, Froissart had once worked as a miner but now kept a farm and ran a small threshing business. Wounds suffered in combat had led to an early discharge from the army and served as constant stimuli for his politics, which were imbued with a hatred of war and contempt for those who justified it.77 Thorez also quickly got to know Arthur Dubus, a 39-year-old miner who organised the CTI branch in Nœux-les-Mines, to the west of Lens. Before the war Dubus had been imprisoned on five different occasions for trade union activity, three times in 1906 after arrests during the strike following the Courrie`res pit disaster. A police report of 1922 describes him as ‘a militant extremist and one of the leaders of the violent strikes of 1919 and 1920’.78 After the split with the Socialists, Dubus would become the secretary of the Communist Party’s Pas-de-Calais Federation. The main organiser of the CTI in the neighbouring Nord department was Florimond Bonte. Although born ten years apart, Bonte and Thorez shared some common background and traits. Both had been brought up in northern Catholic families, both spent time in the Limousin during the war and both possessed a passion for reading. Before the war, Bonte believed in the idea of social partnership between employers and workers and was active in the Christian clerical workers’ union; but the conflict, during which he was badly wounded and later captured by the Germans, changed his outlook profoundly. On returning to France, he was posted to Limoges, where he joined the Socialist Party and began to write for Le Populaire du Centre. He would become

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

29

a close collaborator of Thorez, editor of l’Humanite´ in the early 1930s and communist deputy between 1936 and 1958, with the exception of the war years spent in a Vichy prison.79 Historians have tended to underestimate the influence of the CTI in the events of 1919– 20.80 Yet the authorities clearly considered its activities a threat. On 1 May 1920, railway workers began a strike which soon spread to other industries, including the mines, docks and Paris engineering. The movement was led by a revolutionary minority within the CGT, many of whom were supporters of the CTI. A reluctant CGT leadership sanctioned a rolling general strike but the government responded ferociously, mobilising police against demonstrations, recruiting ‘volunteers’ to replace strikers and threatening to declare the CGT illegal. Police arrested leaders of the CTI, including Souvarine, Loriot, Monatte and the railway workers’ leader, Gaston Monmousseau, on charges of Conspiracy against the Security of the State. Le´on Jouhaux, the CGT general secretary, ordered a return-to-work in midMay and, although railway workers initially tried to fight on, they were forced to retreat. In reprisals, around 18,000 were sacked by the employers and the CGT lost over 200,000 members. However, the manner of the defeat gave sustenance to the arguments of the revolutionary left.81 The CTI linked Jouhaux’s climb-down to his support for the government during the war. It contrasted the position taken by its own leaders, still languishing in the Sante´ prison. While in jail, Souvarine, aided by Loriot and Monatte, wrote the resolution to affiliate to the Communist International that was passed at Tours in December 1920. There are no archival traces of Thorez’s activity as a supporter of the CTI. Henri Darras, a communist activist, later recalled that the Noyelles-Godault Socialist Party had voted by 66 votes to 5 for affiliation to the Communist International after listening to a report from Thorez.82 It is not clear when the meeting took place, though Thorez’s position as branch assistant secretary lends the account some credibility. Young and with limited experience in the socialist movement, Thorez’s role in the founding of the Communist Party was, nevertheless, peripheral. During the decisive months around the Tours Congress, he was a serving soldier.

Private Maurice Thorez The festivities in Paris on 11 November 1920 continued well into the night. Cafe´s, theatres and shops teemed with activity; lightshows and torchlight processions illuminated the grand boulevards, while fireworks lit up murky skies. It was a double anniversary: fifty years of the Third Republic and two years since the nation’s victory in war. During the morning, two decorated

30

MAURICE THOREZ

military carriages had led a parade through the city. The first, draped with a huge tricolour, bore the coffin of an ‘unknown soldier’, symbolically chosen during a ceremony at Verdun. On the second was a small urn containing the severed heart of Le´on Gambetta, the statesmen who in 1870 proclaimed the Republic from the steps of the Paris Hoˆtel de Ville. ‘As far as one could see [. . .] were moving men, mounted and afoot with glinting trumpets, and a swaying forest of flags,’ wrote the correspondent of the London Times. Everything was ‘carried through with that superb instinct for the dramatic that is characteristic of the French’.83 Private Maurice Thorez was eight months into his military service at the time of the parade. On Armistice Day in 1958, he recalled in his diary how forty-eight years earlier he had ‘marched down the Champs Elyse´es during the transfer of the remains of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe’. But he never wrote or spoke publicly about his participation in the event. It would be interesting to know the young soldier’s emotions. Crowds lining the route cheered and threw flowers; the war generals – Foch, Joffre and Pe´tain – were saluted as heroes; shouts of ‘Vive Millerand’ greeted the French president, the former socialist who had become the leader of the right-wing Bloc national. In his speech during a ceremony at the Pantheon, Millerand spoke of ‘the glory of France’, which was expressed through military prowess and great innovations in industry, agriculture and commerce, but also in the areas of science, art, music, literature, history and philosophy.84 Fifteen years later, the ‘grandeur de France’ would become one of Thorez’s own themes. At the time, however, socialists (whether or not supporters of the Third International) were standing well apart from the nationalist discourse. They condemned the parade as ‘bellicose and warlike’ and the transportation of Gambetta’s heart as ‘ridiculous farce’. ‘If the “unknown soldier” could have arisen from his coffin [. . .] he would have learnt that he had died in vain,’ declared l’Humanite´.85 On beginning his military service in the 72nd Regiment, Thorez was stationed at Abbeville before being transferred to Amiens, where he was assigned to work in the office of the machine gun company.86 He refused to undertake training to become a corporal or non-commissioned officer and remained a private (soldat de deuxie`me classe). This was the customary antimilitarist stance adopted by socialist activists, but one which Thorez would regret in later life. The young soldier left a good impression on his officers and got on well with his comrades.87 He did not hide his political views. On 18 December 1958, a poorly punctuated letter from Monsieur Marius Michel, living in Metz, arrived at the PCF headquarters: After seeing your request for subscribers in the special issue of l’Humanite´, it seemed a good idea to send you the sum of 1000 francs

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

31

and kindly ask you to remember me to Maurice Thorez with whom I spent my military service in the non-combative Company of the 72nd Regiment at Amiens where he was in the neighbouring bed and a good comrade whose political ideas have since led to my sympathies for the Communist Party which at the time was seen as the biggest poison in society. Thorez replied, ‘I remember you very well and I’m happy that the hours we spent together in the 72nd have influenced your outlook in such a favourable way.’88 Thorez was with his regiment for the first fourteen months of the Communist Party’s existence. He kept in close contact with members of the CTI and studied pamphlets – mostly translations of Lenin, Trotsky and Clara Zetkin and texts by Souvarine – issued by the CTI’s publishing arm. When on home leave he participated in party activities. On 27 November 1921, Thorez was amongst the hundred delegates attending the Pas-de-Calais Federation Congress at Auchel. The nature of his responsibilities in the party after completion of his military service were probably decided during discussions at this event.

Young militant The Communist Party in the Pas-de-Calais had a difficult birth. On the eve of the Tours Congress, a ballot of the department’s SFIO members produced a 2-to-1 majority in favour of affiliation to the Communist International. But almost 50 per cent did not vote. After Tours, the ‘dissidents’ – as they were called by communists – were able to reconstitute the Socialist Party with relative ease. Every socialist deputy, regional councillor, party official and the vast majority of mayors and municipal councillors decided to stay with the Vieille Maison, Le´on Blum’s affectionate name for the SFIO. The structures of the Communist Party in the department had to be built almost from scratch. The energetic and talented Thorez was therefore much in demand. He left the army on 4 March 1922 and was immediately made secretary of the Noyelles-Godault branch. We can trace some of his activities and political evolution through the minute book.89 The branch met monthly on Sunday afternoons, preceded by an hour-long meeting of the ‘troop’ of Young Communists, also organised by Thorez. Meetings were at first chaired by the mayor, Henri Buffet, one of only five socialist mayors to join the communists in the Pas-de-Calais. Most activists were miners: a register at one meeting (28 January 1923) records that out of thirty-five people in

32

MAURICE THOREZ

attendance, twenty-nine worked in the pit; also present were two engineering workers, two building workers, two shopkeepers, and one woman. On 2 April, representatives of a number of branches met in Courrie`res to establish a committee to cover the Carvin canton. Thorez was appointed its secretary. He travelled around the canton to assist with the activity of weaker branches, including those in Courcelles and E´vin-Malmaison. In June, Thorez joined a committee overseeing ‘communist education’ at department level. He argued that branches were ‘overburdened’ with routine business and should meet fortnightly to allow more time for political discussion.90 On 6 August, the confident 22-year-old gave a talk on The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels at the Noyelles-Godault branch. Thorez was devoting the majority of his time to communist activity. During his military service, he had worked down the pit whilst on home leave (for a total of 22 days in September 1920, July and October 1921).91 But notoriety as a militant meant the blacklist, and he could only find temporary jobs as a general labourer and painter. He nevertheless remained active in the CGTU miners’ trade union. The CGT Unitaire (CGTU) had been born in December 1921 following a split in the CGT trade union federation. After coming close to winning a majority at the Lille Congress in July 1921, the left (a coalition of communists and anarchists) began to organise Comite´s syndicalistes re´volutionnaires (CSR). The CGT leadership around Jouhaux expelled the CSR from the union and the left reconstituted itself as the CGTU. Thorez participated in debates at the CGTU’s Pas-de-Calais Congress in June 1922. Most of his interventions were on organisational issues: he opposed a proposal to place union funds in a cooperative bank, arguing that the money should stay in the branches. A report in Le Prole´taire, now transformed into the communists’ regional newspaper, noted that ‘Torez’ had been elected to the Control Commission and the Commission of Propaganda.92 His reputation was growing, though for the next twelve months his name would often be wrongly spelt in the communist press.93 Thorez first came to the attention of the police in May 1922 when he coordinated the communist campaign in the Carvin canton for the elections to the Pas-de-Calais General Council. The Lens Special Commissioner reported that ‘a certain Thoret’ (sic) with another communist called Fourment had attended a number of public meetings organised by the socialist candidate, Henri Leclercq, to put the ‘counter-argument’. On 12 May, Thorez was in the chair at the communists’ own election meeting attended by 150 people in the Civic Hall at He´nin-Lie´tard.94 With Rene´ Froissart as candidate, the party’s campaign appealed to ‘parents who have lost sons in the massacre and young men, who miraculously escaped a glorious death in the mud and blood’.

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

33

It highlighted the difficult economic times faced by workers, shopkeepers and farmers. But the main target was the Socialists. Leclercq was described as a ‘bourgeois profiteer, lining his own pockets [. . .] using the official car and chauffeur of He´nin-Lie´tard municipal council to travel the region, protecting his own interests’.95 Hostilities on the left sharpened as the campaign progressed. A police observer at a debate between Froissart and a socialist representative at Dourges described a ‘stormy and warlike’ atmosphere. ‘Insults were exchanged from one side and the other; it nearly even came to blows,’ he reported.96 The results of the first round of voting were disappointing for the Communists. Froissart polled 2017 votes, compared to 4,862 votes for the Socialists and 3,075 for the right-wing National Bloc. On Thorez’s home patch, Noyelles-Godault, the party polled only 128 votes, trailing 302 socialist votes and 172 for the right.97 Across the Pas-de-Calais, communists received 6,730 votes, around 8 per cent of the total vote, and well behind the Socialists’ 18,792, a 22 per cent share.98 The results in the neighbouring Nord department were equally disappointing. ‘It’s undeniable. We were crushed,’ admitted Le Prole´taire.99 A few weeks later, a by-election took place in Noyelles-Godault for positions on the municipal council. It was the occasion for Thorez’s first published article in the communist press. Signed jointly with a local councillor Henri Fenzy, the piece was a tortured attempt to expose the ‘slanders and brainwashing methods’ of local socialists. The ‘dissidents’ were, it revealed, planning a secret meeting in the village. Those attending ‘would listen to nonsense without batting an eyelid and, having no experience of socialism, will take delight in cock-and-bull stories spewed out against the communist bastards’. The ‘disloyalty’ of the ‘dissidents’ was contrasted to the democratic approach of communists, whose meetings were always well advertised and open to the public.100 Thorez coordinated the NoyellesGodault election campaign, drafting a leaflet and designing a poster. On 9 July, the six communist candidates were soundly defeated. The party branch discussed the defeat (16 July) and, on Thorez’s proposal, agreed that in view of the result Henri Buffet should stand down as mayor. The election results were amongst a series of setbacks that dispelled the optimism of the Communist Party’s first months. In early 1921, party propaganda had predicted that, with the Soviet Union as a beacon, workers would quickly reject the ‘camp of opportunists, social patriots and reformist trade unionists’ and turn to ‘the sincere revolutionaries’ organised in the new party.101 By mid-1922, it was obvious that things would not be so simple. The promised European revolution seemed to have run out of steam. The Soviet government had begun to reintroduce market relations in

34

MAURICE THOREZ

agriculture and was attempting to establish diplomatic relations with capitalist powers. Harrowing photos of famine victims in the Volga region published in Bulletin Communiste provided further indications of the Russian Revolution’s difficulties.102 PCF membership was in free fall. It dropped from 109,591 in October 1921 to 78,828 in July 1922, and would further slump to 55,598 in 1923.103 As Noyelles-Godault branch secretary, Thorez had to deal with local consequences. Members defecting to the Socialists were formally expelled and their responsibilities reassigned. In June, Thorez proposed that a young member take the place of the departing ‘comrade Baudry’ – undoubtedly one of his uncles – on the local branch committee. In September, there were only thirteen people at the branch, compared to the sixty or so who had attended the SFIO branch in 1920. The departmental committee also faced difficulties. In June the assistant secretary, Deshorgues, announced his resignation so he could remain a member of the CGT mineworkers union.104 In short, the young party was in crisis. French communists were divided into three factions. A small group on the right remained sympathetic to a reunion with the Socialists, and sometimes voiced public criticisms of the Communist International. The centre was led by the two envoys sent to the Soviet capital in 1920: Frossard, now the party secretary, and Cachin, editor of l’Humanite´. Its supporters had failed to realise the shift in culture and practice that would be demanded by the Communist International and often showed reticence and sometimes resistance in the face of its demands. These were communicated by Leon Trotsky, the International’s ‘reporter’ on the ‘French question’, and also responsible for French affairs within the Soviet government. The party was asked to change its leadership structures to the Russian model of Political Bureau and Central Committee, to begin disciplined work in the unions (controversial because of the autonomy of French syndicalism from political parties enshrined in the 1906 Amiens Charter) and to transform l’Humanite´ into a party-controlled organ aimed at workers.105 Above all, it was told to shake off ‘survivals of its reformist and parliamentary past’, operate in a more disciplined and centralist manner and purge members who continued to resist ‘international discipline’.106 Led by Boris Souvarine, the left was in essence a continuation of the CTI and gave unflinching support to the International. In the months before the first national party congress held in Marseille in December 1921, Souvarine bombarded the leadership with blunt, and often rude, criticisms for its failure to pursue the International’s directives. The letters arrived from Moscow, where Souvarine was staying in the dual capacity of French representative and member of the International Secretariat. At the congress, an incensed centre faction voted with the right to

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

35

remove Souvarine from the Leadership Committee and, in rancorous scenes, supporters of the left retaliated by resigning their positions. As the crisis rumbled on through 1922, the International’s leaders were informed of events through Jules Humbert-Droz, the first of a series of emissaries to be embedded in the French party. The former theology student and a founding member of the Swiss Communist Party had arrived in October 1921 with a mandate ‘to intervene in the French Communist Party with full powers’ to ensure the implementation of decisions of the International.107 In early summer, it appeared that the French party was heading for a split.108 Some supporters of the left faction, including Albert Treint, were openly talking of a ‘French Livorno’, the Italian town at which the Italian Socialist Party split in January 1921. Fearing such a setback, Moscow leaders instructed Humbert-Droz to broker a deal between the centre and left factions. The centre was asked to reaffirm its commitment to the International and the left to withdraw its demand for a two-thirds majority on the party’s leadership committees. After fractious negotiations, a compromise was reached, including the principle of parity on the Leadership Committee to be elected at the party’s National Congress in October. Thorez was totally committed to the left faction. He gave a series of talks to the Noyelles-Godault branch on the ‘crisis in the party’ and took every opportunity to attack the centre. When the party HQ failed to provide a speaker to address a public meeting in the village during the municipal byelection, he complained that the Leadership Committee ‘shows no signs of life’ and successfully asked the branch to send a letter of protest.109 Thorez was in correspondence with Souvarine and kept contact with Monatte; one of the left’s organisers, Lucie Colliard, a full-time party worker and one of the few women in the leadership, visited him in Noyelles-Godault.110 When some members expressed concern at the scale of factionalist activity, Thorez replied: ‘the activity against the aims of the International by the right, and also the inertia and passivity of the centre, necessarily compels the convinced partisans of communism to organise themselves [. . .] Only the struggle under the banner of the International against opportunist tendencies can lead to the end of factions.’111

Member of the left faction The most contentious aspect of the conflict in the Pas-de-Calais was the ‘united front’, the strategy developed by the Communist International during the second half of 1921. Recognising that large numbers of workers still followed social-democratic parties and ‘reformist’ trade unions, the ‘united front’ stipulated that communists should propose campaigns around immediate issues

36

MAURICE THOREZ

with the ‘non-communist working masses’. The emphasis was on ‘unity from below’, but the strategy also implied negotiations and formal agreements with socialist and trade union leaders.112 The strategy therefore reversed the policy of 1919–20, when the emphasis was on breaking with social democracy in preparation for revolutionary movements led by communists. Many French communists found it difficult to comprehend the idea of dialogue and joint activity with people with whom there had been such a recent and acrimonious split. Humbert-Droz described the party’s reaction as ‘the greatest confusion’.113 Paradoxically, the right was initially sympathetic towards the strategy, seeing it as a possible step towards a reversal of the outcome of the Tours Congress. The left rallied to the position, but only after some prevarication. In the Pas-de-Calais mining region, opposition to the United Front was particularly stiff. Many communist recruits had come from an anarcho-syndicalist background and their aversion to any form of ‘bourgeois politics’ nourished an intransigent hostility towards the Socialists. The split in the CGT also rekindled pre-war antagonisms within mining trade unionism. Jules Bigotte, the 51-year-old party secretary in Harnes – described by the police as ‘before the war, a devoted friend of Broutchoux’ – was typical of those who wanted to have nothing to do with the socialist-supporting ‘Baslicots’.114 Raoul, the assistant secretary of the Vendin-lez-Be´thune branch, spoke for many: Am I supposed to merge or collaborate with people who I despise or do not respect? All right! But what about my conscience? My rebellious and revolutionary conscience, honest and uncompromisingly red, which surges up within me [. . .] I am ready to make an United Front with unconscious rebels at a time of revolutionary action, but I will not today hitch up with those who would happily send me to the guillotine tomorrow.115 In the ‘bio’ written for the Communist International in 1932, Thorez claimed that he ‘was quite easily able to take a position’ in support of the United Front.116 In fact, he did not raise the issue in the Noyelles-Godault branch until 18 June, over six months after the strategy had been agreed by the Communist International and three months after becoming branch secretary. Throughout the summer he waged an energetic campaign for what he described as ‘the only revolutionary attitude for a communist party’.117 After a number of lively debates, the Noyelles-Godault branch voted twelvevotes to one to support the United Front and elected its young secretary as one of its two delegates to the National Congress in Paris.118 Beginning on 15 October 1922 in a ‘very tense’ atmosphere, the congress was Thorez’s first communist meeting outside his own region.119 Debates

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

37

were dominated by established party figures, and there was little opportunity for a young regional activist to participate. But Thorez contributed to meetings of the left faction and, according to Robrieux, his ability to get to the nub of a problem with clarity impressed the left’s leaders.120 Thorez also met an international leader for the first time at the Congress. Humbert-Droz had been joined in the French capital by Dimitri Manuilsky, a veteran of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions and future secretary of the Communist International. ‘Manu’ would cross Thorez’s path many times during a long and sometimes fraught relationship. The Paris Congress agreed the united front policy by a big majority, the centre and left having brokered an agreement on a common political platform. But an arrangement over parity on the leadership committees collapsed when the centre took a majority of positions and, in scenes described by Humbert-Droz as ‘scandalous and repugnant’, rejected attempts by Manuilsky to arbitrate.121 The following day the left again withdraw from the leadership committees. Negotiations over the leadership of the French party now moved to Moscow where, the following month, the ‘French Commission’ met during the Fourth World Congress of the International. Chaired by Trotsky and attended by Lenin, Zinoviev and representatives from fourteen communist parties, the commission reversed the decisions of the Paris Congress and agreed ‘a slate’ of party officials and members of the Leadership Committee based on proportional representation of the different factions.122 Trotsky also cunningly raised the issue of freemasonry: the commission agreed that freemasons, former freemasons and members of the League for the Rights of Man would be barred from leadership positions in the party. Given the tradition of freemasonry on the French left, this inevitably brought the controversy over the authority of the International to a head. The centre faction split: Marcel Cachin, keen to keep his position as editor of l’Humanite´, supported the settlement; Frossard, himself a freemason, resigned from the party; other opponents of the International’s position were quickly expelled. The left, now the dominant force within the party leadership committees, had triumphed. But its methods of ‘administrative expulsion’ had set a precedent, providing an early model for the series of ‘communist inquisitions’ that would punctuate PCF history.123 The young Thorez was emboldened by the left’s victory. Though in a minority in his region, he had been on the winning side of the national debate, been initiated in the rules of party polemic, and learnt to engage with them convincingly. While there was little depth to his argument, the two major themes on which he focused during the summer of 1922 would become essential elements of the mature thorezien discourse. The first was a political approach that could win influence amongst workers who supported the Socialist Party, while simultaneously voicing

38

MAURICE THOREZ

communism’s hostility to that party’s ‘reformism’. Thorez led two election campaigns, both of which demonstrated the strength of the socialist revival after Tours and the inadequacies of the communist response. Abuse towards SFIO leaders and members marked communist propaganda in each. However, Thorez’s attitude changed significantly during the campaigns. Before the Canton elections in April, he argued that communist candidates trailing in the first round of voting should not be withdrawn during the second ‘whatever position we are in’.124 The policy would have handed out victories for right-wing candidates at the expense of socialist candidates. In the event, after much confusion and hesitation, communist candidates agreed to stand down. At the start of the second campaign – the Noyelles-Godault by-election (June) – Thorez described local people attending socialist meetings as ‘brainwashed’ and ‘easily led’. But after the communist candidates were decisively defeated, he showed sensitivity towards socialist supporters in the town by proposing that communists relinquish the position of mayor. The mature thorezien approach towards the Socialists would always contain a schizophrenic element, combining abusive strictures, such as those aimed at Le´on Blum in 1940, with an insistence that communists should ‘build unity with the socialist workers’. The slogan would become almost a mantra; sometimes helping to broaden the party’s appeal, as for example during the Popular Front, at other times leading to compromises in policy, for example, when used to justify support for Guy Mollet’s special powers during the Algerian War. Thorez’s second theme was unswerving support for policies emanating from the Communist International. His arguments in support of the United Front always emphasised that it was Comintern policy, turning the issue into a demand for loyalty. When the Noyelles-Godault branch debated the United Front, he asked that ‘all comrades present, the majority as well as the minority, affirm their commitment to the International’.125 After the National Congress, the loyalty demanded became more severe. On 19 November, he attended the Carvin branch, which ‘solemnly affirmed its unshakeable commitment to this International, in respect to its twenty-one conditions, as well as the complete implementation of the decisions, whatever they may be, of the fourth congress’.126 The same evening, the Noyelles-Godault branch ‘renewed its commitment to the Third International and declared it would accept all the decisions of the fourth congress.’ On 28 January 1923, Thorez reported on the International’s Fourth Congress. The minutes note that ‘after a discussion, all members present adopted without reservation all the decisions of the Communist International’. Thorez then circulated a sheet and asked each member to sign individually a declaration: ‘1) to accept fully and without reservation the twenty one conditions of the Third International; 2) not to belong to the Freemasons or the League for the Rights of Man.’127

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

39

While Thorez pursued it in a particular zealous fashion, this approach was encouraged by the entire left faction. The attitude towards the International was the essential dividing line between the left – which sought a ‘new approach’ to politics inspired by the Russian Revolution – and the centre, which instinctively attempted to maintain many of the methods of the SFIO. Given that attitudes towards the International had been the root of the split in December 1920, the left believed that compromises on loyalty would lead to a slippery slope towards a reversal of the Tours decision. It supported the intervention of the ‘world party’ into the functioning of its French section to resolve favourably its conflict with the centre. In doing so, the left helped to establish practices that would become part of the routine of French communism: membership of leadership bodies and responsibilities of leaders decided not at the French party conference but in Moscow; those in opposition to the policies of the International expelled from the party at the behest of Moscow. The left’s leaders did not realise it, but they had opened the door for the International leadership to use such measures against themselves. The report on 28 January was Thorez’s last act as Noyelles-Godault branch secretary. Two weeks earlier, he had attended the Executive Commission of the Pas-de-Calais Federation. The secretary, Arthur Dubus, had sent a message to the meeting asking to stand down from his position. Although citing ill health, Dubus was in truth demoralised after finding himself in a minority in the debate over the United Front. He had already asked to resign the previous August, but the Executive’s members had persuaded him to continue.128 Now they suggested that he be ‘assisted in his duties by comrade Thorez’, the idea being that the dynamic but inexperienced Thorez would take some of the burden from Dubus while learning the ropes. So, Thorez was relieved of his duties in Noyelles-Godault. Officially, he became the federation’s ‘secretary for propaganda’; in reality, the apprentice took responsibility for running the party in the Pas-de-Calais.129

Regional leader Thorez began his new role in the Pas-de-Calais Federation three days after the French army had crossed the German border to occupy the Ruhr. The party condemned the act as ‘capitalist piracy’ and sent a delegation to a conference organised by the Comintern in the Ruhr town of Essen to coordinate action against the intervention. On their return to France, police began arresting the participants, charging them with criminal conspiracy. Those arrested included Marcel Cachin, whose immunity from prosecution as an elected deputy was removed by the French parliament. The party’s interim secretary,

40

MAURICE THOREZ

Louis Sellier, instructed federations to organise protest meetings against the occupation and repression. In the Pas-de-Calais, Thorez established an ‘action committee’ and began to organise events in towns and mining villages.130 On 28 January, he spoke at a public meeting convened by the CGTU building workers’ union in the town hall at Billy-Montigny. A police observer sketched the outline of the 22-year-old’s hour-long speech. Thorez dealt firstly with background: the crisis is rooted in the Versailles Treaty, the conditions placed on Germany and the French government’s rights to German coal. Secondly, he examined the immediate consequences, particularly for mining communities. The bosses’ access to German coal will mean lower wages and longer hours: ‘in 1923, the French miner can expect to be robbed more than ever.’ Finally, he outlined tasks: ‘We must at all costs prevent this madness of war [. . .] It is urgent to hold out a hand to German workers [and] protest against the incarceration of communists.’ Thorez would use this template – background, specifics, tasks – to construct his argument in speeches throughout his career. The police observer complimented Thorez’s ability to think on his feet. The deputy-mayor, a socialist, had interrupted his speech: ‘Did you go to fight at the front? How do you think the Germans would have treated us if they had been victorious?’ Initially surprised by the attack, Thorez kept to the political high ground and rebuked the socialist for ‘making such stupid points at such a serious time’. At the end of the meeting, several of those present shouted ‘Vive la Re´volution!’.131 The unfolding crisis in Germany suggested to communists that the European revolution was back on the agenda and encouraged frenetic activity. Thorez was now a young man in a hurry. Throughout the spring, he spoke at public meetings, trade union meetings and demonstrations. On May Day, he addressed a crowd of 1,500 at a demonstration through He´nin-Lie´tard.132 At the end of May, the Ministry of Interior banned Le Prole´taire and arrested its publisher because of the paper’s opposition to the Ruhr intervention. Communists organised thirty protest meetings across the region and launched a new paper, l’Enchaıˆne´. Thorez helped to coordinate the campaign and spoke at meetings in Hersin-Coupigny, Barlin, Hoyelles-sous-Lens, Harnes and Avion.133 On 12 August Thorez’s position as the communists’ principal spokesperson and organiser in the Pas-de-Calais was formally recognised by the Pas-de-Calais Executive. In a reversal of roles, he was appointed federal secretary, while Dubus became assistant secretary. The previous month, the party leadership in Paris had designated Thorez as a full-time party worker (temporary delegate). Rather than one of many volunteers devoting all available time to the party, he was now part of the hierarchy of

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

41

communist functionaries. Thorez’s line manager was the ‘permanent delegate’ for the north, Guy Jerram.134 Four years older than Thorez, Jerram had survived the war to become an important figure in l’Association re´publicaine des anciens combattants (ARAC), the communist-dominated war veterans’ association. He was talented, meticulous and, like Thorez, full of energy. Thorez worked out of the federation’s headquarters in Be´thune: ‘a single room with whitewashed ceiling and walls, some trestle tables, four benches and a few chairs’ situated on the first floor of a building close to the railway station. He oversaw six meetings a week and the work of eight local organisers.135 Most days he rode on bicycle to villages, pit heads and cafe´s, discussing with activists and groups of party members. Each Wednesday morning, he would take the first train to Lille to edit the Pas-de-Calais page in L’Enchaine´. After finishing the paper, he would go with other activists to a restaurant ‘to eat the traditional steak and chips and drink a good black coffee washed down with Genie`vre de Wambrechies’, the local liqueur. Sunday was filled with meetings and demonstrations, often followed by a social event in an inn or cafe´. Thorez would lead the singing with ‘not only revolutionary songs but also often love songs and popular songs, and everyone would join in the chorus with gusto’.136 Such was Thorez’s enthusiasm for popular music that he drew up plans for a ‘music society’ attached to the Pas-de-Calais Federation.137 For Thorez, these were happy and fulfilling days in both his political and personal life. On 8 September, he married the 18-year-old Aurore Marie Membœuf, the daughter of Arthur Dubus’ sister. The couple set up home in Noyelles-Godault and Aurore joined the local party branch.138 Thorez was living and breathing revolutionary politics from morning to night. The belief that revolution was around the corner drove his voluntarism and compensated for the subsistence wage he received from the party. Temporary delegates were expected to work a standard 16-hour day. When one of Thorez’s colleagues asked for a break at Christmas and New Year, Jerram complained to Paris: ‘Comrade Faure Brac is carrying out his tasks very well, but only works around ten hours a day [. . .] In the Nord, fulltimers work 355 days a year and only take a ten-day break in July or August.’ In contrast, Jerram’s reports on Thorez were full of praise: ‘Comrade Thorez is carrying out his tasks marvellously [. . .] Committees have been formed; all the propagandists have received written instructions, all the secretaries have action plans for their region and everywhere posters appear.’ On the basis of Thorez’s energy and diligence, Jerram predicted: ‘In two-and-a-half months, at the most, the Pas-de-Calais Federation will be a formidable weapon in the hands of the party.’139

42

MAURICE THOREZ

Trade unionist Historians and biographers have often ignored Thorez’s trade union activity during this early period. According to Annie Kriegel, ‘from the outset, [Thorez] viewed his activity and career entirely within the framework of the party.’140 Wieviorka similarly notes that his ‘experience of trade unionism and strikes [was] modest’.141 Yet not only was Thorez’s activity as a trade unionist significant, it also helped to shape his approach to politics.142 In 1923 Thorez was acting secretary of the Dourges CGTU miners’ branch; he sat on the departmental committee of the Miners’ Federation and on the departmental CGTU committee. In the summer, he acted as the CGTU’s representative during a ten-day ‘tour’ of meetings in the department. He attended the National Congress of the Miners’ Federation, held in June in Angers, and the CGTU National Congress, held in November in Bourges. He would again attend the CGTU National Congress in 1925 and the Miners’ Federation National Congress in 1926. The combination of Thorez’s party and trade union positions sometimes prompted controversy. The Communist International’s ninth condition of membership – that the work of communists in the unions should be ‘completely subordinated to the party as a whole’ – contradicted the French syndicalist tradition which required that trade unions maintain autonomy from party politics. An anarchist minority continued to defend this position within the CGTU, and some communists were still influenced by it. At the Pas-de-Calais CGTU Congress on 15 July 1923, a delegate criticised Thorez’s summer tour and asked if it were appropriate that a ‘full-time worker for a political party’ should act as a union spokesperson. Thorez replied that active communist militants would not become ‘second-class trade unionists’.143 Thorez played an important role in the two miners’ strikes organised by the CGTU during 1923. The first, against wage cuts, began on 16 February. The date had been set nine days earlier after miners in Lorraine walked out to join a strike in the pits in the neighbouring Sarre region of Germany. Thorez helped to prepare the movement in the Pas-de-Calais and became a member of the strike committee. Socialist politicians and CGT union leaders condemned the strike as an ‘adventure’. An exchange between Thorez and the socialist deputy mayor of Bruay in front of a rally of 2,500 miners is the first mention of the future General Secretary’s activity in l’Humanite´. According to the paper, after Thorez’s intervention only ‘fifty at the most’ of those present supported the ‘reformist position’.144 Although the strike was well supported, particularly by Polish immigrants who made up an important section of the workforce, it was far from general. The Be´thune region was not touched until 19 February. Nevertheless, the movement was strong enough to pressurise the mining

YOUNG MAN IN

A

HURRY

43

companies to offer an increase in wages during negotiations with the CGT. Although miners in the Lorraine region – the cradle of the strike – were not granted any concessions, the CGT accepted the employers’ offer. On 20 February, Thorez, Dubus and two other representatives of the Pas-deCalais strike committee attended the National Council of the CGTU miners’ union. Acting as the delegation’s spokesperson, Thorez argued for a cautious strategy: ‘the agreed increase, although insufficient’ meant that the ‘movement could no longer be led with the same scale of support’ and it was necessary ‘to examine the possibility of a return to work’.145 Thorez displayed similar prudence during the second strike, which began on 15 November. On this occasion, the CGTU Miners’ Federation attempted to call workers out after the CGT had already agreed a settlement with employers. The response in the Pas-de-Calais was, in the words of Guy Jerram’s report to party headquarters, ‘a fiasco’: the union’s ‘lack of skilful tactics’ meant that the strike had been ‘endured by activists in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais instead of being led by them’.146 It was the same picture at national level and the action was called off on 18 November. Thorez spoke about the lessons of the strike at the Miners’ Federation Congress at Montceau-les-Mines the following August: it had been badly conceived and poorly prepared, with the union making no attempt to ascertain the mood of its members. He summarised his argument in a phrase: ‘you can be a revolutionary, but you cannot take your desire [for revolution] for revolutionary realities.’147 One of Thorez’s first articles in the communist press dealt with ‘the problem of foreign labour’. In the mines, Polish and, to a lesser extent, Italian workers had begun to make up a significant section of the workforce. Thorez criticised ‘certain French workers’ for considering immigrants to be ‘producers of their own misery’ and the Socialists for refusing to show any interest because immigrants did not possess the vote. These workers, he argued, had ‘a marvellous sense of organisation but find that French workers do not always reciprocate it’. He proposed that communists organise a propaganda campaign on the issue.148 Thorez often displayed frustration at administrative sloppiness. At the CGTU Pas-de-Calais Congress in July 1923, the secretary, a railway worker called Henri Dumoulin, began the meeting by outlining the union’s financial difficulties. He stated that ‘all the members of the Propaganda Committee had not done what they should have’. Thorez immediately intervened to say that the report had contained ‘too much insinuation and lacked details’: it was necessary to ‘state the names’ of those who had underperformed.149 At other times, he tried to tease out the politics behind organisational proposals. When the Miners’ Federation Congress debated

44

MAURICE THOREZ

the level of union subscriptions and whether to launch a journal, he outlined the importance of addressing workers’ immediate concerns: ‘you know very well, you do not organise workers by only speaking to them about revolution, about which they have only a vague sense in their minds. It’s above all by speaking to them about where tomorrow’s bread will come from that they will come towards our unions. They will also come because they know that they could suffer an injury and that a comrade from the legal department is there to defend them.’150 At the same congress (June 1923), the Pas-de-Calais Federation – and, by implication, Thorez – was criticised by anarcho-syndicalists for not sufficiently breaking with the reformist pre-war practices, specifically localism and electoralism, of the ‘old union’ led by E´mile Basly. The criticism was unfair. Thorez followed the new approach towards trade unionism laid out by the Communist International, involving the CGTU in political campaigns, such as opposition to French intervention in the Ruhr. Nevertheless, his emphasis on day-to-day matters, attention to organisational detail and his preparedness to negotiate partial improvements are evidence that Thorez fused this approach with the powerful legacy of reformist trade unionism in the northern mining belt.

CHAPTER 2 THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

Maurice Thorez is often compared unfavourably with the leader of the other western European communist party to win mass support, the Italian Palmiro Togliatti. Touched by the same great historic events, the two communist lives at times became entwined: in Paris during the 1930s, in Moscow and Ufa during the war years, and as adverseries in debates within in the world communist movement following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. The two men’s backgrounds were very different – Togliatti was born into a ‘typical Piedmontese petit-bourgeois family’1 – and their brands of communism would diverge; but both shared a pragmatic approach to politics. Thorez and Togliatti negotiated similar political crises within the space of a few months in 1924. Togliatti was racked with indecision during the conflict that broke in 1923 between the leader of the Italian party, Amadeo Bordiga, and the Communist International. Initially loyal to Bordiga, Togliatti agonised until February 1924 before reasoning that Italian communists would lose ‘all real and practical immediate influence on the development of the political battle in Italy’ if they were to lose the International’s ‘powerful material and moral support’.2 Thorez also underwent internal turmoil during the spring of 1924. He later wrote in his ‘bio’ (1931) that he had ‘hesitated for several weeks over the question of Trotskyism [. . .]: I was unaware of the entire question [and] up to that point had links with certain leaders of the left who were trying to lead the party into a false position.’3 Thorez’s account of the affair was somewhat disingenuous. In truth, he had in late March committed himself decisively and without qualms to the wing of the French party later assigned the label of Trotskyism, only to yield to the discipline of the International at the end of May. It was a humiliating experience – and one from which Thorez would draw lessons for the future. While Togliatti has been well described as the ‘reluctant revolutionary’,4 Thorez became the hesitant revolutionary. The French leader

46

MAURICE THOREZ

would, whether consciously or out of instinct, hesitate politically in the face of turning points in communist policy and decisive historical events. For Thorez, the conversion to a new political line would invariably be accompanied by a personal sense of unease, though he would generally compensate by pursuing the new position in relentless manner.

Lyon Congress Thorez began 1924 in confident mood. After being re-elected secretary of the Pas-de-Calais Federation in early January, he travelled with the region’s delegation to the National Congress in Lyon (20 – 23 January). By now, he had caught the eye of the party leadership. Souvarine wrote from Moscow to the Political Bureau in June 1923 commenting on his ideal temperament and excellent potential, and Thorez arrived in Lyon in the knowledge he was to be proposed as a regional representative (supple´ment de province) on the Leadership Committee.5 Already displaying his life-long penchant of mixing politics with a little tourism, Thorez visited the medieval Old Town and joined an audience at the Guignol puppet show on the eve of the congress. Lyon was the occasion for Thorez’s first speech at a national event. His theme was relations with the Socialist Party. With the legislative elections approaching, the Socialists had formed an alliance – le Cartel des Gauches – with the Radicals and other small centre parties. They had given short shrift to the communists’ proposal for a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc’, an electoral alliance between Socialists and Communists along with a move towards reunification of the trade union movement. Given the Socialists’ intransigent position, some delegates attacked the leadership’s idea of sending an ‘open letter’ to the SFIO congress in Marseille as ‘a waste of time’. One speaker suggested that the Socialists should instead be ‘nailed to the pillory’. In his contribution, Thorez opposed such sectarian jibes and displayed some strategic vision by arguing that an appeal to the Socialists to break with bourgeois parties and form a left bloc was not simply a tactical matter linked to the coming elections but should be part of the party’s ‘farreaching’ and ‘long-term tasks’ of left and workers’ unity.6 The Lyon Congress was shaken by an announcement from the platform that ‘Lenin, our master, our guide’ had died.7 As French communists went into mourning, few realised that a struggle over the succession, and indeed the whole course of the Revolution, was already underway in the Soviet Union. After suffering a stroke, Lenin had laid incapacitated for ten months amid deepening economic and financial crises and increasingly acrimonious exchanges within the Russian party. On 15 October 1923, forty-six prominent Bolsheviks, including two former party secretaries, attacked the Central

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

47

Committee’s ‘haphazard, poorly thought out and unsystematic’ economic policy and an ‘intolerable regime’ that was ‘replacing the party with a selected bureaucratic apparatus’. The ‘declaration’ echoed criticisms by Trotsky in a letter sent to the Central Committee the previous week, which were developed in a pamphlet, The New Course. The ‘troika’ at the head of the party – Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev – responded ferociously. Trotsky and ‘the opposition’ were denounced as ‘deviationists’, ‘petits-bourgeois’, ‘antileninists’ and ‘mensheviks’ who wanted to ‘weaken the dictatorship of the proletariat and extend the rights of the new bourgeoisie’.8 Inevitably, the conflict in Moscow quickly spread into the International, now under the direction of Zinoviev. The Comintern leadership labelled any potential opposition as the ‘international right’ and mobilised to smother it under the guise of ‘bolshevisation’. Trotsky’s links with France ensured that the dispute would be particularly sharp in the French party. The two main protagonists were Boris Souvarine and Albert Treint. After returning to Paris from Moscow in October 1923, Souvarine had become French communism’s principal strategist. At the Lyon Congress, he moved all the key policy documents and was entrusted to make the announcement of Lenin’s death. Souvarine possessed an arrogant air and generally remained aloof from others in the leadership, but he was the personification of the International in the French party.9 He clashed repeatedly with Albert Treint, who with Louis Sellier was one of two ‘acting secretaries’ of the party, and by the time of the Lyon Congress relations between the two men had become toxic. Albert Treint shared Souvarine’s political background in the Committee for the Third International and the left faction but tended to interpret Comintern policy in a sectarian manner. He was credited with the description of the united front as a tactic to ‘pluck the feathers of the socialist goose’. Treint’s inclination to treat party members as subordinates rather than collaborators earned him the nickname ‘le capitaine’. His antics did not go down well with the International leadership. Humbert-Droz complained to Zinoviev: ‘despite the private and friendly warnings I gave him about his authoritarian and brutal methods, he continues to lead the party like a regiment.’10 At Lyon, on Humbert-Droz’s recommendation, Treint was removed from his position as acting party secretary, as well as from the Political Bureau. Souvarine began publishing articles by protagonists in the Russian conflict in the pages of Bulletin Communiste in autumn 1923, arguing that the French party should not take sides in a dispute between the Moscow comrades. At the Leadership Committee on 12 February 1924, he proposed a resolution declaring that both sides were acting loyally and were committed to

48

MAURICE THOREZ

‘the triumph of the Russian and world revolution’. There were only two votes against, Treint and Suzanne Girault, a 41-year-old Swiss woman who had worked as a teacher in Russia during the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.11 Girault was leader of the Seine Federation, which had been severely criticised by Souvarine for ‘turning in on itself’.12 There was also one abstention: the railway workers’ leader, Pierre Semard. There was consternation in Moscow, where the French resolution was interpreted as implicit support for the position of Trotsky. Abraham Heifetz, known as Guralsky, was dispatched to Paris with orders to knock the French party into line. Born into a Jewish family in Riga, Guralsky had been active in the revolutionary movement in Latvia, Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland and Italy; he had been arrested on numerous occasions and served three stretches in prison. In 1917, he followed Lenin to revolutionary Russia in the second ‘sealed train’ and, after 1919, became the Communist International’s main strategist in the German Revolution. In Paris, Guralsky led a small team of Comintern ‘delegates’ and replaced Humbert-Droz as Moscow’s ‘eyes’, until arrested in July 1925.13 Despite the International’s previous reservations about Treint’s politics and methods, Guralsky formed a bloc with him and Girault. The pair became the leadership hub of the party until the second half of 1925. Semard would also be promoted: he was designated general secretary by a commission at the Communist International’s Fifth Congress in July, though he did not emerge as the party’s key figure until the end of 1925. Guralsky’s appeal for discipline won an echo in a party facing considerable state repression. Leading individuals and important sections began to make declarations of support for the international leadership and Treint was restored to his position on the Political Bureau. Realising the forces ranged against him, Souvarine resigned from the Political Bureau (BP), believing this would allow more freedom to campaign for his position. The BP responded by removing him as editor of Bulletin Communiste and demanding that he return to Moscow to continue his role as the party’s representative, a blatant attempt to restrict his participation in the debate. When on 18 March, the Leadership Committee reversed the 12 February resolution and declared – with only two votes against – to be ‘in entire agreement with the decisions of the Russian party’ and in favour of ‘tightening discipline on the strict basis of Bolshevism’, the absent Souvarine was forced to send his vote by proxy.14 Souvarine now attempted to organise opposition within the party. In a letter to subscribers of Bulletin Communiste, he complained that his removal as editor was a result of factional machinations and called for like-minded communists to come together around a new Marxist publication: ‘send your subscription immediately [. . .] we are certain that we will establish very quickly a network of readers.’15 A few weeks later (on 11 April) he raised the

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

49

ante further by launching an appeal for funds to publish a French translation of Trotsky’s The New Course.

Maurice Thorez: Trotskyist? The 23-year-old Thorez immediately committed himself to Souvarine’s faction. While not close to him in a personal sense, he viewed Souvarine as something of a mentor. On 25 March, Thorez dispatched 40 francs for the opposition’s proposed new publication, adding: ‘I am not very rich at the moment but I will try to send more as soon as possible.’ A fortnight later, he made a commitment to Souvarine’s ‘project’ at a national meeting of federal secretaries (6 – 7 April 1924). Thorez was one of only two delegates to vote against the position of the party leadership, which gained 59 votes. On 15 April, he sent a further donation, this time to aid the publication of Trotsky’s brochure. He summed up his ‘complete solidarity’ in a covering note: I approve your attitude towards the Russian question. I support your opinion on the artificial nature of a French crisis. I refuse to accept that the various displays of opportunism within certain sections of the International are examples of a ‘wave of menshevism’. I consider the labels ‘right, centre and left’ that are applied to activists and opinions without other explanations as arbitrary. I do not accept that we should discuss, write, re-discuss and split hairs over texts and speeches, misplacing commas and misrepresenting ideas. I do not accept that we must, with words and phrases empty of sense, talk about optimism, bolshevism etc. and that we should condemn as pessimism that which is only an appeal to reason, study and work. For all these reasons and others [. . .], I ask you to consider me as a supporter of the ideas that you put forward.16 Thorez remained part of the opposition camp for two months, rejecting warnings from the Leadership Committee that Souvarine’s actions were ‘contrary to the discipline of the party’. Criticisms of Souvarine had been recurrent since the party’s inception, usually from those opposing him as a mouthpiece of Moscow. It did not occur to Thorez that the man who had done more than anyone to systemise the International’s authority and methods within the French party could now be on collision course with it. In effect, Thorez viewed the crisis through a French optic. He was instinctively opposed to the sectarianism of Treint and his supporters and linked their attack on the ‘rightist’ opposition with their hostility to arguments for a strategy towards

50

MAURICE THOREZ

the Socialists. He argued amongst activists in the Pas-de-Calais that the conflict was a diversion from the legislative elections, for which the first round of voting was taking place on 11 May. Thorez worked hard to energise the party’s election campaign, personally leading the intervention at public debates organised by socialist candidates.17 According to one leading member in the region, ‘we were told that we must focus on the elections; we must not divide the party because our divisions will be exploited.’18 Thorez naively believed that he could commit the Pas-de-Calais Federation to the opposition camp. ‘The majority are agreed that Trotsky is not a Menshevik,’ he told Souvarine on 2 May.19 Indeed, when the Federal Executive met on 18 May, there were only three votes for the national leadership’s position.20 But everything changed a few days later when Guralsky arrived in the Pas-de-Calais and began to visit branches and activists in preparation for a special meeting of the federation. There is no record of the conversation between Guralsky and Thorez, but the ‘old Bolshevik’ inevitably made an immense impression on the young militant. Guralsky would have told Thorez that the conflict, even if it were ‘artificial’ and a ‘diversion’, threatened the cohesion of the French party. He would have pointed to the damage done by the resignations at the end of April of Monatte and other supporters of the opposition from their posts on l’Humanite´.21 He would have claimed that Souvarine had ‘concealed’ serious mistakes of the Russian opposition from French communists and was exaggerating the crisis in the Russian party for personal and factional motives. He would have told Thorez that the opposition’s position was going to be rejected by the majority of delegates at the party’s Thirteenth Congress (which had just opened in Moscow) and the opposition – in contrast to Souvarine’s ‘indiscipline’ and ‘disloyal’ statement that ‘there was something rotten in the party and in the International’ – had made clear that it would accept the congress decision. (Indeed, Trotsky made his famous statement, ‘whether it be right or wrong, it’s my party’, a few days later.22) A skilled operator, Guralsky would have certainly conceded some of Thorez’s criticisms of Treint and his supporters. ‘Certain exaggerations and erroneous ideas [. . .] must be corrected and avoided’, but they were secondary to the central issues posed by the conflict: ‘we must be able to see the wood for the trees,’ he argued.23 He probably flattered Thorez by recognising the professionalism of his work in the Pas-de-Calais, suggesting that such methods were the model ‘to bolshevise’ the party nationally.

‘Notre bon collaborateur’ The Pas-de-Calais federal committee met on 25 May. With twenty-four branches represented, twenty-one delegates voted in favour of the leadership’s

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

51

position, with three abstentions. The turn-around from the meeting of the Executive seven days earlier was extraordinary. The following week (1–2 June), 170 delegates met for the party’s National Council in Saint-Denis and – using a block voting system – agreed the leadership’s thesis by 2,353 votes to three, with ten abstentions.24 Now began a salami operation to purge the opposition. The Communist International’s Fifth Congress established a disciplinary commission to investigate Souvarine and his expulsion was announced on 19 July 1924.25 Monatte and Rosmer were expelled on 5 December, after refusing to swear loyalty oaths to the leadership. More dissidents would raise their voices against growing bureaucratisation at the 1925 National Congress at Clichy and would ‘put themselves outside the party’, the euphemism for administrative expulsion. The methods used to expel the opposition were not new. Souvarine and his supporters were victims of the bureaucratic apparatus they had themselves helped to erect in 1922 in order to expel those representing ‘the vestiges of social democratic morals and practices’. But the intolerant culture in the party now reached new levels. Dissident speeches at Clichy were greeted with jeers and whistling.26 Private correspondence between oppositionists was intercepted and forwarded to Moscow.27 Opposition supporters faced personal denigration: Rosmer and Monatte were denounced as part of an ‘offensive’ led by the ‘forces of demagogic fascism’ and labelled ‘enemies of the proletariat, party and International’.28 The seeds of two of the most notorious aspects of Stalinism – the theory of social fascism and the language of the show trials – were being sown. How did Thorez live these months? Writing his Comintern ‘bio’ eight years later, he implied a painless political transformation: I immediately took a correct position from [de`s] the departmental conference of my federation, when the delegate of the CI [Guralsky] came and explained the questions to me and convinced me. I could then, a little time later, take the leadership of the important region of the Nord.29 In other words, he quickly fell into line and was later rewarded with promotion. Conversely, two biographers, Robrieux and Wieviorka, suggest a ‘difficult period of soul searching’. Robrieux suggests that Thorez’s ‘disorientation’ and ‘prevarications’ continued throughout the autumn and winter. He was not drawn back into the fold until early 1925, the final act of ‘seduction’ being Guralsky’s proposal to include the young man on the French delegation to the International’s Conference on Organisation held in Moscow in March 1925. Such were the doubts of Guralsky and Girault about Thorez’s

52

MAURICE THOREZ

reliability, speculates Robrieux, that in September they began to promote Fre´de´ric Garrez as a ‘rival’ to his leadership in the Pas-de-Calais.30 As would be expected, Thorez’s ‘bio’ ignores the inevitable embarrassment, possibly shame, he experienced. His political reputation had been one of total commitment to the International. Yet he, the regional leader, had been censured by an eminent Comintern representative. Robrieux and Wieviorka, however, overstate the ‘soul-searching’. They believe Thorez abstained on the vote at the federal committee. Minutes of the meeting have not survived, so we cannot know for sure. But it is unlikely that Thorez would have been proposed the following week as one of the sixteen members of the Political Commission at the National Council if he had not shown commitment to the leadership’s position. It is also significant that Thorez’s ‘bio’ links his promotion ‘to the leadership of the important region of the Nord’ to the stance he took at the federal committee. It would have been a strange point to make – and one given its subject matter (Trotskyism) that could have led to serious repercussions – if untrue. In fact, Thorez did not ‘prevaricate’ after 25 May, but attempted to atone himself vigorously. Surely, he felt personal discomfort as reprobation rained down on his former comrades. Yet he was determined to make amends; and he did so by proving to be the most enthusiastic advocate of ‘bolshevisation’. Adopted by the Communist International’s Executive in January 1924 and confirmed at the Fifth Congress in June– July 1924, bolshevisation became the essence of communist strategy until late 1926. It aimed to remodel national communist parties on the lines of the Russian party, or more precisely the Russian party of 1924 – 25. A new interpretation of ‘democratic centralism’ stipulated a monolithic, hierarchical structure, with no rights for minority viewpoints. From the outset, bolshevisation and the ‘struggle against Trotskyism’ were synonymous: by claiming the Bolshevik label, the troika intended to remind people of Trotsky’s Menshevik past.31 Bolshevisation in France was driven by Guralsky and Girault, assisted by members of the Seine Federation, including Francois Sauvage, Girault’s partner, who led the commission that oversaw the campaign. Reorganisation of party structures began in earnest after the Comintern congress. The Leadership Committee became the Central Committee in January 1925, but real power was concentrated in the hands of a Political Bureau and Secretariat. Emphasis was placed on the role of ‘professional revolutionaries’, which led to the rapid growth of an apparatus of possibly 400 – 500 activists working full-time for the party in one capacity or another. Weight was given to the promotion of young communists – often with limited experience in the labour movement – to leading committees and as party officials. ‘Workerism’ was reinforced by the reorganisation of

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

53

local structures: members would no longer be grouped in geographical branches but in ‘cells’ attached to particular workplaces linked together into ‘rayons’.32 This aspect of the reorganisation was conducted in a particularly inflexible fashion. The cell structure ignored administrative boundaries, hindering the party’s electoral challenge and complicating the relationship between its elected representatives and activists living in their constituencies. It also antagonised many trade union activists, who viewed the workplace as an arena for trade union rather than party activity. Many members were ‘attached’ to cells some distance from their home or to industries unconnected to their working lives. The focus on the workplace also made activists more prone to victimisation by employers. In consequence, many factory cells remained shells. Thorez started the reorganisation in the Pas-de-Calais in early June; that is, almost immediately after his discussion with Guralsky, but while most of the party leadership were still at the Comintern congress. He began to pen a weekly column in l’Enchaıˆne´ entitled ‘let’s form our cells’. It argued that factory cells were a way of extinguishing ‘inertia’ within local branches, which only half of members were attending and where discussion was often ‘a squabble round some local point’.33 He insisted that members not attending three consecutive branch meeting be summoned to explain their absence or be automatically expelled. Sometimes, as in his branch in Noyelles-Godault, this simply led to resignations.34 On 29 June, he told the federal assembly that bolshevisation was not moving fast enough and plans to remove ‘social democratic vestiges’ should be stepped up.35 The Political Bureau in Paris kept a particularly close eye on the campaign in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. The leadership of the Nord Federation was not only expressing doubts about bolshevisation but, even more worryingly, also showing some sympathy towards the Souvarine opposition. Guy Jerram, the federal secretary, had spoken up against ‘the brutality’ of Souvarine’s expulsion at the International’s Congress. Bonte’s reputation as a political loose cannon also raised suspicions: ‘we have to be careful with him – he was a Trotskyist,’ Guralsky told the Political Bureau.36 So, in late August, the BP assigned Paul Cadeau to supervise activity in the Nord. A little later, he reported on the ‘difficulties’: Jerram and his team had refused to accept his authority and were ‘insisting on a certain autonomy vis-a`-vis the centre’; they were ‘obstructing the decisions of the Communist International’, spreading ‘false ideas across the Nord on the subject of factory cells’ and advocating a structure based ‘on territorial and even electoral tasks’; all this was having a detrimental impact on the development of the party’s proletarian base and its trade union activity was ‘almost non-existent’. Cadeau contrasted the position in the neighbouring Pas-de-Calais:

54

MAURICE THOREZ

The situation is far more favourable in the Pas-de-Calais. Our comrades are seriously pursuing the campaign. [. . .] The Pas-de-Calais has increased its membership very significantly and its proletarian base is stronger. The reorganisation of the federation and the trade union federation [. . .] has been soundly accomplished. It is clear that, up there, comrade Thorez is our reliable collaborator [notre bon collaborateur].37 Guralsky proposed measures to deal with the dissident Nord. The ‘tactic’, he explained, ‘should consist of putting pressure on the Nord through the example and agency of the Pas-de-Calais’.38 Plans were laid to fuse the two federations, along with the smaller federation of the Somme. The aim was to extend Thorez’s influence and weaken that of those with reservations about bolshevisation. Despite resistance to the plans from Jerram and his supporters, the date of 5 October was set for the launch of the new federation.39 Guralsky and Sauvage travelled up to the Special Congress, at which their ‘bon collaborateur’ gave the main report on organisation. The event was declared ‘a new step towards bolshevisation of the party’.40 Thorez was initially appointed assistant secretary of the Nord Federation, part of a three-man leadership team that included Jerram and Bonte. He continued the thrust on bolshevisation with his customary energy. After only three weeks, he had coordinated visits to seventy branches, as well as organising ‘assemblies’ in Douai, Be´thune and Aulnoye and a meeting for women activists.41 By mid-November Thorez had overseen – or so he claimed – the creation of 180 factory cells.42 He also called a conference of sixty communist councillors. The Socialists had successfully used their control of urban municipalities in the Nord as a platform to resist the communist challenge, though often socialist mayors tended to behave as local ‘notables’, rather than as elected representatives of their party. Communists attacked such behaviour as ‘municipal cretinism’, but the party’s own councillors often displayed similar traits.43 At the conference, Thorez laid down the law: the work of elected representatives would now be ‘directed by a precise plan drawn up by the party’ and their main role was ‘to keep a watchful eye on the actions of our class enemies’.44

In the Russian capital Thorez was promoted to federal secretary on the eve of the Federal Congress held in Douai on 11 January 1925, with Jerram reassigned to tasks in Paris. Although he would be chaperoned by Cadeau, Thorez had been entrusted to lead the party’s largest federation outside the capital, its 10,000 members making up one-fifth of the total national membership.45 An enthusiastic

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

55

affair, the Congress was attended by 351 delegates, along with seven visitors from Paris and several Comintern ‘delegates’. In his address, the new secretary went out of his way to stress his support for the leadership of Treint and Girault.46 The following week, at the party’s National Congress at Clichy (17 – 21 January) – an event held under the slogans: ‘the conference of bolshevisation’; ‘against Trotskyist deviations’ – Thorez became a full member of the Central Committee and was appointed to the party’s commission on organisation. Around the same time, he was registered on Carnet B, the list of ‘French people dangerous to internal order’. A police report noted: ‘Thorez [. . .] has perfected his training through the reading of communist literature and has become a good orator. [. . .] He has much influence over his comrades and is able to win his ideas through his speeches. He is dangerous for general security and would be even more so at a time of social unrest or military mobilisation.’47 The mood at the Clichy conference was confident. The legislative elections in May 1924 had seen the victory of the Cartel des Gauches and the formation of a government by the Radical, E´douard Herriot, with parliamentary support from the Socialists. But the Communists had secured twenty-six deputies and a respectable national vote of 10 per cent, winning a quarter of votes in the Paris region. Herriot’s government was one of crisis – torn between the reformist and wealth-redistributing agenda proposed by Socialists and left Radicals and the liberal economic programme advocated by the Cartel’s right. As it retreated on its promises and became increasingly straight-jacketed by financial crisis – becoming in Marcel Cachin’s words ‘reformism without reforms’ (l’Humanite´, 21 November) – communists believed they would be able to build support from amongst its disappointed followers. The latter months of 1924 had been marked by a red-scare campaign in the right-wing press. The frenzy increased in late October when the government gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government and, a few weeks later (23 November), reached new heights when over 100,000 people joined the party’s ‘counter-demonstration’ through the streets of Paris to coincide with the official ceremony to transfer the remains of Jean Jaure`s to the Pantheon. Some prominent industrialists, including the champagne magnate Pierre Taittinger, began to fund extra-parliamentary right-wing leagues, the start of the ‘first wave of fascism’ in France.48 Whatever its sponsors’ intentions, anti-communist propaganda gave the party an exaggerated sense of its own importance. Thorez’s role in the bolshevisation campaign, along with his position as leader of the amalgamated Nord Federation, made him an obvious choice to attend the Comintern’s Conference on Organisation, held in Moscow between 15 and 18 March 1925 on the eve of the Fifth Plenum of the International’s Executive Committee. Thorez travelled to the Russian capital with a

56

MAURICE THOREZ

twenty-strong French delegation. Moscow basked in sunshine while crowds feted the eighth anniversary of the February Revolution. Comintern delegates were courted by members of the Russian politburo, keen to take every opportunity to extol the ‘struggle’ against the Trotskyist opposition. The French delegation was introduced to Mikhail Frunze, Trotsky’s replacement as War Minister, and attended meetings with Stalin and Bukharin. Thorez received a daily allowance of three rubles and a room in the newly renovated annexe of the Hotel Lux, the Communist International’s residence with which he would over the next decade become very familiar. In the evenings, the French comrades dined in the hotel before being entertained into the early hours with singing and dancing by students from the ‘Workers’ Faculty’.49 The delegation included two men with whom Thorez would later develop a bitter rivalry. Jacques Doriot, the former Young Communist leader, was Thorez’s senior by two years. He was already striding the national political stage after his election in 1924 to parliament while in jail for opposing military intervention in the Ruhr. Even more renowned was Andre´ Marty, released in 1923 after serving nearly four years hard labour for his part in the Black Sea munity. The Conference on Organisation was coordinated by Osip Piatnitsky, a veteran Russian revolutionary who would perish in the purges in 1938. It sought to draw up a balance sheet of bolshevisation across different sections of the International. After Sauvage gave a report on behalf of the French party, Piatnitsky criticised the French for approaching reorganisation in a one-sided way. He argued that the establishment of factory cells did not necessarily make ‘street cells’ – the Comintern jargon for branches based on geographical areas – superfluous. In response, Thorez made his first speech to a Comintern event. He gave a glowing account of the bolshevisation campaign in the Nord and rejected Piatnitsky’s points: there were now ‘300 cells organised in 17 rayons’ and the party had managed to organise a 5,000-strong demonstration in Lille, a ‘result not previously achieved’; progress was such that the old geographical branches – which he described as ‘centres of deviation’ – were disappearing like ‘wasted limbs’.50 Thorez demonstrated his approach to bolshevisation – dogmatic and inflexible – but he also, by taking issue with an experienced Bolshevik such as Piatnitsky, displayed considerable self-assurance. Thorez’s rise in the communist hierarchy gathered pace on his return from Moscow. On Guralsky’s suggestion, he was co-opted on to the Political Bureau on 13 July, along with Andre´ Marty and Cle´ment Desusclade, and given responsibility for organisation.51 The same day, he was appointed head of the Central Action Committee against military intervention in Morocco. The Political Bureau agreed to replace him as federal secretary in the Nord: his role would now be that of a national leader based in Paris.52

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

57

Campaign against war in Morocco The Central Action Committee was established to mobilise support for a remarkable attempt by Berber tribespeople to gain freedom from colonial rule. In 1912, under the Treaty of Fez, France and Spain had established protectorates in Morocco: the Spanish in the North, the French in the South. In July 1921 a small but disciplined military force led by the charismatic Abd el Krim routed the Spanish army at Annual. When in February 1923 Abd el Krim declared an independent Rif Republic, demanding international recognition and membership of League of Nations, the French Protectorate felt threatened. The Resident-General, Marshal Lyautey, began skirmishes against the Riffians, and imposed an economic and food blockade. A brutal war soon followed. The military response was led by Marshal Pe´tain, who began to prepare a massive attack, complete with planes and heavy artillery. The offensive started in early September 1925, paused during the winter, and when re-launched the following spring prompted the surrender of Abd el Krim.53 The Rif rebellion merged with another major challenge to French colonial rule: the ‘great Syrian revolt’, which erupted in August, and resisted ferocious military reprisals until the spring of 1927. The solidarity campaign was initially spearheaded by Jacques Doriot and the Young Communists. Doriot created a stir in the Chamber of Deputies in February 1925 when he read out French military despatches reporting the shelling of civilians and burning of crops in the Rif and held aloft a photograph of an army officer proudly displaying the severed heads of Berber captives. His intervention challenged French colonialist culture, which fused arrogant racism with the idea of the nation’s ‘civilising mission’. Much of the left was also imbued with this outlook. A section of Socialists had supported the establishment of a protectorate in Morocco. Colonial war was waged by the Cartel des Gauches government, an administration supported by the SFIO. But communists had also been reluctant to ‘support every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds’, as stipulated in the eighth condition of comintern membership. Despite the developing crisis in the Rif, the debate on the ‘colonial question’ was relegated to the last day of the party congress at Clichy. The Comintern put pressure on the French party to change its position, and a ‘correct’ stance on the ‘eighth condition’ was soon viewed as part of the process of bolshevisation.54 While Doriot kept overall responsibility for the party’s activity on Morocco, Thorez was tasked with organising the wider solidarity campaign.55 The Action Committee was purportedly an independent body but key decisions were taken by the Political Bureau. Thorez was chosen to lead it because of his organisational talents, but also because it was felt that his lack

58

MAURICE THOREZ

of notoriety would help to build broader support for communist initiatives, particularly through an appeal to the Socialists.56 Thorez coordinated a propaganda campaign of the kind ‘rarely seen in France up to that point’.57 Towns were plastered with stickers and posters and a series of big meetings and regional ‘congresses’ were held. Thorez penned a series of open letters to the SFIO and the CGT and, on 31 July, the BP appointed him to a three-person delegation to negotiate with the Socialists, alongside the party’s anti-war heroes, Barbusse and Marty. Socialist leaders spurned all the approaches. On 13 August, to coincide with the SFIO Congress, Thorez presided at a rally of 15,000 people in the Luna amusement park in Paris. Socialist leaders, however, spurned the communist approaches. The campaign provoked ferocious repression. Hundreds of party activists and sympathisers were arrested for distributing leaflets and postering. Some were detained for singing the anthem Sous le soleil marocain or reciting banned poetry. Sentences were harsh: in November alone 165 activists were imprisoned. Thorez’s first brush with the law came when he was summoned to appear with Semard and Girault before the Juge d’Instruction on 7 August 1925.58 Two months later, on 12 October, he and eleven other leading members of the Action Committee – including Doriot, Cachin, Semard, Girault and Monmousseau – were tried in absence and found guilty of ‘inciting military disobedience for the purpose of anarchist propaganda’. All were given prison sentences; Thorez received eight months and was fined 2,000 francs. Despite lodging an appeal with the rest of the group, Thorez was arrested on 7 January 1926. He was released after a day, and an enquiry found that the arrest warrant was an administrative error.59 A game of legal cat-andmouse commenced, which would eventually conclude with Thorez’s arrest and imprisonment in June 1929. The anti-war campaign culminated with a 24-hour strike on 12 October 1925. The action mobilised around 500,000 workers, and was marked by a number of confrontations with police. But it was poorly prepared and badly timed, coinciding with a lull in the fighting in Morocco. The call for a strike was first raised in mid-July and prompted controversy within the party. The CGTU Congress in August was decidedly lukewarm and doubts were expressed by trade unionists on the party’s Central Committee.60 Thorez pushed for the stoppage and, as prevarication about setting a date continued, he became increasingly impatient. ‘The strike will not stop the war,’ he told the Central Committee: ‘it is not a question of bringing out all the workers [. . .]; it’s necessary to build a movement, as quickly as possible in the most important industrial centres.’61 On this occasion, the pragmatism and caution displayed over the miners’ strikes in 1923 was replaced by voluntarist arguments for a political strike mobilising only a minority of workers, an

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

59

approach that owed much to the legacy of revolutionary syndicalism. When the lessons of the strike were considered by the Political Bureau on 14 October, all agreed the action was a ‘political success’, but the discussion revealed sharp disagreements over the general situation within France and the party’s role and activity.62

Maurice Thorez: Zinovievist? The strike’s aftermath brought to the surface discontent over strategy amongst an important section of long-standing activists. On 25 October, 250 members sent a letter to the leadership of the Communist International, outlining a ‘serious state of affairs’ in the party and urging the International to intervene ‘without delay’ in order to restore ‘the broken confidence of its ranks’.63 The signatories included remnants of the Souvarine –Monatte – Rosmer opposition, but also many who raised their heads for the first time, including some parliamentary deputies and leading trade unionists. They declared the 12 October strike a ‘lamentable failure, a real defeat for the proletariat and for the party’, and linked it to other setbacks, including the results of the local elections in May 1925 and the ‘complete failure’ of the campaign for trade union unity. The root of these disasters was the ‘bolshevisation’ campaign: not only had it created factory cells ‘without life’ and ‘phony rayons’ with ‘non-existent influence’, but the ‘blind brutality’ with which it had been pursued had bureaucratised party culture. The party was run by officials ‘isolated in their offices, acting without consultation and imposing an intolerable dictatorship over the mass of activists’. The letter did not mention individuals, but the comments about bolshevisation and the oneday strike made Thorez a barely disguised target. Thorez had indeed gained a reputation as a leadership hard man. At the end of July, he proposed a resolution at the Central Committee declaring: ‘every measure of the BP must be executed without contradiction by all the party [. . .] only iron discipline will allow the party to remain equal to its tasks.’64 On 18 August, the Central Committee summoned leaders of the ‘right’ faction to explain their behaviour. As the political inquisition quickly degenerated into personal abuse, Thorez told Fernand Loriot, a 54-year-old teacher who had, with Souvarine, helped to draft the Congress of Tours declaration whilst serving a prison sentence: ‘I advise you not to attend our cells – the workers might give you a good kicking.’65 Loriot helped to draft the ‘Letter from the 250’ and undoubtedly had Thorez in mind when he wrote: Such-and-such young militant, still having lots to learn, is suddenly invested with total power. He makes decisions about the most sensitive

60

MAURICE THOREZ

questions and summarily judges over men and things. He pigeonholes members of the party, keeps surveillance over morals and prosecutes suspects. He creates factory cells comprised solely of ‘attached’ members, churns out unspeakable cliche´s at public meetings and condemns the national and international right. In support of his statements, he invokes the authority of the International, claims to speak and act in its name with an audacity created by irresponsibility and impunity.66 Any suggestion that Thorez had ‘total power’ in the party by the beginning of 1926 is an exaggeration. But a number of developments had significantly strengthened his position. During the summer of 1925, the wheels dropped off the Treint–Girault ‘tandem’ following disputes between the pair on both organisational and political issues. At the 29 July Central Committee, Thorez led the opposition to defeat Treint’s suggestion that the party should maintain its candidates during the second round of the cantonal elections, unless socialist candidates made a declaration for an immediate end to hostilities in Morocco. He said that the party should not ‘play the game of the reaction’ by pursuing tactics that could split the left vote.67 After detaching herself from Treint, Girault became increasingly reliant on the young Thorez. Reports from the Comintern’s new representative in Paris, Boris Mikhailov (who used the pseudonym Ralph), refer to the leadership as ‘concentrated in the group Suzanne Girault–Thorez–Desusclade’.68 Thorez’s position was further enhanced by deficiencies in the functioning of the leadership bodies. Members of the Political Bureau began to absent themselves from meetings, alienated by Girault’s ‘inclination to spurn everybody who doesn’t always support her on the smallest question of tactics’.69 As a result, the Organisation Commission, increasingly under Thorez’s tutelage, tended to become the forum for key decisions. ‘The Committee of Organisation is running the party,’ complained Doriot at the Central Committee.70 In the autumn, Girault’s star started to fade and a new balance of forces emerged within the leadership. Though holding the title of general secretary, Pierre Semard had played a peripheral role on the leadership team during 1924 and the first half of 1925, focusing his efforts on the task of strengthening the bonds between the party and the CGTU. He now began to assert himself as the party’s political leader, and formed a working relationship with the person now recognised as its national organiser, Thorez. The influence of Jean Cremet also grew. The former shipyard worker was responsible for the party’s work in the regions, a position he exploited to develop a network of industrial espionage under the direction of Soviet military intelligence.71

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

61

While the ‘letter from the 250’ was an implicit attack, a more serious challenge to Thorez came from within the Political Bureau. Jacques Doriot began to demand that the party adopt a ‘new course’ and the leadership team be overhauled. He formed an alliance with CGTU leader, Gaston Monmousseau, and on a completely unprincipled basis with the disgruntled Treint. As conflict in the party, alongside general malaise, spread towards the end of November, the Comintern dispatched a high-powered representative, Dimitri Manuilsky, to Paris. There were three elements to his brief: oversee a transformation in the party’s politics; ensure that French communists lined up on the correct side in the dispute that had erupted within the Soviet ‘troika’; and refashion a unified leadership team. Soon after his arrival, Thorez and Cremet convened an emergency party conference for 1 and 2 December at which ‘Manu’ made the key-note speech. Communist policy had evolved in an incoherent fashion since the collapse of the Cartel des Gauches government in April 1925. In the face of a run on the franc and government stocks, Herriot had lost a vote of confidence in the Senate after backing a proposal from the prominent socialist, Le´on Blum, for a tax on capital. The new government, led by another Radical, Paul Painleve´, linked up with sections of the nationalist right to introduce an austerity programme drawn up by its Finance Minister, Joseph Caillaux. Big repercussions followed for the SFIO and Radicals: the Socialists became a parliamentary opposition to the government on both economic policy and colonial war; in the Radical Party, battle ensued between the Herriot and Caillaux wings with the former defeating the Finance Minister and winning support for a wealth tax at the October party congress. Clearly, the communist mantra of the previous winter, that there was no essential difference between Blum, Herriot and the extreme right, and even fascism,72 no longer chimed with reality. At the National Conference, Manuilsky proposed a major transformation in strategic orientation. He argued that the party should step up its overtures towards the Socialists: Communists should stop thinking of themselves as a minority ‘political fraction’, but realise they could have real political influence. He spoke against voluntarism and impatience and in favour of championing immediate issues facing workers: ‘we must follow the advice of prudence that our CGTU comrades give us. It is necessary to wage systematic, long-term campaigns.’ He recognised ‘serious weaknesses’ in the party and the need ‘to change methods in relation to mass work, the trade unions and the party’.73 Manuilsky’s intervention was part of a general shift in Comintern policy towards a more open type of politics, which was in turn linked to the power struggle within the Soviet triumvirate. This had been brewing all year, with

62

MAURICE THOREZ

Zinoviev and Kamenev questioning the direction of Soviet economic policy, particularly urging a more ambitious industrialisation programme and opposing Bukharin’s advice to better-off peasants (kulaks) ‘to enrich themselves’. Zinoviev also condemned Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’, which he feared would signal the transformation of the International into a mouthpiece of Russian diplomacy, instead of an agent for international revolution. When it broke into the open in September, the struggle became increasingly venomous, as Stalin waged a campaign, firstly, to isolate and, then, to remove his two opponents and their supporters from positions of influence in both the Russian party and the International. In the Comintern, the politics associated with Zinoviev, represented in France by Treint and Girault, were overhauled in favour of a policy of alliances with sections of the labour movement – for example, in Britain through the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee – and sometimes with other class forces, as with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in China. Before arriving in France, Manuilsky had been sent to Berlin to purge the ‘ultra-left’ leadership of the German Communist Party for, amongst other things, refusing to withdraw the party’s candidate, Ernst Tha¨lmann, from the second round of the presidential election, which had helped to ensure the victory of the monarchist, Paul von Hindenburg. The implications of the new approach for France were made more explicit by Pierre Semard, who in October had been with Manuilsky in Berlin. Semard announced in late November that communists would defend a socialist–radical coalition government against ‘attacks by reaction’, on condition that the government was prepared to support a three-point platform: a ‘progressive tax on capital’, an ‘immediate peace in Morocco and Syria’ and an ‘effective struggle against fascism, notably through the disarming and dissolution of the leagues’. Other statements advocated ‘the defence of freedoms granted by the republican regime’.74 Soon the party would also make overtures to ‘middle-class’ pressure groups, including the League for the Rights of Man and the Fe´de´ration Nationale de Libre Pense´e. After the national conference, the Political Bureau assigned Thorez, Semard and Doriot to draft an open letter to party members outlining the changes. Politically, it announced ‘the beginning of an important stage in the life of the party’, and in particular admitted ‘errors’ in the application of the united front. On organisational matters, it defended ‘bolshevisation’ and the central importance of factory cells, but recognised that ‘these did not imply the withdrawal from local work’.75 While condemning the authors of the ‘Letter from the 250’ as ‘enemies of the party and International’, the party had made major concessions to their critique.76 Manuilsky also began discussions to change the make-up of the leadership. He proposed the construction of a team representing the party’s

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

63

three components – former socialists, syndicalists and the youth – with Semard, considered a source of stability, remaining as general secretary. Treint and Girault were removed from the Secretariat but would, for the time being, remain on the Political Bureau.77 Thorez became, officially, the Secretary for Organisation, a role he was, in reality, already playing. Thorez’s position in the leadership became a major issue in the dispute that now began over membership of the Political Bureau. Jacques Doriot argued that the existing leadership team should take responsibility for the ‘errors’ and ‘weaknesses’ of the previous period. His main target was Semard, but Thorez and Cremet were also in his line of fire. He characterised the trio as a group of ‘resisters’, who were at best ‘hesitant’ in the face of the need for political and organisational change. The international context meant that such charges were serious: Doriot was trying to link Semard, Thorez and Cremet to the Zinovievist opposition. Thorez reacted aggressively at the National Conference: ‘Don’t come here and say that we are resisters, when it is we who have shown the best understanding of practical work,’ he told Doriot. He claimed that he had been advocating a ‘change of methods’ for ‘some months’: ‘if the group described as resisters had been listened to, the malaise would have been put right.’ Thorez had a second strand of defence: if there were errors, then ‘all comrades’ should take the blame. ‘Must we place responsibility for all the weaknesses and activity of the party on several comrades? Does the party have so many cadres that it can consider kicking these comrades out?,’ he asked. A new leadership ‘would not make things any better tomorrow’.78 Thorez’s argument was, in effect, a case for the status quo, keeping not only Semard but also Treint and Girault on the Political Bureau. It indicates that he was underestimating the extent to which the party’s politics during the previous year had been called into question. Manuilsky was not simply suggesting a ‘change of methods’, but a major transformation in political orientation. Doriot’s description of Thorez as ‘resistant’ and ‘hesitant’ contained, therefore, a dose of truth. Throughout the previous year, Thorez had instinctively recoiled from the worst ‘ultra-left’ excesses towards the Socialists, often leading the opposition to Treint on this score. But he had been a loyal component of the Treint– Girault leadership, had pursued bolshevisation in an inflexible and bureaucratic manner and shared a large degree of responsibility for the poorly prepared 12 October strike. At the end of 1925, he still maintained personal loyalties to Suzanne Girault and others with whom he had worked during the bolshevisation campaign, such as Francois Sauvage. In early January, Manuilsky – now back in Moscow – asked Mikhaı¨lov to comment on the reaction of French communists to the aftermath of the

64

MAURICE THOREZ

Russian party’s Fourteenth Congress, which had been marked by violent exchanges between Stalin and Bukharin, on one side, and Zinoviev and Kamenev, on the other. Mikhaı¨lov reported that Girault and Sauvage were amongst those supporting the Zinovievist opposition. Doriot, Cachin and Treint were backing the Russian party leadership (in other words, Stalin), and Semard had ‘found his bearings quite rapidly’. But Thorez and Cremet were ‘confused by the opposition of Suzanne [Girault]’ and had not immediately taken a firm position.79 At the Political Bureau and Central Committee, Thorez stressed the need for unity in the Russian party and successfully argued that more information was needed before a view on disputed issues could be taken. Thorez had, in fact, drawn an important lesson from the spring of 1924, when he instantly leapt in to the camp of Souvarine. In the world of communist power politics, it was best to take stock – and often wait – before supporting one camp or the other. At the Central Committee, he referred implicitly to his embarrassment the previous year during the dispute over Trotskyism: Through experience, we have learnt how some good workers in our party can be led astray, how they can be accused of being socialdemocrats or mensheviks if they do not come down for or against Trotsky within 48 hours. We now understand the necessity of engaging in serious discussions in our party.80 ‘Hesitation’ had become established as a thorezien trait, a quality that would, throughout his career as communist leader, help him to negotiate a series of difficult transitions in communist politics.

Stalin against Thorez In February, Thorez travelled again to Moscow to lead the French delegation at the Second Conference on Organisation and, afterwards, to attend the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern’s Executive. Both meetings were uncomfortable experiences. During the Conference on Organisation, Piatnitsky brought up the debate from the previous year over ‘street cells’. He said that Thorez’s position had led to the party’s poor local election results and, equally, led to badly functioning factory cells which were dominated by ‘attached’ members. Thorez was forced ‘to recognise unreservedly the error made by the French delegation at the first conference’, but he stubbornly refused to concede that his essential argument had been wrong. His points received a contemptuous putdown from Piatnitsky.81 Worse was to follow at the Comintern plenum. The French Commission was attended by a large French delegation along with most of the key leaders

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

65

of the International, including Zinoviev, Clara Zetkin, Manuilsky, Togliatti and Stalin. Sitting for five days, it confirmed the party’s political orientation, but controversy erupted over the make-up of the leadership team. It had become normal for the International to scrutinise proposals for the leadership of its sections, a practice pursued diligently in relation to France after Trotsky brokered an agreement for the make-up of the Central Committee in December 1922. When the discussion began, Doriot, supported by Treint and Monmousseau, moved against Semard, Cremet and Thorez, citing their reticence in implementing the shift in policy after 2 December.82 Thorez again responded sharply, accusing Doriot of opportunism. But Stalin weighed into the discussion – and took the side of Doriot. He suggested a ‘compact majority’ on the Political Bureau made up of Semard, Cremet, Doriot and Monmousseau. In other words, the Soviet leader had no place for Thorez on his proposed Political Bureau.83 Stalin’s contribution at the Sixth Plenum was published by the PCF at the time of Thorez’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. It also appears in Stalin’s Collected Works, published in Moscow after the dictator’s death.84 But in these versions, Doriot’s name is replaced by that of Thorez. By 1950, it was unimaginable that Stalin could have favoured Doriot – who broke with the party in 1934, moved into the orbit of fascism and collaborated with the Nazi occupation – over the ‘son of the people’. The Stalinist school of falsification of history being well established, a Soviet scribe made the necessary ‘correction’. Stalin’s motives in March 1926 were guided by his battle with Zinoviev. He was furious at the French party’s refusal to take a firm stance in support of the Russian majority, and would have certainly known of Thorez’s role in the prevarication. Doriot and his supporters, on the other hand, had proven solid allies. Stalin was not yet the omnipotent dictator and his intervention at the commission prompted a strong reaction. Semard told Stalin that ‘the group that has collectively taken responsibility [for implementing the decisions of the December national conference] has been made up of Semard, Cremet, Thorez’.85 He argued that this group should form the backbone of the Political Bureau, which would also include Doriot, Monmousseau and Cachin. The overwhelming majority of the French delegation – particularly the regional representatives – backed Semard, who also won support from Manuilsky and Togliatti. Stalin retreated: despite his intervention, Thorez’s position in the party’s leadership was confirmed.86

Lille Congress The controversy with Stalin meant, paradoxically, that Thorez returned from the Comintern plenum with his status strengthened. Under his direction, the

66

MAURICE THOREZ

Bureau of Organisation became a hub overseeing every aspect of party activity. In June, on the eve of the National Congress, it organised a Conference on Organisation on the model of the Comintern event earlier that year. In the summer and autumn, it carried out reviews of peasant policy, youth work, trade union work, recruitment methods and began to compile detailed reports of the composition of cells and rayons. The initially ‘hesitant’ Thorez energetically mobilised the party apparatus around the new political strategy.87 The bureau was also responsible for staging the party congress held in Lille. Thorez transformed a communist congress into a spectacle for the first time. Proceedings began not with speeches but with a demonstration. Led by eighty stewards, flag bearers carrying huge red banners emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle and an eighty-five strong brass band, thousands paraded to a rally at the Lille Hippodrome. As they marched, they sang the workers’ anthem, L’Internationale, and La Carmagnole, a chant associated with the Sans Culottes during the French Revolution. Thorez addressed the rally, alongside Cachin, Semard, Doriot, and the poet, Paul Vaillant-Couturier.88 The Lille Congress confirmed and developed the new orientation. Major themes were ‘mass work’ – including ‘true mass trade unionism’ rather than the ‘active-minority unionism’ represented by the 12 October strike – and a more flexible approach to alliances. It was stressed that the ‘united front’ should avoid slogans that were ‘too advanced’ for the Socialists: ‘our aim is to realise all the alliances that are possible and beneficial to the proletariat,’ declared Semard, now the uncontested leading figure of the party. Thorez developed these ideas in his contributions. Speaking about winning not only the working class but also ‘the millions of politically backward workers, small peasants, public servants and small shopkeepers’, Thorez explained that communists, whilst ‘internationalists’ were also ‘the best defenders of the national patrimony’ – a ‘nationalisation’ of communist politics that would become the hallmark of thorezien discourse ten years’ later. Thorez no longer described geographical branches as ‘centres of deviation’, but confirmed that in order for the party to compete electorally ‘a solid organisation’ would be set up ‘in every administrative division of the bourgeois state’. He spoke of faire la politique: We do our politics in the factories, but also in the cafe´s and in the countryside. We understand that politics is also made in the cantons; around the monthly or annual fairs, when all the small peasants of neighbouring villages come to the region’s main market town. [. . .] If the Communist Party is not to make its politics in the clouds, it simply must take all these realities into account.89

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

67

As Serge Wolikow notes, it was ‘the first time that a PCF leader had publicly dealt with the diversity of political forms in France’.90 Many elements of the Lille Congress anticipated the Popular Front strategy of the mid-1930s: support for workers’ immediate demands, a political alliance around limited policies, an appeal to the middle class and peasantry, an emphasis on electoral activity, all fused with a dose of Jacobin nationalism; even the precongress demonstration anticipated the theatricality of the great parades of 1935 and 1936.

Nord by-election The extent to which Thorez had bought into the more open approach was illustrated in December, when he stood for the first time as a candidate for the French parliament. The by-election for three members to represent the Nord department was the first electoral test for Raymond Poincare´’s government of ‘national union’. Since forming an administration in July with support from the right and sections of the Radical Party, Poincare´ had attempted to restore financial confidence through an austerity programme, including spending cuts, the repeal of social legislation and devaluation of the currency. Communists faced a major strategic question before the campaign began. When the contest was announced, the right approached the Radicals for an electoral alliance to defeat the Socialists, considered favourites to win the three seats. At the Political Bureau, Thorez argued that, if such a ‘bourgeois bloc’ were formed, standing communist candidates would open the party to the charge of ‘aiding the camp of reaction’. He won support for his proposal that communists should attempt to form a joint electoral list with the Socialists around a ‘minimum programme’.91 Thorez’s position was not without controversy. A conference in the Nord agreed the Political Bureau’s report only after five hours of debate.92 Many younger activists instinctively opposed an alliance with ‘social-democratic traitors’ in an electoral contest. Marcel Cachin criticised ‘an element who have only joined the party yesterday and were engaging in inane polemics against the Socialists’.93 In fact, a latent tension existed within the party. Fifty per cent of delegates at the Lille Congress were under the age of thirty; only 16 per cent over forty: the middle ranks of the party hierarchy were now dominated by the postTours generation. Consequently, the attempt by the party leadership to adapt to traditional political cultures and to form alliances had to negotiate an apparatus imbued with revolutionary rhetoric and methods drawn from the bolshevisation campaign. Paradoxically, Thorez embodied both sides of this contradiction: a figurehead of the ‘bolshevised’ generation, while also a leader of the attempt to root the party in French political culture. In the event, the

68

MAURICE THOREZ

Radical Party in the Nord split over whether to form an alliance with the right. The majority agreed to support a National Union list, but a minority decided to put up candidates on the Radicals’ traditional platform of secular and social republicanism.94 In the absence of a single right-wing candidate, the communists decided not to propose a pact to the Socialists and agreed to field three candidates headed by Thorez. The campaign continued to reflect the tensions in communist politics. The regional party press conducted uncompromising attacks on the Socialists: ‘our campaign will be the campaign for the proletarian revolution, against the lies of bourgeois democracy and the deception of socialist treason,’ it announced.95 In contrast, Thorez tailored his speeches and propaganda to deal more subtly with concerns of socialist-supporting workers.96 He made much of his roots in the region; and his election material carried a mini-version of the narrative of his early life later to appear in Fils du Peuple, including the epithet, ‘son and grandson of a miner’. The communists achieved a respectable result: 65,000 votes, a total similar to that polled in 1924. But, unexpectedly, the election was a clear victory for the National Union, which polled 193,000, defeating the Socialists by 50,000 votes. The Radical vote, at 30,000, collapsed. Thorez drew far-reaching conclusions at the Political Bureau. Many workers, particularly in the Nord, did not understand the essential difference between Communists and the Socialist Party, with its network of cooperatives, trade unions and municipalities and its ‘claim still to be a revolutionary party’. Communist campaigns had left the impression, ‘rightly or wrongly, of being exclusively concerned with attacks on the socialists’. At root, the idea that ‘communists were playing into the hands of the reaction’ had carried the day. It had, he said, been wrong not to propose a joint list to the Socialists.97 Thorez’s arguments indicate that the French leadership was taking its alliance strategy much further than envisaged by the Comintern – a trend that Thorez would repeat in the early 1930s and, more profoundly, at the time of the Popular Front. The proposal for a communist– socialist pact in the Nord by-election was not an isolated episode. There were similar propositions for elections in Valenciennes and in the Seine region, and a joint list with Socialists and Radicals in the Senate elections. There were secret talks between regional delegations from the two parties, ironically in Tours, the town in which the socialist– communist split had taken place. Thorez’s candidature in the by-election meant that he was not able to attend the International’s Seventh Plenum in Moscow. The French delegation left Paris ready to support Zinoviev’s removal as Comintern president, but its members did not expect his replacement, Nikolai Bukharin, to launch an onslaught on the party’s recent politics and activity. Bukharin accused the

THE HESITANT REVOLUTIONARY

69

PCF of being ‘too preoccupied with parliamentary politics’ and of ‘failing to mobilise a mass movement’ to oppose the Poincare´ government.98 On hearing them, Thorez dismissed the criticisms as based on ‘tendentious information forwarded by the former leadership’.99 Yet they were only a foretaste of the censure and reprimands that were soon to rain down on the French leadership. Soon, Thorez would have to make further choices in the face of tortuous turns in the communist world view emanating from Moscow.

CHAPTER 3 CLASS AGAINST CLASS

The alliance phase of PCF politics drew to a close during 1927 when a new slogan encapsulated Comintern strategy: ‘class against class’. It was accompanied by an analysis of capitalism’s supposed ‘third period’, which Nikolai Bukharin theorised as ever-deepening economic and social tensions leading to revolutionary mobilisations, alongside an increased threat of war against the Soviet Union. As war panic increased along the corridors of the Kremlin, the Comintern’s Eighth Plenum was summoned in May 1927 to mobilise for the ‘defence of the Soviet Union’. The panic was not without some substance. The British government had broken off diplomatic relations over a spy scandal, prompting Moscow to retaliate by executing twenty suspected ‘British spies’. The French government began to mobilise 150,000 reservists, including Maurice Thorez who served a month in his regiment. Yet, though relations between the Soviet Union and the western capitalist powers were deteriorating, no major power during the twenties was in the position to contemplate large-scale military conflict. Stalin was playing fears over an ‘enemy without’ to demand the Russian party, assisted by the Comintern, crush the ‘enemy within’: the ‘united opposition’ led by Trotsky and Zinoviev and their international supporters. The bloody suppression of Chinese communists by ChiangKai-shek’s nationalists, formerly allies of the Comintern, increased Stalin’s determination to purge the opposition, though paradoxically the disaster seemed to vindicate Trotsky’s arguments against alliances with broader social and political forces. At the Comintern’s Eighth Plenum, police prevented Zinoviev from entering the conference hall and Trotsky’s contributions were drowned in abusive heckling. The roots of ‘class against class’ were laid in the Russian capital, but the slogan chimed with the experience of many French rank-and-file communists. On 22 April 1927, a speech by Albert Sarraut, the Minister of Interior,

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

71

announced a new wave of repression against the workers’ movement and particularly the PCF. ‘Le communisme, voila` l’ennemi!’, declared the minister on the fiftieth anniversary of Gambetta’s famous rallying cry: ‘Le cle´ricalisme, voila` l’ennemi!’. The anti-communist frenzy was stoked by the discovery of Cremet’s ‘spy network’ in state arsenals and military dockyards and also by a speech by Doriot, who on a visit to China urged the Vietnamese people to rise against French rule. In a febrile atmosphere, communist activity was effectively criminalised: 300 party members were arrested on May Day; party leaders were tried in the courts for their campaign against the Rif war; and communist deputies were stripped of parliamentary immunity. By early August, almost every national party leader – including Semard, Doriot, Cachin, Monmousseau and Marty, but importantly not Thorez – was behind bars. The Sante´ prison became the venue for meetings of the Political Bureau. ‘Class against class’ passed through four distinct stages between 1927 and 1933.1 The initial Bukharinist phase gave way in the summer of 1929 to a more radical and sectarian period, characterised by the labelling of Socialists as ‘social fascists’. In the spring of 1930, a ‘turn towards mass work’ was announced, with measures taken to rein in the worst excesses of ‘leftish sectarianism’. Finally, a meeting of the Comintern Executive in August– September 1932 opened an extremely contradictory period when, disorientated by the rise of Hitler, Comintern leaders delivered strictures for broad, mass work before retrenching behind the most sectarian and dogmatic aspects of the Third Period analysis. Thorez’s elevation to the position of general secretary was linked to the PCF’s response to these stages. The process was not seamless, and an important part was played by the rhythm of police repression.2 Along with the entire leadership of the French party, Thorez initially recoiled from ‘class against class’. Some, including Doriot, would remain antagonistic. But after his doubts, Thorez returned from a sojourn in Moscow to become the policy’s most committed advocate. As well as impressing Comintern leaders, the result was a growth in influence amongst activists at the expense of his more reticent leadership comrades incarcerated in the Sante´ prison. Then, as class against class radicalised during the summer of 1929, it was Thorez’s turn to be locked behind bars, which meant he was untainted by the excesses of sectarianism when they were condemned by the Comintern in 1930. Thorez began to be described as ‘General Secretary’ at this point. In July 1931, however, the Comintern’s disparaging assessment of the PCF’s progress left Thorez demoralised and he offered to resign his post. His morale recovered during the Barbe´ – Celor affair, a purge of a section of the leadership that indicates the brutality of the International’s control over its sections, as well as a pervading culture of paranoia. But in December 1933, disheartened by the

72

MAURICE THOREZ

Comintern’s continuous criticisms, Thorez sought again to be relieved of his role and asked to be transferred ‘for a change of air’ to Moscow.

Clash with Bukharin In mid-March 1927, Thorez travelled to Moscow carrying a statement: ‘Comrade Thorez is mandated to defend the point of view of the party leadership in all meetings of the Executive and Commissions that deal with the French question.’3 Humbert-Droz, the secretary of the Section of Latin Countries, had published an article in the January edition of the International’s review outlining ‘dangers and errors’ in the politics of the PCF, in essence deepening the criticisms raised by Bukharin the previous month at the Seventh Plenum. The Political Bureau was outraged, particularly as Humbert-Droz had made his remarks publicly without raising them with French leaders. It wrote an indignant letter to Moscow claiming that Humbert-Droz had ulterior motives and ‘his politics were not part of the politics of the Communist International’.4 Keen to diffuse the row, comintern leaders announced a commission to examine the matter and Thorez, who had been particularly scathing of Humbert-Droz’s behaviour, was dispatched to repulse the censure of the French party. On arrival, Thorez received two pieces of bad news. The first was that the International had decided to cut the subsidy to the French party by 50 per cent. Thorez protested that the reduction was too severe and would prevent the PCF from waging ‘any major campaign’. But he was obliged to accept the decision and sign a statement affirming that ‘the party would step up efforts to develop its financial strategy’. While the cuts were part of a general financial review, Comintern leaders were, without much subtlety, reminding the French comrades of the proverb: ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune.’5 Thorez also heard that the commission to review the PCF’s politics had already met and, chaired by Bukharin, had prepared a report supporting the bulk of Humbert-Droz’s criticisms. The party was guilty of a ‘whole series of errors on the terrain of unity’, including the electoral tactic of proposing common lists with the Socialists, as in the Nord by-election. It was on the ‘slippery slope’ of agreements with ‘left wing bourgeois organisations’, which was ‘throwing the working class into extreme confusion’. It was not giving sufficient attention to the radicalisation of the class struggle or sufficient urgency to the issue of trade union unity; there was particular criticism for the party’s intervention during a lockout at the Port of Dunkerque, a dispute in which Thorez had played a major role. It had wrongly called for ‘an end to mass immigration’ and, finally, its methods to deal with internal opposition were ‘unhealthy’. Feeling personally slighted, Thorez drafted amendments

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

73

and, on 30 March, made a full-hearted defence of the PCF’s politics in front of sixty-seven members of the Comintern Presidium. Of course there had been ‘some errors, some misunderstanding and equivocations’, he said, ‘but a party that did not commit errors would be doing nothing at all’. The recent slogan against immigration had been wrong – and ‘quickly rectified’ by the Central Committee – but on all essential issues, including electoral tactics, the party had been correct. Blaming weaknesses on previous ‘poor leadership’ (in other words, Treint and Girault), he concluded: ‘we may have been a little bold, sometimes a little dangerous; but we think it is better to take risks than to shut ourselves away as in the past.’6 Thorez did not expect the rough ride that followed. The Austrian communist Richard Schu¨ller accused him of ‘lacking in self-criticism’, and characterised the French party’s slogans as ‘not only wrong but stupid’. Most damaging was the intervention from Marty, who rebuked his party’s ‘electoralist’ approach, its ‘indecisive’ policy towards the Socialists and described an intolerant atmosphere that made genuine discussion impossible. Its policy on immigration had, he said, encouraged ‘xenophobia’. Thorez’s only response was to complain that Marty had not raised the issues previously at the Central Committee. The exchange marked the start of the mutually distrustful relationship between the two men.7 Bukharin described Thorez’s amendments as pandering to ‘opportunism’, ‘social patriotism’ and ‘parliamentarianism’. However, as an olive branch, he offered to redraft the document to acknowledge the ‘positive successes’ of the PCF and its Central Committee.8 Thorez began to retreat and one by one withdrew his amendments, though still signalling his reluctance to accept much of the criticism. Finally, a 23-page letter ‘to the Central Committee of the French party’ was agreed. Written in a more moderate tone, it accepted some of the French leadership’s complaints about Humbert-Droz’s methods, but on essential points judged the arguments of the Comintern representative as ‘absolutely correct’. The letter called for an ‘intransigent and energetic struggle against bourgeois parties of right and left, but also ruthless criticism of the politics of the Socialist Party which in this period of preparation for war, is openly the agent of imperialism.’9 Thorez faced an awkward task on his return to Paris. He had been mandated to go to Moscow to defend PCF policies, but had signed up to a document that was, in essence, a withering rebuke. Thorez paused before deciding how to proceed. Despite the fact it was addressed to the Central Committee, the Comintern’s letter was not mentioned at the committee’s meeting on 6 and 7 April. Thorez, with support from others on the Political Bureau, was concerned that its contents would undermine the authority of the top leadership team. When he opened the discussion three weeks later at the

74

MAURICE THOREZ

Political Bureau, Thorez attempted to minimalise the significance of the new Comintern line. He argued that the letter’s contents did not contradict the PCF’s approach, but simply raised questions about tactics concerning the united front and elections. The International had identified ‘electoralist and parliamentary deviations’, but these were ‘not attributable to the leadership of the party which, on the contrary, had reacted vigorously [against them]’.10 Despite Thorez’s reassurances – which were, given events in Moscow, naı¨ve at best, disingenuous at worst – PCF leaders were worried about the letter’s implications for the following year’s legislative elections. Should the party support, as a matter of course, Socialist and Radical candidates in order to defeat the right? On what basis should communist candidates be maintained in the second round of voting? The letter remained vague on these questions, but they were sharply posed by recent changes in the electoral system: smaller constituencies without the previous element of proportional representation made it harder for smaller parties to win seats without a pact with political neighbours. Discussions around the problem were, however, abruptly interrupted by the repression launched by Albert Sarraut’s speech on 22 April.

Championing ‘Class against Class’ On 10 May 1927, the Appeal Court of Paris heard the case of Maurice Thorez and eleven other members of the Central Action Committee against the Rif War. Dressed and manicured immaculately, Thorez stood in the dock to defend the committee’s call for French troops to fraternise with oppressed colonial people, an appeal he had made ‘in the name of hundreds of thousands of organised proletarians’.11 The judge reduced his sentence from eight to six months’ imprisonment with a fine of 2,000 francs, and told him to wait for a date for his prison term to begin. Concurrently, Thorez also faced prosecution for ‘subversive agitation’ in the Ardennes. Originally arrested on 1 July 1926 after anti-war posters had been plastered in villages around Rocroi, a court in Charleville sentenced Thorez to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of 1,000 francs, despite his legitimate protests that he had never been to Rocroi.12 A hearing on 18 June found the sentence too lenient and raised it to eight months and 2,000 francs, which was confirmed by the Nancy Court of Appeal on 25 August. Thorez faced 14 months behind bars. The PCF was divided over how best to respond to the repression. Most senior communists made no attempt to avoid arrest and communist deputies abstained in the Chamber on a vote to remove their parliamentary immunity, arguing that it was necessary to show the working class that they did not fear imprisonment. The Young Communists and many activists demanded a more robust resistance to the government’s clampdown. Amongst those who

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

75

refused to give himself up was Marty, who was prosecuted on seven occasions during 1925 and 1926 and faced six years in prison. Thorez later claimed – in the ‘bio’ written for the Comintern (1932) – that he had also ‘resisted’ the party’s ‘legalist’ response.13 In fact, initially, he did not demur from the generally complacent approach. In June, he remained at large by a stroke of fortune: while waiting to be summoned to the Sante´, he was called up as an army reservist and joined his regiment in Arras, meaning the date to start his prison sentence was postponed. At the end of July, Thorez was practically the only member of the leadership still at large. But the noose was tightening. The Ministry of Interior dispatched a telegram to police commissioners: ‘Proceed with the arrest of 1141 16073 14169.1792 10330 born 28 April 1900 at 35741 11254 6428 76343. Inform all police and gendarmerie under your command.’14 Deciphering the code revealed the name, Maurice Thorez. By now, Thorez was determined to remain free – his resolve strengthened by the party’s need to send a representative to Moscow to continue discussions over the implications of ‘class against class’. On 30 July, he escaped the attentions of ‘hot-headed cops’ trying to arrest him by running into the l’Humanite´ bookshop. The following day, he was protected by a team of muscular stewards while delivering a speech to the party’s ‘Red Camp’ at Garches, in the Parisian suburbs. On 3 and 4 August, he attended the Central Committee in a venue ‘besieged by an army of flics’.15 After the meeting, he went clandestine and, in mid-August, departed for his second visit of the year to the Soviet Union. Thorez’s visit lasted until early October, his longest stay to date. It marked an important stage in the process of his acculturation to the psychological world and social practices of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was taken on a tour of the Donetz mining basin, including the town of Chistyakovo, and later wrote about miners ‘working six hours-a-day, using sophisticated tools and benefiting from substantial pensions and social security [. . .] the most advanced workers of the world, freed from the yoke of capital and masters of their own destiny’.16 After his death in 1964, Chistyakovo would change its name to Torez and place a bust of the French communist leader in its Town Hall. On 27 September Thorez attended a special session of the Comintern’s Presidium. Every leading communist who happened to be in Moscow had been summoned to witness Trotsky’s expulsion from the Executive. The atmosphere was venomous. When Trotsky revealed the existence of Lenin’s ‘testament’ – which described Stalin as ‘uncouth, disloyal and an abuser of power’ – Stalin screamed: ‘renegades, degenerates, trash – you are a Menshevik.’ Thorez took to the rostrum and played his working-class

76

MAURICE THOREZ

credentials: ‘Comrade Trotsky, I recently visited a strongly proletarian region, the Donetz Basin. I spoke with miners and I can assure you they were not at all inclined to go into the Trotskyist camp. [. . .] One of the workers told me that Trotsky should be sent here for a time to give him confidence in the work we are doing in the construction of socialism.’ Thorez’s story lost its potency when Trotsky interjected to ask: ‘in what language did you talk with him?’17 In contrast to his pugnacious mood at the start of the previous visit, Thorez had the air of a reasonable negotiator seeking to fix a deal. His contribution to the Comintern’s Political Secretariat was uncontroversial and well-received. He referred to ‘the big problem’ posed by the coming legislative elections, but was careful not to take a position that could come back to haunt him. The ‘general line’ for the elections was thrashed out in a ‘special commission’ and private meetings between him and Bukharin.18 Back in France, Thorez outlined the agreement reached with Bukharin in a letter to Political Bureau members incarcerated in the Sante´. The PCF should only offer support to socialist candidates on the strictest of conditions, and it should categorically refuse to support those on the right of the Socialist Party. It should not in any circumstances advocate votes for ‘bourgeois’ candidates, in other words, the Radicals. The policy not only reversed the more flexible and unitary approach of 1926, but also meant that communists were withdrawing from the French left’s traditional practice of republican unity against the nationalist right. It was essential ‘to pose clearly the question of class against class’, wrote Thorez.19 The imprisoned communists were reluctant to sign up to the new line. Semard replied on their behalf, warning of ‘ultra-left errors’ and dangerous consequences if communist tactics were to lead to the victory of a right-wing government.20 The Central Committee meeting on 8 and 9 November could not reach agreement, despite Thorez exploiting the Comintern’s authority by revealing for the first time the contents of its 2 April ‘Letter to the Central Committee’. Further differences emerged on the Political Bureau during a debate over the content of a statement drawn up by Thorez outlining the new policy to party members.21 The party finally reached agreement at a special national conference held between 30 January and 2 February 1928. The controversy had, in fact, been resolved one week earlier at a meeting in Berlin between PCF leaders and a Comintern delegation, including Manuilsky. The Comintern’s decisive argument was that ‘fractional disorder’ in the French party would directly assist the work of the Trotskyist opposition. Any reluctance to ‘intensify the struggle against international social democracy’ would be viewed as a concession to Trotsky and his supporters, who were ‘merging with the left wing of fascism and international social democracy’.22 A majority of the Political Bureau – including Semard,

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

77

the general secretary – now agreed to adopt the electoral strategy. A minority – including Doriot, Guy Jerram and the peasant leader, Renaud Jean – maintained their opposition, but agreed not to fight their corner at the forthcoming national conference.23 Thorez had swung from being a prominent advocate of the alliance strategy to spearheading the campaign for ‘class against class’. In so doing, he had strengthened his position in relation to others in the leadership, particularly Semard. As well as his fiefdom in the Nord, Thorez now had authority amongst party activists in the burgeoning ‘red belt’ around Paris. A violent demonstration in August 1927 to protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchist workers convicted on trumped-up charges in the United States, indicated the radicalised mood amongst activists in the capital.24 Thorez formed a bloc with leaders of the Young Communists and prominent members of the Seine Federation whose criticisms of the leadership’s ‘legalist’ politics came to a head in September when, fearing further violence, the Political Bureau withdrew support from a demonstration against a parade in Paris by the American Foreign Legion. Thorez’s status as a fugitive led him to develop a certain aura in the eyes of the party ranks. Thorez also found his reputation enhanced within the Comintern. In late February 1928 he was part of the PCF’s delegation to the Ninth Plenum. The International’s leaders did not pull any punches when criticising their French comrades. ‘When we analyse the situation and fundamental line of the French party’, observed Togliatti during the French Commission, ‘we cannot escape the thought that this line is not consistently communist.’ One by one, members of the PCF delegation came to the rostrum to ‘make a self-criticism’. To complete their mea culpa, they voted for a resolution ‘to accept and approve the criticisms raised by the International during the past year’. In contrast, Thorez received a seal of approval: the resolution noted ‘with satisfaction’ that some in the party ‘had reacted vigorously and in general correctly against the errors of the leadership’.25 In June, Thorez returned to Moscow with a large French contingent for the Comintern’s Sixth Congress. Marcel Cachin described the gathering as ‘la plus belle Vanity Fair’.26 Medical services, free tickets to the Bolshoi and other theatres, tours of factories and military establishments, state-of-the-art translation technology and a modern hall decked with flowers: the Soviet authorities aimed to impress in every feasible way.27 Bukharin’s opening speech lasted six hours and was followed by several days of set-piece presentations by delegates. The tedium inside the hall masked the brutal conflict taking place across the square in the Kremlin. Faced with food shortages and blockages arising from imbalances between market-orientated

78

MAURICE THOREZ

agriculture and state-managed industry, Stalin was steering Soviet policy towards rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation and, having dealt with opposition from the left, had turned on Bukharin, his erstwhile ally. As Trotsky noted, the length of Bukharin’s speeches to the Sixth Congress was in inverse proportion to the influence he now held in the Soviet regime.28 Thorez took the rostrum on 25 July and, striking an assured tone, explained ‘the problems’ in the French party as ‘the persistence of illusions in democracy, in the socialists and in the government, as well as an underestimation of French imperialism’. He stressed that he was speaking on behalf of those militants who were fighting to turn the party in the right direction.29 At the end of the congress, Thorez was rewarded with a position on the Executive, alongside two other French representatives: the general secretary, Semard, and the party’s rising star, Henri Barbe´. Two years younger than Thorez, Barbe´ had emerged out of Doriot’s shadow as a tenacious leader of the Young Communists. After spending time in the Sante´ in 1927, he was assigned to work with the Communist Youth International in Moscow. His memoirs recount how he was sent back to France in the spring of 1928 with a plan ‘to streamline and regenerate’ the leadership. It had been drawn up with Manuilsky and Stepanov, a Bulgarian (real name Stoyan Minev) who was responsible for overseeing the PCF within the Latin Secretariat. The aim was to promote a ‘nucleus’ of Young Communist leaders to the Political Bureau in order to counter the influence of more conservative members, including Cachin, Doriot and Renaud Jean.30 The restructuring of the leadership was discussed over seven days at meetings of the French Commission directly following the congress. Forming a bloc with Barbe´, Thorez argued that the majority of Political Bureau members should ‘have demonstrated agreement with the correct line of the party and International’. Referring to Togliatti’s analysis of the PCF’s problems as an outcome of ‘a kind of compromise’ between two tendencies that had constituted its initial cadre – the social-democratic left and a trend within anarcho-syndicalism – he observed that a third trend had now emerged to become ‘the essential base’ of the party: This current is made up of young workers who came into the party immediately after the war [. . .]. Based on the youth, this tendency swings sometimes towards one side, sometimes towards the other.31 Thorez was not only describing his own political disposition but also making a case for the trend with which he identified to hold the major responsibilities within the party. The new leadership was finalised at a ‘petite commission’ on 28 August, attended by Molotov and Bukharin. The nucleus of young

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

79

communists to join the Political Bureau included Barbe´, Pierre Celor, Andre´ Ferrat, Raymond Guyot and Francois Billoux. The big loser was Semard, whose star had waned after his initial opposition to class against class. The position of general secretary was replaced by a ‘collective secretariat’, with Thorez appointed secretary for organisation.32 The changes were confirmed at the PCF’s congress, held in Saint-Denis starting on 31 March 1929. Thorez and Barbe´ were both on the run from the police and unable to attend. But they had prepared the main political and organisational reports and were in Moscow on 27 March to rehearse proceedings with Comintern leaders.33

Fugitive Thorez was leading a nomadic life. He had moved to Paris in the spring of 1925 and set up home with Aurore in Enghien-les-Bains, a rather upmarket suburb to the north of the city. In July 1926, Aurore gave birth to a baby boy, who was given the name Maurice. After going clandestine in August 1927, Thorez only intermittently saw his wife and son. For much of the time he was based in Belgium, sharing a house on the outskirts of Brussels with Andre´ Ferrat, a young communist also on the run from the police. There were four trips to Moscow and two to Berlin (March 1929, May 1929). Thorez sometimes managed to see Aurore and Maurice junior by staying with Joseph Pader, an activist with a house in Montmorency, 3 kilometres from Enghien. Thirty years later, Pader reminisced how Thorez had taught him to play belote – a card game that was all the rage during the twenties – and had ‘got stuck in to Capital by Karl Marx’. Thorez remembered ‘a pleasant time’ and being amused by ‘the tortoise that used to crawl around in the garden’.34 The fugitive communist used two pseudonyms: Cle´ment, his grandfather’s name, and Chalier, after the Jacobin revolutionary executed in 1793. Police made sterling efforts to keep on his trail. In April 1928, Thorez was reportedly being chauffeured around the Nord by someone called Mr Alfred Davis in a ‘Ford car bearing the British Coat of Arms and the emblem of the Imperial War Graves Commission’.35 In December 1928, he was sighted in Halluin and an officer from Calais was ordered to stay in the town and make discreet enquiries. He could find no trace of Thorez but encountered a potential informant: ‘a waitress, aged around 23 years, who likes a drink or two and is of loose morality.’ According to the officer, the young woman ‘hangs out in several cafe´s with militants. It is likely that she could supply more details, if a young inspector were appointed to flirt with her.’ His superiors were enthusiastic about the idea, and thoughtfully suggested that the ‘young inspector’ chosen to proposition the woman should ‘know the Flemish language’.36 In May 1929, Thorez spoke to a meeting of miners held

80

MAURICE THOREZ

in a bar in Sallaumines. An inquiry found that Thorez had spent ‘two or three days in the Lens region without facing any problems. To avoid the attention of police, he had dressed as an old man. He wore dark glasses and carried a stick, walking with a bit of stoop. He had the appearance of a man of 60 or 65, while he is only 30.’37 Despite being on the run, Thorez stood as candidate in the legislative elections in April 1928, his second attempt to become a member of the Chamber of Deputies. This time, he stood in Ivry, part of the Parisian ‘red belt’ and, with the party controlling two local municipalities, deemed to be a safe seat. Polling 9,637 votes in the first round, Thorez was well ahead of the 6,392 votes for the National Union candidate Colonel Brocard, a pilot famous for his exploits in the Great War. If the majority of the socialist vote (3,643) had come over in the second round, Thorez would have won an easy victory. Yet he lost to Brocard by a 1,000-vote margin. Nationally, as in Ivry, the Communists paid a heavy electoral price for the anti-socialist slant of their campaign and their refusal to respect ‘republican discipline’ to defeat right-wing candidates. The PCF was reduced to fourteen deputies, losing almost half its seats. Nevertheless, in terms of votes cast, it had not only held its own but, with 11.4 per cent, advanced on its position in 1924 (9.5 per cent). Thorez optimistically claimed that the party had put in place the ‘first conditions for the subsequent rallying of the masses’.38 Thorez did not campaign in Ivry for fear of arrest. But on 19 April, he took part in a co-ordinated stunt to highlight the party’s ‘resistance to repression’. Prominent candidates on the run from the police made dramatic appearances at election meetings in several parts of the country. Jacques Duclos took the rostrum in Saint-Denis to make a brief speech and quickly disappeared. Doriot was less lucky: he emerged in Valenciennes, but was grabbed by a police officer and arrested. Thorez addressed a 600-strong rally in Les Varie´te´s Fivoises in Lille. The cinema was surrounded by forty police, including ten on horseback, while undercover officers mingled with the audience. Half-way through the meeting, stewards locked the doors and those in the hall were ordered to stay in their seats. Thorez entered from the wings to deliver a rousing speech, ending with the words: ‘Long live the working class city of Lille, long live the Soviets, long live the world revolution!’ By the time police moved into action, he had vanished. A major investigation failed to establish how he had managed to escape. Police had organised surveillance of all neighbouring streets and were monitoring every vehicle in the vicinity. Yet they were unable to conduct a thorough search of the cinema and it seems likely that Thorez remained hidden in one of its nooks and crannies until the coast was clear.39 Thorez was captured on 9 June 1929 when police raided a meeting of the Central Committee taking place in a chateau owned by the communist

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

81

municipality in Ache`res. Dozens of officers encircled the building before ‘a large group’ entered to make arrests. This time they searched the premises and found Thorez ‘curled up in a recess in the stairway leading to the cellars’.40 Biographers have debated the circumstances surrounding his arrest. Robrieux claims Thorez ‘lost his head’, while other fugitives – including Duclos and Ferrat – managed to escape ‘without any problem’ by scaling an outside wall. Wieviorka speculates that Thorez did not follow the others over the wall because ‘consciously or unconsciously’ he was tired of living an errant live. A simpler explanation is that Thorez was following the plan that had worked successfully in Lille: concealing himself in a prearranged hiding place, rather than attempting to penetrate a large police cordon.41

Political prisoner Thorez’s arrest was part of the biggest operation of state repression since 1875. Police raided the party headquarters on 17 July, targeted a meeting of the Central Committee and other national organisers on 21 July and rounded up most of the leadership team of the CGTU on 24 July. In all, 160 top- and middle-ranking party leaders were arrested for ‘plotting against the internal security of the state’.42 L’Humanite´ was raided on 30 July – for the third time in eight days – and its print run seized. The pretext was the party’s support for the Comintern’s ‘day of action’ on 1 August to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the declaration of the Great War. The repression was an explicit attempt by the Minister of Interior, Andre´ Tardieu, and Paris police chief, Jean Chiappe, to decapitate the PCF.43 Thorez was held on the wing for political detainees in the Sante´, before being transferred on Bastille Day to appear before a judge in Nancy and start his sentence in the city’s Charles III prison. By the end of July, he was one of around 300 communists held in prisons across France. With the exception of the group in the Sante´, most were denied rights granted to political prisoners and, in protest, communists in three prisons began a hunger strike. Some of six communist prisoners in Nancy joined the protest, but Thorez did not participate.44 Political rights were eventually extended to all communist prisoners, though somewhat inconsistently. In Nancy, Thorez was able to associate freely with his comrades for twelve hours each day. Recreation included exercise classes, boules and an opportunity to play the accordion. A study circle read and discussed communist texts. Food parcels and newspapers arrived from the Secours rouge international (SRI), a communist version of the Red Cross established to support ‘combatants of the revolution and their families’.45 Aurore visited regularly with Maurice junior, whose third birthday coincided

82

MAURICE THOREZ

with the start of his father’s sentence. She took lodgings in Nancy and was compensated for the rent and expenses by the SRI. Thorez wrote in September: ‘My cell is almost fitted out. I have obtained a bookcase for my books and I’ve succeeded to get a small portable lamp installed.’46 Conditions for Thorez in the Charles III prison were far kinder than those endured by inmates in the same establishment thirty years later, which were exposed by Michel Foucault’s prison reform campaign in 1972.47 Some of Thorez’s prison notebooks have survived. In a brown cahier, he followed a course in the German language, practising conjugations and vocabulary on a daily basis. A grey exercise book contains notes on Victor Serge’s translation of a work by two Russian scholars on the Soviet political economy. An orange notebook is devoted to the study of Marx’s Capital. Thorez had begun reading the first of a 14-volume French edition in April 1928 and, while in Nancy, completed another four volumes. His method of study was simply to paraphrase sections, without reflecting on Marx’s argument or method of analysis.48 Thorez was freed from the Charles III prison on the morning of 24 April 1930. ‘It is working-class action led by the party that has released me,’ he told l’Humanite´.49 But the rhetoric contained little substance. Thorez had asked Aurore to pay his fine, which earned him remission from his sentence. He dared not make the fact public as it would have been seen as a fragrant breach of party discipline. The policy of both the PCF and the French section of the SRI was that communists should refuse to pay penalties imposed for political activities. The decision had been taken in 1926 partly because there were insufficient funds to pay the fines of hundreds of activists facing the courts, and partly for its political message: communists, and especially party leaders, were prepared to make sacrifices for the cause, including the loss of liberty.50 Yet twice, in February and again in March, Thorez asked the Political Bureau for permission to pay his fine. Both requests were rejected on the basis that preferential treatment for one party leader could not be justified when others – such as Vaillant-Couturier, Benoıˆt Frachon, Marty and Monmousseau – as well as rank-and-file activists remained in jail.51 The Political Bureau referred the matter to the International, confident that it ‘would remind Thorez of a more accurate understanding of perspectives’. The entire French leadership was shocked when the Comintern’s Political Secretariat ruled in Thorez’s favour.52 Thorez knew he was taking a calculated gamble in paying the fine – and one with high stakes. He remained unaware of the International’s support for his position until after his release, and was fully expecting difficulties when justifying his decision to both the Political Bureau and in Moscow.

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

83

He wrestled with the decision for over a month and probably suffered more than the one sleepless ‘night of reflection’ that he admitted in a letter to Guy Jerram, his former line manager in the Nord who was now the regional official covering Nancy.53 At the very least, his behaviour risked undermining his authority; at worst, it opened the door to disciplinary action. During the summer of 1929 the Political Bureau had summarily expelled Louis Sellier, a former general secretary, and a group of municipal councillors in Paris for defying its directives. Those expelled went on to become an important component of the Parti d’unite´ prole´tarienne (PUP). In short, ‘the Thorez Affair’ – as the incident was referred to within the party – could have finished Thorez’s career in the communist movement. What prompted Thorez to pay the fine? On his release, Thorez gave political reasons. He argued that the French government was preparing to turn the PCF and CGTU into illegal organisations and to allow ‘long-term imprisonment of activists’ would amount to providing the government with ‘hostages’.54 His approach was certainly in tune with political reality. While the party officially opposed payment of penalties as a matter of principle, the policy had never been strictly adhered to. Many militants were either unwilling or unable to serve an extended prison sentence, particularly those with families, and collections were often organised to pay their fines.55 Clearly, Thorez’s morale also played an important part in his decision. Albert Vassart, the only party leader to visit him in prison, recalled that ‘the atmosphere in the prison was not very good [because] other prisoners and activists found it difficult to accept that Thorez, whilst in prison, should continue to enjoy material benefits that others did not receive’.56 Amongst other issues, the Nancy communist activists questioned whether funding from the SRI for Aurore’s accommodation and visits was appropriate, when such support was not available to the families of other prisoners. As a leader of a movement based on egalitarian principles, Thorez found accusations of special privileges difficult to handle. He probably found them hurtful. For six years, he had put the party before every aspect of his personal life – his marriage, his relationship with a young son, possibly a stable, if not particularly comfortable, existence – and he was now enduring a prison sentence. As Thorez’s responsibilities within the communist world had increased, so too had his sense of self-importance. He had begun to comprehend – particularly during his long visits to Moscow – the social and cultural status of a communist leader, and justify the growing differentiation between leaders and ordinary militants. If various perquisites came his way, these were to allow him – a member of the International’s Executive, the ‘general staff’ of the world revolution – to devote himself fully to the responsibilities of leadership. Thorez dispatched a letter to Guy Jerram,

84

MAURICE THOREZ

explaining that ‘his situation as a leader necessitates the presence of Aurore’ as a channel for communications with the party’s leadership committees.57 Nevertheless, resentment from other prisoners and local party activists festered. According to Vassart, the atmosphere meant that Thorez ‘was feeling isolated – and indeed he was isolated’.

The ‘turn’ of 1930 Thorez would have noticed many changes when he arrived in Moscow three weeks after his release. Bukharin had been purged from the Comintern leadership, replaced by Stalin’s ‘man of iron’, Vyacheslav Molotov – though, practically, the day-to-day functioning of the International was firmly in the hands of Manuilsky. Soviet and Comintern policy had radicalised. Preparations were underway for the Soviet party’s congress, which Stalin would proclaim to be ‘the congress of the sweeping offensive of socialism, of the elimination of the kulaks as a class, and of the realisation of complete collectivisation’.58 Since the previous summer, the Comintern had described social democrats as ‘social fascists’, a piece of surly abuse that implied socialist organisations were being assimilated into an increasingly ‘fascisised’ capitalist state. Three reasons made Thorez’s visit, which lasted until mid-July, particularly memorable. Firstly, after ten sessions of the French Commission and a long discussion at the Presidium, the PCF leadership was reconfigured. Thorez was appointed head of the Secretariat and, with three assistants (Henri Lozeray, Bertin and Martin), assigned the task of ‘overseeing the rapid execution of decisions of the Political Bureau and checking that they are applied at every level of the party’.59 Thorez’s role was perceived as the administrative servicing, rather than political leadership, of the Political Bureau. Nevertheless, from June 1930, Thorez began to be referred to as General Secretary of the French Communist Party. Secondly, while dining with the French delegation in the Hotel Lux on the evening of 10 May, Thorez met Jeannette Vermeersch. The 19-year-old textile worker from the Lille suburbs had arrived in Moscow on a false passport with a delegation of CGTU trade unionists. Thorez reminisced forty years later about ‘the tall, friendly girl’ who had approached him to shake his hand saying: ‘It’s comrade Thorez isn’t it? Bonjour.’ It was, Thorez said, ‘love at first sight’. Nevertheless, he continued to live with Aurore in a tiny apartment in rue de Lourmel until February 1934 and the relationship with Jeannette Vermeersch remained platonic until 19 March 1932, a date Thorez would later commemorate each year in his diary as ‘the most beautiful day of my life’.60 Thirdly, Thorez addressed the Soviet party congress, which turned into a ceremony to consecrate Stalin as omniscient leader of the world communist movement.

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

85

Thorez told the 2,000 delegates assembled in the Bolshoi Theatre: ‘We salute comrade Stalin, the combatant of the advanced guard of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and assure him of our profound friendship based on the recognition of his merits as leader of all Bolsheviks.’61 The decision to reorganise the PCF leadership was part of the Comintern’s attempt to rein back ‘ultra-left’ excesses in the application of class against class. During 1929, Manuilsky had encouraged the promotion of younger activists who, convinced that the hour of revolution was approaching, pursued class against class with unremitting zeal. But the sectarian turn had been a disaster. With parties leaking members and influence, Manuilsky announced at the Presidium that the class-against-class policy had been interpreted on a ‘too-restricted basis’. He used the PCF to illustrate sectarian ‘mistakes and weaknesses’. Under the stewardship of Barbe´ and others with a background in the Young Communists, the party had lost 30 per cent of its total membership since 1927, 45 per cent in Paris; turnover was at 70 per cent as recruits came in ‘one door to leave by another’; sales of l’Humanite´ had dropped by 30 per cent and ‘reformist trade unions’ were outstripping the CGTU. Manuilsky argued that the party required tighter organisation to integrate new members and must sort out its ‘bad methods of agitation and propaganda, particularly in relation to social democratic workers and unorganised workers’. He advocated a ‘political turn’ towards mass work, focusing on basic problems of concern to the working class in order to draw socialist-supporting workers into its orbit.62 With his record as an early champion of class against class, and untainted by recent excesses because of his imprisonment, Thorez was the obvious candidate to direct the political turn. Thorez welcomed Manuilsky’s criticisms as ‘absolutely necessary, salutary and precious’ and was particularly enthusiastic about the ‘turn’ towards socialist supporting workers. His Secretariat would work with a new sevenperson Political Bureau, with representation from the right (including Doriot, who saw the Comintern’s critique as justification for his opposition to class against class in 1927– 28) and left, represented by Barbe´. But a bigger organisational change was also announced by Manuilsky. The International, he told the Presidium, would be exercising a tighter control to ensure that affiliates were carrying out its decisions. And, he added, ‘it’s with the French party that we will begin this practice’.63 Accordingly, Thorez remained in Moscow after the departure of the French delegation to scrutinise every aspect of PCF activity with Manuilsky and Stepanov. One item on the agenda was the dire financial position of l’Humanite´ and a decision was taken to dismiss twenty of its forty-three journalists and twenty-five of its sixty-five administrative staff. A German communist, Hugo Eberlein, was appointed to oversee ‘the revision of all the enterprises of the French party’.64 Rather rashly,

86

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez promised that before the end of the year ‘major changes in the politics of our party’ would be accompanied with increased membership and sales of l’Humanite´.65 Back in France, Thorez wasted no time in attempting to apply ‘the turn’. A series of articles in l’Humanite´ under his by-line attacked ‘sectarianism’ and ‘pseudo-revolutionary phrase mongering’.66 While class against class continued to provide the framework for PCF policy, its execution became more flexible. Thorez reversed the decision to call a political strike on 1 August, as part of another ‘day of action’ against war. He proposed instead that Communists should approach socialist and ‘reformist’ workers to agree ‘varied forms of action’, depending on the ‘situation in each workplace, industry, region or industrial centre’.67 In September, Thorez stood as candidate in a by-election in BellevilleSaint-Fargeau, his third attempt to win a seat in the Chamber. The campaign was organised from La Bellevilloise, a PCF-sponsored complex of shops, bars, meeting rooms and cinema, which would become embroiled in financial scandal the following year. Each evening, hundreds of activists poured into the constituency to work out of eleven local committee rooms. Party leaders – including Cachin, Semard and Renaud Jean – spoke together with Thorez at packed public meetings in school yards and local halls, sometimes three the same evening. The Belleville campaign reveals the limited nature of Thorez’s turn away from sectarian politics. Its tone was violently anti-socialist. L’Humanite´ denounced Socialists as ‘social-flics’ (social-cops) and purveyors of ‘fascist tendencies’.68 The Socialists reciprocated with leaflets describing Thorez as the ‘homme de confiance of the Soviet government’.69 Fighting broke out on several occasions. After Communists were refused access to a SFIO public meeting, ‘Thorez was struck by fists and truncheons’.70 On the night of the first round of voting, a brawl erupted at La Bellevilloise. Glasses, bottles and plates flew through the air as police entered the premises and made ninety arrests. The communist press portrayed Thorez as hero of the hour: It was only the intervention of Thorez that prevented a massacre. Our friend moved forward with no regard to the projectiles that continued to rain down [. . .] He was immediately surrounded by a mass of cops, in uniform and in plain clothes. ‘You’ve done a nice piece of work here, Monsieur Thorez,’ said a flic.71 Thorez increased the communist vote in the first round by 5 per cent at the expense of the Socialists, whose vote fell by 4 per cent. The SFIO candidate refused, however, to step down in the second round and, campaigning on

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

87

an anti-communist ticket, secured votes from supporters of the centre- and right-wing candidates to win the seat.

Letter of resignation Thorez travelled to a freezing Moscow in mid-March 1931 to attend the Comintern Executive’s Eleventh Plenum with the genuine belief that the PCF had turned the corner. The Belleville campaign, he would tell the meeting, had represented ‘a great stimulant, a big change’ and was an indication that the party was ‘on the offensive against social democracy’. Pointing to a successful demonstration against unemployment on 25 February and other rallies ‘involving reformist workers’, he claimed that the slump in membership of the party and trade unions had been arrested and there was a ‘tendency towards recruitment’.72 Although recent letters from Stepanov had criticised its trade union work, Thorez arrived in Moscow sensing the Comintern’s general approval of PCF activity.73 Malnuilsky’s report to the plenum came as an enormous shock. In terms of political analysis, it contained little new: increasing threat of war, sharpening of contradictions within capitalism, growth of revolutionary movements in a large number of countries. But – and this became the theme of the meeting – there was a gap between the opportunities arising from the socio-economic crisis and the achievements of communist parties. According to Manuilsky, all major parties of the International were lagging behind the pace; though he noted one exception, the German. The PCF was again singled out for brutal criticism. It had failed sufficiently to prepare the working class to resist the economic crisis and was ‘following’ rather than leading the ‘movement of the masses’. It had neglected work amongst the unemployed and failed to organise the struggle of agricultural workers and the peasantry. Its campaign against war amounted to ‘opportunist passivity’. Workers tended to view communist-controlled trade unions as ‘strike agitators, rather than organisations to bring them immediate gains’. Alongside these organisational failings, the party’s political analysis was ‘confused’.74 Thorez had endured criticisms from the International before, but he had never felt so personally targeted. According to Manuilsky, the party’s decline had begun around a year-and-a-half earlier – at a time when Thorez was in jail – but it was continuing despite assurances given (by Thorez) at the previous year’s French Commission. Marcel Cachin’s diary describes ‘extreme effervescence’ in the French delegation. Thorez and Barbe´ complained of ‘the injustice of Manuilsky’ who ‘has supplied weapons to all the enemies of the party’. The ‘violent, public attack against the leadership and

88

MAURICE THOREZ

the ironic applause from the Plenum has put the leadership on the defensive’, noted Cachin.75 Thorez went to the rostrum to defend the French leadership. Manuilsky was, he said, right to make severe criticisms of the party’s work but he should have taken into account the dislocation of the Political Bureau and Secretariat through internal conflict and repression; and it was important to see ‘the progress’ being made. ‘If our party is cited as an example of opportunism in practice, we say: No’, Thorez concluded with some defiance. Comintern leaders gave him short shrift. Manuilsky provoked laughter in the hall by ridiculing ‘comrade Thorez who comes here banging his fist on the rostrum’ and shouting ‘we will not allow this’.76 Manuilsky’s real complaint about the PCF was that its leadership was not sufficiently homogeneous and not compliant enough to Moscow’s directives, in other words not fully stalinised. To rectify these ‘weaknesses’, the French Commission agreed another reconfiguration of the leadership committees. The pyramid structure became more explicit: the Secretariat would no longer have primarily an administrative function but would become the effective political leadership. It would ‘prepare’ the work of the Political Bureau, which in turn would guide the work of the Central Committee. Three men were appointed to the Secretariat: Thorez, who now officially became the general secretary; Frachon, responsible for trade union work; and Duclos, secretary for organisation. Thorez was also elevated to the Political Secretariat of the Comintern. Courtois and Lazar note the ‘remarkable aptitude of Manuilsky and his team’ in choosing to enthrone the threesome, who would remain the decisive component within the PCF leadership for several decades.77 Yet the Comintern still had grave doubts about the French leadership, including Thorez. As an additional measure of control, a team of ‘instructors’ began to arrive in Paris during the first months of 1931. Leading the team as ‘permanent representative’ of the Comintern was Eugen Fried, a highly cultured 35-year-old Slovakian Jew (he was accomplished in nine languages) and veteran of the 1919 Hungarian Revolution, who would become known in the PCF as, firstly, Albert and, later, Cle´ment.78 Fried’s initial reports back to Moscow were highly sceptical about Thorez. On 28 April, he told Manuilsky that ‘our friends [in France]’ were still ‘feeling the pain of the blows’ endured at the Plenum, but ‘they are intent on continuing as before’. And he noted: ‘at the moment this applies above all to Maurice [. . .] who works in the way he was doing before coming to see you.’79 Such reports prompted further complaints to Paris from Comintern leaders, who warned that, if the situation were to continue, they would ‘intervene and make a public criticism, [. . .] something that we would like to avoid as such a

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

89

critique would damage the prestige of the party leadership’.80 Fried described the impact of the rebuke: Your letter about the methods of work of the leadership, the nonimplementation of the decisions adopted during the Plenum made a deep impression. Above all, Maurice has, as usual, become very upset and totally denies the accuracy of the points made in the letter (again, as usual).81 Thorez became even more agitated when Marty, who had been released from prison in January, weighed in on the side of the Comintern’s criticisms. Fried commented: It is certain that Marty’s inflexibility and his tendency to be hypercritical, while not active enough in carrying out his own responsibilities, clouded the atmosphere. But the decisive fault was on the side of Maurice, who considered Marty’s letter as an attack against him and sacrificed half the time of the BP to deal with the matter.82 Another letter from Moscow at the end of July, this time from the Comintern’s Political Secretariat, brought matters to a head. The ‘alarm bells must sound’, it said, and the PCF leaders must ‘stop denying the seriousness of the situation’.83 Fried reported that ‘everyone was shaken and upset’ when the letter arrived on 26 July.84 The next day, Thorez handed a letter of resignation to Fried: I was entrusted with major responsibilities by the PCF and C[ommunist] I[nternational] while still young. I have always made every effort to fulfil successive roles in a serious and productive way. Over the last year, I have attempted to do likewise in my role in the general secretariat of the party. Given the unsatisfactory results, I consider it my duty to stand down from a position for which I am insufficiently prepared theoretically and politically. In addition, several facts lead me to believe that the comrades of the C[ommunist] I[nternational] doubt, in my opinion wrongly, my genuine desire to carry out all the directives of the CI’s executive. This latter consideration has affected me deeply. I have never tried to hide my considerable weaknesses, but I have always shown total loyalty and devotion to the CI.

90

MAURICE THOREZ

As much as I would like to, I no longer have sufficient strength to participate effectively in the work of the party leadership. I will not communicate the contents of this letter to the P[olitical] B[ureau] until receiving your response. Yours fraternally M. Thorez.85 It is instructive that Thorez’s letter was in the first instance sent to the Comintern, rather than his comrades in the PCF. Was it, as Courtois and Kriegel ask, a ‘skilful manoeuvre’, a sack-me-or-back-me ultimatum to Moscow? Yet everything points to Thorez being disheartened and worn down by the barrage of criticism, which he had taken personally. His morale was the outcome of being ‘trapped in a conflict about which he could understand neither the object nor the terms’.86 To comprehend the impasse facing the PCF, Thorez would have had to challenge the Comintern’s political perspective. But he had internalised its analysis of ‘fascisisation’ of the capitalist state and the accompanying theory of social fascism. He accepted the argument that the ‘economic and agricultural crisis’ in France meant that ‘all the conditions exist for the rapid development of the party, in terms of numbers and also influence’. He agreed that ‘the workers’ movement [was] advancing in France with vast strikes and sharp struggles in resistance to the cutting of wages’.87 In vulgar Marxist logic, therefore, the problems facing the PCF did not arise from the ‘objective situation’ but were ‘subjective’; that is, resulting from weaknesses in the party’s functioning and in the work of individual comrades. In reality, the ‘objective’ situation in 1931 was far from favourable for the PCF. France was witnessing, albeit very temporarily, a degree of political and economic stability. Paradoxically, the repression launched by Tardieu and Chiappe in 1929 – which had radicalised the PCF and disrupted its leadership – had also provoked opposition from within the ruling elites, including the judiciary. This was an important factor in the collapse of the Tardieu administration in December 1930. With the impact of the Wall Street Crash delayed in comparison with other European powers, subsequent governments led by The´odore Steeg and Pierre Laval introduced some measures of mild social reform. Bitter and sometimes violent strike movements were not uncommon – as in June 1931 when textile workers in Roubaix erected barricades – but generally the workers’ movement was on the retreat.88 The theory of ‘fascisisation’ was contradicted by the retreat of the right-wing leagues, an interlude before the start of ‘the second wave’ of inter-war French fascism in 1933.89 The theory of social fascism not only isolated communists from other forces within the labour movement, but meant that communists stood aside from debates between different factions within the SFIO. In short,

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

91

PCF stagnation was rooted in the disconnection between the theory and practice of ‘class against class’ and social and political reality.

The Barbe´ –Celor affair Thorez remained insistent that he would resign for several days, despite reassurances from Fried that the problem was ‘not Maurice Thorez but much more complicated’. He changed his mind after a ‘long discussion’ with Manuilsky, who unexpectedly arrived in Paris to tackle the crisis.90 Manuilsky’s visit launched what became known as the ‘Affair of the Barbe´ – Celor Group’. Like later purges within the PCF – Marty – Tillon (1952– 53), Lecoeur (1954), Casanova– Servin (1960) – and the more baneful show trials in Russia and eastern Europe, the Barbe´ – Celor affair developed with a logic that historians still find difficult to unravel.91 The discussion at the first of three meetings of the Political Bureau (1, 5 and 8 August) began over the need to remove ‘group mentalities’ from within the leadership team. The fact that the PCF leadership was drawn from the party’s different formative components had been accepted for many years. At the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928, Thorez had referred to three tendencies: the syndicalist tradition, socialist tradition and the youth radicalised by the war, the trend with which he openly identified. (see Chapter 10). But the discussion quickly moved on from ‘group mentality’ to the damaging behaviour of the ‘group of youth’ led by Barbe´, Celor and Lozeray. One by one, ‘members’ of the group – who had been softened up in advance by Manuilsky and Fried – described their participation in a secret, ‘masonic-like’ faction. Fried reported to Moscow that Political Bureau members were ‘stupefied and furious’ and ‘could not believe their ears’. Thorez was particularly ‘indignant’: And now I understand everything; I have been a tool in the hands of the group; I have served as their doormat; this clarifies lots of things that I could not understand, in particular why we have been at odds with the CI.92 The supposed ‘group’ – which had been promoted by the Comintern leadership in 1928– 29 – became the scapegoat for all the ills of the party. Barbe´, Celor, Lozeray and others made ‘self-criticisms’ at the Central Committee on 25 August and pledged to ‘liquidate’ the group.93 Yet the dynamic of the witch-hunt had not run its course. In Moscow, Stalin and his aides drew a connection between events in France and the ‘Syrtsov– Lominadze affair’, an ‘anti-soviet front’ imagined by the increasingly paranoid Soviet leadership after two prominent communists

92

MAURICE THOREZ

raised criticisms over forced collectivisation and the speed of industrialisation. As a former secretary of the Communist Youth International, Vissarion Lominadze would have had relations with Barbe´.94 Interrogations of Barbe´, Celor and others members of ‘the group’ now took place in Moscow. A requistory of their ‘criminal activity’ was drawn up and sent to Paris by Marty, recently appointed the French delegate to the Comintern. In March, Celor was again interrogated, this time by GPU agents as well as Comintern officals. He was accused of being a police agent; but, despite immense pressure, refused to confess. His expulsion from the PCF was announced in l’Humanite´ under the headline ‘The Traitor Celor’.95 Paradoxically, Thorez was fortunate not to be labelled a member of the ‘group’. As noted above, in 1928 he had aligned himself with ‘the tendency of youth’ and until his arrest had formed an effective alliance with Barbe´ at the head of the party. This was disrupted by his imprisonment and, then, by the controversy over the fine. Yet, even after his release, Thorez worked closely with another ‘group member’, Lozeray, who had been appointed to the Secretariat in May 1930 before being removed in the reorganisation at the Eleventh Plenum. At the end of April, Fried expressed concerns that Thorez was attempting to reinstate Lozeray, apparently in collusion with Celor. He told Moscow that Thorez’s proposals represented ‘an attempt to create a majority of comrades belonging to the group within the Secretariat’.96 Thorez emerged as the big victor in the Barbe´ – Celor affair. It was he who announced the existence of the group at the August Central Committee, reading out the names of its seven most senior members.97 He penned articles in l’Humanite´ promising more collective and open discussion within the party. Their headlines, ‘Pas de mannequins’ and ‘Que les bouches s’ouvrent’ (‘Let your voices be heard’), won kudos in the ranks, within whom many were frustrated by the party’s stagnation and resentful at the heavy-handed way that discipline had been imposed by the leadership.98 By December, Thorez was presenting himself as the group’s principle target. He told the Central Committee that Lozeray had confessed its aim of conducting ‘an underhand, whispering campaign against Thorez’ and creating ‘an anti-Thorez psychosis’ within the party.99 The Barbe´ – Celor affair would later become part of the Thorez myth. A display at his fiftieth birthday exhibition at Ivry explained that by crushing ‘the group’ Thorez had rescued the party from sectarianism and allowed it to embrace the mass politics of the Popular Front.

Towards the Popular Front? Myths always possess elements of reality and Thorez certainly took the removal of Barbe´ and his supporters as a signal to return to the more open

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

93

approach to politics abandoned in 1927. During three separate periods between August 1931 and April 1933, he made overtures towards the leadership of the SFIO and attempted to steer the PCF towards a programme of realistic reforms and support for broader campaigns around peace and opposition towards fascism. However, on each occasion Thorez’s attempts to ‘do politics’ ran up against vehement opposition from Moscow; and, on each occasion, he retreated into the realm of sectarian denunciations and dogmatic proclamations for socialist revolution. In August 1932 – six months before Hitler’s seizure of power – he declared that ‘in terms of substance and methods, fascism and social fascism were at root identical’ and ‘social democracy was just as violent and bloody [as fascism]’.100 In short, Thorez’s politics during the final phase of class against class were inconsistent and contradictory. The main impact of the Barbe´ – Celor affair was the impetus it gave to Stalinisation. Bureaucratic practices introduced in the Soviet party, as it was refashioned into an instrument of Stalin’s dictatorship, were replicated in the PCF, including the establishment of a Commission of Cadres to check candidates for leadership positions at every level. The PCF Congress, held in March 1932, was the most stage-managed up to that point in the party’s history. Thorez’s speech was long enough to be spread over consecutive days. Rather than letting ‘voices be heard’, the traditional pre-congress forum was removed from l’Humanite´. Thorez complained that too many members thought that ‘the eviction [of the “group”] signal[led] going back to a regime where everyone could say as they please’.101 In contrast with the previous year, he wrote articles condemning ‘rotten liberalism’ and ‘the voice of the enemy’ within party ranks.102 As well as working on a daily basis with Fried, Thorez increased the regularity and length of his visits to the Russian capital. In 1932, he was in Moscow during January, August, September and November and was back again in January 1933. As well as his commitment to the Comintern as an institution, Thorez felt personally indebted to its leaders who had, despite his resignation letter, maintained confidence in his stewardship of the party. The first period of more unitary politics began immediately after the exposure of the Barbe´ – Celor group. In August 1931, Thorez drew up an ‘open letter’ to be sent to socialist branches proposing a pact for the forthcoming cantonal elections: the PCF would withdraw its candidates in the second round of voting if Socialists and Communists were to agree on a minimum programme. Although he went out of his way to deny it, Thorez’s proposals were a step towards reinstating republican discipline at elections. The campaign culminated in a big Paris rally at which, in front of 8,000 activists, Thorez offered an ‘outstretched hand’ to Socialists. The slogan of the

94

MAURICE THOREZ

rally was ‘for bread, for peace’, an anticipation of the propaganda of the Popular Front.103 Yet Thorez soon learnt that he had misread the runes. Comintern leaders condemned the PCF’s approach towards the SFIO as ‘opportunism’ and its campaign around peace as ‘vulgar pacifism’. Their perspective remained one of imminent revolution to overthrow ‘decomposing capitalism’ propped up by social democracy. Attending meetings in Moscow in January 1932, Thorez made no attempt to demur from the analysis and put the blame for the PCF’s ‘opportunism’ on to branches or individual activists who had misinterpreted the party leadership’s directives. He was particularly scathing about cases of communists joining ‘committees for the defence of peace with socialist organisations and petit bourgeois pacifists’. For the legislative elections in May, Thorez lurched back towards sectarianism and proposed ‘a firm and vigorous application’ of class against class. He announced that communists would stand on their ‘entire platform’ in both the first and second rounds ‘against all parties while proclaiming that we never vote for the candidate of the Socialist Party’.104 The tactic guaranteed disastrous results. With the party polling an historic low (8.4 per cent of the vote), only ten communist candidates won seats in the Chamber of Deputies, one more than the nine secured by the ‘renegades’ of the PUP. For Thorez, however, the result was a personal triumph. He was elected on the second round to represent the constituency of Ivry. Carried out of the count on the shoulders of his comrades, he told an enthusiastic crowd that his victory was ‘the first step on the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat’.105 The second period of more open politics commenced in October 1932 following the Comintern’s Twelfth Plenum. Thorez had arrived in Moscow in August to find Manuilsky and his team furious over the party’s lack of progress and particularly over the electoral defeat of proletarian heroes such as Cachin and Marty. A specially convened French Commission to examine policy and activity led to ‘very sharp exchanges’. One bright note had been the success of Doriot who won his seat in Saint-Denis on the first round with 55 per cent of the vote, the only communist candidate to be elected with an absolute majority. A sceptic of class against class, Doriot had concentrated his efforts on ‘municipal communism’ and, as mayor of Saint-Denis, built a solid reputation as a fighter for working-class interests. He despised Thorez, who had in his view been promoted above his station. Comintern leaders were wary of Doriot on account of his lack of discipline, but they championed his SaintDenis experiment as the template for the PCF to follow. The case for more unitary politics received further encouragement when reports arrived of the successful congress held in Amsterdam at the end of August which, fronted by Barbusse and Romain Rolland, launched a ‘world committee against war and

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

95

fascism’, winning the allegiance of a significant array of intellectuals, artists, socialists and pacifists. Manuilsky summarised the French Commission’s deliberations. Communists must, he said, recognise the ‘demand for unity’ in the working class. They must be prepared to engage in more ‘modest’ political action such as press campaigns and delegations, to support propositions by Socialists if they were advantageous to the working class and be able to understand the need to ‘accept a compromise’ if workers’ demands could not be won in totality. The PCF should, in short, adopt a more ‘intelligent’ approach to politics that – while not abandoning its call for socialist revolution – focused on immediate interests of workers and the rural poor. Advised by Fried, Manuilsky maintained his trust in Thorez. But he delivered a stern warning to him and other PCF leaders: ‘We have the right to ask if you are capable of implementing this policy [..] You are good comrades, but I am beginning to doubt whether you can carry it out.’106 Thorez took the discussions in Moscow as a cue for more pragmatic politics, a decisive ‘turn’ towards the Socialists and a campaign in support of trade union unity. A summary of Manuilsky’s speech at the plenum was published in the PCF’s theoretical magazine under Thorez’s by-line and contained a phrase that would become famous in June 1936: ‘savoir terminer une gre`ve’ (‘know how to conclude a strike’).107 Thorez corresponded with Paul Faure, the SFIO general secretary, and proposed meetings around the country at which communists and socialists would discuss ‘precise aims for the organisation of common struggle’.108 On 16 January 1933, he and Doriot, representing the PCF, met with Faure and his deputy, Jean-Baptiste Se´verac, along with two representatives of the PUP. After three hours of talks, the parties issued a joint statement and agreed to meet again on 7 February. Benoıˆt Frachon directed initiatives in the unions. In a number of regions and industries, including the docks, post office and railways, committees were formed in which the CGTU worked alongside the CGT and sometimes the CFTC, the Christian confederation. Once again, however, Thorez had overstepped boundaries delineated in Moscow. At the Comintern Political Secretariat on 29 January 1933 – the eve of Hitler’s triumph in Germany – attempts to build relations with SFIO and CGT leaders were condemned as ‘very serious and opportunist mistakes’. Thorez agreed to ‘correct the errors’. He returned to Paris and the talks with Faure and the PUP were cancelled.109 The third brief period of unitary politics took place following the victory of Nazism in Germany, an event that stunned the world communist movement. The German party had been considered the Comintern’s most powerful asset outside the Soviet Union and a model for other parties to

96

MAURICE THOREZ

follow. Just two weeks earlier, Thorez had spoken in Berlin at a huge communist rally to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the French invasion of the Ruhr. The Comintern’s immediate response to Hitler’s victory was to recommend that affiliates approach socialist parties to establish a ‘common struggle of communist and socialist workers’ action against the offensive of capital and against fascism’.110 Thorez immediately wrote to the SFIO with a proposal for a campaign of solidarity with the German working class, including a national day of action. SFIO leaders did not respond, but joint committees involving socialist activists were established in a number of areas. The PCF also organised a demonstration under the auspices of the Amsterdam Committee, working alongside rank-and-file socialists and non-party intellectuals.111 Rather audaciously, on 30 March, Thorez telegrammed Moscow urging the Comintern to contact the leadership of the Socialist International with proposals for talks.112 Two days later the Comintern Executive issued a statement. Neither recognising the seriousness of the defeat in Germany nor reflecting on the divisive impact of its theory of social fascism on the German labour movement, it announced that on all essential issues the political line of German communists had been correct. The rise of Hitler was ‘thanks to the policy of social democracy’, some of whose leaders had ‘entirely supported the fascists’. Moreover, Nazism was only a ‘temporary phenomenon’ that would be swept away by the inevitable growth of mass revolutionary resistance. One sentence would become notorious, suggesting that by coming to power Hitler had simplified the tasks of communists: ‘The establishment of open fascist dictatorship, by dissipating all the democratic illusions of the masses and freeing them from the influence of social democracy, accelerates the march of Germany towards proletarian revolution.’113 PCF leaders were shocked when they received the statement, some even considering it a forgery. When it failed to appear in l’Humanite´, Comintern leaders telegrammed a complaint to Thorez and the statement was published, one week late, tucked away at the bottom of page four. Thorez followed once again the Moscow directive to change political course. The PCF’s fire was re-concentrated on the Socialists, Radicals and ‘other left-wing bourgeois’ and the party attacked ‘the lie’ that the working masses should view any fundamental difference between regimes of bourgeois democracy and fascism.114 Some elements of unitary politics remained, prompting complaints from Moscow – usually forwarded by Marty – about concessions to opportunism and pacifism. In early June, the Salle Pleyel in Paris hosted the ‘European Congress against Fascism’, effectively a follow-up event to the congress held in Amsterdam the previous summer. Despite

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

97

claims in l’Humanite´ that ‘delegations of all [political] tendencies’ were present, the political base of the congress was narrower than the earlier event.115 In terms of politics, representation and bureaucratic stage management, accusations in the socialist press that the congress was a communist front were not far from the mark.116

‘Allow Maurice a rest’ Thorez’s spirits were low when he arrived in Moscow in mid-November for the Comintern’s Thirteenth Plenum and associated meetings. His contributions during sessions were perfunctory, repeating the mantra of the ‘struggle against social democracy and particularly its left wing’. He found it hard to grasp the machinations of Soviet foreign policy. As it sensed the military threat posed by Nazi Germany, Soviet diplomacy had begun tentatively to reassess its relations with France. Perplexed, Thorez criticised the Comintern leadership’s draft resolution for watering down its previous analysis of the ‘aggressive role’ of French imperialism, which he insisted remained ‘the gendarme of Europe, the sucker of blood’.117 Thorez’s mind was preoccupied with the Comintern leadership’s renewed censure of the PCF and of his own personal responsibility for the party’s lack of progress. He noted the criticisms: Leadership: major criticism on every aspect, targeting the entire leadership. Because of my role within the team, the most severe evaluation of my activity; criticism of my faults and inadequacies, notably the lack of firmness against deviations to the political line and against those proposing such deviations. Weaknesses: insufficient effort in leading the party, in obtaining a resolute and consistent implementation of the line of the party and the International, in opposing and correcting effectively faults and errors, in assuring a strict monitoring and implementation of all decisions of the CI as well as our own party’s decisions.118 Since his resignation letter, Thorez had loyally pursued Comintern policies while striving to insert the PCF within national politics in a meaningful manner. Yet this was the fifth time in less than two years that Moscow had intervened to admonish the PCF. Moreover, there appeared little logic to the Comintern ’s critiques. In August 1931 and October 1932, it had condemned the party’s approach as sectarian; while, in January 1932 and April 1933, it opposed initiatives that it found too broad.

98

MAURICE THOREZ

As in July 1931 when he had written his resignation letter, Thorez did not think to question essential aspects of Comintern policy or behaviour. Patronage, personal ties and political commitment to Lenin’s International ensured he was a disciplined comrade. But he was exhausted by the browbeating and disorientated by Moscow’s political zig-zags. He sought once again to withdraw from the position of general secretary, at least temporarily. Thorez told the French delegation to the plenum that he wanted to transfer to Moscow to work with the Comintern Executive. He would replace Marty, whose return to France had already been agreed. Four meetings of the delegation (6, 7, 13 and 18 December) discussed his position. Thorez’s comrades attempted to persuade him to remain in France. Monmousseau spoke of his ‘concern from the point of view of the party’s leadership’. But Thorez was insistent. ‘Decide firmly on my departure,’ he noted after one meeting. During another he spoke ‘against any discussion of the hypothesis of keeping Maurice [in France]’. Frachon was amongst those who understood Thorez’s frame of mind: ‘it is necessary to allow Maurice a rest, a change of air,’ he explained. Fried also attempted to pull Thorez out of his stupor. Speaking as ‘not only a representative of the Comintern’ but also a friend, he told Thorez: ‘You are wrong to believe that comintern activists do not want to help you, not only the Communist Party but you personally. [You must] make efforts to overcome your state of mind which is preventing you to move forward.’ Discussion turned to who would take over Thorez’s responsibilities. Marcel Gitton was the first candidate, almost certainly put forward by Thorez himself. This proposal provoked controversy. Frachon was ‘in absolute agreement’ but, for Bonte, it was ‘only Marty who c[ould] replace Maurice’. Marty spoke against Gitton, whom he considered an acolyte of Thorez. He said the responsibility would be ‘too heavy’. Agreement was reluctantly reached to share the tasks between a secretariat made up of Duclos, Marty and Gitton.119 The absence of sources means we can only speculate on why Thorez did not transfer to Moscow at the end of 1933. Certainly, the Comintern leadership would have found the proposal of sharing the responsibilities of general secretary between three people totally unacceptable. By now, parties were expected to emulate Stalin’s transformation of the role into one occupied by a single, omnipotent leader. Perhaps, Thorez feared that his post would end up in the hands of Marty, with whom relations had further deteriorated during the previous year. Whatever the reasons, in late December a reluctant Thorez returned to Paris. Thorez would always defend ‘class against class’ as an essential period in PCF history. He considered it the moment at which the party was steeled in combat to become a disciplined force, allowing it to play a crucial

CLASS

AGAINST

CLASS

99

role during the Popular Front. In terms of his political trajectory, the period tutored Thorez in the dialectic between his role as purveyor of policy decided in Moscow and his pursuit of politics that could root the PCF in the national social and political environment. Though the experience was painful, Thorez developed an instinct for knowing whether and how far the boundaries of the Moscow political line could be stretched.

CHAPTER 4 POPULAR FRONT

The Popular Front – or People’s Front – has been well described as a me´tae´ve´nement, a synthesis of major events that unfolded over several years (1934– 38) and ushered in fundamental changes to the fabric of French society.1 The vortex of this meta-event was the mass movement of strikes and factory occupations that erupted after the Popular Front’s electoral victory in May 1936. The political core of the Popular Front was the pact between Communists, Socialists and Radicals against fascism, the threat of which raised it head during riots on 6 February 1934. Such a coalition would have been impossible without a remodelling of PCF politics. In a series of stages, the Communists’ tactic of the ‘united front from below’ – joint activity with rank-and-file socialists but implacable hostility to the ‘reformist’ leadership – was transformed into a ‘People’s Front’, a broad alliance between the political representatives of the working class, middle class and peasantry. Simultaneously, the party embraced the republican tradition, its values and symbols. Its language was moderated, so as not to alienate the middle class and peasantry, and a disconnect opened between its immediate programme and ultimate goal of socialist revolution. By transforming the PCF into a mass force, the Popular Front made Thorez a national political personality. He demonstrated his instinct for mass politics and an ability to relate communist identity to the French national tradition, alongside a pragmatic approach to policy and barely disguised timidity in the face of the revolutionary potential of the mass social movement. Alongside Thorez’s national stature came increased prestige within the world communist movement, for which the Popular Front strategy became a model. The period also saw the first firm shoots of the leadership cult around his persona. Much ink has been spilt in evaluating Thorez’s role in fashioning the Popular Front. Thorez often claimed its provenance, fondly quoting a remark by Stalin that French communists had ‘found a new key to open the doors of

POPULAR FRONT

101

the future’.2 Leftist historiography has generally stressed the French roots of the Popular Front, while the totalitarian school explains it as ‘fruit of a strategic decision by Stalin’. The most influential study of the period in English describes Thorez’s ‘hesitancy’ and the need for ‘much prodding’ from Moscow during the summer of 1934 before he adopted the unity policy.3 Having had his fingers burnt for arranging talks with SFIO leaders between August 1931 and April 1933, Thorez’s prudence is understandable. It is, however, necessary to recognise also that policy changed in Moscow in a confused manner, with mixed signals from Stalin creating frustration for the new Comintern leader, Georgi Dimitrov. From late summer 1934, Thorez drove forward the Popular Front strategy: the extension of the alliance to include the Radicals was his initiative, carried through despite opposition from Comintern officials. His proposals for the PCF to join the government in 1936, and later in 1938, and his advocacy of ‘a French Front’ were vetoed by the Comintern. While PCF politics were linked to the interests of Soviet diplomacy and constrained by the discipline of the Comintern, Thorez’s sensitivity for ‘doing politics’ – of rooting French communism in national politics and culture – led him to grasp the logic of the Popular Front to a greater extent than Comintern leaders based in Moscow.

February days In December 1933, Thorez returned to France from the Comintern plenum on the eve of a full-blown political crisis triggered by the suicide of Serge Stavisky, a fraudster who had swindled investors out of an estimated 300 million francs. The Cartel des Gauches (Radicals and Socialists) had narrowly won the legislative elections in May 1932 against the background of world depression. A series of fragile Radical-led administrations followed, with Socialists reluctant to support austerity measures proposed by their parliamentary partners. An insurgency by extreme right-wing leagues – including Les Croix-de-Feu, Solidarite´ Francaise and Les Camelots du Roi – railed against ‘corrupt’ parliamentary democracy and whipped up xenophobic passions against the arrival of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Stavisky’s death was a godsend for this ‘second wave of fascism’: the swindler not only had connections within the parliamentary and state elites, he was also Jewish.4 The extreme right took to the streets throughout January 1934, demanding the resignation of prime minister Camille Chautemps, who they claimed had guaranteed Stavisky’s silence by ordering his murder. Communists made similar accusations and lambasted the Socialists for their supposed complicity in the Radical government’s attempt ‘to cover up

102

MAURICE THOREZ

the murder’ and aid ‘bourgeois corruption’. They also mobilised against the activity of the extreme right. Violence erupted on 14 January when militants battled police after the leagues attempted to parade through rue Me´ntilmontant. On 23 January, fighting broke out on Boulevard Montparnasse after a rally addressed by Thorez to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. According to l’Humanite´, ‘the cops displayed an extraordinary brutality. Our comrade Thorez was assaulted by a horde of agents, but defended himself with his fists and managed to free himself from their clutches.’5 Chautemps resigned on 27 January and the more left-leaning Radical, E´douard Daladier, made attempts to form a government. To help secure support from the SFIO, he sacked the Paris police chief, Jean Chiappe, who had shown reluctance to investigate Stavisky but was also sympathetic to the extreme right. Furious, the leagues called demonstrations for 6 February, the evening Daladier was due to confirm his new government in the Chamber of Deputies. As protestors converged on the French parliament, police opened fire, killing thirteen demonstrators and seriously wounding another six. One policeman also lost his life in the fighting, during which over a thousand people were hurt. Entering popular consciousness as an attempted fascist coup, 6 February gave rise to a powerful sentiment of working-class unity, expressed during the one-day protest strike and mass demonstration called by the CGT on 12 February.6 Thorez’s role in the February events was less than glorious. He had returned from Moscow committed ‘to oppose and correct faults and errors’ in the implementation of Comintern policy. Practically, this meant trenchant resistance to proposals from Doriot that the party should approach the SFIO leadership for ‘a united front of action’. The conflict erupted at the Central Committee on 23 –25 January. Describing the SFIO leaders as ‘social fascists’ and ‘the shock troops of capital’, Thorez said negotiations with socialists would be ‘a slippery slope’ towards opportunism. While it was correct to call for a ‘united front from below’, the proposal for ‘an alliance, a bloc with the Socialist Party and reformist trade unions’ represented ‘a tendency of capitulation in face of the enemy’.7 This analysis guided the PCF’s chaotic intervention on 6 February. Overseen by Thorez with an important input from Marty (who was responsible for the political content of l’Humanite´), the party called its supporters on to the streets around slogans against the leagues, but also in opposition to Daladier and his socialist allies. Communist ex-servicemen mobilised at the Arc de Triomphe, while other militants rallied at railway stations and outside l’Humanite´ headquarters, to defend it from possible attack. Communists employees at the Hoˆtel de Ville fought against extreme-right activists, who were assembling at

POPULAR FRONT

103

this traditional spot of revolutionary proclamations in anticipation of a seizure of power by their leaders. Thorez spent the afternoon and evening in the Chamber of Deputies, participating in a session that became increasingly rowdy as violence mounted in neighbouring streets. The parliamentary right tried to block the formation of Daladier’s government, forcing a vote of confidence. Led by Thorez, the small communist group refused support to Daladier. As the right began a fullthroated rendition of La Marseillaise, Thorez yelled at former Minister of Interior, Andre´ Tardieu – who he held responsible for his imprisonment in 1929 – and led communist deputies in a chorus of l’Internationale and chants of ‘all power to the Soviets’. He was unable to deliver his prepared speech, which would have argued that there was no essential difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism: it was like ‘choosing between cholera and the plague’.8 On 8 February, Thorez spoke at a special ‘information meeting’ for Paris activists and made light of the significance of the extreme-right mobilisation. ‘The [police] gunshots were aimed at the working class, even if elements of the fascist organisations copped it,’ he claimed; if ‘the working class had not taken to the streets’ under the leadership of the party, the evening ‘would have passed off very peacefully, with only a few small incidents’. He explained that the Political Bureau had turned down a proposal from the SFIO for a joint demonstration at the Bastille: ‘It is not the moment to accept a proposal for a united front from above [. . .] We do not have the right to fasten ourselves to Social Democracy, which has just given its votes to the government,’ he said to applause. He announced that the party would be calling its own demonstration the following evening (9 February): ‘We previously thought that it was not yet possible to launch the call for a great rally in Paris, exclusively in the name of the party; we now think the time has come.’ He also announced that the party would be supporting the general strike called by the CGT on 12 February, which he construed as an attempt to outflank the communists’ demonstration on 9 February. He made no commitment, however, to join the mass demonstration through Paris planned to coincide with the strike.9 Thorez disappeared from public activity at the end of the information meeting, not re-emerging until the Political Bureau on 8 March. His absence during this period remains perplexing, ‘one of the mysteries posed by the biography of Thorez’, notes Robrieux.10 Thorez did not attend the 9 February demonstration, during which fighting with the police in streets surrounding Place de la Re´publique claimed the lives of four activists. Nor was he present on the unity demonstration on 12 February, for which communists had mobilised support after much prevarication. Nor did he join the large procession on 17 February that followed the coffins of communist militants who had died during or as a result of the clashes on 9 February.

104

MAURICE THOREZ

A few months before his death, Thorez reminisced in his diary on events after the 8 February meeting: ‘Feverish, struck down by a sore throat that would last more than a month, I was taken away for reasons of security to a comrade’s house in L’Hay¨[-les-Roses]. And Jeannette, who I was unable to warn of the situation, was left waiting for me.’11 Security was certainly a concern for the communist leadership on 8 February. Daladier had resigned immediately after the riot and the right-winger Gaston Doumergue was in the process of forming a government, evidence for the PCF of ‘fascisisation’ of the regime. On the evening of 7 February, Jacques Duclos had been arrested and an attempt also made by police to apprehend Marty.12 At the January Central Committee, Thorez had spoken of ‘preparing the party for illegality, reinforcing guaranties of security for each member and activist’. PCF leaders had once again adopted pseudonyms, Thorez taking the name ‘Piervi’.13 Yet security worries do not explain why Thorez remained absent for so long, especially as after the 12 February general strike the party began to emphasise the strength of the ‘working class upsurge’ against the fascist threat. Wievrioka comments on the three amalgamated elements in Thorez’s account: security concerns, health and his relationship with Jeannette Vermeersch. His illness, she suggests, offered a convenient ‘refuge’ from a difficult situation in his personal life. On 3 February, Thorez had chaired the opening session of the Young Communists’ Special Congress held in Ivry. Afterwards, he accompanied Vermeersch, who had been subjected to some ferocious criticism during the congress, back to her apartment in Avenue des Gobelins. Promising ‘not to leave her’, it marked the end of Thorez’s relationship with Aurore, with accompanying repercussions for the life of his 8-year-old son. Wieviorka notes that ‘working class communities found it difficult to accept that a man leaves home to move in with a woman ten years younger than him’ and Thorez would have naturally feared that this change in his personal life could ‘tarnish his image’.14 However, Thorez’s more general political morale must also be considered. He had been reluctant to return from Moscow after the Thirteenth Plenum, with some of his comrades thinking he was in need of ‘a change of air’. As the shock of the 6 February riots led to a growing sentiment for working class unity, did Thorez – despite his dogmatic denunciations of Doriot – once again feel trapped within a policy with which he felt instinctively uncomfortable? He had, let us not forget, attempted to open dialogue with SFIO leaders on three occasions between August 1931 and April 1933, not to mention his arguments for a PCF–SFIO pact around the time of the Nord by-election further back in 1926. It seems probable that Thorez suffered, as he had in July 1931, a crisis of political and personal confidence.

POPULAR FRONT

105

‘Listen carefully, Maurice’ Thorez returned to the Political Bureau on 8 March and immediately ratcheted up the conflict with Doriot. His emphasis was on discipline, accusing Doriot of ‘violating the line of the International’.15 At a fractious conference of the Paris Nord region, attended by a large contingent of Doriot’s supporters, Thorez condemned the idea of ‘the united front from above’ as a ‘Trotskyist concept’, which would ‘replace the fundamental policies of the Comintern with a political bloc with the social democracy’.16 In Moscow, however, Comintern leaders were becoming alarmed by the conflict. Considering Doriot an important asset on account of his popularity in Saint-Denis, they summoned both him and Thorez for talks. But Doriot was already moving in new directions. Sending a curt apology to Moscow, he launched a campaign to bolster his popular base, forcing a by-election for a new mandate in Saint-Denis and issuing a defiant ‘open letter’ to the International. It was the first step in his break with communism. Paradoxically, a path that began with a call for communist–socialist unity against fascism would, through the Parti populaire francais (PPF) – which he founded in 1936 – and collaboration with the Nazi occupation, lead to an untimely death in 1945, strafed by an allied war plane while travelling in a German military staff car. Thorez reached Moscow in time for the May Day parade and might have noticed that Georgi Dimitrov and his family had been accorded a place alongside Stalin on Lenin’s mausoleum. The Bulgarian communist had spent a year in a German prison, after being accused of and put on trial for the Reichstag Fire. His acquittal in December 1933 received international coverage and embarrassed the Nazi leadership. Granted Soviet citizenship, Dimitrov received a hero’s welcome in Moscow at the end of February 1934 and Stalin turned to him to shake up Comintern politics.17 The Soviet leader was shocked by the consolidation of Hitler’s power, by the fascist riot in France and by the crushing of the socialist movement and trade unions in Austria during February 1934. In terms of political strategy, however, Stalin had nothing new to offer. During a discussion in the Kremlin on 7 April, he gave short shift to Dimitrov’s suggestion that in order to win the ear of social democratic workers it was necessary to review ‘our system of propaganda and incorrect approach towards the European workers’.18 In Moscow, Thorez discussed with a number of Comintern leaders, including Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Piatnitsky, before meeting Dimitrov and Stepanov for ‘a long conversation’ on 11 May. Thorez’s notes indicate that Dimitrov focussed on the same problem he had raised with Stalin on 7 April: how best to remove political barriers between communist and socialist workers.

106

MAURICE THOREZ

‘[Socialist workers] are beginning to doubt [their leaders] but do not yet have confidence in us,’ he told Thorez. ‘We must organise the struggle, not by demanding that they abandon their party or their unions. They will be offended by abuse and insults aimed at their leaders and organisations.’ Communists should ‘explain the line with facts and patience’ and not ‘resort to jargon or strident harangues’.19 The meeting has been viewed as the moment at which Dimitrov ‘explained to Thorez’ that the International was preparing to adopt a new, more unitary strategy.20 But Thorez’s notes indicate that Dimitrov’s main concern at this stage was the tone of the communist message, rather than a decisive turn in strategy. A better interpretation is Marietta Stankova’s conclusion that the discussion with Thorez helped ‘Dimitrov to crystallise his ideas’ and to ‘conclude that a united front “from below” was not sufficient’.21 It also probably helped to transform Thorez’s mood, as the discussion indicated that a political course more in tune with his instincts was possible. Following the meeting, the question of negotiations with SFIO leaders moved on to the Comintern agenda. The issue was discussed at the Presidium on 16 May, the session that sealed the fate of Doriot. Thorez said that talks with SFIO leaders under certain conditions were ‘not impossible’, though he did not suggest that the time was ripe. Manuilsky – still officially the most senior Comintern official and supportive of Dimitrov – was more forthright, but nevertheless still cautious. The PCF should ‘underline that we have not been opponents of negotiations and we will not be so again if a suitable situation arises’, he stressed. Proposals for joint activity must, however, be around ‘concrete issues’ – for example, action against fascist meetings and demonstrations – and there must be ‘no question of speaking about unity in general’. He emphasised this point on several occasions: ‘when you make these proposals, be careful not to involve matters of a general nature, but rather focus on concrete demands’. And in case Thorez was in any doubt, he concluded: ‘listen carefully, Maurice, concrete!’22 Manuilsky’s remarks are interesting. He had, of course, reprimanded Thorez for going beyond Comintern guidelines by pursuing negotiations with the SFIO between 1931 and 1933. Was he now simply offering helpful cautionary advice or had Thorez already shown signs that he might again go too far with unitary politics? Focussing the minds of Comintern leaders was the fact that Stalin was still pouring cold water on the idea of talks with the Socialists. After Dimitrov discussed ‘the French question’ with the Soviet leader on 20 May, he noted that Stalin was ‘very unhappy’ about steps in France towards ‘a united front from above’.23 Morale re-established, Thorez returned from Moscow and immediately sent out signals that the Communists were ready to negotiate with SFIO

POPULAR FRONT

107

leaders. One ‘concrete’ issue for joint action was a campaign for the release of Ernst Tha¨lmann, the German communist leader languishing in a Nazi jail.24 On 11 June, Thorez, Frachon and Gitton sat around the table with two men who only five months earlier they had considered ‘social fascists’: Le´on Blum and Jean Zyromski, an influential figure on the SFIO left.25 Blum stressed the SFIO’s desire for united activity, but expressed doubts about a focus on Tha¨lmann, who was not particularly known in France. His main argument was the impossibility of joint action if communist leaders and the communist press continued publicly to attack the SFIO and insult its leaders. Thorez struggled to deal with the issue, which quickly became the main sticking point. On 20 June, the SFIO leadership pulled out of the talks, complaining about an article by Thorez describing socialists as the ‘principal social support of the bourgeoisie’.26 The breakthrough came five days later during the PCF national conference (Ivry, 23– 25 June). Thorez’s opening speech signalled three decisive shifts in policy. Firstly, fascism and bourgeois democracy were no longer viewed as equal enemies (‘the cholera and the plague’). Thorez stressed that it was the fascists, not communists, who fought against bourgeois democracy and wanted to suppress parliament: ‘Communists are never disinterested in the form of the bourgeois political regime. They have defended, do defend and will always defend democratic freedoms won by the masses.’ Secondly, the party’s programme for the forthcoming canton elections was announced as a diverse package of reforms. It addressed issues such as public health and hygiene, education, transport, social care for the elderly and large families, the status and pay of public servants, construction and improvement of roads, special crisis payments and interest-free loans for small farmers. Thorez was attempting to reach beyond the party’s traditional constituency in the working class towards the professional middle classes and peasantry. Finally, the relationship between communists and the national patrimony was redefined. ‘Communists love their country’, Thorez told the conference. ‘In France we are attached to the revolutionary traditions of our fathers, to the great lessons of 1789, 1848 and 1871.’ While Thorez had alluded to such sentiments during his speech at the Lille Congress in 1926, it was the first time a communist leader had tied the party so explicitly to the republican tradition.27 Despite these novelties, Thorez stumbled over the issue of negotiations with the SFIO. On the conference’s opening day, the Paris region of the PCF and the Seine Federation of the SFIO agreed to organise a mass meeting against repression in Germany and Austria and the threat of fascism in France.28 Yet at national level negotiations remained stalled and Thorez’s speech offered nothing that might kick-start the process. Ambiguously, he

108

MAURICE THOREZ

spoke about electoral agreements for the forthcoming cantonal elections but reiterated the tactics of ‘class against class’, promising that the party would not ‘enter into commonplace electoral coalitions’. He stressed that it would be wrong for the PCF to stop criticising the SFIO leadership.29 The initiative to break the deadlock came from Moscow. Dimitrov and Manuilsky despatched a telegram which, amongst other things, told the party leadership to address the SFIO’s main sticking point. Thorez’s closing address to the conference now struck an unequivocal tone. There would ‘not be the slightest criticism’ of the Socialist Party once an accord was signed. ‘We want unity at any price,’ he declared, emphasising the point four times.30 The road was clear for an accord. Thorez and Cachin met Blum, Faure and other socialist leaders at SFIO headquarters on 14 July – the symbolic nature of the date not accidental – and a pact was signed between the two parties on 27 July. It called for joint mobilisation against fascist organisations, in defence of democratic rights, in opposition to the government’s austerity programme; and pledged solidarity with communist and socialist prisoners of fascism in Germany and Austria.

People’s Front While the initiative for an agreement with the Socialists had come from Moscow, the proposal to extend the alliance to the Radicals was authored in France. Thorez coined the phrase ‘Popular Front against Fascism’ during a speech on 10 October 1934, a few days after the first round of voting in the cantonal elections. He announced that, in the second round, Communists and Socialists were prepared to withdraw in favour of Radical candidates, on condition they disassociated themselves from the Doumergue government. After the collapse of Daladier’s attempt to form an administration on 6 February, the Radicals had broken their alliance with the Socialists and agreed ‘a truce’ with the right-wing National Union. Six Radical personalities, including E´douard Herriot, became ministers in administrations led, firstly, by Doumergue and, after November 1934, by PierreE´tienne Flandin. The Radical leadership’s accord with the right, which was increasingly displaying authoritarian inclinations, was opposed by Daladier and fostering discontent amongst party activists, which Thorez sought to exploit. In one sense, Thorez’s speech signalled the return by communists to the French left’s traditional position of republican unity against the nationalist right, a position tentatively practised during the party’s early years but abandoned in 1927 with the onset of ‘class against class’. But it also announced a new, much wider, alliance strategy. ‘It is not just a question of Sunday’s election,’ Thorez explained, ‘but a matter of realising a firm alliance

POPULAR FRONT

109

of the working class and middle classes in the fight against fascism and for le pain, la liberte´ et la paix.’31 The aim of a united front of working-class organisations had become transformed by Thorez into a broader ‘people’s front’, including a party classified as representatives of the ‘republican bourgeoisie’. Thorez’s overtures towards the Radicals raised hackles in Moscow. Comintern leaders were happy with attempts to win over sections of the Radical rank-and-file to an ‘anti-fascist front’, but made clear their opposition to formal approaches to Radical Party leaders. A telegram dispatched to Paris condemned a secret meeting between Julian Racamond, representing the PCF Central Committee, and Daladier as ‘a wrong step’ and warned against a repetition.32 On the morning of 24 October, Thorez was preparing to depart for the Radical Congress in Nantes when a Comintern delegation made up of Togliatti and Czech party leader, Klement Gottwald, arrived at his residence. The meeting was also attended by Duclos and Fried, and has been described in the memoirs of Giulio Cerreti, an Italian communist active in the PCF under the pseudonym Paul Allard.33 Thorez would become fond of recalling the conversation when relations with Togliatti and the Italian party soured after 1956 in the wake of de-Stalinisation. According to Thorez, Togliatti had warned him ‘not to go too far in the theory and tactic of the Popular Front policy’, to which the PCF General Secretary had defiantly replied: ‘It is now too late. We consider it a correct policy. I am catching a train in half-an-hour from the Gare Austerlitz and these are the themes of the speech I will be making on behalf of our party leadership on the eve of the Radical Party congress.’34 Thorez arrived in Nantes accompanied by Renaud Jean, the PCF peasant leader who had opposed ‘class against class’ and supported Doriot’s arguments earlier in the year. As Le Figaro noted, the two men made little attempt ‘to teach communist doctrine’ but attempted to woo delegates with a political programme containing many traditional Radical predilections: crisis payments to the peasantry, moratorium on peasant debt, defence of small shopkeepers, a crackdown on action against speculators and tax fraud, a progressive income tax, as well as defence of republican values and a clampdown on the far-right leagues.35 Another telegram arrived from Moscow to remind Thorez that Comintern policy remained ‘an anti-fascist front of workers’ and that ‘any participation by bourgeois parties must be excluded in advance’.36 Despite these warnings, Thorez was in confident mood when he travelled to the Russian capital at the end of November to report to a meeting of the Comintern Presidium. A commission to prepare Dimitrov’s speech at the approaching Seventh Congress was considering the theoretical issues posed by

110

MAURICE THOREZ

the Popular Front, while Dimitrov had urged Stalin that national parties should be allowed to ‘develop initiatives of their own’ on the basis of the International’s ‘general guidelines’.37 Rehearsing his speech on 3 December in front of Manuilsky at the Latin Secretariat, Thorez presented the Popular Front as a ‘true adaptation of Leninism to the French situation’. PCF aims were still the same, the Socialists remained ‘the principle support of the bourgeoisie’, but the party had learnt to marry the longer-term ‘revolutionary programme for soviets’ to the immediate struggle: the fight against fascism. In so doing, it had broken out of its isolation and ‘become a political factor’. Thorez explained how previously he and other communist deputies had been ignored by members of other parties as they walked through the corridors of the French parliament. ‘Now’, he announced, ‘people speak to us [. . .] in the street and in the Chamber.’ In recognition of the PCF’s new status, party leaders and even activists selling l’Humanite´ on the street dressed to impress, wearing suits and ties, and hats rather than caps. Manuilsky said he had ‘not heard such an interesting report for some years’, but – aware that Stalin was still prevaricating on the new strategy – wanted time ‘to reflect on the errors that could be committed’ and ‘think through the difficulties’.38 Nevertheless, Thorez’s report six days later at the Presidium, in front of 150 international communist leaders, was a triumph. Only a year earlier (at the Thirteenth Plenum), he had been chastised for his ‘faults’ and ‘inadequacies’. Now he could proudly record flattering remarks by Comintern leaders in his notebook: Thorez’s report had produced ‘great joy,’ said Manuilsky. ‘Thorez has grown up’ and ‘the party has also grown up alongside its leaders.’39 Two processes coalesced during 1935 to transform the People’s Front from an idea into a reality. Firstly, in Moscow, a sense of the threat from Nazi Germany drove Stalin towards diplomatic relations with France, as part of a policy of collective security involving Germany’s enemies amongst the capitalist powers. On 2 May Pierre Laval, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Flandin’s government, met the Soviet ambassador to agree a mutual aid treaty. A staunch anti-communist, Laval had only a few months earlier brokered an agreement with Mussolini that effectively promised the fascist leader a free hand to conquer Ethiopia. Although his instincts favoured an alliance with Hitler, Laval travelled to Moscow, where he was feted by Stalin and other senior Soviet leaders. A joint communique´ announced Stalin’s ‘total approval’ for a policy of French national defence through the maintenance of a strong French army. The Soviet position caused some consternation within the PCF, a party schooled to oppose militarism and ‘the bourgeois army’, and it also strained relations with the Socialists, with whom Communists had recently campaigned against the extension of military service to two years.

POPULAR FRONT

111

But Thorez immediately declared ‘Stalin is right’ and confronted potential critics at a meeting of Parisian activists on 17 May. Deploying lengthy quotes from Marx and Lenin to reject ‘revolutionary purity’, he explained that communist policy must adapt to the changed nature of international relations, the decisive elements of which were the existence of the Soviet Union – ‘the rampart of peace’ – and the rise of the fascist regime in Germany, the ‘principal threat to peace’: the franco-soviet pact was correct because defence of the Soviet Union from the military threat posed by Germany was now the essential task facing communists.40 Just over one week later, Thorez was back in Moscow to attend a meeting of the Comintern Presidium. Previous ambiguity by Comintern leaders towards the Popular Front strategy had dissipated and Thorez learnt that the French experience would be adopted as the official strategy of the world communist movement at the International’s Seventh Congress later that summer.41 The second process was the intensification of the dynamic of anti-fascist unity within France. Cooperation at the municipal elections in May secured major gains for both Communists and Socialists. The same month, Thorez stood alongside Blum and other Socialist leaders as over 100,000 people paraded past the Communards’ Wall in the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery on the anniversary of the crushing of the Paris Commune. Talks on the reunification of the CGT and CGTU also began to progress, the deadlock broken when the Communists reversed opposition to the traditional syndicalist position of strict demarcation between political and trade union activity. Communists even proposed a ‘project’ of communist–socialist unity within a ‘single party of the proletariat’, though their insistence on its recognition of ‘the marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ would ensure it remained a pipedream.42 On 14 July 1935, a coalition of political, social and cultural organisations supporting the Popular Front organised parades in towns and cities across France. Under pressure from its ranks, the Radical Party Executive gave support to the demonstrations. In Paris, the day began with a mass swearing of an oath of loyalty to the Republic and its values, a ceremony that mimicked the feˆtes in the years after the 1789 Revolution. In the afternoon, a convoy of taxis led a huge march through the Place de la Bastille to La Nation. Thorez wore a tricolour sash and travelled in the same taxi as Paul Faure, the SFIO general secretary. For the first time communists sang La Marseillaise, alongside the workers’ hymn, l’Internationale.43 The Comintern Congress opened ten days later and was another triumph for Thorez. Throughout, praise was bestowed on the PCF, now considered the most important affiliate of the International (outside, of course, the Soviet party). Speeches by Thorez and Cachin were greeted with thunderous applause and Marty was elevated to the Secretariat in recognition of the PCF’s standing.

112

MAURICE THOREZ

Marty was now on a higher echelon in the communist hierarchy than Thorez, an arrangement that would have important repercussions when the two men operated from the Soviet Union during wartime. But in terms of esteem accorded during the congress, Thorez outshone Marty. On the opening day, the PCF General Secretary processed on to the platform immediately behind Stalin and was seated alongside the Soviet leader. He was granted the honour of chairing the final session, at the end of which he led the hall in the singing of l’Internationale and two songs of the French Revolution, La Carmagnole and C¸a Ira.44 Thorez’s speech to the Seventh Congress represents the crystallisation of what can been described as thorezien politics. Developing further the relationship between the PCF and the Republic, he sketched a French version of the communist message, while still pledging total loyalty to the Soviet Union and ‘Stalin, our beloved leader’. Thorez saluted France’s ‘glorious past’, ‘the intellectual heritage’ of its philosophers and ‘the audacious heritage and revolutionary energy of the Jacobins’. Communists were ‘the great grandchildren’ of both the sans-culottes and soldiers of the revolutionary army. They ‘presented themselves to the popular masses as the champions of liberty and independence of the country’. The mutation in Thorez’s politics to embrace French traditions and culture was possible because of the convergence between Soviet and French diplomatic interests. But the change was more than a temporary tactic. Thorez introduced a strategy and language for the PCF that would not only distinguish the party during the Popular Front period but mark the party’s identity for the remainder of the twentieth century.45 Throughout 1935, Thorez kept open channels with a number of Radical leaders and personalities, including Herriot, Ce´sar Campinchi and Yvon Delbos.46 At the end of May, the Flandin government collapsed and in another shift in policy the PCF spokesperson in the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Ramette, offered communist support if the Radicals were to form a government.47 On the 14 July demonstration, some communist contingents even chanted the slogan ‘Daladier to Power’.48 Although Radicals again joined a right-wing administration, this time led by Laval, support for the Popular Front within Radical ranks was growing. The Laval government lurched sharply to the right, pursuing a strict austerity programme, flirting with the extreme-right leagues, inviting opprobrium after Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and prompting widespread disapproval amongst the Radical electorate. By December, support for Laval had provoked a full-blown crisis amongst Radicals, leading to the resignation of Herriot as party president. The following month, Daladier took his place; Radical ministers resigned from Laval’s administration, prompting its collapse, and the party

POPULAR FRONT

113

signed up to the Popular Front’s ‘common programme’. Thorez’s commitment to the democratic republic and, particularly, to national defence had been decisive in securing a previously unimaginable pact between Communists and Radicals. In negotiations around the programme, he had insisted on ‘patience and moderation’, amongst other things vetoing Socialist proposals for nationalisation of certain key industries.49

The Popular Front government The PCF won 15.2 per cent of the vote in the first round of the April – May 1936 legislative elections and, after the second, gained seventy-two deputies (compared to ten in the previous parliament). Commentators were surprised by the surge in communist support, which meant that the PCF had become a decisive parliamentary force. Thorez was one of nine communists to win his seat in the first round of voting. He became a national personality during the campaign, broadcasting an election address on the radio and showcasing his oratorical skills in the PCF-commissioned film La Vie est a` Nous, directed by Jean Renoir, the son of impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. Thorez had outlined the main elements of the election campaign at the party’s congress held in January at Villeurbanne. Published under the title ‘Union of the French Nation’, his speech marked a further shift in strategy. While continuing to advocate unity on the left and the construction of an anti-fascist alliance between the working class and middle classes, Thorez now also highlighted the theme of ‘national unity’. Only a small minority holding the levers of economic power – ‘the two hundred families and their mercenaries, the leaders of fascist bands’ – were excluded from the proposed union.50 Comintern leaders again expressed doubts about Thorez’s position, saluting ‘the desire of the party to unite the widest layers in the struggle against fascism and to speak in the name of the entire French people’ but warning the PCF leadership ‘against the danger of sliding into the terrain of bourgeois nationalism’.51 Although the criticism prompted some adjustment in language, Thorez continued to campaign around the theme of national unity. On French radio (17 April) he proposed ‘the true reconciliation of the people of France’ and offered an ‘outstretched hand’ to Catholics and also to followers of the extreme-right Croix-de-Feu, who ‘like us suffer from disorder and corruption and want to avoid the country sliding into ruin and catastrophe’.52 Given the left’s intrinsic secularism, Thorez’s idea of an alliance with Catholics raised eyebrows. But ‘the outstretched hand’ quickly became a thorezien leitmotif, put forward with consistency and ‘remarkable

114

MAURICE THOREZ

vigour’ for the rest of Thorez’s life. The ‘outstretched hand’ received a sympathetic reception from a small number of Catholic intellectuals, most notably Robert Honnert. It prompted alarm amongst the Catholic hierarchy and was one of the major motivations for Pope Pius XI to write his Encyclical Divini redemptoris (1937), which denounced ‘atheistic communism’. Thorez’s approach was to avoid discussion on the philosophical differences between Communists and Catholics and to focus on what might unite them politically.53 Sometimes, however, he decorated his message with phrases familiar to a Catholic audience. A long lecture in October 1937 included quotations from Saint Paul, prompting one sarcastic journalist to describe Thorez as ‘a new theologian’.54 Another recurring thorezien phrase – ‘for a free, strong and happy France’ – featured prominently in La Vie est a` nous. Opening with shots of wheat fields and containing a central section which describes the effect of the economic crisis on the peasantry, the film is striking for the attention it pays to the rural world. In its final sequence, a child standing on a farm stares longingly over fields and optimistically into the future. For Thorez, an essential element of the ‘union of the French nation’ was unity of the countryside, in 1936 home to 47.6 per cent of the population. Advocating the formation of a ‘Peasant Popular Front’, the PCF came close to embracing the vision of right-wing agrarians who talked of ‘the great family of the land’ composed of all agricultural classes: farmers, the small peasantry and landless labourers.55 The Popular Front’s election victory posed two immediate challenges. The first was whether or not communists should join Le´on Blum’s government. The question of potential participation in a Popular Front government had been posed by Thorez during his speech at the International’s Seventh Congress in August 1935.56 Dimitrov’s reply had displayed some ambiguity, which encouraged Thorez to raise the issue again amongst the PCF leadership and then, openly, at the Central Committee in October.57 This time the Comintern Secretariat’s response was unequivocal. A telegram arrived from Manuilsky expressing ‘alarm’ at the mood within the PCF in favour of participation, a step for which ‘the situation was not ripe’.58 The Comintern position was that communists should only join a Popular Front government in conditions of extreme social crisis in order to raise revolutionary slogans as a prelude to socialist revolution. In Moscow, Marty helped to draft a letter to remind Thorez that outside this context, participation would lead to ‘a loss of authority of the Communist Party’. Thorez quickly retreated and Fried reassured the Comintern that ‘Maurice’s declaration on participation in the government [was] useless chatter and [did] not represent the view of either the leadership or Maurice.’59

POPULAR FRONT

115

In early May 1936, Blum asked the PCF to join the Popular Front administration. Thorez was keen to accept the proposition and canvassed support from other party leaders. But, aware that the decision that mattered would be taken in Moscow, he was reluctant to argue his case openly at leadership committees. Marty later complained that three meetings of the Political Bureau in early May had been postponed while Thorez, Duclos and others engaged in ‘private discussions’ and ‘explored contacts’ with Socialist and Radical parliamentarians.60 Fried travelled to Moscow to report on events in France. While carefully choosing his words, he presented a case for joining the government, stressing that doing so would reflect the sentiment of most communist voters. But the Comintern maintained its opposition. Dimitrov argued that participation would draw the party into the management of the capitalist state, resulting in pressures to abandon its principles and the danger that PCF representatives in parliament would become divorced from the party’s ranks. Moreover, the appointment of communist ministers would provide ammunition to the right and offer an easy excuse for the Radicals to break from the Popular Front.61 A disappointed Thorez told the Central Committee on 25 May that the PCF would be declining Blum’s offer in order to ‘serve the interests of the country’. While not joining the government, the party would do everything possible to ensure its success.62 The second challenge was how to respond to the mass movement of strikes and factory occupations that erupted in late May/early June. The social explosion represented the political awakening of new sections of the working class – heavily concentrated in suburbs around big cities and with a strong immigrant contingent – that had grown out of the ‘second wave of industrialisation’ of 1900 – 30. In the French collective memory, the summer of 1936 would come to represent the moment when working people won a sense of dignity, and the right to have their role recognised by society. On 7 June, employers, trade unions and ministers met at the prime minister’s Matignon residence and agreed a package of substantial wage increases, statutory collective bargaining rights, a 40-hour week and paid holidays, remarkable achievements given that the left and labour movements were in retreat throughout Europe. The workers’ movement spurred the Popular Front government to implement a series of other measures, including the raising of the school leaving age, a public works programme, partial nationalisation of the Bank of France and banning the far-right leagues. A ‘cultural explosion’ accompanied the social explosion. New opportunities for leisure and sport, innovation in theatre and cinema, a mushrooming of clubs and organisations: the period witnessed an attempt by the left to break down barriers and widen the population’s access to culture.63

116

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez viewed the mass strikes as a double-edged sword. Thousands of workers poured into the CGT trade unions, which grew from 800,000 to four million in a matter of weeks, strengthening communist influence within the confederation.64 PCF membership also mushroomed to 250,000, ten times the level of 1932; in the Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt, the communist cell grew from 120 to a claimed 7,200 (one worker in four).65 But national unity rather than a sharpening of the class struggle was Thorez’s priority: it was the PCF’s ‘responsibility’ to use its authority to restrain the working class from action that might undermine this aim.66 An lexicometric analysis of Thorez’s speeches shows that during 1936 Thorez used the word gre`ve (strike) four times less often than during 1930.67 Paradoxically, the communist leader schooled in ‘the theory of class struggle’ perceived working-class mobilisation not as an opportunity but as a threat. After meeting Blum in late May, for what was now a regular weekly discussion between the two men, Thorez jotted in his notebook: ‘Fear of the factory occupations (do something).’ Despite the Matignon Accords, the strike wave surged to higher levels. Thorez’s notes of a meeting between a PCF delegation (Thorez, Duclos, Frachon) and Socialist ministers (Blum, Roger Salengro, Marx Dormoy) suggest near-panic, as well as impotence. Both sides played the blame game. ‘It is necessary to know what you [the communists] want. Whether there is a desire for an insurrectional movement,’ remonstrated Salengro. ‘Do you [really] want a return to work?,’ demanded Blum. In response, Thorez reaffirmed the PCF’s unconditional support for the Popular Front and accused socialist trade unionists of failing to recommend an end to the strikes. Frachon placed responsibility for the continuation of strikes on to the shoulders of Marceau Pivert, the left-wing socialist who at the end of May had declared ‘everything is possible’.68 On 11 June, Thorez addressed a meeting of Parisian communist activists and declared: It is necessary to know how to end a strike when satisfaction has been obtained [. . .] and even accept a compromise when all demands have not yet been met [. . .] The working class must ensure its union with the middle class and particularly with the peasantry [. . .] All is not possible.69 The speech signalled a sustained campaign by the PCF leadership for a return to work. The strike wave ebbed, particularly in Paris and in the mining, textile, building and engineering industries. But the position was not uniform. New groups of workers – often those traditionally ignored by the labour movement, such as shop workers and agricultural labourers – began to

POPULAR FRONT

117

mobilise and in some regions the movement continued to expand. By the autumn, employers had regrouped and were attempting to backtrack on the Matignon accord. An increasingly bitter and sometimes violent social conflict would mark the remainder of the Popular Front period, culminating in November –December 1938, when workers endured a major defeat after trying to defend the 40-hour week.70 Thorez’s statement – il faut savoir terminer une gre`ve – has become part of contemporary French political discourse. In recent years it has been employed by two French presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy (November 2007) and Francois Hollande (June 2014 and June 2016), to demand trade unions abandon strike action. But Thorez did not coin the phrase. It was first used by Manuilsky at the Comintern Executive in October 1932, a speech that Thorez transformed into an article for the PCF’s theoretical magazine without attributing its origin.71 Thorez’s approach to the Popular Front’s social explosion was symptomatic of his pragmatic approach to labour struggles, first displayed during his intervention in the two miners’ strikes of 1923. But in 1936 his policy was guided by the movement’s wider political implication, specifically its impact on the PCF’s alliance strategy, rather than tactical concerns. At the Comintern Executive in September, Thorez spoke of ‘difficulties arising from the consequence of the class struggle’ and at the October Central Committee he bemoaned the way in which ‘the development of the workers’ movement ha[d] frightened elements of the petite bourgeoisie’ in both urban and rural areas.72 When discussing the lessons of the Popular Front later in his career, he would return to the theme. In May 1945 he told the Central Committee that the strikes and factory occupations had provided ammunition for reactionary forces to exploit, with particular success amongst the middle class and, particularly, small farmers. This had, he said, been one of ‘two elements’ that had planted ‘the seeds of division and disintegration’ of the Popular Front.73

Spanish solidarity The second ‘element’ was, Thorez believed, the government’s nonintervention policy in the Spanish Civil War. The military rebellion on 17 July against the Spanish Popular Front government shocked the French left. Initially, Blum seemed prepared to respond positively to the Spanish government’s request for weapons and aircraft; but quickly backtracked in the face of opposition from the Radicals and also from pacifists within his own party, as well as pressure from the British. His refusal to provide material aid to the Republican camp inevitably created tensions within the

118

MAURICE THOREZ

communist– socialist alliance. Thorez accused Blum of ‘capitulating in the face of fascism’ and relations between the two men deteriorated.74 Thorez couched demands for practical support for the republican cause in terms of the interests of French national security. A victory for Franco would, he told a huge rally in the Buffalo Stadium on 25 August, serve Hitler’s ambition ‘to encircle France’ and act as a prelude for war.75 Thorez was also worried that the PCF’s campaign over Spain would undermine the Popular Front strategy. The government’s position of non-intervention had, he conceded to the Comintern, gained strong support amongst the middle class and particularly in the countryside. Thorez spoke of ‘the widening division’ and the possibility of ‘a rupture between the working class and middle classes, and thus a rupture in the Popular Front’.76 These concerns were the context for Thorez’s slogan of ‘a French Front’, which he raised for six weeks during August and early September 1936. A ‘French Front’ would, Thorez argued, unite supporters of the Popular Front with ‘its four million opponents’. It was a way of preventing the type of catastrophe that was engulfing Spain, which if it were to occur in France would be even more frightening as it would open the door to a military intervention by Hitler. A French Front would ‘respect republican laws’, ‘defend the national economy’ and fight for the ‘liberty and independence of France’ through ‘indivisible peace and collective security’.77 The slogan sparked immediate controversy. Seizing an opportunity to outflank the PCF from the left, socialists condemned Thorez’s proposal as a retreat from the Popular Front and an attempt to build ‘alliances with groups who have fought and are still opposed to democracy and peace’.78 Thorez responded sharply, pointing out – not without reason – that the ‘French Front’ was the logical continuation of the message of ‘national unity’ and ‘French conciliation’ he had argued during the election campaign.79 Thorez’s commitment to collective security also guided his attitude to the official visit to France on 30 August by a representative of the Polish government, General Edward S´migły-Rydz. Though considered a natural ally of France, Poland had begun to take an ambivalent attitude towards Nazi Germany, with whom it signed a non-aggression pact in 1934. S´migły-Rydz, the commander-in-chief of Polish armed forces, arrived in Paris to finalise a military aid package, which French diplomacy hoped would revitalise FrancoPolish relations. Thorez wrote an article for the front page of l’Humanite´ welcoming the general ‘on behalf of the working masses’ and offering solidarity to an ally who, like France, faced a threat from Nazi Germany.80 Soviet attitudes towards Poland were, however, not so benign. For the Comintern, the Polish government was ‘a fascist regime’ whose opponents were facing ‘revolting tortures’.81

POPULAR FRONT

119

On 8 September, Dimitrov summoned Thorez to Moscow to attend a meeting of the Comintern Executive. The primary aim of the meeting and its accompanying discussions was to coordinate the intervention in the Spanish war. But Dimitrov also wanted to reprimand Thorez over the French Front and his fawning greeting of S´migły-Rydz, both viewed as more evidence of a trend towards bourgeois nationalism. ‘Scandalous’ is the word used in Dimitrov’s diary when commenting on Thorez’s article about the Polish general.82 Aware of the criticisms, Thorez withdrew the French Front slogan before departing Paris, informing the SFIO leadership that he was taking the step ‘to avoid misunderstandings’.83 In Moscow, Thorez admitted the ‘error’ of welcoming ‘the representative of the [Polish] fascist dictatorship’ and accepted that the French Front slogan had been ‘inopportune’, though he was adamant that the idea was ‘correct in itself’ and ‘could be appropriate in other circumstances and conditions’.84 Despite his embarrassing climbdown, Thorez took centre stage at the Comintern meeting. His report covered not only the French Popular Front but also introduced the discussion on Spain. The PCF’s role as the main conduit for the Comintern’s intervention in the war was confirmed and Thorez’s visit ended on a high note. On the evening before his departure, he and Dimitrov were entertained by Lazar Kaganovich, secretary of the Soviet party’s Central Committee and confidante of Stalin. Dimitrov’s diary notes Kavanovich’s remarks: ‘Comrade Stalin thinks very highly of Thorez. Affairs are going well in France, and Thorez is leading the party well. His popularity in the ranks of our party and in the country is growing rapidly. The successes of the Popular Front are down to you. When coming here, you have brought the European spirit with you.’85 Between the autumn of 1936 and late 1938, solidarity with Republican Spain became the PCF’s most prominent campaign. The Comintern assigned three main responsibilities to the party: channelling material support through France, including volunteers, finance and arms; coordinating international solidarity by western communist parties, including in September 1938 hosting a conference of international communist leaders; lobbying for diplomatic support for the republican camp from western governments and other political parties, particularly through links with the Socialist International. While delegating tasks, Thorez closely monitored all aspects of the campaign. He visited Spain twice during the civil war: a nine-day tour, beginning 31 January 1937, and a briefer visit to Barcelona in late November 1937.86 The PCF’s role in Spain immediately posed the problem of friction between Thorez and Marty, who from late summer of 1936 was based in Albacete as commander of the International Brigades. Always frosty since their first clash in 1927, relations between the two men had sunk to a new low after Marty voiced opposition to Thorez’s proposal to join the Popular Front government. Thorez

120

MAURICE THOREZ

opened a file on Marty. Typical of the content is a letter – signed simply ‘a comrade’ – sent to the Political Bureau in the aftermath of the May elections. It reported Marty’s contribution at a Parisian PCF branch: ‘He spoke repeatedly in very fond terms about Duclos, Gitton and other members of the BP [. . .] but then, comrades, he uttered the name Maurice Thorez in a tone that was so cold that comrades found hard to understand.’87 Comintern leaders in Moscow were aware of the difficulties posed by the Thorez– Marty antagonism. In September, during discussions about how best to organise practical support for Spain, Dimitrov noted in his diary: ‘It would not be sensible to have Thorez and Marty working together.’88 By the early winter, complaints about Marty’s ‘lack of flexibility’ were arriving from senior communists based in Albacete. Simultaneously, Marty was accusing the PCF leadership of dragging its feet in supplying personnel and equipment to the International Brigades.89 In December, Fried wrote to Moscow: ‘Tensions between Maurice and Andre´ are rising. Andre´’s actions are indeed working to discredit the French party. The workers of the French party who accompanied [volunteers to Spain] returned demoralised and discouraged. Maurice is threatening to demand that he be relieved of this work if Andre´ continues.’ Dimitrov’s staff dispatched telegrams to both men. Marty was told that ‘the Secretariat is insisting on the need for highly amicable contacts on your part with the Political Bureau of the French Communist Party, and first and foremost with Maurice. Lack of coordination, manifestation of individualism, and the aggravation of personal relationships are damaging to the cause. We are giving the same instructions to the Political Bureau of the French Communist Party.’90 One of Thorez’s aims during his visit to Spain in early 1937 was to sort out relations with Marty. Travelling with E´mile Dutilleul, PCF treasurer and responsible for siphoning money into Spain, Thorez toured the main centres of the republican sector, including Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. He met members of the International Brigades stationed at Requena, noting their ‘great joy’ on his arrival but also ‘their complaints’. At Murcia, he was greeted at the hospital with bouquets and met ‘the lads from Vitry’, part of his parliamentary constituency. As he travelled, he noted ‘recriminations against the command’ and friction ‘amongst above all the French’. On 5 February, he met Marty in Albacete. Though no notes survive, it seems certain that Thorez’s report of the meeting was a factor in the decision to recall Marty to Moscow a few weeks later.91

POPULAR FRONT

121

Thorez’s visit also had a more explicitly political purpose. It included attending a session of the Spanish party’s Central Committee and holding talks with Lluı´s Companys, president of the autonomous Catalan government, and Largo Cabellero, the Spanish prime minister (a Socialist). Communist strategy for Spain aimed to build support for a republican victory without threatening Soviet diplomacy’s objective of collective security with western democracies. In the weeks before Thorez’s visit, Stalin had urged Cabellero to form a firm relationship with centrist-republican leaders, to limit his aims to ‘bourgeois-democratic’ tasks and to prioritise winning support from the middle classes.92 Thorez was, of course, the embodiment of such politics. Communist attempts to moderate the politics of the republican camp were combined with a campaign to restrict – and later physically crush – its revolutionary wing, particularly the anti-Stalinist POUM and the anarchist influence in Barcelona. Thorez’s visit coincided with final stages of the trial in Moscow of the so-called Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre, which in Spain was a signal to step up the drive against the POUM. A communique´ from the Comintern urged Spanish communists ‘to use the trial [. . .] to liquidate the POUM politically by attempting to obtain from the working-class elements of that organisation a declaration condemning Trotsky’s terrorist gang.’93 The link between Thorez’s Spanish visit and the Moscow trial was made explicit on his return to Paris. The party organised a huge rally at which Thorez reported his visit to Spain alongside Marcel Cachin and Paul VaillantCouturier, who had just returned from attending the trial in Moscow. Five months earlier, after the first show trial, the PCF had cheered on the executions of Zinoviev, Kamenev and other ‘old Bolsheviks’. An article in l’Humanite´ described them as ‘enraged dogs of the Bourgeoisie, vile individuals under orders from Trotsky and the hitlerite Gestapo’. The rally in February 1937 had a similar theme: drawing an amalgam between Franco’s rebellion and Stalin’s victims, its message was that in both Spain and the Soviet Union ‘democracy is fighting those at the service of fascism [. . .] in order to safeguard peace and security of the peoples’.94

A time of heroisation The Popular Front transformed Thorez’s communist life. Mid-1934 had marked the end of his eleventh year as full-time party organiser. Working for the party was a privilege, and more pleasant than mind-numbing manual labour, but a nomadic itinerary had put pressure on his marriage; he had been pursued by the courts and police, incarcerated for eleven months in prison and his income was modest. In 1932, Thorez and Aurore had occupied an apartment so small that when Martha Desrumeaux, an activist from Lille,

122

MAURICE THOREZ

stayed with the couple, the three comrades shared a bed, with Thorez squashed up against the wall.95 In the Popular Front period, the PCF began to accord its leaders a more comfortable existence, recognition not only of the party’s increased standing in French politics but also a mirror of the growing differentiation between the party bureaucracy and ordinary workers in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Thorez and Vermeersch moved into a spacious residence, adjacent to the PCF office in Ivry. Thorez was assigned a chauffeur, as well as an odd-job-man/caretaker to assist with domestic chores. For the first time, Thorez experienced a settled home life, happiness from his relationship with Jeannette Vermeersch complementing satisfaction from his political successes. When in February 1936, Jeannette gave birth to a son (Jean), party propaganda began to portray the Thorez household as the ideal communist family, though with the false implication that the couple were married.96 Thorez’s most important political partnership during this period was with Eugen Fried. Relations between the two men had been tetchy in the year or so following the Comintern delegate’s arrival in France. But genuine friendship was kindled after December 1933, when Thorez’s morale had been sapped by criticisms in Moscow and Fried, empathising with Thorez’s frustrations, offered advice and support. After Thorez began to live with Jeannette Vermeersch, Fried became intimate with Aurore and acted as father to Thorez’s son, Maurice junior. The arrangement seems to have strengthened, rather than sullied, the relationship between the two men, who developed a firm personal and intellectual bond.97 Fried was a francophile, enthralled by French culture and history, especially the revolutionary events of 1789 – 93. If Thorez needed encouragement to fuse French communism with national tradition, he received plenty of it from Fried. Though officially a representative of the Comintern, Fried became increasingly an intermediary between Thorez and the International’s leadership. Hesitations in Moscow over the Popular Front strategy allowed him a degree of manoeuvre. Often, when differences between Thorez and Moscow arose, Fried’s reports were implicitly supportive of the PCF leader’s position. In the post-war years, his role would be expunged from PCF history, but Thorez always kept fond memories: during the late fifties and early sixties, the name Cle´ment (Fried’s adopted party name) was still mentioned with reverence over the Thorez family dinner table.98 Thorez established his particular style of party management during the Popular Front years. Each morning, he worked in his study at home, rather than the office in party headquarters. After a discussion with Fried to review political developments and party activity, he met other members of a select group of collaborators. In effect, Thorez discussed key policy and strategic

POPULAR FRONT

123

matters at a kitchen cabinet, before bringing them to be ratified at meetings of the Secretariat and Political Bureau. Paradoxically, his aloofness from the party headquarters and party cadres helped to enhance a sense of his authority, generating an aura of special qualities and even a certain mystique. Jacques Duclos took responsibility for much of the party’s day-to-day functioning, including propaganda and parliamentary affairs. Maurice Tre´and became increasingly important as head of the Commission of Cadres, which compiled ‘biographies’ and reports on the political reliability and sometimes moral behaviour of activists. He also oversaw the selection of volunteers for the International Brigades and managed the party’s clandestine network to transport volunteers, equipment and weapons to Spain.99 In this latter task, Tre´and worked closely with Cerreti, who was appointed managing director of La Compagnie France-Navigation (a shipping company established by the Comintern to assure supplies to Spain). Laurent Casanova, who held a doctorate in law, became Thorez’s private secretary (though the position was strictly unofficial). He ran Thorez’s office, acted as researcher and, on occasion, travelled to Moscow to report on PCF matters.100 Casanova was an important link with a group of intellectuals in Thorez’s entourage, including Louis Aragon, the surrealist writer, who was appointed editor of Ce Soir, the party’s evening newspaper. The philosopher, Georges Cogniot, who represented the PCF in Moscow before becoming editor of l’Humanite´, also formed a close bond with Thorez, joining him and Vermeersch on their alpine holiday in 1938. Another regular visitor to the Thorez residence was Jean Fre´ville, real name Euge`ne Schkaf, part of a wealthy family that had fled Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution. Like Casanova, he possessed a doctorate in law and not inconsiderable talent as a writer, trying his hand at poetry, novels and translations of classic Marxist texts. In 1937, Fre´ville acted as ghost writer of Fils du Peuple. Post war, he would become one of Thorez’s fountains of knowledge on matters relating to art and culture and, in 1956, provide intellectual weapons for Thorez’s campaign against birth control. He also became an impresario of the Thorez cult, a vocation he pursued even after the death of the General Secretary. Cultish practices formed an inherent part of communist activity. A dogmatic belief system with a claim to historical truth, centralist code of discipline and intolerance of minority viewpoints, excessive activism ensuring all aspects of a cadre’s life revolve around the party, a ‘cult of confession’ in which members admit to and ask forgiveness for ‘errors’, and a language of cliche´s narrowing capacity for independent thought: all helped to lay the basis for the manufacture of cults around individual leaders, both dead and alive.101 The Thorez cult would, in the post war years, become a distorted reflection of the cult around Stalin: the Soviet leader was ‘little father of the people’;

124

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez was ‘son of the people’. The cult’s function and characteristics were, however, more complex in its germination phase during the Popular Front. In his comparative study of communist cults, Kevin Morgan draws the distinction between ‘integration cults’ and ‘enkindling cults’. The integrating cult became the norm during the Cold War, unity around a single leader bolstering conformity and hierarchical structures and serving to bind the communist community in the face of hostile social and political environments. The enkindling cult was more prevalent in the mid- and late-thirties. It looked outwards, personifying the communist message through a particular leader in order to reach broader sections of the population. Enkindling cults were rooted in national cultures, often adapting to contexts ‘in which the role of political leaders was already strongly accentuated’; it was also possible for a number of cults to exist simultaneously within the same party.102 Thorez was not the only political personality to become the object of veneration during the Popular Front, a period well described as ‘a time of heroisation of political leaders’.103 Mass mobilisations aroused expectations of sweeping change, the closing of one historical era and the opening of a new, and people invested hopes in those who appeared to personify the spirit of the age. During the spring and summer of 1936, the slogan ‘Vive Blum’ had particular resonance, after the Socialist leader’s survival of an attempted lynching by right-wing extremists in February 1936.104 Amongst communist contingents, ‘Vive Thorez’ was a popular chant, but so also was ‘Vive Cachin’, ‘Vive Marty’ and ‘Vive Duclos’. For many – even outside communist circles – Thorez’s youthful verve seemed to symbolise the energy of the moment. After listening to his radio address, the writer Francois Mauriac compared Thorez’s ‘soft and bleating voice’ to ‘a nightingale trying to sing’.105 The artist Fernand Le´ger, who would join the PCF after the war, eulogised about his stamina during the parade to commemorate the Paris Commune (May 1936): ‘Thorez was there. He must have been there since half-past one and it is now eight o’clock! The number of hands he has shaken, faces recognised. It’s incredible! Heroism begins with endurance, with great patience and exhausting tasks.’106 A rightwing Belgian francophone journal contrasted Thorez’s athletic appearance with the inertia of the elderly French political elite: ‘He’s a strapping fellow, with his strong build, fresh skin and golden locks, his good health and his smile. The accession of Mr Thorez to the most important post in the PCF has been one of the greatest successes of the young generation in French politics.’107 The upward trajectory of the Thorez cult coincided with the waning of Blum’s image. Non-intervention in Spain was just one issue to tarnish the

POPULAR FRONT

125

Popular Front government in the eyes of many of its supporters. In September 1936, an investment strike and flight of gold reserves led to devaluation of the currency. In February 1937, Blum announced ‘a pause’ in reforms, and spending plans for pensions and unemployment benefits were soon cancelled. Probably most damaging for the Prime Minister were events in Clichy on 16 March when police fired on a crowd protesting outside a rally organised by the Parti Social Francais, the reincarnation of the Croix-de-Feu. Five demonstrators were killed and hundreds injured. Paradoxically, the fact that the PCF had not joined the government allowed Thorez to draw political capital from these episodes. He condemned devaluation as an ‘attack on the poor’, his huge audience at the Parc des Princes stadium indicating the wide appeal of the message. On 5 December 1936, communist deputies abstained in a vote over the government’s Spanish policy. Dimitrov had cabled Thorez to express concern that the position might destabilise the government, which would ‘not be advantageous’; but Thorez knew that a section of the parliamentary right had pledged support to Blum, and there was no danger of the government’s defeat.108 Thorez’s intervention in the aftermath of the Clichy events was particularly adept. On hearing news of the shootings, he rushed to the scene before visiting some of the injured in hospital. His actions contrasted favourably with images of a sheepish Blum arriving in a dinner jacket. A few days later, Thorez spoke at a huge protest meeting at the Ve´l’ d’Hiv cycling track and on 22 March he delivered an emotional address at the victims’ funeral procession, attended (according to l’Humanite´) by a million people.109 The Blum administration lived its final days in June 1937, struggling to deal with a rapidly deteriorating financial situation. As the crisis unfolded, Thorez announced that communists were prepared to join the government in order ‘to strengthen’ it. Thousands of posters and leaflets were distributed with the message that the PCF was ‘ready to take all its responsibilities’. It was a bold move, made without consultation with Comintern leaders in Moscow. When, a few days later, Blum resigned after the Senate rejected his demands for special powers, Thorez reiterated the communists’ offer. By now, however, the Radicals had moved significantly to the right and were not prepared to tolerate a communist ministerial presence. A significant group was already looking to break with the Popular Front, its members’ anti-communism fuelled by industrial unrest, the Spanish war and the Moscow trials. On 22 June, Chautemps returned as prime minister to lead a Radical–Socialist coalition, with Blum as his deputy. Thorez immediately pledged support to the government, which still wore the Popular Front label. But the idea of communist participation had left its mark on the aspirations of activists and supporters. Two days’ later, a huge crowd at a Popular Front rally in the Place de la Nation greeted Thorez with the

126

MAURICE THOREZ

slogan, ‘Thorez to power’. From this moment until the advent of war, the chant became part of the ritual surrounding Thorez’s appearances at party events and public demonstrations.110

‘Party of government’ The publication of Fils du Peuple in September 1937 served a double purpose. It outlined the credentials of the PCF’s main candidate for a prominent position in government – his working-class credentials, cultural heritage, commitment to the French people and supposedly innate leadership qualities. In that sense, the book attempted to reach an audience beyond the communist constituency. Yet Thorez’s ministerial ambitions were at variance with the country’s political trajectory. The Popular Front was experiencing a process of steady disintegration, as Radicals and Socialists became increasingly hostile to communism. By April 1938, the experiment was effectively over: a period of setbacks and political isolation for communists beckoned. In the face of this, Fils du Peuple offered an easily digestible account of party history: one of progress through the tenacious overcoming of obstacles. By making the narrative synonymous with the life-story of the General Secretary, it created a focus around which the communist community could close ranks. As the Popular Front unravelled, Thorez made further attempts to propel the PCF into government. Communists supported the Chautemps administration, despite its orthodox financial policy. They walked a tightrope, identifying with workers’ resistance against an employers’ counter-offensive, but urging restraint for fear of dislocating the Popular Front. Thorez presented himself as a statesman: his opening speech at the PCF’s Ninth Congress in Arles (25 – 29 December 1937) celebrated ‘la grandeur de France’, which was in the vanguard of the international struggle for peace and social progress; his closing address was broadcast live on radio.111 In January 1938, PCF deputies felt compelled to abstain during a vote on Chautemps’ programme of further monetary restraint and a promise to confront unions in order to restore ‘social peace’. Socialists withdrew from the cabinet and the government collapsed. During several days of parliamentary manoeuvring, Thorez announced that communists would be happy to serve in an administration committed to the Popular Front programme. On 16 January, Albert Lebrun, the president of the Republic, and Blum agreed the notion of a coalition that would span the political spectrum ‘from Paul Reynaud [leader of the centre-right Democratic Alliance] to Thorez’. Blum met Thorez and Duclos to discuss the proposition: ‘if you want to know our personal opinion’, said Thorez, ‘we are absolutely in agreement with such an idea.’112 Negotiations broke down when Reynaud

POPULAR FRONT

127

proposed that the coalition be extended to include Louis Marin, a conservative figure who had flirted with the extreme right and, on 18 January, Chautemps returned to lead a ‘transitional’ administration made up entirely of Radicals. Thorez claimed, nevertheless, a tactical victory. Over the weekend, the PCF held rallies throughout the country. In Paris, a packed Ve´l’ d’Hiv reverberated to the chant ‘Thorez to Power’. By expressing a desire to join the government, the communists had, said Thorez, shown themselves to be the best defenders of the Popular Front. At the Central Committee, he boasted that Blum had eventually come round to the idea of a French Front and described the PCF as ‘a party of government’, the first use of a phrase that would become a thorezien motif in the post-1945 period.113 The resignation of Chautemps on 9 March opened another debate about communist participation. Asked by the president to form an administration, Blum firstly proposed a ‘100 per cent Popular Front’ government with ministerial posts divided between Socialists, Radicals and Communists proportionate to the number of parliamentary seats held by each party. Radicals met to discuss the idea and – though some voiced opposition to communist involvement – seemed prepared to accept it, on condition agreement could be reached on the government’s programme. Hitler’s invasion of Austria, however, transformed the political climate. Late on 11 March, Blum announced that he would attempt to form a ‘union of the nation’ made up of all parties represented in parliament. Thorez and Duclos met Blum at midnight and agreed that such a government was necessary ‘given the worsening of the international situation’. But the next day, the parliamentary right decided that they would not join a national government if the Communists were part of it. Blum went ahead to form a government ‘similar to 1936’; in other words a Socialist–Radical coalition without the Communists. ‘This is not the solution expected by the country,’ said Thorez, who attacked ‘supporters of international fascism and the 200 families’ for obstructing communist participation.114 Within a week, however, Blum’s proposal for a national government was back on the agenda. A number of senior figures on the centre-right, including Paul Reynaud, were arguing for ‘a government of all parties and classes’ to combat the threat from Germany; Chautemps spoke in favour of ‘a government of public safety and nation defence’. At a meeting of Parisian activists on 19 March, Thorez again declared that the PCF ‘was ready to take its place’ in a government of national unity.115 Comintern leaders in Moscow were following events with some alarm. On 11 March, they had dispatched a telegram instructing Thorez not to participate in Blum’s proposed government. Clearly irritated, Thorez cabled Dimitrov on 18 March to argue that participation in government with parties who were not members of the Popular Front was now ‘inescapable’:

128

MAURICE THOREZ

Rejecting such participation will either undermine the national rassemblement of forces, or else this national rassemblement will occur without and against us. [. . .] If this rassemblement collapses, the country will face the Hitlerian danger disunited, insufficiently armed, and at risk of defeat in the case of war. On the other hand, accepting the offer to create a government of national unity will reinforce resistance to Hitler and facilitate the struggle of the united front.116 After consulting Stalin, Dimitrov replied (20 March) to say that communists must not join the government. ‘Only a state of war against fascist aggression could change such a position of the communists, who [. . .] would enter a government of national unity in order to strengthen the forces of international democracy against fascism.’ Three days later, Thorez cabled Moscow to say that he would abide by the decision. By this point, however, opposition from the political right had already buried the idea of a national coalition.117 Blum’s second government gave way on 10 April 1938 to an administration led by Daladier. Though the PCF voted to support its formation, the government – which was made up of Radicals and other representatives from the centre-right – signalled the death throes of the Popular Front. Amongst the party’s former Radical and (many if not all) Socialist allies, the threat of war, rather than the threat from fascism, was now viewed as the biggest peril. During the last three months of 1938, communists endured serious defeats on both foreign and internal affairs. At the end of October, Daladier joined British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich to sign an accord with Hitler, which – by giving the Nazi leader a freehand in Czechoslovakia – torpedoed the policy of collective security. The PCF was the only party to oppose Munich in the French parliament, an act from which it would draw immense political capital after the war, but which was widely viewed as bellicose at the time. In Spain, republican forces were in retreat: in October, the International Brigades began to withdraw and, in December, the first shots were fired in the final and decisive battle for Barcelona. On the home front, a decree on 12 November ended the 40-hour week – a symbolic attack on the gains of the May– June 1936 social movement. Spontaneously, workers began strikes and the CGT called a one-day protest strike for 30 November. Poorly prepared and executed, it provoked retribution by employers, the sacking of thousands of workplace militants, and a drastic drop in CGT membership. Discussing these months, Becker and Berstein’s study of French anti-communism notes that ‘hardly a section of public opinion from the left to the extreme right did not openly express its fundamental hostility or hatred towards communism’.118

POPULAR FRONT

129

PCF membership had surged from 70,000 to 330,000 between June 1935 and December 1937 but the fresh recruits were only accustomed to success and unschooled in the norms of party discipline.119 Questioning and disillusionment in the ranks was inevitable. It was publicly recognised in May 1938 when ‘a letter from Maurice Honel, deputy of Clichy-Levallois, to Maurice Thorez’ appeared on the front page of l’Humanite´. Honel wrote of ‘growing concerns, fears and doubts’ amongst workers and activists, some of whom were arguing that communists should ‘go beyond the formation of the Popular Front, through the constitution of a “workers’ front” or a “revolutionary front”’.120 As the communist community drew in on itself, articles in the communist press made explicit the underlying premise of Fils du Peuple. Thorez was ‘the reliable guide of all those who work and who endure capitalist exploitation [. . .] the great figure of our Communist Party, of which he is the uncontested leader’.121 He had ‘through personal aptitude, hard work, perseverance and determination [. . .] attained the highest level of culture that a son of the people might accrue. And the people are proud of him, because they recognise in him their most beautiful and most authentic reincarnation.’122 In the face of political defeats and isolation, Thorez had become an ‘integrating figure’ to bind together and discipline the communist community. The emergence of the cult was one of several reasons why the Popular Front would become a reference point for Thorez. The period provided many happy memories, both in politics and in his personal life. Though his strategy was conditioned by the Soviet world view, the temporary correlation between French and Soviet diplomatic interests had allowed scope for considerable manoeuvre. Tensions emerged between Thorez and Moscow on a number of matters, the most important the question of taking ministerial positions. Thorez would remain bitter about the stifling of his desire to take the PCF into the government. Twenty years later, in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s secret speech, he told the Central Committee: ‘Perhaps we were too loyal [. . .] We should have defended our line more energetically and more strongly at that time and later on.’123 What would have been the outcome if, in 1936, the PCF had joined the Popular Front government? Thorez believed that its trajectory would have been different. Yet in terms of economic policy, there was little essential difference between his position and that of Blum. The Socialist leader was committed to the principle of ‘the exercise of power’, rather than the ‘conquest of power’; Thorez argued that the Popular Front government must remain within the framework of capitalism in order to secure an alliance with the middle class. Even in November 1938, when the Popular Front was effectively dead, the PCF’s ‘programme for government’ authored by Thorez

130

MAURICE THOREZ

was one of limited reforms, with some measures of nationalisation of important industries, an anticipation of the programme of the immediate post-war government.124 Communist participation in a national government during early 1938 would have been even more problematic. Thorez would have supported armament spending and other preparations for war and, more controversially, would have urged support for the republican camp in Spain and stronger ties with the Soviet Union. But what would have been his position on the 40-hour week? A growing political consensus considered rearmament and the continuation of the shorter working week as incompatible. While communists defended the reform, some of their statements were ambivalent, often hinting at arguments that would be employed during ‘the battle of production’ in 1945 – 46. An editorial in the party’s trade union paper argued: ‘If to save peace, it is necessary to work 45, 50 or 60 hours a week, that would be better than abandoning the chances of peace.’125 Yet peace could not be saved. Though the war that began in September 1939 did not surprise Thorez, he was astonished and shaken by the way in which it came about.

CHAPTER 5 EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

In mid-August 1939 Thorez and Jeannette Vermeersch took a vacation at Saint-Martin-Ve´subie, a picturesque village on the edge of the Mercantour mountain range. Thorez had grown fond of the Alps, holidaying near Chambe´ry the previous summer and returning at Christmas to see in the New Year. Then, as now, the Thorez couple were accompanied by Laurent Casanova and his wife, Danielle, a close friend of Jeannette and leader of l’Union des Jeunes Filles de France (UJFF), the party’s movement for girls and young women. As the holiday progressed, fine sunshine gave way to a muggy atmosphere and, then, to violent thunder. Storms swept the country; in the south, hail destroyed vineyards, torrents washed away crops and flooded villages; lightening destroyed buildings and sparked forest fires. The weather anticipated the impending catastrophe. On 22 August, Thorez read newspaper reports that Nazi foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, was due to arrive in Moscow to sign a non-aggression pact with the Soviet government. Ten days later, German aircraft began bombarding the Polish town of Wielun´; battleships shelled the port of Gdan´sk and thousands of German troops crossed the border heading for Warsaw. The events heralded for France five dark years of war and military occupation and, for Thorez, five awkward years of exile in the Soviet Union.

‘Profound inner turmoil’ Thorez described the PCF’s – and undoubtedly also his own – reaction to the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact as ‘surprise and rather profound inner turmoil’.1 Throughout 1939, he had castigated the ‘capitulators’ who had signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. In May, he had again proposed a ‘government of national defence’ to mobilise ‘all French people who refuse to bend to the

132

MAURICE THOREZ

orders of Hitler and Mussolini’ and to engage in ‘fraternal collaboration with Britain, whose friendship is an essential element of peace’.2 During grandiose celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the 1789 Revolution, he drew contemporary analogies when referring to the ‘revolutionary war against kings and tyrants on the other side of the Rhine’.3 He could not imagine the possibility that Stalin was moving towards a communist version of Munich while still paying lip-service to the idea of a Franco– Soviet alliance. Yet Thorez immediately understood that the political thunderbolt of the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact would destroy the PCF’s anti-Nazi identity and shake the loyalty of its membership base, of which 85 per cent had joined the party during the Popular Front period. Abandoning his holiday, Thorez journeyed back to Paris to convene the Political Bureau, which was followed by a meeting of parliamentary deputies and available members of the Central Committee. He took his political cue from a telegram that had arrived from Moscow signed ‘Jeannette’, the most recent pseudonym of Georgi Dimitrov: the pact should not signal a change in communist strategy; it was necessary because the British and French governments had ‘dragged their feet’ in negotiations for a treaty with the Soviet government; the Soviet Union had acted ‘in the interests of peace and socialism’, had ‘blown apart the plans’ of capitalist governments looking to attack the Soviet Union and had ‘divided the camp of the aggressors’. The telegram concluded that communists ‘must continue with even more energy their anti-fascist struggle against aggressors and above all fascist Germany’.4 Dimitrov and other Comintern leaders had failed to recognise the strategic implications of the diplomatic realignment with Nazi Germany, a position that would change brusquely after a meeting with Stalin on 7 September. Thorez’s politics were equally confused. Press releases issued after he had chaired meetings of the parliamentary group applauded the military preparations ordered by the Daladier government ‘to assure the defence of the country against the fascist aggressors of the Third Reich’. Communists would not only support ‘measures taken by the government to guarantee our borders’, but also those required ‘to bring necessary aid to a nation with which we are tied by treaty’.5 Thorez was advocating French military action against the Nazi invasion of Poland, while defending the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact that had paved the way for it. Thorez was unprepared for the French government’s response. For the ruling elites, the pact served as the pretext for a new wave of repression against the communists. Despite a prepared front-page banner proclaiming ‘Union of the French Nation against Hitler aggression’,6 police raided l’Humanite´’s print shop to shut down the paper, together with the party’s evening publication, Ce Soir. Throughout the country, offices were stormed and activists arrested.7

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

133

A rally planned in Paris for 29 August, at which Thorez was due to speak, was banned.8 Thorez’s initial reaction to the repression was measured. He drafted communique´s that opposed the closure of l’Humanite´ for ‘seriously affecting the working class and all republicans’, but which made no comment about arrests and raids. He continued to pledge support for the government’s military policy, ‘saluting’ party members called up by the army ‘who were ready to resist fascist aggression’.9 At an emergency session of the French parliament on 2 September, PCF deputies voted for war credits, in the words of the authoritative right-wing journal, Le Temps, ‘without batting an eyelid’. They leapt to their feet to applaud nationalistic rallying calls by Daladier and Herriot, behaviour described in Le Temps as a sign of ‘admirable French union around the government’.10 During the first days of the crisis, Thorez received guidance from Togliatti, who was in Paris to direct the work of the Italian party leadership in exile. Togliatti was arrested on 1 September together with two other Italian activists and although his false papers ensured that the French authorities remained unaware of his true identity, they did not prevent beatings from the police. Before his arrest, Togliatti advised Thorez that the ‘the French party should behave like Clemenceau before entering government during the war of 1914– 18, that is to criticise harshly all the weaknesses shown by the government in conducting the war’.11 Given Clemenceau’s role in dispatching troops against striking miners in the aftermath of the Courrie`res pit disaster, the analogy with ‘the tiger’ may have been uncomfortable; but Thorez knew his history. Clemenceau’s newspaper had been banned during 1914 and again in 1915, despite its fervent support for the war and the ‘sacred union’ of French unity. Yet Clemenceau had continued to participate in political life to become prime minister in 1917, earning the epithet ‘Pe`re la Victoire’ after Germany’s capitulation. It was a trajectory that Thorez, at the end of August 1939, sought to emulate. Like thousands of other party activists, Thorez was called up by the army. He was ordered to report to the Third Engineers Regiment in Arras on 4 September, seven months short of his fortieth birthday, and assigned to a company of bargemen, based for the first two weeks at Fampoux, a small village on the river Scarpe, before being transferred to Chauny (Aisne). Thorez’s role was described by a local newspaper as ‘a cushy number’: he was chauffeur to the company’s commander, with accommodation provided by a local priest and, later, by a teacher.12 His immediate superior recalled him as ‘always very polite, very punctual and never doing politics’.13 Another officer reported the ‘delight of the men’ when the communist leader ‘handed around cigars with red bands labelled La Chambre des Depute´s’.14

134

MAURICE THOREZ

An ‘unjust imperialist war’ With Thorez in the army, Duclos became the PCF’s acting general secretary, assisted by Frachon and Bonte. At the same time, Fried left Paris for Brussels, to establish a base for Comintern operations in Western Europe.15 Thorez maintained contact with party leaders through the intermediaries of Jeannette Vermeersch and Arthur Ramette, a member of the French parliament. On at least one occasion, he took the opportunity to attend to party affairs in Paris when assigned to drive officers to meetings in the capital.16 Thorez’s unqualified support for the actions of the Daladier government angered Moscow.17 On 1 and 2 September, Dimitrov despatched messages to Stern (Thorez’s pseudonym) demanding ‘an explanation’ and ‘regular information’. But communication channels between the PCF and Moscow were broken – an outcome of the police repression and dispersal of the leadership – and Dimitrov received no response. On 9 September, the Comintern leader sent a new telegram which opened with the words: ‘This war is an unjust, imperialist war.’ It ordered that communist parties, ‘especially those of France, England, Belgium, and the United States of America, which have proceeded in opposition to this view, must immediately correct their political line’.18 Two days earlier, Stalin had announced that ‘Hitler, without understanding or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system’: the Popular Front and ‘unity of the nation’ were ‘yesterday’s position’, continued support for which meant ‘slipping into the position of the bourgeoisie’.19 Dimitrov’s telegram did not reach its three intended recipients: Thorez, Fried and Maurice Tre´and, head of the Commission des Cadres (who had also been mobilised by the army). Makeshift communications with Fried in Belgium were only restored on 17 September. The same day, Soviet troops crossed the Polish border and the rage directed against the Communists by the whole political spectrum, including the Socialists, reached a frenzy. Elected representatives began to abandon the party, including 25 parliamentary deputies; over the next few weeks, 44 per cent of mayors, 20 per cent of assistant mayors and 15 per cent of councillors publicly cut ties with their former comrades.20 Despite the party continuing to advocate an ‘unshakeable desire to defend the country’ and reaffirming its support for war credits,21 the government issued decrees on 26 September to ‘dissolve’ the PCF and to allow the suspension of municipalities under communist control. How did Thorez respond to the Comintern’s new analysis of the war? Throughout September, the PCF’s position remained at variance with the ‘imperialist war’ line, prompting a new telegram from Dimitrov on 28 September to demand that the party ‘correct the mistakes it ha(d)

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

135

committed [and] decisively break with the politics of the Sacred Union’.22 Several weeks later in Moscow, Thorez placed responsibility for the party’s delay in changing its position on to the shoulders of the Central Committee and parliamentarians, and particularly Jacques Duclos who had ‘left the party rudderless for a month and a half’.23 Thorez’s account of himself as purveyor of the Moscow line was, however, made in the face of severe criticism from Dimitrov and other Comintern leaders and does not stand up to scrutiny. Thorez claimed to have acted on ‘clear directives’ received through Raymond Guyot, who had been in Moscow at the beginning of the crisis.24 In her memoirs, Jeannette Vermeersch describes how she met Guyot on his return to Paris and forwarded a ‘communication’ from Dimitrov to Thorez at Chauny.25 But we now know from Dimitrov’s diary that the Comintern leader ‘gave instructions’ to Guyot on 3 September.26 His ‘instructions’ to Thorez could only therefore have related to the International’s insistence that French communists maintain their independence from the Daladier government, rather than to the changed characterisation of the war. Guyot was already on his way back to France when Stalin decreed the conflict ‘an imperialist war’. Thorez probably heard the new line for the first time from Mounette Dutilleul, an activist attached to the Commission des Cadres and the liaison between Fried in Brussels and Duclos and Frachon in Paris. Dutilleul’s partner, Arthur Dallidet – also part of the Commission des Cadres – arrived in the Russian capital on 16 September and held discussions with Dimitrov and Marty the following day.27 In her memoirs, Dutilleul recalls how she travelled to Brussels immediately after the banning of the PCF. Fried told her to memorise a telegram: ‘I will remember its first words for the rest of my days: “This war is an imperialist war”.’ Back in Paris, Mounette briefed Duclos and Frachon and the same evening she visited Thorez in Chauny – which, if the account is accurate, would have been on either 26 or 27 September.28 Certainly, Thorez began to steer the party towards the new characterisation of the war during the last week in September. Even now, his approach prompted criticism from Moscow. On 1 October, Florimond Bonte and Arthur Ramette, on behalf of communist deputies reconstituted as Le Groupe Ouvrier et Paysan Francais (GOPF), sent a letter to Herriot, the president of the Chamber. Approved in advance by Thorez, it called for a parliamentary debate to discuss ‘the problem of peace’ and stressed the ‘power of the Soviet Union’ as the force to guarantee ‘collective security’ and ‘the independence of France’.29 In the Comintern offices, an increasingly irritated Dimitrov considered the letter ‘an error’, as it legitimised the ‘French bourgeois government’ and proposed ‘an imperialist peace, the source of new wars’.30 In France, reaction to the letter was furious. Against the background of the new ‘German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation’

136

MAURICE THOREZ

signed on 28 September, the text was interpreted as advocating peace on German terms, including recognition of the Nazi occupation of Poland. The right-wing press condemned communists as ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of France’, and the military governor of Paris issued arrest warrants for members of the GOPF.31 By 6 October, thirty-five communist deputies were incarcerated in the Sante´ prison.

Deserting the army Fried first raised the question of Thorez’s personal security immediately after the party was banned. Ramette was sent to Chauny with a recommendation that the General Secretary should leave the army. According to the communist deputy, Thorez ‘weighed up the pros and cons, hesitated a lot and his first instinct had been a refusal’.32 One week later, a party chauffeur drove Jeannette Vermeersch and Mounette Dutilleul to Chauny and this time Thorez agreed to join Duclos – who was preparing to leave Paris – and Tre´and in the Belgian capital to establish a clandestine leadership, working closely with Fried and his right-hand man, Cerreti. Thorez’s action is still described by historians as ‘deserting from the French Army, rather than fighting against the Nazis’.33 Yet amidst the fury generated by the letter to Herriot, remaining in his regiment would have meant certain arrest. Thorez’s departure from the army had heavy consequences. On 28 November, a military tribunal sentenced him to six years in prison for desertion, and on 17 February 1940 the Council of State stripped him of his French citizenship.34 Throughout the war, Charles de Gaulle recognised the judgements and in 1944 used them as reasons to obstruct Thorez’s return to French territory. Thorez’s flight from the army on the night of 3 October has been dramatised – one account refers to a ‘communist “commando” forcing him to desert’.35 Yet the episode passed with little incident. Thorez was driven to Lille to pick up false papers, spent a night on an activist’s uncomfortable couch in Tourcoing, and crossed the border early next morning. Jeannette joined him in Brussels the following day, bringing with her the couple’s son, Jean.36 During the following weeks and months, police mounted a manhunt across the northern mining region. Thorez was supposedly travelling around using a passport in the name of Juan Sambeit. He was ‘spotted’ in He´ninLie´tard and, then, in Bruay-en-Artois, where an informant claimed he kept a mistress. Police set up roadblocks and searched buses and trains after a sighting in Bully-Grenay.37 In Brussels, Thorez was lodged on Boulevard Charlemagne by the lawyer, Jean Fonteyne, an acquaintance from his previous period as a fugitive in

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

137

1928. Despite precautions to keep his presence in Belgium secret, Fried expressed fears over Thorez’s safety. A Belgian communist, the poet and lawyer Rene´ Blieck, seriously believed there was evidence of a plot to assassinate Thorez.38 On 16 October, Fried telegrammed Moscow: ‘Situation for Maurice becoming increasingly difficult each day. Propose departure to you with family.’ The reply from Dimitrov came next day: ‘Stern can come to us with his wife.’39 Before he left for the Soviet Union, Fried arranged for Thorez to give an interview to Sam Russell, a 24-year-old member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Russell (born as Manassa Lesser into a Jewish family in London’s East End) had fought in the Spanish Civil War before moving to Paris to work for l’Agence France-Monde, a Comintern news agency. He had met Thorez on several occasions and interviewed him for the Daily Worker in July 1939 to mark the 150th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Russell was driven to a house in Bruges by Maurice Tre´ard: ‘The door was opened by a woman. We went inside and a few minutes later, Thorez came down the stairs. He was very friendly, smiling and jolly.’40 The two men spoke for 90 minutes, with the resulting article splashed across the front page of the Daily Worker on 4 November 1939. Publication in Britain was not the primary purpose of the interview. A French version was distributed widely amongst party members and supporters. Its positive impact on morale is mentioned in Les Communistes, a fictionalised account of the period by Louis Aragon.41 The party, claims Thorez, has held firm: ‘only a mere handful have ratted’ and ‘the spirit of self-sacrifice’ will ‘result in new recruits to the immortal cause of communism’. The political significance of the interview is that Thorez states explicitly for the first time that the war has ‘imperialist aims’. He is, nevertheless, still reluctant to sign up completely to the Comintern analysis. While condemning ‘the forces of French reaction’, including Daladier and ‘the treacherous leaders of the French socialist party’, he characterises the war as ‘the slaughter caused by the British capitalists in their struggle of interests with the German capitalists’ – whereas Moscow assigned equal responsibility to French and British imperialism. The interview was also a diversion. A subheading announced that Thorez was alive, free and ‘somewhere in France’. As it was distributed, he was preparing to journey, via Stockholm and Riga, to reach Moscow.42 He arrived on 8 November, to be greeted the following day by Manuilsky and, two days later, invited to Dimitrov’s dacha.43

La Barbe There were three distinct stages to Thorez’s wartime exile in the Soviet Union: he stayed in Moscow until October 1941; then, he was evacuated 1,400

138

MAURICE THOREZ

kilometres east to Ufa; finally, he returned to Moscow in January 1943. Throughout his stay, Thorez’s role and responsibilities were ill-defined, and complicated by his clandestine status. A PCF strategy document stressed the need to take ‘every measure to ensure that leaders temporarily abroad are always presented as being within the country’.44 Unable to make public appearances, Thorez spent most of the first two years holed up in a dacha in Kuntsevo Park, an elegant estate on the bank of the Moskva River reserved for prominent figures in the Soviet elite, including Stalin. He signed letters as La Barbe, on account of the growth of a fine beard. For Thorez, it was a frustrating time. Firstly, information from France was intermittent: ‘worrying that there has been nothing, no material’, he complains in his diary on 18 December 1939.45 Secondly, his presence in the Russian capital gave the Comintern leadership more leverage over PCF policy, and reduced his room for manoeuvre. Thorez was required to submit every text and communication destined for France for approval. Invariably, he would be told to ‘revise’ them, sometimes after considerable delay. Even when asked to compose a ‘salutation’ for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, Manuilsky told him: ‘rework it again with more passion (18 December 1939).’ Thirdly, the relationship with Marty was a constant source of friction. As a member of the Comintern Secretariat, Marty was superior to Thorez in the communist hierarchy and the official conduit through which Dimitrov and Manuilsky dealt with the French party. Arriving in the Soviet Union five days before the signing of the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, he had promoted the ‘imperialist war’ line with customary zeal, drawing an analogy with Lenin’s defeatist position during the Great War.46 Marty denounced the PCF’s delay in adopting the position as ‘unquestionable capitulation’ and ‘cowardly opportunism’, crimes for which he held Thorez personally responsible.47 On arrival in Moscow, Thorez attempted to defend the PCF’s politics since the pact. Speaking to the Comintern Secretariat on 14 November, he accepted ‘weaknesses and faults’ – from which he absolved himself – but gave a glowing account of how the party had carried through ‘the turn’ in policy ‘without serious mistakes’. But Dimitrov and Manuilsky remained unconvinced and the meeting instructed Thorez to work with Marty to draw up ‘concrete proposals’ on the ‘situation in France’.48 Thorez’s diary indicates some painful negotiations: ‘Non-founded criticisms from A[ndre´]. Inadmissible method. Signifies party incapable – leaders,’ reads one entry (18 December). Nevertheless, Thorez signed up to a ‘frank and Bolshevik selfcriticism’ of the PCF’s approach. The agreed document announced that the party had changed its ‘completely erroneous politics’ and raised the defeatist slogans: ‘our enemy is at home’ and for ‘an immediate peace’. The text

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

139

provided the basis for a letter to the French leadership (3 December) and an article in Cahiers du Bolche´visme (January 1940)’.49 Thorez’s diary and notebooks reveal his preoccupation with the aim of maintaining a loyal cadre within the PCF to provide the basis for its eventual recovery. Throughout January, Thorez recorded the names of ‘traitors’ in a special section of his notebook. Most senior officials had remained loyal, with the notable exception of Marcel Gitton (who would be assassinated by a PCF hit-squad in September 1941). But the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland at the end of November had prompted new doubts and desertions amongst elected representatives. Worryingly, the party doyen, Marcel Cachin, had taken an equivocal position and was refusing a request from Dimitrov to relocate to Moscow. His stance created continuous anxiety for Thorez: ‘Cachin declaration in Senate quite simply scandalous,’ he noted in his diary (27 May 1940). The behaviour of thirty-five parliamentary deputies on trial for reconstituting a banned organisation also raised concerns (nine others also faced charges, including Thorez, but had evaded arrest). Thorez met Manuilsky on 29 January to agree tactics to prevent the government using the trial ‘to decompose, split and demoralise’ the party. It was necessary ‘to assure the line of the party, even if only 12 [remained solid]’. Thorez drafted letters to Duclos and Frachon, warning of ‘grave dangers’ if the accused did not adopt a ‘correct and firm’ stance. He demanded Cachin sign ‘a declaration without reservations approving the politics of the party, International and Soviet Union’. He also suggested that a female activist be designated to monitor the morale of the wives of those on trial. In the event, most of the accused put their names to a statement of loyalty to the communist movement read out by Billoux from the dock, only four disassociating themselves from their comrades. Thirty-six deputies were sentenced to five years in prison, with eight others receiving suspended sentences. Thorez’s strategy for sustaining party patriotism contained two elements. The first was to disparage ‘the renegades’, former comrades turning their backs on communism. In February, he prepared an article, which after customary ‘reworking’ to take into account comments from Manuilsky was published under the title ‘Traitors to the Pillory’. Amongst the ‘rotten individuals’ labelled as ‘police spies’ was the novelist and philosopher Paul Nizan, who three months later would lose his life fighting the German advance on Dunkerque.50 The second element was to vilify the party’s closest political allies, particularly the Socialists. On 15 January, Thorez began composing a text on Le´on Blum, again sharing drafts with Manuilsky. The article appeared in international communist journals and was circulated amongst leading activists in France during March.51 Its language is of such extremity that some historians have mistakenly suggested that, rather than

140

MAURICE THOREZ

written by Thorez, it was drawn up by Soviet scribes.52 Thorez attacked Blum for ‘his wild instincts of a bourgeois exploiter’, ‘his repugnant hypocrisy’, for possessing ‘the savagery of Mussolini’. Blum is animalised: he is a ‘vulture’, ‘a hyena’; ‘hisses like a repugnant reptile’, ‘barks full-throated like a guard-dog’, and has ‘long and claw-like fingers’. There are no less than ninety-six different personal denigrations of the Socialist leader. The extraordinary article with its anti-Semitic tropes indicates not only the extent to which antagonism towards social democracy remained within Thorez’s political DNA, but also the extent to which his thinking was imbued with the vocabulary and mentality of the Moscow trials.

A second melody On 10 May 1940, a huge German force moved through the Ardennes forest and, three days later, crossed the Meuse at Sedan, a symbolic reminder of the French defeat in 1870. Millions of civilians took to the road in panic. The government, led by Paul Reynaud since March, joined the flight, reinstalling itself, briefly, in a chaˆteau near Tours. While Reynaud looked for ways to continue the war, powerful voices within the ruling elites and army general staff sought a negotiated peace with Germany. The Supreme Commander, Maxime Weygand, attempted to conjure up the spectre of a new Paris Commune: Maurice Thorez was presiding in the Elyse´e, he announced to frightened ministers at a cabinet meeting on 13 June.53 The Reynaud government soon collapsed and the new administration led by Marshall Philippe Pe´tain signed an armistice on 22 June. German terms were humiliating: Alsace-Lorraine was annexed and the country divided into occupied and unoccupied zones, with the cost of the occupation to be paid by the French. On 11 July, the republican constitution was abolished and full powers in the unoccupied zone granted to Pe´tain, who ruled from the Hoˆtel du Parc in the spa town of Vichy. In Moscow, Dimitrov and other Comintern leaders struggled to respond to the constantly evolving situation. Stalin remained committed to a long-term alliance with Germany and dismissed the significance of the Nazi offensive in France and the Low Countries. Molotov informed the German ambassador that ‘the Soviet government understands that Germany was forced to resort to such measures’ and ‘wished Germany a total victory in its defensive undertakings’.54 Thorez’s first political response – written on 20 May and finalised at a meeting with Dimitrov and Manuilsky the following day – stayed within the framework of prevailing Comintern politics.55 Entitled Nous Accusons and modelled on Emile Zola’s famous declaration during the Dreyfus Affair, the text does not take the side of either France or Germany but directs fire against

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

141

Radicals and Socialists, including Daladier and Blum, as architects of ‘the imperialist policy of national desertion’. Nevertheless, nuances with Soviet policy can be detected: there is no attack on Paul Reynaud or on the British – both of whom were arguing for a continuation of the war against Germany – and there is reference to ‘the criminal designs’ of ‘German imperialism’.56 Just before she died, Annie Kriegel suggested that Thorez’s youthful experience of fleeing his birthplace in northern France in advance of German troops had led him ‘to understand by instinct’ that support for the German– Soviet alliance and the slogans linked to it – ‘the main enemy is at home’ and ‘for immediate peace’ – could in the summer of 1940 no longer serve as an ‘anchorage point’ for communist politics.57 Certainly, as the German attack began, Thorez’s thoughts were focussed on Noyelles-Godault: the previous day he had received news – eight weeks after the event – of the death of his adoptive father. On 26 May, Thorez met Dimitrov and the two men discussed the Nous Accusons article: ‘Believe correct. But is it sufficient?’, Thorez noted in his diary. And in response to the essential question of how communists should position themselves in the conflict, he wrote: ‘Not defeatism in general; not for defeat [underlined in original] of French people and victory for Ger[man] imp[erialism]. We are not for the victory of that bandit (H[itler]).’ Thorez’s reflection on events, as well as his scope to act, was enhanced by some new arrivals in the Russian capital. Arthur Ramette and Raymond Guyot reached Moscow on 24 May after a choppy journey on a Russian cargo ship. They brought an archive of party literature, reports and correspondence, which Thorez studied attentively during the next seven days. Cerreti (Paul Allard) arrived on 9 June; the Italian was – like Ramette and Guyot – close to Thorez. The presence of a small group of PCF activists strengthened Thorez’s hand and also checked to some degree the influence of Marty. Thorez’s morale was also improved by the appearance of Togliatti, who had spent two months in Paris following his release from prison. The Italian leader reported that the PCF’s organisation was in a chaotic state, but ordinary members, ‘despite and because of the repression’, remained attached ‘to the party and its leaders, and to M[aurice] in particular’. Thorez doubleunderscored the last four words in his diary (25 May 1940). On 4 June, Thorez began work on a text to outline the PCF’s position after the German invasion. There are five separate drafts of the ‘Declaration of the French Communist Party’ in the archives, an indication of the rapidly changing military and political situation, the sharp debate over the content and the hesitations of the Comintern and Soviet leaderships.58 Drafting provoked the inevitable tensions with Marty. Thorez’s diary suggests that the hero of the Black Sea Mutiny criticised early versions of the text for ‘not attacking Reynaud’ and for proposing a government of national unity.

142

MAURICE THOREZ

Describing the conflict within the French government over whether to continue the war as ‘a divergence between two camps of the bourgeois’, Marty maintained that communists should continue to advance the slogan of ‘a revolutionary government’ (7 June). In contrast, Thorez argued that the slogan of a revolutionary government would pose the question of ‘civil war in France’, which could only ‘facilitate the task of the invading German army’.59 Thorez’s position prevailed in meetings of the French contingent, but on 10 June Dimitrov delayed signing off the document and forwarded it to Stalin. For the next ten days the text was picked over by Stalin and other prominent Soviet leaders, including Andrei Zhdanov, and then reconsidered by the Comintern Secretariat. Thorez’s frustration grew each time it returned for revision. On 17 June, his diary records: ‘my irritation’. On 18 June: ‘general explosion [. . .] we are missing the opportunity’. On 19 June: ‘I express my regrets at all this to-ing and fro-ing [underlined by Thorez]. We are compromising the capital of the party.’ Eventually, on 21 June, the speed of France’s military collapse meant that much of the text was out-dated and the ‘declaration’ was ‘withdrawn’. A lazy version of communist history maintains that the French Communist Party ‘stuck by’ Moscow’s position of neutrality in the war until June 1941.60 Certainly, until Operation Barbarossa Thorez’s politics remained restrained by the flawed logic of the German – Soviet alliance. The ‘declaration’ avoids any reference to Hitler or Nazism: the war is still an inter-imperialist conflict, the outcome of ‘the bankruptcy’ of Socialist and Radical leaders – who should be put on trial to face the ‘highest punishment’ – and France’s national liberation can only be delivered through the defeat of capitalism. Nevertheless, the declaration also pledges support for a government that ‘mobilises all the means and forces in the country and honestly organises the defence of the people and France against the invasion’: Today, the survival of the French people is at stake. Today, German imperialism is implementing its plan of enslaving France. In order to safeguard its privileges, the oligarchy of the two hundred families is ready to capitulate. It is ready to sacrifice the independence of our country, to sacrifice once again the vital interests of our people. It is ready to ally with the occupier, to hide behind German bayonets from the reckoning that is being prepared by the indignant people. Communists have always struggled against capitalist exploitation, against the yoke of the national bourgeoisie. They have all the more reason to struggle against the enslavement of our people by a foreign conqueror. Like the entire French people, they do not want to permit [such] double bondage.

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

143

That is why today communists are supporters of a most decisive defence against the foreign invasion and are calling on the army, the workers, the peasants, and the masses to strain every nerve in order to repulse the foreign invasion and secure the independence and integrity of the country.61 In short, as early as the summer of 1940, Thorez had called for national popular unity to repulse the German intervention. Kriegel used a musical analogy when describing the process. While remaining in harmony with Soviet policy, the French leader managed to ‘obtain agreement first from Dimitrov and above all from Stalin’ to introduce a ‘second melody’ – one that would be heard alongside the main themes associated with the German– Soviet pact, but that would take account of a desire for national independence of a people living under foreign occupation.62

Negotiations with the occupier Back in France, party leaders remained unaware of Thorez’s call for ‘decisive defence against the foreign invasion’. Shortly after the German occupation of Paris, Duclos and Tre´and travelled back from Brussels and – along with the regional organiser, Jean Catelas – took responsibility for party activity in the capital (Frachon having joined the exodus from the city as the German army advanced). The chaotic situation meant that communication channels between the PCF and Moscow were intermittent for the next two months. Duclos and Tre´and remained trapped within a defeatist mind-set. For them, the military and political collapse, as well as confirming the ‘bankruptcy’ of the French bourgeoisie and ‘social democratic traitors’, provided an opportunity for communists. Duclos cabled the Comintern on 8 July: ‘Situation very favourable for the PC’ (Thorez diary, 16 July). Guided by ambiguous statements from the International and advice from Soviet intelligence, PCF leaders in Paris sought to exploit Soviet relations with the Nazis to secure the legalisation of the party and its press.63 On 26 June, four party representatives – Tre´and, Catelas, Denise Ginollin and Albert Foissin, a lawyer with links to the Soviet embassy – met Otto Abetz, the most senior diplomat at the German embassy. A further six meetings, mainly involving Foissin, took place before the end of July; and contacts continued until the final week of August. Proofs of the PCF’s evening paper, Ce Soir, were submitted to the Nazi censors on 6 July. An aide-me´moire summarising communist strategy was drawn up. Negotiators were to tell the occupying power: ‘we will do nothing for you, but nothing against you’.64

144

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez heard news of the contact with the Germans on 12 July: ‘Attempt “to collaborate” with Party. To compromise it,’ he noted in his diary. As more reports of ‘Abetz’s intrigue’ arrived, Thorez became increasingly anxious: [The occupying authorities] want to use the strength of the party to try to resolve their difficulties, to get the war factories working. They want to make the party bear responsibility for the current chaos and suffering of the masses. Through an apparent liberal approach towards the communists, the invaders want to undermine the confidence of the masses in our party.65 On 2 August Thorez heard that Abetz had posed the question of ‘a government with us of national revolution’ and had ‘asked to see M[aurice]’. His diary reads: ‘Serious danger [. . .] Categorical warning. Expulsion of those who compromise.’ On 7 August, a no-nonsense telegram signed by Dimitrov and Stern [Thorez] was dispatched to Paris: it described ‘complicity with the occupiers’ as ‘treason’ and held Duclos ‘personally responsible’ for ensuring ‘iron discipline’ on the matter.66 After the war, the PCF sought to expunge the ‘affair of June 1940’ from its history. Publicly, the suggestion that party leaders had negotiated with the Nazi occupiers was denounced as ‘police lies’ designed to insult the memory of communist resistance fighters. Foissin had quickly become the primary scapegoat, expelled as a German agent in September 1940, but Tre´and was also soon out of favour; from 1941 he was progressively removed from positions of responsibility and, in 1945, lost his place on the Central Committee. In 1949, the PCF Secretariat established an investigation into the affair. Led by Marty, it placed responsibility for ‘the false politics’ on to the shoulders of ‘the leadership on the ground’ – in other words, Tre´and and Duclos – who were ‘confused about the notion of fascism’ and had ‘an erroneous understanding of the German –Soviet pact and the situation in France under Nazi occupation’.67 The enquiry’s findings were never made public, even to the PCF Central Committee. During the second half of July 1940, the PCF circulated a leaflet entitled Peuple de France. It had two named authors: Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos. After the war, the text became known as the ‘Appeal of 10 July’ and heralded as ‘the first act on national territory calling for unity and for resistance’, the PCF’s counterpart to General de Gaulle’s radio address of 18 June.68 One sentence entered the popular memory: ‘Never will a great people such as ours be a people of slaves.’69 Historians have tended to view the ‘Appeal’ as a version of the declaration drafted by Thorez in Moscow.70 The intermittent communications at this

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

145

time between Paris and Moscow render this interpretation questionable. The leaflet certainly contains many of the themes of Thorez’s ‘declaration’. Its message is that only the Communist Party can lead France ‘back to work’, ‘liberate the country from the chains of capitalist exploitation’ and ‘assure independence and peace’. But the text differs from the ‘declaration’ in important respects. Although referring to ‘the humiliation of occupation’, Peuple de France sidesteps any explicit calls for ‘a common front of struggle’ or ‘decisive defence against the foreign invasion’ of the kind found in the ‘declaration’. The famous phrase about ‘a people of slaves’ does not relate to slavery imposed by the Nazis, but is attached to a sentence about France being ‘chained to the chariot of British imperialism’. After the war, it was ripped out of context. In short, the ‘Appeal of 10 July’ is a reflection of the same ‘false politics’ that underpinned the concurrent attempt to negotiate with the German occupying power.71 Thorez included it in his Oeuvres (volume 19, 1959) – but, given the mythology that had been built around the text, it would have been impossible for him not to accept authorship.

National Front for national liberation The ‘second melody’ of national popular defence evolved during the latter part of 1940 and early months of 1941, though its rhythm was irregular and harmony discordant on account of Moscow’s insistence that Hitler should not be offered a pretext to break the Soviet – German pact. In June 1940, Stalin took advantage of the German offensive in Western Europe to occupy Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Bessarabia, nations assigned to the Soviet sphere in secret protocols. Thorez welcomed the move: ‘Soviets in Bessarabia. Movement becoming stronger in the Baltic countries (1 July 1940).’ But by the autumn, Moscow’s relations with Germany had become fraught. On 25 November, Dimitrov was summoned by Stalin and Molotov to discuss Hitler’s designs on Bulgaria and Turkey. ‘Our relations with Germany are polite in appearance, but there is serious friction between us,’ said the Kremlin dictator. For Dimitrov, this was a signal that communists could ‘pursue a policy aimed at demoralising the German occupation troops in various countries without shouting about it from the rooftops.’72 The Comintern leader had appreciated Thorez’s role in the drafting of the ill-fated ‘declaration’, as well as his initiative during the debacle over the negotiations. Thorez noted in his diary (8 August 1940) that Dimitrov ‘wants me to discuss with him more often’ and would like me to ‘play a part, lead the comrades here’. Dimitrov began, though not consistently, to treat Thorez and Marty as equals when matters relating to France were on the Comintern agenda. On 8 October, Thorez, Marty, Manuilsky, Stepanov and Togliatti

146

MAURICE THOREZ

discussed ‘directives’ for the PCF. They examined ‘the organisation of the leadership’ and agreed guidelines for ‘methods of illegal work’, including how to protect party cells in the event of arrests. They also considered ‘perspectives’ for a ‘conflict’ between Germany and the Soviet Union – significantly, almost nine months before the event. The PCF should, it was agreed, avoid ‘premature actions’; but in the event of a German – Soviet war it would risk everything and ‘go for broke’ (‘tout pour le tout’).73 Thorez started to receive regular reports from within France. On 13 September, he took notes from a letter by Frachon: ‘Anti-German sentiments in population [. . .] Hope of the popular masses for Soviet Union. Profound traces of the P[opular] F[ront]. Workers and soldiers are saying “A new PF is needed”.’ On 16 October: ‘We are working with Socialists, Radicals and former Croix-de-Feu. Hatred against the occupiers is growing.’ On 28 December, Thorez, Marty and Manuilsky were invited by Dimitrov to attend a briefing from Lev Vasilevsky, a colonel in Soviet intelligence.74 ‘Special information’ was how Thorez described the meeting in his diary. Vasilevsky, who would later be involved in an attempt to liberate Leon Trotsky’s assassin from a Mexican jail, had been operating in Paris under the cover of Soviet consul and using the alias Tarasov.75 The spy’s remarkable knowledge of PCF functioning and general politics prompted Thorez to take six pages of notes. Vasilevsky gave a particularly graphic account of events in Paris on 11 and 12 November: The march at the Arc de Triomphe, the crowd, Champs Elyse´es, at nightfall. The shouts ‘V[ive] De Gaulle’, ‘Down with the occupiers’. Gun shots [. . .] 30 wounded, 12 dead. [. . .] The singing of the Marseillaise. The applause. [. . .] Young C[ommunists] work audaciously. Stickers on Ger[man] cars. Distribution of papers and leaflets to queues. Travellers get off metro cars so they are not with Ger [mans]. Shop assistants reluctant to serve ‘the Boche’.76 Thorez, Cerreti and Manuilsky met with Dimitrov on 11 December to discuss how to organise the growing popular sentiment against the occupation. The idea of a ‘National Front for national liberation’ was raised for the first time. Thorez discussed the proposition again with Cerreti on 8 January and a further meeting took place with Dimitrov on 25 March. In the third week of April, Thorez was asked to draft a ‘directive’ for the Comintern Secretariat. After amendments and the usual consultation with Soviet leaders, his text was approved on 26 April and dispatched to Fried in Brussels. The PCF launched its appeal to establish the National Front on 15 May.

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

147

Though it remained a shell until the end of 1942, the announcement of the National Front marked a major step in PCF policy. The party pledged to ‘support any French government and any organisation or individuals’ prepared to wage a ‘genuine struggle against the invaders and traitors’. The words echoed those in the ‘declaration’ of the previous June, but now there was additionally a commitment ‘not to take a hostile position towards the partisans of the movement of de Gaulle’. The most striking novelty was the principle noted by Thorez in his diary: ‘the national takes precedence over the social’ (24 April 1941). The ‘essential task’ was ‘the struggle for national liberation’ and the party would ‘support any French government, all organisations and all people’ prepared to fight for that aim.77 After the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Comintern generalised the idea of ‘a great national front of peoples against fascist oppressors’. Described by Joan Barth Urban as ‘the Sphinx of the Popular Front raised from the ashes’, the slogan encompassed partisan warfare against the German army, broad social and political movements in support of resistance and an attempt to unify resistance activity under communist hegemony. An ‘integral part of Soviet national security policy’, it was applied across Nazi-occupied Europe, particularly in Yugoslavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and in fascist Italy.78 But the gestation of the policy and its initial prototype was, as with the Popular Front itself, fashioned by the PCF – with decisive input from Thorez.

A family in wartime While in the Soviet Union, Thorez kept a diary specifically devoted to family life.79 The first entry is 14 August 1940, the day Jeannette gave birth to the couple’s second son, Paul. The diary notes milestones in young Paul’s life: the first time he opens ‘his big eyes’, his weight and height, his first teeth, first steps, first ‘rrrs’. It charts the life of his brother Jean, a four-year-old in 1940: favourite bedtime stories, games and education. It also records special family occasions: meals, walks in the park and other outings. In some respects, it is a wartime version of what today would be a family photo album. The diary runs to thirty pages. Most days there are three or four sentences, though there are no entries at times when the family was separated. Gaps become more frequent during Thorez’s last few months in the Soviet Union. He did not continue making entries when back in France. It is a diary of exile. Thorez’s political and social isolation placed value on a personal life often previously neglected through frenetic political activity; it also gave him more time to record it.

148

MAURICE THOREZ

The diary tells us about Thorez’s concerns beyond the political. The Thorez family was treated as middle-ranking Soviet officials and privileges included access to provisions and medical care. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union in wartime was not an easy place to bring up young children. An anxious Thorez records winter temperatures – ‘minus 35 in the sun, minus 45 at night’. In the summer, he notes how the children are ‘devoured by mosquitos’. Occasionally, he notes the lack of electricity. The diary depicts a family prone to illness. During late 1940, Jeannette is ‘ill all night’ and Jean twice struck by fever. The young boy is prone to bed-wetting, a classic symptom of unsettled childhood. Paul becomes unwell in early November and is admitted to hospital. ‘I am choked with emotion as he leaves,’ writes Thorez. After ‘a terrible day of anxious waiting’, news arrives that inflammation of the lungs has developed into pneumonia. Thorez visits the baby in an isolation ward: ‘I see Paul through the glass. He looks at me, turns his eyes towards mine but does not smile [. . .] He is pale.’ Thorez is very close to his children. The family is Jeannette’s domain – and ‘Mummy’ receives no encouragement to become involved in politics or even social activity outside of the home. But Thorez participates in tasks which, at the time, would have been considered exclusively a mother’s responsibility. He sometimes gives Paul his bottle, washes him, changes nappies; he is open about his love when talking to Jean, sings to him and recites stories. Perhaps, Thorez’s dedication to his children was a reaction to the lack of warmth in the home environment he had experienced as a boy. Perhaps, also, Thorez was compensating for the failure of his marriage, and for losing contact with his first son, Maurice. Certainly, the fate of Maurice, who was living with Fried and Aurore in Nazi-occupied Brussels, would have been a constant worry. Fried cabled Dimitrov on three occasions in 1940 and early 1941 asking for arrangements to be made to send the 15-year-old to Moscow: ‘The young man runs the danger of being conscripted for forced labour [. . .] and it is also possible that he will be recognised and arrested, as he resembles his father.’80 During the Popular Front, Thorez had spoken of the ‘French family’ as the foundation of a ‘strong and healthy’ population, physically and morally. It was necessary, he said, to draw out the ‘innate desire to learn’ within children, to ‘enrich [their] memory with all the richness elaborated by humanity’.81 He viewed his own family as a centre for education and culture; or rather, the culture of which he considered himself part. Thorez read Jean the fables of Francois Fe´nelon and Hans Christian Anderson, the legend of William Tell and the story of Gavroche from Les Mise´rables. He taught him about Robespierre and Marat during the French Revolution and took him to see Charlie Chaplin’s satire on industrial capitalism, Modern Times – a film that gave the young boy nightmares. Thorez notes that, by the age of six, Jean has

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

149

‘the taste for books’. When he reads him an adventure by Paul-Louis Courier about French troops in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars, Jean ‘listens like a grown-up’. The remarks are an echo of the young Thorez’s own ‘thirst for knowledge’ described in Fils du Peuple. Thorez even encouraged Jean to read his autobiography and to ‘ask Mummy’ about it.82 The Thorez family discussed the Soviet Union – ‘Stalin’s concern for young school pupils’ – and Jean enjoyed playing as a Red Guard, marching around the house with a toy rifle. More often, however, talk was about France, its history, geography and some elementary politics. ‘Will Laval be kept in the Chateau de Vincennes?,’ asks Jean on one occasion. Looking at maps of the country – and particularly the plan of Paris – was a favourite pastime. Diary entries combine nostalgia with a touch of melancholy: ‘Jean comes and slips into my bed. I tell him about the great journeys he made as a baby – the Ce´vennes, Provence, Corsica, the Loire, the Charente, the Jura and the Alps.’ The war and its progress receive hardly a mention in the family diary. But on 22 June 1941, Thorez wrote: ‘Hitlerite aggression against the S[oviet] U[nion],’ underlining the phrase in red crayon.

Ufa Dimitrov was summoned to the Kremlin at 7 o’clock on the morning of 22 June. ‘They have attacked us, without any demands, without any negotiations; they have attacked us as traitors, like bandits,’ announced Stalin with, according to the Comintern leader, ‘incredible calmness, resoluteness and confidence’. A few hours later, Dimitrov relayed Stalin’s analysis of the situation to a meeting of Comintern functionaries and leading foreign communists: ‘The question of socialist revolution is not to be raised. The Soviet people are waging a patriotic war against fascist Germany. It is a question of defeating fascism, which has enslaved a great many people and is attempting to do the same to many others.’83 Comintern strategy had become straightforward: communists should now ‘go for broke’ to inflict blows against the Nazi enemy, while simultaneously attempting to mobilise the broadest possible alliance. In France, this posed the question of relations with General de Gaulle. On 25 June, Thorez and Marty telegrammed Duclos: ‘The time has come to search out and organise direct contacts with the Gaullist movement, whose partisans understand [. . .] that the liberation of France is linked to the victory of the Soviet Union.’84 Simultaneously, plans were laid for Thorez, Marty and Raymond Guyot to return to France, travelling by way of London in order to meet with de Gaulle. ‘By making contact with de Gaulle,’ explained Dimitrov to Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria, ‘they believe it possible to

150

MAURICE THOREZ

form important military forces in the colonies and, inside France itself, to initiate a major movement against the government of Pe´tain and Laval, including the possibility of civil war.’85 At first, there were assurances from the British that the trio would be allowed to come to London. A meeting between Thorez and Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador, to discuss arrangements was provisionally arranged for 6 July.86 Eleven days later Dimitrov was, however, informed that ‘the English and de Gaulle consider that at the present time it would not be useful to conduct negotiations with the leaders of the French Communist Party’.87 Relations between the Communists and de Gaulle would remain tense. The Communists sought an alliance in which the general would take responsibility for exterior forces, while allowing the PCF to hegemonise resistance within France. But de Gaulle insisted on leadership of the entire resistance movement. He also held a trump card: Thorez’s conviction for desertion, which he skilfully played both to restrict the communist leader’s scope for activity and to use as a bargaining tool. So Thorez remained in a city threatened by an advancing German army and increasingly coming under air attack. Russian-born British journalist Alexander Werth, a veteran of the London Blitz, wrote of ‘tracer bullets, and flares, and flaming onions, and all sorts of rockets [. . .], the din was terrific; never saw anything like it in London.’88 The authorities began an evacuation. On 11 July, Jeannette Vermeersch, Jean and Paul left for Gorky as part of ‘the Comintern’s children’s collective’ (400 kilometres east of Moscow in the Volga region, Gorky is today called Nizhny Novgorod); on 24 July, Thorez and other residents of the Kuntsevo dachas were relocated to Pushkino, a former summer haunt of the nobility, twenty miles north of Moscow; on 15 October, a convoy of trains began transporting Soviet and Comintern officials and staff towards the Urals. The notice to depart was short and, in the panic, Thorez had no time to pick up personal effects and papers. The journey was also chaotic: at one point the train took the wrong track, putting an additional 20 hours on its duration. Thorez stayed two days in Kuybyshev, the new administrative centre for the Soviet government, and then travelled a further 450 kilometres to Ufa, the town in which the International’s staff was relocated.89 Dimitrov and Manuilsky remained in Kuybyshev, an indication that the Comintern was acting, more than ever, as an extension of Soviet diplomacy. Thorez was again removed from discussions about policy and strategy, even sometimes from discussions concerning France. His isolation increased after June 1942, when Dimitrov and other Comintern leaders, including Marty, moved back to Moscow. Operations in Ufa were directed by Togliatti. The most important activity was the Inoradio, the Comintern radio stations communicating with activists

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

151

and transmitting propaganda to occupied countries. The writer Jean-Richard Bloch, who had arrived in the Soviet Union in April 1941, was assigned to Radio France. Thorez noted an array of grievances in his diary. He had not been given a role in the highly centralised functioning of Inoradio and resented criticisms from Stepanov, Togliatti and others aimed at Bloch. If there were problems with Radio France, he fumed, they should be raised directly with him. ‘There is hardly ever the need to discuss with me,’ he noted after a row over a broadcast drawing lessons from the life of the revolutionary leader, Saint Just (27 August 1942). Another time he complained that Togliatti had promised to see him but not turned up: ‘I continue to be totally isolated, and kept in ignorance (19 August 1942).’ More resentment arose over relations with Roger Garreau, de Gaulle’s representative in Moscow. In early August, Garreau told Soviet diplomats that he would like ‘to meet one of the leaders’ of the PCF.90 Dimitrov arranged a meeting between Garreau and Marty for 13 August, and the two men met a further five times during August and September. Dimitrov received an immediate report: ‘Garaux [sic] is in favour of joint actions with the communists [and] De Gaulle is convinced of the necessity of such joint actions.’91 Thorez only heard about the first meeting ten days after it had taken place, and was furious: ‘G[arreau] wanted to see all the F[rench] com [munists] in the first place T[horez] [. . .] Astonished that A[ndre´] was alone.’92 The Thorez family was reunited in Ufa in January. Thorez’s diary refers to a ‘tranquil summer’, with ‘walks in the park with Paul and over the hill with Jean’. It also records consternation at the extreme conditions – trucks travelling over frozen ice on the river, snow in May – and continuing worries over the health of Paul. In November 1942, there was ‘no heating, no light and no water’ in the lodgings – described by Cerreti as ‘a barracks’ – and the family lived and slept in a single room, which also served as Thorez’s office.93 Thorez could do little more than record events in France in his notebooks. Using information from Duclos, usually received after several weeks’ delay, he sketched the campaign of sabotage and assassinations of German officials by the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). He noted broader mobilisations, such as the ‘grande journe´e of struggle against the enemy’ on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Valmy. He recorded the ‘rafle du Ve´l’ d’Hiv’ on 16 July, when French police rounded up 13,000 Jews, including 6,000 women and 4,000 children, handing them to the German authorities for deportation to Auschwitz. ‘Terrible scenes. Unfavourable impression on the population,’ he noted (21 August 1942). He followed Vichy’s collaboration in the dispatch of workers to German war factories: ‘[need to] elaborate an action plan for struggle against departure to Germany,’ he wrote on 28 October, and listed in

152

MAURICE THOREZ

the following weeks a series of workers’ demonstrations and strikes. Thorez also recorded the ruthless retribution by the German authorities: the first group of communist hostages went to their deaths at Chaˆteaubriant in October 1941 after making a declaration including the words: ‘Long live the PCF and its leader Maurice Thorez.’94 In June 1942, Thorez celebrated the escape of nineteen detainees from the Camp de Compie`gne; amongst those tunnelling out were his future personal secretary, Georges Cogniot, and his brother, Louis.

Disbanding the Comintern On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched a counter-offensive at Stalingrad. The same day, Thorez was summoned by Dimitrov to Moscow and asked to report on PCF strategy to the Comintern Secretariat. ‘The war’, Dimitrov told Thorez, was ‘at a military and political turning point’ and ‘France [had] become very important (23 November 1942).’ Eleven days earlier an American– British force had landed in French North Africa, prompting Hitler to invade France’s ‘non-occupied zone’. The Resistance received a huge impetus as remaining illusions that Vichy was a shield against the Germans were destroyed. Thorez’s presentation to the Secretariat on 25 November was not well received. Manuilsky demanded ‘a more profound analysis’ and Dimitrov, though defending Thorez from ‘unfair criticism’, spoke of ‘insufficiencies of the line’. By now, Thorez had learnt to expect petulant complaints and delivered ‘a lively riposte’ (25 November), blaming deficiencies on ‘his political and mental isolation of nine months’ in the Urals (27 November). Thorez reached agreement with Dimitrov that he could stay in Moscow and his family would be able to join him, but – for reasons that are unclear – he returned to Ufa on 5 December, arriving with a big bag of presents, including woolly winter clothes and books for the children.95 Before leaving Moscow, Thorez drafted a policy document on France, which Dimitrov forwarded to Stalin for approval.96 Representing a further evolution of the national front strategy, it raised the preparation of a ‘popular insurrection’ for the liberation of France ‘not as propaganda but as a practical task’ and posed broadening the national alliance to unite ‘all the French [. . .] regardless of former political and other disagreements’. Thorez resurrected the slogans of ‘French reconciliation’ and ‘French Front’, first raised in the summer of 1936. The document proposed formal cooperation with de Gaulle, which led to a decision to send Fernand Grenier to London as permanent delegate of the PCF. It also advocated reaching out to ‘people who until the very last moment were under the influence of Vichy’. This was a reference to

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

153

Francois Darlan, the former minister in Pe´tain’s government, now recognised by Roosevelt and Churchill – despite protests from de Gaulle – as head of a ‘sort of Vichy across the sea’ in North Africa.97 Stalin approved American and British support for Darlan, saying that in war it was necessary to make use of ‘the devil and his crew’.98 Yet Thorez’s enthusiasm for the former Vichy minister went beyond Soviet diplomatic considerations. When Darlan was assassinated a few weeks later, he wrote a ‘eulogy and salute’ for publication in the Comintern and Soviet press. His declaration that Darlan had died as a martyr ‘for France’ was too much for Soviet editors, who substituted the phrase that Darlan had ‘paid the price for all his previous crimes’ (26 December). The Thorez family began the six-day train journey back to the Russian capital on 31 January, the day the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad. For three weeks they stayed in a small apartment – ‘cold, despite the central heating’ – before moving to a small house in a southern district of the city. There was ‘no sun in the two main rooms’, but ‘a small sunny room upstairs was set aside as a playroom for the children’. Thorez’s presence in the Soviet Union was now well known in diplomatic circles and he no longer behaved as a clandestine. He made the most of Moscow: there were family visits to the circus, walks around the Kremlin and across the Moskva’s bridges, trips on the metro and outings to the public baths, where Paul was ‘thrilled to take his first shower’. The family moved back to their dacha in Kuntsevo on 10 May and Thorez’s diary records a happy early summer: walks through grassland and woods, an abundance of butterflies, meals on the terrace; ‘the children are magnificent’.99 Thorez’s good spirits were linked to his more inclusive role in Comintern and PCF affairs. He discussed regularly with Dimitrov, received timely and detailed reports of events in France and convened a weekly ‘editorial board’ of PCF members to discuss general strategy and the content of broadcasts. Using the pseudonyms Pierre Gallois and Andre´ Lefranc, Thorez wrote commentaries for Radio France, which were read by Jean Richard Bloch.100 Relations with Marty remained fractious, despite Dimitrov brokering a deal for ‘comrades to work more collaboratively’ at the ‘editorial board’ (19 March). On 30 March, Thorez drafted a long ‘directive’ to Grenier in London. Roosevelt’s decision to replace the assassinated Darlan with General Henri Giraud, ‘a man of reactionary views and no political sense’,101 meant relations between de Gaulle and the allies were close to breaking point. Following the Soviet line, Thorez refused to privilege one or other of the two generals. His diary notes: ‘real perspective to create powerful anti-Hitl[er] army, which is why C[ommunist] [P]arty demands unity G[overnmen]t DeG[aulle],

154

MAURICE THOREZ

Gir[aud] and all others.’ As de Gaulle’s leadership was not ‘an accomplished fact’, it was necessary to ‘continue cordial relations with patriots of all tendencies’ (emphases in original) (30 March 1943). Paradoxically, the refusal by the allies and the Soviet Union to recognise de Gaulle as uncontested leader of ‘free France’ prompted the General to bolster his position through seeking firmer ties with the internal resistance and the PCF. In May 1943, Thorez was appointed to the thirteen-person Presidium specially convened to discuss the dissolution of the Communist International. Stalin’s directive to wind up the ‘world party of socialist revolution’ was delivered to Dimitrov on 8 May, and the Comintern leader wasted no time in convening the Presidium for 13 May. Alongside Thorez sat many who were to help shape the post-war communist bloc, including Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck (German Democratic Republic) and Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi (Hungary). Thorez was appointed to the five-person editorial commission to finalise the drafting of the decision (along with Dimitrov, Manuilsky, Pieck and Dolores Iba´rruri, the Spanish communist known as La Pasionaria). The Comintern’s demise was announced to the Politburo in Stalin’s office on 21 May, and published in Pravda the following day.102 Historians have linked the decision to disband the Comintern – as well as the haste with which it was carried through – to Stalin’s desire to give ‘absolute priority’ to the fight against Nazi Germany and his need ‘to improve relations with the allies’.103 Yet the idea had been on the Kremlin dictator’s mind for several years. By the mid-thirties, the Comintern had become a mouthpiece for Soviet diplomacy, but one that nevertheless possessed an annoying degree of autonomy. On occasions, Stalin expressed irritation at its ‘absurd decisions’.104 As Joan Barth Urban notes, ‘however hollow the bureaucratic structure had become [. . .], the last thing [Stalin] wanted was an organisational framework in any way conducive to genuine multilateral consultations amongst communist leaderships.’105 Thorez first heard of the possibility of the Comintern’s closure on 21 April 1941, two years before its actual demise. The previous evening, Stalin had told a vodka-drenched outing of high-powered communists to the Bolshoi Theatre that the Comintern should be replaced with ‘an organ of information, ideological and political aid’, allowing parties to be ‘transformed into authentic national communist parties’ which adapted in appropriate ways to the politics and culture of their particular countries.106 On receiving a report from Dimitrov, Thorez noted: ‘seems right, conforms to the direction of my own thinking.’107 Thorez explained the dissolution of the Comintern to a meeting of exiled French communists on 27 May 1943. Though ‘opportune’, the decision was, he stressed, ‘not a manoeuvre’ taken for ‘temporary considerations’. It related to the ‘path of development of the workers’ movement [. . .] and the fight

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

155

against fascism, before and during the war’ and was linked to the struggle for the ‘U[nited] F[ront], the P[opular] F[ront], the French F[ront] and the current need of a broad National Front’. It would also open the way for a fusion with the Socialists to create a ‘single party of the working class’. In short, Thorez believed that shutting down the International would – despite the interruption of 1939 – 40 – reinforce the process began in 1934: the evolution of the PCF into a socially progressive force firmly rooted in national political culture. If Thorez believed the decision would allow him and his party more autonomy, while maintaining its ‘internationalist spirit’ and ‘loyalty’ to Moscow, he was quickly disappointed. Stalin had no intention of loosening his grip on the world communist movement. Dimitrov and Manuilsky were transferred to a ‘Special Department of International Information’ attached to the central committee of the Soviet party, and equipped with new secretariats staffed by Soviet apparatchiks. Their role remained the same – ‘leadership’ and ‘liaison with foreign countries’ – but gone were the meetings and forums at which national leaders could, even in a superficial way, partake in policy discussions and share experiences.108 The consequences for Thorez were immediate. Access to information – through meetings with Dimitrov and reports received through the International’s apparatus – was restricted. Thorez sought discussions with Dimitrov, only to receive ‘a long formal and contemptuous reply, showing no eagerness’.109 Simultaneously, the agreement brokered by Dimitrov over the functioning of the French editorial board collapsed. Marty stopped attending meetings and failed to respond to Thorez’s requests for a discussion.

The long return Thorez’s frustration reached boiling point over Dimitrov’s handling of arrangements to send Marty to Algiers, which from June 1943 was the seat of the Comite´ francais de Libe´ration nationale (CFLN), effectively a provisional government led jointly by de Gaulle and Giraud. The PCF presence in Algiers was strong after the release of twenty-seven parliamentary deputies and hundreds of other communist activists from Vichy detention centres. Without consulting Thorez, Dimitrov began negotiations to obtain a visa for Marty to travel in order to take command of the communist group.110 Discussions dragged on, until Thorez heard from Stepanov on 21 September that ‘Andre´ is going to leave’. The following day, he learnt that Dimitrov had fully briefed Marty on his role in Algiers: ‘work collectively, give aid not orders, take account of complex problems and perspectives, [. . .] maintain leadership and liaison with B[enoıˆ]t [Frachon].’ On being informed about the

156

MAURICE THOREZ

briefing, Thorez responded with sarcasm: ‘I simply observe that it would have been good if I had been invited’ (22 September). Thorez and Marty met two days before the latter’s departure. Thorez’s advice well summarises his view of the demeanour of a communist leader: Be unitary, the best patriot, and at the same time, prudent. Everyone will have their eyes on you, because you are A[ndre´], because you are part of the leadership of the largest party in France, because you have arrived from M[oscow]. [. . .] Be scrupulous, patient. Make every effort to work collectively. Our unity (I lock my fingers together), is our most precious asset. A great responsibility falls on you. You will be an invaluable aide. Thorez finished with a quip, which also served as a word of warning: ‘Let it not be like here.’ According to Thorez, ‘Andre´ seemed emotional. [. . .] On leaving, he embraced me. I gave him a final recommendation: “prudence and unity”. He replied: “Do not worry. When you come back to France, you will be happy.”’111 Before long, however, Thorez was railing at Marty’s behaviour in Algiers. On 25 August, de Gaulle had invited the PCF to become part of the CFLN and, by late September, negotiations for Grenier and Billoux to join the administration were near completion. But, after Marty’s arrival, the party put down new conditions, including the right to select which communists would be ministers. De Gaulle rejected the demands – having recently seen off the challenge of Giraud, his position was strengthened – and Thorez immediately blamed Marty for the ‘impasse’. For him, the essential issue was that communists should become members of de Gaulle’s government-in-waiting and the idea that ‘such or such a communist’ would substantially ‘change the face of things’ was an ‘illusion’ (17 November 1943). On 15 January 1944, Thorez met Dimitrov and Manuilsky and attacked Marty’s line as lacking ‘ambition, perspectives and political sense’ and his language as ‘narrow and sectarian’. He concluded: ‘it is necessary to let me go [to Algiers] as quickly as possible’.112 In effect, Thorez’s caution and pragmatism was confronting Marty’s intransigence and dogmatism. But the General Secretary’s approach was in accord with Soviet diplomacy and received encouragement from Dimitrov and Manuilsky. In Algiers, tensions between the PCF and de Gaulle centred on the organisation of state power after the defeat of Germany. De Gaulle was preparing a list of prefects and senior civil servants who would take office after the defeat of the occupation; the Communists advocated organs of the popular movement as an alternative basis for the new power, particularly local committees of the Resistance in which the party and its supporters were

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

157

rapidly becoming the dominant force. The position of Thorez and Moscow was that ensuring victory in the war should take priority over resolving this and related matters. The details of the strategy were formulated on 3 March at a meeting attended by Dimitrov, Manuilsky, Thorez and, significantly, Togliatti. It was the Italian leader who communicated a ‘directive’ to Marty in Algiers. It told the PCF to avoid ‘confrontations on secondary and formal questions [. . .] that can only damage relations with de Gaulle’, including the ‘totally premature and pointless [. . .] discussion over the future constitution of France’. It stressed the priority of ‘the creation of a French army and its active participation in military operations against the Germans’. The line for France mirrored the strategy for Italy, which was confirmed the same day at a meeting between Stalin and Togliatti.113 Two days later, Togliatti began a journey back to Italy where he would oversee what became known as the ‘Svolta di Salerno’ (the Salerno turn), joining a government of national unity under the former fascist chief-of-staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and postponing ‘the institutional question’ – particularly the role of the monarchy – until the end of the war. Thorez’s diary is now dominated by his campaign to return to French territory. He held meetings with Garreau and General Ernest Petit, de Gaulle’s military representative in Moscow, and soon became on friendly terms with both men. A passport was prepared and Thorez met Sir Archibald Clark, the British ambassador, who agreed to supply a visa. He made his moderate stance known to the Gaullists at every opportunity, telling Garreau: ‘my party does not contemplate taking power, neither now nor during the Liberation, nor during the period of convalescence and reconstruction of the country.’114 But on 24 February, an embarrassed Garreau read Thorez a communication from de Gaulle’s private office: ‘T [horez] deserted at the start of this war and took refuge on enemy territory [. . .] T[horez] coming to Algeria [is] inopportune [and] could provoke disturbances.’ Thorez was incandescent with rage: ‘I do not know if I can continue maintaining relationship [with de Gaulle] under these new conditions,’ he wrote in his diary. On calming down, a strategy was agreed with Manuilsky, which included asking communists in Algiers to raise the ‘Thorez affair’ when negotiating with de Gaulle (24 February 1944). On 4 April, however, Grenier and Billoux became commissioners in de Gaulle’s administration, while leaving the General Secretary’s situation unresolved. ‘I find it hard to understand’, Thorez complained to Dimitrov, ‘how our comrades in Algiers could have entered the CFLN without resolving in a positive way the question of my journey to Africa.’115 In October 1947, after the Cominform conference, Thorez would launch a ferocious attack on Marty over the matter

158

MAURICE THOREZ

(see chapter seven). However the directive to Algiers communicated by Togliatti did not insist that the General Secretary’s return become a red line in negotiations. Communist participation in the administration and good relations with de Gaulle were considered more important than a ‘secondary question’ relating to a particular comrade, a point Thorez himself had previously argued. Part of the strategy to pressurise de Gaulle was to raise Thorez’s profile through broadcasts on Radio Moscow. Between 18 May and 22 October, Thorez delivered twenty commentaries of 10 – 12 minutes duration, which were transmitted to France on Thursday evenings. He spoke about the allied advance, the Liberation of Paris, Nazi atrocities, and the ‘glorious combat’ of the Francs-tireurs et partisans. Familiar themes from the Popular Front period were delivered with a patriotic fervour of astonishing intensity: France was waging a ‘holy war of national liberation’; its people possessed the spirit of those who had fought in the Battles of Bouvines (1214) and Valmy (1792), on the Marne and at Verdun. Thorez declared the victory of ‘the French Front’ which ‘has finally emerged’ at the cost of terrible suffering. ‘Let us swear French men and women, that nothing will ever again divide us,’ he urged. Some broadcasts contained ebullient calls for retributive justice. On 17 July, 57,000 bedraggled and dishevelled German prisoners-of-war – captured during Operation Bagration, the dramatic Soviet advance in Belorussia and Poland – were paraded through the streets of Moscow. Thorez declared: And while they passed, I savoured the joy of vengeance. Vengeance for our young children dying of hunger for four years. Vengeance for our brothers and sons, who died in captivity, murdered by Hitlerite hard labour. Vengeance for our martyrs, for the heroes of Chaˆteaubriant. [. . .] Vengeance for all our heroic young people decimated by the Nazi bandits. Vengeance for our beautiful country of France, ravaged, oppressed, wounded, humiliated.116 On 15 September, Thorez heard that his position would be ‘a touchstone’ in the diplomatic preparations for the visit of de Gaulle to Moscow. Soviet diplomacy had turned its attention to the post-war settlement. In early October, Churchill would arrive for the ‘Tolstoy Conference’, at which famously the ‘percentages agreement’ for Eastern Europe was brokered. De Gaulle’s planned visit in November was viewed as equally significant. Stalin viewed France as an important counterweight to Anglo-American influence in Europe, as well as an obstacle to German renaissance. De Gaulle was seeking a relationship with the Soviet Union to assert his independence

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

159

over Britain and the United States, with whom his wartime relations had been difficult. In France, however, relations between de Gaulle and the Communists were becoming increasingly strained. Following the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle strove to reassert the authority of state institutions: prefects and other appointed officials, the regular army – into which resistance forces were to be integrated – and a reconstituted police force. Yet, in parts of the country, particularly in the south, the resistance movement held effective sovereignty; and in some industrial regions, workers were taking control of factories whose owners had collaborated with the occupation. A report by the Soviet charge´ d’affaires described a ‘duality of power’, with the popular movement challenging the legitimacy of de Gaulle’s representatives.117 Some historians argue that during this period communists in France pursued a revolutionary strategy to take power.118 Certainly, leaders, including Frachon and Duclos, made statements that questioned de Gaulle’s authority, proclaiming the Resistance to be ‘the legal basis of the provisional government’.119 But the political line was inconsistent and incoherent. Communists remained part of the Provisional Government and generally intervened to channel potentially revolutionary eruptions away from open defiance of the administration. Communist strategy – if indeed a strategy existed – was to maintain a mobilised resistance movement as points of influence for the party to exert pressure on the administration and state. Nevertheless, for de Gaulle, this represented a challenge to his personal authority and a wider threat to social order. On 28 October, de Gaulle played the card of the General Secretary’s desertion for the final time. Garreau, his Moscow representative, informed Thorez that an amnesty would soon be announced for offences linked to the war dating before 18 June 1940, thus paving the way for his return to France. Simultaneously, in Paris, de Gaulle decreed the disbandment of the Patriotic Guard, militias linked to the resistance movement. Positioning himself with leverage in advance of negotiations with Stalin, de Gaulle had implicitely linked Thorez’s amnesty with the demand that the PCF respect the structures of the post-war state. The communist leadership in France immediately opposed the dissolution of the Patriotic Guard. While hinting at a compromise in which the militias would become a component of the national army, the Political Bureau condemned de Gaulle’s ‘contempt for popular sovereignty and democratic forms of government’.120 On 4 November, Frachon addressed a defiant rally of 30,000 Patriotic Guard members, at which it was announced that the militias would continue to function under the name of Gardes Civiques et Re´publicaines.121 In Moscow, Thorez discussed de

160

MAURICE THOREZ

Gaulle’s forthcoming visit and the controversy over the militias with Dimitrov and Manuilsky.122 Then, on 19 November, he was summoned to the Kremlin. Thorez’s audience with Stalin, which was also attended by Molotov and Beria, lasted almost two hours.123 After the mandatory small talk, Stalin got to the point: ‘communists have not yet understood that the situation has changed in France’; it was a ‘new situation, favourable to de Gaulle’, whose government has been recognised by the allies. Communists must therefore pass from an offensive to a defensive situation and not succumb to provocations, which could allow its enemies ‘to strangle’ the party and create a ‘reactionary government’. And, referring to the immediate controversy over the militias, he ruled: ‘in these conditions it is difficult for the communists to have parallel armed forces as there is a regular army. [. . .] It is difficult to defend this position.’ The same evening, Thorez called on Dimitrov and summarised Stalin’s conclusions: the PCF should attempt to build a ‘left bloc’, searching ‘patiently for allies amongst the socialists and radicals’; it should stand for ‘the renaissance of France’, its military and industrial rebirth, and ‘a democratic regime’; it should not ‘overestimate the party’s strength’ and not expect ‘to single-handedly resolve the tasks confronted by the French people’; it ‘should not become isolated from other political formations and the masses’ and not ‘defy the government of de Gaulle’, but instead pursue ‘loyal politics’; it should not ‘insist on maintaining the armed forces of the Resistance’ but advocate a ‘single army’, while ensuring ‘its people’ were well placed within it; finally, the party should not re-establish the Young Communists but launch a broader ‘general patriotic union’ of the youth.124 The points would form the basis of PCF strategy on Thorez’s return to Paris. Thorez’s audience at the Kremlin has been considered proof that post-war PCF policy was simply ‘the strict application by Thorez’ of Stalin’s orders.125 Indeed, Thorez took precautions to avoid this charge, never referring to the meeting, either publicly or at leadership meetings on his return to France. Certainly, Stalin was using Thorez as a pawn in his negotiations with de Gaulle, whom he could confidently reassure that communists would not be a threat to ‘republican order’. The French leader arrived in the Soviet Union on 26 November and before leaving would sign a ‘treaty of friendship’. But to suggest that the meeting with Stalin shows that Thorez ‘possessed no autonomy within the international communist movement’ approaches the problem in a one-sided way.126 The politics outlined in Moscow and followed in post-Liberation France were a continuation of those pursued during the Popular Front period and during the war since early 1941. Thorez’s role in defining them had not been passive.

EXILE IN THE PROMISED LAND

161

The day following his meeting with Stalin, Thorez began a week-long journey back to France, passing through Baku, Tehran, Cairo, Naples and Malta. On 26 November, he stepped on his native soil for the first time in over five years at a military airbase near Salon-de-Provence. Thorez had not directly known the pain of occupation or experienced the combat of resistance, but the conflict had marked him personally. Amongst lost comrades were his mentor, Eugen Fried, assassinated by the Gestapo in August 1943, his predecessor as general secretary, Pierre Semard, shot as a hostage in March 1942 and his brother, Louis, executed by the Germans in August 1942. Lost also was one of those with whom the Thorez couple had shared their alpine holiday in August 1939: Danielle Casanova was arrested for resistance activities in February 1942 and transported to Auschwitz, where she perished in May 1943.

CHAPTER 6 IN THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

The PCF emerged from the Nazi occupation as a vibrant force, energised by its role in the Resistance and the prestige of the Soviet Union, considered by 61 per cent of Parisians as the ‘nation that had contributed the most to the defeat of Nazi Germany’.1 Membership surged from around 60,000 in the summer of 1944 to 540,000 in 1947.2 Workers poured into the CGT, which grew from its pre-war membership of under two million to over five million: Communists controlled twenty-one major federations, compared to ten in 1939, and 80 per cent of departmental unions.3 The adherence of Pablo Picasso – welcomed into the party at a reception attended by Paul Langevin, Fre´de´ric Joliot-Curie (eminent physicists) and Paul E´luard, Claude Morgan, Louis Aragon (writers) – symbolised the party’s stature amongst intellectuals and artists.4 The next two-and-a-half years represent the high watermark of Thorez’s career as communist politician. He was not only general secretary of a mass party but also after October 1945 a minister of state and, on two occasions, deputy prime minister within a coalition government. Revelling in this heightened status, Thorez pursued a hectic agenda of official functions and visits, at which he was greeted by dignitaries and feted by party supporters. His personal life was enriched by the birth in November 1946 of another son, Pierre, and in September 1947, after finalising a divorce with Aurore, by his marriage to Jeannette Vermeersch, who gradually became not only his political prote´ge´e but his confidante as well as spouse. The post-war years, thought Thorez, promised a lengthy period in government for the PCF and – for him personally – a long ministerial career. But, as Cold War winds began to brew, this ‘most happy perspective’5 came to an abrupt end in May 1947, when communist ministers were ejected from Paul Ramadier’s government. For several months, Thorez believed his party’s exit from the corridors of power would be temporary. It was not until the

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

163

launch of the Cominform in October 1947 that he began to recognise the implications of the shift in world geopolitical relations for French politics.

Battle of production The atmosphere in the French capital was bitter-sweet when Thorez arrived back on 27 November 1944: Paris had been liberated, but war continued. Two million French people were either prisoners or deportees within Germany; thousands of homeless Parisians were spending the night in stinking metro stations; food supplies remained scarce.6 One of de Gaulle’s associates wrote: ‘Paris is lugubrious, cold, as if empty and without a soul.’7 The PCF’s slogan of the hour was drawn from the poetry of Paul VaillantCouturier: ‘communism is preparing [. . .] les lendemains qui chantent’ [a future that sings]’.8 But many communist activists were already impatient at the pace of change, angry at the ineffectual purge of collaborationist officials and disheartened by the side-lining of resistance organisations, symbolised by de Gaulle’s decision to disband the Patriotic Guard. Reporting to the Soviet Institute for French Affairs, Frachon described ‘the disillusionment of workers [. . .] who having chased out the Germans were counting on fundamental revolution in France and the social liberation of workers.’9 Thorez’s arrival enthused party ranks. Some activists drew an analogy with Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917. The PCF leader would, they hoped, steer the party back on course towards the socialist transformation. One branch addressed Thorez, saying they were ‘surprised and worried’ by the ‘present evolution of the party’: We are writing to you, dear comrade, because we know that for you as for us Russia is the living example to try to emulate. [. . .] The situation is even riper for us than it was for the Russians in 1917. [. . .] Let us not move further to the right; let us stand firm to become bigger and stronger. Let us not push our red flag further into the background.10 Such voices were, however, drowned amidst the general excitement of recruits pouring into the party. Thorez addressed three huge events in the Ve´l’ d’Hiv, symbolically reclaiming for the left the cycling stadium that had served as a detention centre for thousands of Jews in July 1942. He spoke at a youth festival (2 December) and at a commemoration for hostages executed by the Nazis, featuring the orchestra and choir of the Paris Opera (14 December). Most dramatic was the rally on 30 November. An article in l’Humanite´ penned by Cogniot described how 50,000 people leapt to their feet to greet ‘the

164

MAURICE THOREZ

great patriot, the bravest and most visionary Frenchman [and] applauded, sang, laughed, repeatedly chanting “Vive Thorez!”.’ After the General Secretary’s speech, ‘hands reached out, laden with flowers, books, presents and more flowers. Like waves in an ocean, floral tributes broke over the rostrum: humble bouquets, sumptuous baskets, magnificent sprays.’11 Thorez had meticulously rehearsed the rhetorical flourishes in what was his first speech for over five years. He adroitly evoked the humiliation of occupation and privations of war, attacking Nazism, ‘traitors’ and the still existing ‘fifth column’. But, following the line agreed with Stalin in Moscow, his words offered not a hint of promise of social liberation. They were, as Anthony Beevor puts it, a demand for ‘blood, sweat, increased productivity and national unity’.12 Thorez outlined the policy in more detail at a national meeting (described as a central committee, but really a mini-conference attended by over 400 regional leaders) held in Ivry between 21 and 23 January 1945. ‘Duality of power’ could not continue indefinitely in a non-revolutionary situation; demands of a socialist or communist character were not on the agenda; there could only be ‘a single state, with a single army and single police’; the role of local and regional committees linked to the Resistance was not to ‘substitute themselves’ for local and regional administrations, but ‘to help those who are administrating’. Communist activists steeped in Lenin’s theory of the state would have been familiar with Thorez’s logic, but some might have also noticed that his comments about ‘a single state’ were similar to those being made by de Gaulle. Thorez had up to this point avoided the thorny issue of the Patriotic Guard. He was now explicit: armed groups linked to the Resistance had been necessary during and in the immediate aftermath of the struggle against the Nazis and their Vichy accomplices, but public order must now be assured by the regular police. Conceding his line would not be universally popular, he attacked ‘false understanding and perspectives amongst certain militants’: failure to disband the guards would encourage ‘putschist tendencies [with] regrettable consequences for the party’s relationship with the masses’ and incite ‘incidents of degeneracy and gangsterism amongst the Resistance’.13 Thorez’s reference point throughout 1945– 46 was the Popular Front. His speech to the PCF’s Tenth Congress – held seven weeks after the German surrender – was published under the title Renaissance, De´mocratie, Unite´, slogans expressly recalling the 1935– 38 period. ‘National renaissance’ would be achieved through securing France a strong position in the world market, giving the country an ability to act independently from other major powers, particularly the United States. It would be led by the working class, who had a ‘class duty to produce, produce, and produce’. The theme of ‘democracy’

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

165

related to the party’s campaign for a constitution which placed sovereign power in the hands of a National Assembly, to which the executive and president would be accountable – a principle held by the republican left since 1793. ‘Unity’ had several dimensions. Throughout the first half of 1945, Thorez again proposed a fusion between the PCF and SFIO to form a ‘French workers’ party’, prompting a number of meetings between representatives of the two parties. At first, the proposal won some support amongst socialist activists, but faced decisive opposition from Le´on Blum after his return from the Buchenwald concentration camp. The theme of ‘unity’ also referred to the PCF’s aim of ‘a broad alliance between the working class and the middle classes’, the essence of Popular Front strategy. However, as in 1936, Thorez went further and posed effectively the question of a ‘French front’. He advocated a ‘climate of patriotic collaboration between workers, technicians and patriotic bosses’ and declared that ‘the recovery of France was not the task of a single party [but] the task of the entire nation’.14 Thorez drew particular lessons from the Popular Front period in relation to managing working-class militancy. At the May 1945 Central Committee, he argued that in 1936 strikes and factory occupations had been skilfully used by political opponents to frighten the middle class. The post-war party now faced a similar challenge. Strikes were, he claimed, being fermented by elements within de Gaulle’s government to embarrass the party and by ‘the trusts’ in an attempt to undermine France’s ‘national renaissance’. Party members working in the unions must ‘not fall into adventures and provocations’.15 Thorez took an especially strident stance against strikes in his former fiefdom, the northern coalfields. A vital component of economic recovery, coal output was running at only 40 per cent of its pre-war level, but the slogan ‘battle for coal’ had met little enthusiasm within mining communities. A series of strikes began in January 1945 and absenteeism was also widespread, the CGT estimating 19 per cent of miners were missing shifts each week. Workers’ discontent was rooted in the experience of the occupation, during which mining companies had eagerly collaborated with the Nazi authorities. Miners had staged two mass strikes (May– June 1941 and November 1943) and in August 1944 an insurrectional strike coincided with the liberation of Paris. Led by communists, most prominently Auguste Lecoeur, the miners’ movement demanded a purge of collaborating managers and supervisors, a return to working conditions agreed under the Popular Front, particularly an end to piecework, and the nationalisation of the mining companies, a demand of the National Council of the Resistance. Miners celebrated when the government took over the northern pits on 27 September 1944, but were quickly disappointed when working conditions remained unaltered. Only two supervisors were sacked, additional working

166

MAURICE THOREZ

days – particular Sundays – were introduced, and schemes linking wages and bonuses to individual output were not only maintained but extended.16 On 21 July, Thorez travelled to the pit town of Waziers, invited to report on decisions of the recent PCF Congress to party members. His speech, however, was aimed at the entire mining community and indeed the wider population. It was calculated to enhance his standing as a statesman, to show his courage when called upon to say unpopular things or make difficult decisions in the national interest. Thorez told miners that ‘the heroism displayed in the battle against the occupier [. . .] must now be deployed to win the battle for production’. Many in the 2,000-strong audience had heard a similar message from other PCF and CGT leaders, as well as from the socialist minister Robert Lacoste, but Thorez’s tone was different: Absences [from work] are happening too easily, for the slightest grievance. Miners who feel pride in their profession well know that so many absences lead to complete disruption of work. [. . .] I tell you, it’s a scandal. Such methods must end because they lead to anarchy, and encourage laziness. And here’s another thing. The other day I heard that in the Escarpelle pit, fifteen young miners asked to leave at six o’clock to go to a dance. I tell you, it’s a scandal, unacceptable, impossible. You well know, dear comrades, I was also young once. I also went to dances, but I never missed a single shift because of a fete or because it was Sunday. I say to the youth: you must have pride in your work [. . .] lazy people will never be good communists, good revolutionaries. Never. Never. Courageous miners who fear no challenge, who understand their profession have always been the best of our worker militants, the pioneers, the organisers of our unions, the pillars of our party. [. . .] It is impossible to approve a strike of any kind. [. . .] The whole of France is watching you, the whole of France is expecting a new and great effort from the miners, and particularly the miners of Nord and Pas-de-Calais.17 The audience was visibly ‘shaken’ by Thorez’s uncompromising opposition to strikes, his dismissal of the grievances that underpinned them and, particularly, his accusations of laziness and egotism.18 Nevertheless, the speech won applause. Skilfully constructed, it managed to dress a demand for industrial discipline and hard work in the clothes of the miners’ sense of community and solidarity. Waziers entered communist folklore – today, the sports centre in the town is still named ‘The Maurice Thorez Complex’. Thorez’s speech launched a massive propaganda campaign around ‘the battle for coal’, with posters,

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

167

brochures and visits to coalfields by communist and CGT leaders. Thorez spoke at four more rallies in northern mining towns during 1945 and 1946, sometimes, as at Auby in February 1946, donning pit gear to repeat his message underground. On every occasion, he recalled his familial ties to the region and his youthful activity as a leader of the miners’ union.19 Thorez viewed the Waziers speech as a key moment in the ‘battle of production’, a turning point for France’s post-war industrial recovery and a major factor behind the party’s electoral successes. In truth, the extent to which its message was heeded in northern mining communities was exaggerated. Throughout 1946, absenteeism remained at around 20 per cent and miners continued to resent working ‘additional days’, 85 per cent voting not to work on the Sundays either side of the New Year. Strikes also continued: miners in the region around Lens stopped work between 12 and 20 September 1945, prompting local communist mayors to write to colliery managers demanding ringleaders be sacked.20 Thorez scolded activists in the miners’ union for not resisting ‘a campaign of provocations by reformist elements against our effort for production’. When Auguste Lecoeur outlined workers’ grievances to the November Central Committee, Thorez condemned his contribution as ‘unworthy of the rostrum of the Central Committee’. Lecoeur’s immense stature, due to his leadership of miners’ struggles under the occupation, did not prevent the General Secretary questioning his stewardship of the union: ‘We love Lecoeur, but we love our party even more,’ he declared with a hint of a threat.21

‘Thorez to Power’ PCF politics in 1945 had evolved from the Popular Front period in one major respect. Communists were now ‘a party of government’. Between 1936 and 1938, Thorez’s proposals that the PCF should join a coalition government had been vetoed by the Comintern, but his arguments had been prescient. Following the war, communists joined the government in Italy, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg; in France, two communist ministers had sat in de Gaulle’s administration since April 1944. Thorez resurrected the term ‘party of government’ (first used in January 1938) to describe a long-term strategy. It is not ‘an empty phrase’, he told the May 1945 Central Committee, but indicative of the party’s ‘new role at the heart of the nation’s politics’.22 It also had implications for the character of the PCF: whilst ‘before the war, our members were excellent propagandists, they must now become hommes politiques’, capable of holding ‘high positions in state administration, prefectures and town halls’.23

168

MAURICE THOREZ

There were three parliamentary general elections during 1945 and 1946, two for a Constituent Assembly (October 1945 and June 1946), and in November 1946 for the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. The PCF topped the poll in October 1945 and polled its historic high of 28.3 per cent in November 1946. In municipal elections in May 1945, 1,413 communist mayors were elected (compared to 310 pre-war), with the party winning control of major towns, including Toulon, Nantes, Reims and Limoges.24 The October 1945 elections produced a communist–socialist majority in the Constituent Assembly and the PCF proposed a PCF–SFIO coalition with Thorez as President of the Council (prime minister). The idea was rejected out of hand by the Socialists and the PCF quickly compromised, voting with other parties to elect de Gaulle unanimously as head of the Provisional Government. The two wartime exiles, Thorez and de Gaulle, clashed when they met on 15 November to discuss the make-up of the administration. Thorez demanded that the PCF, as the largest party in the assembly, be awarded one of the three ‘grand’ ministries – Interior, Foreign Affairs or Defence – and a ‘fair distribution’ of other portfolios. De Gaulle refused to entrust a communist with a key ministry. Furious, Thorez accused the General of ‘insulting the memory of 75,000 communists who died for France and liberty’.25 Six days of brinkmanship followed. Thorez continued to insist that one of the three top positions be assigned to a communist; de Gaulle replied that pursuing the issue would prompt his resignation. Thorez’s diary contains a transcript of a draft ‘resignation letter from de Gaulle’ (16 November), an indication that the threat was real: ‘Certain demands, formulated as requirements by one of the parties, concerning the attribution of such or such specified ministerial department to one of its members seems to me incompatible with conditions of governmental independence, cohesion and authority.’26 The diary also records a frantic agenda of discussions within the PCF and negotiations with leaders of the SFIO and the Mouvement Re´publicain Populaire (MRP), the Christian centrist party that had won 25.6 per cent of the vote. Thorez tried to persuade the Socialists to move against de Gaulle, who he regarded as representative of ‘a still strong reaction’ inside France and figurehead of an attempt to mobilise a ‘western bloc’ against the Soviet Union on the international stage.27 He proposed an administration headed by Le´on Blum, a reincarnation of the Popular Front; but this time with Communists holding several ministerial positions, including Thorez as deputy prime minister. The SFIO was not prepared to participate in the manoeuvre and continued to support the premiership of de Gaulle. On 20 November, Thorez held two further meetings with the General and an agreement was reached. Five Communists joined the government, taking the portfolios of National Economy (Billoux), Industrial Production (Marcel Paul), Labour (Ambroise

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

169

Croizat) and Armaments (Charles Tillon), though expressly without control of the Armed Forces. Thorez became Minister of State with responsibility for Civil Service reform. The PCF had failed to attain a top ministry but, as The Times noted, ‘never before in France, or in any great country outside Russia, have there been so many communists in a government or in such important positions’.28 The Communists’ position was further strengthened when de Gaulle finally resigned on 20 January 1946. His departure followed a tussle with the Constituent Assembly over whether the level of military expenditure should be in his hands or controlled by parliament. But the ‘final provocation’ was the agreement reached by the PCF and SFIO over plans for the new constitution: the proposal of a single parliamentary chamber holding strict control over the executive was an anathema to de Gaulle’s notion of a strong presidential style of regime.29 With the general gone, the PCF again proposed Thorez as prime minister, which prompted a warning from within the Army chief-of-staff of ‘immediate military, economic, and diplomatic reprisals’ from the United States.30 The Socialists refused again to join a SFIO– PCF coalition and the three-party coalition continued, but now with the socialist Fe´lix Gouin as premier. Thorez became one of two deputy prime ministers (Vice-President of the Council) and three more communists joined the government, including Casanova and Lecoeur. The May referendum on the constitution and the June parliamentary elections signalled the first post-Liberation setbacks for the PCF. The left’s constitution was rejected by 53 per cent of those voting, with opposition mobilised by the MRP who whipped up fears of communists dominating a single chamber and restricting rights of expression and individual property. An atmosphere of anti-communism also shrouded the June elections to a new assembly. By raising the slogan ‘Thorez to Power’, Communists ensured that the General Secretary became an issue in the campaign. The socialist Minister of Interior, Andre´ Le Troquer, recalled Thorez’s support for the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact and his desertion from the army, claiming that Thorez in power would directly serve the interests of the Soviet Union. The MRP became the largest party (with 28.2 per cent), while the PCF’s vote declined slightly to 25.9 per cent. The MRP leader, Georges Bidault, became prime minister, but Thorez remained deputy prime minister and another communist, Rene´ Arthaud, joined the government as Minister for Public Health.

Minister of State Thorez won a reputation as a diligent and effective minister even amongst political opponents. To run his ministerial office, he appointed not a

170

MAURICE THOREZ

communist but the Radical, Pierre Meunier, formerly general secretary of the National Council of Resistance and close friend of the resistance martyr, Jean Moulin. Meunier was an experienced civil servant, before the war holding senior positions in the Ministry of Finances and the private office of Pierre Cot, Minister of Air during the Popular Front. Thorez’s private secretary (Chef de Cabinet) was also a Resistance figure: Marcel Servin, a PCF member and talented organiser. In January 1947, Jean Chaintron, a PCF member who led the Free French forces and became Prefect of Haute-Vienne at the Liberation, replaced Meunier as Directeur de Cabinet. Thorez seems to have consciously chosen aides with irreproachable Resistance credentials. After spending the war in the Soviet Union, Thorez sought ‘to surround himself with a kind of cordon sanitaire of resistance legitimacy’.31 One important exception was Jean Fre´ville, ghost writer of Fils du Peuple, who was appointed assistant private secretary. In total, Thorez’s office in the Place de la Concorde employed forty-eight staff, including officials, typists, chauffeurs and a cook, E´tienne Virlouvet, who became the husband of Thorez’s first wife, Aurore, and whose culinary talents prompted the envy of others in government circles.32 Thorez tried to divide his week strictly between governmental and party duties. Generally, Mondays and Thursdays were devoted to PCF work – the Secretariat met on Monday afternoon and Political Bureau on Thursday morning. Ministerial meetings were held on Tuesdays and Fridays, but each Tuesday morning before leaving home Thorez diligently prepared an article for Le Travailleur, the communist paper covering his Ivry constituency. Wednesdays were usually kept clear for appointments. After his return to France, Thorez was bombarded with letters and requests for meetings. A considerable number of letters begged for a personal helping hand, sometimes loans; Servin acted as a gatekeeper in such cases. Many were from people seeking information about wartime deportees or missing loved ones; Thorez always accorded ‘audiences’ to wives, girlfriends and children of party members who had been executed by the Nazis.33 Saturdays and Monday mornings were assigned to public engagements, which were often grand affairs. Typical was a visit to the old armaments factory in Ruelle (Charente) in January 1946. Thorez arrived with a large entourage to be welcomed by local public officials and dignitaries. He inspected a ‘guard of honour’, while a crowd mobilised by the local PCF cried ‘Vive Thorez’. After a lavish reception, ‘all the personalities of the town and region’ were presented to Thorez: members of the chamber of commerce, farmers’ leaders, as well as local employers and trade unionists. Young workers formed up around the national flag to offer the minister a gift. Thorez’s declaration that ‘a strong and powerful’ France

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

171

‘would have need of sturdy canons’ prompted a throaty rendition of La Marseillaise.34 Like other communist ministers and deputies, Thorez handed his parliamentary pay to the party treasurer, and received a modest remuneration linked to the average wage of a skilled worker. But the party granted him a lifestyle appropriate to his status through provision of a lavish residence, chauffeur and luxury car, housekeeper and unlimited expenses. Thorez organised much of his work from the office in his home, described by Robrieux as ‘a vast villa, almost a small chateau’, surrounded by extensive gardens in the Avenue de Versailles, Choisy-le-Roi.35 Thorez’s son, Paul, recalled: ‘My family didn’t live an ordinary lifestyle. [. . .] We went from one residence to another in chauffeur driven cars. In the middle of these expenses, we didn’t have a penny. [. . .] Because of the way the Party treated us, I developed a taste for this luxurious lifestyle. All those goodies came to us, the Thorez family, and we grew up with no idea of what things actually cost.’36 Thorez held ministerial responsibility for civil service reform. Demands to modernise the Fonction Publique had been on the political agenda for over fifty years, but its politicisation under Vichy meant that the issue was now urgent. The Pe´tain regime had introduced a law (September 1941) requiring public servants to swear loyalty to its values, linking their wages to marital status and number of children, forbidding the employment of Jews and women, and banning trade unions and the right to strike. To draw up the General Statute for Civil Servants (Statut ge´ne´ral des fonctionnaires), Thorez recruited expertise from both outside and inside the party, including Max Amiot, a young, highly qualified civil servant, and Jacques Pruja, an official in the CGT’s civil service federation. He relied on his own skills as a political fixer to negotiate the proposals through an avalanche of objections from within the civil service hierarchy, from the Christian Trade Union Federation (CFTC) – which was initially denied negotiating rights in the statute – and from within parliament, particularly the MRP.37 It is thought that Thorez secured the support of Georges Bidault by pledging, in return, communist backing for enshrining ‘the French Union’ – France’s overseas possessions – into the Republic’s proposed constitution.38 The statute was passed unanimously by the Assembly and became law on 19 October 1946.39 As well as outlining improved conditions in relation to pay, promotion opportunities based on merit (rather than seniority), longer holidays, sickness and retirement benefits, it granted, for the first time, full civil rights for public servants – including the right to join trade unions and to strike – and equal opportunities, at least formally, for women workers; it also stipulated disciplinary codes and procedures. Imbued with the Liberation ethos that a New France would be built not by elites but by its people, the

172

MAURICE THOREZ

statute attempted to introduce a democratic approach to human resource management, which – while leaving the power of the administrative elites intact – placed many decisions in the hands of ‘joint commissions’ made up of elected trade unionists and senior officials.40 It remained in place until 1983, when superseded by equally far-reaching reforms introduced by the government of Francois Mitterrand.

‘Absolute Monarchy’ Despite strict attempts to divide his time, Thorez found it difficult to balance ministerial responsibilities with his role as general secretary. Nevertheless, he remained ever-present at the Secretariat and Political Bureau – both of which he chaired – and always delivered a long closing address at the Central Committee, which allowed him to chastise individual comrades and have the final word on controversies. After his wartime isolation and anger at playing second fiddle to Marty, Thorez was determined to assert total authority over the party leadership. The demise of the Communist International gave him more leverage in shaping the makeup of leading committees. Before the war, the French Commission in Moscow had scrutinised and finalised their membership. Now a list of candidates was drawn up by Thorez, with some cursory consultations at the Political Bureau, before being presented to the Central Committee and party congress for formal stamp of approval. A major review of the leadership was inevitable at the June 1945 Congress, the first for eight tumultuous years. The Central Committee was greatly expanded, with twenty-nine full members and thirty-three candidate members. Thorez became the apex of a four-person secretariat – which also included Duclos, Marty and Le´on Mauvais, who as organisation secretary became known as the Minister of Interior – and a twelve-person Political Bureau.41 For the first time, a small group from the PCF women’s organisation (l’Union des Femmes Francaises) joined the Central Committee, including Mounette Dutilleul, who had acted as liaison with Thorez before his flight from the army in 1939, and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. Both women had been arrested for Resistance activities and deported to Nazi concentration camps. Thorez also sponsored the membership of his partner, Jeannette Vermeersch. The Stalinist practice of ranking members of the Central Committee to create a type of ‘dominance hierarchy’ was now entrenched. Thorez’s position as number one was more secure than ever, with only the number three, Marty, a potential competitor. Duclos (number two) was compromised by the l’Humanite´ affair of 1940. The ageing Cachin (number four) was also damaged

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

173

by his wartime wavering over the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact and whether to support acts of armed resistance. The next three in the hierarchy – Billoux, Ramette and Guyot – were Thorez loyalists. An undeclared member of the Political Bureau, Benoıˆt Frachon, possessed a powerbase in the unions and authority from his wartime exploits but had an unwritten agreement with Thorez granting him autonomy as CGT leader in return for his unswerving support for the General Secretary in the party. The relationship between Thorez and Marty became even more rancorous. With power relations of the war years between the two men reversed, it was now Marty’s turn to protest that, though a member of the Secretariat, he was excluded from key decisions about party policy. A clash took place following the October 1945 elections when Thorez refused to call a meeting of the Political Bureau to discuss the unfolding crisis around de Gaulle’s government.42 Marty was especially incensed by Thorez’s promotion of Jeannette Vermeersch to the Central Committee. When, a little later, Thorez also proposed her as a candidate to the Constituent Assembly, Marty campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the alternative candidature of Resistance hero, Lucie Aubrac. Thorez was infuriated by Marty’s demand that Vermeersch produce a short autobiography so the ‘merits’ of the two women could be compared.43 On 7 October 1946, Marty wrote to Stepanov, now a member of the CPSU’s International Department in Moscow. Widely circulated amongst Soviet officials, the letter was an open assault on Thorez’s leadership. It criticised the PCF’s ‘parliamentarism’, its tendency to compromise whilst in government, its failure to support workers’ grievances and its reluctance to support colonial freedom movements; all of which were feeding a growing ‘gap between the party and workers’ radicalism’ and increasing support for the ideas of Trotskyist organisations on the party’s left. Marty described Thorez’s leadership as ‘an absolute monarchy’ infused with ‘a spirit of nepotism’ and ‘self-congratulation’. He singled out the General Secretary’s antagonism towards the Resistance leader, Charles Tillon, the Minister of Air. The promotion of Jeannette Vermeersch – ‘who had refused to do anything at all during the period 1939 – 44’ – indicated ‘a family leadership, a clique, an anti-democratic leadership’. Menacingly, Marty likened the Thorez– Duclos partnership to that of Barbe´ – Celor, with the inference that as in 1931 a purge was necessary.44 Marty’s critique reflected the mood of a section of activists. Many put setbacks at the May referendum and June elections down to the party’s moderation and statesmanship, which had antagonised sections of its working-class base. Criticisms of Thorez’s role were often direct. A secretary of a PCF branch in the Hautes-Pyrene´es wrote to party headquarters:

174

MAURICE THOREZ

Our leaders do not sufficiently follow the advice of the masses on how to act and do not give enough information about accusations raised by our opponents against comrade Maurice Thorez. We do not believe lies spread by the reaction about the supposed ‘chateaux’ of Jacques Duclos or Charles Tillon. But we are obliged to face facts when it comes to Maurice Thorez’s car, his guards of honour and his protocol – things about which he used to criticise our opponents so strongly.45 A branch secretary from the Yonne complained about ‘concession after concession’ to political enemies and demanded that the Political Bureau instruct PCF deputies to stop ‘collaborating’ with other parties in parliament. He reported his branch’s discussion on ‘Maurice Thorez’s very bad press’: ‘Thorez tells us to roll up our sleeves. Yes, fine, but there has been no bread for a month. How about rolling up yours and working harder [to sort this out]. A little less speechifying; as speeches do not make things happen.’46 Thorez shrugged off such criticisms, viewing them as examples of sectarianism in the ranks, but he was furious when the issue of his war record began to be discussed amongst party activists. Political opponents were continuously trying to exploit his desertion from the army. E´douard Herriot said he was ‘shocked’ to see Thorez become a minister: he ‘would have been shot if he had not been a politician’.47 Others made innuendos about Thorez spending some of the war in Nazi Germany or raised questions as to why Thorez was in Moscow, rather than engaging in Resistance activities in France. Wishing to defend their leader from such attacks, party members began to ask for more information about Thorez’s wartime exploits. Thorez reacted violently. He accused activists seeking explanations of ‘echoing the slanders’ of right-wing opponents. Freedom of discussion in the party was necessary, he said, but not ‘freedom to introduce counter-revolutionary propaganda’. Thorez noted that it was considered perfectly ‘fine’ for de Gaulle to engage in Resistance from London, but ‘bad’ for Thorez to organise his activities from Moscow. He drew parallels between his wartime exile and that of Lenin during the years before the Russian Revolution: ‘I would naturally like to be modest but I am forced to point out that the criticisms made against us today are the same as those made against the Bolshevik leaders for several decades [. . .], who outside of Tsarist Russia were able very effectively to fulfil their role of leadership of the party and the forces of the Revolution.’48 A narrative emerged. Thorez had arrived in Moscow in 1943, invited to participate in the proceedings to wind up the Comintern. Before then he had fulfilled his functions as head of the PCF in clandestine. At the PCF Congress in June 1945, Marcel Prenant, the respected scientist and former chief-of-staff of the communists’ armed wing of the Resistance, saluted Thorez as ‘the first

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

175

amongst the Franc-tireurs et partisans’.49 The myth surrounding the ‘Appeal of 10 July’ began to be take shape. In late 1947, the party even circulated a fake copy of l’Humanite´ dated July 1940, which included a craftily edited version of the ‘appeal’. Even today, a display to commemorate the Resistance at the Barbe`s-Rochechouart metro station contains an image of Thorez and Duclos seated side by side to write the appeal in July 1940, a time at which the two men were over 2,500 kilometres apart.50

The Times interview Thorez was keen to develop an international profile, particularly amongst the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. In June 1946, his face dominated the front page of Time, the world’s biggest-selling news magazine. ‘French Communist Thorez: Hunger was his fellow traveller’, ran the title. Thorez told his American interviewer that France ‘hopes to build a new world, based on democracy and collective security’ and stands ‘by the side of those with whom she fought against the Nazi oppressor, and in particular the United States, England, the Soviet Union’. The journalist was surprised by Thorez’s comment that he had deliberately mentioned the United States before the Soviet Union: ‘[Thorez] underlined the two words [United States] with a quick stroke of his pen. Then he smiled engagingly.’51 In November Thorez gave an interview to The Times, then the mouthpiece of Britain’s ruling elite.52 On this occasion, he impressed his interviewer with ‘great, but well harnessed, energy and enthusiasm’, and talked of ‘ties of friendship’ between Britain and France, ‘a friendship for which much British blood has flowed’. He used the interview to stress that the party proposed ‘not a strictly communist programme’ but a ‘democratic programme and national reconstruction, acceptable to all republicans’. He opposed ‘a dominant economic position’ in a rebuilt Europe for Germany, calling for the internationalisation of the Ruhr, the integration of the Saar into the French economy and the ‘effective disarmament’ of Germany. In so doing, he echoed the position of de Gaulle and distanced himself from the Socialists, who were beginning to advocate Germany’s recovery as a basis of European stability, whilst harnessing its economic power to the interests of France.53 It was a paragraph near the end that secured The Times interview its place in PCF history. Thorez pledged support for ‘the framework of the parliamentary system’ and spoke of ‘other paths to socialism than the one taken by the Russian communists’: The path is necessarily different for each country. We have always thought and said that the French people, who are rich in great

176

MAURICE THOREZ

traditions, would find for themselves the way to greater democracy, progress, and social justice. Ten years later, Thorez referred to this passage to claim he had foreshadowed Nikita Khrushchev’s remarks at the CPSU Twentieth Congress about ‘increasingly varied roads to socialism’. Amongst the party faithful, The Times interview became another example of the General Secretary’s ‘clairvoyance’. Later, sympathetic historians viewed the interview as the precursor of the ‘French road to socialism’, announced during the PCF’s brief flirtation with Eurocommunism in 1976 – 77.54 Others have stressed its tactical aspect: it appeared eight days after the November elections, at a time when Thorez was making a new pitch to become prime minister.55 A prominent historiographical school considers the interview as simple camouflage. Thorez wanted to disguise the fact that he was embarking on a ‘strategy for the progressive conquest of power’, seeking to transform France into a ‘people’s democracy’ by securing key positions in government and state. He sought to follow the models of Poland and Bulgaria and made no attempt to renounce the aim of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Assurances of support for French democratic traditions in the interview were, it is argued, a smokescreen to disguise Thorez’s real aims.56 So how should the interview be interpreted? Its context is clearly important. The issue of a ‘Maurice Thorez government’ dominated the November elections for the National Assembly. The PCF produced huge campaign posters of Thorez, urging people to deliver votes in large enough numbers to secure a communist prime minister. Simultaneously, the MRP fought the election on a ‘stop Thorez’ ticket. Thorez considered the results – which gave the PCF 182 deputies and made it once again the largest party – as a mandate for communist leadership of a ‘government of democratic union’: the PCF had, because of its leadership of the ‘battle for production’, convinced the ‘broadest masses’ that ‘we are at the service of the people, at the service of democracy and at the service of France’.57 Thorez also viewed the results as vindication of his more conciliatory approach following the setbacks in the May referendum and June elections, after which he had attempted to soften the party’s image in the eyes of the middle class.58 A deal was brokered with the MRP over a draft constitution, including compromises over a second chamber and the election of president by parliament; the draft was agreed by a large majority at a referendum on 13 October 1946. Thorez told the Central Committee that his candidacy for prime minister was ‘very serious’.59 He drew up a programme for government and attempted to garner a parliamentary majority, appealing to the SFIO for support. The Times interview was therefore designed to reassure Socialists and the small rump of

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

177

Radicals, as well as the wider public, that Thorez as prime minister would respect parliamentary democracy and shun the notion of Bolshevik-style revolution. While the context of the interview is important, its content is equally significant. At the November 1946 Central Committee, Thorez rejected the suggestion that his remarks about different paths to socialism were ‘a trick or ruse’ and tried to give his arguments some theoretical substance.60 Using obligatory quotations from Engels and Lenin, he defined socialism as ‘the most consistent form of republicanism and democracy’. It was democracy without the corruption of money and ‘released from the power of the trusts’. In France, the march towards this ‘unfettered democracy’ had begun in 1789 and taken the form of ‘continual creation’ through the revolution of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Popular Front. In other words, Thorez was describing the path to socialism as an incremental process. Socialism had become, in the words of Donald Sassoon, a ‘continuation of indigenous radical bourgeois traditions whose symbols [communists] could appropriate, and no longer as a dramatic rupture in the life of the nation’.61 Thorez’s comments about ‘people’s democracy’ should be placed in broader historical context. During the Cold War the term became a euphemism for Stalinist dictatorship in eastern Europe, but in 1946 it was ‘a new departure in communist nomenclature’. It represented, notes Sassoon, ‘an attempt to go beyond the stark dichotomy in which all non-socialist regimes were simply “bourgeois” and all socialist regimes the dictatorship of the proletariat’.62 When Thorez told the November Central Committee that ‘the advantage of people’s democracy is that it makes the passage towards socialism possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ he had in mind a government, in which communists had a major share of power, that would introduce social and welfare reform, increase ‘the purchasing power of the masses’, consolidate the nationalised sector of the economy, extend workers’ rights and pursue a foreign policy that would – through maintaining the wartime coalition – retain ‘normal relations’ with the Soviet Union.63 Rather than interpreting the thorezien approach to politics between 1944 and 1947 as a failed attempt to pursue ‘a policy faithful in every respect to that followed by its counterparts in the countries of eastern Europe’,64 it is more useful to view it against the background of post-war politics in western Europe. It was part of the trend in which parties of the left joined a political consensus around the ‘building of social capitalism’, through welfare policies and state intervention in industry.65 During 1945 and 1946, PCF ministers helped to lay the foundations for the French post-war social settlement; they urged restraint on a buoyant workers’ movement, while overseeing a series of far-reaching reforms. Universal health provision, social security and welfare

178

MAURICE THOREZ

systems, a democratic framework for industrial relations, publicly owned gas, electricity, mines, airlines, banks – and much more: the legacy of communist participation in post-war French government was profound. Thorez certainly continued to make ‘revolutionary’ speeches, especially at party leadership meetings: ‘of course’, he reassured the Central Committee, ‘one thing of which we are certain, is that one day the working classes will be entirely in power’.66 Revolutionary predictions about the future were, however, delivered alongside pragmatic and gradualist politics for the present. The British Intelligence (MI6) official assigned to snoop on the PCF described its programme as ‘one of moderate reform to which all progressive parties could subscribe without difficulty’.67

Expelled from government Although his bid to become prime minister in November 1946 failed by 318 votes to 261, Thorez was encouraged by the result. The National Council of the SFIO had supported his candidature by 3,121 to 843 and – while twentyfour right-wing socialist deputies refused to vote for him – the issue of a communist prime minister had, Thorez believed, become legitimised. After Bidault, the MRP leader, also failed to secure the premiership, a reluctant and physically weakened Blum attempted to form a coalition and held a series of meetings with Thorez. He hoped ‘to recreate the frank and cordial relations’ of 1936, but Thorez recoiled from the conciliatory overtures, and could not hide his antagonism towards the veteran socialist: ‘We cannot forget your actions against the cause of unity,’ he lectured Blum.68 Thorez and other communist ministers briefly withdrew from government during a caretaker socialist-only administration led by Blum. Thorez returned to the post of deputy prime minister on 22 January 1947 in a new tripartite government led by the socialist, Paul Ramadier – one week after supporting the election of another socialist, Vincent Auriol, as first president of the Fourth Republic. He celebrated a big breakthrough when a communist, Francois Billoux, was appointed Minister of National Defence, one of the three top ministries. Thorez described the situation as ‘rather favourable’ for the party as ‘the masses and workers understand that a government without us is not acceptable’.69 But, despite his optimism, relations between the Communists and their governmental partners deteriorated rapidly. The turn in the geopolitical climate was at the root of the tensions. On 12 March, President Harry S. Truman announced his ‘doctrine’ of military and financial aid to countries facing the threat of communism. Thorez recognised the speech as a game-changer – ‘the imperialist policies of the United States will lead to war’ – but made little

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

179

real attempt to reflect on how strains in international relations could have a negative impact on the potential for political alliances within France.70 Two ‘internal’ issues threatened cohesion within the government: colonial policy and wages policy. Thorez’s anthem of ‘la grandeur de France’ marginalised the aspirations and rights of colonial peoples. Communists had little to say about the massacre of thousands of Algerians by the settler authorities at Se´tif and Guelma in May 1945, placing blame for the violence on ‘pseudo-nationalists’ and ‘Nazi agents’ attempting to divide ‘the Muslim masses from the people of France’.71 The brutal suppression of the nationalist rebellion in Madagascar prompted similar equivocation. Thorez protested at the Council of Ministers on 16 April and the following day at the Political Bureau mused over whether colonial repression might force the party ‘to decide if we leave [the government] of our own initiative or await a vote’.72 Yet, simultaneously, he warned that the Madagascan nationalist movement contained ‘a whole series of elements, intrigues and provocations about which we must be very wary’.73 Thorez showed more commitment to the struggle in Vietnam – and was on good terms with Ho Chi Minh, who he entertained at his Choisy home during the Paris negotiations of June 1946. Rather than supporting independence, he argued for a settlement that could ‘inspire the [Vietnamese] people with confidence in the French Union’.74 Nevertheless, Thorez and Billoux provoked outrage in right-wing circles when they refused to participate in a government-sponsored parliamentary homage to the Expeditionary Corps. Opposition had its limits: on 22 March, communist deputies abstained in a vote on war credits, but Thorez and communist ministers voted in favour of the credits so not to break collective ministerial responsibility. ‘Having affirmed our position, it was not wise to go towards a rupture,’ he told the Central Committee.75 Thorez attempted to manage tensions over wages policy in a similar fashion. The first three months of 1947 saw a big upturn in strike activity; days lost were officially two-and-a-half times higher than the previous quarter.76 Driving the militancy was price inflation, shortages of basic commodities, and general disappointment that hopes engendered by the Liberation had not been realised. The party and CGT sought to address workers’ grievances through the introduction of a minimum wage (minimum vital); but when the Commission on Wages (involving unions, employers and government) failed to reach agreement on 20 February, communist ministers withdrew support from the demand in the name of ministerial discipline. Thorez grew increasingly anxious over the number of strikes. The Secretariat urged ‘vigilance over the errors and provocations which seem to be occurring in firms, notably in the Paris region’.77 The Political Bureau warned that ‘strikes risk dividing us from the poorest layers of the working class, the

180

MAURICE THOREZ

small folk on fixed incomes and the peasants under our influence who fear inflation’.78 PCF and CGT activists were, however, becoming uncomfortable with the calls to exercise restraint. Voices began to warn of the dangers inherent in the situation for the party’s working-class base. In mid-March, Thorez attended a meeting of federal secretaries in the south of the country and heard reports of railway workers ‘tearing up their CGT cards’ in frustration at the party’s failure to address their grievances.79 On Friday 25 April 1947, 1,100 workers walked out of the Renault car plant in Boulogne-Billancourt. Nationalised after the collaboration of its owner with the Nazi occupation, Renault had great symbolic significance.80 Not only France’s biggest factory, employing 30,950 people, it held a reputation as a communist bastion. While PCF membership in 1947 had fallen to 2,035 (compared with 7,200 in 1936), the party maintained a firm grip on life inside the plant.81 Department 70 was affectionately known as le petit Kremlin.82 The ‘Battle for Production’ had been pursued with particular zeal at Renault, with the CGT playing a pseudo-managerial role and enforcing a strict labour discipline.83 By January 1947, real wages of workers were 61 per cent of their 1945 level, compared with a fall to 74 per cent in the metallurgical industry generally.84 Thorez received a report on the strike at the Secretariat on Monday afternoon. Despite both the PCF and CGT labelling its leaders as ‘provocateurs’, ‘Gaullists’ and ‘hitle´ro-trotskistes’, the movement was growing within Renault and threatening to spread into the wider Paris engineering industry.85 The same evening Thorez and Frachon discussed the situation and agreed ‘a tactical turn’, a decision revealing the CGT’s lack of real autonomy from the PCF leadership. The ‘turn’ explained Frachon, aimed ‘to take engineering workers in hand because there was the risk that provocateurs were going to influence the movement in other factories’.86 The next morning, the Renault CGT put forward a claim for a productivity bonus and called on the whole factory to stop work. Simultaneously, the regional CGT announced a campaign for a 10 francs bonus in the Parisian metallurgical industry. On 30 April, the PCF’s Political Bureau pledged its ‘unreserved support for the legitimate demands of the confederated trade unions’.87 By now, the Renault conflict had triggered a national political crisis. Government ministers joined the management in talks with the CGT, but – with the exception of the communist Minister of Labour, Ambroize Croizat – negotiators refused to support an increase in wages. With the Council of Ministers split, Ramadier tabled a confidence motion in the National Assembly, to be debated on 2 and 4 May.88 The discussion at the Central Committee on 3 May reveals the dilemma posed by the strike. On one hand, Thorez emphasised that the ‘tactic forced

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

181

upon us’ at Renault had not changed the party’s position as a ‘party of government which consistently serves the national interest’. On the other, Croizat stressed the party’s role as a tribune for the working class. ‘From the moment we lose our positions in the working class, we lose our subsequent possibilities of action, and that is dangerous,’ he warned.89 After the failure of an attempt by the CGT on 2 May to diffuse the situation inside Renault – with a ballot of workers rejecting a union proposal to return to work without a settlement – a reluctant Thorez had no option than to oppose the government in the confidence vote, knowing it could lead to Communists leaving the administration. Nevertheless, he seemed shocked when Ramadier announced at the Council of Ministers on 4 May that powers would be withdrawn from him and the other communist ministers. Thorez’s ‘face reddened with a rush of blood’, according to Charles Tillon, who was dismissed as Minister of Reconstruction.90 By expelling the Communists, Ramadier had paved the way for the ‘Third Force’ – a centre – right coalition – that would dominate the next half decade of the Fourth Republic. Yet Thorez believed that the Communists’ break from government would be short. On 5 May at the Secretariat, he outlined the party’s strategy: there would be ‘no opposition to or systematic denigration’ of the government; the party would keep contacts with the prime minister and president; it ‘should break nothing, but fight to put things back together, [and] preserve the possibilities of unity with the socialists and republicans’.91 Thorez’s optimism that the PCF would continue as ‘a party of government’ was underpinned by his belief that – despite polarising world relations – the wartime diplomatic alliance would hold. He refused to accept the ‘pessimistic view’ that divided ‘Europe and the world into two implacably antagonistic blocs’.92 In late July, he suggested that France should be happy to accept American aid through the Marshall Plan, just as it had not refused the help ‘our American friends’ brought to the liberation of France. He hoped that ‘together, the British, Americans, Russians, French and all peoples will march towards the great hope of a reconciled world’.93 The same themes dominated Thorez’s speech to the party’s Eleventh Congress, which began on 25 June in Strasbourg. A symbol of French nationalist aspirations since the Franco-Prussian war, the Alsatian capital had been carefully chosen as a venue. The congress brochure featured a pensivelooking Thorez against the background of the Cathedral and Old Town and the slogan: ‘Strasbourg Ville Francaise’. Thorez spent eleven days writing his speech, before rehearsing it, amending it and rehearsing it again. Its theme was that the PCF was not ‘afraid to take its responsibilities’ and would stick to the ‘difficult path’ it had taken since the Liberation.94

182

MAURICE THOREZ

Although expulsion from the government was a political defeat, at a personal level it came as something of a relief for Thorez. Since the beginning of the year, he had been complaining about ‘endless cabinet meetings’ and ministerial appointments getting in the way of important party business.95 He took the opportunity to take his first proper holiday since returning to France. Together with Jeannette and the household staff, he returned to SaintMartin-Ve´subie, the alpine resort at which he had heard news of the Molotov– Ribbentrop pact during the fateful summer of 1939. His chauffeur, Daniel Debusscher, a home-movie enthusiast, filmed a now portly Thorez in vest and shorts leading the group to the summit of Mont Tournairet, the highest point of the Southern Alps.96 Thorez and Vermeersch also found time to book their wedding, which took place with modest ceremony on 17 September.

Szklarska-Pore˛ba Thorez did not travel to the conference of nine European communist parties that began at Szklarska-Pore˛ba in Poland on 22 September 1947. The meeting, which led to the establishment of the Information Bureau of Communist and Workers’ Parties (soon to be generally known as the Cominform), was attended by seven parties that were either in power or consolidating power (in the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) and the two mass parties in the western sphere of influence, the Italian and French. The PCF was represented by Duclos and E´tienne Fajon. There are suggestions that Thorez absented himself because he had anticipated the conference’s severe censure of the PCF’s politics, but he probably considered preparations for the approaching municipal elections to be more of a priority. He may have also been reluctant to go away a few days after his wedding to Jeannette Vermeersch. Certainly, Thorez seems to have been surprised by the attack on the French party. In the days before Szklarska-Pore˛ba, he had continued to argue for the party’s return to government, and made attempts to form an electoral alliance with socialists and republicans for the municipal elections. In short, he maintained the political approach agreed with Stalin in November 1944.97 But the Soviet dictator had changed direction and, in a discussion with Dimitrov, already condemned ‘the politics of the French party [as] totally erroneous’.98 Andrei Zhdanov announced the new Soviet world perspectives at SzklarskaPore˛ba. Until this point, communists had presented the idea of the world being divided into two camps as the ambition of reactionaries. Now it was declared as reality. On one side was the imperialist/anti-democratic bloc led by the United States, which was seeking to create a ‘European protectorate’

IN

THE

CORRIDORS OF POWER

183

and pursuing a new, ‘predatory, expansionist orientation reminiscent of the adventurist programme [. . .] proclaimed by the fascist aggressors’. This camp was entering a period of profound crisis and preparing the way for new interimperialist wars. On the other side was the ‘anti-imperialist and democratic camp’ around the leadership of the Soviet party and state, to which communist parties were expected to display total political and ideological solidarity. In central and eastern Europe, this meant transforming the ‘people’s democracy’ experiment into one-party regimes based on the Soviet model. In western Europe, it meant implacable opposition to the Marshall Plan and all other elements of American influence. In France, it meant breaking with the ‘American party’, particularly the Socialists, and raising the ‘banner of national independence and sovereignty of the nation’.99 Zhdanov launched a stinging attack on the French and Italian parties for refusing to recognise and combat American pressure on their countries’ politics, for failing to act as effective oppositions and for harbouring illusions in parliamentarianism. Other delegates took the cue to censure the PCF’s ‘opportunism’. Milovan Djilas from Yugoslavia lambasted its wartime alliance with de Gaulle, its failure to take power at the Liberation, its moderate approach towards workers’ struggles, its ambivalent support for the struggle of colonial peoples and, especially, its slogan ‘party of government’. The French leaders, he said, lacked ‘courage and discipline’. At the start of the conference, Jacques Duclos had delivered a pedestrian report of the PCF’s ‘great successes’ since the Liberation, after which Zhdanov telegrammed Stalin to say that his ‘lack of perspective and firm party line [had] left a painful impression on the participants.’ In the final session, Duclos beat an obsequious retreat: ‘I want to give warm thanks to Comrade Zhdanov for his clear and brilliant report which will help us to find the right road.’100 On the first day of the Szklarska-Pore˛ba conference, Thorez was still arguing for ‘a common and reciprocal effort of understanding and conciliation’ between the United States and the Soviet Union.101 He was shocked by the ferocity of the attack on the PCF and worried about the implications for his leadership. He would have been acutely aware that the criticisms expressed by Djilas were virtually identical to those raised the previous year in Marty’s letter to Stepanov. Thorez displayed little of his customary hesitation in signing up to Moscow’s new ‘appreciation of the international situation’.102 During 1944– 47, he had focused on national politics, managing the PCF as a party rooted in the French political and cultural tradition with a conformist political practice and reformist agenda. In so doing, he had continued and deepened the approach first developed at the time of the Popular Front. In the post-war

184

MAURICE THOREZ

period, it was a path that was broadly similar to that pursued by mass labour and socialist parties throughout Europe. The essential difference with the non-communist left was Thorez’s and his party’s attachment to the regime in Moscow. After the Cominform conference, ‘the international question’ would again dominate. With the Cold War ushering in a bi-polar world of antagonistic social and political systems, the social democratisation of French communism hit a road block.

CHAPTER 7 THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

The platform at the PCF’s Eleventh Congress in June 1947 at Strasbourg was decorated with images of the party’s top personalities. In the centre was a portrait of a youthful looking Maurice Thorez, gesticulating with a forefinger whilst in full oratorical flow. Though the most prominent, the image shared the space behind the stage with smaller, more prosaic, sketches of other party leaders, including Duclos, Cachin and Marty. Three years later at the Twelfth Congress held at Gennevilliers (April 1950), just one banner adorned the platform: a giant sketch of Thorez by the celebrated sculptor Lucien Bancel. It was not the only significant change in hall decoration. At the 1947 Congress – held at a time when the PCF was seeking a new governmental alliance with the Socialist Party – the portrait of Thorez stood opposite a large poster of Jean Jaure`s. In 1950, Jaure`s had been replaced by a grandiose fresco of a marching crowd, at the centre of which stood Stalin. The symbolism was explicit: the PCF was now ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’, who was the ‘greatest and most faithful disciple of Stalin in France’.1 The phrase – ‘le parti de Maurice Thorez’ – had first appeared in PCF propaganda in May 1944, when it served to highlight the absurd situation that communist ministers were members of a provisional government of which the head, General de Gaulle, was blocking their leader’s return to French territory.2 From early 1948, it became ubiquitous, appearing on recruitment literature, in the party press and as a rallying call in speeches by leaders. In 1944, the word ‘de’ signified that the party contained Thorez as a member. From early 1948, the word took on its full, possessive form. It signalled the completion of the process of symbiosis, begun in the final stages of the Popular Front, between the party’s identity and that of its General Secretary. The phenomenon of leader cults in international communism reached its zenith during the late 1940s and early 1950s, not coincidently

186

MAURICE THOREZ

alongside the movement’s uncompromising and strident Cold War perspective and policy. Stalin decreed the unity of the communist camp around the Soviet Union (with no quarter given to dissent), a political and ideological struggle against the ‘imperialist camp’, and promised the creation of a Soviet powerhouse economy to ‘erect socialism’ and secure peace through a more equitable military balance with the United States. The strategy was underpinned by a series of dogmatic assumptions: the belief that class struggle was becoming increasingly polarised as capitalism entered an irreversible crisis, the perspective that a new imperialist war was ‘inevitable’, and the notion that the Soviet road was the universal model for communists to follow. These assumptions provided the essential elements of PCF politics after Szklarska-Pore˛ba. The party recommitted itself to militant working-class struggle to retie the bonds with its support-base which had loosened during the time in government, though Thorez sought to impose strict boundaries on the demands and actions of the workers’ movement. It emphasised the struggle for ‘national independence and peace’, with Thorez drawing parallels with 1938: appeasement with Nazi Germany had prepared the way for war; now ‘a new Munich’ imposed by the United States threatened a more terrible conflict.3 Finally, the party showed total loyalty to the excesses of late Stalinism, including its paranoia about ‘Titoist dissidents’. Communist leader cults were paler, often ludicrous imitations of the dominant Stalin cult.4 Outside the ‘people’s democracies’, the cult of Maurice Thorez was the most pronounced. It gained nourishment from the peace campaign during 1948 and 1949 – during which Thorez was presented as a saviour figure – and reached a triumphant and frenzied climax around the time of his fiftieth birthday. It thrived while Thorez was in the Soviet Union for treatment and convalescence after a stroke (October 1950 to April 1953) and continued, after his return, in more spasmodic fashion during 1954 and 1955.

Scapegoating Marty Communist leader cults, observes Kevin Morgan, can be viewed as ‘a diptych’.5 One panel glorified the leader and his role in party history; the other obliterated, morally and sometimes physically, potential opponents and erased aspects of history that were awkward for the cultish narrative. Thorez was instinctively aware of the implications of this duality. By late 1947, the Thorez cult dominated the less developed, but still existing, cults around other PCF heroes, including those whose portraits hung behind the stage at

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

187

the Strasbourg Congress. Nevertheless, Thorez knew that the events at Szklarska-Pore˛ba had left him vulnerable. Zhdanov and particularly Djilas had not only attacked PCF politics and implicitly his leadership but had used ammunition supplied by Marty. Marty had first clashed with Thorez in March 1927, criticising the latter’s ‘electoralism’. Subsequent complaints concerned Thorez’s bureaucratic methods (1931), his ‘pacifism and opportunism’ (1933), his attempt to join the Popular Front government (1936), his lack of urgency in providing support for the International Brigades and his delay in supporting the ‘imperialist war’ line in 1939. If there is a constant, the criticisms indicate Marty’s more combative and uncompromising view of communist activity, compared to Thorez’s more cautious and conservative approach. In the context of Szklarska-Pore˛ba, Marty’s criticisms amounted to a curriculum vitae of a leadership challenger. His letter to Stepanov in October 1946 (see Chapter 6) had described Thorez’s leadership as ‘an absolute monarchy’ infused with ‘a spirit of nepotism’ and contained a coded demand for his removal as general secretary. Thorez’s sense of unease was heightened by the focus in Djilas’s critique on the PCF’s ‘opportunist’ alliance with de Gaulle during the Resistance and at the Liberation, including its failure to mobilise opposition to the disbandment of the Patriotic Guard. By raising the politics of the war years, the Yugoslavian communist had drawn attention to the Achilles heel of the Thorez cult: the General Secretary’s five-year wartime absence in the Soviet Union. Thorez’s sense of vulnerability over the issue boiled to the surface two weeks after the Cominform conference. When a member of the audience at a public meeting in the Parisian suburbs referred provocatively to his wartime ‘treason’, the usually measured communist leader proceeded to slap the man around the face. A legal case rumbled on until the National Assembly voted narrowly in June 1949 to uphold Thorez’s parliamentary immunity from prosecution.6 Thorez began a campaign of self-protection after Szklarska-Pore˛ba. By now, he had perfected the art of admitting subsidiary errors, while deflecting the blame for more serious faults on to others. He accepted that during the summer of 1947 his ‘eyes had been on secondary issues’ and he ‘did not recognise the changes in the [international] situation quickly enough’. He also conceded that there was ‘some fact’ as well as ‘some fiction’ in Djilas’s critique.7 His campaign dominated the Central Committee meeting on 29 – 30 October.8 Thorez began by making a ‘self-criticism for the recent past [. . .] of not having fought enough against the government and the Socialist Party, and of having encouraged a certain opportunist tendency, of fearing the movement of the masses’. He then rummaged into

188

MAURICE THOREZ

PCF history to put the ultimate responsibility for the ‘opportunist tendency’ on to the shoulders of others. Echoing some of the points raised by Djilas in Szklarska-Pore˛ba, he argued that opportunism had emerged during the Popular Front and within the Resistance when some leaders prioritised agreements ‘at the top’ with other parties and movements, while ignoring the more important task of building united action ‘from below’. In particular, too much emphasis had been placed during the later stages of the war on friendly relations with Gaullists in the National Council of the Resistance and insufficient attention given to the development of the Communists’ front organisation, the National Front. One scapegoat was Fernand Grenier, the PCF’s representative in London in 1943, who had, claimed Thorez, been too conciliatory towards de Gaulle. Duclos spelt out the criticism even more explicitly: the proposals put forward by Thorez at the Ivry Central Committee to disband the Patriotic Guard and to end the vestiges of dual power had been forced on the party by previous opportunist mistakes and the ‘situation could have evolved differently’.9 The attack on Grenier was designed to provide ballast for an assault on the main target, Marty. Thorez seized on a remark by Marty that de Gaulle and his new party, Le Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF) – which had won the biggest share of the vote at the recent municipal elections – were now ‘enemy number one’. It was American imperialism and its supporters in France, especially the Socialist Party, that were the main enemy, retorted Thorez. By concentrating fire on de Gaulle, Marty had underestimated the threat posed by the American camp and was challenging the analysis agreed at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. Thorez then broadened his attack by returning to the war years and particularly Marty’s role in Algeria during 1944. He interrupted Marty’s speech to accuse him of failing to challenge de Gaulle’s refusal to grant an amnesty for the General Secretary to return to French territory. In one breath, Thorez had criticised Marty for denouncing de Gaulle; in the next, he was charging him with having been too conciliatory towards the General. Consistency of argument did not matter: Thorez was determined to land a decisive blow against his fre`re ennemi, and equally to lance the boil of the war years within the cultish narrative. The offensive against Marty continued during a special meeting of the Political Bureau convened during a break in the Central Committee. Early in the discussion, Waldeck Rochet expressed concern that things had become unnecessarily personalised. Yet Thorez was in no mood for concessions: it was ‘necessary to recognise the error committed by those in Algiers [who] did not have an accurate understanding of what Maurice represents [. . .] a symbol of party unity and 1939’. The phrase, ‘la question 1939’, dominated the meeting.

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

189

In party parlance, it referred to the PCF’s support for the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, which had become a touchstone issue when designating the party cadre. It was equally code for Thorez’s desertion from the army and wartime exile in the Soviet Union, a fact well-known amongst the leading cadre but never uttered aloud. Bonte told the meeting that the question of 1939 was ‘decisive’. For Duclos, ‘1939 was not over’: it was one of the reasons why ‘the issue of the General Secretary hangs over this Central Committee’. The insinuation was that, by failing to campaign for an amnesty for Thorez, Marty had given comfort to ‘the pigs who betrayed [the party] at that time’, the words used by Ramette to describe those who had opposed the Soviet–German pact.10 Marty was on the defensive. Towards the end of the meeting, he expressed ‘astonishment’ at the criticisms and offered to resign from the Secretariat. He ‘could not understand the discussion about Maurice’ and ‘would not let it be said that he did not evoke 1939’. He would not claim that ‘everything done in Algiers was perfect’, suggesting a commission should establish what had actually happened, but he had always loyally followed directives from Moscow and from the clandestine PCF leadership. Regarding the campaign for Thorez’s amnesty, he cited the communication from Togliatti on behalf of the Comintern leadership (see Chapter 5), which had warned against ‘creating too many obstacles’ that might prevent entry into de Gaulle’s provisional government.11 But Marty found himself totally isolated within the leadership team. With their party marginalised in French politics and facing censure within the world communist movement, the Political Bureau and, later that evening, the Central Committee coalesced around the General Secretary. Thorez had secured a double victory. Firstly, he had undermined the possibility of Marty taking advantage of the critique of his leadership at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. In attacking the PCF’s parliamentarianism and reformism, Zhdanov and Djilas had appeared to endorse Marty’s more combative stance; but Thorez’s audacious, if disingenuous, strategy had succeeded in portraying Marty as an opponent of the Cominform analysis. During the controversy over the amnesty, Thorez had even managed to brand Marty as one of the architects of ‘opportunism’ within the party, rather than its most consistent opponent. Secondly, Thorez had confronted the Achilles heel within his own cultish narrative. By making the flight to the Soviet Union a component part of the ‘question of 1939’, he ensured that criticisms of his wartime record would become an attack on the party’s support for the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, a defining aspect of communist wartime policy. If there was a moment at which the PCF became ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’, it was during the Central Committee of 29– 30 October 1947. It became so by ensuring that it could never become the party of Andre´ Marty.

190

MAURICE THOREZ

Seeking reassurance from Stalin Szklarska-Pore˛ba still posed major difficulties for Thorez. While he had responded to Zhdanov’s attack on the PCF by making the ‘self-criticism’ that he had been slow to recognise the changes in world relations after May 1947, he still faced the array of criticisms expressed by Djilas. Most damning was the Yugoslavian communist’s assertion that the PCF had derailed a revolutionary situation at the Liberation – a charge that questioned the PCF’s character as a revolutionary party. Duclos spelt out the significance of the matter at the Political Bureau: ‘Any self-criticism must not raise the question that our line at Ivry [over the Patriotic Guard] was wrong [. . .] We cannot leave the impression that the party is in difficulties.’12 Thorez had little reason to think that Djilas had spoken without the approval of the Soviet leadership. At this stage, there were few signs of the coming fissures between Stalin and Tito. As well as allowing the Yugoslavian party to play a major role at its founding conference, Molotov had planned to base the Cominform office in Belgrade. Clearly, the problems posed by Djilas’s speech could only be resolved in Moscow. The day after the Central Committee, Thorez took the train to Prague, the first stage of a journey to the Russian capital. He had not visited the Soviet Union since November 1944, the longest gap since his trips began in 1925. Accompanied by Jeannette Vermeersch and Casanova, his official capacity was to represent the PCF at the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. A grand parade and light-show was followed by a lavish reception hosted by Molotov, at which Thorez socialised with the writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, and the French ambassador, General Georges Catroux. For the Thorez couple, the festivities also served as a belated honeymoon. Three weeks were filled with receptions, soire´es, tours and outings, including evenings at the opera and ballet. But, in discussion with Soviet and Cominform leaders, Thorez only had one issue on his mind: he wanted clarification of the criticisms of the PCF raised at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. He received reassurance from Stepanov (11 November), who told him that ‘in 1944, the line [was] correct’ – an attempt at insurrection ‘would have put things back ten years and perhaps even changed the course of the war.’13 Thorez knew, of course, that the opinion that mattered was that of Stalin. On 18 November, Thorez was invited to the Kremlin for an audience with the Soviet leader, who was accompanied by Molotov and Mikhail Suslov, head of the Soviet party’s foreign policy department.14 Thorez told the group that ‘French communists would be proud’ that their general secretary ‘had had the honour to discuss with comrade Stalin’. But the sensitive nature of the

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

191

discussion meant that the meeting remained secret even to members of the PCF leadership. It took place almost three years to the day after the equally unreported discussion between the two general secretaries to agree PCF post-Liberation strategy. Whereas the meeting between Stalin and Thorez in November 1944 had begun with small talk, this time the two men got quickly to the point. Thorez assured Stalin of his agreement with the new Soviet world view. The PCF had, he said, redefined its tactics accordingly. It was organising ‘a union for the independence of France’ in the factories and countryside against the meddling of American imperialism. It planned to campaign in defence of French cinema, the car and aeronautic industries and would seek to involve ‘owners of industries unhappy with American competition’. Then Thorez posed the question ‘that touche[d] more on the past than the future’. Although he did not have the temerity to remind the Soviet leader that post-Liberation PCF policy had unswervingly followed the course outlined at their previous meeting, Thorez’s approach was nevertheless remarkably direct. Criticisms of PCF politics in 1944 raised at the meeting of the nine communist parties, he said, had been ‘unfair’ and ‘unjustified’, particularly those expressed by the Yugoslavian comrades, and he ‘would like to know the opinion of Comrade Stalin on the matter’. Stalin immediately put Thorez’s mind at rest: the existence of AngloAmerican troops on French soil at the end of the war meant that ‘at that time French communists could not have taken power into their hands’, though ‘the picture would have been quite different if the Red Army had been in France’. Stalin disassociated himself from Djilas’s remarks with the barbed comment that ‘the Yugoslavian comrades work very well, but they owe so much to the fact that their country was liberated by the Red Army’. Full of deceit, the statement anticipated the war of words with Tito that would erupt six months later. Feeling more confident, Thorez refuted other criticisms raised by Soviet party officials on recent visits to France, including their objection to the fact that the PCF no longer named its youth organisation the ‘Young Communists’. Given that he had himself suggested a broader name to Thorez three years’ earlier, Stalin had little choice but to ‘express surprise that such statements have been made by Soviet comrades’. The discussion could have finished there. In fact, Thorez seemed to think that it should, at one point declaring that ‘he did not want to impose on the time of Comrade Stalin’. Yet the meeting continued for two-and-a-half hours. Stalin went out of his way to flatter the French leader by asking his opinion of other communist parties and their leaders. Thorez answered cautiously, aware that his remarks would probably find their way to those concerned. He volunteered the view that the Italians, though ‘good

192

MAURICE THOREZ

comrades’, might be pressurised by an influx of new members ‘to renounce certain position on matters of principle’. When Stalin commented that British communists ‘acted like sectarians’, Thorez described Willie Gallagher as ‘a mediocre worker’ who despite being criticised by Lenin ‘had learnt nothing’. Stalin turned to the qualities of PCF leaders. He asked whether ‘Duclos was a good number two’, remarking that he had recently made an ‘unfortunate’ speech in parliament. The question would have buoyed Thorez, as it indicated that he was in Stalin’s mind the undisputed number one. Duclos was ‘a very good, intelligent communist’, replied Thorez, even if he tended to ‘speak in parliament without sufficiently preparing his interventions’. Thorez then described Cachin, Frachon and Guyot as ‘remarkable’ comrades, but he did not miss the opportunity to land another blow on Marty. He told Stalin that Marty had intervened at the Central Committee to contradict the new world view outlined at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. Though ‘a good soldier full of revolutionary spirit’, Marty was prone to take ‘erroneous positions’ and did not immediately ‘orientate himself in complex situations’. Stalin concluded the discussion with a series of banal and sometimes bizarre questions – ‘is there unemployment in France?’, ‘how many workers are there in France?’, ‘does France possess an army?’ – and the two men parted sharing a joke that ‘de Gaulle had never lost a single battle’ because the General ‘had never participated in a single battle’.15

‘Insurrectional’ strikes, 1947 –48 It is astonishing that a meeting between the two general secretaries, who both viewed the class struggle as the motor of history, contained only a passing reference to the social storm that had erupted inside France. Starting in Marseille on 10 November and fuelled by anger after the death of a young demonstrator on 12 November, a strike movement was sweeping the country, touching the mines, docks and building industry. By 18 November – the day Thorez and Stalin met – it had reached Paris, where Renault workers were occupying their factory. The movement possessed an overtly political content, with slogans attacking the Marshall Plan and the government’s ‘politics of famine’. It was also characterised by violence. At Renault, strikers took police officers hostage and two PCF members were injured in an explosion while manufacturing Molotov cocktails in the plant’s laboratories.16 Contemporaries labelled the strikes – which eventually involved almost three million workers – as ‘insurrectional’; historians describe an ‘atmosphere close to civil war’.17 Stalin expressed his concern to Thorez. He chastised ‘comrade Monmousseau’ (a leader of the CGT) for ‘frighten[ing] the entire French

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

193

bourgeoisie’ by calling a general strike when ‘nobody is on strike’ and told Thorez ‘not to go too far in the fight against the Marshall Plan’.18 The social movement had been maturing since the Renault strike of April– May. Throughout the summer, Thorez had demanded ‘prudence’ and attacked ‘provocations and ultra-leftism’, while using the upturn in strikes as an argument for the Communists to return to government. But after the Cominform conference, many militants took Thorez’s ‘self-criticism’ and the PCF’s more strident slogans as a signal that the party was readopting a more aggressive approach to class struggle. Swept along by events and in the absence of Thorez, the PCF Political Bureau endorsed the strikes and the CGT leadership convened a national strike committee to coordinate action – steps which gave the movement further impetus.19 On 20 November, the crisis led to the collapse of Ramadier’s government, but Thorez was in no hurry to return to France. That day, together with Casanova and Vermeersch, he travelled via Smolensk and Minsk to begin a tour of Poland. A day of meetings with party and state leaders in Warsaw was followed by a trip to Upper Silesia, where Thorez toured factories, saluted the ‘new Poland’ at a rally and attended a performance of Faust in Katowice. The next day he was in Wroclaw, for more visits and meetings, including a reception hosted by the communist leader, Władysław Gomułka. Next stop was Berlin for meetings, including one with the future president of the German Democratic Republic, Wilhelm Pieck, and more cultural engagements. Thorez crossed the French border on 28 November, stopping to pay homage at the monument to the French fallen at Verdun, before taking the road to Paris.20 He had departed Paris with a sense of insecurity, but returned to France holding the Soviet leader’s personal seal of approval. Whether deliberate or not, Thorez’s absence during the first stage of the industrial storm was convenient. He was not associated with PCF or CGT tactics and was free to pass stern judgement on those entrusted with leadership during his time away. First, however, Thorez took steps to associate himself with the workers’ movement. On 4 December, he joined the Saint Barbara festivities in He´nin-Lie´tard, the pit town in which he had lived as a baby. Miners in the region had been on strike for seventeen days and many marched in the parade wearing badges on their work overalls: on one label, a red and blue badge with a picture of Maurice Thorez; on the other, a pink badge with the word ‘gre´viste’ (‘striker’).21 In his speech, Thorez defended the strike as ‘a cry of mise`re by people lacking bread and milk’ and pledged that Communists were ‘at their post to fight those trying to break it’. He finished with the slogans: ‘vive la gre`ve’, vive la France’, ‘vive la Re´publique’, after which the crowd began to chant ‘Thorez to Power’.22

194

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez was also at the forefront of defending the strike movement in the National Assembly during stormy exchanges prompted by a series of violent incidents. On the night of 3 December, twenty-four people were killed when a postal train was derailed near Arras, almost certainly by striking railway workers under the direction of local PCF officials. The following day at Valence railway station, police opened fire on pickets, killing two workers and injuring ten others. On 5 December, l’Humanite´ announced that a grenade had been thrown at Thorez’s home, blaming ‘reactionaries and foreign agents’ eager to sabotage the General Secretary’s call for workers’ rights and independence for France. In the National Assembly, Thorez was twice called to order as the debate degenerated into a shouting match, with communist deputies yelling ‘assassins, assassins’ and the right-wing benches chanting ‘go back to Moscow, to Moscow’.23 While supporting the strike movement publicly, Thorez adopted a critical tone within the party leadership committees. He described the conflict as ‘a great class battle of international significance’ which had ‘mobilised considerable forces against the American party’ and laid ‘a blow against Gaullism’. But he attacked ‘errors [that] had aided the enemy’. He argued that setting up a national strike committee had wrongly given the impression that the PCF and CGT were seeking to launch a general strike; emphasis should have been placed on the industrial rather than political aspects of the conflict and it was wrong to encourage workers to stay on strike when the employers had been willing to grant concessions. When on 9 December the PCF Secretariat reviewed events with leading communist trade unionists, Thorez echoed the words used by Stalin in Moscow – ‘there can be no strike without strikers’ – and urged an ordered return to work, which took place the following day.24 The employers and authorities responded with sackings and arrests of communist and trade union activists. Thorez argued that ‘false tactics’ towards the strikes by communists were rooted in misunderstandings over the implications of the world view outlined at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. Since national unity remained necessary in order to defend national sovereignty and defeat the Marshall Plan, steps should have been taken to avoid alienating ‘patriotic employers’ and other potential allies. He told the Central Committee (22 –23 December) that declaring a strike against employers who may ‘for different reasons than us also struggle to defend national independence’ and then advocating that workers should not return to work ‘even if they receive a satisfactory offer’ was ‘a political error [. . .] in relation to the wider perspective’.25 In effect, Thorez’s aim remained a French Front type of alliance, which he described as a ‘National Front’ going beyond traditional notions of left- and right-wing politics. With participation by the Socialists – ‘the most active wing of reaction’ – ruled

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

195

out, the ‘fundamental forces’ were ‘the working class, the popular masses committed to the idea of peace, together with the middle classes and layers of the grand bourgeoisie interested in maintaining the economic and political independence of France’.26 In late summer 1948 a new strike movement began to spread, involving – amongst others – workers in engineering, textiles, paper manufacturing, the merchant navy and the railways. On 4 October, miners walked out to begin an eight-week conflict, which became increasingly bitter. When the miners’ union withdrew safety cover in the pits, government ministers dispatched army reservists to the mining regions. Commentators and right-wing politicians renewed talk of ‘insurrectional strikes instigated by Moscow’. But Thorez again approached the movement in a cautious manner. He worked closely with Frachon to ensure that the CGT – now even more of an appendage of the party after the departure of its socialist wing to form Force Ouvrie`re – restrained the development of a generalised conflict of the type that had erupted in November 1947. The PCF’s active and explicit support for the workers’ movement in 1947 and 1948 helped to rekindle the enthusiasm of many activists who had become disillusioned during the party’s years in government. But Thorez’s watchword remained the need to avoid e´troitesse, a term implying sectarianism. The aims of any major strike movement, he insisted, must remain ‘in tight liaison with our political line’ which ‘derives from the international situation’.27

‘Peace hangs on a knife-edge’ The ‘international situation’ was code for defence of the Soviet Union, in Thorez’s words, ‘the rampart of peace and democracy’.28 His challenge was, once again, to present the PCF as a patriotic party standing up for French national interests, while acting as purveyor of Soviet diplomacy and interests. After the breakdown of the wartime alliance, it was often a difficult conundrum. In April 1948, Raymond Aron summarised a widely held sentiment that communists were ‘not citizens of the Fourth Republic’ and were prepared ‘to betray France’.29 Yet, despite political isolation, the PCF maintained its electoral base, in 1951 securing 26.9 per cent of the vote, a shade higher than the 25.7 per cent won in June 1946.30 The party’s focus on the issue of peace partly explains the cohesion of its support. Historians looking back on the late 1940s emphasise the success of policies that would eventually secure stability in western Europe, particularly the strategy of Robert Schuman’s Third Force government (MRP, Socialists and Radicals) to resolve the ‘German question’ by putting a

196

MAURICE THOREZ

contained Germany at the centre of European integration. But often the extent to which a significant section of the population, including opinionmakers and intellectuals, feared that the Cold War would turn into a terrifying ‘hot’ conflict can be overlooked. Sabre rattling by the US, development of the atomic bomb, establishment of NATO, plans for German rearmament, war in Vietnam and the American offensive in Korea in 1950: all gave credibility to Thorez’s new leitmotif that ‘peace hangs on a knife edge’.31 Following directives from the Cominform, the Political Bureau agreed ‘to take the head of a vast movement for the defence of peace’ at its meeting on 18 March 1948. The initiative for a peace campaign within France had originally come from two prominent Resistance figures, Charles Tillon and a fellow traveller Yves Farge, who had – independently of the PCF leadership – utilised their links with former Resistance activists to form Combattants de la Liberte´. Thorez worked to subordinate the movement to party control, and its name changed to Combattants de la Paix et de la Liberte´ and then to Mouvement de la Paix. Laurent Casanova was appointed as the PCF’s representative within the international peace movement while Tillon was consigned responsibility for the movement within France, a subservient role. During these years, Thorez became increasingly reliant on Casanova, who provided some of the intellectual support previously offered by Fried. Tensions over strategy within the Peace Movement soon arose. Thorez and Casanova viewed the movement as a direct vehicle for Cominform and PCF strategy, while Tillon and Farge were more sensitive to the movement’s autonomy and independent dynamic.32 Two major campaigns mobilised impressive forces. In April 1949, Paris hosted a ‘World Congress of Partisans for Peace’, for which Picasso designed his ‘peace dove’. Huge crowds attended the final rally in the Buffalo Stadium.33 In the spring of 1950, a petition in support of the ‘Stockholm Appeal’ for the banning of the atomic bomb gathered over ten million signatures. Thorez drove the campaign as the ‘task of the entire party’, lambasting members and sections that did not deploy sufficient energy.34 In Thorez’s mind, events after 1947 were a rewind of the period 1938 – 43. He drew an analogy between retribution aimed at the workers’ movement after the ‘insurrectional strikes’ of 1947 – 48 and repression after the defeat of November 1938 and in the period after the banning of the PCF following the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact. Whereas in 1938, appeasement with Nazi Germany had prepared the way for imperialist war, now the ‘enemies of socialism’ wanted to ‘create an atmosphere of pogroms against the working class, the CGT and the Communist Party’ in order to prepare the way for a new war ‘for the benefit and under the direction of

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

197

American capitalists’. Thorez likened the role of the Peace Movement to that of the Resistance. Plans by the United States and its supporters in France for a resurgent and re-armed Germany would allow ‘German capitalists to remove the last traces of Hitler’s defeat’ and ‘all those who mobilised for the Resistance can and must unite once again to prevent France and the world falling into the horrors of a new catastrophe’.35 Thorez prioritised public engagements that linked him to the legacy of the Resistance, for example opening a commemoration to Resistance fighters executed in the pits surrounding the Citadel of Arras (December 1948). He continued to propagate the myth of ‘the Appeal of 10 July’, and ‘was the object of moving demonstrations of affection’ at a rally on its eighth anniversary.36 Uncomfortably for Thorez, enemies of communism were also drawing analogies with the Second World War. Would the PCF face difficulties in taking sides in a war between France and the Soviet Union in the way it had when war was declared against Nazi Germany, they asked. Thorez’s response was that ‘the people of France will never wage war against the Soviet Union’.37 The phrase became another thorezien motif, appearing on banners, in speeches and as headlines in the communist press. The PCF’s opponents kept up the offensive. How would Communists behave if the Red Army reached French territory? Would the PCF defend France or support an external enemy? In response, Thorez made a widely reported speech at the February 1949 Central Committee. The questions were hypothetical, he explained, because ‘by definition’ the ‘country of socialism’ could not pursue a policy of aggression: the Soviet army had never attacked a population but always fulfilled its ‘glorious mission of liberation of peoples’. Nevertheless, since the question had been posed, he was prepared to answer: If our country were led – against her wishes – into an anti-Soviet war and if in these conditions the Soviet army, defending the cause of the peoples, the cause of socialism, were forced to pursue the aggressors on to our territory, the workers, the people of France, would behave in the same way towards the Soviet army as have the workers and people of Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.38 Thorez’s statement, with its images of the Red Army marching into Paris, created a storm. Critics noted how it ignored the Soviet Union’s incursions into Poland and the Baltic states following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, while allies within the Peace Movement expressed concern that Thorez’s position was undermining its campaign. The National Assembly passed a resolution condemning the PCF as ‘collaborationist’ and senior politicians

198

MAURICE THOREZ

began to canvass proposals to ban the party. In 1950, while not withdrawing his words, Thorez somewhat moderated his position and emphasised that the Soviet Union had neither territorial claims nor demands of military, economic or political nature over France.39 Thorez’s statement in February 1949 was primarily aimed at the communist community. Although its level of electoral support remained stable, the PCF’s characteristics had changed from those of the post-Liberation period. Between 1947 and 1949, it shrank in size, losing one-third of its membership.40 In the first two-and-a-half years after the war, emphasis had been placed on building a ‘mass workers’ party’, with minimal demands placed on the broader membership. Now, political isolation called for an organisation of cadres committed, ideologically and actively, to every aspect of the communist cause. Thorez’s declaration in support of a French ‘people’s democracy’ ushered in by Red Army tanks had the desired effect. Casanova told the Political Bureau that it had stirred the ‘e´lan’ of activists, proving that they would remain firm and loyal in the face of a furore whipped up by ‘alien class pressures’.41 Thorez bathed in the cultural currents of late Stalinism. He attacked ‘bourgeois decadence’, recognising it as a melange of ‘moronic Hollywood films’, ‘the total pessimism and retrograde obscurantism’ of existential philosophy (a swipe at Jean-Paul Sartre) and ‘formalism by painters for whom art begins with form not with content’. At the PCF’s Twelfth Congress (Genevilliers, April 1950), he anointed Andre´ Fougeron – who had recently completed a portrait of the General Secretary’s mother – as the party’s painter in residence, overlooking Pablo Picasso, who had been criticised for his ‘decadent and bourgeois’ approach by Soviet representatives at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace held in Wroclaw (August 1948). Thorez’s approach led to a rupture with a group of Resistance intellectuals, including the writer Marguerite Duras (who would later script the film Hiroshima Mon Amour). But his attack on modernist culture struck populist chords. Thorez suggested that socialist realism was ‘art in the great French tradition’ – meaning the art of Euge`ne Delacroix, Victor Hugo and Honore´ de Balzac – while modernist art and literature was betraying ‘the memory of our intellectual traditions; our qualities of taste, our sense of elegance of probity, all that has made our country great’.42 For Thorez, the ‘other’ was made up of explicit enemies in the camp of western imperialism but also ‘spies and agents’ within the communist movement. In the summer of 1948, relations between Stalin and Tito broke down after the Yugoslavian leader refused to countenance a federation with Bulgaria. For seeking a degree of autonomy within the world communist movement, the Yugoslavian party was expelled from the Cominform and

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

199

denounced as ‘anti-Soviet’, ‘pro-imperialist’ and, from November 1949, ‘fascist’.43 Thorez felt vindicated by the Soviet condemnation of Yugoslavian communists, the PCF’s fiercest critics at Szklarska-Pore˛ba. He was buoyed by Stalin’s mendacious words to Tito that ‘even though the French and Italian Communist Parties ha[d] so far achieved less than the Yugoslavian Communist Party’, this was ‘not due to any special qualities of the Yugoslavian communists’ but because the ‘Soviet Army had come to the aid of the Yugoslavian people’.44 In fact, Yugoslavia had been the only east European country to possess a resistance movement strong enough to liberate the country without help from the Soviet army. A frenzied campaign to root out ‘Titoist spies’ began throughout the people’s democracies. Thorez received a briefing when he attended the extravagant and somewhat grotesque rituals surrounding the funeral of Dimitrov (July 1949). On his return from Sofia, he told the Political Bureau that the former Hungarian party secretary La´szlo´ Rajk – whose trial had yet to begin – was ‘an American spy and police agent linked to the Yugoslavs’.45 The Political Bureau agreed that the Yugoslavian affair should ‘serve as a warning for all communist parties’ and soon dossiers began to arrive on Thorez’s desk outlining the ‘activities of Titoist agents’ within the PCF.46 Thorez’s commitment to Soviet dogma was absolute, but he nevertheless continued to apply it in a fashion that took account of the French context. In doing so, he sometimes came close to the limits imposed by Soviet thinking. His boldest excursion was over the issue of ‘inevitability of war’ under capitalism, an essential element of the Marxist canon. During 1950, Thorez began to argue against ‘the erroneous idea that war is inevitable’. A new war would depend ‘on the people, on the working class and all partisans of peace’, who are capable through their activity of ‘defeating the imperialist war plans’.47 Six years later, in the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress, Thorez claimed that these ‘clairvoyant’ comments had been an anticipation of Khrushchev’s call for ‘peaceful coexistence’ (see chapter eight). In reality, Stalin had made similar, though more circumspect, remarks. In early 1951, he spoke of the ‘non-inevitability of war’ and even suggested a peace pact between the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, USA, China and France.48 Yet Stalin also continued to make contradictory statements. Possibly with Thorez in mind, he warned that ‘certain comrades’ who no longer viewed war as ‘inevitable’ were ‘mistaken’ and that ‘to eliminate the inevitability of war, it [was] necessary to abolish imperialism’.49 Thorez’s position on the inevitability of war was a response to the success of the Stockholm petition – which generated genuine optimism within the Peace Movement – and also to important shifts in the balance of world power, particularly the successful Soviet nuclear test (August 1949) and the Chinese

200

MAURICE THOREZ

Revolution (October 1949). His remarks were influenced primarily by the relationship between communists and non-communists within the Peace Movement. It would be impossible, Thorez argued, to gain the ear of intellectuals, socialists, pacifists and broader non-party people in the movement if communists were to insist that the struggle for peace was doomed from the outset.50

Fiftieth birthday Thorez’s working methods were now well established. He still spent mornings at home, reading newspapers and Marxist texts, preparing reports and writing speeches, venturing into his office at party HQ only during the afternoons.51 Gone was the tension between ministerial responsibilities and his position as general secretary that had marked the period 1945 – 47. Thorez dominated discussions at the Political Bureau and held discussions about tactics with individual leaders of the Peace Movement and trade unions. His leverage in the party was exercised by a group of trusted lieutenants. As well as Casanova, these included his former personal secretary Servin, who was assigned to the Commission of Cadres, and Lecoeur, the Pas-de-Calais miners’ leader. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance, during which he had been responsible for the party’s clandestine apparatus, Lecoeur was a popular and heroic figure. Thorez initially promoted him to re-establish an underground network – safe houses, radios, false papers, escape routes – in the event of a new war.52 Relations between the two men were good. Thorez even felt comfortable enough to gossip about family life. ‘At least, if you are worn out after working all day, you can go home to find some relaxation,’ he told Lecoeur. ‘With me, it’s the opposite. When I go back to Jeannette, she wants to continue the discussions, she wants to know what I have decided. [. . .] I have no rest, no peace.’53 Impressed by his diligence and loyalty, Thorez appointed Lecoeur to the Secretariat, effectively as his deputy, after the Gennevilliers Congress in April 1950. The promotion aimed to obstruct the influence of Marty on the four-person committee,54 but it was also part of a reshaping of leadership committees in Thorez’s image. Twenty-nine members of the Central Committee (around one-third) were removed at the congress, the biggest shake-up in PCF history. Those purged were invariably veterans of the Spanish Civil War and Resistance (Lecoeur was an exception), while new incumbents tended to have a trade union background, often one formed during the Popular Front period. Amongst those losing their place was the Resistance hero and eminent biologist Marcel Prenant, who in 1945 had heralded Thorez as leader of the armed resistance but had more recently

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

201

spoken out against the pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko. New additions to the Political Bureau included Jeannette Vermeersch.55 Celebrations for Thorez’s fiftieth birthday began immediately after the congress. During three weeks, thousands of supporters and activists filed past an exhibition of presents in Ivry Town Hall (see Introduction). At a lavish ceremony to launch the festivities, a symphony orchestra and three choirs performed traditional and specially commissioned music, including ‘a song for the birthday of Maurice Thorez’. The audience chanted ‘Maurice, Maurice’, as party members advanced to the rostrum to offer Thorez flowers and gifts, before shaking hands with or bowing before the General Secretary’s mother. A spectacular firework display and release of hundreds of pigeons into the night sky marked the end of the celebrations.56 The rituals surrounding Thorez’s birthday were an imitation, and in many ways a prolongation, of the PCF’s celebration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday. In December 1949, trucks had toured France collecting presents which, after an exhibition and rally in Paris, were transported to ‘the man we love the most’ in Moscow.57 Both the Stalin and Thorez festivities were choreographed by Jean Chaintron, Thorez’s former cabinet secretary and Resistance leader (who, despite his endeavours, was also removed from the Central Committee at Gennevilliers).58 The Thorez cult co-opted the authority of Stalin in a similar fashion to the Stalin cult’s appropriation of Lenin’s legacy, but in terms of real content it was remarkably shallow. The fixation on birthdays was, as Kevin Morgan notes, ‘like the royalist ceremonies it subliminally evoked [. . .] a cult of mediocrity, of office over achievement of arbitrary preferment no longer of divine origin but deriving from a higher power in Moscow’.59 Extolment of Thorez’s supposed qualities reached absurd proportions. Guyot told a meeting: ‘his general knowledge is immense, especially in history and geography, in natural science, in biology and above all in geology; from the earliest age, he followed Lenin’s advice to the youth that to become a communist it is necessary to enrich your mind with all the knowledge accumulated by humanity through the centuries.’ It is significant that for Guyot the importance of these accomplishments was that they enabled ‘Maurice Thorez [to] become the best Stalinist in France’.60 A Central Committee resolution was even more explicit about the qualities that bestowed legitimacy to Thorez’s leadership: ‘[He] is the best disciple of Stalin in France, [who has] learnt to observe as a golden rule the unconditional loyalty, the unqualified attachment to the country of socialism, to the country of Lenin and Stalin.’61 The Thorez cult drew capital from the Popular Front, a defining period in PCF history with which Thorez’s leadership was intrinsically connected. But the General Secretary’s absence during other formative and heroic

202

MAURICE THOREZ

moments – including the party’s foundation and the Resistance – meant that PCF history needed to be refashioned. So, to an enormous fanfare, the second edition of Fils du Peuple was published in the autumn of 1949. ‘It has returned to the battle like a glorious soldier covered with scars,’ wrote Fre´ville, who worked with Thorez on the updated text.62 As in 1937, Thorez embarked on a tour to promote the book, carefully recording the number of signed dedications in a notebook: 1,216 copies in Dunkerque, 1,764 in Limoges, 5,049 in Marseille; in all Thorez autographed 148,270 books during a twelve-month period.63 The new edition of Fils du Peuple contained a chapter entitled ‘the war’ in which Thorez describes his role as ‘at the head of the hunted and persecuted communist militants’. At the beginning of 1949, the party had drawn up plans to publish a collection of biographical pamphlets dedicated to ‘heroes of the Resistance’, including Guy Moquet, Arthur Dallidet and others executed by the Nazis. Seventy booklets were in preparation, four of which were at press. Such narratives inevitably raised questions about Thorez’s role in the Resistance: the Political Bureau ordered a halt to the series and the destruction of existing proofs.64 No room existed for accounts that threatened the definitive version of party history described in Fils du Peuple. The Thorez cult formed part of an international communist phenomenon, but its manifestation was conditioned by the national context. It tapped into an historical heritage that included cults around the Sun King, Napoleon, Louis Napoleon and more recently Marshall Pe´tain, whose cult had climaxed in April 1944 with his eighty-eighth birthday celebrations, including an exhibition of presents, specially created songs, poems, posters, paintings and postcards. The Thorez cult competed directly with the cult around Charles de Gaulle, who was beginning to galvanise a right-wing challenge to the Third Force government. De Gaulle drew on Resistance myths – particularly his broadcast of 18 June 1940 – in order to cultivate, in the words of Daniel Mahoney, ‘a unique theological-political language to explain his “mission” as saviour-leader of France’.65 Communists also depicted Thorez as a saviour figure. A few weeks after his fiftieth birthday celebrations, a poster appeared with the slogan ‘For Peace’. It depicts a huge bomb wreaking havoc and devastation, while in the foreground a phalanx of demonstrators with banners and clenched fists march towards it. Growing out of the crowd is the upper torso and head of Thorez, who holds out a hand to halt the bomb and protect the crowd. Two women complete the scene: one shielding two frightened children; the other holding aloft a young girl as if presenting the child to Thorez. It is difficult not to detect a quasi-religious aspect to the image: Thorez personifies the

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

203

crowd, represents the strength and will of the people; but he is also a father figure, the protector of life, the saviour.

Illness On the afternoon of 10 October 1950, rumours began to circulate that Thorez had been carried into a Paris hospital ‘unconsciousness and covered in blood’. Some speculated that he had been ‘beaten up’ by two party members.66 Thorez had, in fact, suffered a stroke which paralysed the right-side of his body. He was seriously ill. Thorez was attended by a coterie of PCF doctors and, a week later, by the Soviet neurologist Professor Sergei Davidenkov, who flew in from Moscow. For a year, Davidenkov had been pleading with Stalin for the release of his son Nickolaj, also a respected scientist, who was being held in the gulag and facing the death sentence.67 Arrangements were made for Thorez to be treated in the Soviet Union and on 11 November he left Le Bourget airport in a Soviet plane. Cold War drama accompanied his journey when an American fighter buzzed the flight close to Frankfurt. Soviet authorities condemned the ‘provocation of American air gangsters’ and ‘an attempt on Maurice’s Thorez’s life’.68 The right-wing press described Thorez’s treatment in the Soviet Union as an insult to the French medical profession.69 Yet Jeanette Vermeersch and senior communists genuinely believed in ‘the inevitable superiority of Soviet science, including in the area of medicine’ and expected Thorez would have access to ‘the specialists, experts and scholars’ befitting of a senior official in the world communist movement.70 The fact that the PCF was ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’ also impacted on the decision to treat him in the Soviet Union. In a report to his superiors in London, a British Intelligence officer understood the implications of the symbiosis between party and leader: ‘as a sick man in France, [Thorez] would be an embarrassment, rather than a help to his party’.71 The PCF leadership kept up a brave public face about the illness. Auguste Lecoeur, who travelled with the stricken Thorez to Moscow, spoke of the ‘absolute certainty that by the start of the year Maurice Thorez will return to us completely recovered’.72 Privately, however, leading communists were deeply concerned about the prognosis. British Intelligence had a source – codenamed ‘Cuckoo’ – in the PCF’s Seine Federation and reports reaching London have some credence. ‘Central Committee members’, reported Cuckoo, ‘recognise the seriousness of Thorez’s health’ and know that he is likely to have ‘much diminished physical and intellectual capacities. Some members of the

204

MAURICE THOREZ

Central Committee are comparing the case of Maurice Thorez to that of Lenin’ (who had spent much of the final year of his life incapacitated by a stroke).73 Thorez’s recovery was slow and uneven. In Moscow, he received electric stimulation treatment at the Barvikha Sanatorium, a hospital built in the 1930s exclusively for Soviet dignitaries. Setbacks in December 1950 and January 1951 were followed by a severe bout of pneumonia in March, prompting a concerned Stalin to instruct his personal physician, Vladimir Vinogradov, to treat the French leader. In March 1951, Thorez was transferred to a health centre at Sukhumi, a Black Sea resort renowned for its spas and tropical climate. In June, he was moved to another sanatorium at Naltchik in the foothills of the Caucuses. Recalling visits to his father, Paul Thorez describes a remote region of ‘villages on the edge of the earth, [. . .] a backdrop of snowy mountain peaks and turquoise glaciers’.74 Amongst those to visit during these months was Casanova whose ‘much less optimistic’ observations ‘made to close friends’ found their way to British Intelligence: Mr Thorez is certainly feeling better, but his right side is not good; movement of the right hand is painful and likewise it is painful for him to walk. However, he is still just as intelligent and totally aware. If he returns at some point to France (it is not known when), he will not be able to work much, or speak in public. Any exertion will be totally forbidden by the doctors. Casanova concludes that Thorez’s leadership of the Communist Party is ‘finished’. At best, he will be able to serve as a figurehead.75 The secrecy surrounding Thorez’s health led inevitably to rumours. An M15 tap on the phone at the British Communist Party headquarters intercepted a call between an East London activist (Gollhard) and Derek Kartun, who later became a writer of spy novels after his break with communism in 1956. The agent reported: ‘Gollie rings and says he has just had a message through one of the News Agencies that Thorez has died in Moscow.’76 In fact, Thorez’s condition began to improve steadily after the summer of 1951. In October he was moved to the Maison de Repos in Gagra, on the Black Sea coast. Gagra was only 50 kilometres from Stalin’s holiday villa at Sochi and the Soviet leader paid a number of visits to the convalescing French leader. In January 1952, Thorez began washing and dressing without help and was no longer in need of 24-hour nursing. He dispensed with his wheelchair and was able to walk using a cane. By February, he had gained sufficient concentration and dexterity to read and was beginning to dictate letters and texts, working up to five hours a day. L’Humanite´ published extracts of letters

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

205

on Marxist theory and general politics addressed to his 23-year-old son from his first marriage, Maurice junior, who had recently joined the party.77 By May, Thorez was dictating letters saying that it ‘would not be long’ before he would be once again participating in the struggle for peace and socialism.78 Throughout his illness, the image of Thorez permeated every aspect of PCF activity. The Central Committee met with a huge photo of their general secretary behind the top table.79 Branches passed resolutions and individual members wrote letters rededicating themselves to the stricken leader. The schedule to publish Thorez’s ‘Collected Works’ was accelerated. A ‘year of study’ was launched in October 1951, during which activists were encouraged to pepper their speeches with quotations from Thorez’s works.80 Artists offered their talents. Boris Taslitzky created a large canvas depicting a visit by a fatherly-looking Stalin to an ailing but happy-looking Thorez wrapped in a blanket. Jean Milhau painted Maurice Thorez va bien, which portrays a seller of l’Humanite´ holding aloft an image of Thorez’s smiling face while surrounded by an animated crowd. The work was seized by police for ‘striking a blow at national sentiment’ when displayed at the Paris art exhibition, Le Salon d’Automne, in November 1951.81 The Feˆte de l’Humanite´ became a paean to the sick leader. A wooden statue of Thorez took centre stage; photos, drawings and slogans of the General Secretary draped the stalls; an exhibition displayed scenes from Fils du Peuple. Communist activists could buy a pair of pocket mirrors, one decorated with the face of Thorez, the other an image of Jeannette Vermeersch.82 In short, the cult of Thorez gathered new energy despite – or perhaps because of – his illness and convalescence in the Soviet Union. The influence of the absent Thorez on PCF politics during this period is a more complex question. An immediate impact of his illness was on the functioning of the Secretariat and Political Bureau, both devoid of the person with overwhelming authority. Rivalries opened. Lecoeur was widely viewed as Thorez’s heir apparent, but his intransigence and belligerence ruffled the feathers of more cautious members, including Duclos, the interim general secretary, and Frachon, the CGT leader. While Marty again found himself frozen out of leadership responsibilities, the influence of Jeannette Vermeersch increased, on account of her access to Thorez and his thoughts. Vermeersch travelled several times to see her husband, usually staying with him for a few weeks. On her return to Orly airport, she would be met by a delegation of Political Bureau members seeking news about Thorez’s health but also eager to hear his pronouncements on PCF politics. For some, Vermeersch’s status became a source of resentment. After a row over strategy within the Peace Movement, Tillon sarcastically reminded her that he had

206

MAURICE THOREZ

spent the war fighting Vichy and the Nazis while she was safely installed in the Soviet Union.83 On 7 April 1952, Billoux returned from the Black Sea with ‘a note’ from Thorez. When members of the Political Bureau convened to discuss it four days later, they spoke of its ‘great help’ (Casanova), ‘extreme importance’ (Guyot) and ‘inestimable aid’ (Marty). According to Fajon, it was ‘proof’ that Thorez had once again ‘resumed his leadership role’. Nevertheless, there was no unanimity on the note’s significance. For Fajon, it showed that ‘in [Thorez’s] absence, we have worked not too badly’; others stressed that Thorez was proposing ‘serious corrections on a series of issues’ (Guyot).84 Billoux wrote up the ‘note’ and his discussions with Thorez into an article.85 The text has been interpreted as ‘the jettisoning’ of the ‘politics of the Popular Front and national-thorezism of the years of the Liberation’ and a return to the more militant anti-imperialist policies of the party’s early years. It is viewed as a signal for the violent protests that erupted around the visit to France in May by General Matthew Ridgway, NATO Supreme Allied Commander who had led American forces in Korea.86 A more nuanced reading is necessary. Thorez’s note, as reported at the Political Bureau, certainly represents a shift in rhetoric. It argues that the PCF had ‘under-estimated’ the reactionary role of the French bourgeoisie, had ‘abandoned a class position and was sliding towards a nationalist position’. In addition, the party had been ‘insufficiently firm’ in its opposition to the French army’s role in Vietnam and Korea, where a French battalion was fighting the Chinese-backed North. Whereas after the meeting with Stalin in November 1947, Thorez had proposed unity with ‘patriotic employers’, he now condemned the French bourgeoisie as a whole for acting as a ‘servant’ to American imperialism in a ‘willing’ and ‘deliberate’ fashion. This evaluation of the role of French capitalism would become a consistent part of Thorez’s world view, underpinning (after 1958) his refutation of arguments that an indigenous wing of French capitalism could be antagonistic to American interests (see chapter nine). With the exception of Marty, nobody at the Political Bureau dared to point out the irony of Thorez’s position: that the PCF’s assimilation of nationalism had been guided by Thorez, or that his stress on the ‘reactionary’ French bourgeoisie, rather than American imperialism as ‘enemy number one’, contradicted one of the arguments he had enthusiastically deployed against Marty in the aftermath of SzklarskaPore˛ba. The note had, Marty pointed out, made an ‘essential correction’ because it recognised that the principal ‘blow must landed against our own bourgeoisie’.87 Despite these shifts, the Thorez-Billoux article retains many essential elements of the ‘national-thorezien’ approach. Its assessment of the political

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

207

situation in France is ambiguous. On one hand, it argues that French politics is moving towards the right, even taking ‘a road of fascisation’ – a reference to the growth of de Gaulle’s RPF (described as an openly ‘fascist’ formation). On the other, it makes the bold claim that ‘the conditions for a reversal of the political situation in France are favourable’. Thorez argues an explicitly Popular Front type approach: a direct ‘path towards socialism’ is not on the agenda, but conditions exist for communists to lead a ‘united front of action’ with ‘the poor and middling peasantry and the middle class of the towns’ to ‘impose a policy of peace, national independence with a broad government of national union’. The article also calls for more effective communist activity with clearer political ends. In February, the government banned a communist-sponsored demonstration to commemorate the anti-fascist protests of February 1934. In response, the party and CGT called a ‘day of action’ for 12 February, but support from workers was sporadic. Thorez blamed ‘insufficient political clarity’ from the leadership, mentioning ‘articles by comrade Lecoeur’ (a sign that Thorez was already lining up the Secretary for Organisation as a scapegoat for the party’s failings). Thorez’s note was not an argument for the type of robust demonstration that greeted Ridgway. Rather, it was a demand that proposals for action should have firm objectives and be more varied in character in order to involve wider sections of the working class.88 The violence that erupted on the anti-Ridgway demonstration should be viewed against the background of a crackdown against the Communists’ right to demonstrate. The centre-right government led by Antoine Pinay, in office since March, seemed determined to create a showdown. Banning orders were issued and protests on 23 and 24 May were broken up by police, with 279 arrests and many injuries. Through the auspices of the Peace Movement, the Communists called for a major demonstration on 28 May. The government issued a new ban and police raided the offices of l’Humanite´ to arrest its editor, Andre´ Stil. Defying the authorities, communist contingents assembled in different parts of Paris to converge on the Place de la Re´publique. Stewards carried placards fastened to sturdy batons, capable of being used to defend demonstrators from police attack. Violence erupted: one demonstrator was killed and many injured. Amongst the 718 people arrested was Jacques Duclos, whose car was halted with, amongst other things, two dead pigeons on the backseat.89 The Affaire des pigeons was one of the more bizarre episodes of French Cold War politics – the birds were assumed by police to be carriers to communicate messages to the Soviet government. The incident was, however, only one aspect of the heavy-handed response to the demonstration by the authorities. When trade

208

MAURICE THOREZ

unionists organised a day of action on 4 June to protest the imprisonment of Duclos and Stil, warrants were issued for the arrests of CGT joint general secretaries Alain Le Le´ap – who would serve ten months in prison – and Benoıˆt Frachon, who went on the run. Many participants of the demonstration on 28 May were rounded up, including leaders of the communist youth organisation. A warrant was issued for Maurice Thorez junior, who – like his father in 1927 – went clandestine, before handing himself in to serve a sentence in the Sante´.90

‘Il revient il revient il vient il va venir’ (Louis Aragon) On 3 September, Jacques Duclos, who had recently returned from visiting Thorez, announced to the Central Committee that the General Secretary would be back before the next meeting, most probably arriving in November.91 Festivities were planned to celebrate the return: a big reception in Paris, a new collection of gifts and a ‘promotion Maurice Thorez’ to recruit new members in his honour.92 Louis Aragon penned a poem entitled Il revient.93 Anticipation increased with the news that Thorez had attended, along with Vermeersch and Lecoeur, the Nineteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in October: his five-minute oration – saluting ‘the glorious teacher and leader of communists of all countries, our beloved and great Stalin’ – was interrupted eight times by stormy applause.94 But in early November, disappointment reigned. Duclos announced that the General Secretary’s homecoming had been delayed: Thorez had left Moscow to travel not to Paris but back to the Maison de Repos in Gagra. Historians have speculated over the reasons for the postponement. Wieviorka makes a convincing case that Stalin sought to embroil the French leader in the nasty episode known as ‘the doctors’ plot’. The witch-hunt against ‘medical terrorists’ began in the summer of 1951, with claims that doctors had been responsible for the death of Andrei Zhdanov (in 1948), and reached an hysterical climax in late 1952 when doctors were forced to confess to being part of a conspiracy to murder leading communist figures. Most of those arrested were Jewish and included Stalin’s personal physician, Vinogradov, who had treated Thorez in January 1951. After days of beatings with rubber truncheons, torture which induced a mild heart attack, Vinogradov confessed to ‘medical wrecking’, including doing ‘much harm to the health of comrades Thorez and [Kyuichi] Tokuda’ (the leader of the Japanese Communist Party).95 Wieviorka suggests that Stalin wanted to keep Thorez in the Soviet Union so that he could testify in a show trial against the ‘criminal doctors’.96 While this scenario cannot be discounted, there were also circumstances particular to France that made it inopportune for Thorez to return. The first

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

209

relates to a new round of legal repression. On 8 October, police raided PCF offices and activists’ homes across the country and, a week later, the authorities sought to lift parliamentary immunity in order to prosecute six leaders – Duclos, Fajon, Marty, Billoux, Guyot and Le´on Feix – for ‘offences against the external security of the state’. The events, which for the PCF brought back memories of the repression during 1927 – 28 and 1939 – 40, occurred while Thorez, Vermeersch and Lecoeur were in Moscow at the Soviet Party Congress. It is easy to see a decision being taken that the physically weakened Thorez should remain in the Soviet Union until the situation in France became less perilous. The second reason is the ‘Marty– Tillon affair’. An investigation into the two men had begun in secret over a year earlier, undoubtedly sanctioned by Thorez during a visit from Servin in July 1951. After l’Humanite´ broke news of the affair on 17 September 1952, the persecution unfolded with the dynamic of a Stalinist show trial: accusations of factional activity, confessions of guilt, new accusations of treachery towards the party, all concluding with the sullying of the moral reputation of the accused. In December, Marty was expelled and Tillon stripped of his positions. The following month, articles in l’Humanite´ denounced Marty as a ‘police spy’. The witch-hunt was linked to the purge of ‘Titoists’ within the people’s democracies. Its de´nouement coincided with the trial in November 1952 of fourteen leaders of the Czechoslovakian party, including its former general secretary Rudolf Slansky, who was executed with ten others in December 1952. Marty had transferred his archives – including those relating to the International Brigades – to Slansky’s office in Prague, an act his accusers deemed as one of defiance against the Soviet Union.97 The initial charges against Marty were a continuation of the attack on him by Thorez during the Central Committee of 29– 30 October 1947. Resurrected were the accusations that he had refused to recognise American imperialism as the ‘main enemy’ (despite Thorez’s volte-face on the issue in his ‘note’) and had failed to secure Thorez’s passage to Algeria in 1944. Marty was reproached for disloyalty towards the party and for ‘ignoring and minimising’ the role of its general secretary.98 Like Marty, Tillon was a veteran of the Black Sea Munity and had immense popularity amongst PCF activists. He was the first communist leader to make an explicit call for ‘resistance’ in June 1940, several weeks before the ‘appeal’ in the names of Thorez and Duclos. He was a constant reminder that resistance activity had often been independent of the party leadership, and certainly took place without the input of Thorez. The campaign against Tillon coincided with the expulsion of Georges Guingouin, whose activities as Resistance leader in the Limousin also questioned the official party narrative.

210

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez followed the Marty – Tillon affair throughout the autumn and winter of 1952, noting key developments in two separate notebooks – one of which he opened to practise writing with his disabled right hand.99 He would have understood the advantages of remaining absent from the scene while scores were settled with Marty. According to Lecoeur, when in May 1952 party leaders discussed whether or not Thorez should be present before proceedings against Marty began, Duclos reported that the General Secretary ‘wanted everything to be settled before his return’.100 On 1 March 1953 Thorez left the Black Sea to journey through the Donetz basin to reach Moscow. On arrival, he heard the news that Stalin was seriously ill. The shock of the Soviet leader’s death a few days later sparked hysterical reactions – over a hundred people were crushed as crowds massed to see his body lying in state. Thorez marked the occasion by ‘using ink for the first time’ since his illness; he wrote a letter of condolence to Georgy Malenkov, effectively Stalin’s deputy and the new Chairman of the Council of Ministers. In France, a PCF national conference was in session and immediately abandoned. Political Bureau members journeyed to Moscow to pay their respects. Aragon wrote that Stalin was the ‘great teacher whose mind, knowledge and example nurtured our party, the party of Maurice Thorez’.101 Thorez had one final hurdle to jump before he could leave the Soviet Union. During the last week in March, he applied for a ‘transit visa’ to allow him to cross West Germany, still divided into French, British and American zones. On 26 March, the French authorities used diplomatic backchannels to request that the British and American governments ‘create difficulties’.102 The British ambassador in Paris informed the Foreign Office about a visit from French security police urging the British government to block Thorez’s visa. ‘This request, which was made on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior, was described as unofficial as it was important that it should not become known that the French government were making this de´marche,’ he told London.103 Why did French authorities make a cack-handed attempt to block Thorez’s return? After all, as the ambassador noted, ‘even if he were prevented from travelling by train, [Thorez] could travel freely to France by sea in a Soviet ship’.104 The context was a new round of judicial repression against French communists. On 24 March, warrants were issued for the arrest of Stil, the editor of l’Humanite´ (who had been imprisoned the previous summer), along with Frachon and three other communist trade union leaders. Police raided CGT offices, seizing documents and making arrests, though Frachon again managed to slip through the net. The raids came as a surprise and the PCF and CGT’s response was, though noisy, vague

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

211

in terms of concrete action. On 26 March, Thorez cabled Duclos and Frachon from Moscow and repeated the criticisms he had made in his ‘note’ of April 1952. General statements in defence of the party and CGT were not enough, he told them. It was necessary ‘to make the greatest effort’ to organise a powerful and broad movement in defence of the party and CGT. Thorez called for ‘large-scale strikes’ in mines, building and engineering, as well as action by railway workers and public servants. He also outlined a strategy to involve socialist and Christian trade unionists in the campaign. The efforts by the French security police to block Thorez’s travel arrangements came immediately after the message was dispatched, suggesting that its content influenced their actions. Two days later, the affair landed on the desk of Sir Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary: ‘I see no reason why we should get mixed up in it,’ he wrote. ‘I am not prepared to shoulder French responsibilities for them.’105 Thorez received his visas on 2 April and left Moscow two days later. Accompanied by an entourage, which included Jeannette Vermeersch, Casanova and a doctor, he stopped for a couple of days in Warsaw, before travelling back to France in a special carriage belonging to Polish state railways. He avoided crowds waiting at the Gare du Nord in Paris, who mistakenly mobbed an American journalist with some resemblance to Thorez, by alighting at Saint Quentin. A journalist from the Manchester Guardian commented on his appearance: ‘He walked very slowly across the platform leaning on a stick held rather convulsively in his left hand. [. . .] He took ten minutes to get out of the station to the waiting car and asked on the way whether it was much further. [. . .] M Maurice Thorez who has returned to France is no longer the commanding physical giant whose energy seemed to give a personal impetus to the whole party.’106

A new routine Thorez arrived back with strict orders from Soviet doctors: less intensive work, strict diet, exercise regime, regular rest and leisure. The PCF leadership spared no expense to facilitate the prescribed life-style. Thorez was supplied with a new home: a converted farm on the outskirts of Bazainville, 50 kilometres west of Paris. His office overlooked a large garden and copse, with views over the valleyed Normandy countryside.107 The barn was transformed into a library, with a gallery to display his fiftieth birthday presents; another room became a small cinema. A newsreel from Pathe´ News records the day the ‘hideout’ was discovered by journalists: photographers and a film crew roam outside the farm, while newsmen taunt party guards as they patrol its perimeter fences.108

212

MAURICE THOREZ

The PCF leadership also provided Thorez with a residence on the Coˆte d’Azur. In late October 1953, he began a six-month sojourn at La Gatounie`re, an imposing villa close to Mougins, the medieval village famous as an artists’ retreat. Man Ray had chosen the spot for his studio in the 1930s, as would Picasso during the final years of his life; after Thorez’s stay, La Gatounie`re would be rented by the crime writer, Georges Simenon. The following October, Thorez returned to the Mediterranean, this time to a villa purchased by the party at Les Escarrasses, a leafy quarter in Le Cannet. Named l’Oliveraie on account of its 150 olive and orange trees in its gardens, the residence overlooked the Bay of Cannes. ‘The house is delightful,’ noted Thorez in his diary on arrival (26 October 1954). Thorez settled down to a new routine. Early mornings were still devoted to browsing newspapers, dealing with correspondence and general political work. Mid-morning, he would take a stroll – around either the copse in Bazainville or the olive grove in Les Escarrasses – followed by an hour of relaxation, most of it spent reading. At lunch, he caught up with the news on the radio before taking a siesta. During the afternoon he received visitors, often Political Bureau members to discuss party business, and continued his reading; he also began a course in Latin. Thorez then took another rest, before undertaking a programme of light physical exercise. The day would finish with dinner, after which he would retire early to bed. Two trusty party members, Nini and her husband Baptistin, acted as housekeeper and odd-job man, and earned great affection from the Thorez children.109 Thorez’s personal physician, Professor Henri-Pierre Klotz paid regular calls and, on occasions, ‘comrade doctors’ flew in from the Soviet Union to monitor progress. After an examination by two Soviet professors in July 1955, Thorez noted: ‘General state excellent. Serious progress in the hand and leg, in power and flexibility. The comrades are happy with the discipline I am observing, the way in which I am following the recommendations I received on leaving Moscow.’110 Family life became unconventional. Vermeersch continued to live in Choisy, with the two oldest children. When Thorez was at Les Escarrasses, she paid frequent visits, travelling on the overnight express from Paris. The youngest child, Pierre, stayed with Thorez and went to school in Le Cannet. When Thorez was at Bazainville, the family came together on Sundays, often for an outing: a tour of the Normandy countryside, a visit to Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet in their twelfth-century converted windmill at Saint-Arnoulten-Yvelines, or a trip to cheer on the Tour de France. School vacations were occasions for short breaks and summer the opportunity for long holidays. In 1954, Thorez passed twelve weeks in the Soviet Union, some of it ‘installed in a dacha nesting in the mountains’ near Sevastopol, where he and Vermeersch

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

213

socialised with key members of the new Soviet leadership, Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev. On holiday, Thorez’s ‘favourite method of relaxation’ was to referee volleyball games. A team was made up of his sons, Jeannette, his driver, nurse, body guards and barber. Paul Thorez describes how his father ‘would ensconce himself on a raised platform at the side of the net and signal the start of the game when he was ready. He took his rulebook and whistle everywhere on these vacations.’111 Reading became an even more essential part of Thorez’s routine. Books and pamphlets would arrive at the Thorez residence on an almost daily basis. His library became a space for study, a place to impress visitors and, more generally, a symbol of Thorez’s status as ‘a new type of intellectual’. Divided between Bazainville and Les Escarrasses, it would grow to around 13,000 items. Party intellectuals and sympathisers sent their books to the General Secretary, who would reply with encouraging and often flattering remarks. A novel by Claude Roy was ‘a treasure of popular poetry’; Henri Lefebvre’s philosophical work was ‘read with enormous interest’; Yves Montand’s ‘deeply moving pages’ were an indication that he was a ‘great artist, faithful to his origins and convictions’. ‘I hope I will meet you one day soon, at the house if possible. You have plenty of admirers here,’ Thorez told Montand.112 Thorez read rapidly, often finishing a book within a day. He worked his way through collected writings of Marxist, Enlightenment and Classical thinkers: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin (before 1956); Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire; Juvenal and Plato. He peppered his diary with pithy sentences, some of which would find their way into articles and speeches. Thorez catalogued his library into twenty-five different sections, some with comprehensive sub-sections. Themes included history, politics, political economy, the labour movement, the Soviet Union, Marxist and other schools of philosophy (Enlightenment and Materialist). Sections were also devoted to literature, painting, popular songs, linguistics, geology and Catholicism. Analysing the catalogue, Bernard Pudal notes how it is marked by Thorez’s ‘double patriotism’, dominated by works about the Soviet Union and France. Despite its considerable size, it represents ‘a relatively homogeneous universe’ that excludes ‘anything that could introduce contradiction or confusion’. Histories of the Soviet Union and Marxism that do not accord with the communist world view are absent. Contemporary literature is totally missing, with the exception of novels by party members and fellow travellers. The library of a ‘new type of intellectual’ had no place for the writings of Andre´ Gide, Jules Romains, Jean Genet, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Koestler or Victor Serge.113

214

MAURICE THOREZ

His health, geographical location and lengthy holidays meant that Thorez was no longer the hands-on leader involved in every detail of the PCF’s day-today activity. During 1953, he attended two meetings of the Central Committee, his short speech in June greeted with bouquets of flowers. But he did not participate in meetings of the Political Bureau throughout 1953 or 1954 (except when it convened briefly during the Central Committee and congress) and was present on only four occasions during 1955. It was not until 29 September 1955 that he visited his office in party headquarters. Political Bureau members were invited to Bazainville to discuss specific questions, their areas of responsibility or to go over reports they were due to deliver. Thorez dispatched a steady stream of written observations and criticisms to the Secretariat, on which Duclos served as his trusted lieutenant. The Secretariat was refashioned at the party’s Thirteenth Congress (June 1954) when Duclos was joined by three other loyalists, Billoux, Fajon and Servin, the latter replacing Lecoeur as Secretary for Organisation. Around the same time, the immensely loyal Georges Cogniot became Thorez’s ‘political secretary’ and, for the Thorez children, ‘master of Latin, Greek and humour’.114 Jeannette Vermeersch was promoted to become a full member of the Political Bureau at the same congress. Although her primary responsibility was the PCF’s work amongst women, Vermeersch became increasingly influential on a range of matters. Thorez often spoke to her on the telephone before Political Bureau meetings to ensure that his concerns were expressed. On some occasions, he would ‘help prepare her information for the BP’.115 His wife provided a conduit into the Political Bureau, but the flow was not all in one direction. Vermeersch influenced Thorez’s views on a number of issues, primarily those of an organisational nature. When a string of visitors (Billoux, Cogniot, Servin and Duclos) arrived at Le Cannet in November 1954, Thorez briefed them on ‘organisation and propaganda in the sense of proposals made by Jeannette’. Vermeersch’s status in the party hierarchy was indicated when, on the first anniversary of Stalin’s death, she was chosen to ‘exalt the life and work of the late master’ at the Central Committee (5 March 1954).116 Thorez followed his wife’s work with pride, cutting out her articles and coverage of her activity in l’Humanite´ to insert in his diary. He peppered the Secretariat with complaints that her role was not fully recognised in the party press. Typical was a remark that the analysis in l’Humanite´ of ‘Jeannette’s excellent report’ at a women’s study day was ‘too short’ (21 September 1953). Sometimes, the criticisms became vitriolic. After a report in l’Humanite´ of a meeting of Parisian activists, Thorez accused the editors of ‘methods of discrimination’ similar to those employed by ‘anarcho-trotskyist enemies’ for failing to mention that ‘the speaker designated by the Secretariat was Jeannette Vermeersch’.117

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

215

The Lecoeur affair The rise of Vermeersch was concurrent with the downfall of Lecoeur, who was stripped of his position as Secretary for Organisation at the Central Committee in March 1954 and expelled (initially for one year) from the party in January 1955. The dynamic of his elimination is similar to that of the Marty – Tillon purge, with which it is linked, and just as difficult to unravel fully. Lecoeur would later claim that his downfall was connected to Thorez’s defiance to the first signs of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union. In July 1953, Duclos and Pietro Secchia, an Italian communist leader, met with Molotov, Malenkov and Khrushchev in Moscow. The Soviet leaders briefed the two men on the recent arrest of Beria before raising the first tentative criticisms of Stalin, using formulations that would become famous after the Twentieth Congress in 1956. While ‘a great Marxist and great leader’, Stalin had been guilty of ‘mistaken methods of leadership’, including ‘deviations in Leninist teachings on the role of eminent individuals in history’; in short, he had promoted a ‘cult of the personality’. The Soviet leaders spoke of reform throughout the communist movement – including in the French and Italian parties – in order to enshrine the ‘supreme principle’ of ‘collective leadership’. On his return and in agreement with Thorez, Duclos’s report to the Political Bureau covered only those aspects of the conversation relating to the downfall of Beria. Thorez and Duclos attempted, as they would do in 1956, to shield the French party from the critique of Stalin, as well as the associated problems it posed for the PCF’s own leader cult. A few weeks later, Lecoeur was in Moscow to meet Mikhail Suslov, the liaison officer for foreign communist parties. Suslov demanded to know why the criticisms of Stalin had not been reported to the PCF Political Bureau and instructed him to insist that the PCF introduce the principle of collective leadership. According to Lecoeur, ‘Suslov was greatly shocked by statements from Thorez. He told me [. . .] that it was necessary to take measures so that Maurice Thorez had less personal power.’ Lecoeur attempted to report back to the Political Bureau, but discussion was blocked by a furious interruption by Jeannette Vermeersch. Wider criticisms of Lecoeur’s work then began and an enquiry established to gather evidence for disciplinary action.118 Thorez’s criticisms of Lecoeur had, in fact, begun over a year earlier. The Thorez–Billoux article of May 1952 implied that he was responsible for weaknesses in the organisation of the 12 February day of action.119 Thorez also blamed Lecoeur for the inadequate mobilisations after the arrests of Stil and Duclos during the Ridgway protests and made similar criticisms over the party’s response to the arrests and raids in March 1953, just before his return to France. Amongst other things, Thorez argued that Lecoeur’s appointment of

216

MAURICE THOREZ

‘political instructors’ had weakened the party’s capacity for action, particularly within the workplaces. Introduced to kick-start the activity of moribund branches, the policy of ‘instructors’ had been approved by the entire leadership team, including by Thorez before his illness. Lecoeur was unprepared to act as scapegoat for the party’s difficulties and refused to make a humiliating ‘self-criticism’. He visited Thorez at Mougins on 20 January 1954 to try to resolve the situation, but quickly realised that the refusal to submit to Thorez’s authority meant that ‘his bridges’ with the General Secretary were broken. Thorez remained on the Coˆte d’Azur while Lecoeur’s political and moral reputation was savaged at the Central Committee on 5 and 6 March. As well as ‘grave and opportunist faults’ as head of the Section for Organisation, the charge sheet included ‘errors’ going back to the 1947 and 1948 miners’ strikes, including an attempt to blame him for the derailment of the postal train near Arras in December 1947. Lecoeur was also denounced for operating ‘a monopoly of leadership’ and ‘behaviour not conforming to the principle of collective leadership’.120 Although he had originally attempted to block Moscow’s directive on collective leadership, Thorez quickly realised that the idea could be useful. Not only did it help to pin responsibility for problems in party organisation at the door of Lecoeur, who was accused of operating ‘a monopoly of leadership’, but it rationalised the way the leadership was refashioned to take account of his illness. Other members of the Secretariat and Political Bureau could be given more formal responsibility as part of a ‘collective’ team, while the General Secretary remained the source of policy and strategy. Moreover, ‘collective leadership’ did not necessarily imply an abatement of the Thorez cult: in his report to the party congress (June 1954), Duclos cited Thorez on 34 occasions, whereas Stalin was referenced 29 times.121

Back to the thirties Thorez’s return after illness led to two major modifications in PCF politics. The first related to strategy. In his brief intervention at the Central Committee in June 1953, Thorez argued for ‘a complete change in orientation in French politics’ and raised the prospect of a ‘new Popular Front’.122 The second related to theory. In January 1955, Thorez argued that French workers were facing ‘absolute pauperisation’ and that a ‘revival’ of the French economy was ‘impossible’.123 The Popular Front slogan became more prominent during 1954 and 1955, as Thorez sensed the possibility of once again forging alliances and ‘doing politics’. Though Thorez would not admit it, the death of Stalin had contributed to a thaw in the Cold War – symptoms included an armistice to

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

217

end the Korean War and tentative talk of negotiations over disarmament – and the ‘two camps’ in international relations no longer totally conditioned the dividing lines in French politics. Thorez described the climate as ‘not 1947 not even 1951’.124 Two controversies dominated French politics: whether to ratify the establishment of a European Defence Community (EDC) and the increasingly disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The EDC implied a supranational army as part of a strategy for broader economic European integration; it would permit German rearmament, though within strict limits. The PCF condemned the proposal with nationalist arguments: it was ‘a Vichyist project’, a threat to national independence and a besmirch to the memory of the victims of Nazism. Gaullist rhetoric was very similar; and opposition to the EDC could be found in every segment of the political spectrum. The pre-war prime minister E´douard Daladier, who had spent time in Buchenwald concentration camp, said he would work with ‘all men and all parties’ to stop the EDC. Headlines appeared: ‘Towards a new Daladier– Thorez Popular Front?’125 Le Monde commented that ‘the debate on the EDC has allowed the Communist Party to come out of the isolation in which it had been confined for six years’.126 Thorez was most encouraged by the conflict over the EDC within the Socialist Party. The SFIO parliamentary group was split, reflecting widespread opposition to the EDC amongst socialist supporters. Thorez offered the SFIO a series of olive branches. When Vincent Auriol stood down as president at the end of 1953, the PCF’s 113 parliamentary deputies voted for the socialist candidate, Marcel-Edmond Naegelen, an opponent of the EDC. In January 1954, Thorez noted that ‘thanks to us’ a socialist opponent of the EDC (Andre´ Le Troquer) had been elected president of the National Assembly. He wrote optimistically in his diary: ‘We have inflicted a new blow on the “Europeans”. We have deepened the rift between socialists and MRP. We are facilitating the united front from below.’127 Thorez also attempted to create openings towards the centre. In June 1954, Communists voted for the premiership of Pierre Mende`s France, a Radical who had served in Blum’s Popular Front administration. Mende`s France had promised to settle the conflict in Vietnam, where the French army had just suffered a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and given a commitment to resolve the conflict over the EDC. Thorez noted that the PCF’s support for Mende`s France’s administration – the first time it had offered support to a sitting government since 1947 – had ‘provoked a strong reaction in France and throughout the world’.128 Thorez’s flirtation with Mende`s France did not last. After the French parliament refused to ratify the EDC in August, the London and Paris

218

MAURICE THOREZ

conferences of the major western powers (September–October 1954) agreed that Germany would regain its sovereignty and be permitted to rebuild an army as a member of NATO. Thorez wrote two articles for l’Humanite´, the first since his illness, to attack the French government’s support for the agreement and to call for an alliance between Communists and Socialists to oppose it.129 Relations with Mende`s France deteriorated further when, after the fall of his government in December 1954, he sought a realignment of the centre-left, while excluding the Communists. By uniting Socialists and radicals (including a section of Gaullists around Jacques Chaban-Delmas) within the Front Re´publicain, Mende`s France became an obstacle in the path of a new Popular Front. During 1955 a war of words erupted between Thorez and Mende`s France, though perhaps surprisingly the conflict centred on Thorez’s pronouncements on pauperisation, rather than directly on the question of left unity. Thorez’s series of articles on pauperisation theory has been described as one of the ‘strangest theoretical statements’ in all PCF and perhaps all communist history.130 His position was, in fact, a rehash of chapter nine of the Manual of Political Economy, a popular text book produced by a team of Soviet economists.131 Thorez read the book on 6 December 1954 and immediately decided ‘to elaborate the fundamentals of scientific socialism for our party’.132 Presenting statistics about housing conditions and costs, food intake, sanitary conditions and the general health of workers, intensification of labour and accident rates, as well as purchasing power, Thorez proved ‘the undeniable fact’ of the ‘Marxist law of absolute pauperisation’.133 There were elements of truth in Thorez’s argument. The purchasing power of workers in big engineering factories on the outskirts of Paris was indeed below the level of 1938. Housing had become a national political issue in 1954, after Abbe´ Pierre (Henri Groue`s) launched a campaign of direct action to highlight the plight of the homeless. Yet, as Thorez wrote up his ideas, France was entering the second decade of a thirty-year period of economic upswing with accompanying social change, which would become known as les trente glorieuses. It was not difficult for critics, including Mende`s France and the former prime minister, Paul Ramadier, to point out that the ‘law of pauperisation’ was refuted by reality. Nevertheless, the theory became an essential element of PCF doctrine until the early 1960s. Thorez announced it during his closing address to the Central Committee on 27 January 1955, a speech delivered in front of a huge photograph of his smiling face. In April, at the Political Bureau, he attacked a group of PCF-supporting academics, including some instructors at party schools, for denying its truth.134 Yet the theory received widespread acceptance from party activists, now accustomed to Thorez’s status as a fountainhead of knowledge.

THE PARTY OF MAURICE THOREZ

219

Pauperisation theory and the slogan of a new Popular Front were connected. Both signalled Thorez’s attempt to shift the PCF away from politics driven by ‘the international situation’ on to new political terrain. Thorez sensed an opportunity to pursue alliances with the Socialists and republican left, but he was also sensitive to the need to secure the PCF’s working-class constituency. By reinforcing the PCF’s commitment to improve working-class conditions, pauperisation theory allowed Communists to mark boundaries with others on the left on social and economic matters. ‘Corrections on the question of pauperisation’, declared Thorez, would help the party’s trade unionists to conduct a ‘more constant and demonstrative activity’ in the battle for workers’ demands.135 Pauperisation also became an argument for communist participation in a left – centre alliance. Critics such as Ramadier and Mende`s France were, said Thorez, refusing to recognise the ‘reality’ of capitalist exploitation and ‘attempting to paralyse’ attempts to challenge it. Their opposition to the theory was a warning of ‘the politics of class collaboration’ that Socialists and radicals would pursue if Communists were excluded from an alliance.136 Pauperisation, alongside the optimistic pronouncements of a new Popular Front, indicate the extent to which Thorez was unable to analyse the economic, social and political transformations of the mid-fifties. Four years later, he would admit that his illness made it ‘difficult to think’, but he would never reflect on the impact of the leadership cult on his mental faculties. The observation of Lucio Magri in relation to the cult in the Soviet Union is surely relevant: The enormous prestige of his image, the ritualistic but earnestly spoken eulogies, the stock gestures of obedience: all this not only stifled critical thinking, debate and research [. . .] but also paralysed the mind of the Leader himself, annulling the gifts of intelligence and political insight of which he had given many a proof in the past. Instead of encouraging him to look for new answers to a new predicament, it led him to fall back on fossilized ideas and previous options.137 Certainly, as 1955 drew to a close, Thorez’s world view remained firmly locked in the economic, social and political relations of the 1930s. He was far from prepared, physically or intellectually, to deal with the most traumatic year in communist history.

CHAPTER 8 THE TRAUMA OF 1956

1956 was communism’s big trauma. On 25 February, in a four-hour report to a closed session of the Soviet Party’s Twentieth Congress, Nikita Khrushchev demolished the Stalin myth, denouncing the former leader for ‘choosing the path of repression and physical annihilation’. Khrushchev aimed to dethrone Stalin while preserving the essence of the Soviet system. But as knowledge of his ‘secret speech’ spread, it fuelled a mixture of frustration and resentment, as well as expectations of change. Revolt broke out in Poland (June –October) and insurrection in Hungary (October– November). A fault line emerged within the communist movement between those attached to a monolithic system led by ‘the guiding party’ and Togliatti’s more pluralistic notion of ‘polycentrism’, while Mao began to challenge Khrushchev for moral leadership of the world movement. In the west, communist parties leaked thousands of disillusioned members.1 In the PCF, Thorez’s handling of Khrushchev’s secret report provoked disquiet, which fused with discontent over his policy towards Algeria and decision to commit the party to oppose birth control. Support for the Soviet intervention in Hungary prompted the first stirrings of organised dissent. Thorez was shocked by the secret speech. It was a challenge to his political identity and life work. We cannot ‘draw the conclusion that we have fought for 35 years for nothing’, he told the Political Bureau in June.2 Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin challenged his own leadership cult and, in relation to French politics, threatened to undermine his strategy for a ‘new Popular Front’, as it provided grist to the mill for anti-communists within the Socialist Party. This was not, of course, the first time that Thorez had felt uncomfortable with the repercussions of Soviet policy within France. But on previous occasions he had attempted – with differing degrees of success – to manage the impact. In 1956, he challenged Khrushchev’s approach and worked to force a reinterpretation of the secret speech that would recognise the ‘merits’

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

221

of Stalin as well as his ‘errors’. The following year would mark the start of Thorez’s new role as international communist diplomat.

At the Twentieth Congress Thorez began 1956 in good spirits. On 2 January, the party took 25.9 per cent of the vote in the legislative elections, gaining half-a-million votes and an additional fifty-one deputies. With the Socialists polling nearly 16 per cent and the two Radical formations, led by Pierre Mende`s France and Francois Mitterrand, gaining over 14 per cent, the left and centre-left had won a clear majority. ‘Our success is provoking vexation and anxiety in “western” capitals who fear a new Popular Front,’ wrote Thorez in his diary (3 January 1956). Overall, the campaign was a personal triumph for Thorez. He won his Ivry seat with an increased majority and, for the first time since his illness, felt confident enough to appear on the public stage, speaking at five rallies in the Paris suburbs. He was flattered when journalists commented on his ‘vigour and spirit’ and particularly the return of his smile, an essential part of his persona.3 He remained, however, self-conscious about the imprint of the stroke on his face. While he delivered the party’s radio address on 23 December, he passed responsibility for the television broadcast – an opportunity to utilise the medium for the first time at an election – to Jeannette Vermeersch. On returning to Les Escarrasses for ‘a rest’ (4 January), Thorez continued to direct the party’s campaign for a ‘new Popular Front’. Billoux was instructed to draft letters to Socialist and Radical leaders; Duclos travelled to the Coˆte d’Azur to discuss strategy and l’Humanite´ ran a series of articles looking back on the social conquests of 1936. Encouragement arrived with news that a socialist delegation was to visit Moscow in March. But optimism that the SFIO was redefining its relationship with the Communists was misplaced. On 26 January, the SFIO leader Guy Mollet was appointed prime minister of a coalition with the Radicals, under the banner Front Re´publicain. Thorez was determined to keep bridges open to the new administration. On 30 January, he rushed back to Paris and at around midnight the following day was the first deputy in the National Assembly to vote for Mollet’s investiture. He paid a price for this symbolic gesture. The weather in Paris was freezing – ‘minus 15 in our garden’ – and Thorez succumbed to a fever. He did not closely follow the Mollet government’s early trials: the protests by the settler community during the prime minister’s visit to Algiers on 6 February – the so-called ‘Day of Tomatoes’ – do not warrant a mention in

222

MAURICE THOREZ

his diary. Thorez’s mind was already elsewhere and, on 8 February, he departed for the Twentieth Congress. Travelling with Georges Cogniot, Thorez stopped in Berlin to pay homage at the tombs of the communist martyrs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and to visit the vast war memorial at Treptower Park, before dining with Otto Grotewohl and Walter Ulbricht (leaders of the German Democratic Republic). In Warsaw a group of Polish leaders came to see him in his railway carriage. A combination of news and gossip – information that Polish communists, purged and executed after being lured to Moscow in 1938, and Be´la Kun, the leader of the 1919 Hungarian Revolution, also executed by Stalin, were to be rehabilitated – confirmed that the coming congress would be an arena of combat over Stalin’s legacy. Thorez had already decided to make his mark. He had spent time in January reading Stalin’s late works, jotting pithy sentences in his diary (11 January 1956), and written an article for Pravda to be published on the opening day of the congress, in which he approvingly cited Stalin. Thorez was accorded a seat on the imposing platform in the Great Hall of the Kremlin, from which he would have noticed the absence of portraits and slogans of the former Soviet general secretary. He was given a copy of Lenin’s ‘testament’ of 1923, describing Stalin as ‘uncouth, disloyal and an abuser of power’, perhaps remembering how, twenty-nine years earlier, he had come to the rostrum at a Comintern conference to denounce Trotsky, who had just revealed the existence of the document. He addressed the congress on its fourth day. An Italian delegate, Vittorio Vidali, describes how Thorez ‘walked slowly to the microphone, leaning on his stick’: His voice was strong and I liked his clear French. [. . .] He mentioned Stalin’s name almost as a challenge and the delegates burst into spontaneous applause. They jumped to their feet at the end of the speech and continued to applaud until he returned to his seat. [Along with Mao] Thorez is the only one who has mentioned the old man’s name.4 Sessions continued each day until 7.30 pm and were followed by receptions, dining and cultural activities. ‘In the old days,’ Vidali reminisced, ‘we used to recount episodes from the past, joke, sing our songs. We used to stay up late and went to bed filled to the brim with sentiments of international solidarity. There is none of that now.’5 Most evenings, Thorez skipped protocol to go back to his room to pencil-sketch the face of Jeannette Vermeersch, composing fifteen miniature portraits of his wife during his stay in Moscow.6 Thorez was enthusiastic about Khrushchev’s opening public report. It contained a coded attack on Stalin, rejecting the cult of personality and

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

223

stressing the need for ‘collective leadership’; but these had been familiar themes since July 1953. Khrushchev spoke of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between communism and capitalism, argued that the road to socialism had become ‘increasingly varied’, emphasised the potential for working class unity – at international and national levels – and raised the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism through the winning of parliamentary majorities. The themes chimed with Thorez’s pragmatic and reformist instincts. The PCF leader told members of his delegation (Cogniot, Duclos and Pierre Doize) that Khrushchev had repeated ‘my declaration of 1946’ (The Times interview) and ‘my report of 1950’ (his speech arguing that ‘war was not inevitable’).7 Thorez received a copy of Khrushchev’s ‘report on the cult of the personality’ on the evening of 25 February and convened a meeting of the French delegates, at which Cogniot made a ‘rapid translation and summary’. Thorez had been instructed not to divulge the report’s ‘very secret’ content and observed the edict even when completing his diary.8 On 25 February, the entry reads simply ‘continue reading’; the reference is not to the secret speech but to documents concerning Khrushchev’s negotiations with Tito during his trip to Belgrade in May 1955. The following day Thorez attended a meeting with Khrushchev, Molotov and leaders of other major European parties, including Togliatti. The group had met three days earlier to discuss relations with the Yugoslavian communists and to consider proposals to wind up the Cominform, now discredited as one of Stalin’s pet projects. A reluctant Thorez had warned that ‘an International in fragments would diverge ideologically and politically’. When the group reconvened on 26 February, Thorez challenged Khrushchev over the secret speech. He wrote in his notebook: ‘Remarks to K on 20th report concerning corrections to errors of the past. Not only the negative side.’ Thorez later told the Political Bureau (13 March): ‘Our delegation was not silent. I declared to comrade Khrushchev that it would have been better to accompany the criticism of the faults and errors of Stalin with several phrases recognising his great historic merits.’9 Khrushchev’s reply – as noted by Thorez – is interesting: We speak and will always speak of Stalin with profound respect. After the death of Lenin he led our party, led it through immense conquests. Consequently, alongside gigantic work, the negative sides. Stalin taught us not to fear our enemies. To assure the success of the great cause M[arx], E[ngels], L[enin], S[talin].10 While Khrushchev had precise aims when delivering his report – to loosen constraints on the Soviet economy and society, stabilise relations with the

224

MAURICE THOREZ

West and lance the boil of Stalin’s relations with the Yugoslavian party – he had given scant consideration to its impact on communist parties outside the Soviet Union, either in the People’s Democracies or in the west. His remark to Thorez, only a day after his speech, already hints at the compromise over Stalin’s legacy that would be agreed at the Soviet Central Committee on 30 June.

Reinterpreting the Secret Speech Thorez did not rush back to France. Staying in Moscow for ten days, he attended ‘fraternal dinners’ and meetings, including a briefing for Soviet leaders on the imminent visit by French socialists. He read the groundbreaking study on Beethoven by the musicologists Brigitte and Jean Massin, writing later that their book on ‘the greatest and most human of all musicians’ was ‘a precious friend during these weeks in the land of the Soviets’.11 He also had a health check: ‘Continue to progress. No medicine. Holidays. Mountains,’ was the encouraging advice from doctors (29 February 1956). On the journey home, he stopped in Warsaw to attend a lavish reception put on by the Polish government and also briefly in Berlin to meet leaders of the German Democratic Republic. With conversations dominated by one topic, Thorez was able to witness the turbulent effect of Khrushchev’s speech and was particularly horrified by remarks by Ulbricht that Stalin was ‘not a classic [Marxist]’.12 The day after returning to France, Thorez met Duclos to discuss the implications of the congress for the PCF. That evening (9 March), Duclos spoke to a packed meeting of activists in the Salle Wagram. He announced that the Soviet party had ‘stood up against the cult of the personality, which is alien to the spirit of Marxism and Leninism’; but in the next breath, and prompting a huge ovation, he began a long eulogy to Stalin ‘whose merits are inscribed in history’.13 The Political Bureau met at Bazainville on 13 March, the day after the PCF had controversially voted ‘full powers’ to Guy Mollet’s government to pursue its policy in Algeria (see chapter nine). Thorez spoke about the congress for two hours, dealing with three main themes. First, he praised the ‘importance’ and ‘newness’ of the analysis within Khrushchev’s public report. He took the opportunity to bolster his own prestige by contending – as he had done in Moscow – that the Soviet general secretary had ‘gone in the direction of notions formulated by ourselves’, even making the extravagant claim that Khrushchev had ‘implicitly evoked the thesis on pauperisation’. Secondly, he dealt with the implications of the cult of the personality for the PCF. When the Soviet leadership first attacked the Stalin cult in the summer of 1953, Thorez had dismissed the idea that the matter had relevance for France.

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

225

Now, he realised it would be impossible to condemn the cult of the personality in the Soviet Union without addressing its manifestations within the PCF. It was, he said, necessary ‘to finish absolutely with the expression “the party of Maurice Thorez”, to combat the excess of quotations of a great leader, and to give more attention to collective leadership [. . .] to criticism and modesty’. Thirdly, Thorez turned to Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin. Contrary to the historiographical consensus that he ‘did not breath a word’ about the secret speech at the meeting,14 Thorez outlined its essential content: Lenin had warned: authoritarianism, brutality, poor temperament, aggravated in the last period by excessive distrust [. . .] not able any more to stand the slightest contradiction – then to see plots everywhere – and then began what Khrushchev (report closed session) called: the tragedy of Stalin. [. . .] Thousands of communists were killed, of whom many are now being rehabilitated posthumously – members of the CC and BP, regional leaders, local activists, cadres in the economy administration and army. All that [is] very prejudicial’ [all emphases in Thorez’s notes].15 Thorez developed an argument that he would consistently maintain throughout the summer and beyond. Khrushchev’s explanation for Stalin’s ‘arbitrary and repressive regime’ was ‘unmarxist’. Stalin’s ‘faults’ should, he said, be placed in historical context. They were ‘the necessary struggle against the enemies of the revolution’ and should be viewed alongside ‘his positive sides’: ‘We will defend Stalin [. . .] As Lenin said about Rosa Luxembourg, we will say of Stalin: “despite his faults he was an eagle of the Revolution”.’ Everyone at the meeting supported Thorez. ‘Why nothing positive? Socialism has been built with Stalin,’ declared Raymond Guyot. ‘Defend Stalin,’ said Vermeersch, who added in characteristic fashion that arguments that did not take into account ‘the conditions of the struggle get on my wick’ (‘m’a fait braire’).16 The significance of the Political Bureau on 13 March is that it agreed – for the first time in the PCF’s history – to resist the Moscow line: Khrushchev’s report would be reinterpreted by balancing the ‘positive and negative characteristics’ of Stalin.

Seeking advice from Togliatti The day after the Political Bureau, Thorez took the train back to the Mediterranean. He did not attend the Central Committee on 22 March, saying later that he was too tired and ‘in need of a little rest’.17 Was this, as is often suggested, a ‘very diplomatic’ use of illness?18 It would not have been

226

MAURICE THOREZ

the first time that Thorez had absented himself at a critical moment. Yet the enthusiasm in the Salle Wagram for Duclos’s speech – which the party quickly turned out as a pamphlet – and the unanimity expressed at the Political Bureau suggested that it was unlikely that discordant voices would be raised at the Central Committee. The tape recordings of the meeting have not been preserved, which is surely not accidental; but fragments preserved in the archives show that Duclos followed the strategy agreed at the Political Bureau. Reporting the fact that there had been a closed session, Duclos spoke of ‘the widespread repression’ carried out by Stalin, who ‘saw enemies everywhere’, but he also stressed ‘the merits of Stalin’, which should ‘not be forgotten’.19 What happened next is less certain. In 1976, two participants, Jean Pronteau and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, recalled that widespread disquiet forced the Political Bureau to adjourn the meeting and redraft a resolution in a manner that was ‘a little less outrageous and a little more honourable’.20 At Les Escarrasses, Thorez noted simply in his diary: ‘Session of the Central Committee which approves the work of the Twentieth Congress (22 March 1956).’ In fact, Thorez was becoming increasingly anxious about the impact of the secret speech within the French party. Duclos had explained to the Central Committee that the leadership was ‘not authorised’ to mention the report in public pronouncements because it was ‘considered an internal affair’ of the Soviet party.21 But news of the speech’s existence and some of its content was filtering out in the media, including in l’Humanite´.22 On 19 March, while on an outing to take some sea air, Thorez was ‘surprised’ to meet Picasso and Pierre Courtade. The two men dragged him off for dinner. Courtade had been the PCF’s correspondent in Moscow and, through his links with Soviet journalists and diplomats, was aware of the speech and probably of its true content. It does not take much historical imagination to guess the topic of discussion over the dinner table. The next day, Thorez wrote a long article for l’Humanite´ in which he described Stalin’s ‘serious breaches’ of Leninist principles as an understandable response to threats from imperialism and its agents.23 On the morning of the article’s publication (27 March) Thorez travelled with Jeannette and their three sons to Italy. For several days, the family took in major tourist sights – Florence, Fiesole, Siena and then on to Rome, the Appian Way and its Catacombs, the Gulf of Naples, Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. Italian newspapers published photos of the PCF general secretary riding through Rome in a fiacre. Thorez’s main purpose was to discuss with Italian communist leaders, including Luigi Longo, Giorgio Amendola and Togliatti. His mood was captured by Cerreti, who Thorez always addressed using his French party name of Pierre (sometimes Paul) Allard. Thorez had hardly arrived in his living room when ‘exhausted, he collapsed into an

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

227

armchair’ exclaiming: ‘Pierre! What muck this Khrushchev has landed on us all!’24 On 1 April, Thorez met with Togliatti. According to Cerreti, Thorez’s demeanour after four hours of talks with the Italian communist leader was ‘drawn and absent’, clearly unhappy with the way in which the discussion had gone.25 However, Thorez’s note of the meeting suggests that the two men shared, at that stage, a similar analysis and similar fears, with Togliatti particularly concerned about the impact of the secret speech on his party’s fragile alliance with the socialists: Conversation with Tog[liatti] Does not understand reasons for the disclosures (Ulbricht) and exaggerations (Moravski) [. . .] Fears for the future. Nenni [Italian socialist leader] wants to draw advantage – ‘I was right’ [. . .] Reservations about Yugoslavs but in touch. Dreads losses at May elections, as in 1948 after enemy hysteria against [communist takeover in] Prague. Finds my paper [in l’Humanite´ ] very good.26 The two leaders agreed that the PCF and PCI would coordinate their response to the de-Stalinisation crisis. Representatives met twice during the summer and Amendola travelled to Paris to brief Thorez after Togliatti’s discussions with Tito in Belgrade. The position of French and Italian communists would, however, soon diverge. In June, in an interview in Nuovi Argomenti, Togliatti explained Stalinism as ‘the phenomena of bureaucratisation [. . .] and degeneration in various aspects of social organisation’, concluding that ‘the Soviet model is no longer obligatory and cannot be’.27 Such ideas were an anathema for Thorez.

The fight against ‘byrth-controˆle’ A few days after Thorez’s return from Italy (5 April), Jean Fre´ville arrived at Le Cannet carrying drafts of a hefty book tracing arguments, from Plato to Lenin, against Malthus’s rationale for population control.28 The two men had first discussed the project in January 1954;29 and its subject was now very topical. While Thorez was at the Twentieth Congress a group of deputies led by Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, a Resistance figure close to the Communists, had introduced proposals in the National Assembly to liberalise laws on contraception. Fre´ville was alarmed that ‘some communist doctors’

228

MAURICE THOREZ

were ‘agitating’ in support of this ‘neo-Malhusian’ policy. The following day, Thorez read Fre´ville’s ‘remarkable work’ and immediately launched a campaign against ‘byrth-controˆle’ – his franglais implying the supposed foreign and decadent nature of the practice.30 Over the next few weeks, Thorez penned a series of stinging ‘open letters’. He targeted Jacques Derogy, a communist journalist who had in October 1955 written a series of articles in Libe´ration about the scandal of illegal abortions. ‘The path for the liberation of women passes through social reforms, through social revolutions, not abortion clinics,’31 Thorez told Derogy, whose mother had died of septicaemia after a botched operation.32 He also attacked Dr Marie-Andre´e Lagroua Weill-Halle´, the founder of the French Family Planning movement who had a deserved reputation as a champion of poor women trapped by the country’s reactionary laws.33 The campaign to commit the party to oppose d’Astier de La Vigerie’s proposed reforms was led by Jeannette Vermeersch, who liaised closely with her husband throughout the controversy. Writing to the PCF Secretariat, Vermeersch argued that legalising information about contraception would allow ‘charlatans’ to ‘unleash propaganda for sexual education’ that would ‘collide with family and human sentiments’.34 At times, Thorez and Vermeersch’s language – though sprinkled with quotes from Lenin – was similar to that used by the other big institution opposing reforms in the law, the Catholic Church. Bizarrely, while opposing contraception, Thorez and Vermeersch argued that abortion be permitted in certain ‘medical and social circumstances’, including once a woman had given birth to three children. The communist doctors’ organisation pointed out that proposing abortion to restrict births while opposing free sale of contraceptives was advocating ‘the solution most dangerous for women’.35 From today’s standpoint, the idea that a left-wing leader should oppose the legalisation of information about contraception seems extraordinary. Thorez’s position had been consistent since the Popular Front period. Previously, his party had opposed the 31 July 1920 law outlawing abortion, contraception and ‘neo-Malthusian propaganda’; in 1933, the communist deputy JeanMarie Clamamus had presented a bill in the Chamber to repeal the legislation. Yet, in 1936, the PCF announced a pro-natalist agenda and, following the April – May elections, its parliamentary deputies joined the Groupe parlementaire pour la protection de la natalite´ et de la famille. In July 1939, they did not oppose the Code de Famille, legislation that gave incentives for mothers to stay at home, tightened abortion legislation and increased penalties for the promotion of contraception. The transformation of PCF policy mirrored the course pursued by Stalin in the Soviet Union: in 1936, the Soviet government introduced a law to outlaw

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

229

abortion and to make divorce more difficult, simultaneously issuing a directive to prevent the sale of contraceptive devices.36 While consistent with shifts in Soviet policy, the PCF’s new position also signalled an acceptance of what was almost a national consensus. Pronatalism had deep roots in the French psyche. The Catholic Church extolled, of course, the virtues of the traditional family and condemned ‘the sin of contraception’.37 But Enlightenment thinkers, including Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, had also written on the ‘population question’, lambasting the Church and aristocracy for maintaining ‘unproductive’ institutions such as monasteries and supporting celibacy for priests.38 Beginning in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and receiving new impetus following the 1914 – 18 conflict, an obsession about falling birthrates and an aging population touched all parts of the political spectrum, including the left. In 1887, the Marxist Jules Guesde penned an article entitled La France se meurt (France is dying); a decade later the author E´mile Zola helped to establish L’Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population francaise, an organisation that continued to play a prominent role in the interwar years.39 After the war, Georges Clemenceau remarked that ‘if France turns her back on large families, [. . .] France will be lost because there will be no more Frenchmen.’40 The crooner Maurice Chevalier sometimes finished his shows with a ditty: ‘Faites des enfants et ne cessez jamais d’en faire’ (Make children and never stop doing it). During the Popular Front, the Radical leader Daladier spoke of the importance of ‘a birth rate policy’ because ‘an empty country cannot be a free country’.41 Thorez embraced this tradition. At the Villeurbanne Congress (January 1936), he lamented ‘a loosening of moral behaviour’ and the fact that ‘mothers’ were forced to do factory work. France faced, he said, ‘the serious problem of denatality’, which was leading to a ‘nation of old people, a weakened, depleted people, on the path to extinction’.42 As well as being predicated on a world view rooted in the 1930s, Thorez’s opposition to contraception in 1956 was linked to his pauperisation theory. According to Thorez, ‘what interests mothers is not “birth control”; what they want is sufficient bread to feed their children.’ Restricting births was an ‘essentially individualist’ attempt to combat working-class poverty and undermined the fight for decent homes, family allowances and better wages.43 The notion that women should have control over reproductive rights allowing ‘motherhood to be freely chosen’, as powerfully argued by Simone de Beauvoir in La Deuxie`me Sexe (1949), was beyond the comprehension of Thorez – and, it has to be said, of most politicians at the time. De Beauvoir’s work never found a place on the shelves of the General Secretary’s extensive library.

230

MAURICE THOREZ

As with the theory of pauperisation, Thorez decreed the position on birth control without consulting experts within his own party. He told the Central Committee (9– 10 May) that he had received six letters criticising the stance, ‘the majority’ from ‘non-proletarian’ elements. Yet his archives contain a whole folder of critical letters from prominent doctors, health professionals and party organisations. Often complaining that the party had adopted its position without discussion or debate, they addressed the essence of the matter. ‘A woman has the right, in whatever society, to decide whether she wants a child. It is what distinguishes a human being from an animal,’ wrote a party cell made up of health professionals.44 ‘To fight against birth control was to fight against scientific progress,’ declared a statement from nine prominent communist doctors, including Professor Klotz, Thorez’s personal physician.45 Thorez’s campaign against birth control is often viewed as ‘an operation of diversion’ to detract attention from the problems posed by the Twentieth Congress.46 In fact, it broadened the issues of contention within the party. Speaking to parliamentarians on 14 April, Thorez was forced to defend his position on both de-Stalinisation and birth control, as well as on two other controversies, the vote for special powers in Algeria and pauperisation. He condemned ‘confused intellectual elements’ who, while being PCF members, ‘at all difficult moments, call everything into question [and] read bourgeois newspapers and books with greater care than those from the party they claim to follow’.47 The following week, the Secretariat registered an unprecedented number of letters from activists critical of the leadership’s approach, citing mainly the Twentieth Congress and Algeria.48

The May Central Committee Thorez addressed the discontent over the Twentieth Congress at a meeting of the Central Committee on 9 and 10 May.49 ‘Many have reproached the Central Committee for not telling everything [about the Twentieth Congress],’ he conceded. But the blame for the situation should, he said, be laid at the door of the ‘methods’ adopted by Khrushchev. Thorez explained the circumstances in which the PCF delegation had been permitted to read the report to the closed session but not allowed to take notes or divulge its content. (Despite this admission at a meeting attended by around eighty people, the PCF publicly denied that its delegation had received a copy of the secret speech until a party enquiry established the facts in 1977, testimony to the culture of secrecy within the party.)50 Thorez said that by putting restrictions on the circulation of the speech, Khrushchev and his team had failed to understand the difference between disseminating information in the Soviet Union – where ‘there is no

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

231

immediate fire from the enemy’ – and the situation in France, where ‘immediately the report is published’, there would be a ‘fierce bombardment against everything to which we are committed [. . .] the ideas of communism’. He reassured the Central Committee that ‘it had been informed of everything we have known’, thus maintaining the fiction that the secret speech had ‘rendered homages to Stalin’ as well as making ‘criticisms’. Thorez then attempted to theorise the origins and nature of the Stalin cult. His arguments were drawn from a recent statement by the Chinese Communist Party drawn up by Mao, which attempted to correct the ‘onesided nature’ of Khrushchev’s report and combat any suggestion that the personality cult was intrinsic to the Soviet system.51 Why had the cult been allowed to develop? Psychology was important, said Thorez: ‘the presence of Stalin bore down on certain comrades [. . .] they are only human.’ Did the PCF share some responsibility? Yes, said Thorez, the PCF had contributed to the Stalin cult with ‘certain slogans and expressions’. But there were good reasons: the party’s opponents – starting with the Trotskyists – had used the term ‘Stalinist’ as an ‘insult’, so ‘we made it a title of glory’. What mattered, Thorez said, was that despite the personality cult ‘the [political] line had been correct [. . .] even if there were partial errors, the line was verified by the facts’. And, he optimistically concluded: ‘all this will blow over [and] the essential content of the Twentieth Congress will remain.’ Thorez next turned to the manifestation of the leader cult within the French party. A rancorous row had erupted at the meeting after Frachon described the slogan ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’ as a ‘formula that has given us nothing’. He also said that the poem written by Aragon on Thorez’s return to France after his illness, Il Revient, was ‘neither good for the party and nor for Maurice’. An aggrieved Aragon wanted to know ‘why Benoıˆt ha[d] waited three years and the Twentieth Congress to make the criticism’; while Jeannette Vermeersch ‘approved Aragon’s poem’ because ‘the working class ha [d] need of leaders’.52 Thorez described ‘the party of Maurice Thorez’ as a ‘reprehensible expression’, but denied any responsibility, claiming he had protested many times against the use of the slogan. He accepted that there had been ‘a bit too much fuss about certain birthdays’ and an ‘excess of quotations’, though again he abdicated any responsibility: the chief culprit was ‘Lecoeur, who never made a speech without citing Maurice Thorez’. In any case, he told the meeting, ‘the cult of Maurice Thorez could not be put on the same level as the cult of Stalin’ and that ‘displays of confidence’ should not be confused with the cult of the personality. According to Thorez, the main impact of the Stalin cult on the PCF was that the party had ‘softened its sense of criticism’ and ‘not defended [its] own ideas with sufficient energy’. Again, his examples were those noted in his

232

MAURICE THOREZ

diary during the Twentieth Congress: ‘our’ pronouncements in 1950 that ‘war was not inevitable’ and ‘our ideas [in 1946] on the possible paths to socialism’, the latter point leading to a general defence of the PCF’s role in the post-war government. ‘We were criticised for our opportunist orientation – and our Yugoslavian comrades really went to town [at Szklarska-Pore˛ba],’ he recalled, ‘in fact, it turns out that we were not all that far from a correct position.’ Thorez also revealed his differences with the Comintern leadership over whether or not to participate in Le´on Blum’s government: It is true that, from 1936, I was a partisan of participation in government. I believe that was a correct position. It is true that this opinion was never taken beyond the circle of the Political Bureau. [. . .] And I do not regret it. Because we were conscious of being disciplined members of the International. There was a fixed line; we had no intention, even when we thought of a policy, of entering into a war with our International. It is true. But we should have defended our line more energetically, more strongly at that moment and subsequently. So, while attempting to tone down some of the more flamboyant aspects of his leadership cult, Thorez reminded the Central Committee of his role during the party’s most successful periods, of the fact that ‘our’ ideas were ‘his’ ideas, and that they had often been formulated despite, and even against, opposition from Moscow. Thorez’s emphasis on the periods 1936 –38 and 1945– 47 was an indication that believed the PCF was again in a position ‘to do politics’. ‘The problem posed before the party is a great and audacious policy of unity,’ he declared. ‘Our aim is an agreement with the Socialist Party, as took place twenty years ago.’53 Some of Thorez’s fury at Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin was fuelled by his belief that the controversy would undermine prospects for such an alliance. Thorez could not consider the view that, while in the immediate term it might pose problems for a party schooled in sycophancy towards the former Soviet leader, in the longer term taking its distance from Stalin would remove obstacles in the way of the alliances needed for the PCF to play an influential role within the French political system.

‘The report attributed to Khrushchev’ The storm brewed by the secret speech did not ‘blow over’. On 6 June, Le Monde began to publish extracts of a version that had fallen into the hands of the US State Department. The same day – and perhaps not coincidentally – Thorez complained of an aching feeling and raised blood pressure.54

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

233

Nevertheless, he began a period of frenetic activity reminiscent of the days before his illness as he sought to grapple with the crisis. During a nine-day period (14 –22 June), he took charge of three long meetings of the Political Bureau, a meeting of the Secretariat, and a meeting of the Central Committee. The Political Bureau (14 June) discussed the mood in the ranks. Guyot reported that activists were ‘affected very severely [and] frightened’. They were criticising the speech delivered by Duclos at the Salle Wagram, asking: ‘if you knew [about Khrushchev’s speech], why was so little said’. Georges Frischmann spoke about the morale of older members: ‘[they] do not speak much but they [are] disturbed, all their life [is] falsified’ (emphasis in Thorez’s notes). Thorez’s appraisal of the situation was pessimistic: ‘[the report’s] publication has created an impossible situation for us, vis-a`-vis the party and the masses. It is not excluded that some activists will begin to doubt everything.’55 A few days later Thorez scribbled a resolution, which would become the basis of a statement agreed at the Political Bureau on 18 June: In view of the legitimate emotion of party activists after the publication in the bourgeois press of the report on the alleged acts of Stalin attributed to comrade Khrushchev, and having learnt moreover that the Khrushchev report has been made known to members of other communist and workers’ parties, the BP agrees to ask the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for communication of this report, so that all members of our party are informed of it and can express their opinion on this subject.56 The phrase ‘report attributed to comrade Khrushchev’ would become infamous, the epitome of the PCF’s refusal to engage with de-Stalinisation. But its intended function when coined by Thorez in June 1956 is often misunderstood. After Le Monde began to publish extracts of the secret speech, Thorez sought an official copy, writing to Moscow asking for the text. His plan was, as he explained to the Political Bureau on 14 June, to publish the speech while doctoring its message through the addition of ‘a preface’ containing an ‘objective appreciation of the role of Stalin’. By 18 June, however, the strategy had evolved. Thorez concluded that ‘it was not possible to stay silent any longer’: there was serious risk that the continuing revelations in the press, as well as the impact of Togliatti’s interview in Nuovi Argomenti, would further increase the ‘confusion and turmoil’ amongst ‘the working class and the mass of our party’.57 The 18 June statement was not a denial of the existence of Khrushchev’s report, though it suggested dishonestly that the secret speech had not been ‘made known’ to the PCF

234

MAURICE THOREZ

leadership. It questioned the content of the speech. In doing so, it was a challenge to Khrushchev, a declaration that the PCF would defend ‘the merits’ of Stalin, even if this meant open opposition to the Soviet leadership. Thorez’s antipathy towards Khrushchev was now explicit; his arguments strident, his tone mordant. He fumed over concessions made by the Soviet leader to Tito during the Yugoslavian communist’s visit to Moscow in early June. Thorez had supported Soviet attempts to mend relations with the Yugoslavian party, but was horrified by Tito’s reaction to the secret speech, which he described as ‘putting into question “the system” [and] moving towards becoming an apology for Trotskyism’.58 He was also furious about attacks in the Yugoslavian communist paper, Borba, on ‘Thorez’s draft thesis’ for the coming party congress; ‘an aggression against our party,’ he fumed.59 Thorez viewed the declaration signed by Khrushchev and Tito, which implied that the Soviet Communist Party would no longer act as the ‘directing party’ in the world communist movement, as a betrayal. He likened relations between Khrushchev and Tito and those between the Soviet leader and the PCF – ‘the faithful son’ – to the Parable of the Prodigal Son: By saying: ‘it’s the fault of the system,’ Tito is thinking like [John Foster] Dulles [the virulently anti-communist US Secretary of State – JB] and the social democrats – and this is the man who receives a medal of Leninism from our Soviet comrades. [. . .] The Soviet comrades must tell us exactly how they consider our party. Are we witnessing a new and improved version of the parable of the prodigal son? Now, not only would the fattened calf be killed on his return, but the faithful son would also be condemned. We must be told to what extent we are still considered as a great Communist Party, with the right to be treated with respect.60 Thorez attacked Khrushchev for hypocrisy. He quoted extracts from speeches by the Soviet leader and others in his entourage (Nikolai Bulganin and Anastas Mikoyan) at the Nineteenth Congress of the Soviet Party (October 1952), in which they had praised the politics of ‘comrade Stalin, the beloved educator and leader’ just five months before his death. ‘Where is the selfcriticism? Why the praise?,’ spitted Thorez. ‘They have deceived us and deceived the masses. They stood in solidarity with Stalin – at least for a period, at least partially.’61 Thorez accused Khrushchev of inventing ‘a sort of cult of personality in reverse’: ‘Yesterday [Stalin] was an omnipotent genius. Now he belongs to a species of wicked demon who is responsible for every accumulated evil.’62 Thorez well understood the significance of his actions. ‘It is the first time in 35 years that we have raised a public criticism towards

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

235

the Communist Party of the USSR,’ he told the Central Committee. He warned that the fight could be long and hard: ‘the BP resolution does not bring the discussion to an end. It is only the beginning.’63 To ramp up the pressure, he proposed to send a delegation to Moscow and, on 23 June, he briefed Fajon, Waldeck Rochet and Servin before their departure. Thorez knew that Khrushchev was facing difficulties. Much to his disgust, the Soviet leader had dismissed Molotov as Foreign Minister on the eve of Tito’s visit to Moscow, but the influence of conservatives in the regime remained strong. Despite an obvious conflict of interests, Molotov was appointed to lead a commission to investigate the show trials of the 1930s, an enquiry that would drag on for months and eventually find the victims guilty of opposition to the party and Soviet state.64 In communist eastern Europe, the secret speech, along with the Soviet rapprochement with Tito, had prompted talk of reforms and greater autonomy from Moscow. Most dangerously, in Poland it emboldened a protest movement that broke the constraint of party control. In Poznan´ (28 June), a massive strike by workers demanding wage increases and better working conditions led to disturbances and attacks on symbols of communist power. Elsewhere, the secret speech had opened divisions between, on one hand, the ‘revisionist’ course charted by Togliatti and, on the other, resistance to the post-Stalin thaw, led by the Chinese with the French party in tow. Faced with these pressures, Khrushchev felt compelled to tone down the anti-Stalin rhetoric and compromise with the conservatives around Molotov. On 30 June, the Soviet party’s Central Committee agreed a resolution ‘on overcoming the consequences of the personality cult’. It paid homage to Stalin, reducing his ‘serious errors’ to policy mistakes, rather than the ‘physical annihilation’ of opponents outlined in the secret speech. Most importantly, the cult was explained as a phenomenon rooted in his personal failings, rather than a bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet system.65 The PCF delegation returned from Moscow brandishing the resolution. Thorez noted in his diary that it ‘responded to all the questions posed by our Central Committee and other fraternal parties [. . .] and has answered the erroneous opinion of Togliatti (3 July 1956)’. The Political Bureau met on 4 July for an orgy of self-congratulation. Duclos praised Thorez for his role in preparing the delegation, admitting his own doubts about sending it. All agreed that the ‘international prestige of the party and its leadership’ had been enhanced. The resolution was going ‘to reassure the party, raise the level of discussion and put the Khrushchev report behind us’.66 Thorez opened the party congress in Le Havre on 18 July. In a three-hour speech, he applauded the ‘exultant results’ of the Twentieth Congress and heralded the PCF Political Bureau’s role in securing the ‘deep analysis’ of the

236

MAURICE THOREZ

30 June resolution. He boasted of the foresight of his policies on pauperisation, birth control and the decision to support the Mollet government over Algeria. He said oppositional voices in the party had been exposed and isolated, warning dissidents: ‘we do not acknowledge [that they have] the “liberty” to propagate their destructive and anti-communist conceptions within our ranks. Better still, we will take the liberty to put them outside the party.’67 As for the secret speech, it was buried. The Thorez family spent the remainder of the summer at Les Escarrasses, an opportunity for car tours in the mountains, picnics, raspberry picking and trips to the exclusive Plage de la Garoupe. On several occasions the family socialised with Pablo Picasso, who was living 5 kilometres away in a villa, La California, near Cannes. Thorez and Picasso passed time on the beach together and exchanged dinner invitations; on 14 August, the artist was special guest at Paul Thorez’s sixteenth birthday party. Thorez had first met Picasso in May 1945 when sitting for a series of pencil sketches, probably the only political portraits drawn by Picasso with the presence of a sitter.68 Relations remained business-like during the late 1940s, the hey-day of socialist realism. Though recognising the mediocre Andre´ Fougeron as unofficial PCF artist, Thorez tended to avoid dogmatic criticism of ‘the formalist’ Picasso on account of his value to the party. The relationship became warmer after Thorez’s return from the Soviet Union in April 1953 and his intervention in the controversy over Picasso’s sketch marking the death of Stalin. Published in the PCF’s cultural magazine Les Lettres francaises, the artist’s image of a young Stalin with bushy moustache and short combed-back hair provoked a storm of protest from party militants. ‘The slightest alteration, the slightest transposition of his thought and his face is intolerable,’ was a typical comment.69 The Secretariat denounced the picture as irreverent and censured Aragon, the magazine’s editor, for permitting its publication.70 Fougeron described it as ‘a profanation’, saying he was embarrassed to imagine ‘what Maurice is going to think if he ever sees [it]’.71 Watching from Moscow during the final days of his convalescence, Thorez believed the row could destabilise the party and damage efforts to reach out to potential allies. He dispatched a message to Duclos describing the discussion as ‘very bad’ and likely to ‘damage our relations with intellectuals’ at a time when ‘the broadest possible front is necessary’.72 On his return to France, Picasso was one of the first to be invited to visit Thorez at Bazainville (22 April 1953) and when Thorez relocated to Mougins later in the year the two men began to meet regularly. Picasso’s villa would always be an early port of call during Thorez’s sojourns in the Mediterranean. Thorez placed the blame for the ‘brutal condemnation of Picasso’s drawing’ at the door of the perennial scapegoat, Lecoeur. He told the Central

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

237

Committee that communist artists were permitted ‘the greatest initiative as creators’ and could use ‘the forms they choose’, as long as they remained committed to the struggle of the working class and the ‘great ideal of communism’. The party leadership, Thorez claimed, had always ‘struggled against the pretence of dictating to intellectuals’.73 His previous support for the doctrine of socialist realism was written out of party history. Friendship with Picasso drew Thorez into a circle of artists and celebrities. Amongst those he met at Picasso’s home during 1956 were Armand Salacrou, the playwright, Pierre Leyris, a renowned translator of English literature, and the writer and film director, Jean Cocteau. That summer, Thorez began a friendship with two other near neighbours, Nadia Le´ger and her partner Georges Bauquier. Nadia (born Khodasevich in Belorussia) was the widow of Fernand Le´ger, who had died in August 1955; Bauquier was the artist’s former pupil and assistant. Like Picasso, Le´ger had joined the PCF at the end of the war. He visited Thorez at Les Escarrasses in January 1955 and ‘spoke of his paintings [. . .] his memories of the First World War and his joy of becoming a member of the Communist Party (5 January 1955).’ After his death, Nadia Le´ger and Bauquier drew up plans to build a museum to display his life work at Biot, 12 kilometres from Les Escarrasses. Thorez began to visit the site regularly and took great interest in the project’s every detail.74

Polish October and Hungarian November Thorez’s relatively peaceful summer gave way to a stormy autumn as shockwaves of the secret speech reverberated in Poland and Hungary, prompting more questioning from within PCF ranks. In June, Thorez had described the Poznan´ protests as ‘imperialist agents mounting a provocation against the People’s Republic of Poland’ (28 June). In October, he was horrified when the Polish party appointed Władysław Gomulka – who had been imprisoned between 1951 and 1954 for pursuing a more independent brand of communism – as First Minister and simultaneously sacked Defence Minister, Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Red Army Marshall and hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, who had led the bloody repression at Poznan´. Poland seemed on the brink when Khrushchev, Molotov and Mikoyan arrived in Warsaw on 19 October. But, while simultaneously readying the Soviet army for intervention, Khrushchev was prepared to broker a deal – accepting Gomulka’s agenda of mild reform and relaxing some aspects of direct Soviet rule in exchange for his undertaking to maintain order and remain within the Soviet orbit. Thorez was outraged: ‘reaction is rejoicing!,’ he wrote in his diary (22 October 1956). Over the next few weeks, he fumed as Gomulka announced a reform package, including a more liberal policy towards the

238

MAURICE THOREZ

Catholic Church and a reversal of steps towards the collectivisation of agriculture. ‘We are keeping a close eye on certain declarations, on certain acts, which seem by their nature to compromise the subsequent march towards communism,’ he told the Central Committee.75 Thorez viewed events leading up to the Hungarian Revolution in similar vein. Demonstrations against the regime had begun in March, prompting Khrushchev to advocate changes in the Hungarian communist leadership. In July, the loyal Stalinist, Ma´tya´s Ra´kosi, was removed from power, but – in what would prove a costly mistake – he was replaced by the equally unpopular Erno Gero¨. Simultaneously, La´szlo´ Rajk, executed as a Titoist agent in 1949, was rehabilitated. A large crowd attending the reburial of his body on 6 October demanded the return of Imre Nagy, the reform-minded leader purged in April 1955. Thorez was horrified when on 12 October, Miha´ly Farkas, the principal accuser of Rajk, was arrested. ‘Is this Thermidor?,’ he asked in his diary. ‘Yes’ – the analogy with the overthrow of Robespierre’s revolutionary government was correct – ‘it was Thermidor!,’ he scribbled in the diary margin. On 23 October, a huge demonstration in Budapest calling for Polish-style reforms turned into confrontation with the security police and, after sections of the army sided with protestors, triggered an insurrection. ‘Fascist elements raise their head in Hungary thanks to the rotten liberalism shown by the leaders,’ was Thorez’s immediate evaluation.76 Despite Nagy’s appointment as prime minister, the revolution gathered pace as a network of workers’ councils and other independent committees covered the country. At first, Nagy attempted to restore order, but he soon began to express some of the movement’s demands. Fearing contagion in other Eastern Bloc countries, an initially reluctant Khrushchev prepared to intervene. When Nagy announced on 1 November that Hungary was to leave the Warsaw Pact, the die was cast and Soviet tanks and troops moved into Budapest. Thorez noted in his diary: ‘the counter-revolution is crushed (4 November 1956).’ Support for the Soviet military intervention put the PCF under fire from every section of French politics, from the far right to extreme left. On the night of 5 November, students demonstrated outside the l’Humanite´ offices and the national students’ union (UNEF) cancelled a planned Franco-Soviet cultural festival. The following evening a fire-cracker was thrown through the l’Humanite´ windows as demonstrators, mainly students, chanted ‘Free Hungary’ and ‘Thorez Murderer’. On 7 November, political leaders – including Socialists, Radicals and Christian Democrats – led a march of 30,000 people down the Champs Elyse´es. Break-away contingents headed for the PCF headquarters and l’Humanite´ offices. 500 party militants had been mobilised to protect the premises and, as news of fighting spread, more

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

239

activists raced to the scene. Fighting continued into the night and resulted in numerous injuries and the deaths of three people, including two communist militants.77 Thorez attended their funeral on 17 November. Thorez’s support for Soviet military action in Hungary was consistent with the position of every other major world communist leader, with the exception of the Polish leadership. Togliatti spoke of ‘intervention against white terror and [. . .] fascism’.78 Even Tito supported the intervention, though he added that it should be political as well as military.79 But whereas Togliatti blamed the crisis on ‘the mechanical transposition’ of the Soviet model and Tito found its roots in Khrushchev’s failure to reform fast enough, Thorez saw events as a confirmation of his warnings about the Soviet leader’s de-Stalinisation reform project. His reference point was once again the Chinese party, with whom relations had been strengthened by a visit by Duclos to Beijing during September and October. At the Central Committee (20– 21 November), Thorez approvingly quoted a Chinese statement stressing the need for the ‘Soviet camp to strengthen under the leadership of the Soviet Union to oppose imperialist aggression and subversive intrigues’. The lesson from Hungary, he explained, was that socialist regimes must, because of their very nature, be prepared to put down dissent. As long as ‘imperialism existed in the world, it would plot to restore the capitalist regime where it has been abolished’, particularly in a country like Hungary in which ‘reactionary elements had deep roots’. Thorez drew a parallel between the ‘class duty’ of the Red Army in putting down ‘fascist barbarism’ in Hungary and the campaign by the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.80

‘A senile incapacity to rise to the level of the event’ Within the PCF, the Hungarian events revived dissent, which had stalled following the Soviet party’s 30 June statement on Stalin and the PCF’s Congress at Le Havre. The first high-profile defector was Aime´ Ce´saire, deputy for Martinique, who resigned before the Hungarian Revolution began in earnest. The poet visited Thorez on 27 September, after attending the International Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Paris, and the two men ‘spoke about poetry and the “liberty” of the artist’. Three weeks later Ce´saire circulated a ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, in which he described the PCF’s response to de-Stalinisation as an ‘senile incapacity [. . .] to rise to the level of the event’ and warned that ‘French Stalinism [. . .] would have produced in France the same catastrophic effects as in Russia, if chance had permitted it to come to power’.81 Thorez was still smarting from Ce´saire’s ‘betrayal’ when France Observateur published a protest from prominent intellectuals and artists – including

240

MAURICE THOREZ

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the poet Jacques Pre´vert – against the Soviet army’s ‘use of canons and tanks to break the revolt of the Hungarian people’. Amongst the signatures were four PCF members, including the writers Claude Morgan and Claude Roy. A similar petition in Italy received a ‘quite moderate’ response from Togliatti,82 but in France the communist signatories were immediately expelled from the party. Thorez’s diary maligns ‘the conjunction of fascist and social democratic attacks against the party and the wrecking activity of certain intellectuals’ (15 November). Then, on 20 November, a letter from ten ‘worker intellectuals’ was delivered to the Central Committee. It had been coordinated by the novelist, He´le`ne Parmelin and her husband, the painter E´douard Pignon. To Thorez’s dismay, it was also signed by Picasso, a friend of the couple. Although the letter’s tone and demands – for more information from the party leadership and the convening of a special congress – were measured, Thorez denounced it as an ‘attempt to constitute tendencies and factions’ in order to ‘discredit the party and its leadership at a time it was facing a furious assault from the class enemy’.83 When the letter was published in Le Monde, the Political Bureau feared it would ‘have echoes’. Frachon described it as ‘a serious affair, the work of Titoists’ and urged ‘energetic measures to defend [the] party’. Thorez agreed to draw up a political response and to take urgent steps to reconcile Picasso.84 Thorez’s nightmare was that Picasso would follow in Ce´saire’s footsteps. After seeking advice from Aragon and Elsa Triolet, he returned to the Mediterranean to talk to the artist. On arrival at Les Escarrasses he was forced to take to his bed with a heavy fever and could only speak to Picasso on the telephone. Once fit again and accompanied by Jeannette Vermeersch, Thorez visited the artist’s home to find him ‘happy to see us and quite contrite at having given his signature to a factional document, which he had not even read’ (11 December). Picasso appears to have signed the statement in a clumsy attempt to preserve his public image without threatening his attachment to the party.85 Thorez smothered the artist with attention over the next few weeks. On 21 December, Picasso opened an exhibition of his illustrated books in Nice. A few days earlier, Andre´ Stil arrived at Les Escarrasses to cover the event for l’Humanite´. Stil had just returned from a long tour of Warsaw, Moscow and Budapest and Thorez immediately took him to share ‘his impressions and conversations’ with Picasso (19 December). The next day, Thorez received a ‘happy surprise’ when he met Casanova walking up the hill from Picasso’s villa and the two men immediately returned together to discuss with the artist. For many observers, Thorez’s appearance at the exhibition’s grand opening was ‘a surprise’. L’Humanite´ published a photograph of Thorez, accompanied by Vermeersch and Casanova, posing with the artist as if a

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

241

mentor.86 On New Year’s Day 1957 the entire Thorez family were guests of Picasso and – even more symbolically – Thorez and Vermeersch dined with him on 19 March 1957, to commemorate the ‘25th anniversary’ of their intimacy. While the PCF’s most prominent public celebrity remained loyal, the weeks and months following the Hungarian intervention witnessed departures, some through expulsion or suspension, of a small, though significant, section of intellectuals.87 A number of oppositional bulletins began to circulate. Amongst those to organise the group around L’E´tincelle, which appeared in December, was Jean Chaintron, Thorez’s former cabinet secretary and director of his fiftieth birthday celebrations.88 Thorez described criticisms by intellectuals as the ‘wavering of weak elements’, and pointed to the fact that the bulk of party activists had rallied to the leadership’s positions on de-Stalinisation and Hungary. Anti-communist demonstrations by the extreme right and attacks on party offices instilled party patriotism, as did French participation in the Suez adventure and intensification of the intervention in Algeria. Thorez warned that war against Egypt threatened ‘to spread into a world conflagration with the inevitable use of modern weapons of mass destruction’ and reminded PCF members that those supporting it and the war in Algeria were the same people who were cheering on ‘counter-revolution’ in Hungary.89 PCF membership fell by 19,000 between 1956 and 1957 (6.8 per cent), but remained remarkably stable compared to the leakages suffered by other western communist parties.90 Nevertheless, many sympathisers and potential supporters were repelled by the party’s stance on Hungary. In December, communists suffered losses during work-place elections for representatives on the Comite´s d’Entreprise. ‘It is surprising the scale of the repercussions that the events of Hungary have had,’ concluded Mauvais at the Political Bureau, after outlining setbacks for the CGT of between 10 and 15 per cent in the engineering industry and 25– 30 per cent amongst white collar workers. ‘It is the first time for years that communists have been in such difficulty on a major political question,’ added Frischmann.91 The main beneficiary was the CFTC, which had not only opposed the Hungarian intervention but had also taken a firm position against the Algerian war and the Suez expedition. Thorez began to doubt the loyalty of some of his immediate associates. On the eve of Picasso’s exhibition in Nice, he and Vermeersch hosted a dinner party for Nadia Le´ger, Casanova, Aragon and Elsa Triolet, who was accompanied by her sister, Lilya Brik, and her husband. Stalinist repression had touched Brik’s life. She had been a lover of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the experimental poet, artist, playwright and actor, who before his suicide in 1930 had been censured by the

242

MAURICE THOREZ

Soviet establishment for his modernism and, more pertinently, for his satirical attacks on bureaucracy. After Mayakovsky’s death, Brik became the wife of General Vitaly Primakov, who had distinguished himself in the Civil War and risen through the ranks of the Red Army to become a senior commander in Leningrad. In 1937, along with Mikhail Tukhachevsky and others in the high command, Primakov was accused of ‘Trotskyist anti-Soviet conspiracy’ and, after a secret trial, executed. At the time of the dinner party, Thorez would have been aware that steps were in motion to ‘rehabilitate’ Primakov; but the extent to which his mind was closed to the problem of Stalinist repression is indicated by his failure to include Lilya Brik’s name in the diary entry about the evening. At the time of the dinner, Elsa Triolet was working on a novel, Le Monument. With themes echoing episodes from her sister’s life and also the censure of Aragon for publishing Picasso’s ‘irreverent’ sketch of Stalin (after the death of the Soviet dictator), the book is the story of an artist in an unnamed east European country, who is commissioned to create a statue of Stalin. The experience shatters his illusions about the role of art in communist society. His glorification of Stalin has created not art, but a hideous monument that profanes the history and culture of the town in which it is situated. In despair, he takes his own life.92 Thorez read the book on 31 May 1957 and was horrified. He organised a meeting with Triolet to express ‘the critical opinion of the leadership about her novel’ and enlisted Fre´ville to write a ‘critical review’ for the communist press. Simultaneously, he asked Servin to investigate Aragon’s loyalty and, in particular, ‘his approach towards Hungary’.93

International communist diplomat Thorez believed that the Soviet statement on Stalin (30 June) and his position on Poland and Hungary had not only vindicated his approach towards the secret speech within the PCF but had also strengthened his reputation within the world communist movement. During 1957, he began to strut the stage of international communist diplomacy with undisguised self-assurance. Thorez’s diplomatic mission was to solidify the conservative faction in the world communist movement, while isolating the Yugoslavs, Italians and Poles. His opinion of Khrushchev had mellowed after the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion, and he was encouraged by the Soviet leader’s retreat from his assault on Stalin in the secret speech. In January 1957, Thorez’s diary applauds Khrushchev’s reaction to a remark by Tito that ‘Stalinists’ in the Soviet Presidium had been responsible for the arrest of Nagy (after he had left the asylum of the Yugoslav embassy). ‘We are all Stalinists,’ was the supposed response of the Soviet leader at a New Year’s Eve reception in the Kremlin (2 January). And Thorez could not help crowing when Khrushchev made a

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

243

similar comment after signing a Sino– Soviet statement during a visit by Zhou Enlai. The epithet Stalinist ‘is not an insult but an honour!’, was Khrushchev’s reported remark, which, wrote Thorez, ‘proves more and more that our party was the first to have precisely understood the role of Stalin, despite his serious errors’ (18 January 1957). During the first half of 1957, Thorez despatched PCF envoys for talks with partis fre`res throughout the communist bloc. Vermeersch was assigned a prominent role, visiting Prague and Sofia, before leading a delegation to Albania; Waldeck Rochet was sent to Romania; Guyot went to Budapest and Duclos to Berlin; a visit by Andre´ Merlot to Beijing led to the signing of a ‘common statement’ with the Chinese party. The fight was also taken into the ‘revisionist’ camp: in January, a delegation arrived in Warsaw with Thorez’s caustic criticisms of the Polish government’s ‘reestablishment of private land ownership’ ringing in their ears (10 January); a PCF delegation to Belgrade confirmed that Franco– Yugoslav communist relations remained dire; while ‘cold’ was the word used at the Political Bureau to describe the relationship with the Italians.94 Khrushchev’s caution on de-Stalinisation was an indication of the vitality of the faction around Molotov in the Soviet leadership. Thorez hoped that the group would either keep Khrushchev a permanent prisoner, or possibly manage to remove him. Nevertheless, when in June an attempt by Molotov and his supporters to do just that misfired and they were removed from the Soviet leadership, Thorez condemned ‘factional activity by a factional group’. Cleverly, the Khrushchev group had attacked Molotov for opposing the perspectives outlined at the Twentieth Congress: ‘the possibility of preventing war in contemporary conditions [. . .], the possibility of different paths to socialism in different countries’ and ‘the necessity of strengthening contacts with progressive parties’.95 While the criticism was a distortion of Molotov’s position, it struck a chord with Thorez. He reminded the PCF leadership that the party had ‘suffered’ because it had been criticised for voicing such politics in 1934 (the Popular Front), 1946 (The Times interview) and 1950 (his statement that war was not inevitable). The implication was that Molotov’s ‘conservative’ opposition to the ‘line of the Twentieth Congress’ was as much a threat to the French party as it was to the ‘immense tasks’ facing communists in the Soviet Union.96 With the removal of Molotov, Khrushchev was free to renew his de-Stalinisation drive; but he had learnt to move more cautiously. He announced a congress of communist parties for November with the aim of repairing fractures within the international movement. While holding a new olive branch to the Yugoslavs, he was determined to rein in attempts at

244

MAURICE THOREZ

excessive liberalisation and thwart any challenge to the centrality of Moscow. For these tasks, he was prepared to recruit the assistance of Thorez. The Thorez family spent six weeks in the Soviet Union during July and August 1957. The itinerary had been drawn up by Soviet officials to include plenty of opportunity for informal talks and networking, with the aim of drawing Thorez and the PCF closer to the Khrushchev leadership. That summer a procession of PCF leaders holidayed in the Soviet Union, including Duclos, Guyot, Casanova, Frachon, Roger Garauldy, Monmousseau and Merlot. Thorez travelled to Leningrad on a Russian steamship, the Baltika, along with some of the 2,000-strong French contingent to the World Festival of Youth and Students, an event used by Khrushchev to showcase post-Stalin glasnost to the outside world. The Baltika was accompanied into Leningrad by a flotilla of boats and welcomed by a huge crowd; Thorez may well have mused on the fact that only a few weeks earlier the liner had been named Vyasheslav Molotov. After two days touring the sights of Leningrad, Thorez arrived in Moscow, which had been decorated for the festival with flags, flowers and thousands of Picasso peace doves. The same evening Khrushchev ‘dropped by’ Thorez’s dacha, bringing along his children and grandchildren. Next, Thorez travelled to the Crimea, where he spent four weeks in a dacha by the sea. Neighbours included Jacques Duclos and his wife and some of the world’s top communists, including Ulbricht, Gomulka and – ‘a great joy’ – Ho Chi Minh. As well as breakfasting on the beach, trout fishing, trips to the mountains and forests, boat trips and ‘bathing by the light of the moon’, Thorez attended two ‘receptions’ at Khrushchev’s nearby holiday residence. With the main topic of conversation preparations for the forthcoming world conference, it was communist diplomacy in idyllic surroundings. The November conference was attended by sixty-eight communist parties and coincided with celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution’s fortieth anniversary. Spirits were high after the success of the Sputnik satellite launched on 4 October, which prompted talk that the Soviet economy would overtake its capitalist competitors within fifteen years. Thorez spent a month in the Russian capital, though for the first five days he was bed-ridden with a fever. He and Jeannette were allocated an apartment on Lenin Hills (today Sparrow Hills) close to the university, where their eldest son, Jean, had just commenced his studies. Duclos acted as the PCF’s main spokesperson at the conference, while Thorez played the role of back-stage fixer in negotiations over the declaration, which was issued in the name of all ruling communist parties, with the exception of the Yugoslavs (who failed to attend). The declaration spoke of ‘identity of views’ and ‘unanimity’; but it was a compromise that hid increasingly fraught relations between, firstly, the Soviet and Italian leaderships

THE TRAUMA

OF

1956

245

and, secondly, Khrushchev and the Chinese, who also had support from the Albanians.97 Thorez received a visit from Mao Zedong soon after arriving in Moscow. Thorez was impressed by Mao’s declarations about the danger of ‘revisionism’ arising from de-Stalinisation and the need to secure the centrality of the Soviet camp. He was prepared to overlook Beijing’s criticisms of those aspects of Khrushchev’s policy that chimed with his own approach to politics: ‘peaceful coexistence’ and its accompanying aim of a parliamentary, possibly peaceful, road to socialism. ‘We talked for two hours. Total agreement,’ Thorez noted in his diary (8 November 1957). In reality, the two men’s view of international communist strategy was divergent. At the conference, Mao attacked Khrushchev over ‘peaceful coexistence’. For him, plans by the US government to place tactical nuclear weapons on Taiwan, along with its backing of the Kuomintang regime, ruled out normal diplomatic relations with imperialist powers. Mao also expressed bizarre views about nuclear war. Even if the world were to lose half its population, ‘there will be another half; the imperialists will be hit completely [. . .] and the whole world will become socialist’, he explained at the conference, to the obvious discomfort of delegates.98 Thorez sought, nevertheless, to ensure that the conference declaration accommodated the Chinese party, while making no concessions to the ‘opportunist line of the Italians’. He was heartened when, at a dinner reception, Khrushchev, Mikoyan and others in the Soviet leadership expressed ‘agreement’ with a French amendment. At the end of the conference Thorez claimed ‘complete satisfaction’.99 Thorez returned to Bazainville and, after giving a report on the conference to the Political Bureau, relocated to Les Escarrasses for the winter. On arrival he passed by Picasso’s villa ‘to salute’ the artist, before taking to bed with a kidney complaint. After Christmas, he dropped into ‘chez Nadia’ to view the progress of the Le´ger museum. ***** Thorez began 1958 feeling confident that he had negotiated the turmoil that opened almost two years earlier with Khrushchev’s secret speech. By successfully managing the crisis, he had enhanced his authority within the PCF and the international communist movement. His diary notes ‘the abundance’ of New Year greetings received, including from the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha and, ‘for the first time since 1947’, the Yugoslavian ambassador. Thorez understood that the party had taken a hit from the secret speech and continued to describe November 1956 as ‘a difficult period’.100 But he was encouraged by the stability of membership figures and the lack of

246

MAURICE THOREZ

progress by oppositional trends within its ranks. In the National Assembly, the PCF remained the largest party and, despite its political isolation, Thorez believed it was once again poised ‘to do politics’. His optimism was blind to underlying currents. Reluctance to condemn the crimes of Stalin, support for the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, compounded by opposition to birth control and the vote in parliament for special powers in Algeria, meant that for a new generation the aura of the party’s association with social liberation and resistance had dissipated: the PCF was directly associated with repression. Within the party, questioning of Thorez’s approach reached the leading committees when, starting in 1957, two of his closest confidantes, Servin and Casanova, began to express differences. Politically, Thorez had failed to grasp the significance and implications of the struggle for national liberation in Algeria and, soon, the victory of Gaullism – a direct outcome of that brutal conflict – would land a serious blow against his perspectives and world view. Thorez may have circumvented the trauma of 1956, but his political acumen would desert him during the crisis that erupted in 1958.

CHAPTER 9 ALGERIA AND DE GAULLE

On 2 December 1958, Thorez dropped a bombshell. The Political Bureau had been convened to discuss the results of the elections to the National Assembly of the new Fifth Republic. All were expecting a difficult discussion following the decimation of the PCF’s representation from 150 seats (in January 1956) to ten. But few had anticipated Thorez’s announcement: he would not be leading the party’s delegation to the Soviet party’s Twenty-First Congress in January, not be giving the main report to next summer’s PCF Congress and – most shockingly – he would be relinquishing the post of general secretary. The same evening, Thorez took the train for Cannes, leaving behind a party leadership in a state of shock. For PCF leaders, it was simply unimaginable that the person who embodied the party could step aside as general secretary. All winter, through letters and visits, they strove to convince Thorez to reconsider. On 9 January 1959, Maurice Servin and Jean Fre´ville arrived at Les Escarrasses to hear Thorez explain his position in a remarkably frank manner.1 The impact of the stroke meant that he found it ‘difficult to write, speak and think’; he did not have the strength or concentration for ‘frequent and long meetings’ and, if able to attend, was unable to sufficiently prepare for them to ‘play an active role’. He feared the ‘danger of being cut off’, of becoming an ‘office leader’ and ‘unintentionally a brake and obstacle’ in the work of the leadership. When Servin reminded him of his historic ‘authority’ within French communism, Thorez replied that ‘any past merits cannot mask or compensate for the inadequacies of the present’.2 Thorez was physically exhausted. A gruelling six months had begun on 13 May with the political crisis provoked by the ‘fascist riot’ and putsch in Algiers and the campaign against full powers being granted to Charles de Gaulle. In September, Thorez led the PCF’s opposition to de Gaulle’s proposed constitution at the referendum and, in November, he threw himself

248

MAURICE THOREZ

into the election campaign. After returning to Les Escarrasses on 3 December, he paid his customary visit to Picasso before taking to bed with a heavy cold and high blood pressure. Between 2 December 1958 and 19 March 1959 he was adamant that remaining general secretary was ‘hardly compatible with [medical] recommendations of prudence and rest’.3 It was, he told Servin, ‘physically impossible to fulfil properly the obligations that were normally incumbent’ to the role.4 Health worries were real enough, but Thorez’s frame of mind was conditioned by politics. In his diary, he summed up his mood with a quotation from Diderot: I’ve been tempted countless times to fling myself into the arms of repose, and abandon those blind men who lash out with their sticks at anyone who meddles in trying to restore their sight.5 Thorez’s ‘arms of repose’ were the Mediterranean, whose scenery, weather and cultural life he had grown to love. The ‘blind men’ and their ‘sticks’ were a metaphor for critics of Thorez’s politics within the PCF. Oppositional bulletins had emerged in the wake of the party’s opposition to de-Stalinisation and the Hungarian revolt; the cell Sorbonne-Lettres had begun a polemic against the failure to ‘warn of the dangers of the Algerian War’ as well as the ‘dogmatism of the theory of pauperisation’. Thorez denounced the factional bulletins as ‘police sheets’6 and seemed to relish the opportunity to label the arguments of student and academic activists in Sorbonne-Lettres as ‘reflections of the uncertainties of the petit-bourgeoisie’.7 At the Central Committee on 4 October, he launched a vitriolic outburst against ‘men like Marcel Prenant’ (the Resistance hero and eminent scientist), who had dared to suggest inadequacies in the party’s referendum campaign. ‘He did nothing in the campaign. Where was he? He was teaching his university courses. He was organising his exams,’ thundered Thorez.8 What most concerned Thorez, however, was that doubts were also being raised within the Political Bureau, by two men who had been amongst his closest associates, Marcel Servin and Laurent Casanova. The winter of 1958 was not the first occasion on which Thorez had experienced personal anguish in the face of major events. But previous crises were triggered from Moscow: either by admonishments from the International (July 1931 and December 1933) or by turns in Soviet policy that disrupted the course Thorez was following in France (1939, 1947); his hostility towards Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956 was partly an instinctive defence of his Stalinist identity, but also partly because he feared that the speech would undermine the strategy for ‘left and democratic unity’

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

249

he had been pursuing throughout 1954 and 1955. This time, however, the crisis in Thorez’s morale had French stimuli. The victory of Gaullism had changed the political landscape: the perspective of a new Popular Front, still forcefully proclaimed at the start of the year, was more remote than ever. The pivotal event in politics was the Algerian struggle for independence. Its evolution had taken Thorez by surprise. Inconsistent and incoherent, his Algerian policy was an attempt to square the circle between his belief in the progressive nature of the French nation, his instinctive abhorrence at the practices of colonialism, his political project of left unity, the growing Soviet interests in the region; and the problem of supporting a burgeoning anti-war movement in the face of sympathy amongst large sections of the French population for the Algerian settler community.

Thorez and inter-war Algeria French communism had struggled with the issue of Algeria from its earliest days. Algeria differed from other North African colonies in that it was, from 1848, considered integrally part of France. Not only denied its history, culture and any possibility of nationhood, the native majority was, in the words of President Millerand in 1922, part of ‘one people in the process of becoming French’.9 Settler identity was marked by a siege mentality that expressed itself through racist denigration of Muslims, as well as the small Jewish community, and resistance to any reforms that might improve the rights and status of the majority. Ignoring the first stirrings of the nationalist movement after the Great War, the young Communist Party failed to raise demands for Algerian liberation and considered political and social progress in Algeria as dependent on the struggle for socialism in France. With most members of the party’s three Algerian federations drawn from the settler community, Algerian communists looked down on ‘backward’ Muslims and argued that propaganda aimed towards them would be counter-productive.10 ‘Bolshevisation’ in 1924– 25 led to a policy change and the party attempted to apply the International’s line of ‘irreconcilable struggle against colonial slavery’.11 Alongside organising opposition to the war in Morocco, the young Thorez voiced support for Algerian national rights. In 1926, the Lille Congress was unequivocal in its commitment to ‘agitation and systematic propaganda’ around the slogan of independence.12 Nevertheless, the Algerian question remained low on the PCF’s list of priorities, an indication that many members and supporters were sceptical about support for independence. In Algeria, attempts to broaden support for the party were hampered by the sectarianism of ‘class against class’ – which condemned moderate nationalists as ‘collaborators’ – and by the stepping up of police

250

MAURICE THOREZ

repression against the Muslim population, for whom any form of activity that ‘defamed’ the French Republic or its officials was illegal.13 Thorez visited Algeria twice during the 1930s. In May 1933, he toured party cells, discussed with individual members, attended the regional conference and addressed two public meetings. His notebook records the malaise facing Algerian communism: ‘no life in the party’, ‘no leadership’, ‘no activity’, ‘no indigenous members’; a failure to follow the PCF’s policy on the national question and even charges of antisemitism were amongst Thorez’s complaints. Visiting the Casbah – the Muslim quarter in Algiers – a sympathetic shopkeeper told him that ‘the PC is not Arab enough, does not translate its pamphlets, does not want to recruit [us]’.14 The public side of Thorez’s tour was more successful. When he visited Larbaaˆ on 23 May, he was surrounded by a crowd of peasants, who had managed to reach the town despite obstruction from the police. By abandoning the worst excesses of ‘class against class’, communists in the region had succeeded in mobilising poor farmers against land expropriations. With an Arabic translator, Thorez announced that he would raise their plight in the French parliament: ‘Go back to your huts, your fields; work them and defend them,’ he cried to rapturous applause. Sympathetic peasants then led him around neighbouring villages on the back of a mule.15 By the time of his second tour in January–February 1939, both the context and Thorez’s approach to Algerian nationalism had changed. The Popular Front had kindled a growth of support for communists in the colony, who were now organised in the Parti Communiste Alge´rien (PCA). Although membership was still overwhelmingly European, the launch of the party and its focus on land and democratic rights had attracted a layer of young Algerians.16 But many hopes in the Popular Front had been dashed when the government retreated in the face of settler protest from introducing the limited reforms of the ‘Blum–Viollette project’ and when it outlawed the nationalist organisation, E´toile nord-africaine, using legislation introduced primarily to ban the far-right and fascist leagues. Thorez approached Algerian politics through the prism of the Popular Front, prioritising the creation of national and international alliances against fascism over demands for national liberation. While arguing for improvements in conditions and rights for the native population, he feared that demands for independence would push the settler community into the arms of the extreme right. At the Arles Congress (1937), he described independence as ‘an attitude which could favour the enterprises of fascism’ and would place France’s North African colonies under the ‘yoke of Mussolini or Hitler’.17 Thorez’s tour was proclaimed a triumph and turned into a propaganda film by the PCF. Images of sightseeing, walking across desert sand and taking tea

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

251

in shanty towns leave the impression of an excursion by a visiting colonial dignitary.18 In a foretaste of the repression to bear down on the party later that year, the government banned Thorez’s public rallies but large crowds still turned out to his meetings, renamed ‘private gatherings’. 8,000 people at Boˆne (now Annaba) and 15,000 in Algiers heard his attempt to theorise the problem of Algerian nationhood. With considerable lyricism, Thorez explained that Algeria was a ‘melting pot of twenty races’, descendants of Berbers, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Maltese, Spanish, Italians and French people: ‘There is an Algerian nation that is being historically constituted, whose evolution can be facilitated and aided by the effort of the French Republic.’19 Borrowed from an early text by Stalin,20 the theory of ‘nation in formation’ justified opposition to independence – premature because an Algerian nation did not yet exist – while leaving open the possibility that communists would support it in the future, once a nation had been ‘formed’. It denied the existence of Algerian nationhood under the French conquest, suggested that the colonial power could play a benevolent role, and effectively granted the settler community – one of the races out of which the nation would be ‘formed’ – a veto over Algerian freedom. The theory would have fatal consequences for the PCF’s and PCA’s relationship with burgeoning Algerian nationalism following the Second World War. A ‘nation in formation’ underpinned the party’s refusal to condemn indiscriminate military reprisals and atrocities by settlers after the Se´tif events (May 1945). In October 1946, it justified Thorez’s willingness to enshrine the ‘French Union’ into the constitution of the Fourth Republic, ignoring proposals from the nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas for Algeria to become an autonomous republic within the union. In 1947, as the PCF began to view Algeria through the lens of the Cold War, ‘two-camp’ dichotomy, Le´on Feix, the party’s spokesperson on North African matters, described independence as ‘a false position’ that would place Algeria ‘in the clutches of the American trusts’.21

‘The part and the whole’ Thorez was settling in to his new residence at Les Escarrasses, organising the library and exploring the ‘extremities of the garden’, when the Front de libe´ration nationale (FLN), inspired by the Viet Minh’s victory over the French army at Dien Bien Phu, attacked seventy military and industrial targets on 1 November 1954 (All Saints Day). Thorez had recently returned from a threemonth holiday in the Soviet Union and events in Algeria were barely on his political radar. His complacency was shared by most leading French politicians, preoccupied with debates over the European Defence Community and the

252

MAURICE THOREZ

London and Paris conferences to determine the status of Germany. Even as the FLN’s guerrilla war took hold during the first months of 1955, Algeria rarely featured in Thorez’s speeches or articles. In January, he sketched an analysis of world relations – noting ‘several new aspects’ of politics, including ‘peace in Vietnam’ and threats by the United States against de´tente – but failed to make reference to Algeria.22 During five meetings of the Central Committee in 1955, Thorez’s interventions focussed on German rearmament, nuclear weapons, rural politics and election strategy. It was not until May 1955 that he began to pay serious attention to Algerian events, noting in his diary that the ‘situation worsens’ (19 May 1955). In Thorez’s mind the question of Algeria held a subordinate role within his political project to prepare an alliance with the Socialists to form a new Popular Front. During the election campaign in November and December 1955, he spoke of forging unity with socialists around ‘a policy of negotiation with the people of North Africa, for a true French union’.23 After the result, he suggested socialist– communist– republican unity as ‘the way to stop the war’. Thorez continued to argue that peace could be brought to Algeria through redefining the relationship between France and its colony, rather than through independence.24 This is the background to his insistence that the PCF should back the wide-ranging special powers demanded by the socialist prime minister Guy Mollet on 12 March 1956. After forming a government, Mollet had signed off the independence process in Morocco and Tunisia and announced the objective of securing peace in Algeria. But he was rattled by settler protests when visiting Algiers on 6 February and it soon became clear that, for him, ‘pacification’ meant crushing the liberation movement. He appointed the hard-line Robert Lacoste as Minister-Resident and drew up proposals for special powers to allow Lacoste to rule by decree. Initially communists were reluctant to offer support. After meeting Mollet on 6 March, Duclos commented that special powers might ‘dangerously aggravate’ the Algerian problem.25 At that moment, Thorez was attending a reception in Warsaw on his journey back from the Twentieth Congress. On his return, he instructed the party’s deputies to vote for the powers, stressing that communists could not be seen as an obstacle to a government committed to peace, particularly as Mollet had turned the matter into a confidence vote. Pierre Lareppe, PCF deputy for the Ardennes, recalled that ‘the order to vote for special powers was communicated to the communist group [. . .] at the most twenty minutes before the start of the session. It was impossible to discuss seriously whether they were appropriate.’26 In effect, Thorez had imposed the decision on his party’s parliamentary group without seeking approval from the Secretariat, Political Bureau or Central Committee.

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

253

When the Political Bureau met the following day at Bazainville, Thorez conceded that the vote would create difficulties. ‘We will have to do much explaining,’ he told the meeting. His argument was that ‘flexible and skilful tactics’ would help to draw socialist-supporting workers into the party’s campaign for a ceasefire. Applying some theoretical veneer, he continued: ‘We acted dialectically. We should never view a question in isolation. As Lenin said, we should not sacrifice the whole for the part.’27 This phrase – ‘the whole for the part’ – was well known in communist parlance, and had sometimes been used by the PCF leadership to justify participation in the Popular Front. But, as party dissidents and others on the left would point out, Lenin (in What is to be Done) had written that ‘the struggle for reforms’ (the part) should be ‘subordinate to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and socialism’ (the whole). Thorez had reversed Lenin’s meaning by turning ‘the whole’ into a tactical alliance with the Socialist Party. As Thorez had sensed, the vote prompted ‘emotion in the party’, aggravating the shock of the Twentieth Congress. At the Central Committee on 9 May, Thorez admitted that the Communists had provided ‘cover’ for the socialist leaders; but, he declared, it was part of a ‘great and audacious policy of unity’ to bring about ‘an accord with the entire Socialist Party, as happened twenty years ago’.28 The special powers ramped up the cycle of violence in Algeria. Mass arrests, curfews, summary executions, forced resettlement of villages, detention camps, torture centres and the guillotine: the government, with unintentional irony, named its pacification policy ‘Hope’.29 In April, it announced the mobilisation of 200,000 reservists, which provoked attempts to block troop trains and at least one attempted mutiny.30 By the autumn, Algiers had become a huge armed camp, with military control facilitated by a network of informers and a card-index listing every inhabitant. Alongside the attempt to destroy the FLN and its military wing the Arme´e de libe´ration nationale (ALN), communists were ruthlessly pursued. Embarrassed and weakened by Thorez’s support for special powers, the PCA distanced itself from the PCF. In April, Henri Maillot, a PCA member, deserted from the French army to join the Maquis rouge, bringing with him arms and ammunition. In May, the PCA began talks with the FLN and, in July, communist guerrillas were integrated into the ALN. Many lost their lives, including Maillot and his comrades; others were rounded up to endure torture, including the entire communist network in Oran.31 One PCA prisoner, Henri Alleg, kept a diary of his experience, which was smuggled out of the detention centre and published as La Question. Thorez read this ‘hallucinating account of torture’ on 28 February 1958. Despite being banned by the French government, it was sold under the counter in bookshops and was the second most popular book in France after Anne Frank’s diary. Widely translated, it stirred an international storm.32

254

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez began to reconsider his approach towards Algeria towards the end of May 1956. His diary entry for 26 May reads: ‘Visit from Servin. I express my concerns about the policy of war in Algeria’, though it seems certain that Servin arrived at Bazainville to raise concerns of his own. PCF policy was refashioned in a cautious, contradictory manner, and without any mea culpa. One of the first changes was to drop the slogan for a ‘true French Union of free and equal people’. On 9 May, Thorez was promising that the party would ‘not for a moment abandon this formulation’, but on 20 June the Political Bureau drew up its resolution for the approaching party congress and deleted the word ‘French’.33 Secondly, Thorez’s attitude to the Mollet government hardened. He could not contain his contempt for the Prime Minister at a joint meeting of the parliamentary group and Central Committee, convened on 5 June to discuss how to vote on a new confidence motion. ‘Do not count on us to tolerate the dozens of Oradours that you are reducing to cinders’, he fumed, drawing parallels between the behaviour of the French army in Algeria and the SS Panzer Division’s massacre of a Limousin village in June 1944. This time, Thorez advocated abstention as the best way to prove to ‘socialist activists’ that ‘communists are fully conscious of the interests of working class unity’.34 Abstention turned to opposition on 25 October, when Thorez led the communist group in voting against the government, though Mollet clung to office with support from the political right. On 21 May 1957, the socialistled government finally collapsed, opening up twelve months of ministerial crisis and, eventually, the demise of the Fourth Republic. Despite voting to bring down his government, Thorez continued to make overtures to Mollet, writing to him in October 1957 to ‘renew our proposals for a government of the left to bring about peace in Algeria’ (23 October 1957). The third change was Thorez’s assessment of Algerian national consciousness. The party began to talk of le fait national alge´rien – a term difficult to translate that implies the existence of Algerian nationhood – and, at the Central Committee on 14– 15 February 1957, Thorez announced ‘the formed Algerian nation’, a phrase that signalled independence was on the agenda. The timing was not accidental. On 13 February, the United Nations had voted down a resolution in support of independence by just one vote. Even more importantly, Thorez had heard that the Soviet Union was to begin supplying the FLN with arms through the conduit of Czechoslovakia and Egypt.35 Thorez continued, however, to defend his ‘nation in formation’ thesis, which had been ‘borne out in practice’. The ‘formed Algerian nation’ had, he claimed, evolved through ‘the merging of elements of varied origins’, including the European settler community. The FLN retorted that Algerian national identity had been forged in the face of opposition from the ‘majority of Europeans who had closed ranks around the colonialists’.36

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

255

The PCF stepped up its activity over Algeria, but without offering explicit solidarity to the national liberation movement. It sought to act as the voice of the anti-war movement, while recognising that many workers identified with the settlers and were reluctant to support Algerian independence. Thorez characterised some expressions of Arab nationalism as racism and attacked ‘individual acts’ by the FLN as playing into the hands of colonialists.37 The party organised a ‘day of action’ in support of peace on 17 October 1957, which included sporadic strike action. Thorez hailed it as ‘a great success’, but described the lack of activity in ‘Paris and its big factories’ as ‘a black spot’. The problem, he contended, was ‘the impact of 50 –70 years of colonial domination on the consciousness of the working class’. Whether the party had reinforced that consciousness with his ‘nation in formation’ theory, its failure to support the struggle for national liberation and support for special powers was a question he did not consider.

De Gaulle: ‘a personal dictatorship that opens the way to fascism’ On the evening of 13 May 1958, Thorez and Vermeersch went to the Apollo Theatre to see Prome´the´e 48, a play by Roger Garaudy, philosopher and Central Committee member, set in the days of the 1848 revolution. As they watched, in Algiers General Massu was addressing a huge crowd of the settler community from the balcony of the Minister-Resident’s building. He demanded ‘a government of public safety’ under the leadership of General de Gaulle.38 Nine days later, General Salan seized power in Corsica and it seemed only a matter of time before the military staged a coup d’e´tat in Paris. The political class turned to de Gaulle. On 1 June, the retired general formed a government, promised a new constitution and was, the following day, granted special powers. Only half the Socialist group and Mende`s France’s Radicals joined the Communists in voting against. Although de Gaulle’s return to power was a major blow, it did not take Thorez completely by surprise. At the March Central Committee, he had spoken of it as a possibility. ‘If our people allow its leaders to suppress liberty in Algeria for much longer, it is our own freedom that will be compromised,’ he warned in a speech that was widely circulated in brochure form.39 It has been suggested that following the events of 13 May Thorez ‘panicked’ and departed ‘in the greatest secrecy to hide in Switzerland’ for around ten days.40 Yet, according to Thorez’s diary, he was at Choisy on 14 May celebrating the birthday of Vermeersch’s mother, at the National Assembly on 15 May, and between 18 May and 2 June at meetings of the Political Bureau. In fact, Thorez threw himself into activity to ensure that the PCF was the most consistent defender of the Fourth Republic, guiding party

256

MAURICE THOREZ

strategy at daily meetings (sometimes twice daily) of the Political Bureau and parliamentary group. Parallels can be drawn between Thorez and de Gaulle. Both were awakened politically by the experience of the Great War. Both shared a sense of loyalty, devotion, discipline and service: Thorez to communism, party and country, de Gaulle to army and country. Both had a similar view of historical change: ‘Force [is] an instrument of action, the condition of movement [. . .] the midwife of progress,’ wrote de Gaulle, but it could have been Thorez.41 De Gaulle fused his identity with that of France, Thorez with that of his party; both projecting their image through the use of myth and charisma. Beneath their public masks, both men were prone to periods of self-doubt and ‘sullen withdrawal’.42 Both men also shared a certain respect for the other. De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs that Thorez had ‘on several occasions, provided service to the public interest, and served France’. On reading the compliment, Thorez noted: ‘as for the rest of it, this megalomaniac takes great licence with the truth (29 October 1959).’ Yet, sometimes, he spoke in warm terms about de Gaulle’s commitment to France. On 1 February 1958, the Soviet ambassador, Sergey Vinogradov, visited Thorez at Les Escarrasses and the two men talked over de Gaulle’s politics and personality. According to the ambassador’s report, Thorez had stressed de Gaulle’s ‘keen sense of the national interest’.43 Nevertheless, in June 1958 Thorez characterised de Gaulle as leader of ‘a government of personal dictatorship that opens the way to fascism’. It was an ‘illegitimate government’, which drew its social support from the ‘most colonialist, chauvinist, reactionary layers of the bourgeoisie’. A tool of the big monopolies and banks, de Gaulle was a ‘grave threat’ to the democratic rights and conditions of the working class. Thorez’s analysis was shared by other European communists: Togliatti also declared that ‘fascism is advancing under de Gaulle’.44 In Thorez’s mind, the May 1958 events recalled the surge of the extreme right in February 1934 which – after the parenthesis of the Popular Front – paved the way for the banning of the PCF in September 1939 and the victory of Pe´tain in 1940. Thorez also positioned Gaullism within the Cold War, ‘two-camp’ landscape: the General’s accession had been applauded in the United States and Germany and his promises to defend national independence and sovereignty were mere ‘fine words’. In relation to Algeria, de Gaulle was a ‘man of all-out war’, who had ‘adopted the position of the ultras’ (the extremists within the settler community) and who rendered ‘impossible’ any peaceful outcome of the conflict.45 Yet Soviet diplomacy was adopting a more nuanced position. After talking with Thorez in February, Vinogradov had met de Gaulle and forwarded to Moscow the General’s encouraging remark that ‘France’s dependence vis-a`-vis the United States would not be eternal’. Khrushchev

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

257

quickly realised that the new administration represented an opportunity to drive a wedge within the western alliance. On 14 June, through the channel of Vinogradov, Khrushchev passed de Gaulle a letter and, according to Thorez, a ‘verbal message’. It urged him to pursue a more autonomous line in world politics and offered a closer relationship with the Soviet Union.46 Thorez was clearly frustrated at the tensions between his own evaluation of de Gaulle and the machinations of Soviet diplomacy. His diary entry on 14 June refers to Khrushchev’s courting of de Gaulle, but notes also that Pravda had published ‘in extenso my speech at the Central Committee’ (in which he had characterised Gaullism as ‘dictatorship opening the way to fascism’). Yet, as always, Thorez sought ways to reconcile the PCF and Soviet positions. On 23 June at Bazainville, Thorez received ‘some friends’ – the code used in his diary to record meetings with Soviet diplomats. Two days later, Vinogradov reported to Moscow that Thorez ‘will encourage our regular contacts with de Gaulle’: ‘Comrade Thorez said that the development of Franco-Soviet relations would not complicate the position of the PCF at all but, on the contrary, reinforce it.’47 Despite de Gaulle’s victory, Thorez’s spirits during the summer of 1958 remained good. He announced that the party would mobilise ‘a great campaign for a massive no vote’ at the referendum on the General’s proposed ‘monarchist constitution’. He told the Central Committee and communist parliamentarians that ‘illusions in de Gaulle were beginning to dissipate’.48 After speaking at the party’s national conference in July, a diary entry heralded ‘the combativity, enthusiasm and confidence of the whole party in the final victory’ (17 July 1958). After replacing his summer holiday on the Black Sea with a twelve-day break at Les Escarrasses, Thorez took personal charge of the referendum campaign. From the outset there were difficulties. Negotiations to establish a unified opposition – le contrat des non – were unsuccessful, and Communists campaigned against the proposed constitution separately from other opponents, which included Mende`s France, a minority of socialist deputies and a coalition of left-wing personalities. Thorez blamed the result – only 20 per cent voting ‘no’ – on the frenzied press campaign, the fear of violence and anti-communism. It was, he told the Political Bureau, ‘a serious defeat that paves the way for the worst’.49 Another big defeat followed at the legislative elections. Throughout November, Thorez devoted considerable energy to the campaign, sometimes addressing two or three meetings the same day. Nationally, the party lost almost one-third of its support in face of ‘the fascist and reactionary surge’. Thorez narrowly retained his seat in Ivry, though his vote fell from 53 to 47 per cent (in the first round).50 Two days after the results, Thorez shocked the Political Bureau by announcing he would be standing down as general secretary.

258

MAURICE THOREZ

‘I remain, but against my will’ Thorez had first expressed concerns about his role as general secretary in May 1956 when he spoke at the Central Committee of his frustration ‘at being cut off, almost completely, from a life of [political] activism after one has been in the battle for so long’.51 He discussed ‘the difficulties of [his] work’ at a meeting with Servin (26 May 1956) and raised the matter again in April 1957 at a meeting with Duclos (5 April 1957). Between 2 December 1958 and 17 March 1959, he was adamant that he would stand down at the forthcoming party congress. Yet, after two long meetings of the Political Bureau on 17 and 19 March, Thorez reversed his decision and agreed to stay on. What prompted Thorez’s change of mind? Firstly, there was the incessant and intense pressure from others in the leadership. At the Political Bureau, all spoke with one voice: ‘unthinkable that Maurice should no longer be here,’ said Georges Se´guy; ‘let him stay and do what he can – the BP and CC will have to make the best of it,’ offered Waldeck Rochet; ‘evict Thorez – that’s what the enemy wants,’ declared E´tienne Fajon.52 Secondly, Thorez was in better spirits and, despite recurring back pain (‘perhaps an after-effect of the pleurisy contracted in 1951’), he was feeling physically stronger following the winter break at Les Escarrasses.53 By March, the party had shaken off the shock of the November defeat. It had taken some difficult decisions: full-time organisers were sacked (‘reintegrated into the workforce’ was the official terminology) and regional newspapers shut down, due to the loss of income from parliamentary deputies required to hand over their salaries and draw the wage of a skilled worker. The economies even touched the Thorez family; Jeannette and the children moved out of their grand residence in Choisy to relocate to the family’s previous, more modest, home in Ivry. In February, the PCF achieved encouraging results at by-elections, and the CGT scored well in workplace elections. The following month the PCF was the biggest party at municipal elections in virtually every major town, recovering around half of the vote lost in November. Thorez’s diary notes ‘general joy around the dinner table’ after Jeannette arrived with details of the results (11 March 1959). The third reason is the most important. There were serious doubts about the succession, with disagreements in the Political Bureau ruling out any possibility of a smooth transition. Although it would not explode into the open until January 1961, the meetings of the Political Bureau on 17 and 19 March 1959 marked the first skirmishes in what would become known as the Servin – Casanova Affair. The discussion about Thorez’s position as general secretary was conflated with ‘very sharp’ exchanges over the ‘erroneous opinions of Servin and Casa’.54

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

259

Thorez’s watchword during this period was ‘collective leadership’. This did not imply an acceptance of varying political viewpoints but a more equitable sharing of responsibilities, while maintaining the authority of the general secretary. A dauphin was, nevertheless, still needed. Marcel Servin had for some time been Thorez’s preferred choice of heir. Born in 1918 and representing a younger generation, he was a skilled operator at the highest echelons of the party: Thorez’s private secretary in 1945, head of the Service de Cadres in 1950 and Secretary for Organisation from 1954, replacing Lecoeur.55 Disciplined, loyal, trustworthy but also talented, he was one of the select group to be invited to Bazainville not only for an audience but to join the Thorez family for dinner. Servin had begun to raise disagreements during 1957, though in a decidedly non-confrontational manner. Thorez recorded in his diary on 18 May 1957 that ‘for the third time, Servin wr[ote] to me after a session of the Central Committee or Political Bureau to register his dissent’. The following day, he invited his prote´ge´ for a discussion at Bazainville ‘to show him the consequences of his attitude, if it should persist’. Amongst other things, Servin was arguing for a more open, less vanguardist, approach towards ‘mass work’, including a review of the party’s relationship with the trade unions and peace movement. His ideas were influenced by Togliatti’s notion of ‘a party of a new type’, a broader and more flexible form of organisation than the classical Leninist model defended by Thorez. When his proposals were discussed at the Political Bureau on 20 May, he won support from one other member: Laurent Casanova. Thorez had few real friends amongst fellow comrades in the party leadership. The cult surrounding him distorted possibilities of expressing feelings in a mutually trustful and empathetic relationship. But his relationship with Casanova was genuinely warm. Before the war, the Thorez– Vermeersch and Casanova couples had socialised and shared holidays. Intelligent and cultured, Casanova had become the conduit for Thorez’s contacts with the world of intellectuals and artists. Frustrated over the party’s cautious approach towards the Algerian liberation struggle, he began to raise differences around the same time as Servin, urging a more sensitive approach to working with others in the peace movement. When he argued at the Political Bureau on 3 October 1957 that the party needed ‘to be more active’ on the ‘principal task of peace’, Thorez scrawled in his notebook: ‘new critique of blunders’.56 On 7 January 1959, Servin wrote to Thorez and, two days later, travelled to Les Escarrasses to urge him to remain as general secretary. He had heard through Jacques Duclos that Thorez was standing down not primarily for health reasons but because of the ‘absence of party unity’.57 Feeling

260

MAURICE THOREZ

responsible for the General Secretary’s state of mind, Servin attempted to reassure him. There were, he said, no fundamental differences on the Political Bureau over ‘the line’, simply ‘divergences over its application’ of the sort that were always ‘probable’. If Thorez were to step down, questions would inevitably be posed by the ‘masses, by the party and by its enemies’ that ‘could not be dodged’ by explanations about his state of health.58 Thorez agreed that any differences within the leadership ‘could be ironed out and resolved through collective activity’. But it was now ‘physically impossible’ for him to play a role in that process: ‘I have sought to pursue [that approach] for more than thirty years, and I am aware that I can do so no longer,’ he told Servin.59 Thorez’s reply indicates his determination to stand down, but also shows that he did not anticipate the extent to which relations with Servin and Casanova would deteriorate in the coming few weeks. The ‘Italian question’ was the catalyst for the breakdown. In December, Servin and Casanova had been part of a PCF delegation to Rome for talks with the PCI, after which Servin facilitated the drafting of a joint declaration. At first, Thorez seemed happy with the text, but he was soon making disparaging comments about its ‘concessions to revisionism’. Thorez travelled back to Paris and attacked the declaration openly at the Political Bureau on 22 January, but only in his closing remarks. Consequently, Servin had no opportunity to respond. Furious, he complained of ‘abnormal methods of discussion’, of policy being ‘increasingly made outside the BP’, and demanded that his opposition to Thorez’s remarks be recorded in the minutes and made known to the Central Committee. Both requests were denied. Two days later, Duclos and Feix arrived at Bazainville to inform Thorez that Servin and Casanova had in protest withdrawn from the commission to draw up the Central Committee’s thesis for the forthcoming congress. They also told him that the two men had raised other criticisms. The first related to the referendum campaign. Servin was claiming that the party – and thus Thorez who directed the campaign – had ‘buried’ the negotiations around a Contrat des Non by refusing to give ‘guarantees’ to potential allies. He was also saying that the party had effectively fought the referendum as defenders of the status quo (the Fourth Republic) and had failed to develop a programme to act as a basis for left unity. Servin and Casanova labelled the party’s approach as ‘routinist’. The second criticism related to the evaluation of Gaullism. Servin had told Duclos and Feix that there were ‘some members of the CC who were not in agreement with the position of the BP on the monopolies’. This was a reference to Thorez’s analysis of Gaullism as the direct ‘grip of the monopolies on the organ of the state’. For the Political Bureau majority, this was prima facie evidence that Servin and Casanova were beginning to act as representatives of a ‘tendency’ within the party.60

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

261

It has been suggested that the ‘Casanova– Servin affair illustrates Thorez’s determination to remain in control of the party.’61 More accurately, it explains why Thorez changed his mind to stay at the helm as general secretary in 1959. There is no doubt that his intention to retire was serious. He still wanted, of course, to ‘serve the party’: it was just a matter of ‘determining under what form’.62 He planned to act as its foreign ambassador, embarking on long tours and vacations in the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies. He would mix freely with the PCF’s friends and associates in the cultural world, and appear in front of an adoring membership at party conferences and rallies. In short, he would become the elder statesman, filling the shoes of Marcel Cachin, whose funeral he had led in February 1958. In early 1957, Cachin had been provided with a ‘bel appartement’ on Nadia Le´ger’s land at Biot, and it seems probable that in late 1958 the artist’s widow made the offer of a similar retirement home to Thorez. But Thorez was trapped by the cult that had been built around him. In the minds of the party’s leading cadre, he alone possessed the authority to bind together ‘a collective leadership’ in challenging times. Even Servin would describe him as ‘the sole element of unity’.63 And equally decisive, in Thorez’s own mind, the ideas of the party were synonymous with his own ideas. A challenge to his way of thinking was an attack on the party – and a challenge was, he sensed, beginning to happen. ‘I will remain general secretary, but against my will,’ he noted in his diary on 20 March 1959. In another notebook, he explained: ‘I will stay, understanding the reasons given [by comrades] about repercussions inside the party and its public perception.’ And, he added, ‘given the circumstances, I believe it my duty to give the [Central Committee’s] report to congress.’ Yet Thorez also made it clear that he would be staying on his own terms. He would not be attending the Secretariat, but he could ‘if need be envisage meeting several members of the Secretariat and BP on essential political problems at Bazainville’. In other words, though general secretary in name, he would not take responsibility for the party’s day-to-day functioning, but would through unofficial channels continue to have the main say on essential policy matters.64

The Casanova –Servin affair Having agreed to continue as general secretary, Thorez wasted no time in ‘lashing out with sticks’ against ‘blind men’ meddling in the party. He stood up at the Central Committee on 19 March to launch a blistering attack on ‘revisionists’ and ‘opportunists’. Those raising differences were, he said, ‘comrades more used to reading the press of our enemies than the documents of their party’. Older members would know that there had always been such

262

MAURICE THOREZ

people in the party, people influenced by ‘the ideology of the bourgeoisie’ who wanted ‘to pull the party away from its revolutionary line towards the politics of social democracy’.65 Thorez made a claim for omniscience and prescience in every aspect of policy since his illness: the Twentieth Congress, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the dangers posed by the Algeria War, the threat of de Gaulle. In relation to the referendum, he did not need lectures about how to build alliances to secure a Contrat des Non, reminding listeners that it was he ‘who had raised the slogan of the Popular Front’. Thorez’s speech was not reported in the communist press, but duplicated and circulated amongst party cadres. The named target of his ire was the party cell at Sorbonne-Lettres, but the violence of the attack – and his reference to previous oppositions – was a clear warning to Casanova and Servin, and anyone else contemplating support for the two men. Casanova and Servin represented neither a faction nor a coherent political alternative. They were a loyal opposition, attempting to win Thorez to their views, rather than openly confronting him. But during 1959 and 1960, they articulated a trend that contradicted the thorezien world view on a series of fronts: its evaluation of French capitalism, approach towards the Algerian War, relations with the left, and ambiguities towards de-Stalinisation. In the words of one of its adherents, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, editor of the party’s magazine France Nouvelle, it was ‘an attempt at renovation [. . .] to modify the style of work and style of thinking’.66 Economically and socially, France was changing rapidly. Industrial output rose by 50 per cent between 1952 and 1959 and the country had, in 1959, the highest per capita consumption in Europe. Affluence was, of course, uneven and poverty had certainly not disappeared. But, along with other western European nations, France was experiencing what economist Jean Fourastie´ famously described as ‘an invisible revolution’. The infant mortality rate – that persuasive statistic of progress (which Thorez had used to substantiate his pauperisation thesis) – fell by 280 per cent during the 1950s.67 De Gaulle, who had become president in December 1958, was also reasserting France’s status on the world stage. While staying firmly within the confines of the western alliance, a series of foreign policy initiatives attempted to carve out increased autonomy. To demonstrate France’s claim as an independent world-player, he received President Dwight D. Eisenhower on a state visit in September 1959 and, the following month, issued an invitation to Khrushchev to tour the country. Cautiously, Casanova, Servin, Kriegel-Valrimont and others sought to analyse these developments. The party’s economic review, E´conomie et Politique edited by Jean Pronteau, discussed the nature of the economic upswing and, by implication, dissented from Thorez’s theory of pauperisation. An article by Servin in France Nouvelle (January 1960) suggested that a clash within de

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

263

Gaulle’s cabinet between the foreign minister, Antoine Pinay, and the prime minister, Michel Debre´, represented tensions between two ‘factions of the grande bourgeoisie’: one wing, represented indigenous capitalism; the other, ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (PCF code for US imperialism).68 In short, the article proposed that de Gaulle’s more independent foreign policy was underpinned by the interests of a section of French capitalism. Thorez attempted to shut down such discussion. Despite the obvious vitality of west European capitalism, he took every opportunity to search for anecdotal evidence to prove the law of pauperisation. His summer holiday in 1959 began with a cruise on a Russian liner between Le Havre and Odessa. Thorez would generally stay on board when the ship docked into a port, but he descended at Naples to take a car-tour of the city. He wrote in his diary: Crowds in the streets, shops without customers, everywhere dilapidation and decay, and except for a few main thoroughfares, rubbish and filth in the roads. [. . .] And filthy, filthy.69 Relations between the PCF and PCI were at an all-time low. At the next Central Committee, Thorez attacked the Italian opposition to pauperisation theory as a ‘lamentable point of view’: he had seen the dreadful conditions faced by workers in Naples ‘with his own eyes’.70 Thorez launched into Servin’s argument in France Nouvelle that Gaullism was a reflection of ‘national’ capitalist interests. He told the Political Bureau on 16 June 1960 that the magazine ‘lacked a party spirit’, after which bureau members intervened to demand that Kriegel-Valrimont be removed as editor. Alone, Casanova came to his defence, arguing also that Servin’s article had been misunderstood. Thorez roared: ‘You cannot recognise an error. The future will judge. Opponents and enemies are speculating about your attitude.’71 After another heated exchange at the next meeting, Thorez invited Casanova to dine at Bazainville and noted in his diary: ‘Casa [. . .] explains his point of view on different questions and gives his opinion on the qualities of members of the Political Bureau, which I refute. I warn him against a certain attitude, which he shares with Servin, and about which opportunists and enemies are openly speculating.’72 Algeria remained the decisive factor in politics. In March 1959, a brutal offensive led by General Challe aimed to smash the FLN within six months. For Thorez, it was proof that de Gaulle was ‘practising the true integration of French Algeria’.73 A major theme of his three-and-a-half-hour speech to the party congress in June was that, since de Gaulle had been raised to power by the right-wing Algerian ‘ultras’, he was loyally pursuing their agenda. Yet on 16 September, de Gaulle announced a major policy shift: ‘I deem it necessary

264

MAURICE THOREZ

that recourse to self-determination be here and now proclaimed’, he told a mass television audience. De Gaulle did not propose independence: he was seeking a way to extradite France from the Algerian conflict while maintaining influence within the region. But recognition of self-determination bestowed legitimacy on the national liberation movement and provoked a ferocious backlash from the settler community, as well as threats from within the army. On 24 January 1960, an attempted insurrection in Algiers triggered the ‘week of the barricades’. De Gaulle faced down the revolt, ordering the arrest of some of its leaders, including the future leader of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and in another television address reaffirmed that ‘self-determination is the only policy that is worthy of France’.74 The PCF and Thorez were wrong-footed by de Gaulle’s talk of selfdetermination. The Political Bureau met on 17 September and described it as a ‘purely demagogic manoeuvre.’ Thorez was still on his summer vacation, visiting Helsinki and dining with Hertta Kuusinen and other leading Finnish communists. He returned on 23 September and, the next day, attended the Political Bureau and Secretariat. Neither meeting reassessed the party’s response to de Gaulle’s announcement. Thorez embarked on a tour of the Ce´vennes mining region and, in front of an audience of 5,000 in the pit village of Le Martinet (27 September), repeated the Political Bureau’s line: ‘The recent declaration made by de Gaulle takes us ever further from a solution to the Algerian problem [. . .] The promise of self-determination is only a political manoeuvre.’75 After a further meeting of the Political Bureau on 1 October, which discussed international relations in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s recent visit to the United States, Thorez departed for an elevenday visit to Germany to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), during which he spoke at a ‘monster meeting of 400,000 Berliners’, alongside Ulbricht and other GDR leaders (7 October 1959). Despite de Gaulle’s announcement prompting a generally positive response from the FLN’s provisional government and being welcomed as a step forward by the Soviet Union, the PCF continued to dismiss reference to self-determination as ‘a manoeuvre’. The line continued until 26 October, when an article in l’Humanite´ by Thorez ‘corrected the rather one-sided appreciation of the Political Bureau’. A week later at the Central Committee, Thorez did not mince his words: the Political Bureau’s response had not only been ‘hurried, hasty and incomplete’, but had ‘disoriented the party [and] fed the enemy campaigns of slander against it’.76 De Gaulle’s statement had, he explained, been forced by the ‘heroic and courageous struggle for independence’ and ‘international opinion’. Once again, Thorez presented himself as the omniscient party arbitrator. Cynically, he chastised Central Committee members for not recognising that

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

265

the Political Bureau’s response was in contradiction with party policy. Dishonestly, he failed to mention his own Le Martinet speech or that he had attended three meetings of the Political Bureau without making any attempt to ‘correct’ the line. Quite deliberately, he also ignored the role of Casanova in prompting the party’s U-turn. Thorez ‘received Casa’ on the afternoon of 22 October, the day following press reports of de Gaulle’s invitation to Khrushchev to come to France. Thorez’s diary notes that he and Casa discussed ‘the changes in the situation’ and agreed that Casanova would outline these in the main report at the next Central Committee. The most important ‘change’ related to de Gaulle’s statement on Algerian self-determination, while others pertained to international relations. After Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, there was the real prospect that a summit between the Soviet leader and Eisenhower would be held in Paris the following summer. Given de Gaulle’s invitation to Khrushchev and his potential role at the summit, the PCF’s view that ‘Gaullist power was the principle obstacle to de´tente’ was not only now factually inaccurate but extremely undiplomatic.77 By suggesting he give the report to the Central Committee, Thorez was conceding Casanova’s influence in the policy change, but also ensuring that Casanova would take a good share of the blame for the Political Bureau’s mistaken response to de Gaulle’s selfdetermination statement. Thorez failed to reflect on a possible connection between the Political Bureau’s ‘mistake’ and his characterisation of de Gaulle as a precursor of fascism and servant of the Algerian ultras. After Casanova’s report, he told the Central Committee that ‘the changes in the situation’ did not mean that the party’s ‘analysis of de Gaulle’s regime’ was in any way wrong. And with Casanova and Servin in mind, he warned that any suggestion to the contrary ‘even by members of our party [. . .] is a reflexion of what is said outside by members of the petit-bourgeois’.78 The ‘week of the barricades’ prompted more confusion and prevarication by PCF leaders. Thorez was at Les Escarrasses working on a new edition of Fils du Peuple when on Sunday 24 January he heard news of the ‘armed riot’ in Algiers. Nevertheless, he made no immediate plans to return to Paris. Tuesday was spent reading L’Inge´nieur Bakhirev, the French translation of an anti-Stalinist novel by Soviet author, Galina Nikolaeva, which was soon to become a source of controversy within the PCF. In Paris, Casanova was complaining about the party leadership’s lacklustre response to the crisis. Servin was criticising Duclos and the Political Bureau majority for describing events as ‘a battle between two clans (within the bourgeoisie)’; he was also attacking Frachon for ‘not wanting to involve the CGT’.79 This was the signal for Thorez to take the night train back to the capital (27 January 1960).

266

MAURICE THOREZ

After Thorez’s arrival in Paris, the PCF’s response to the crisis became more urgent. Thorez dealt with three essential issues at two meetings of the Political Bureau (28 and 30 January) and a special Central Committee (2– 3 February). The first was the party’s political response. He raised three slogans: liquidate the fascist plot in Algeria and France; defend and renew democratic liberties by fighting against de Gaulle’s ‘personal power’; and bring about negotiations with the Algerian provisional government to secure selfdetermination and peace.80 The next issue he turned to was how to explain that Gaullist power, supposedly ‘opening the way to fascism’, was acting to put down the revolt by ‘fascist’ ultras. Thorez deployed some dialectical gymnastics. De Gaulle was resisting the ultras because their actions were opposed by the vast majority of French people as well as by the grande bourgeoisie and ‘monopoly capital’. Nevertheless, he said, it was necessary to remember that the revolt had only been possible because of the origins of de Gaulle’s ‘personal power (the ‘fascist riot’ of 13 May 1958) and its undemocratic nature. Thorez continued to talk of the ‘fascist danger’ emanating from Gaullist power but described some measures taken by the general as ‘positive’.81 This contradictory approach toward de Gaulle would now characterise PCF policy. Thirdly, Thorez addressed the question of how Communists should coordinate with other forces opposed to the war. At the start of the crisis, Casanova and Servin had criticised the party leadership for failing to propose specific action around which a broad movement could coalesce. ‘We should have spoken out quicker, shown the dangers and the necessity of unity,’ Casanova told the Political Bureau.82 On 1 February, the CGT, the CFTC (Christian trade union federation), the teachers’ federation (FEN) and National Students’ Union (UNEF) organised a one-hour general strike. It was supported by a ‘cartel’ made up of the PCF and a number of smaller left-wing parties and groups, including two formations that had recently broken from the Socialist Party, the Parti Socialiste Autonome (PSA) and the Union de la Gauche Socialiste (UGS). The party’s liaison with other groups had been the initiative of Servin. The Socialist Party – severely damaged by Mollet’s support for the war and de Gaulle’s administration – stood outside the cartel. Thorez recognised the importance of the strike and noted the big mobilisation of students, drawing a contrast with February 1934 when students had overwhelmingly sided with the extreme right. But he expressed reservations about Servin’s orientation towards the smaller left parties. It remained ‘necessary to turn towards the socialist workers and not become obsessed’ with forces such as the PSA and UGS, he told the Central Committee.83 The Algerian War had created ferment on the left. In April 1960, the PSA fused with republicans around Pierre Mende`s France and a number of former

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

267

communists to form the Parti Socialiste Unifie´ (PSU). Declaring itself an alternative to both socialist democracy and Stalinism, it became one of the first components of what would become known as ‘the new left’. Another manifestation was the growth of the Reconstuction grouping within the CFTC, which won a majority in 1961. In 1964, it would reconstitute the union as a secular formation and, under a new name (the CFDT), begin to challenge the hegemony of the CGT on the trade union left. The war’s impact on the student movement was more immediate. Students were outraged when in the summer of 1959 the government withdrew the sursis, the opportunity to postpone military service until the completion of their university studies. The UNEF coordinated protests. Radicalised, many students sought political expression outside the PCF, in their eyes compromised by its support for special powers and opposition to insoumission (resistance to the draft). The burgeoning anti-war movement was, in effect, fractured. The PCF sought to impose its strategy of ‘mass action in favour of peace’ and insisted that activity be coordinated through the Peace Movement. Others advocated more explicit solidarity with the national liberation movement and practical support for those resisting the draft. In addition, campaigns emerged around specific issues, including the Audin Committee against torture organised by the historian, Pierre Vidal-Naquet.84 These tensions were reflected within the PCF. Casanova sought to form working relationships with other trends in the Peace Movement, even if it meant compromises and refraining from putting forward PCF policy in a nonnegotiable fashion. Thorez expected the Peace Movement to function as a party-controlled front and refused to support ‘manoeuvres’ outside its auspices on ‘subordinate and secondary’ aspects of the war.85 One controversy arose over the party’s attitude towards twenty-six young communists serving prison sentences for refusing to serve in Algeria. In September 1957, Thorez had seemed to support the action of the young soldiers: ‘To say that it is a stance that does not confirm to Lenin’s teachings is dogmatism, in fact worse than dogmatism,’ he told the Central Committee.86 On 2 May 1959, he led the celebrations at the wedding of Serge Magnien, an imprisoned communist who had been given two hours of freedom to marry his fiance´e. ‘A moving occasion,’ Thorez noted in his diary. But, a few weeks later, at the Paris Federation conference (31 May 1959) he emphasised ‘Lenin’s principle’ that ‘the communist soldier goes to every war, even to a reactionary war, in order to continue the struggle against the war [from within the army]’.87 On another occasion, he argued that communist soldiers who obeyed orders were often making greater sacrifices than their imprisoned comrades.88

268

MAURICE THOREZ

Tensions in the party increased after the arrest of the Jeanson Network and the beginning of the trial of twenty-four of its members for terrorist offences on 5 September 1960. Led by the philosopher Francis Jeanson, the Porteurs de Valises – as the network became known – operated within France to supply material and financial support to the FLN. On the first day of the trial, 121 personalities from across the academic and cultural world issued a manifesto expressing support for direct aid to the liberation movement and solidarity with those refusing to take up arms against it. Amongst those signing were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the musician Pierre Boulez, the author/publisher Francois Maspero, and a number of communists, including He´le`ne Parmelin and the historian Madeleine Rebe´rioux.89 A few weeks later, the UNEF called on trade unions and leftwing parties to join a united demonstration against the war on 27 October, a mobilisation that was promptly banned by the government. Thorez described the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ as an ‘anarchist, petit bourgeois position’ and said he was ‘astonished that some intellectuals, members of the party, had signed a text that contradicts communist doctrine’.90 He declared the UNEF demonstration ‘a diversion and attempt to disorganise the youth’, attacking the Communist Students for wanting to mobilise its members in support.91 Rather than taking part in an ‘adventure’, the PCF proposed an alternative series of protests outside town halls on the same day under the auspices of the Peace Movement. Servin and Casanova argued for a more ‘measured’ approach towards the UNEF demonstration, which had secured support from the CFTC, Force Ouvrie`re, the FEN teaching union and the PSU. They warned against the danger of the party ‘excluding itself from a mass movement’.92 At the Central Committee on 14 October, Thorez made a long speech that began with a defence of his entire policy on Algeria, starting with the ‘nation in formation’ theory. ‘The party has played a decisive role in the development of the movement of the masses against the war,’ he claimed. The speech finished with a tirade against the students’ movement and its demand that communists join the demonstration on 27 October. It has, said Thorez, been ‘truly remarkable [that] this organisation of youth can come along to tell major organisations representing millions of workers: “there you are, I’ve decided. It’s up to you to follow.”’ While communists will always ‘support’ the youth, they will never ‘pander’ to them: ‘If a twenty-year old is sufficiently qualified to decide the national actions of the working class, what then is the purpose of our party?’93 On 27 October, 20,000 people, mainly students, marched through the streets of the Latin Quarter, with many packing into an anti-war rally in the Maison de la Mutualite´. There was no official presence from the PCF, which continued to criticise the demonstration from the sidelines.

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

269

Thorez and Khrushchev A constant rhythm to the Casanova – Servin affair was provided by the deepening conflict in the world communist movement over de-Stalinisation. With contacts cultivated through work in the peace movement, Casanova’s standing was high in Moscow. Thorez feared he was Khrushchev’s eyes in France and fumed when in April 1959 news broke that he was to be nominated for the Lenin Peace Prize. Soviet officials had taken advice from Aragon, but for Thorez it was ‘astonishing’ that the Political Bureau had not been consulted.94 He believed Khrushchev was bestowing honour on his favourite French communist. The following year, Thorez raged when Servin penned a favourable review of Inge´nieur Bakhirev, the novel he had been reading during the ‘week of the barricades’. Servin outlined the book’s story of bureaucratic practices stifling economic innovation and personal talent and suggested that by reading it ‘the Twentieth Congress could be well understood’. Thorez denounced these ‘unfortunate formulations’.95 Thorez’s own relationship with Khrushchev improved notably during the summer of 1959 and especially during 1960, a busy year of international communist diplomacy for the French leader. At the start of 1959, Thorez was still deeply suspicious of Khrushchev’s intent. PCF relations with the Chinese remained good and friendship was also growing with Mao Zedong’s European ally, Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. After a row erupted between Hoxha and Khrushchev during the Soviet leader’s visit to Tirana in the spring of 1959, the Albanians began a campaign to recruit the PCF leadership to their cause. Thorez and Vermeersch dined at the Albanian legation in Paris and were invited to holiday in Albania the following year. But Khrushchev was also determined to cultivate relations with Thorez. In July 1959, the Thorez family took a soviet cruise ship to the Black Sea and socialised with the Soviet leader, his wife, Nina Petrovna, and daughter. The sense of pride in Thorez’s diary is palpable when it describes how the Soviet leader ‘dines in the dacha in which we are living’ and imparts the latest news on the Soviet Union’s second rocket towards the moon.96 Khrushchev visited France twice during the first half of 1960. In late March, he began an eleven-day tour as guest of de Gaulle. The PCF drew maximum prestige from the arrival of ‘the messenger of peace’ and Thorez beamed when Khrushchev stepped out of the official procession at the Hoˆtel de Ville to greet him and Jeannette, much to the ‘astonishment’ of the ‘scowling’ Gaullist prime minister, Michel Debre´. For Thorez, Khrushchev’s visit to a little apartment in rue Marie-Rose (near

270

MAURICE THOREZ

Montparnasse) was the highlight of the tour. Lenin had lived there between 1909 and 1912, and the lodging had been purchased by a PCF cultural organisation. Thorez and Khrushchev waved from the balcony to crowds, who then chanted for Jeannette Vermeersch and Nina Petrovna also to appear. ‘We embraced tightly,’ noted Thorez, ‘[Khrushchev] was very emotional. I was no less moved.’97 Khrushchev returned to Paris in May for the planned East – West Summit with Eisenhower; negotiations were to be facilitated by de Gaulle and also involve the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan. In the days running up to the event, a Soviet missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane taking photographs of military installations in the Urals. When Eisenhower refused to apologise, Khrushchev broke off talks and stormed home, though not before meeting Thorez at the Soviet embassy.98 A few weeks later, Thorez received reports of the growing schism between Khrushchev and Mao. Frachon arrived back from a meeting of the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions held in Beijing shocked by positions adopted by the Chinese party leadership, particularly on the question of world peace. Seizing on the spy-plane incident, the Chinese had condemned the aggressive intent of American imperialism and described peaceful coexistence as utopian. Frachon reported their view that to fight for disarmament was ‘to betray the working class’, that the ‘campaign against the horrors of atomic war was being led by the bourgeoisie’ and – repeating Mao’s delusionary comments of November 1957 – that in the event of nuclear war ‘there will remain enough of us left to build socialism on the entire earth’.99 A few days later, Le´o Figue`res returned from Bucharest with reports of stormy exchanges during the Romanian party congress. The Soviet leadership had circulated a 68-page statement attacking the Chinese party’s positions, after which Khrushchev subjected its representative to a six-hour tirade of criticisms.100 Thorez realised ‘the seriousness’ of the situation, while arguing that everything should be done to ‘soften’ the conflict. Nevertheless, he was now drawn more firmly towards Khrushchev. The ‘ultra-leftism of the Chinese is akin to the opportunism of the Italians,’ he told the Political Bureau.101 So Thorez’s four-week holiday in Albania, beginning in late July, took place against a different background than originally anticipated.102 Arriving with Jeannette and his two youngest sons, Thorez was greeted by Enver Hoxha and senior Albanian communists and allocated a suite in the palace of the former King Zog, dominating Durre¨s harbour. Throughout the visit, the Thorez family was treated as royalty: grand dinners, tours of lakes and mountains, bathing on private beaches, soire´es of dancing and folk singing, as well as complimentary medical checks. Hospitality was extended to other

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

271

PCF Political Bureau members, including Mauvais, Gaston Plissonnier and Rochet, who arrived with their wives. Thorez was impressed by Albania, noting prominent statues of Stalin and ‘level headed and intelligent young men and women, proud and handsome’, though also worrying about the number of ‘women dressed in black and wearing the veil’. Yet relations with Hoxha quickly became strained. Khrushchev had recently announced a cut in aid, which the Albanians believed was punishment for their refusal to support the Soviet party against the Chinese. Thorez dined privately with Hoxha (6 August) and summarised the conversation in a notebook: ‘Grievances about everyone (and the Soviet Union). I respond on essential points and ask him to reconsider.’103 Three days later, Thorez departed Durre¨s on a Soviet liner for the Black Sea, ‘laden with presents, including a walking stick with a silver handle shaped as an eagle’. The Thorez family continued to Yalta where to their ‘great surprise’ Khrushchev and his wife boarded the boat. Thorez reported the discussions with Hoxha; Khrushchev briefed him on differences with the Chinese and outlined arrangements for another international conference of communist parties to be held in November. Thorez noted: ‘Fraternal discussion about everything. Complete agreement.’104 Thorez holidayed for a month in Georgia – crowds gathering when he visited the nursing home in which he had convalesced during his illness – and after a week in Moscow departed from Leningrad on another Soviet cruise liner. Also travelling was the young British Labour MP Tony Benn, who had been on a parliamentary delegation to the Soviet Union. Benn introduced himself to Thorez and questioned him about French politics. Benn wrote in his diary: Afterwards I got up, and thanked him very much and said how much I enjoyed meeting him and his sons (who were very charming and pleasant) and said how secure we all felt that the ship was under the control of the French Communist Party. Thorez smiled broadly and shook my hand with his left hand as I said goodbye. He is known as a Stalinist and the French Communist Party, under him, has been very bad about the Algerian War.105 Thorez was soon back in Moscow to spend a month at the international communist conference. Attended by large delegations from eighty-one parties, it was the biggest world event in communist history. ‘How happy and proud Lenin would have been if he had seen such an assembly,’ said Thorez.106 Khrushchev’s aim was to find a truce in the conflict with the Chinese, avoiding a damaging split. Thorez proved himself an important ally, both through his work on the ‘editorial commission’ to draw up a declaration and

272

MAURICE THOREZ

on the conference floor. His boast of the ‘strong impression’ made by his speech and its ‘marked role’ in the outcome of the conference was not idle. The official conference photograph has him sitting centre-stage, next to Khrushchev and the Chinese representative, Deng Xiaoping. Though Thorez appeared as a mediator, he took a firm line with the Chinese, expressing ‘total disagreement’ with their thesis and challenging their right to continue an argument that had been rejected by the majority of world parties in November 1957.107 But most of his ire was reserved for Enver Hoxha, with whom he held two meetings during breaks in the proceedings. Thorez spoke of his ‘sense of shame’ on listening to Hoxha’s ‘crude attack on the Soviet Union and in particular on comrade Nikiti Khrushchev’.108 He returned to France with his reputation in the world communist movement greatly enhanced, leaving Jeannette Vermeersch to stay behind to attend the ceremony at which Casanova received the Lenin Peace Prize. The denouement of the Casanova–Servin affair coincided with the beginning of France’s ‘end game’ in Algeria. In December, de Gaulle faced huge crowds in Algiers shouting support for the FLN and independence. Realising there was no alternative but to negotiate with the FLN, he called a referendum for 8 January 1961, asking approval for a bill ‘concerning the selfdetermination of the Algerian people’ and ‘the organisation of public powers in Algeria prior to self-determination’. He won a decisive majority in France and a smaller majority in Algeria, where the FLN staged a boycott. The referendum prompted new tensions within the PCF. As in September 1959, Thorez misread de Gaulle’s intentions and continued to describe Gaullist policy as ‘identical to ultra-reaction’, aiming ‘to maintain Algeria in a state of dependence’.109 The party campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum, which put it in the same camp as the extreme right and the Algerian settler community. Many on the left advocated abstention, with some even supporting a ‘Yes’ vote. Publicly, Casanova supported the party line, but privately argued that the position to adopt in the vote was not a matter of principle. Thorez accused him of again sowing confusion in party ranks.110 Thorez began the final assault on Casanova and Servin at the Political Bureau, two days after the referendum result. The affair dominated two Central Committees (13 – 15 January and 23 – 24 February 1961), before breaking into the public domain. ‘Despite all the long-standing affection that I have for Casanova, it is not possible to have two leaderships,’ said Thorez.111 Casanova was removed from the Political Bureau and Servin from both the Political Bureau and Secretariat, on which he was replaced by a future general secretary, Georges Marchais. Casanova, Servin and a group of their supporters were then purged from the Central Committee at the National Congress in May 1961.

ALGERIA

AND DE GAULLE

273

With the fate of Casanova and Servin settled, Thorez raised again that he should retire as general secretary. The issue dominated a meeting of the Political Bureau during a break at the February Central Committee.112 Unlike the winter of 1958 – 59, Thorez’s morale was good, even buoyant. A health check during the Moscow conference had found ‘continual progress, despite the stress of the recent period’.113 Nevertheless, the scars of his stroke were ever-present and Thorez lived with an increasing sense of mortality. He wanted to become the doyen of the party, free from specific responsibilities in the leadership team – or more precisely free to choose what duties he would fulfil. As in March 1959, Political Bureau members told him that standing down was ‘not correct, not possible’ (Mauvais). ‘It would indicate that Maurice is distancing himself from the leadership,’ said Fajon. ‘The party would not understand, above all at a difficult time,’ added Marchais. Frachon was the most blunt: ‘does his presence [as general secretary] threaten his life and health?’ Reluctantly, however, the Political Bureau recognised it was necessary to start thinking about the transition. Thorez was to remain the fountainhead of policy, but his responsibilities for party management would be reassigned to a deputy general secretary, Waldeck Rochet. ‘The question of general secretary’ was, said Rochet, ‘a problem of timing’ and it was necessary to ‘prepare the party’.114 It was agreed that he, rather than Thorez, would give the opening report at the congress in May. When two days after the meeting of the Political Bureau, Thorez went to ‘dine with our friends’ – in other words, his regular rendez-vous with the Soviet ambassador and his entourage – he was accompanied by Rochet, his newly designated heir.115

CHAPTER 10 FINAL YEARS AND LEGACY

Historians of French communism tend to interpret the period 1961– 64 as one of a party edging towards modernisation in policy and practice, but held back by the iron grip of an obstinate Thorez wedded to a Stalinist past. According to Waldeck Rochet’s biographer, the new deputy general secretary commented in private that ‘for something to change in the Church, it is necessary to wait for the death of the Pope’.1 The position is more complex. Thorez was fond of quoting a phrase from Marx: ‘social existence determines consciousness’. Ironically, his cosseted lifestyle ensured it was difficult to grasp the social reality in French society. His mental perspective of the world continued to be shaped by his experience of the 1930s and immediate post-war years, times in which his political acumen had reached its height. A distorted view of life in the Soviet Union completed his world view. Nevertheless, Thorez had built his career on an ability to adapt to new political waters. Sensing, if not understanding, changing social and political relations, he sought during his final years to re-position the PCF at the centre of a proposed coalition of opposition to Gaullism. While refusing to repudiate the dogma and practices of the previous period, he began attempts to modernise the party’s image. New themes – including ‘common programme’, ‘true democracy’ and ‘rejuvenation’ – would dominate the PCF’s Seventeenth Congress in May 1964, which would be Thorez’s last.

‘Common programme, not communist programme’ By mid-1962, de Gaulle was no longer the apparently omnipotent figure who had won 80 per cent in the referendum of September 1958. Negotiations to conclude the Algerian conflict had been messy and punctuated by violence. As talks stalled, restarted and again stalled, de Gaulle issued threats to

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

275

partition Algeria and to expel Algerians from France, before conceding the Algerian provisional government’s major demands in the E´vian Accord of May 1962. In April 1961, he had faced down a military rebellion designed to scuttle the peace process. But a campaign by the Organisation Arme´e Secre`te (OAS) established a state of fear in Algeria and terrorised supporters of Algerian self-determination within France. Homes of leading communists were bombed, including that of Raymond Guyot, whose wife Fernande was injured. Shots were fired at the headquarters of l’Humanite´ and party guards chased away a group trying to get into Thorez’s Bazainville residence.2 On 10 March 1962, a car bomb exploded outside the congress of the Peace Movement taking place in Issy-les-Moulineaux, killing three people and injuring fifty. Censorship of the left press and police repression of demonstrations by Algerians and the Peace Movement gave credence to the PCF’s claim of collusion between the Gaullist authorities and the OAS. L’Humanite´ was seized on a number of occasions, including at the time of the military plot. Gaullist ministers covered up the violent suppression of an FLN-sponsored demonstration on 17 October 1961.3 It was necessary to wait fifty-one years before an incumbent president, Francois Hollande, recognised the ‘bloody repression’ by forces of the State and paid homage to the memory of the many victims. On 8 February 1962, a police charge of an anti-OAS protest crushed eight people to death at the Charonne me´tro station. Seven of the victims were PCF members. Thorez joined one million people at ‘the grandiose and moving’ funeral parade, following the coffins in a car (13 February 1962). Thorez viewed the end of the Algerian War as a ‘great victory’ for the ‘forces of peace and the people of Algeria’ and ‘a considerable political success’ for the PCF. Disingenuously, he told the Central Committee that through his declaration of 1939 the party had been the first to recognise an Algerian nation, while ‘the fact’ was being denied by ‘all others’. He spoke of the PCF’s ‘principled line’ pursued consistently for seven years, avoiding any mention of the vote for special powers in March 1956.4 Yet he was correct to recognise that the war, and particularly its bloody endgame, had ‘weakened the personal power’ of de Gaulle. Thorez restored the perspective of broad left unity that had been disrupted by the trauma of 1956 and the victory of Gaullism in 1958. Still guided by the principles that had underpinned the Popular Front, he introduced a new form of words: for communists, the task was to raise ‘a programme of demands acceptable to all democrats; a programme adapted to the immediate situation and relationship of forces; a programme of measures that are achievable if people unite around them’.5 The idea of a ‘common programme’ to unite the left now became a key component of communist strategy.

276

MAURICE THOREZ

The possibility of constructing a broad alliance against Gaullism seemed confirmed by the outcome of the referendum and legislative elections in October and November 1962 respectively. De Gaulle’s proposal to change the constitution to introduce a directly elected president provoked widespread opposition, including from many who had offered him support in 1958. The National Assembly passed a censure motion, prompting the resignation of George Pompidou’s government. Although de Gaulle won a clear majority at the referendum, the abstention rate was high and the ‘No’ vote scored a respectable 38 per cent. Drawing a comparison with the 1958 referendum, Thorez noted that it was the first time in French history that a leader had lost around one-third of his support in a plebiscite. ‘Even Napoleon III after 18 years of power still managed to obtain almost all the votes on the eve of the disaster at Sedan,’ he told the Central Committee.6 At the legislative elections, the PCF increased its support by 2.7 per cent and its representation in the assembly from ten to forty-one seats. Significantly, the second round of voting saw cooperation between Communists, Socialists and Radicals secure the defeat of a number of Gaullist candidates. Thorez won his Ivry seat in the first round with 58.5 per cent of the vote, after Socialists refrained from standing and voiced support for the communist leader for the first time since he had won the seat in 1932.7 Throughout 1963, Thorez focused on strategy for the presidential election of 1965. Arguing for ‘a common programme, not a communist programme’, he suggested that the PCF should consider not standing a candidate in the first round of voting. With only two candidates potentially progressing to the second round, it was important to ensure that a challenger to de Gaulle should have the best chance of winning.8 Thorez’s strategy would be followed by Waldeck Rochet during the 1965 elections, at which Francois Mitterrand shook de Gaulle’s presidency by winning 45 per cent of the vote. PCF electoral gains were matched by an influx of new members, for the most part young. Almost 90,000 joined the party during 1962 – 63, double the number of the previous two years and by 1964 membership had recovered to the level known before the trauma of 1956 (275,000).9 Communists won adherents from the Peace Movement, which gained momentum from the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962) and, in its aftermath, encouragement from talk of a nuclear test ban and positive statements about world peace by American president John F. Kennedy. The PCF also grew out of the upturn in social conflict, with strikes in the public sector and most particularly a bitter miners’ strike (March – April 1963) winning wide popular support.

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

277

‘Stalinism weighs heavily on us’ For Thorez, the changed situation in France was complemented by the beginning of a ‘new epoch’ at international level. He returned from the Soviet party’s Twenty-Second Congress (November 1961) brimming with enthusiasm. Khrushchev had announced a ‘new programme’ that would enable the Soviet Union to surpass, economically and culturally, the United States and other advanced capitalist countries by 1980, preparing the material and technical basis for communism. Thorez described these illusions as ‘scientifically based’ and ‘the realisation of the secular dream of humanity’. He believed that the shift in the ‘balance of world forces in favour of socialism’ would not only guarantee international ‘peaceful coexistence’ but also allow major steps towards the socialist transformation of France.10 Thorez and Khrushchev had discussed a draft of the programme in July during their summer vacations. When the Thorez family arrived on a yacht in Pitsunda harbour, the Soviet leader was waiting to greet them. ‘We embraced effusively,’ recorded Thorez, ‘dined together and spoke a bit about everything.’ The following day, Thorez and his family went to the pool and ‘were hardly in the water when Nikita arrived with his grandchildren’. Socialising continued at Khrushchev’s dacha, where Thorez met an array of Soviet leaders, including the future head of government Alexei Kosygin. Politically, the French party leader had become Khrushchev’s most important communist ally outside the Soviet bloc, particularly in the increasingly fractious conflict with the Chinese and Albanians. During the banquet for international visitors at the Twenty-Second Congress, Thorez was chosen to lead the toast to the Soviet leader.11 One aspect of the congress, however, posed difficulties for Thorez. Unexpectedly, Khrushchev launched a new assault on ‘the cult of personality’, including the announcement that Stalin’s corpse would be removed from Lenin’s mausoleum. The Soviet leader had two targets. The first was Molotov and his supporters, who had described the new programme as ‘unrealistic’ and criticised Khrushchev’s ‘pacifist illusions’. In his closing address, Khrushchev charged the former right-hand man of Stalin with personal responsibility for the repression of the 1930s. The Soviet leader also sought to strike a blow against the Chinese and Albanian parties, who were still ‘refusing to recognise the lessons of the Twentieth Congress’.12 Khrushchev’s speech meant that de-Stalinisation became once again an unwelcome item on the PCF’s agenda, marring attempts to convince potential partners of its democratic commitment. Articles in France Observateur recalled the party’s hostile response to the ‘secret speech’ in 1956 and reminded readers of the indigenous leader cult surrounding Thorez. Political Bureau members questioned whether Khrushchev should have resurrected an issue they had

278

MAURICE THOREZ

considered settled in the summer of 1956. In Italy, Togliatti raised similar doubts.13 Jeannette Vermeersch summarised the problem: ‘We are considered as a Stalinist party. That weighs heavily on us. On our leadership.’14 Thorez was quick to defend the new phase of de-Stalinisation: the cult of the personality had been a violation of Soviet democracy, but ‘the error’ had not prevented the ‘advance of socialism’, whose very strength had allowed it to be corrected. He condemned the cult blossoming around Mao in China and the ‘hysteria’ surrounding Enver Hoxha in Albania, whose leadership team he described as ‘a clan’ comparable to the Corsican mafia.15 Over the next couple of years, Thorez’s uncompromising support for Khrushchev would provoke an increasingly bellicose response from his erstwhile allies in the Chinese leadership.16 Thorez attempted to distance the PCF more decisively from the former Soviet dictator. He began to talk of ‘the crimes’ of Stalin, singling out as examples the execution of Tukhachevsky and other leaders of the Red Army and ‘the doctors’ plot’, in which he had narrowly avoided becoming embroiled.17 In Thorez’s constituency of Ivry, the street ‘rue Staline’ was re-baptised as ‘rue Le´nine’. Thorez chaired lectures on the ‘philosophical errors’ of Stalin given by Roger Garaudy, who became during this period Thorez’s intellectual mentor.18 Criticism had its limits. Thorez reminded the Central Committee that one of the ‘merits of Stalin’, for which ‘we continue to pay homage’, was ‘his fight against the erroneous concepts of Trotsky, the determined opponent of Lenin’.19 Thorez also attempted to mitigate his own leadership cult, which had witnessed a certain revival in 1960. Thorez’s sixtieth birthday had been marked by a new edition of Fils du Peuple and a rally at the Palais des Sports, which featured eulogies from party leaders, a reading of Aragon’s poem Il Revient and a performance of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.20 Thorez also participated in a special homage at Clugnat, the village in which he had lived his adolescent years between 1914 and 1917.21 While still refusing to acknowledge the cult’s existence, Thorez conceded in November 1961 that ‘we have not been without faults’ and that the party must ‘pay even more attention to its internal democracy and functioning of collective leadership’.22 He began to protest when the communist press conflated his name and that of the party. After a headline in l’Humanite´ announced an appeal to political organisations and trade unions as an initiative of Maurice Thorez, he wrote to the editor: ‘It is necessary to rid ourselves of the tendency to personalise matters [. . .] That’s one of the great lessons we have drawn from the teachings of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses. Such headlines can appear as acts of defiance designed to give sustenance to the campaigns of opponents of the party.’23

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

279

Modernising the party Thorez introduced a series of measures to modernise the PCF’s image. ‘There are certain expressions that we should change,’ he told the Central Committee, while stressing that essential elements of communist policy would stay the same.24 The perennial problem remained: how to present the PCF as a democratic party rooted in national politics, while expressing solidarity with authoritarian regimes in the Soviet bloc. Thorez began to stress the possibility of ‘a peaceful road to socialism’, recalling the point made in his interview with The Times of 1946 that socialism in France did not necessarily imply a Bolshevik-style revolution. He also spoke more explicitly about ‘the diversity of forms’ of socialism. The suggestion that socialism implied a one-party state was an ‘error of Stalin’. It had been proved wrong, argued Thorez, by the experience of the People’s Democracies, in which communists had initially formed a coalition with other partners.25 Thorez’s vision of the socialist transformation remained ambiguous. His models were the various forms of ‘really existing’ socialism in the People’s Democracies and Soviet Union, but he saw the transition as a series of stages involving ‘the most complete collaboration between communists, socialists and republicans’.26 The establishment of a Common Programme, he said, was not only about securing the best conditions for the French people in the immediate period, but ‘it would leave the way open towards the most complete transformation of society by peaceful means’.27 Though Thorez continued to attack the ‘revisionism’ of the Italian party, particularly Togliatti’s analysis of Stalinism and the idea of polycentric organisation of the world communist movement, his conception of the transformation towards socialism was closer to the PCI’s formula of ‘a democratic road to socialism’ than he was prepared to admit.28 Nevertheless, certain aspects of party doctrine remained untouchable. The phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, originally coined by Marx to describe the Paris Commune, was an established part of the Marxist canon. It had also become synonymous with Stalinist repression, making it a major target for opponents of communism. Thorez attempted to redefine its meaning: proletarian dictatorship was ‘nothing more than the widest democracy for the working class and its allies’; it was a temporary phase ‘to deal with the resistance of the old exploiters [and] reactionary forces of the old order’. But he revealed the absence of any fresh thinking on the matter by adding that the dictatorship’s necessity had been proven during the Hungarian ‘counterrevolutionary riot’ in 1956.29 Thorez confronted dissident voices in the party, which continued to be raised despite the defeat of the trend around Casanova and Servin. Leaders of the Union of Communist Students (UEC) were sympathetic to the politics of

280

MAURICE THOREZ

the Italian party, including its analysis of Stalinism. Some student activists were beginning to gravitate towards Trotskyism. Speaking at length to the Central Committee about ‘the problems of the student movement’, Thorez attacked the UEC’s ‘liberal and eclectic position’, an inevitable result of the lack of ‘social homogeneity’ amongst students. He opposed the communist students’ slogan of ‘grants for all students’, saying that it was wrong ‘in principle’ for working people to support ‘young people of the opposing classes’ through their taxes. He announced that the leadership would be taking the UEC in hand to ensure ‘conscious leadership of the student movement by the party of the working class’.30 Thorez altered a number of details in policy. When opposing the ‘personal power’ of de Gaulle, he replaced the slogan ‘restoration of democracy’ with ‘the establishment of true democracy’, in order to indicate that the PCF was opposed to ‘a pure and simple’ return to the past.31 Another change was the decision that PCF elected representatives would participate within the structures of the Common Market, an institution described as ‘imperialist integration’ and an attack on national sovereignty. The ‘theory of absolute pauperisation’ was quietly dropped and the party spoke instead of the ‘aggravation of working class conditions’. (Despite this modification, Thorez in private continued to adhere to the pauperisation theory.32) There was also a new ‘outstretched hand’ towards Christianity. Thorez had known Pope John XXIII when, as Angelo Roncalli, he had been Apostolic Nuncio in Paris after the Liberation. Enthused by the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council, Thorez inscribed quotations from the pope on a set of National Assembly calling cards.33 As holiday reading in 1963, he studied the memoirs of another cleric, Cardinal de Retz, a leader of the seventeenth-century aristocratic revolt known as Le Fronde. On Roncalli’s death, Thorez paid tribute to ‘the pope of peace [who] wanted to modernise the Church and adapt it to the era of socialism’.34 In September 1963, Thorez raised ‘the necessity of rejuvenating the party’, adding the suggestion that ‘the leadership set the example’. He campaigned on the issue amongst sceptical Political Bureau members for several months.35 At the PCF’s Seventeenth Congress in May 1964, a number of long-serving members were retired from the Central Committee, to be replaced by twentythree members of a ‘young guard’ (average age thirty four). Thorez’s arguments about ‘rejuvenation’ were influenced by his continuing determination to stand down as general secretary. On his sixty-third birthday, his diary records a remark by Khrushchev who, reflecting on his own age, had mused that ‘everyone knows that I will not be able to hold my current positions in party and state eternally’. ‘Wise words,’ noted Thorez, ‘applicable to everybody and everywhere, and similar to those that I have said twice already, at the 15th and 16th congresses of our party, without making myself understood.’36

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

281

Thorez worked with Marchais on proposals to change the party rule book. The new statutes were designed to put more emphasis on ‘the rights’ alongside the ‘duties’ of members and place ‘an accent on democracy’, including the introduction of secret ballots to elect leadership committees.37 Agreed at the congress, the changes were cosmetic. Factions and tendencies remained banned, except of course the undeclared faction around the leadership team. Members could still be disciplined if expressing opposition to policy after it had been adopted. And, although members would vote in secret, the list of candidates would be filtered by a commission to ensure that the number of candidates was the same as the number of positions to be filled.38 Nevertheless, the retirement of a section of the old guard and a more democratic flavouring to the rule book signalled a desire to turn a page of PCF history.

In defence of French art Thorez continued to divide his year into three. Spring and autumn were spent at Bazainville. During these months Thorez attended the Political Bureau, though not the Secretariat, except on the rare occasion it convened at his residence. He would make a speech at the Central Committee, though not the opening presentation, and sometimes chair meetings of the parliamentary group, though he rarely participated in debates in the Assembly. Party functioning was in the hands of Rochet and Marchais, who would visit Thorez to review aspects of policy and organisation, or to finalise reports they were due to deliver to leadership committees. In exceptional circumstances Thorez was still prepared to intervene directly. During the Algerian putsch (April 1961), he and Jeannette Vermeersch arrived at l’Humanite´ offices at 5 o’clock in the morning to castigate the editors for failing to publish an appeal issued by the Political Bureau.39 While he retained the reins on policy, Thorez’s activity became increasingly ceremonial: he attended receptions at embassies of friendly countries or hosted by organisations such as the Committee for an Amnesty in Spain; he unveiled monuments to the Resistance and made wellpublicised appearances at premie`res of Soviet films or performances by Russian ballet companies; he was often guest-of-honour at dinners organised by PCF regions and branches. In September 1963, he welcomed Yuri Gagarin to Paris, taking him (as he had taken Khrushchev) to Lenin’s apartment in rue Marie Rose and hosting a dinner for the cosmonaut and his entourage at Bazainville. Summer and Easter were devoted to holidays. From 1961, the two-month summer vacation began on the brand new Soviet steamship, the M.S. Litva, which the Thorez family joined at Marseille. On board, they dined at the captain’s table and the crew erected a tent outside their cabin to ensure Thorez

282

MAURICE THOREZ

and Vermeersch were ‘absolutely alone and in peace’.40 Soviet ambassadors greeted the French communist leader at ports-of-call in Naples and Piraeus and, at Varna, Bulgarian ministers invited the family to dine in the former Royal Palace. Officials in Odessa, Yalta and Sochi welcomed Thorez as a visiting dignitary. ‘Since Varna, at each port, we have been showered with presents . . . and wine,’ he noted (in 1962), after receiving a vintage bottle from the renowned wine cellars of Massandra.41 Easter holidays were generally more private affairs. In April 1962, the family spent two weeks touring England and Scotland. Thorez’s diary reads like a precursor to TripAdvisor. At Canterbury, he was amazed that dinner was served ‘without drink other than fruit juice and tea’. A highlight in Windsor was a first taste of Guinness in the Horse and Boy. At Loch Lomond, the hotel bedrooms were ‘freezing and never heated’ and The Caledonian in Inverness ‘did not serve salmon from the lochs or grouse, despite the claim in the guide’. At the Embassy Hotel in London, Thorez was shocked when asked to ‘pay for our two rooms in advance’. His choice for the ‘most beautiful town in Great Britain’ was Edinburgh.42 Winters and some of the summer were spent on the Coˆte d’Azur. During these final years, Thorez’s friendship with Nadia Le´ger and Georges Bauquier blossomed. The two artists were frequent guests at the Thorez dinner table and Thorez often dined at the couple’s home in Callian, a hilltop village with streets nestling around its chateau. Nadia Le´ger and Bauquier possessed property in the village and, during 1961, hosted a long visit from Vermeersch’s mother. Thorez often visited the Fernand Le´ger museum in Biot, which had opened to a huge fanfare in May 1960. As a gift for Thorez, Nadia painted a ‘grand portrait’ of Louis Thorez, the brother who had been executed by the Nazis. Thorez took it to Noyelles-Godault to present to his mother.43 In late 1962, Thorez offered enthusiastic support to a major retrospective of the works of Fernand Le´ger promoted by Nadia Le´ger and Bauquier at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Thorez witnessed the departure of Le´ger’s works from Marseille on a Soviet cargo ship and wrote the preface for the exhibition’s catalogue. The Le´ger exhibition brought to the surface one issue over which Thorez remained critical of Khrushchev: the communist approach towards art. De-Stalinisation had been accompanied by a thaw in the cultural climate, leading to greater tolerance of criticism in literature and to experimentation by painters and sculptors. Yet Khrushchev’s outlook remained infused with the dogma of socialist realism. In November 1962, the Soviet leader attended an exhibition at the Manezh gallery in Moscow. Many exhibitors were influenced by a school of ‘underground art’, whose most prominent representative was the sculptor and

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

283

graphic artist, Ernst Neizvestny. Khrushchev exploded: the artists were ‘out of their minds’; their work was ‘dog-shit’, only worthy of ‘covering urinals’. Anticipating the cultural freeze that would follow his downfall in late 1964, he warned: ‘you want to deflect us from the proper course. No, you won’t get away with it [. . .] Gentlemen we are declaring war on you.’44 Thorez was aware of the type of ‘underground art’ on display at the Manezh. Paul Thorez had discovered its existence during visits to Moscow and got to know a number of its practitioners. He discussed his ‘discoveries’ with his father, who encouraged him to ‘help [his] new friends’ and even offered to pay for the services of a picture-framer in Cannes to prepare work brought back by Paul for display in France.45 Thorez’s preface for the Le´ger exhibition not only extolled the artist’s virtues as a communist but also indirectly refuted the ideas expressed by Khrushchev. It described how Le´ger had been ‘one of the creators of modern art’ who through his ‘work in cubism, structures of spheres, cylinders and cones’ had ‘transformed the traditional image of man’.46 Conservatives in the ‘ideological section’ of the Soviet party’s Central Committee attempted to cancel the exhibition but, according to his son, Thorez’s intervention was ‘decisive’ in ensuring it went ahead.47 It was a big success, though plans to tour the exhibition in towns outside the Russian capital were dropped. Thorez’s diary reveals the extent to which ‘the problems of art and literature’ were on his mind during the winter of 1962 –63. Two long and ‘interesting’ discussions took place at the house of Picasso, an artist also attacked by Khrushchev at the Manezh gallery as someone ‘he could not understand’. On 31 January 1963, Thorez visited Picasso with Paul, who showed the Spaniard ‘the drawings of a young Soviet painter’, undoubtedly one of those facing Khrushchev’s wrath. Thorez’s diary notes approvingly that ‘Pablo said: let him carry on!’48 Thorez’s boldness on the issue of artistic freedom had, however, strict boundaries. On 18 March, the controversy was on the agenda when he dined with Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador. Knowing his remarks would quickly find their way back to Moscow, Thorez expressed ‘reservations’ about Khrushchev’s ‘latest speech’. But his criticism was limited to the Soviet leader’s ‘negative appreciation of French painting’. The ‘ideological struggle’ in France and the Soviet Union should, Thorez said, ‘be viewed differently’ as ‘the practice in France was markedly different from the principles outlined in the speech [by Khrushchev]’. He reassured his Soviet listeners that ‘in [his] opinion’ the ‘ideological struggle [against formalism in art in the USSR]’ was ‘correct’.49 When Thorez returned to the Mediterranean in November 1963, it was to a property owned by Nadia Le´ger and Bauquier in Callian. He had decided to

284

MAURICE THOREZ

leave Les Escarrasses, the residence provided for him by the party since 1954. Though his diaries give no indication of its motivation, Thorez’s decision was primarily linked to the new campaign against the cult of the personality and his attempt to deflect criticisms of his leadership cult. Hostile newspapers and political opponents had continued to draw attention to the luxurious home at Les Escarrasses ‘next door to the Aga Khan’. Another factor was Thorez’s intention to retire as general secretary. The PCF leadership’s justification for the provision of the villa was that it allowed Thorez to preserve his health in order to perform the functions of his post. If he were to stand down, reasoned Thorez, the rationale for the villa would be gone. Thorez arrived at Callian without a firm plan of where he would be living for the next few months, but he knew he could rely on the hospitality of Nadia Le´ger and Georges Bauquier. On 25 November, he and Jeannette Vermeersch went to Biot ‘to examine the possibility of spending the winter’ in a house adjacent to the Fernand Le´ger museum. Two weeks later, removal vans arrived at the residence in Les Escarrasses. Roger Garaudy supervised the de´me´nagement of Thorez’s considerable library, which was stored at Callian. Thorez and Vermeersch were planning for the future and, in early February 1964, began ‘a project’ to build a modest house in Callian. Georges Bauquier signed over an acre of land on the slopes below the chaˆteau. Thorez recruited an architect, sought planning permission and secured a loan from the Questeur of the National Assembly. He had never previously owned a home, living either as a young activist in cheap rented accommodation or, after 1934, in properties owned by the party. ‘We are proprie´taires’, he announced in his diary on 26 March.

President Maurice Thorez The PCF’s Seventeenth Congress convened in Paris in May 1964. Commentators noted the youthfulness of the event: 56 per cent of delegates were under thirty five and one-third of the congress had joined the party after 1958.50 168 out of 776 delegates were women, a significant advance. The mood was confident and optimistic. Using words like ‘evolution’ and ‘new phase’, even unsympathetic commentators speculated on whether the party had ‘emerged from the ghetto’ to play again an important role in politics. Te´moignage Chre´tien reminded its readers that the PCF was ‘le plus grand political party in France’. An article in Paris-Presse suggested that ‘the perspectives of a new Popular Front [were] no longer in dream world’.51 As the congress drew to a close, Plissonnier came to the rostrum: ‘Comrade Maurice Thorez has requested to be no longer general secretary of the party. He has proposed that another comrade be elected to this post, which involves intense activity and effort at all times. To succeed Maurice Thorez will not be

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

285

a simple task, but the Central Committee has accepted his request.’ After an eulogy to the man whose ‘political vision’ had guided ‘the great steps’ in French communist history, Plissonnier continued: ‘To assure the necessary continuity of leadership [. . .], the Central Committee has asked Maurice Thorez to become president of the Party, which he has accepted.’52 Le Monde described the scenes: ‘Hardly were these words spoken, when enormous cheers erupted. Every delegate stood and chanted: “Maurice, Maurice!”.’53 After Waldeck Rochet had been inaugurated as the new general secretary, Thorez closed the congress. His speech was ‘a passionate call for unity’ of the party, of the world communist movement, ‘of the working class and of all democratic forces’.54 The socialist paper, Le Populaire, noted that its ‘tone was not the same, the ideas had a different flavour, and we should reflect carefully and act with prudence in order to taste it’.55 Commentators speculated about whether Thorez’s new, specially created, position was ‘purely honorific’ or whether Thorez was ‘vacating his chair but remaining the boss’. Some commented on the former General Secretary’s health, noticing that for the first time he had given his closing address seated on a stall. ‘As the hours passed, his face became more flushed and his gait more weary,’ noted Paris Match.56 Waldeck Rochet told the congress that Thorez ‘remained at the head’ of the Central Committee; others stressed that ‘a fruitful collaboration’ would continue between Rochet as general secretary and Thorez as president.57 A few weeks later, Thorez told Jean Cathala, a communist journalist and writer, that ‘with Waldeck as general secretary’ he would now ‘be able to devote himself to intellectual activity [travail de l’esprit] without being weighed down by daily politics’.58 Building work on the new house in Callian began three weeks after the congress. On 6 July, Thorez visited the village post office to pay 40,000 francs for a telephone line. The same evening, he and Jeannette Vermeersch departed from Marseille on the M.S. Litva, sailing towards Sochi. Thorez had sketched out his holiday plans in a notebook: one month on the Black Sea coast, a week in Moscow, a stay in Odessa and then home in time for l’Humanite´ feˆte. He took with him a book about Balzac by the communist writer, Andre´ Wurmser, a book by the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, and several copies of Fils du Peuple as potential gifts. On 11 July, as the M.S. Litva sailed along the coast of Turkey, Thorez suffered a massive stroke. Vermeersch later told her children that he had died ‘so quickly, without suffering, without torment for the body, and therefore so perfectly’.59 Thorez’s body was taken to Varna before being flown back to France. It lay in repose in Ivry, in the hall that had fourteen years earlier staged his fiftieth birthday exhibition. Party officials and trade union representatives formed a guard-of-honour as activists and members of the public filed past the

286

MAURICE THOREZ

tricolour-draped coffin, in which a small window exposed the face of the deceased. Behind the catafalque, a row of alternating red and tricolour flags offered an appropriate representation of Thorez’s political identity. For communists, and particularly French communists, death was a collective affair, an occasion to draw inspiration from the life of the deceased, to recommit to the beliefs and values to which they had devoted their life.60 In a superbly choreographed final parade, an estimated 500,000 people followed Thorez’s coffin from PCF headquarters to the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery.61 Voices from beyond the communist family rendered respect and tributes. The anti-communist L’Express, spoke of Thorez’s ‘human warmth [. . .] and radiant presence’. The centre-right, l’Aurore, described him as being ‘far from the traditional image of a Bolshevik’: ‘With his chubby face, he could hardly give the impression of a man-of-violence, of a rebel, fanatic or hothead. [. . .] Deep down, he was more a man-of-order than a man-of-action.’ De Gaulle wrote to one of Thorez’s sons: ‘Whatever his actions before or since, I do not forget that at a decisive time for France, President Maurice Thorez, responding to my appeal and as a member of my government, contributed to the maintenance of national unity.’62

Legacy For the next decade, ‘the thought of Maurice Thorez’ remained the reference point for PCF politics.63 The new general secretary, Waldeck Rochet, launched ‘a systematic study’ of Thorez’s writings, including Fils du Peuple and his Oeuvres.64 The Maurice Thorez Institute was established to preserve his legacy and, in 1966, began publishing a journal. Commemorations continued around the anniversaries of the former General Secretary’s birth and death. Communist municipalities rebaptised streets with his name. The seventieth anniversary of his birth was marked with another edition of Fils du Peuple and the appearance of a new literary paean, Maurice Thorez: l’homme, le militant, including a preface by Marchais. An intention of the book, explained one of its authors, Georges Cogniot, was to demonstrate ‘admiration for our Master’.65 In death as in life, the Thorez cult was carefully managed. Jean-Paul Le Chanois, writer of songs for E´dith Piaf and director of one of the most esteemed works of French cinema, Les Mise´rables, submitted a proposal for ‘a grand film’ of Thorez’s life, which would be ‘appealing, moving and artistic’. The Political Bureau demanded ultimate control of the script and, after a period of wrangling, the project was abandoned.66 The extent to which Waldeck Rochet represented ‘a new strategy’ and an ‘abandonment of a large part of the thorezien past’ tends to be exaggerated.67 Thorez had already signalled much of Rochet’s more open approach,

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

287

including the party’s support for Mitterrand in the 1965 presidential election and the formation of a left alliance for the legislative elections in 1967. Even the decision of the Central Committee in March 1966 to support freedom of artistic expression – often considered ‘a rupture with thorezien heritage’68 – had been anticipated by the former General Secretary. The party’s Eighteenth Congress (January 1967) began with a homage from Rochet to Thorez and saw the continuation of his campaign for ‘rejuvenation’ when another batch of younger members joined the Central Committee. According to his biographer, Waldeck Rochet confided in 1967 that he ‘had not slept properly for two years’ out of ‘fear’ that his stewardship would ‘weaken the party and therefore the heritage of Maurice’.69 The PCF’s response to the social explosion of May 1968 possessed the mark of Thorez. Its cautious approach to the wave of strikes and factory occupations has parallels with Thorez’s position in June 1936. As during the Popular Front, the call for ‘a people’s government of democratic union’ coalesced with a desire to contain the mass movement and limit demands for fundamental social change. Marchais’s description in l’Humanite´ (3 May 1968) of the student movement as ‘pseudo revolutionaries’ and ‘sons of grands bourgeois’ directed by ‘a German anarchist Cohn-Bendit’ mirrored Thorez’s contempt for the student campaign against the Algerian War in October 1960, though Thorez had shown considerably more discretion by not making his remarks in public. The PCF’s ‘disapproval’ of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 sits less comfortably within the thorezien legacy. Jeannette Vermeersch resigned from the Political Bureau in protest. ‘If Maurice had still been here. . .’, she blustered when confronting Rochet.70 Yet Rochet deployed the legacy of Thorez to justify the PCF’s public criticism of Soviet policy. Attempting to show that differences with the Moscow regime were not new, he revealed some of his predecessor’s disagreements with the Comintern during the Popular Front period and spoke of Soviet disapproval (expressed at the Cominform conference in September 1947) of Thorez’s interview in The Times.71 Also at the forefront of Rochet’s mind was the Soviet Union’s preference during the 1965 presidential election for de Gaulle over Mitterrand, viewed in Moscow as a friend of the Atlantic Alliance. Marchais referred to Thorez twice during his first congress speech as general secretary (December 1972). Earlier in the year, he had negotiated a Common Programme with Mitterrand’s recomposed Socialist Party. At the congress, Marchais raised the slogan ‘unity at any price’, which he reminded his audience ‘was launched by Maurice Thorez in 1934’.72 He recalled ‘the passionate conviction of Maurice Thorez’ that communists were ‘not the party

288

MAURICE THOREZ

of the clenched fist’ but ‘the party of the outstretched hand to the entire French people’.73 Marchais also evoked the thorezien legacy during the 1974 presidential election campaign, during which the PCF again supported the candidature of Mitterrand. In a speech in Marseille, he appealed directly to Gaullist supporters, speaking of transforming the ‘union of the left’ into a ‘union of the French people’. Both communists and Gaullists, he said, shared a desire for ‘la grandeur of France, its independence and prestige in the world’, an explicitly thorezien phrase. The Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez drew ‘a straight line in thought’ between Marchais’s appeal and Thorez’s call in 1936 for the Popular Front to be transformed into a French Front.74 The PCF appeared to be in a healthy state at the start of the 1970s. Jacques Duclos had scored 21.5 per cent at the 1969 presidential elections and communist candidates secured 21.4 per cent at the March 1973 legislative elections. Membership continued to grow throughout the decade, rising from 305,000 in 1970 to 566,500 in 1978.75 Yet, beneath the surface, three connected processes were eroding the party’s foundations. Firstly, the PCF faced the challenge of a reinvigorated Socialist Party, which between the 1973 and 1978 legislative elections overtook it in terms of electoral support. Mitterrand had successfully deployed a conscious strategy within the Union of the Left to ‘pluck the communist goose’. Secondly, the party struggled to relate to the social and cultural changes that had underpinned the events of 1968. Cloistered in a dogmatic intellectual world, communists were ill-equipped to engage with new social movements mobilising young people and women from which, potentially, they could have drawn strength. Thirdly, instead of the ‘radiant perspective’ of outstripping Western capitalism, the Soviet Union was living the stagnation of the late Brezhnev era; its disregard for human rights and oppressive culture an anathema to the generation of 1968. The PCF’s response to this triple challenge was schizophrenic. In 1976, Marchais aligned French communists to Eurocommunist criticisms of the Soviet Union, symbolically proposing to revoke the aim of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ at the party congress (February). Yet, three years later, he declared the balance sheet of the Soviet bloc to be ‘globally positive’; the PCF supported the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (December 1979) and also the military coup and crushing of Solidarnosc in Poland (December 1981). Despite the policy of ‘unity at any price’, the PCF leadership broke with the Union of the Left in 1977, denouncing the Socialist Party as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reformist’ and expelling the leadership of the Paris Federation for demanding a continuation of the left alliance. Yet, after Mitterrand’s victory in 1981, the PCF signed an agreement with the Socialist Party and

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

289

four communist ministers joined a coalition government. Electoral support ebbed steadily during the 1980s, leading to further internal crises. Repercussions of all this for Thorez’s memory began in 1976. The revocation of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could hardly be presented as part of his legacy. Then, two years later, Marchais announced that the problems facing the party were at root the result of le retard in drawing the implications of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. While he did not assign responsibility for ‘the delay’, no-one could doubt at whose door Marchais was laying blame. Thorez had been transformed from ‘the visionary leader’ who had steered the party to its greatest successes into the man responsible for the PCF’s decline. Sudhir Hazareesingh notes that ‘the idea of the strategic retard of the PCF soon acquired an almost incantatory character, being repeatedly invoked not only to dispel accusations of neo-Stalinism [. . .] but also to justify the immediate political strategy of the Marchais leadership, and even to explain every conceivable setback suffered by the party in the 1980s.’76 The Thorez heritage began to be dismantled. In 1979, the Maurice Thorez Institute merged with another party research centre to become the Institut de Recherches Marxistes. Thorez’s works disappeared from party bookstalls; his anniversaries were no longer celebrated. In 1990, a huge and spectacular celebration of PCF history to mark the party’s seventieth anniversary could not ignore Thorez, but recognition of his role was limited to the period of the Popular Front.77 The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 posed starkly the question of the PCF’s raison d’eˆtre. On becoming national secretary in 1994, Robert Hue announced plans for a ‘mutation’ into a ‘new’, ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ and ‘more human’ party, which would turn its back definitively on the ‘Stalinism a` la francaise’ that had marked the PCF’s past.78 In essence, it was an attempt to transform the party into a more radical but smaller version of the Socialist Party. Hue’s project could not stall the PCF’s inexorable decline and, in the first few years of the twenty-first century, it ground to a halt. It prompted more factional dispute, during which Thorez’s legacy again became a reference. Hue himself recalled approvingly the example of Thorez, who in 1936 and, particularly, in 1945 – 47, had revealed himself as ‘a statesman’. ‘The role of the Communist Party remains that assigned by Thorez,’ wrote Hue, ‘to mobilise widely the democratic forces, take all its responsibilities in elaborating progressive politics and actively contribute to putting them into practice.’79 Yet – as if to demonstrate the paradox of thorezien politics – those opposing the ‘mutation’ also made claim to the heritage of the former General Secretary. A band of aging activists pledged to fight ‘opportunism, anti-communism, anti-Sovietism and reformism’ and condemned the party leadership for ‘denigrating the heritage of Maurice Thorez’.80

290

MAURICE THOREZ

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the PCF had shaken off the legacy of Thorez. During 2014, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, just seven articles in l’Humanite´ made reference to Maurice Thorez, compared to 300 that recalled the socialist leader, Jean Jaure`s.81 Visitors to the Feˆte de l’Humanite´ – still the biggest political festival in France – found ‘avenues’ in the park named after Marcel Cachin, Benoıˆt Frachon, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso; but none to honour the memory of the leader with whom communist identity was once synonymous.82 Some commentators have attempted to find Thorez’s legacy in political formations that have filled some of the space vacated by the demise of the PCF. The Front National of Marine Le Pen has presented itself as the voice of workers, opponent of liberal capitalism, supporter of state intervention in industry and even, in terms of foreign policy, hinted at an alliance with Russia. Marine Le Pen’s headquarters during the 2017 presidential election campaign was in He´nin-Beaumont, the former mining town in which Thorez lived his first years, and her brand of populist nationalism won support in many former heartlands of the PCF. The Front National is ‘the reincarnation of the Communist Party,’ wrote one journalist.83 The ‘programme of the Front National could have been written by Maurice Thorez,’ insisted another observer.84 Other commentators have drawn comparisons between Thorez and Jean-Luc Me´lenchon. The historian Sylvain Boulouque points to the style of Me´lenchon’s rallies, his frequent references to literature and history, particularly the French Revolution, his reconciliation of the red flag with the tricolour and his skill at creating the ‘syndrome of a besieged fortress’. He concludes that Me´lenchon possesses a ‘state of mind and political culture which repeats the same set of themes [put forward by] national-thorezism’.85 Such analogies are problematic as they ignore other tributaries flowing into the identities of modern political formations. The Front National’s genealogical tree includes the inter-war extreme-right leagues, Vichy’s ‘national revolution’, the struggle to defend ‘French Algeria’ and the theories of the ‘new right’ formulated in the wake of 1968. Ever since their appearance in the 1920s, movements of the radical right have consciously drawn language and practice from the political left. Similarly, the movement around Me´lenchon (France Insoumise at the 2017 presidential elections) did not possess a single parentage. While his candidature in 2012 and 2017 was supported by the PCF, Me´lenchon’s politics have been influenced by diverse social movements, green politics, Trotskyism and the socialist tradition, including that of Jaure`s, Jean-Pierre Cheve`nement and the Francois Mitterrand of the 1970s. Nevertheless, the fact that Thorez’s legacy could simultaneously be claimed for Marine Le Pen and Me´lenchon is not only an

FINAL YEARS

AND LEGACY

291

indication of its complex nature but also a reflection of the many contradictions within Thorez’s ideas and political trajectory. Thorez’s communist life began when he joined the Socialist Party in the aftermath of the First World War with an aspiration to build a better world. As a young communist, he sacrificed time, money, family life and, for a period, his liberty. ‘Serving the party’ became, however, an end in itself, often justifying policies at variance from his original noble aims. ‘The party has given me a sense of my entire existence. It has been and still is my entire life,’ he told the Political Bureau on his sixtieth birthday.86 For his role as the embodiment of the PCF, he received much in return: status, prestige, material comfort and – within the communist community – the opportunity to exercise power. Thorez’s achievement was to manage the ‘ill-sorted marriage’ at the heart of the PCF’s identity. He died defending the Soviet Union, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the ‘merits’ of Stalin. He mastered bureaucratic and authoritarian methods of party organisation, following the model of Soviet communist practice. Yet Thorez was also a proficient politician with pragmatic instincts who attempted, and sometimes succeeded, to position the PCF as a factor in French politics. Between 1936 and 1938, he sought to join the Popular Front government, not to pursue revolutionary change but to act as a force for order and stability. In government between 1945 and 1947, he and other communist ministers helped to lay the foundations for the post-war social settlement. During his final years, he was again attempting to position the PCF ‘to do politics’. As leader of a mass party, he displayed skill and acumen, including an ability to relate to ordinary French people. Thorez’s life can be viewed as a reflection of the intertwined hopes and tragedies of the communist movement in the twentieth century.

NOTES

Introduction

Thorez in the Biographical Matrix

1. ‘Livre d’or de l’exposition en l’honneur de Maurice Thorez pour son 50e anniversaire’, Archives Communales d’Ivry-sur-Seine. 2. Le Travailleur (Journal d’information du canton d’Ivry), 18 May 1950. 3. The gifts can be viewed on the website hosted by the Archives Municipales d’Ivry-surSeine. http://www.fonds-thorez.ivry94.fr/ 4. Cornelius Castoriadis, Le Nouvel Observateur (January 1982) in Tony Judt, ‘Une historiographie pas comme les autres: The French Communists and their History’, European Studies Review, 12 (1982), 445– 78, (p. 446). 5. Claude Pennetier, ‘Maurice Thorez’, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD Rom, Les E´ditions de l’atelier, 1997. 6. Ge´rard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berg, 1990), p. 141. 7. ‘M. Maurice Thorez’, Pourquoi Pas?, 13 August 1937, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, Archives Nationales (AN), 626 AP 206. 8. Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), pp. 316– 60. 9. Paul Thorez, Model Children: Inside the Republic of the Red Scarves, trans. Nancy Cadet (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), p. 169. 10. Ibid., pp. 175– 6. 11. Ste´phane Sirot, Maurice Thorez (Paris: Presses de Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2000), pp. 275– 6. 12. Quoted in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 7. 13. Claude Pennetier & Bernard Pudal, ‘Le questionnement biographique communiste en France (1931– 1974)’, Pennetier & Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (E´ditions Belin: Paris, 2002), 119– 56; Sylvain Boulouque, L’Affaire de l’Humanite´ (Paris: Larousse, 2010); Julian Mischi, Le controˆle biographique a` l’e´chelon fe´de´ral: Le Bourbonnais (1944 – 1962)’ in Pennetier & Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, 157– 88. Louis Aragon, ‘Une visite a` Maurice Thorez’, L’Homme Communiste (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2012), 427–39 (p. 437). 14. See the collection of articles in ‘Communism and the Leader Cult’, Twentieth Century Communism, 1, 2009. 15. Louis Aragon, ‘Une visite a` Maurice Thorez’, p. 447.

NOTES

TO PAGES

5 –10

293

16. Billoux, Note au secre´tariat du CC, 14.3.1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 212; & Notebook in AN 626 AP 211. 17. L’Avant Garde, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 212. 18. Claude Pennetier & Bernard Pudal, ‘Stalinism: Workers’ Cult and Cult of Leaders’, Twentieth Century Communism, no. 1 (2009), 20 – 9 (p. 26). 19. Arouet, Vie de Jocrisse More`ze, fils du peuple, petit-fils du petit-pe`re des peuples, d’apre`s les documents ramene´s par le Sue´dois Syllog de son voyage en Absurdie (Paris: S. I. P., 1947). 20. Renseignements Ge´ne´raux 220, Comintern Archives, 495.270.82. The archives of the mining company show that between April 1919 and March 1920 Thorez spent one year employed underground in the Dourges pit. Marcel Gillet, ‘Maurice Thorez a-t-il e´te´ mineur de fond?’, L’Histoire, April 1987, p. 44. 21. Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 88. 22. Philippe Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, Vie secre`te et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975). 23. Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre, p. 442. 24. Ste´phane Courtois et al., Le Livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur et re´pression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997); Ste´phane Courtois (ed.), Du Passe´, faisons table ruse! Histoire et me´moire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), 15 – 159. 25. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Chronique de l’historiographie du Parti communiste francais’, in Courtois (ed.), Communisme en France: de la re´volution documentaire au renouveau historiographique (Paris: E´ditions CUJAS, 2007), 5 – 44 (pp. 28 – 9). 26. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Maurice Thorez: homme d’E´tat francais ou apparatchik stalinien international?, Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 271 – 88 (pp. 271 – 2). 27. Fre´de´rick Geneve´e, La Fin du Secret: Histoire des Archives du Parti Communiste Francais (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2012), p. 16. 28. Ste´phane Sirot, ‘Les Archives de Maurice Thorez et Jeannette Vermeersch aux Archives nationales’, Cahiers d’Histoire: Revue d’Histoire Critique, 88 (2002), 135– 43. 29. Thorez’s library is conserved at Archives Municipales d’Ivry-sur-Seine. See http://www. fonds-thorez.ivry94.fr//. 30. The first entry reads simply ‘premiers mots a` Gagra’ (the Black Sea resort where he was convalescing). 31. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 32. Ste´phane Sirot, Maurice Thorez (Paris: Presses de Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2000). 33. Ibid., pp. 275– 7. 34. Annette Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette: Biographie du couple Thorez (Paris: Fayard, 2010). 35. Courtois, ‘Maurice Thorez: homme d’E´tat francais’, pp. 271– 2. 36. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 161. 37. Ibid., p. 32. 38. See Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 101–8. 39. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Problems of Communist History’, New Left Review, 54 (1969), 85 – 90 (p. 88). 40. ‘L’Entretien entre Maurice Thorez et Joseph Staline du 18 Novembre 1947’, Communisme, 3 (1983), 31 – 54 (p. 44). 41. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 19 September 1959. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 42. La´szlo´ Rajk et ses complices devant le tribunal du peuple (Budapest: Gyula Janka/Imprimerie Stephaneum, 1949), Archives Municipales, Ivry-sur-Seine, 80 Z1– 7093. 43. Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: a Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), pp. 106– 10.

294

NOTES TO PAGES 10 –17

44. Georgi Dimitrov, Journal 1933 – 1949, 20 April 1941 (Paris: Belin, 2005), pp. 458 – 9. 45. Quoted in Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 13. 46. See Foreword by Donald Sassoon to Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti. 47. Dimitrov to Stalin, 6 October 1934, in Alexander Dallin & F. I. Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934– 1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives (London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 18 – 9. 48. Annie Kriegel, Les Communistes francais, 1920– 70 (Paris: Seuil, 1985), pp. 217– 8. 49. Richard Cross, Andrew Flinn, ‘Introduction’, Science & Society (Special Issue: ‘Biography Meets History: Communist Party Lives in International Perspective’), vol. 70, no. 1 (2006), 11 – 21 (p. 14). 50. Kevin Morgan, ‘Parts of People and Communist Lives’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan & Alan Campbell (eds), Party People Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), 9 – 28 (p. 23). 51. Timothy W. Mason, ‘Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 212–30 (p. 224). 52. Ibid. 53. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Maurice Thorez: homme d’E´tat francais’, pp. 287– 8.

Chapter 1

Young Man in a Hurry

1. Michelle Boutry, ‘Dourges et Noyelles-Godault. L’Utilisation du sol dans deux communes du bassin minier’, Diploˆme d’e´tude supe´rieure: Me´moire de ge´ographie, Lille, 1962. 2. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 42. 3. Maurice Thorez, ‘A` la Jeunesse’ (26 June 1938), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 15 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1955), 122– 40 (p. 125). 4. Joseph Valynseele, Denis Grando, A` la De´couverte de leur racines, vol. 2 (Paris: Patrice du Puy, 1994), pp. 174– 5, 210– 11. 5. Documentation rassemble´e pour une biographie de Maurice Thorez, Archives ThorezVermeersch, Archives Nationales (AN), 626 AP 204. 6. Valynseele & Grando, A` la De´couverte, p. 210. 7. Marc Lazar, ‘Le Mineur de fond: un exemple de l’identite´ du PCF’, Revue francaise de science politique, 35, 2 (1985), 190– 205 (pp. 197– 8). 8. ‘Produire, faire du charbon’ (21 July 1945), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 21 (Paris, E´ditions sociales, 1963), 137– 82. 9. Hanna Diamond, ‘Miners, Masculinity and the “Battle du Charbon” in France, 1944– 48’, Modern & Contemporary France, 19, 1 (2011), 69 – 84. 10. Be´ne´dicte Grailles, ‘Heure par heure, jour par jour, une comme´moration d’urgence’, in Denis Varaschin and Ludovic Laloux (eds), 10 Mars 1906: Courrie`res aux Risques de l’Histoire (Vincennes: E´ditions GRHEN, 2006), 203– 17. 11. Kriegel, Les Communistes Francais, 1920– 70, p. 212. 12. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, January 1958 & December 1959. Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 13. Roger Magraw, ‘Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour before 1914’, in Dick Geary (ed.), Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 48 – 100 (pp. 79 – 80).

NOTES

TO PAGES

17 –21

295

14. Michel Delwiche, Francis Groff, Les Gueules Noires (Bruxelles: Les E´peronniers, 1985), p. 89. 15. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 15 – 18. 16. L’Enchaıˆne´, 11 December 1926. 17. Regards, Nume´ro spe´cial, May 1950. 18. Renseignements Ge´ne´raux 220, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.270, d.82. 19. Maurice Thorez, ‘Jean Mace´ et l’E´cole Laı¨que’ (7 April 1946), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 22, p. 29. 20. Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour une Jeunesse Heureuse’ (27 March 1937), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 14, 25 –34. 21. Thorez, ‘A` La Jeunesse’, p. 125. 22. Documentation rassemble´e, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 204. 23. One study notes Noyelles-Godault as a particular example of the phenomenon. Yves-Marie Hilaire, ‘Les Ouvriers de la re´ gion du Nord devant l’e´ glise catholique (XIXe et XXe sie`cles)’, Cahiers du Mouvement Social, 1 (1975), 223– 43 (p. 229). 24. La Croix du Nord, 26 July 1936. 25. Documentation rassemble´e, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 204. 26. Renseignements Ge´ne´raux 220, RGASPI 495.270.82. 27. Paul Thorez, Model Children, pp. 59 – 60. 28. Maurice Thorez, Fils du Peuple (Paris: E´ditions sociales internationales, 1937), p. 13. 29. Claude Pennetier & Bernard Pudal, ‘Stalinisme, culte ouvrier et culte des dirigeants’, in Michel Dreyfus et al. (eds), Le Sie`cle des communismes (Paris: E´ditions de l’Atelier/E´ditions ouvrie`res, 2004), 553– 63 (p. 560). 30. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies: Maurice Thorez’, Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise (Paris: Fayard, 2010) 319–45. 31. Claude Pennetier & Bernard Pudal, ‘La Volonte´ d’emprise’, Pennetier & Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (E´ditions Belin: Paris, 2002), 15 – 39. 32. Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, pp. 339– 40 & pp. 326– 7. 33. Marc Lazar, ‘Damne´ de la terre et homme de marbre. L’Ouvrier dans l’imaginaire du PCF du milieu des anne´es trente a` la fin des anne´es cinquante’, Annales ESC, 5, 45 (1990), 1071– 96 (p. 1075). 34. Fourgeron’s painting appears in the collection, Le Pays des Mines (Paris: E´ditions cercle d’art, 1951). 35. Regards, Nume´ro spe´cial, May 1950. 36. Pierre Bougard & Alain Bolibos, Le Pas-de-Calais de la pre´histoire a` nos jours (Saint-Jeand’Ange´ly: E´ditions Bordessoules, 1988), p. 291. 37. Valynseele & Grando, A` la De´couverte, p. 175, pp. 210– 11. 38. Paul Thorez, Une voix presque mienne (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1985), pp. 36 – 40. 39. Notice: Louis, Cle´ment Thorez, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD Rom. 40. Notebook, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. 41. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 16. 42. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 43. See http://www.fonds-thorez.ivry94.fr/expo/frise.swf 44. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 12. 45. Le Sous-pre´fet de l’arrondissement de Be´thune a` Monsieur le Pre´fet du Pas de Calais, 8 August 1931, Archives De´partementales, Pas-de-Calais, M2408.

296

NOTES

TO PAGES

21 – 28

46. The minutes record Louis voting at the meeting on 28 January 1923. Fe´de´ration Communiste du Pas-de-Calais, Section de Noyelles-Godault, Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, Archives Municipales Ivry, 80Z 2/12. 47. Notice: Louis, Cle´ment Thorez, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD Rom. 48. Letter, 29 October 1937, Archives Municipales Ivry, 80Z 2 –285. 49. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 30 September 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 50. Thorez, Fils du Peuple (1937), pp. 18 – 20. 51. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 10 November 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 52. Aragon, ‘E´crit pour une re´union’, L’Homme Communiste, pp. 452– 53. 53. Thorez, Fils du Peuple (1937), pp. 22 – 30. 54. See letters from Lucie Baujard (Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 172) and Lucien Jaumeau (AN 626 AP 269). 55. Thorez, Fils du Peuple (1937), p. 24. 56. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 51 –5. 57. Kedward, La Vie en Bleu, p. 54. 58. Cited in Romain Ducoulombier, Camarades!: La Naissance du Parti communiste francais (Paris: E´ditions Perrin, 2010), pp. 83 – 4. 59. Ducoulombier, Camarades!, p. 121. 60. Thorez, Fils du Peuple (1937), pp. 27 – 8. 61. Ducoulombier, Camarades!, pp. 121– 2. 62. Joseph Boulet, 11 April 1917, Lettres adresse´s a` Henri Barbusse et saisi pendant l’occupation au 120 rue de la Fayette (1916– 1930), Archives Thorez-Vermeersch AN 626 AP 73. 63. L’Humanite´, 17 March 1917. 64. Thorez, Fils du Peuple (1937), pp. 30 – 2. 65. L’Humanite´, 24 & 26 November, 2 December 1917. 66. Marcel Gillet, ‘Maurice Thorez a-t-il e´te´ mineur de fond?’, L’Histoire, Avril 1987, p. 44; Documentation rassemble´e, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 204. 67. Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, p. 344. 68. Roger Martelli, Prendre sa carte 1920– 2009, Donne´es nouvelles sur les effectifs du PCF (Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2010), p. 46. 69. E´lections Municipales 1919, Archives De´partementales, Pas-de-Calais, 1Z 329. 70. Odette Hardy-He´mery, ‘Strikes in the Coal and Metal Basin of the Nord: New Work Force, New Ideas. Three Years of Indecision: 1919– 21’, in Leopold Haimson & Giulio Sapelli (eds), Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War. An International Perspective (Milan: Fondzione Glangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 45 – 64 (p. 58). 71. L’Humanite´, 30 March 1919. 72. Annie Kriegel, Aux Origines du communisme francais, 1914– 20: Contribution a` l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier francais (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1964). 73. Romain Ducoulombier, Camarades!, p. 20. 74. Ibid., pp. 17 – 27. 75. Ste´phane Courtois & Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste francais, second edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), pp. 50 – 3. 76. Francois Ferrette, ‘Le Comite´ de la 3e`me Internationale et les de´buts du PC francais (1919 – 36)’, Me´moire de Maıˆtrise, Universite´ Paris 1, 2005, pp. 75 –114. 77. Archives De´partementales (AD) Pas-de-Calais, 1Z 291. 78. Commissariat Spe´cial Arras, 10 December 1922, AD Pas-de-Calais, 1405W 291/1.

NOTES

TO PAGES

29 –36

297

79. Y. Le Maner, Notice Florimond Bonte, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD-Rom. 80. Annie Kriegel suggested that the CTI organised no more than a hundred people and was rendered ’powerless’ by the summer of 1920. Historians close to the PCF have downplayed the CTI’s role in the decision taken at Tours, whilst emphasising that of Marcel Cachin, the PCF’s doyen during the Stalinist era. See Ferrette ‘Le Comite´’, pp. 57–64. 81. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 42 – 4. 82. Christian Lescureux, Communistes en Pas-de-Calais (Paris: E´ditions France De´couvertes, 1998), p. 59. 83. The Times, 12 November 1920. 84. Le Figaro, 12 November 1920. 85. Le Populaire, 12 November 1920; L’Humanite´, 12 November 1920. 86. See summary of military record in AD Nord, M154/195E. 87. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 30 – 1. 88. Letters 18 December 1958 and 7 January 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 204. 89. Fe´de´ration Communiste du Pas-de-Calais, Section de Noyelles-Godault, Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, Archives Municipales Ivry, 80Z 2/12. 90. Le Prole´taire, 29 July 1922. 91. Marcel Gillet, ‘Les Mineurs de fond dans l’imaginaire social: L’exemple de Maurice Thorez’, Commission historique du Nord, 23 November 1987, p. 3; cited in Ste´phane Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 170. 92. Le Prole´taire, 17 June 1922. 93. L’Enchaine´, 28 July, 4 August and 18 August 1923. 94. Commissariat Spe´cial Lens, 13 May 1922, & Commissaire de Police, He´nin-Lie´tard, 13 May 1922, AD Pas-de-Calais, 1Z 291. 95. Parti Communiste (SFIC), Elections au Conseil Ge´ne´ral du 14 Mai 1922, Canton de Carvin, AD, Pas-de-Calais, 1Z 291. 96. Commissariat Spe´cial Lens, 14 May 1922, AD, Pas-de-Calais, 1Z 291. 97. L’Avenir de l’Artois, 18 May 1922. 98. AD, Pas-de-Calais, M286. 99. Le Prole´taire, 24 June 1922. 100. Le Prole´taire, 17 June 1922. 101. Le Prole´taire, 9 & 30 January 1921. 102. Bulletin Communiste, 16 February 1922 & 9 March 1922. 103. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 46. 104. Le Prole´taire, 17 June 1922. 105. L. Trotsky, ‘From the ECCI to the Central Committee of the French Communist Party (June 25, 1921)’, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2 (London: New Park Publications, 1974), 44 – 51. 106. L. Trotsky, ‘Resolution of the ECCI on the French Communist Party (2 March 1922)’, ibid., pp. 110– 12. 107. Jules Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline: Dix ans au service de l’Internationale communiste, 1921– 1931 (Neuchatel: E´ditions de la Baconnie`re, 1971), p. 21. 108. Trotsky to Ker, cited in Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline, pp. 83 – 4. 109. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 9 & 14 July 1922. 110. Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 63 –5. 111. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 6 August 1922. 112. Trotsky, ‘On the United Front (Material for a report on the question of French communism)’, The First Five Years, vol. 2, 91 – 109.

298

NOTES

TO PAGES

36 – 44

113. Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline, p. 75. 114. Pre´fecture du Pas-de-Calais, Notice Individuel, Archives de Pas-de-Calais, 1405 W 335. 115. Le Prole´taire, 29 April 1922. 116. ‘Bio’ of Maurice Thorez in Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, p. 342. 117. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 18 June 1922. 118. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 3 September 1922. 119. Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline, p. 103. 120. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 35 – 6. 121. Un lettre du camarade Humbert-Droz, Bulletin Communiste, 9 November 1922, p. 836. 122. ‘Resolution of the French Commission’ (2 December 1922), in Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years, vol. 2, pp. 291–4. 123. Ducoulombier, Camarades!, pp. 275– 86. 124. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 9 April 1922. 125. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 24 September 1922. 126. Bulletin Communiste, 7 December 1922, p. 911. 127. Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 19 November 1922 & 28 January 1923. 128. Le Prole´taire, 9 September 1922. 129. Le Prole´taire, 20 January 1923. 130. Le Prole´taire, 3 February 1923. 131. Commissariat Spe´cial de Lens, 29 January 1923, AD Pas-de-Calais, M2387. 132. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 37. 133. L’Enchaıˆne´, 9 & 16 June 1923. 134. La Confe´rence des De´le´gue´s Permanents, 16 July 1923, Archives du Parti communiste francais provenant de l’ex-Institut du marxisme-le´ninisme (Moscou) 1921– 39, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/5 49. 135. Lettre de la Re´gion Nord-Pas de Calais au Bureau d’Organisation, 11 December 1923, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/5 49. 136. Florimond Bonte, ‘La Jeunesse Militant de Maurice Thorez: Souvenirs et Re´flexions’, Cahiers du Communisme, December 1964, p. 77 & p. 84. 137. L’Enchaıˆne´, 12 January 1924. 138. Her name appears in the minute book as a member in 1926. 139. Lettre de la Re´gion Nord-Pas-de-Calais au Bureau d’Organisation, 11 December 1923, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/5 49. 140. Quoted in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 172. 141. Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 104. 142. Much of the argument that follows is drawn from Sirot, Maurice Thorez, pp. 172– 82, 197– 202. 143. L’Enchaıˆne´, 28 July 1923. 144. L’Humanite´, 20 February 1923. 145. L’Humanite´, 21 February 1923. 146. Lettre de la Re´gion Nord-Pas de Calais au Bureau d’Organisation, 11 December 1923, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/5 49. 147. Fe´de´ration nationale unitaire des travailleurs du sous-sol, Compte rendu official des travaux du 3e`me congre`s tenu a` Montceau-les-Mines les 18 – 22 aouˆt; cited in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 178. 148. L’Enchaıˆne´, 18 August 1923. 149. L’Enchaıˆne´, 28 July 1923, 4 August 1923. 150. Cited in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 176.

NOTES

TO PAGES

45 –54

299

Chapter 2 The Hesitant Revolutionary 1. Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 2. 2. Ibid., p. 28. 3. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, Le Bolchevisme a` la francaise (Paris: Fayard, 2010) pp. 319–45 (p. 343). 4. Donald Sassoon, foreword to Agosti, Togliatti, p. xiii. 5. Boris Souvarine, ‘Au Bureau politique du Parti’, 24 June 1923, Archives Boris Souvarine, Institut d’Histoire Sociale. 6. L’Humanite´, 22 January 1924. 7. Boris Souvarine, ‘La Mort de Le´nine’, Bulletin Communiste, 25 January 1924. 8. Pierre Broue´, Trotsky (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 381– 3. 9. Letter to Zinoviev (23 November 1923), Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline, p. 156. 10. Letter to Zinoviev (23 June 1923), Humbert-Droz, De Le´nine a` Staline, pp. 153–5. 11. Pierre Boichu, ‘Girault, Suzanne’, Notice in ‘Dictionnaire biographique de l’Internationale communiste en France, en Belgique, au Luxembourg, en Suisse et a` Moscou (1919 – 43)’ (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, CD Rom, 2010). 12. Souvarine, ‘Me´moire au Comite´ Directeur sur la Fe´de´ration de la Seine’, 23 November 1923, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/5 49. 13. Mikhaı¨l Pante´leiev & Serge Wolikow, ‘Gouralski, Abraham Yakovlevitch’, Notice in Dictionnaire biographique de l’Internationale communiste (CD Rom). 14. Jean-Louis Chaigneau, ‘Cours Nouveau et l’Exclusion de Souvarine’, Les Cahiers d’Histoire Sociale, 12, 1999, 43 – 57. 15. ‘Lettre aux abonne´s du Bulletin Communiste’, L’Humanite´, 27 March 1924. 16. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 72 – 3. 17. L’Enchaıˆne´, 26 April 1924. 18. Conseil National, 1 – 2 June 1924, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/6 60. 19. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 75. 20. Raoul, Conseil National, 1 – 2 June 1924. 21. Guralsky outlined his argument in an article ‘Les taˆches du Conseil national’, writing under the pseudonym A. Klein, in Bulletin Communiste, 30 May 1924. 22. Broue´, Trotsky, p. 406. 23. A. Klein, ‘Les taˆches’. 24. Conseil National, 1 – 2 June 1924, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/6 60. 25. L’Humanite´, 19 July 1924. 26. Ducoulombier, Camarades!, pp. 275– 86, p. 354 & p. 347. 27. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 86 – 7. 28. L’Humanite´, 7 December 1924. 29. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, p. 343. 30. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 78 – 87; Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 110– 11. 31. Serge Wolikow, L’Internationale Communiste (1919 – 1943): Le Komintern ou le reˆve de´chu du parti mondial de la re´volution (Ivry-sur-Seine: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2010), p. 76. 32. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 84 – 92. 33. L’Enchaıˆne´, 21 June 1924. 34. Section de Noyelles-Godault, Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, 29 June 1924. 35. L’Enchaıˆne´, 5 July 1924. 36. Political Bureau, 9 September, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/7 64. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

300

NOTES

TO PAGES

54 –60

39. Bureau d’Organisation, 24 September 1924, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/8 74. 40. L’Enchaıˆne´, 11 October 1924. 41. L’Enchaıˆne´, 8 November 1924. 42. L’Enchaıˆne´, 22 November 1924. 43. Re´mi Lefebvre ‘Le Socialisme municipal sous les fourches caudines du communisme: l’exemple de Roubaix dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, in Emmanuel Bellanger & Julian Mischi (eds), Les territoires du communisme: E´lus locaux, politiques publiques et sociabilite´s militantes (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 53 – 72. 44. L’Enchaıˆne´, 1 November 1924. 45. ‘Rapport sur la situation dans la re´gion du Nord (R. Duisabou)’, 19 March 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/15 122. 46. ‘Congres de la Fe´de´ration Communiste de la re´gion du Nord le 11 jan 1925 (notes Dufresnoy)’, Fe´de´ration Communiste du Pas-de-Calais, Section de Noyelles-Godault, Cahier du Proce`s-verbaux, Archives Municipales Ivry, 80Z 2/12. 47. Le Commissaire Spe´cial de Be´thune a` Monsieur le Sous-Pre´fet de Be´thune, 16 January 1925, AD Pas-de-Calais, 1405W 319. 48. Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924 –33 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 49. Marcel Cachin, Carnets 1906– 47, Tome III, 1921– 33, Denis Peschanski (ed.) (Paris: CNRS, 1998), pp. 253– 4. 50. Comintern Archives, F.495, op.26, d.20. 51. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 114. 52. Bureau Politique, 13 July 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/11 95. 53. Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse & Nicolas Marmie´, La Guerre du Rif: Maroc 1921– 26 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). 54. David H. Slavin, ‘The French Left and the Rif War, 1924–25: Racism and the Limits of Internationalism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26, 1 (1991), 5 – 32. 55. Political Bureau, 24 July 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3mi 6/11 95. 56. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 115. 57. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 93. 58. L’Humanite´, 8 August 1925. 59. Dossier Thorez, Archives Nationales, BB18 2755 201 A 26. 60. Contribution of Julien Racamond, Central Committee, 10 September 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis 3Mi 6/11 94. 61. Central Committee, 7 October & 10 September 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 3Mi 6/11 94. 62. Political Bureau, 14 October 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 mi 6/11 96. 63. Cahiers du Bolchevisme, 15 January 1926, 143– 50. 64. Central Committee, 29 July 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/10 93. 65. Central Committee, 18 August 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/10 93. 66. Cahiers du Bolchevisme, 15 January 1926. 67. Central Committee, 29 July 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/10 93. 68. Letter of Ralph, 2 October 1925, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.19, d.153. 69. Ibid. 70. Central Committee, 18 August 1925, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/10 93. 71. Michel Dreyfus, ‘Cremet, Jean’, Notice in ‘Dictionnaire biographique de l’Internationale communiste (CD Rom, 2010).

NOTES

TO PAGES

61 – 69

301

72. Albert Treint, ‘Sus au Fascisme!’, L’Humanite´, 28 November 1925. 73. Confe´rence national (1– 2 December 1925), PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/10 91. 74. Political Bureau, 17 November 1925, cited by Serge Wolikow, ‘Un Secre´taire ge´ne´ral oublie´’, in Serge Wolikow (ed.), Pierre Semard, Engagements, discipline et fide´lite´ (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2007), 159– 96 (pp. 180– 1). 75. L’Humanite´, 6 December 1925. 76. Serge Wolikow, ‘L’Organisation du PCF a` ses de´buts’, Nouvelles FondationS, 2006/1, 159 – 65. 77. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 93. 78. Confe´rence nationale (December 1925), PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/10. 79. Letter of Ralph to Manuilsky, 4 January 1926, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.19, d.153a. 80. Central Committee, 7 –8 January 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/20 141. 81. La Correspondance Internationale, 15 May 1926. 82. Serge Wolikow, ‘Le Parti communiste franc ais et l’Internationale communiste (1925 – 1933)’, The`se de doctorat en Lettres, Universite´ de Paris VIII (1990), pp. 405 – 6. 83. Comintern Archives, F.495, op.164, d. 308 & F.495, op.164, d.312. 84. It was published in Cahiers du Communisme (April 1950, no. 40) as ‘Conseils donne´s en 1926 au Parti communiste francais’. See also ‘Speech Delivered at the French Commission of the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I. March 6, 1926’, Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1926/03/06. htm 85. Comintern Archives, F.495, op.164, d.312. 86. Wolikow, ‘Un Secre´taire ge´ne´ral oublie´’, pp. 181– 3. 87. Bureau d’Organisation, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/23 156. 88. L’Enchaı¨ne´, 26 June 1926. 89. ‘Ve`me Congre`s National du Parti Communiste Francais, Tenu a` Lille du 20 au 26 Juin 1926’, Compte rendu ste´nographique (Paris, Bureau d’e´ditions de diffusion et de publicite´, 1927), p. 20 & pp. 43 – 4. 90. Serge Wolikow, ‘Un Parti a` la croise´e des chemins’, Nouvelles FondationS, 2006/1, 90 – 102 (p. 95). 91. Political Bureau, 4 November 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/22 150. 92. Political Bureau, 13 November 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/22 150. 93. Political Bureau, 28 October 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/22 150. 94. Jean-Pierre Florin, ‘Le Radical-socialisme dans le de´partement du Nord (1914 – 1936): parti du “mouvement” ou de “l’ordre e´tabli”?’, Revue francaise de science politique, 1974/2 (236 – 77), pp. 253– 6. 95. L’Enchaı¨ne´, 19 November 1926. 96. L’Enchaı¨ne´, 28 November 1926. 97. Political Bureau, 16 December 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/22 150. 98. La Correspondance Internationale, 7 December 1926. 99. Political Bureau, 30 December 1926, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 6 Mi/22 150.

302

NOTES

Chapter 3

TO PAGES

71 –79

Class against Class

1. Matthew Worley, ‘Courting Disaster? The Communist International in the Third Period’, in M. Worley (ed.), In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004), 1 – 17. 2. Fre´de´rick Geneve´e, ‘Pierre Semard et la re´pression, essai d’interpre´tations’, in Wolikow (ed.), Pierre Semard, 223– 36. 3. Political Bureau, 3 March 1927, Wolikow, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et l’Internationale’, p. 894. 4. Lettre au Pre´sidium de l’I.C., Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.96. 5. Political Secretariat ECCI, 21 March 1927, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.3, d.10. 6. Presidium ECCI, 30 March 1927, Comintern Archives, F. 495, op.2, d.95. 7. Ibid. 8. Presidium ECCI, 1 April 1927, Comintern Archives, F.495 op.2, d.96. 9. ‘Au Comite´ Central du PC Francais’, 2 April 1927, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.96. 10. Bureau Politique, 21 April 1927, cited in Wolikow, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et l’Internationale’, p. 909. 11. L’Humanite´, 11 May 1927. 12. L’Humanite´, 3 July 1926. 13. Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Trois autobiographies’, Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise (Paris: Fayard, 2010), pp. 319– 45 (343). 14. Telegram, 4 June 1927, AD Pas-de-Calais, M2387. 15. L’Humanite´, 31 July, 1 & 4 August 1927. 16. Maurice Thorez, Fils du Peuple (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1970), p. 52. 17. ECCI Presidium, 27 September 1927, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.107. 18. ECCI Political Secretariat, 2 September 1927, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.3, d.25. 19. Lettre de Maurice Thorez aux emprisonne´s de la Sante´, 11 octobre 1927, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/32 219. 20. Lettre de Pierre Semard, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/32 219. 21. L’Humanite´, 19 November 1927. 22. ‘Theses of the Agitprop Department of the ECCI on the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU and the Opposition’, Jane Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919– 1943, vol. 2 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1959), pp. 420– 1. 23. Central Committee, 28 January 1928, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/40. 24. Danielle Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue en France, 1918– 1968 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 181– 8. 25. ‘Re´solution du IX Exe´cutif sur la question francaise’, Classe contre classe, La question francaise au IX exe´cutif et au VIe`me Congres de l’IC (Paris: Bureau d’E´ditions, 1929), pp. 98 – 104. 26. Cachin, Carnets 1906– 47, p. 353. 27. Commission for Organisation of Sixth Congress, Comintern Archives, F.493, op.1, d.3. 28. Degras, The Communist International (vol. 2), pp. 446– 55. 29. Cachin, Carnets 1906– 47, Tome III, pp. 407– 8. 30. Henri Barbe´, ‘Souvenirs de Militant et de Dirigeant Communiste’ (unpublished manuscript), p. 122. Archives Institut d’Histoire Sociale. 31. Stenogram of the Latin Secretariat, 10 August 1928, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.32, d.23. 32. Cachin, Carnets 1906– 47, Tome III, pp. 506– 7. 33. Presidium, 27 March 1929, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.147.

NOTES

TO PAGES

79 –86

303

34. Correspondence with Joseph Pader, September 1957, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 204. 35. Pre´fet du Nord, 5 April 1928, AD Pas-de-Calais, M2387. 36. Le Commissaire spe´cial adjoint (Lille), 23 December 1928, AD Nord, M154/195E. 37. Le Commissaire spe´cial de Lens, 30 May 1929, AD Pas-de-Calais, M5059/2. 38. Stenogram of the Latin Secretariat, 10 August 1928, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.32, d.23. 39. Le Commissaire Central, Ville de Lille, 21 April 1928, AD Nord, M154/195E. 40. Le Petit Parisien, 10 June 1929. 41. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 111; Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 128– 9. 42. Dossier ‘Complot 1929– 36’, Correspondance ge´ne´rale de la division criminelle, AN BB18 2811. 43. Fre´deric Monier, Les anne´es vingt 1919– 1930 (Paris: Librairie ge´ne´rale francaise, 1999), p. 173. 44. L’Humanite´, 31 July 1929. 45. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 113. 46. Thorez to Quinet, 25 September 1929, AN 626 AP 230, cited in Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeanette, p. 136. 47. Marcelo Hoffman, ‘Foucault and the “Lesson” of the Prisoner Support Movement’, New Political Science, 34:1 (2012), 21 – 36. 48. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 208. 49. L’Humanite´, 27 April 1930. 50. Fre´de´rick Geneve´e, Le PCF et la justice: Des origines aux anne´es cinquante; organisation, conceptions, militants et avocats communistes face aux normes juridiques (Clermont-Ferrand: Les Presses Universitaire de la Faculte´ de Droit de Clermont-Ferrand, 2006), pp. 113 – 4. 51. Political Bureau, 13 February 1930, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/57. 52. Telegram received 19 April 1930, Comintern Archives F.495, op.4, d.27. 53. Cited in Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 115– 6. 54. Maurice Thorez, ‘L’Action de masse doit briser le complot’, L’Humanite´, 27 April 1930. 55. Geneve´e, Le PCF et la justice, pp. 114– 7. 56. ‘Les Me´moires de Vassart, 5e`me partie’, Les Cahiers d’Histoire Social (Spring– Summer 1997), 165– 201 (p. 171). 57. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, pp. 115– 6. 58. Stalin, ‘Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S. U.(B.)’, June 27, 1930 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/ aug/27.htm 59. Presidium, 13 June 1930, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.166. 60. Annette Wieviorka, ‘L’Intimite´ dans un couple politique: Les Thorez’, in Anne Muxel (ed.), La Vie prive´e des convictions (Paris: Presses de Science Po, 2014), 115– 34 (pp. 119– 22). 61. ‘Au XVIe`me Congre`s du Parti Communiste (Bolchevik) de l’URSS (Juin 1930)’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 1, pp. 38 – 43. 62. Presidium, 13 June 1930, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.166. 63. Ibid. 64. Commission sur la question financie`re en France, 30 June 1930, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.4, d.41. 65. Presidium, 13 June 1930, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.166. 66. L’Humanite´, 23 July & 13 August 1930.

304

NOTES TO PAGES 86 – 93

67. ‘Comment lutter le 1er aouˆt?’ (26 July 1930), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 1, pp. 61 – 63. 68. L’Humanite´, 29 September 1930. 69. ‘E´lection le´gislative comple´mentaire, Scrutin de ballottage du 5 Octobre 1930’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 62. 70. L’Humanite´, 12 September 1930. 71. L’Humanite´, 29 September 1930. 72. Extraits du discours de Thorez, 11th Plenum of ECCI, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.32, d.101. 73. Stepanov to Thorez, 25 February 1931, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.4, d.92. 74. Extraits du discours de Manuilsky, 11th Plenum of ECCI, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.32, d.101. 75. Cachin, Carnets 1906– 1947, p. 653. The entry is marked 17 March 1931, but should probably read 27 March 1931. 76. 11th Plenum of ECCI (March 1931), Comintern Archives, F.495, op.32, d.101. 77. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 104. 78. Annie Kriegel & Ste´phane Courtois, Eugen Fried: Le grand secret du PCF (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 16 & 38– 40. 79. Fried to Manuilsky, 28 April 1931, F.495, op.19, d.160, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 143. 80. Kuusinen, 27 May 1931, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 147. 81. Fried to Manuilsky, 24 June 1931, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 148. 82. Ibid. 83. ‘Projet de lettre ferme´e au Bureau politique du PCF’, 12 July 1931, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.4, d.121. 84. Fried to Piatnitsky, 3 August 1931, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 153. 85. Thorez, 27 July 1931, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 154. 86. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 153. 87. ‘Projet de lettre ferme´e au Bureau politique du PCF’, 12 July 1931, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.4, d.121. 88. ‘Pre´face de Maurice Thorez’, Les Barricades de Roubaix (Paris: Bureaux d’E´ditions, 1931). 89. Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933– 1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 90. Cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 154. 91. Perhaps the best account is Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 152– 73. 92. Report from Fried, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 160. 93. Central Committee, Se´ance ille´gale’, 25 August 1931, PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 3Mi 6/65. 94. R. W. Davies, ‘The Syrtsov – Lominadze Affair’, Soviet Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (Jan. 1981), 29 – 50. 95. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 201– 3. 96. Fried, 28 April 1931, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.19, d.160, cited in Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 144– 5. 97. Central Committee, Se´ance ille´gale’, 25 August 1931, PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 3Mi 6/65. 98. L’Humanite´, 14 & 21 August 1931. 99. Central Committee, 2 December 1931, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3Mi 6/65. 100. Presidium, 22 August 1932, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.197. 101. Presidium, 17 January 1932, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.186. 102. L’Humanite´, 16 February 1932.

NOTES

TO PAGES

94 –104

305

103. L’Humanite´, 14 October 1931. 104. Political Secretariat, 15 January 1932, Comintern Archives F.495, op.4, d.165; Presidium, 17 January 1932, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.186. 105. L’Humanite´, 9 May 1932. 106. Presidium, 26 September 1932, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.197. 107. M. Thorez, ‘Appliquons les de´cisions du XIIe Exe´cutif: Pour un travail bolche´vik des masses’, Cahiers du bolche´visme, 15 October 1932, pp. 1247–60. 108. L’Humanite´, 24 November 1932 & 14 December 1932. 109. Political Secretariat, 29 January 1933, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.3, d.273. 110. ‘Un Appel de ‘I‘Internationale Communiste’, L’Humanite´, 5 March 1933. 111. L’Humanite´, 6 March, 25 March & 13 April 1933. 112. Claude Pennetier, ‘Maurice Thorez’, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD Rom. 113. ‘Re´solution du Pre´sidium du Comite´ exe´cutif de l’International Communiste’, L’Humanite´, 7 April 1933. 114. See, for example, Jacques Duclos, l’Humanite´, 5 June 1933. 115. L’Humanite´, 3 June 1933. 116. Le Populaire, 5 June 1933. 117. Presidium, 25 November 1933, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.206. 118. Political Bureau, 30 December 1933, cited in Wolikow, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et l’Internationale’, p. 2064. 119. Notes of delegation meetings, 6, 12, 13 & 18 December 1933, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 222.

Chapter 4

Popular Front

1. Serge Wolikow, ‘Le Front Populaire: quel e´ve´nement? Historiographie et actualite´ des recherches sur le Front Populaire’, in Xavier Vigna, Jean Vigreux, Serge Wolikow (eds), Le Pain, Le Paix, La Liberte´: Expe´riences et Territoires du Front Populaire (Paris: La DisputeE´ditions sociales, 2006), 11 – 24 (p. 20). 2. Central Committee, 4 – 5 July 1957, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 1 AV/7046. 3. Michel Margairaz & Danielle Tartakowsky, L’Avenir nous appartient! Une histoire du Front Populaire (Paris: Larousse, 2006); Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 232– 4; Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934– 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 33. 4. Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, pp. 26 – 36. 5. L’Humanite´, 9, 11, 15 & 24 January 1934. 6. Pierre Pellissier, 6 fe´vrier 1934: La Re´publique en flammes (Paris: Perrin, 2000), pp. 320–1; Brian Jenkins & Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (London: Routledge, 2016). 7. Central Committee, 23 – 26 January 1934, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/103. 8. ‘Sous le drapeau rouge du Parti communiste’ (6 February 1934), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 6 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1951), 21 – 45 (p. 45). 9. Assemble´ d’Information du 8 fe´vrier 1934, Rapport de Maurice Thorez, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/109. 10. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 186. 11. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 8 February 1964, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225.

306

NOTES

TO PAGES

104 –112

12. L’Humanite´, 8 February 1934. 13. Central Committee, 23 – 26 January 1934, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/103; Bureau Politique: proce`s-verbaux (1933– 4), PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 3 Mi 6/106. 14. Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 191– 2 & pp. 197– 8. 15. Political Bureau, 8 March 1934, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 3 Mi 6/106. 16. Confe´rence de la Re´gion Paris Nord, 2 & 3 avril 1934, PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 3 Mi 6/109. 17. Marietta Stankova, Georgi Dimitrov: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), pp. 113–17. 18. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 110– 14. 19. Carnet de notes, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 223. 20. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 123. 21. Stankova, Georgi Dimitrov, p. 118. 22. ECCI Presidium, 16 May 1934, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.214. 23. Dimitrov, Journal, p. 127. 24. L’Humanite´, 30 & 31 May 1934. 25. ‘Entrevue de la de´le´gation du Comite´ Central du PCF (Thorez-Gitton-Frachon) avec la de´le´gation de la CAP du PS (Blum-Zyromski) le 11 juin 1934’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 60. 26. Letter from SFIO, 20 June 1934, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 60. 27. ‘Les travailleurs veulent l’unite´’ (23 June 1934), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 6 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1951), 130– 76 (pp. 170– 5). 28. L’Humanite´, 26 June 1934. 29. ‘Les travailleurs veulent l’unite´’ (23 June 1934), pp. 172–3. 30. ‘Front unique pour battre le fascisme’ (26 June 1934), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 6 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1951), 177– 92. 31. L’Humanite´, 12 October 1934. 32. Cited in Fridrikh I. Firsov, Harvey Klehr & John Earl Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933– 1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 54. 33. Giulio Ceretti [sic], A` l’Ombre des deux T, 40 ans avec Palmiro Togliatti et Maurice Thorez (Paris: Julliard, 1973), pp. 158–9. (For unknown reasons, French publications often wrongly spell Cerreti’s name.) 34. Central Committee, 2 –3 November 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 35. Le Figaro, 25 October 1934; L’Humanite´, 25 October 1934. 36. Telegram, 31 October 1934, cited in Fridrikh (ed.), Secret Cables, p. 54. 37. Georgi Dmitrov, Letter to Stalin, 6 October 1934, in Dallin & Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, pp. 18 – 19. 38. ‘Re´union du Secre´tariat Latin du 3 de´cembre 1934’, Communisme, 67 – 68 (2001), pp. 83 – 108. 39. Carnet, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 222. 40. L’Humanite´, 21 May 1935. 41. Wolikow, L’Internationale Communiste (1919– 43), p. 91. 42. ‘Le Projet socialiste du 21 novembre 1935’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 61. 43. L’Humanite´, 15 July 1935. 44. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 249– 50; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 132– 33; Footage of Thorez at the Seventh Congress can be viewed at Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue-d-exploitationu-494-15-0-0. html

NOTES

TO PAGES

112 –116

307

45. Maurice Thorez, ‘Discours prononce´ au VIIe`me congre`s de l’Internationale communiste, le 3 aouˆt 1935’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 9 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1952), 95 – 153 (pp. 116– 130). 46. Central Committee, 19 –20 May 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 47. Se´ance du 30 Mai 1935, Journal Officiel de la Re´publique francaise, De´bats parlementaires, 31 May 1935, pp. 1734– 5. 48. L’Humanite´, 15 July 1935. 49. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` l’assemble´e des communistes parisiens le 6 aouˆt [1936]’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 12 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1954), 135– 52 (p. 145). 50. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ au VIIIe congre`s du Parti communiste francais tenu a` Villeurbanne du 22 au 25 janvier 1936’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 11 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1953), 9 – 128. 51. ‘Re´solution du Pre´sidium du CE de l’IC sur le rapport du camarade Marty’ (23 February 1936), Comintern Archives, F. 495, op.2, d.237. 52. ‘Discours prononce´ le 17 avril 1936 au micro de Radio Paris’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 11 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1953), 203– 16 (pp. 215– 6). 53. Michael Kelly, ‘Catholicism and the Left in twentieth-century France’ in Kay Chadwick (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 142– 74 (p. 151). 54. Charles Pichon in L’E´poque, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 56. 55. John Bulaitis, Communism in Rural France: French Agricultural Workers and the Popular Front (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), pp. 1 –12. 56. Maurice Thorez, ‘Discours prononce´ au VIIe`me congre`s de l’Internationale communiste, le 3 aouˆt 1935’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 9 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1952), 95 – 153 (p. 136). 57. Georgi Dimitrov, ‘Unity of the Working Class against Fascism. Concluding speech before the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International’, 13 August 1935. Available at Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/ dimitrov/works/1935/unity.htm#s4 58. Telegram, F. 495, op.18, d. 20, cited in Dallin & Firsov (eds), Dimitrov & Stalin, p. 35. 59. Cited in Fridrikh et al., (eds), Secret Cables, pp. 56 – 7. 60. Marty complained at the Presidium on 17 June 1936. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 257; Jean Maitron et Claude Pennetier, ‘Biographie d’Andre´ Marty’, in Paul Boulland, Claude Pennetier & Rossana Vaccaro (eds), Andre´ Marty: l’homme, l’affaire, l’archive (Paris: Codhos, 2005) 155– 89 (p. 171). 61. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, pp. 258– 61; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 150– 1. 62. Rapport presente´ a` la session du Comite´ central, le lundi 25 mai 1936 Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 12 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1954), 9 – 28 (pp. 19 – 21). 63. Jackson, The Popular Front, pp. 113– 45. 64. Serge Wolikow, Le Front Populaire en France (Brussels, E´ditions Complexe, 1996), p. 156. 65. The first figures were given by Thorez to the Comintern Presidium in September 1936, the second by Thorez at the 3 May 1947 Central Committee. 66. ‘Discours de Maurice Thorez’, Presidium ECCI, 16 –17 September 1936, Comintern Archives F.495, op.2, d.251. 67. Damon Mayaffre, ‘1789 – 1917: l’ambivalence du discours re´volutionnaire des communistes francais des anne´es 1930’, Mots. Les langages du politique, no 69 (2002), 65 – 78 (p. 76). 68. ‘Conversations avec Blum, Salengro, Dormoy au juin 1936’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 61.

308

NOTES

TO PAGES

116 –123

69. L’Humanite´, 12 June 1936. 70. Jackson, The Popular Front, pp. 104– 12. 71. M. Thorez, ‘Appliquons les de´cisions’, Cahiers du bolche´visme, 15 October 1932, 1247– 60. 72. Presidium ECCI, 16 – 17 September 1936, Comintern Archives, F.495, op.2, d.251; Central Committee, 16 October 1936, PCF archives, 3 Mi 6/124 783. 73. Central Committee, 18 May 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 74. Presidium ECCI, 16 – 17 September 1936, Comintern Archives F.495, op.2, d.251. 75. L’Humanite´, 26 August 1936. 76. Presidium ECCI, 16 – 17 September 1936. 77. ‘Rapport pre´sente´ a` l’assemble´e des communistes parisiens le 6 aouˆt [1936]’; ‘Discours prononce´ le 2 septembre 1936 devant les communistes et les sympathisants des usines Renault’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 12 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1954), 135 –52 & 175– 202. 78. Le Populaire, 4 September 1936. 79. ‘Discours prononce´ le 2 septembre 1936’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 12. 80. L’Humanite´, 30 August 1936. 81. Georgi Dimitrov, ‘The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism’, Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, 2 August 1935. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/ 08_02.htm 82. Dimitrov, Journal, 3 September 1936, pp. 154– 5. 83. ‘Une lettre du Secre´tariat du parti a` la Commission administrative permanent du Parti socialiste sur les e´ve´nements d’Espagne [9 Septembre 1936]’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 12, pp. 211– 3. 84. Presidium ECCI, 16 – 17 September 1936, Comintern Archives F.495, op.2, d.251. 85. Dimitrov, Journal, 16 September 1936, pp. 159– 60. 86. Agenda 1937, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 223. 87. Un Camarade, 23 May 1936, Dossier Andre´, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 284. 88. Dimitrov, Journal, 13 September 1936, p. 158. 89. Communications from Victoria Codovilla and Jose´ Dı´azin in Fridrikh et al., Secret Cables, p. 97. 90. Comintern Archives, F.495, op.184, d.6 & F.495, op.184, d.2 cited in Fridrikh (ed.), Secret Cables, p. 98. 91. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 223. Marty returned to Spain during the summer of 1937. 92. Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 193– 4. 93. Ibid., pp. 197– 8. 94. L’Humanite´, 25 August 1936, 14 & 15 February 1937. 95. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 217. 96. See the promotional film for Fils du Peuple (1937). Cine´-Archives: http://www. cinearchives.org/Films-447-92-0-0.html 97. Ibid., p. 16. 98. Discussion with Pierre Thorez (2009). 99. Boulouque, L’Affaire de l’Humanite´, pp. 145– 79. 100. Claude Pennetier, ‘Laurent Casanova’, Notice in ‘Dictionnaire biographique de l’Internationale communiste’ (CD Rom, 2010).

NOTES

TO PAGES

123 –132

309

101. Dennis Tourish & Tim Wohlforth, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), pp. 3 – 15. 102. Kevin Morgan, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs under Lenin and Stalin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 71 – 126. 103. Vincent Chambarlhac, ‘L’He´roı¨sation. Repre´senter, ne´cessite´ du Rassemblement populaire’, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, 103 (2008), 55 – 71. 104. Pierre Birnbaum, Le´on Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 99 – 117 (p. 101). 105. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 213. 106. Thorez recalled the eulogy in his diary in August 1955. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 107. ‘M. Maurice Thorez’, Pourquoi Pas?, 13 August 1937, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 206. 108. L’Humanite´, 5 & 7 October, 6 December 1936; Dimitrov, Journal, 3 December 1936, pp. 166– 7. 109. L’Humanite´, 17 – 23 March 1937. 110. L’Humanite´, 18 – 25 June 1937. 111. L’Humanite´, 27 – 30 December 1937. 112. Thorez’s report to the Central Committee, 17 January 1938, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 113. L’Humanite´, 14 – 18 January 1938; Thorez’s report to the Central Committee, 17 January 1938, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 114. Le Figaro, 11 – 14 March 1938; L’Humanite´, 12 – 14 March 1938. 115. Le Figaro, 19 & 21 March 1938; L’Humanite´, 22 March 1938. 116. ‘Telegram from Com. Thorez of 18 March 1938’, Comintern Archives F.495, op.74, d.517, in Dallin and Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, pp. 37 – 8. 117. Cited in Ibid., pp. 36 – 7. 118. Jean-Jacques Becker & Serge Berstein, Histoire de l’anti-communisme, tome 1: 1917– 1940 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1987), p. 329. 119. Tableau d’effectifs, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 35. 120. L’Humanite´, 13 May 1938. 121. L’Enchaıˆne´, 2 July 1938. 122. L’Enchaıˆne´, 15 April 1939. 123. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central’, 9 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 124. ‘Discours prononce´ a` la se´ance du Comite´ central, 21 novembre 1938’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 16 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1956), pp. 61 –106 (98– 102). 125. La Vie Ouvrie`re, 30 March 1939, cited in Yves Santamaria, L’Enfant du malheur: Le Parti communiste francais dans la Lutte pour la paix (Paris: E´ditions Seli Arslan, 2002), p. 251.

Chapter 5

Exile in the Promised Land

1. ‘Maurice Thorez: notes ine´dites, novembre 1939’, Cahiers d’Histoire d’Institut de Recherches Marxistes, 14 (1983), 119 –30 (p. 121). 2. L’Humanite´, 22 January 1939; ‘Rapport de M. Thorez devant le Comite´ central a` Ivry, le 19 mai 1939’, Cahiers d’Histoire d’Institut de Recherches Marxistes, 14 (1983), 112 – 6. 3. L’Enchaine´ 11 March 1939.

310

NOTES

TO PAGES

132 –136

4. Dimitrov, 22 August 1939, in Denis Peschanski (ed.), Moscou– Paris – Berlin: Te´le´grammes Chiffre´s du Komintern (1939 – 41) (Paris: Tallandier, 2003), pp. 60 – 2. 5. Communique´s de presse du groupe parlementaire communiste, 25 August & 29 August 1939 in ‘Les de´pute´s communistes en aouˆt – septembre 1939’, Cahiers d’Histoire d’Institut de Recherches Marxistes, 39 (1989), 71 – 88 (p. 72 & pp. 77– 8). 6. L’Humanite´, 26 August 1939. 7. Le Temps, 3 September 1939. 8. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940– 44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 115. 9. Communique´s, 26 August & 29 August, ‘Les de´pute´s communistes’, pp. 73 – 6. 10. Le Temps, 4 September 1939. 11. Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 134. 12. Courrier et Tablettes de l’Aisne, 27 October, 1939. 13. Lieutenant Noe¨l Que´nivet, cited in Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 266–7. 14. Courrier et Tablettes de l’Aisne, 27 October, 1939. 15. Kriegel & Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 324. 16. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 267. 17. Dimitrov and Manuilsky to Stalin, 27 August 1939, cited in Dallin & Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, p. 150. 18. Telegrams, 1 September, 2 September & 9 September 1939 in Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris – Berlin, pp. 68 – 9 & pp. 74 – 5. 19. Georgi Dimitrov, Journal 1933– 1949 (Paris: Belin, 2005), pp. 339– 41. 20. Fre´de´rick Geneve´e, Le PCF et la justice, p. 220. 21. ‘Communique´ du Groupe Parlementaire Communiste’, 19 September, ‘Les de´pute´s communistes’, pp. 86 – 8. 22. Telegram, 28 September 1939 in Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris – Berlin, pp. 80 – 1. 23. Thorez, ‘Notes ine´dites, novembre 1939’, pp. 126 – 7; Mikhaı¨l Narinski, ‘Le Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais dans les archives du Komintern (quelques remarques sur la biographie de Jacques Duclos)’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, vol. 34, no. 1 (1994), 21 – 3. 24. Thorez, ‘Notes ine´dites, novembre 1939’, pp. 126– 7. 25. Jeannette Vermeersch-Thorez, La Vie en Rouge (Paris: Belfond, 2000), pp. 92 – 3. 26. Dimitrov, Journal, p. 339. 27. Dimitrov, Journal, p. 343; Later in Moscow, Thorez acknowledged the importance of ‘communication IC (Dalidet)’ [spelling in original] in clarifying the Comintern’s position. Thorez, ‘Notes ine´dites, novembre 1939’. 28. ‘Me´moires de Mounette Dutilleul’, http://trcamps.free.fr/Mounette%201939.html See also Francois Cre´mieux & Jacques Estager, Sur le Parti, 1939– 1940 (Paris: Messidor/ Temps Actuels, 1983), pp. 137– 8. 29. Cre´mieux & Estager, Sur le Parti, pp. 145– 6. 30. Telegram, 3 October 1939 in Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris – Berlin, pp. 97 – 8. 31. Le Temps, 5 & 10 October 1939; V. P. Smirnov, ‘Le Komintern et le Parti communiste francais pendant la “Droˆle de Guerre”, 1939– 40 (D’apre`s les archives du Komintern)’, Revue des e´tudes slaves, 65, 4 (1993), 671– 90 (p. 680). 32. Ramette cited in Cre´mieux & Estager, Sur le Parti, p. 149. 33. Firsov et al., Secret Cables, p. 48. 34. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 269. 35. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 174. 36. See account in Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 264– 71. 37. Police reports in Archives De´partementales, Pas-de-Calais, M5059/2.

NOTES 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

TO PAGES

137 –144

311

Discussion with Sam Lesser, 8 March 2007. Telegrams 16 & 17 October 1939, Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris– Berlin, pp. 111– 12. Discussion with Sam Lesser, 8 March 2007. Louis Aragon, Les Communistes (Premie`re e´poque. Fe´vrier 1939– juin 1940) (Paris: La Bibliothe`que francaise, 1951). Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 272. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 349– 50. ‘Project de re´solution sur la question francaise, 20 Novembre 1939’, cited in Philippe Buton, ‘Le Parti, la guerre et la re´volution 1939– 40’, Communisme, 32 – 34 (1993), 41 – 67 (46). References to Thorez’s diary are to a notebook in which he recorded daily political activity. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Santamaria, L’Enfant du malheur, p. 256. Smirnov, ‘Le Komintern et le Parti communiste francais’, p. 682. Ibid., pp. 683– 4. De´claration du BP du PCF, Cahiers du Bolche´visme, January 1940, excerpt in ‘Documents: Le PCF; L’Anne´e 1939’, Cahiers d’Histoire d’Institut des Recherches Marxistes, 38 (1989), pp. 121– 2. Maurice Thorez, ‘Les traıˆtres au pilori’, published in The Communist International, no. 3, March 1940. For a French translation and commentary by Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Textes ine´dits de Maurice Thorez’, Communisme, 1, 1982, 75 – 105. The article was published by the Socialists in 1956. Le´on Blum, tel qu’il est (Librairie des municipalite´s, 1956). Robrieux, Thorez, pp. 253– 5. Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 105. Geoffrey Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac, 2012), p. 40; Firsov et al., Secret Cables, p. 169. The article was published in the Daily Worker, 24 May 1940. Santamaria, L’Enfant du malheur, p. 263. Annie Kriegel, ‘Le P.C.F., Thorez et la France’, Le Mouvement Social, 172 (1995), 95 – 9 (p. 99). Wolikow, L’Internationale Communiste, pp. 125– 6. Dimitrov to Stalin, 10 June 1940, Dallin & Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, pp. 167–8. Robert Service, Comrades: A World History of Communism (London: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 216– 7. ‘Declaration of the French Communist Party (Draft)’, 16 June 1940, in Dallin & Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, pp. 170– 4. Kriegel, ‘Le P.C.F., Thorez et la France’, p. 99. The best account of the episode is Jean-Pierre Besse & Claude Pennetier, Juin 40: La ne´gociation secre`te (Paris: E´ditions de l’Atelier/E´ditions ouvrie`res, 2006); See also Boulouque, L’Affaire de l’Humanite´, pp. 180– 209. ‘De´claration d’intention du 20 juin’, in Besse & Pennetier, Juin 40, pp. 10 –13. Comintern Archives, F.495, op.74, d.518, cited in Bernhard H. Bayerlein et al., ‘Pre´sentation’ in Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris – Berlin, 193– 204 (p. 203). Telegram 7 August 1940, in Peschanski (ed.), Moscou– Paris – Berlin, pp. 279– 81. Besse & Pennetier, Juin 40, pp. 22 –7. The words are by Gaston Plissonnier (11 July 1990). A film of a commemoration of the ‘Appeal’ can be viewed at: http://www.cinearchives.org/Films-447-338-0-0.html The text can be found in Besse & Pennetier, Juin 40, pp. 165– 75.

312 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

NOTES

TO PAGES

144 –154

Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 294– 5. Besse & Pennetier, Juin 40, pp. 164– 5. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 396– 9. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Dimitrov, Journal, p. 406. Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 187 & p. 374. Cahier, 13 September 1941, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Telegram Paul [Dimitrov], Stern [Thorez], Andre´ [Marty], 26 April 1941, Peschanski (ed.), Moscou– Paris – Berlin, pp. 402– 3. Joan Barth Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (London: I.B.Tauris, 1986), pp. 154– 61. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 210. Telegram, 2 April 1941, Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris –Berlin, p. 392. The young Maurice spent the remainder of the war in France. Susan B. Whitney, Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 173– 82; Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour une jeunesse heureuse (27 May 1937)’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 14, 25 – 34. 8 September 1942, Family Diary, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 210. Dimitrov, Journal, 22 June 1941, pp. 478–9. Stern & Andre´ to Yves [Duclos], 25 June 1941, Peschanski (ed.), Moscou – Paris– Berlin, pp. 441– 2. A note from Dimitrov to Beria, cited by Gae¨l Moullec, in Dimitrov, Journal, fn 1, pp. 480– 1. Dimitrov, Journal, 6 & 7 July 1941, pp. 485– 6. Ibid., 17 July, p. 491. Cited in Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War (New York, Random House, 2006), p. 177. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 538– 9. Ibid., 5 August 1942, p. 671. Ibid., 14 August 1942, pp. 680– 1. Cahier, 22 August 1942, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Ceretti [sic], A` l’Ombre des deux T, p. 290. Telegram, Yves [Jacques Duclos], 9 December 1941, Peschanski (ed.), Moscou-ParisBerlin, pp. 521– 3. Family Diary, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN, 626 AP 210. Dimitrov to Stalin, 3 December 1942, Dallin & Firsov (eds) Dimitrov and Stalin, pp. 200– 3. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, p. 447. Cited in Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 191. Family Diary, 19 February, 10 & 16 May, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 210. Youri Koslovsik, ‘Maurice Thorez Commentateur de Radio-Moscou en 1943– 1944’, Cahiers de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, 17 (1970), 109– 11. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, p. 448. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 803– 10. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997), p. 86. Dimitrov, Journal 11 February 1937, p.186. Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party, p. 155. Dimitrov, Journal, pp. 458– 60.

NOTES 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

TO PAGES

154 –164

313

Cahier, 21 April 1941, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Dimitrov, Journal, 12 June & 13 July 1943, pp. 823– 4 & 834– 5. Cahier, 21 August 1943, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Dimitrov, Journal, 11 June, p. 823. Cahier, 26 September 1943, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Cahier, 15 January 1944, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Dimitrov, Journal, 3 & 5 March 1944, pp. 889– 91. Discussion between Garreau and Thorez, 20 January 1944. Quoted in Philippe Buton, Les Lendemains qui de´chantent: Le Parti communiste francais a` la Libe´ration (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993), p. 63. Letter to Dimitrov, 19 April, cited in Buton, Les Lendemains, pp. 177– 8. Maurice Thorez, Un grand Francais vous parle: Allocations prononce´es au micro de Radio Moscou (Mai-Octobre 1944) (Paris: E´ditions du Parti Communiste Francais, 1945). See broadcasts on 13 July, 25 May, 27 July, 20 July. Buton, Les Lendemains, p. 142. See Ste´phane Courtois, ‘Thorez, Staline et la libe´ration de la France’ in Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise, 199– 212. A more sophisticated argument is in Buton, Les Lendemains. Duclos quoted in Jackson, France: The Dark Years, p. 575. De´claration du Bureau Politique, l’Humanite´, 3 November 1944. L’Humanite´, 5 November 1944. Dimitrov, Journal, 8, 11 & 17 November 1944, pp. 977– 9. ‘Notes de l’entretien du Cam. I.V. Staline avec le secre´taire ge´ne´ral du C. C. du Parti communiste francais le camarade Thorez’, Communisme, 45/46 (1996), pp. 22 – 9. Dimitrov, Journal, 19 November 1944, pp. 980– 1. Courtois, ‘Thorez, Staline’ p. 206. Ibid.

Chapter 6 In the Corridors of Power 1. Buton, Les Lendemains qui de´chantent, p. 127. 2. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 17 & p. 45. 3. George Ross, Workers and Communists in France: From Popular Front to Eurocommunism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 26– 8. 4. L’Humanite´, 5 October 1944. 5. Maurice Thorez, ‘Renaissance, De´mocratie, Unite´’, Une Politique de Grandeur Francaise (Paris, 1945), 261–366 (p. 343). 6. Matthew Cobb, Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944 (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013), pp. 346– 7. 7. Herve´ Alphand, cited in Anthony Beevor & Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation, 1944– 1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994), p. 137. 8. In 1946, the party used the phrase as title for a propaganda film. See Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives.org/Films-447-111-0-0.html 9. Cited in Buton, Les Lendemains, p. 294. 10. La cellule communiste de Sillans (Ise`re) a` Maurice Thorez Secre´taire Ge´ne´ral du PCF, 10 December 1944, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 75. 11. L’Humanite´, 1 December 1944. 12. Beevor, Paris, p. 136. 13. Central Committee, 21 –23 January 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3.

314

NOTES

TO PAGES

165 –174

14. Maurice Thorez, ‘Renaissance, De´mocratie, Unite´’, Une Politique de Grandeur Francaise (Paris 1945), 261– 366. 15. Central Committee, 18 May 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 16. Bruno Matte´i, ‘Apre`s la guerre . . . la bataille (1945 – 1947)’, Evelyne Desbois, Yves Jeanneau, Bruno Matte´i, La Foi des Charbonniers (Paris: E´ditions de la Maison des Science de l’Homme, 1986), 17 – 55. 17. ‘Produire, faire du charbon’ (21 July 1945), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 21 (Paris, E´ditions sociales, 1963), 137– 82. 18. A. Lecoeur, cited in Bruno Matte´i, ‘Apre`s la guerre’. 19. Sirot, Maurice Thorez, pp. 184– 6. 20. Rolande Trempe´, Les Trois batailles du charbon, 1936– 1946 (Paris: E´ditions La De´couverte, 1989), p. 90; Matte´i, ‘Apre`s la guerre’. 21. Central Committee, 3 –4 November 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 22. Central Committee, 18 May 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 23. Thorez, ‘Renaissance, De´mocratie, Unite´’, p. 357. 24. Olivier Wieviorka, ‘Replacement or Renewal? The French Political E´lite at the Liberation’, in Andrew Knapp (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2007), 75 – 86 (p. 79). 25. ‘Daily Digest of World Broadcast: de Gaulle-Thorez Correspondence, 15.11.45’, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 26. Agenda 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 227. 27. Agenda 1945 (21 November), Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 227. 28. The Times, 22 November 1945. 29. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 232. 30. Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944– 1958 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 98. 31. Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 226. 32. Annette Wieviorka, ‘L’Intimite´ dans un couple politique’, p. 119; Jean Chaintron, Le Vent soufflait devant ma porte (Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1993), pp. 266– 8. 33. See letters in Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 269. 34. L’Humanite´, 14 January 1946. 35. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 311. 36. Paul Thorez, Model Children, pp. 130– 1. 37. Rene´ Bidouze, ‘Le Statut General des fonctionnaires (1946 – 2006)’, Dossier, Les Cahiers de l’Institut CGT d’histoire social, no. 99 (2006); Sirot, Maurice Thorez, pp. 230– 5. 38. Georgette Elgey cited in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 232. 39. ‘Loi du 19 Octobre 1946 relative au Statut General des Fonctionnaires’, La Revue administrative (1996), pp. 84 – 97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40770442 40. Jeanne Siwek-Pouydesseau, Le Syndicalisme des Fonctionnaires jusqu’a` la guerre froide 1848– 1948 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1989), pp. 308– 15. 41. Central Committee, 18 May 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 42. Agenda 1945, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 227. 43. Claude Pennetier, ‘Andre´ Marty a` l’e´preuve des archives’, in Boulland, Pennetier & Vaccaro, Andre´ Marty: l’homme, l’affaire, l’archive, 15 –34 (p. 33). 44. Pennetier, ‘Andre´ Marty’, pp. 33 – 4. 45. Jean Boue, Secre´taire de la cellule du PCF de Salichan (May 1946), Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 46. Pierre Boivin, Secre´taire de la cellule de Vinneuf (16 May 1946), Archives ThorezVermeersch, 626 AN AP 3.

NOTES

TO PAGES

174 –180

315

47. Yves Santamaria, Le Parti de l’ennemi?: Le Parti communiste francais dans la lutte pour la paix, 1947– 58 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), pp. 31 – 2. 48. Central Committee, 15 – 16 June 1946, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/10. 49. Philippe Robrieux, Histoire inte´rieure du Parti communiste, vol. 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1981), pp. 121– 2. 50. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 294. 51. Time, 3 June 1946. 52. The Times, 18 November 1946. 53. William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944– 1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 54 –62. 54. M. Adereth, The French Communist Party, A Critical History (1920– 84): From Comintern to ‘the Colours of France’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 144 & pp. 208– 9. 55. See discussion in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, pp. 253– 74. 56. Buton, Les Lendemains, p. 298 & pp. 235– 64; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 242– 7. 57. Central Committee, 27 November 1946, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 58. Central Committee, 15 – 16 June 1946, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/10. 59. Central Committee, 27 November 1946, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 60. Ibid. 61. Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, p. 99. 62. Ibid. 63. Central Committee, 27 November 1946, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 3. 64. Buton, Les Lendemains, p. 13. 65. Sassoon, One Hundred Years, pp. 137– 66. 66. Central Committee, 15 – 16 June 1946, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/10. 67. ‘10th Congress of Communist Party, France, 3.6.1945’, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 68. Entretiens M. Thorez –Le´on Blum, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 67. 69. Central Committee, 18 January 1947, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/14. 70. Political Bureau, 17 April 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 71. Rene´ Dazy, La Partie et le tout: le PCF et la guerre franco-alge´rienne (Paris: Syllepse, 1990), pp. 32 – 4. 72. Political Bureau, 17 April 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 73. Central Committee 3 May 1947, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/16. 74. Central Committee, 18 January 1947, PCF Archives, 261 J2/14. 75. Central Committee, 3 May 1947, PCF Archives, 261 J2/16. 76. Revue Francaise du Travail (Presses Universitaires de France), June/July 1947, p. 620. 77. Secretariat, 13 January 1947, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J5/4. 78. Secretariat, 17 February 1947, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J5/4. 79. Confe´rence des Secre´taires Fe´de´raux, 15 March 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, 626 AP 224. 80. Andre´ Tiano, ‘L’Action des syndicats de la Re´gie National des usines Renault, 1945– 55’, Hubert Lesire-Ogrel, Michel Rocard & Andre´ Tiano (eds), Les Expe´riences francaises d’action syndicale ouvrie`re (Paris: E´ditions ouvrie`res, 1956) p. 33. 81. The figure was given by Benoıˆt Frachon at the May 1947 Central Committee. PCF Archives, 261 J2/16.

316

NOTES

TO PAGES

180 –188

82. On the pre-war history of the PCF at Renault see Jean-Paul Depretto & S. V. Schweitzer, Le Communisme a` l’usine: Vie ouvrie`re et mouvement ouvrier chez Renault 1920– 39 (Roubaix: EDIRES, 1984). 83. Claude Poperen, Renault: regards de l’inte´rieur (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1983), p. 45. 84. Tiano, ‘L’Action des syndicats’, p. 191. 85. L’Humanite´, 27/28 April 1947, p. 3; L’Humanite´, 29 April 1947, p. 1; Le Me´tallo, June 1947. 86. Frachon at the 3 May Central Committee, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/16. 87. Le Monde, 1/2 May, 1947. 88. The best account of the PCF’s relationship with the social conflict during 1947 is Robert Mencherini, Guerre Froide, Gre`ves Rouges, Parti communiste, Stalinisme et luttes sociales en France, Les Gre`ves ‘insurrectionnelles’ de 1947– 48 (Paris: E´ditions Syllepse, 1998). 89. Central Committee, 3 May 1947, PCF Archives, AD Saint-Seine-Denis, 261 J2/16. 90. Charles Tillon, On Chantait Rouge (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), p. 462. 91. Secre´tariat, 5 May 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 92. Secre´tariat, 8 July 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 93. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 261– 2. 94. Congre`s Strasbourg, 25 – 29 June 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 21. 95. Secre´tariat, 10 February 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 96. The film can be viewed at http://parcours.cinearchives.org/Les-films-758-745-0-0.html 97. Central Committee, 12 September 1947, PCF Archives, 261 J2/17. L’Humanite´, 18 September 1947. 98. Dimitrov, Journal (8 August 1947), p. 1244. 99. Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 80 – 7; Anna Di Biaglio, ‘The Establishment of the Cominform’ in Giuliano Procacci (ed.), The Cominform, Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994), 11 – 34 (p. 16). 100. Procacci (ed.), The Cominform, Minutes of the Three Conferences, pp. 223– 45. p. 428 & p. 369. 101. L’Humanite´, 22 September 1947. 102. Political Bureau, 3 October 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224.

Chapter 7

The Party of Maurice Thorez

1. L’Humanite´, 21 March 1950. 2. Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 57. 3. Maurice Thorez, Partisans de la Paix: Unissons-nous! (Paris: Parti communiste francais, 1949). 4. See essays in ‘Communism and the Leader Cult’, Twentieth Century Communism, No. 1 (2009). 5. As Morgan notes, Souvarine raised the idea in his biography of Stalin. Morgan, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual, pp. 140– 1. 6. L’Aurore, 23 June 1949. 7. Political Bureau, 3 October 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 8. See the account in Mencherini, Guerre Froide, Gre`ves Rouges, pp.191 – 95 & 258– 60. 9. Central Committee, 29 – 30 October 1947, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 261 J2/18 & Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 4.

NOTES

TO PAGES

189 –198

317

10. As Wieviorka remarks (p. 401), Thorez’s notes of the meeting are found inserted in one of his wartime notebooks (AN 626 AP 265), an indication of the extent to which the Cominform conference resurrected controversies of the war years. 11. Political Bureau, 30 October 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. 12. Ibid. 13. Thorez recorded details of his visit in a brown notebook. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 14. Mikhail Narinski, ‘L’Entretien entre Maurice Thorez et Joseph Staline du 18 Novembre 1947’, Communisme, 45/46 (1996), 31 – 4. 15. ‘Compte rendu de la rencontre entre le Cam. I.V. Staline et le secre´taire du C.C. du Parti communiste francais, Thorez’, Communisme, 45/46 (1996), 35 – 54. 16. L’Aube, 23 November 1947. 17. Edward Mortimer, ‘France’, in Martin McCauley (ed.), Communist Power in Europe, 1944– 1949 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 151– 67 (p. 165). 18. ‘Compte rendu’, p. 46 & p. 38. 19. Mencherini, Guerre Froide, Gre`ves Rouges, pp. 174– 204. 20. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 21. L’Humanite´, 5 December 1947. 22. ‘Discours Prononce´ a` He´nin-Lie´tard le 4 De´cembre 1947 par M. Maurice Thorez’, Archives de l’Office universitaire de recherche socialiste (L’OURS). 23. Le Monde, 8 December 1947. 24. Political Bureau, 11 December 1947; Re´union des Militants, 9 December 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 25. Mencherini, Guerre Froide, Gre`ves Rouges, pp. 235– 44. 26. Central Committee, 29 – 30 October 1947, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 4. 27. Political Bureau, 16 September 1948 & 29 July 1948, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 28. Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour de´velopper et gagner la bataille de la paix’, 29 September 1950 (PCF, 1950), p. 12. 29. Cited in Santamaria, Le Parti de l’ennemi?, p. 101. 30. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 465. 31. L’Humanite´, 6 November 1948. 32. Tillon, On Chantait Rouge, pp. 463– 79. Casanova criticised Farge’s negative approach towards the international peace movement at the BP on 8 September 1949, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 33. See the film made by Louis Daquin: http://www.cinearchives.org/Films-447-533-0-0. html 34. Political Bureau, 28 April 1950, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 35. See Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour de´velopper et gagner la bataille de la paix’, 29 September 1950 (PCF, 1950), and the speech delivered at Antony (February 1949), L’Humanite´, 17 February 1949. 36. L’Humanite´, 10 July 1948. 37. L’Humanite´, 31 October 1948. 38. L’Humanite´, 23 February 1949. 39. Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour de´velopper et gagner la bataille de la paix’, 29 September 1950 (PCF, 1950), pp. 11 –12. 40. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 18. 41. Political Bureau, 17 March 1949, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224.

318

NOTES

TO PAGES

198 –203

42. Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 106; Maurice Thorez, ‘Rapport pre´sente´ au XII Congre`s du Parti communiste francais a` Genevilliers’ (April 1950). 43. Geoffrey Swain, Tito: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), pp. 91 – 100. 44. Cited in Swain, Tito, pp. 94 – 5. 45. Political Bureau, 15 July 1949, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 224. 46. Rapport sur l’activite´ des Agents de Tito (26/8/49), Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 130. 47. Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour de´velopper et gagner la bataille de la paix’, 29 September 1950 (PCF, 1950), pp. 23 –4. 48. Santamaria, Le Parti de l’ennemi?, pp. 170– 1. 49. J. Stalin, ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1951)’, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems 50. Thorez, ‘Pour de´velopper et gagner la bataille de la paix’, p. 24. 51. Fernand Dupuy, Eˆtre maire communiste (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1975), pp. 36 – 40. 52. Guillaume Bourgeois, ‘Les me´tamorphoses du Beria francais’, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (ed.), Ouverture, Socie´te´, Pouvoir: De l’e´dit de Nantes a` la chute du communisme (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 193– 217 (pp. 195– 200). 53. Claude Harmel, ‘Henri Barbe´: Entretiens avec Auguste Lecoeur’, Les Cahiers d’Histoire Sociale, 12 (1999), 77 – 142 (p. 94). 54. The Secretariat was now made up of Thorez, Marty, Duclos and Lecoeur. 55. Santamaria, Le Parti de l’ennemi?, pp. 109– 111; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 273– 4. 56. A film of the events can be viewed at Cine´-Archives, the audio-visual archives of the PCF: http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue-d-exploitation-494-535-0-0.html 57. See the PCF film (written and narrated by Paul Eluard), ‘L’Homme que nous aimons le plus’: http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue-d-exploitation-494-1758-0-0.html 58. Jean Chaintron, Le Vent, pp. 292– 8. 59. Kevin Morgan, ‘Introduction: Stalinism and the Barber’s Chair’, Twentieth Century Communism, No. 1 (2009), 9 – 19 (p. 15). 60. ‘Sche´ma confe´rence de R. Guyot, 26 octobre 1951’, Fonds Guyot, Archives Seine-SaintDenis, 283 J 46. 61. L’Humanite´ 21 March 1950. 62. L’Humanite´, 22 September 1949. Fre´ville also published a collection of his own laudatory essays about the General Secretary: Jean Fre´ville, Avec Maurice Thorez (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1950). 63. Billoux, Note au secre´tariat du CC, 14.3.1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 212; & Notebook in AN 626 AP 211. 64. Chaintron, Le Vent, pp. 300– 3. 65. Daniel J. Mahoney, De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (New Jersey: Transaction, 2000), p. 68. 66. Daily Express, 12 October 1950. 67. Philipp O Valko & Christian R Baumann, ‘Sergej Nikolajevich Davidenkov (1880– 1961)’, Journal of Neurology (2011), 258 (pp. 338– 9). 68. For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, 24 November 1950. 69. Le Figaro, 12 November 1950. 70. La Liberte´, 25 November 1950. 71. Report to Miss M. J. E. Baget, MI5, 1 December 1950, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 72. La Liberte´, 25 November 1950.

NOTES

TO PAGES

204 –211

319

73. ‘France Communism: Illness of Maurice Thorez and its consequences’, 18 November 1950, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 74. Paul Thorez, Model Children, pp. 173– 4. 75. ‘France, Communism’, 12 May 1951, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 76. ‘DW line’, 21 June 1951, National Archives, KV 2/2168. 77. L’Humanite´, 7 February 1952. 78. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 448– 51, 457– 8 & 462– 4. 79. Central Committee, 7 – 8 September 1951, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 4. 80. Georges Cogniot, Parti Pris, tome 2: de la Libe´ration au Programme commun (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1976), pp. 257– 8. 81. Jeannine Verde`s-Leroux, ‘L’Art de parti: Le Parti communiste francais et ses peintres (1947 –1954)’, Actes de la recherche´ en sciences sociales, vol. 28, no. 1 (1979), 33 – 55, p. 40. 82. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 461– 2. 83. Tillon, On Chantait Rouge, p. 486. 84. ‘Bureau Politique du 11 Avril 1952’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 85. Francois Billoux, ‘Les taˆches du Parti deux ans apre`s le XIIe`me Congre`s: Organiser et diriger l’action unie des masses pour imposer une politique de paix et d’inde´pendance nationale’, Cahiers du Communisme, No 5, May 1952, 453– 68. 86. Wievrioka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 465; Courtois et Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 276. 87. ‘Bureau Politique du 11 Avril 1952’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 88. Billoux, ‘Les taˆches du Parti’, pp. 458– 9, p. 467, pp. 465– 6. 89. Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue, pp. 565– 6; Footage of the demonstration can be viewed at Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue_d_exploitation-494188-0-0.html 90. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 467. 91. L’Humanite´, 4 September 1952. 92. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 473– 4. 93. Louis Aragon, ‘Il revient’, L’Homme communiste (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2012), pp. 477– 9. 94. For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy, 17 October 1952. 95. Jonathan Brent & Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London: John Murray, 2003), p. 212 & p. 228. 96. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 475– 7 & pp. 481– 2. 97. Pennetier, ‘Andre´ Marty a` l’e´preuve des archives’, in Boulland, Pennetier & Vaccaro, Andre´ Marty: l’homme, l’affaire, l’archive, 15 – 34 (pp. 20 – 1). 98. For Marty’s account see Andre´ Marty, L’Affaire Marty (Paris: Deux Rives, 1955). 99. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 209 & ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, AN 626 AP 225. 100. Harmel, ‘Henri Barbe´: Entretiens avec Auguste Lecoeur’, p. 93. 101. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: The Bodley Head, 2009), pp. 222– 3. 102. Leishman, 26 March 1953, National Archives, FO 371/104130. 103. Sir Oliver Harvey, 27 March 1953, National Archives, FO 371/104130. 104. Ibid. 105. Handwritten note, 28 March 1953, National Archives, FO 371/104130. 106. Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1953. 107. Jacques Denis, ‘Maurice Thorez: Tel que je l’ai connu’, L’Humanite´ Dimanche, no. 269 (1970), Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 206.

320

NOTES

TO PAGES

211 – 219

108. The film can be viewed at: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/thorez-hideoutdiscovered/query/photography 109. Interview with Pierre Thorez: http://www.fonds-thorez.ivry94.fr/expo/entretien.swf 110. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 19 July 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 111. Paul Thorez, Model Children, p. 163. 112. See letters in Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 221; Letter to Yves Montand, 27 December 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 287. 113. Bernard Pudal, ‘La Bibliothe`que de Maurice Thorez, un intellectuel de type nouveau (premiers e´le´ments d’enqueˆte)’, Sie`cles, Cahiers du Centre d’histoire ‘Espaces et Cultures’, 29 (2009), 83 – 96. 114. Paul Thorez, Une voix presque mienne, p. 70. 115. Thorez phones her on 18 February 1955 to ensure that the reasons for the communist vote against the investiture of Christian Pineau as prime minister are ‘explained’ and on 28 July ‘helps prepare her report’ on the relationship between Yugoslavia and other countries in socialist camp. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 116. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 20 November 1954 & 5 March 1954. 117. ‘Maurice Thorez to Secre´tariat du Comite´ Central’, 21 May 1955, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. 118. See Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges: Les Partis communistes francais et italien de la Libe´ration a` nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), pp. 82 – 8; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 300 – 2; Bourgeois, ‘Les me´tamorphoses du Beria francais’, pp. 202 – 15. 119. Billoux, ‘Les taˆches du Parti’, p. 465. 120. Guillaume Bourgeois, ‘Les Brise´es d’Auguste Lecoeur’, Communisme, no. 55– 56 (1998), 183– 253. 121. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 426. 122. Notes of Thorez’s speech, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. 123. Maurice Thorez, ‘La situation e´conomique de la France (mystifications et re´alite´s)’ in La Paupe´risation des travailleurs francais: Une tragique re´alite´ (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1961), 27 – 67. 124. L’Humanite´, 5 November 1955. 125. Le Courrier de l’Ouest, 30 October 1953, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 58. 126. Thorez noted the article in his diary on 18 November 1953. 127. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 12 January 1954. 128. Ibid., 18 June 1954. 129. L’Humanite´, 28 October & 25 November 1954. 130. Ross, Workers and Communists, p. 79. 131. K.V. Ostrovityanov et al., Political Economy: A Textbook issued by the Institute of Economics the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957). 132. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 6 December 1954. 133. Thorez, ‘La situation e´conomique de la France (mystifications et re´alite´s)’. 134. ‘Intervention du Camarade Thorez au BP’, 28 April 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. 135. Ibid. 136. ‘Nouvelles donne´es sur la paupe´risation. Re´ponse a` Mende`s-France’, La Paupe´risation des travailleurs francais, pp. 69– 105 (p. 105). 137. Magri, The Tailor of Ulm, p. 82.

NOTES

TO PAGES

220 –227

321

Chapter 8 The Trauma of 1956 1. Roger Martelli, 1956 Communiste: Le glas d’une espe´rance (Paris: La Dispute, Paris, 2006), p. 128; Sergey Radchendko, ‘1956’ in Stephen A. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 140– 55. 2. Political Bureau, 14 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 3. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 29 & 31 December 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 4. Vittorio Vidali, Diary of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London: Journeyman Press, 1974), p. 39. 5. Ibid., p. 9. 6. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 7. Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954 – 63, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 8. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central’, 9 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 9. Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954 – 63, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. Political Bureau, 13 March 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 10. Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954 – 63, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 11. Letter to Brigitte and Jean Massin, 12 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 287. 12. Ibid. 13. ‘Le congre`s des baˆtisseurs du Communisme’, Compte-rendu de Jacques Duclos, Salle Wagram, le 9 mars 1956’, Supple´ment a` France Nouvelle, 17 March 1956. 14. Martelli, 1956 Communiste, p 41; Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 542. 15. Thorez’s contribution at the meeting was typed up but this section excluded from the final text. It remains, however, in the notes on which Thorez based his contribution. Political Bureau, 13 March 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 16. Political Bureau, 13 March 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 17. Central Committee, 9– 10 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 18. Lazar, Maisons Rouges, p. 91. 19. See excerpt in Martelli, 1956 Communiste, pp. 179– 81. 20. Interviews with Jean Pronteau and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, translated from Politique Hebdo and published in The Socialist Register, vol. 13 (1976), 58 –66. 21. Martelli, 1956 Communiste, pp. 179– 81. 22. Pierre Hentge`s, l’Humanite´, 20 March 1956, republished in Martelli, 1956 Communiste, pp. 176– 9. 23. L’Humanite´, 27 March 1956. 24. Giulio Ceretti [sic], A` l’Ombre des deux T, p. 343. 25. Ibid., p. 345. 26. Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954 – 63, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 27. Interview in Nuovi Argomenti, quoted in Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 237. 28. Jean Fre´ville, La Mise`re et le nombre (1. L’E´pouvantail malthusien) (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1956). 29. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 9 January 1954, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225.

322 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

NOTES

TO PAGES

228 –233

See the account of this affair in Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 561–98. L’Humanite´, 2 May 1956. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 597– 8. L’Humanite´, 18 May 1956. J. Vermeersch, ‘Note au Secre´tariat’, 16 April 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 187. Commission de travail des me´decins communistes, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 187. David L. Hoffmann, ‘Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 1 (2000), 35 – 54 (p. 39). Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando: Academic Press, 1985), p. 18. Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that ‘the government under which, without external aids, without naturalisation or colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most is beyond question the best. The government under which a people wanes and diminishes is the worst.’ The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Everyman 1993), p. 256. Richard Tomlinson, ‘The “Disappearance” of France, 1896– 1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate’, The Historical Journal, vol. 28, no. 2 (1985), 405–15 (p. 414 & p. 405). Quoted in Teitelbaum and Winter, The Fear, p. 36. Marie-Monique Huss, ‘Pronatalism in the Inter-War Period in France’ Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 25, no 1 (1990), 39 – 68 (p. 52 & p. 41). ‘Rapport pre´sente´ au VIIIe congre`s du Parti communiste francais (22 January 1936)’ in Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 11, Janvier-Mai 1936 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1953), 9 – 128 (p. 41). Thorez, Stage Saint Denis, 14 April 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. Cellule Pierre Rouques de la Policlinique des Oeuvres Sociales des Services Publiques, 30 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 187. Commission de travail des me´decins communistes, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 187. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 305. Sandra Fayolle, ‘Le de´bat sur le birth control: une simple diversion?’ in Pascal Carreau (ed.), Le Parti communiste francais et l’anne´e 1956 (Paris: Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2007), 105– 13. Thorez, Stage Saint Denis, 14 April 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. Secre´tariat 19 April 1956, Fonds Gaston Plissonnier, Archives De´partementales Seine Saint-Denis, 264 J 18. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central, 9 Mai 1956’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. Re´union du Bureau politique du 5 janvier 1977, Fonds Gaston Plissonnier, Archives De´partementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, 264 J 18. Lorenz M Lu¨hi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 50. ‘On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/ international/Comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/hedp.htm Thorez’s notes of CC 9/10 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central, 9 Mai 1956’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 6 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. Political Bureau, 14 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. Political Bureau, 18 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13.

NOTES TO PAGES 233 –242

323

57. ‘Rapport du Camarade Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central du 22/6/56’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 58. ‘Intervention du Camarade Maurice Thorez a` la Se´ance du Bureau Politique’, 14 June 1956, Archives Thorez- Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 59. ‘Intervention au Comite´ Central, 4. 6. 1956’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 131. 60. ‘Intervention du Camarade Maurice Thorez a` la Se´ance du Bureau Politique’, 14 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 61. Political Bureau, 18 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 62. Central Committee, 22 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 63. Ibid. 64. Roberts, Molotov, p. 177. 65. See extracts in Martelli, 1956 Communiste, pp. 130– 5. 66. Political Bureau, 4 July 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 67. Maurice Thorez, ‘Pour un avenir de progre`s social de paix et de grandeur national’, XIVe congre`s du Parti communiste francais, Le Havre 18 –21 juillet 1956, Cahiers du Communisme nume´ro spe´cial (1956), 23 – 67 (p. 63). 68. Utley, Picasso, p. 135 & p. 177. 69. Georges Laporte, Me´nilmontant, Les Lettres Francaises, 26 March 1953. 70. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 489– 502. 71. Andre Fougeron, Au secre´tariat du PCF, 13 March 1953, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 52. 72. ‘Maurice a` Jacques, 29.III.53’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 52. 73. Central Committee, 20 – 21 November 1956, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 4AV/3706. 74. Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, pp. 514– 6. 75. Central Committee 20 –21 November 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 76. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 24 October 1956. 77. Jean-Pierre Bernard, ‘Novembre 1956 a` Paris’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, vol. 30, no. 1 (1991), 68 – 81. 78. Agosti, Togliatti, pp. 243– 4. 79. Swain, Tito, p. 124. 80. Central Committee, 20 – 21 November 1956, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 4AV/3706. 81. Aime´ Ce´saire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ (translation Chike Jeffers), Social Text, vol. 28, no. 2 (2010), 145– 52. 82. Agosti, Togliatti, pp. 242– 3. 83. Central Committee, 20 – 21 November 1956, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 4AV/3706. 84. Political Bureau, 21 November 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 85. Utley, Picasso, pp. 197– 201. 86. Ibid., p. 201. 87. The list includes Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Victor Ledruc, Annie Kriegel, Roger Vailland. 88. Jean Chaintron, Le Vent, pp. 367– 9. 89. Maurice Thorez, ‘La Force de l’Unite´ du Parti’, l’Humanite´, 15 November 1956. 90. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 66. 91. Political Bureau, 27 December 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 92. Helena Lewis, ‘Elsa Triolet: The Politics of a Committed Writer’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 9. no. 4 (1986), 385– 94.

324

NOTES

TO PAGES

242 –251

93. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 9 & 17 July 1957, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 94. Political Bureau, 9 April 1957, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 14. 95. Roberts, Molotov, p. 184. 96. Thorez’s contributions to Political Bureau, 3 July 1957 (Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 14) and Central Committee, 4 – 5 July 1957 (PCF Archives, AD Seine-SaintDenis, 4 AV/3730). 97. ‘Declaration of Communist and Workers’ Parties of Socialist Countries’, November 1957. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/Comintern/sino-soviet-split/ other/1957declaration.htm 98. Lu¨thi, The Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 65 – 7 & p. 77. 99. Cahier-Journal de la main droite, 16 & 19 November 1957, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 100. Political Bureau, 3 July 1957, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 14.

Chapter 9 Algeria and de Gaulle 1. Cahier, Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 2. ‘Conversation avec Servin, 9. 1. 59’. Cahier, ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, 626 AP 226. 3. Cahier, Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch AN 626 AP 226. 4. Thorez to Marcel Servin, 7 January 1959, Cahier, Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 5. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 9 December 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 6. Central Committee, 3– 4 October 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 6. 7. Central Committee, 19 –20 May 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 8. Central Committee, 3– 4 October 1958. 9. Kedward, La Vie en Bleu, p. 138. 10. Danie`le Joly, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 29. 11. Alan Adler (ed.), ‘Resolution of the Fourth World Congress on the French Question’, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (London: Inks Link, 1980) 346– 54 (p. 354). 12. ‘Re´solution pour la Commission coloniale’, Ve`me Congre`s National du Parti Communiste Francais, Tenu a` Lille du 20 au 26 Juin 1926, Compte rendu ste´nographique (Paris, Bureau d’e´ditions de diffusion et de publicite´, 1927), pp. 695– 7. 13. Allison Drew, We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 46– 50. 14. Carnet 1933, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 222. 15. Drew, We are no longer in France, pp. 62 –7, 70 – 1. 16. Ibid., pp. 89 – 98. 17. Maurice Thorez, ‘La France du Front Populaire et sa mission dans le monde’ (December 1937), Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 14 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1954), 199– 318 (pp. 280– 1). 18. ‘Le Voyage de Maurice Thorez en Alge´rie’, http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue-dexploitation-494-65-0-0.html 19. Maurice Thorez, ‘Le Peuple alge´rien uni autour de la France’, Œuvres de Maurice Thorez, tome 16 (Paris: E´ditions sociales, 1956), 171– 87 (p. 184).

NOTES

TO PAGES

251 – 257

325

20. Stalin, ‘Marxism and The Nation Question (1913)’, available at Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm 21. Le´on Feix, ‘Quelques vues sur le proble`me alge´rien’, Cahiers du Communisme, September 1947, cited in Rene´ Dazy, La Partie et le tout: Le PCF et la guerre franco-alge´rienne (Paris: E´ditions Syllepse, 1990), p. 45. 22. Political Bureau, 26 – 27 January 1955, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 23. L’Humanite´, 5 November 1956. 24. Alain Ruscio, ‘Les Communistes francais et la guerre d’Alge´rie, 1956’, in Carreau (ed.), Le Parti communiste francais et l’anne´e 1956, 79 – 89 (pp. 80 – 1). 25. L’Humanite´, 7 March 1956, cited in Ruscio, ‘Les Communistes francais’, p. 81. 26. Pierre Lareppe, Le De´bat communiste, 15 April 1963, cited in Dazy, La Partie et le tout, p. 101. 27. Political Bureau, 13 March 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 28. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central’, 9 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 29. Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 167– 72. 30. Marc Giovaninetti, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et les soldats du contingent pendant la guerre d’Alge´rie: proˆner l’insoumission ou accepter la mobilisation ?’, Le Mouvement Social 2015/2 (no. 251), 75 – 97 (p. 78). 31. Drew, We are no longer in France, pp. 203– 5, 219–20. 32. Evans, Algeria, p. 224. 33. Political Bureau, 20 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 13. 34. ‘Intervention devant le Comite´ Central et le Groupe parlementaire’, 5 June 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 35. Thomas Gomart, ‘Geˆner sans pe´naliser: l’utilisation du dossier alge´rien par la diplomatie sovie´tique, 1958– 62’, Communisme, 74/75 (2003), 131– 52 (pp. 134– 5). 36. Stage Saint-Denis, 14 April 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202; Joly, The French Communist Party, p. 80 & p. 93. 37. Central Committee, 3– 4 October 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 6. 38. Evans, Algeria, pp. 233– 4. 39. Central Committee. 25 – 26 March 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 6. 40. Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 494. 41. Charles de Gaulle, Le Fil de l’E´pe´e, cited in Courtois, ‘Gaullisme et communisme: le double re´ponse a` la crise de l’identite´ francaise’, Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise, 242– 68 (p. 261). 42. Jonathan Fenby, The General Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 4 – 5. 43. Marie-Pierre Rey, ‘De Gaulle, French Diplomacy and Franco-Soviet Relations as seen from Moscow’, in Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher and Garret Martin (eds), Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Relations, 1958– 1969 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 25 – 42 (p. 28). 44. Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 255. 45. Central Committee, 10 June 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermmersch, AN 626 AP 6. 46. Rey, ‘De Gaulle, French Diplomacy’, pp. 28 – 9. 47. Gomart, ‘Geˆner sans pe´naliser’, p. 136. 48. Central Committee, 10 June 1958 & 2 July 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 6. 49. Political Bureau, 20 September 1958, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 14.

326

NOTES

TO PAGES

257 –267

50. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 23 November 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 51. ‘Ste´nogramme de l’Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central’, 9 – 10 May 1956, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 5. 52. Notes attaining to Political Bureau, November 1958– March 1959, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. 53. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 13 February 1959. 54. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 17 March 1959; ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 55. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 327– 8. 56. Political Bureau, 3 October 1957, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 14. 57. ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 58. Thorez took detailed notes of the letter. Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 59. Thorez to Servin, 7 January 1959, Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 60. ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 61. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 331. 62. ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, 626 AP 226. 63. Notes of discussion between Servin and Thorez, 28 January 1960, Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954–63, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 64. ‘BP 19.III’, Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 65. Central Committee 19 – 20 March 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 66. Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Me´moires Rebelles (Paris: E´ditions Odile Jacob, 1999), p. 147. 67. Kedward, La Vie en Bleu, pp. 372– 9; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), pp. 324– 43. 68. France Nouvelle, 28 January 1960; Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 328– 9. 69. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 20 July 1959. 70. Central Committee, 2 –3 November 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 71. Political Bureau, 16 June 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 72. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 24 June 1960. 73. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 30 April 1959. 74. Evans, Algeria, pp. 261– 76. 75. Cited in Robrieux, Maurice Thorez, p. 529. 76. Central Committee, 2 –3 November 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 77. The remark was by Fajon at the Political Bureau on 1 October 1959, summing up the tone of the discussion. 78. Central Committee, 2 –3 November 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 7. 79. Notes of discussion between Servin and Thorez, 28 January 1960, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 80. Central Committee, 2 – 3 February 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 81. Political Bureau 28 & 30 January 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16; Central Committee, 2 – 3 February 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 82. Political Bureau, 28 January 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 83. Central Committee, 2 – 3 February 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 84. Joly, The French Communist Party, pp. 122– 4. 85. Dazy, La Partie et le tout, p. 82. 86. Central Committee, 16 –17 September 1957, PCF archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 4AV/3747.

NOTES

TO PAGES

267 –275

327

87. Giovaninetti, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et les soldats’, p. 90. 88. Speech in Saint-Denis in 1960. Quoted in Ibid., p. 92. 89. Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954 – 1962) (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Herve´ Hamon & Patrick Rotman, Les Porteurs de valises: La re´sistance francaise a` la Guerre d’Alge´rie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979), pp. 393–6. 90. Central Committee, 14 October 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 91. Political Bureau, 6 October 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 92. Casanova at Political Bureau, 14 October 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 93. Central Committee, 14 October 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 94. ‘Secre´tariat-BP anne´e 1959’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 95. Central Committee, 24 February 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 9. 96. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 12 September 1959, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 97. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 24 & 25 March 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 98. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 17 May 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 99. Political Bureau, 22 June 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 100. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 28 June 1960; Lu¨hi, The Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 167– 74. 101. Political Bureau, 22 June 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 16. 102. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 21 July – 10 August 1960, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 103. Carnet, ‘Rappel d’e´ve´nements d’e´poques diverses’ 1954 – 63, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 226. 104. Ibid. 105. Tony Benn, Years of Hope, Diaries, Letters and Papers 1940– 1962 (London: Hutchinson, 1994), p. 341. 106. Central Committee, 15 December 1960, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 8. 107. ‘Intervention du Camarade Maurice Thorez a` la Confe´rence des Partis Communistes et Ouvriers (Moscou Novembre 1960), Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 34. 108. ‘Confe´rences et rencontres internationales 1947– 1976’, Fonds Guyot, PCF Archives, AD Seine-Saint-Denis, 283 J 34. 109. ‘Declaration of Central Committee’, l’Humanite´, 16 January 1961. 110. Central Committee, 13 –15 January 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 9. 111. Political Bureau, 10 January 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 17. 112. Political Bureau, 24 February 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, 626 AP 17. 113. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 26 November 1960. 114. Political Bureau, 24 February 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, 626 AP 17. 115. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 27 February 1961.

Chapter 10

Final Years and Legacy

1. Jean Vigreux, Waldeck Rochet: Une Biographie Politique (Paris, La Dispute, 2000), p. 195. 2. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 4 & 30 January 1962. 3. Jean-Paul Brunet, Police contre FLN: Le drame d’octobre 1961 (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). 4. Central Committee, 22 March 1962, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 11. 5. ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central, 31 Mai 1962’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 11.

328

NOTES

TO PAGES

276 –281

6. Central Committee, 13 –14 December 1962, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 11. 7. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 16 & 18 November 1962, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 225. 8. Central Committee, 6 October 1963, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 12. 9. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 66. 10. ‘Intervention au Comite´ Central (26 novembre 1961) par Maurice Thorez’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 10. 11. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 21 July – 7 August & 1 November 1961. 12. Roberts, Molotov, p. 188. 13. Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 272. 14. Political Bureau, 14 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 17. 15. Political Bureau, 7 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 17; ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Bureau Politique’, 14 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 10. 16. ‘Whence the Differences? A Reply to Thorez and Other Comrades’ (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/ Comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/replytothorez.htm 17. ‘Intervention au Comite´ Central (26 novembre 1961) par Maurice Thorez’, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 10. 18. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 17 November 1961 & 14 June 1962. 19. ‘Intervention au Comite´ Central (26 novembre 1961) par Maurice Thorez’. 20. L’Humanite´, 28 April 1960. 21. ‘Hommage a` Maurice Thorez pour son 60e`me anniversaire, Clugnat’, Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives.org/Films-447-1618-0-0.html 22. ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Bureau Politique’, 14 November 1961. 23. Letter to E´tienne Fajon, 18 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 202. 24. Central Committee, 13 –14 December 1962, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 11. 25. Central Committee 8 – 10 May 1963, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 12. 26. Central Committee, 13 –14 December 1962, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 11. 27. ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central 31 Mai 1962’. 28. ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Bureau Politique’, 14 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 10. 29. Central Committee, 25 – 27 November 1961, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch AN 626 AP 10. 30. Central Committee, 8– 10 May 1963, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 12. 31. ‘Intervention de Maurice Thorez au Comite´ Central 31 Mai 1962’, Archives ThorezVermeersch, AN 626 AP 11. 32. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 25 November 1962. 33. Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 56. 34. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 3 June 1963. 35. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 26 September 1963 & 3 January 1964. 36. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 25 April 1963. 37. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 16 November 1963. 38. ‘Les nouveaux statuts’, Cahiers du Communisme, nume´ro spe´cial, juin – juillet 1964, pp. 484– 97. 39. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 23 & 24 April 1961.

NOTES 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

TO PAGES

282 –288

329

‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 15 July 1961. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 23 July 1962. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 13 – 24 April 1962. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 17 April 1961. Stephen Lovell, ‘Thirty Years of Moscow Art, Art Exhibition Soviet Union 1962’, in Derek Jones (ed.), Censorship: A World Encyclopaedia (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2422; Encounter, April 1963. Available at: http://soviethistory.msu.edu/ 1961-2/khrushchev-on-the-arts/khrushchev-on-the-arts-texts/khrushchev-onmodern-art/ Paul Thorez, Une voix presque mienne, p. 72. Cited in Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette, p. 517. Paul Thorez, Une voix presque mienne, p. 76. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 31 January 1963 & 6 February 1963. ‘Cahier-journal de la main droite’, 18 March 1963. ‘Rapport de la Commission des Mandats’, Cahiers du Communisme, nume´ro spe´cial, juin – juillet 1964, 532–6. Te´moignage Chre´tien, 21 May 1964; Paris-Presse, L’Intransigeant, 21 May 1964. ‘Les Premie`res de´cisions du Comite´ Central’, Cahiers du Communisme, nume´ro spe´cial, juin-juillet 1964, 547– 51. Le Monde, 19 May 1964. Maurice Thorez, ‘Discours de Cloˆture’, Cahiers du Communisme, nume´ro spe´cial, juin – juillet 1964, 552–65. Le Populaire, 19 May 1964. Le Monde 14 May 1964; Paris Match, 30 May 1964. ‘Rapport du Comite´ Central pre´sente´ par Waldeck Rochet’, ‘Cahiers du Communisme, nume´ro spe´cial, juin-juillet 1964, 12 – 106 (p. 106); ‘L’E´lection du Comite´ Central pre´sente´ par Gaston Plissonnier’, Ibid., 545– 51 (p. 551). France Nouvelle, 21 July 1964. Paul Thorez, Une voix presque mienne, p. 88. Jean-Pierre Bernard, ‘La Liturgie fune`bre des communistes’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, vol. 9, no. 1 (1986), 37 – 52 (p. 38). Footage can be viewed at http://www.cinearchives.org/Catalogue-d-exploitation-494245-0-0.html L’Express 16 July 1964, L’Aurore, 22 July 1964, Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 207. Much of the argument that follows is influenced by Sirot, Maurice Thorez, pp. 144– 61. Cahiers du Communisme, August – September, 1964, pp. 8 – 37. Georges Cogniot & Victor Joannes, Maurice Thorez: l’homme, le militant (Paris: Editions sociales, 1970), Cogniot, Parti Pris (tome 2), p. 478. Le Chanois’s letter (4 March 1965) and other documents are conserved in Archives Thorez-Vermeersch, AN 626 AP 265. Courtois & Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, pp. 334– 6; Jean Vigreux, Waldeck Rochet, pp. 231– 2. Vigreux, Waldeck Rochet, p. 231. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 280. Cited in Sirot, Maurice Thorez, p. 148. Extracts of Marchais’s speech can be viewed at Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives. org/Catalogue-d-exploitation-494-285-0-0_printv.html

330

NOTES

TO PAGES

288 –291

74. Jean Gacon, ‘E´le´ments pour un portrait politique de Maurice Thorez’, Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, no. 7 (1974), 7 – 20 (p. 15). 75. Martelli, Prendre sa carte, p. 66. 76. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 282. 77. ‘70e`me Anniversaire du PCF (Spectacle a` Bercy): Re´volutionnaire, 1920–1970.’ Available at Cine´-Archives: http://www.cinearchives.org/recherche-avancee-70EME-ANNIVERSAIREDU-P.C.F.-_SPECTACLE-A-BERCY_-424-418-0-13.html?ref¼6b2e25c8c02290aa1a4 c9e5eec59d206 78. Robert Hue, Communisme: La Mutation (Paris: E´ditions Stock, 1995). 79. Robert Hue, ‘Maurice Thorez, un homme d’E´tat’, Nouvelles FondationS 2007/1 (n8 5), 86 – 91. 80. Le Poˆle de Renaissance Communiste en France, January 2004. See http://prcf-38.overblog.net/article-2833838.html 81. Vive le PCF, 11 July 2014: http://vivelepcf.fr/3154/commemorer-maurice-thorez-190011-juillet-1964-une-necessite-pour-le-pcf-et-les-communistes/ 82. See, for example, the programme for the festival in 2012. 83. Laurent Herblay, ‘Le Front National, re´incarnation du Parti communiste’, AgoraVox, 10 October 2015. 84. Gaspard Koenig, ‘Cette rose bleue du FN qui sent bon le communisme’, Contrepoints, 21 November 2016. 85. Sylvain Boulouque, ‘Le Front de Gauche: Le ‘National-thore´zisme’ comme mode`le’, Nouvel Observateur, 20 April 2012. 86. Cahiers du Communisme, May 1960, p. 833.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography lists the most important archival sources and scholarly studies that have been used while writing this book. It does not include works by Thorez and other PCF leaders or memoirs by communist activists, full details of which can be found in the endnotes.

Principal archival sources Archives de´partementales de l’Aisne (Laon) Archives de´partementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis (Bobigny) PCF Archives Archives de´partementales du Nord (Lille) Archives de´partementales du Pas-de-Calais (Arras) Archives municipales d’Ivry-sur-Seine (Ivry) Fonds Thorez-Vermeersch Archives Nationales (Paris) Fonds Thorez-Vermeersch Ministe`re de Justice Centre d’Histoire social du XXe`me sie`cle (Paris) Fonds Marty Cine´-Archives, the audio-visual archives of the PCF: http://www.cinearchives.org Institut d’histoire sociale, La Souvarine (Nanterre) L’Office universitaire de recherche socialiste (OURS) Thorez dossier National Archives (London) Security Service files Foreign Office Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) (Moscow) Students of French communism have available some invaluable online sources. The communist press (up to 1944) can be consulted through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France. The archives of the Communist International and the PCF (1922 – 39) can be accessed through PANDOR, a portal managed by the University of Bourgogne. The audio-visual archives of the PCF can be viewed on the Cine´-Archives website (www.cinearchives.org).

332

MAURICE THOREZ

Scholarly books and articles Adereth, Maxwell, The French Communist Party, A Critical History (1920 – 84): From Comintern to ‘the Colours of France’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Adler, Alan (ed.), Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (London: Inks Link, 1980). Agosti, Aldo, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008). Banac, Ivo (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933– 1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Beaumont, Thomas, ‘International communism in interwar France, 1919– 36’ in Ludivine Broch & Alison Carrol (eds), France in an Era of Global War, 1914– 1945: Occupation, Politics, Empire and Entanglements (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 92 –110. Becker, Jean-Jacques & Serge Berstein, Histoire de l’anti-communisme, tome 1: 1917– 1940 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1987). Beevor, Anthony & Artemis Cooper, Paris after the Liberation, 1944– 1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994). Bellanger, Emmanuel & Julian Mischi (eds), Les Territoires du communisme: E´lus locaux, politiques publiques et sociabilite´s militantes (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013). Bernard, Jean-Pierre, ‘La Liturgie fune`bre des communistes’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, vol. 9, no. 1 (1986), 37 – 52. ——— ‘Novembre 1956 a` Paris’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, vol. 30, no 1 (1991), 68 – 81. Besse, Jean-Pierre & Claude Pennetier, Juin 40: La ne´gociation secre`te (Paris: E´ditions de l’Atelier/ E´ditions ouvrie`res, 2006). Bidouze, Rene´, ‘Le Statut General des fonctionnaires (1946– 2006)’, Dossier, Les Cahiers de l’Institut CGT d’histoire social, no. 99 (2006). Birnbaum, Pierre, Le´on Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Boswell, Laird, Rural Communism in France (London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Bougard, Pierre & Alain Bolibos, Le Pas-de-Calais de la pre´histoire a` nos jours (Saint-Jeand’Ange´ly: E´ditions Bordessoules, 1988). Bouju, Marie-Ce´cile, Lire en communiste: Les Maisons d’e´dition du Parti communiste francais (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2010). Boulland, Paul, Des vies en rouge. Militants, cadres et dirigeants du PCF, 1944– 1981 (Paris, E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2016). Boulland, Paul, Claude Pennetier & Rossana Vaccaro (eds), Andre´ Marty: l’homme, l’affaire, l’archive (Paris: Codhos, 2005). Boulouque, Sylvain, L’Affaire de l’Humanite´ (Paris: Larousse, 2010). Bourderon, Roger, Le PCF a` l’e´preuve de la guerre, 1940– 1943: De la guerre impe´rialiste a` la lutte arme´e (Paris: E´ditions Syllepse, 2012). Bourgeois, Guillaume, ‘Les Brise´es d’Auguste Lecoeur’, Communisme, no. 55–56 (1998), 183–253. ——— ‘Les Me´tamorphoses du Beria francais’ in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (ed.), Ouverture, Socie´te´, Pouvoir: De l’e´dit de Nantes a` la chute du communisme (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 193– 217. Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War (New York, Random House, 2006). Brent, Jonathan & Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London: John Murray, 2003). Broue´, Pierre, Trotsky (Paris: Fayard, 1988). Brower, Daniel R., The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968). Brown, Archie, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: The Bodley Head, 2009). Brunet, Jean-Paul, Police contre FLN: Le drame d’octobre 1961 (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). Bulaitis, John, Communism in Rural France: French Agricultural Workers and the Popular Front (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008). Buton, Philippe, ‘Le Parti, la guerre et la re´volution 1939– 40’, Communisme, 32 – 34 (1993), 41 – 67.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

333

——— Les Lendemains qui de´chantent: Le Parti communiste francais a` la Libe´ration (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993). Carreau, Pascal (ed.), Le Parti communiste francais et l’anne´e 1956 (Paris: Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2007). Chaigneau, Jean-Louis, ‘Cours Nouveau et l’Exclusion de Souvarine’, Les Cahiers d’Histoire Sociale, no. 12 (1999), 43 – 57. Chambarlhac, Vincent, ‘L’He´roı¨sation. Repre´senter, ne´cessite´ du Rassemblement populaire’, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, 103 (2008), 55 – 71. Cobb, Matthew, Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944 (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013). Codaccioni, Vanessa, Punir les opposants. PCF et proce`s politiques (1947 – 1962) (Paris: CNRS E´ditions, 2013). Courban, Alexander, Gabriel Peri: Un Homme politique, un depute´, un journaliste (Paris: La Dispute, 2011). Courcelle-Labrousse, Vincent & Nicolas Marmie´, La Guerre du Rif: Maroc 1921– 26 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). Courtois, Ste´phane, ‘Chronique de l’historiographie du Parti communiste francais’, in Courtois (ed.), Communisme en France: de la re´volution documentaire au renouveau historiographique (Paris: E´ditions CUJAS, 2007), 5 – 44. ——— Le Bolchevisme a` la Francaise (Paris: Fayard, 2010). ———, Du Passe´, faisons table rase! Histoire et me´moire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002). Courtois, Ste´phane (ed.), Le Livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur et re´pression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997). Courtois, Ste´phane & Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste francais (2nd edn) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Cre´mieux, Francois & Jacques Estager, Sur le Parti, 1939– 1940 (Paris: Messidor/Temps Actuels, 1983). Cross, Richard & Andrew Flinn, ‘Introduction’ Science & Society (Special Issue: ‘Biography Meets History: Communist Party Lives in International Perspective’), vol. 70, no. 1 (2006), 11–21. Dallin, Alexander & F. I. Firsov (eds), Dimitrov & Stalin, 1934– 1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Davies, R.W., ‘The Syrtsov – Lominadze Affair’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1981), 29– 50. Davies, Sarah & James Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Dazy, Rene´, La Partie et le tout: le PCF et la guerre franco-alge´rienne (Paris: Syllepse, 1990). Degras, Jane (ed.), The Communist International 1919– 1943, 3 volumes (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1955, 1959, 1964). Delwiche, Michel & Francis Groff, Les Gueules Noires (Bruxelles: Les E´peronniers, 1985). Depretto, Jean-Paul & S.V. Schweitzer, Le Communisme a` l’usine: Vie ouvrie`re et mouvement ouvrier chez Renault 1920– 39 (Roubaix: EDIRES, 1984). Di Biaglio, Anna, ‘The Establishment of the Cominform’ in Giuliano Procacci (ed.), The Cominform, Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994), 11 – 34. Diamond, Hanna, ‘Miners, Masculinity and the “Bataille du Charbon” in France, 1944– 48’, Modern & Contemporary France, 19, 1 (2011), 69 – 84. Drew, Alison, We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Dreyfus, Michel, Bruno Groppo, Claudio Ingerform, Roland Lew, Claude Pennetier, Bernard Pudal, Serge Wolikow (eds), Le Sie`cle des communismes (Paris: E´ditions de l’Atelier/E´ditions ouvrie`res, 2004). Ducoulombier, Romain, Camarades!: La Naissance du Parti communiste francais (Paris: E´ditions Perrin, 2010). Evans, Martin, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954 – 1962) (Oxford: Berg, 1997).

334

MAURICE THOREZ

——— Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Fayolle, Sandra, ‘Le de´bat sur le birth control: une simple diversion?’ in Pascal Carreau (ed.), Le Parti communiste francais et l’anne´e 1956 (Paris: Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2007), 105– 113. Fenby, Jonathan, The General Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010). Ferrette, Francois, ‘Le Comite´ de la 3e`me Internationale et les de´buts du PC francais (1919– 36)’, Me´moire de Maıˆtrise, Universite´ Paris I (2005). Firsov, Fridrikh I., Harvey Klehr & John Earl Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern 1933– 1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Florin, Jean-Pierre, ‘Le Radical-socialisme dans le de´partement du Nord (1914 – 1936): parti du “mouvement” ou de “l’ordre e´tabli”?’, Revue francaise de science politique (1974/2), 236– 77. Forest, Philippe, Aragon (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). Gacon, Jean, ‘E´le´ments pour un portrait politique de Maurice Thorez’, Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, no. 7 (1974), 7 – 20. Geneve´e, Fre´de´rick, Le PCF et la justice: Des origines aux anne´es cinquante, organisation, conceptions, militants et avocats communistes face aux normes juridiques (Clermont-Ferrand: Les Presses Universitaires de la Faculte´ de Droit de Clermont-Ferrand, 2006). ——— ‘Pierre Semard et la re´pression, essai d’interpre´tations’, in Serge Wolikov (ed.), Pierre Semard: Engagements, discipline et fide´lite´ (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2007), 223– 236. ——— La Fin du Secret: Histoire des Archives du Parti Communiste Francais (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2012). Giovaninetti, Marc, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et les soldats du contingent pendant la guerre d’Alge´rie: proˆner l’insoumission ou accepter la mobilisation?’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 251 (2015/2) 75 –97. Giulio Ceretti [sic], A` l’Ombre des deux T, 40 ans avec Palmiro Togliatti et Maurice Thorez (Paris: Julliard, 1973). Goldey, David, ‘De Gaulle and the Paradox of Post-War French Politics’ in Andrew Knapp (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation, 1944– 47 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 57 – 74. Gomart, Thomas, ‘Geˆner sans pe´naliser: l’utilisation du dossier alge´rien par la diplomatie sovie´tique, 1958– 62’, Communisme, 74/75 (2003), 131– 152. Gotovitch, Jose´ & Claude Pennetier (eds), Dictionnaire biographique de l’Internationale communiste en France, en Belgique, au Luxembourg, en Suisse et a` Moscou (1919 – 1943) (2nd edn) (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, CD Rom, 2010). Hamon, Herve´ & Patrick Rotman, Les Porteurs de valises: La re´sistance francaise a` la Guerre d’Alge´rie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). Hardy-He´mery, Odette, ‘Strikes in the Coal and Metal Basin of the Nord: New Work Force, New Ideas. Three Years of Indecision: 1919– 21’, in Leopold Haimson & Giulio Sapelli (eds), Strikes, Social Conflict, and the First World War. An International Perspective (Milan: Fondzione Glangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1992), 45 – 64. Harmel, Claude, ‘Henri Barbe´: Entretiens avec Auguste Lecoeur’, Les Cahiers d’Histoire Sociale, no. 12 (1999), 77 – 142. Hazareesingh, Sudhir, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Hilaire, Yves-Marie, ‘Les Ouvriers de la re´gion du Nord devant l’e´glise catholique (XIXe et XXe sie`cles)’, Cahiers du Mouvement Social, 1 (1975), 223– 243. Hitchcock, William I., France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944– 1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘Problems of Communist History’, New Left Review, 54 (1969), 85 –90.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

335

Hoffmann, David L., ‘Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2000), 35 – 54. Hopkins, Stephen, ‘French Communism, the Comintern and Class against Class: Interpretations and Rationales’ in Matthew Worley (ed.), In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004), 106–128. Hue, Robert, ‘Maurice Thorez, un homme d’E´tat’, Nouvelles FondationS 2007/1 (no. 5), 86 – 91. Huss, Marie-Monique, ‘Pronatalism in the Inter-War Period in France’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 25, no. 1 (1990), 39 – 68. Jackson, Julian, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934 –38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ——— France: The Dark Years, 1940– 44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). ——— The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jenkins, Brian & Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (London: Routledge, 2016). Joly, Danie`le, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Judt, Tony, ‘Une historiographie pas comme les autres: The French Communists and their History’, European Studies Review, 12 (1982), 445– 478. ——— Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005). Kedward, Rod, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006). Kelly, Michael, ‘Catholicism and the Left in twentieth-century France’ in Kay Chadwick (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 142– 174. Kemp, Tom, Stalinism in France. The First Twenty Years of the French Communist Party (London: New Park Publications, 1984). Koslovsik, Youri, ‘Maurice Thorez Commentateur de Radio-Moscou en 1943– 1944’, Cahiers de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, 17 (1970), 109– 111. Kriegel, Annie, Aux Origines du communisme francais, 1914 –20: Contribution a` l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier francais (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1964). ——— Communisme au miroir francais (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). ——— Les Communistes francais, 1920– 70 (Paris: Seuil, 1985). ——— Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991). ——— ‘Le P.C.F., Thorez et la France’, Le Mouvement Social, 172 (1995), 95 – 99. Kriegel, Annie & Ste´phane Courtois, Eugen Fried, Le grand secret du PCF (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1997). Laporte, Norman, Kevin Morgan & Matthew Worley (eds), Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Larkin, Maurice, France since the Popular Front: Government and People, 1936– 86 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Lavau, Georges A` quoi sert le Parti communiste francais (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Lazar, Marc, ‘Le Mineur de fond: un exemple de l’identite´ du PCF, Revue francaise de science politique, 35, 2 (1985), 190– 205. ———, ‘Damne´ de la terre et homme de marbre. L’Ouvrier dans l’imaginaire du PCF du milieu des anne´es trente a` la fin des anne´es cinquante’, Annales ESC, 5, 45 (1990), 1071– 1096. ———, Maisons rouges: Les Partis communistes francais et italien de la Libe´ration a` nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992). ———, Le Communisme, une passion francaise (Paris: E´ditions Perrin, 2002). Lefebvre, Re´mi, ‘Le Socialisme municipal sous les fourches caudines du communisme: l’exemple de Roubaix dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, in Emmanuel Bellanger & Julian Mischi (eds), Les territoires du communisme: E´lus locaux, politiques publiques et sociabilite´s militantes (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 53 –72. Lescureux, Christian, Communistes en Pas-de-Calais (Paris: E´ditions France De´couvertes, 1998). Lewis, Helena, ‘Elsa Triolet: The Politics of a Committed Writer’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 9. No. 4 (1986), 385– 394.

336

MAURICE THOREZ

Lu¨hi, Lorenz M, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Magraw, Roger, ‘Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour before 1914’, in Dick Geary (ed.), Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 48 – 100. Magri, Lucio, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2011). Mahoney, Daniel J., De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Piscataway: Transaction, 2000). Margairaz, Michel & Danielle Tartakowsky, L’Avenir nous appartient! Une histoire du Front Populaire (Paris: Larousse, 2006). Martelli, Roger, Le Rouge et le Bleu: Essai sur le communisme dans l’histoire francaise (Paris: E´ditions de l’Atelier, 1995). ——— 1956 Communiste: Le glas d’une espe´rance (Paris: La Dispute, Paris, 2006). ——— Prendre sa carte 1920– 2009, Donne´es nouvelles sur les effectifs du PCF (Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2010). Marty, Andre´, L’Affaire Marty (Paris: Deux Rives, 1955). Mason, Timothy W., ‘Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Matte´i, Bruno, ‘Apre`s la guerre. . . la bataille (1945 – 1947)’ in Evelyne Desbois, Yves Jeanneau & Bruno Matte´i, La Foi des Charbonniers (Paris: E´ditions de la Maison des Science de l’Homme, 1986), 17 – 55. Mayaffre, Damon, ‘1789 – 1917: l’ambivalence du discours re´volutionnaire des communistes francais des anne´es 1930’, Mots. Les langages du politique, no. 69 (2002), 65 – 78. McMillan, James F., Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society 1898– 1991 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). Mencherini, Robert, Guerre Froide, Gre`ves Rouges: Parti communiste, Stalinisme et luttes sociales en France, Les Gre`ves ‘insurrectionnelles’ de 1947– 48 (Paris: E´ditions Syllepse, 1998). Mischi, Julian, ‘Le controˆle biographique a` l’e´chelon fe´de´ral: Le Bourbonnais (1944– 1962)’ in Claude Pennetier & Bernard Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (E´ditions Belin: Paris, 2002), 157– 188. Monier, Fre´deric, Les anne´es vingt 1919–1930 (Paris: Librairie ge´ne´rale francaise, 1999). Morgan, Kevin, ‘Parts of People and Communist Lives’, in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan & Alan Campbell (eds), Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001), 9 –28. ——— ‘Harry Pollitt, Maurice Thorez and the writing of exemplary communist lives’ in Julie Gottrieb and Richard Toye (eds), Making Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in British Politics (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005). ——— ‘Introduction: Stalinism and the Barber’s Chair’, Twentieth Century Communism, no. 1 (2009), 9 – 19. ——— International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs under Lenin and Stalin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Morgan, Kevin, Gidon Cohen & Andrew Flinn, Agents of the Revolution: New biographical approaches to the history of international communism in the age of Lenin and Stalin (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005). Morin, Gilles & Gilles Richard, Les deux France du Front populaire: Chocs et contre-chocs (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2008). Mortimer, Edward, ‘France’, in Martin McCauley (ed.), Communist Power in Europe, 1944– 1949 (London: Macmillan, 1977) 151– 167. Moullec, Gae¨l, The Rise of the French Communist Party (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Moullec, Gae¨l (ed.), Georgi Dimitrov, Journal 1933– 1949 (Paris: Belin, 2005). Naoumova, Natalia, ‘Moscow, the Parti Communiste Francais, and France’s Political Recovery’ in Andrew Knapp (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation, 1944– 47 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 160– 182.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

337

Narinski, Mikhaı¨l, ‘Le Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais dans les archives du Komintern (quelques remarques sur la biographie de Jacques Duclos)’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, vol. 34, no. 1 (1994), 21 – 23. ——— ‘L’Entretien entre Maurice Thorez et Joseph Staline du 18 Novembre 1947’, Communisme, 45 –46 (1996), 31 – 34. Noiriel, Ge´rard, Workers in French Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berg, 1990). Payne, Stanley G., The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Pellissier, Pierre, 6 fe´vrier 1934: La Re´publique en flammes (Paris: Perrin, 2000). Pennetier, Claude, ‘Maurice Thorez’, notice in Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais, CD Rom (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, CD-Rom, 1997). Pennetier, Claude, ‘Andre´ Marty a` l’e´preuve des archives’ in Paul Boulland et al (eds), Andre´ Marty: l’homme, l’affaire, l’archive (Paris: Codhos, 2005). Pennetier, Claude (ed.), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais (Le Maitron) (Paris: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, CD-Rom, 1997). Pennetier, Claude & Bernard Pudal, ‘Stalinism: Workers’ Cult and Cult of Leaders’, Twentieth Century Communism, no 1 (2009), 20 – 29. Pennetier, Claude & Bernard Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste (E´ditions Belin: Paris, 2002). Peschanski, Denis, Et pourtant ils tournent. Vocabulaire et strate´gie du PCF, 1934– 1936 (Paris: Klincksiek, 1988). Peschanski, Denis (ed.), Marcel Cachin, Carnets 1906– 47, four volumes (Paris: E´ditions du CNRS, 1993– 98). ———, Moscou – Paris– Berlin: Te´le´grammes Chiffre´s du Komintern (1939 – 41) (Paris: Tallandier, 2003). Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917– 1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Procacci, Giuliano (ed.), The Cominform, Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994). Pudal, Bernard, ‘La Bibliothe`que de Maurice Thorez, un intellectuel de type nouveau (premiers e´le´ments d’enqueˆte)’, Sie`cles, Cahiers du Centre d’histoire ‘Espaces et Cultures’, no. 29 (2009), 83 – 96. Pudal, Bernard & Claude Pennetier, Le souffle d’octobre 1917: L’engagement des communistes francais (Ivry-sur-Seine: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2017). Rey, Marie-Pierre, ‘De Gaulle, French Diplomacy and Franco-Soviet Relations as seen from Moscow’, in Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher and Garret Martin (eds), Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Relations, 1958– 1969 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 25 –42. Rioux, Jean-Pierre, The Fourth Republic 1944– 1958 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Roberts, Geoffrey, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2012). Robrieux, Philippe, Maurice Thorez: Vie secre`te et vie publique (Paris: Fayard, 1975). ——— Histoire inte´rieure du Parti communiste, vols 1 & 2 (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Ross, George, Workers and Communists in France: From Popular Front to Eurocommunism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Ruscio, Alain, ‘Les Communistes francais et la guerre d’Alge´rie, 1956’ in Pascal Carreau (ed.), Le Parti communiste francais et l’anne´e 1956 (Paris: Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2007), 79 – 89. Santamaria, Yves, L’Enfant du malheur: Le Parti communiste francais dans la Lutte pour la paix (Paris: E´ditions Seli Arslan, 2002). ——— Le Parti de l’ennemi?: Le Parti communiste francais dans la Lutte pour la paix, 1947– 58 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006). Sassoon, Donald, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997).

338

MAURICE THOREZ

Service, Robert, Comrades: A World History of Communism (London: Macmillan, 2007). Sirot, Ste´phane, Maurice Thorez (Paris: Presses de Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2000). ——— ‘Les Archives de Maurice Thorez et Jeannette Vermeersch aux Archives nationales’, Cahiers d’Histoire: Revue d’Histoire Critique, 88 (2002), 135– 143. Siwek-Pouydesseau, Jeanne, Le Syndicalisme des fonctionnaires jusqu’a` la guerre froide 1848– 1948 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1989). Slavin, David H., ‘The French Left and the Rif War, 1924– 25: Racism and the Limits of Internationalism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26, 1 (1991), 5 –32. Smith, Stephen A. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Soucy, Robert, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–33 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). ——— French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933– 1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Sowerwine, Charles, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Stankova, Marietta, Georgi Dimitrov: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010). Swain, Geoffrey, Tito: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). Tartakowsky, Danielle, Les Manifestations de rue en France, 1918– 1968 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997). Thorez, Paul, Une voix presque mienne (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1985). ———, Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, trans. Nancy Cadet (New York: Autonomedia, 1991). Tiano, Andre´, ‘L’Action des syndicats de la Re´gie National des usines Renault, 1945– 55’, in Hubert Lesire-Ogrel, Michel Rocard & Andre´ Tiano (eds), Les Expe´riences francaises d’action syndicale ouvrie`re (Paris: E´ditions ouvrie`res, 1956). Tiersky, Ronald, French Communism, 1920– 1972 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). Tomlinson, Richard, ‘The “Disappearance” of France, 1896– 1940: French Politics and the Birth Rate’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1985), 405– 415. Tourish Dennis & Tim Wohlforth, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2000). Trempe´, Rolande, Les Trois batailles du charbon, 1936– 1946 (Paris: E´ditions La De´couverte, 1989). Trotsky, Leon, The First Five Years of the Communist International, 2 volumes (London: New Park Publications, 1973 & 1974). ——— On France, David Salner (ed.) (New York: Pathfinder, 1979). Urban, Joan Barth, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (London: I.B.Tauris, 1986). Utley, Gertje R., Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Varaschin, Denis and Ludovic Laloux (eds), 10 Mars 1906: Courrie`res aux Risques de l’Histoire (Vincennes: E´ditions GRHEN, 2006). Verde`s-Leroux, Jeannine, ‘L’Art de parti: Le Parti communiste francais et ses peintres (1947– 1954)’, Actes de la recherche´ en sciences sociales, vol. 28, no. 1 (1979), 33 – 55. Vigna, Xavier, Jean Vigreux & Serge Wolikov (eds), Le Pain, Le Paix, La Liberte´: Expe´riences et Territoires du Front Populaire (Paris: La Dispute-E´ditions sociales, 2006). Vigreux, Jean, Waldeck Rochet: Une biographie politique (Paris: La Dispute, 2000). ——— La Faucille apre`s le marteau: Le Communisme aux champs dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Besancon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comte´, 2012). Vinen, Richard, France, 1934– 1970 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Volodarsky, Boris, Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Wall, Irwin M., French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945– 1962 (London: Greenwood Press, 1983).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

339

Whitney, Susan B., Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Wieviorka, Annette, Maurice et Jeannette: Biographie du couple Thorez (Paris: Fayard, 2010). ——— ‘L’Intimite´ dans un couple politique: Les Thorez’, in Anne Muxel (ed.), La Vie prive´e des convictions (Paris: Presses de Science Po, 2014), 115– 134. Wieviorka, Olivier, ‘Replacement or Renewal? The French Political E´lite at the Liberation’ in Andrew Knapp (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 75 – 86. Wolikow, Serge, ‘Le Parti communiste francais et l’Internationale communiste (1925– 1933)’, The`se de doctorat en Lettres, Universite´ de Paris VIII (1990). ——— Le Front Populaire en France (Brussels: E´ditions Complexe, 1996). ——— ‘Le Front Populaire: quel e´ve´nement? Historiographie et actualite´ des recherches sur le Front Populaire’, in Xavier Vigna, Jean Vigreux, Serge Wolikov (eds), Le Pain, Le Paix, La Liberte´: Expe´riences et Territoires du Front Populaire (Paris: La Dispute-E´ditions sociales, 2006). ——— ‘Un Parti a` la croise´e des chemins’, Nouvelles FondationS 2006/1, 90 – 102. ——— ‘L’Organisation du PCF a` ses de´buts’, Nouvelles FondationS, 2006/1, 159– 165. ——— L’Internationale Communiste (1919 – 1943): Le Komintern ou le reˆve de´chu du parti mondial de la re´volution (Ivry-sur-Seine: Les E´ditions de l’Atelier, 2010). Wolikow, Serge (ed.), Pierre Semard: Engagements, discipline et fide´lite´ (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2007. Worley, Matthew, ‘Courting Disaster? The Communist International in the Third Period’, in Matthew Worley (ed.), In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004), 1 – 17.

INDEX

Abbas, Ferhat, 251 Abbe´ Pierre (Henri Groue`s), 218 Abd el Krim, 57 Abetz, Otto, 143– 4 Ache`res, 80 – 1 Affaire des pigeons, 207– 9, 215 Afghanistan, 288 agriculture, 30, 33 – 4, 77 – 8, 238, 250 Albania, Albanians, 243, 244– 5, 269, 277–8 Thorez’s visit, 270–1 see also Hoxha, Enver Algeria, Algerians, 3, 13, 241, 248, 259, 262, 263– 6, 271–2, 281, 287, 290 Blum – Viollette project, 250 during Second World War, 157, 188, 209, 220 E´vian Accord, 274– 5 inter-war communist policy, 249– 51 Jeanson Network, 268 ‘nation in formation’ theory, 251, 254– 5, 268 Parti Communiste Alge´rien (PCA), 250– 1 protests by reservists, 253, 267 Se´tif & Guelma massacres, 179, 251 special powers, 38, 220, 224, 230, 236, 246, 252– 3 visits by Thorez, 250– 1 see also Arme´e de libe´ration nationale; Comite´ franc
ais de Libe´ration nationale; French Union; Front de libe´ration nationale Algiers, 155– 8, 188

Allard, Paul, see Cerreti Alleg, Henri, 253 Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population franc
aise, 229 Alps, the, 131, 149, 182 Amendola, Giorgio, 226–7 Amiot, Max, 171 Amsterdam– Pleyel peace campaign, 94, 96– 7 anarcho-syndicalism, 17, 32, 36, 42, 44, 58, 77, 78, 121 Appeal of 10 July (1940), 4, 144– 45, 175, 209 Aragon, Louis, 137, 163, 212, 240– 1, 269, 290 and portrait of Stalin, 236, 242 and Thorez cult, 208, 210, 231, 278 Arme´e de libe´ration nationale (ALN), 253 Aron, Raymond, 195 art, 30, 123, 205, 242 socialist realism, 198 Soviet ‘underground’ art, 282– 3 Arthaud, Rene´, 169 Association (l) re´publicaine des anciens combattants (ARAC), 41, 102 Aubrac, Lucie, 173 Audin Committee, 267 Auriol, Vincent, 178, 217 Austria, Austrians, 73, 105, 107– 8, 127, 167 Babeuf, Gracchus, 285 Baltic states, 145, 197 Balzac, Honore´ de, 198, 285

INDEX Bancel, Lucien, 185 Barbe´, Henri, 78– 9, 85, 87, see also Barbe´ – Celor affair Barbe´ – Celor affair, 71, 91 – 3, 173 Barbusse, Henri, 23 – 4, 58, 94 Barvikha Sanatorium, 204 Basly, E´mile, 15, 17, 36, 44 battle for production, 164– 6, 176, 180 Baudry, Cle´mence (Thorez’s mother), 14– 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 28, 198, 201, 256, 282 Baudry, Cle´ment (Thorez’s grandfather), 14– 15, 19, 22, 24 –5, 79 Bauquier, Georges, 237, 282–4 Bazainville, 212– 4, 224, 236, 245, 253– 4, 257–8, 260– 1, 263, 275, 281 Beauvoir, Simone de, 229, 240, 268 Beethoven, 224, 278 Beijing, 239, 243, 245, 270 Belgium, Belgians, 14, 25, 124, 134, 147 Thorez in, 79, 136– 7, 167 Belleville by-election (1930), 86 – 7 Benn, Tony, 271 Beria, Lavrentiy, 149, 160, 215 Bessarabia, 145 Be´thune, 22, 36, 41 – 2, 54 Bidault, Georges, 169, 171, 178 Billoux, Franc
ois, 79, 139, 206, 209, 214–5, 221 in wartime, 156– 7 minister, 168, 173, 178– 9 Billy-Montigny, 15, 40 Biot, 237, 261, 282, 284 birth control, 3, 123, 220, 227– 30, 236, 246 Black Sea, 204, 206, 210, 269, 271, 285 Black Sea mutiny, 26, 56, 141, 209 Blieck, Rene´, 137 Bloc National, 26, 30 Bloch, Jean-Richard, 151, 153 Blum, Le´on, 31, 61, 129, 165, 168, 217 meetings with Thorez, 107– 8, 111, 116, 126– 7, 178 prime minister, 114– 5, 124– 5, 128, 232, 250 Spanish civil war, 117– 8 Thorez’s attack on, 38, 139– 40, 141 Bolshevik Party, see Communist Party of the Soviet Union Bolshevik Revolution, see Russian Revolution

341

bolshevisation, 3, 50, 52 – 57, 59, 62 – 3, 67, 249 Bonte, Florimond, 28, 53–4, 98, 134–5, 189 Bordiga, Amadeo, 45 Boulez, Pierre, 268 Boulouque, Sylvain, 290 Brac, Faure, 41 Breton, Henri (Thorez’s natural father), 15, 20– 1, 141 Brezhnev, Leonid, 288 Brik, Lilya, 241– 2 Britain, British, 62, 70, 79, 117, 128, 175, 181, 210– 11, 270– 1 Communist Party, 137, 192 in wartime, 132, 137, 141, 145, 150, 152– 3, 157, 159 Secret Service reports on Thorez, 178, 203– 4 visit by Thorez, 282 Broutchoux, Benoıˆt, 17, 36 Bulganin, Nikolai, 234 Buffet, Henri, 31, 33 Bukharin, Nikolai, 5, 56, 62, 64, 68, 70– 73, 76– 8, 84 Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 5, 78, 105, 145, 176, 182, 198, 282 Bulletin (le) Communiste, 28, 34, 47 – 8 Cadeau, Paul, 53 – 4 Caillaux, Joseph, 61 Callian, 282, 284– 5 Camelots du Roi, 101 Campinchi, Ce´sar, 112 Cartel des Gauches (1924), 55, 57, 61; (1932), 101– 2 Casanova, Danielle, 132, 161 Casanova, Laurent, 169, 190, 193, 198, 200, 206, 211, 244 and Lenin Peace Prize, 269, 272 criticism of PCF Algerian policy, 265– 8 friendship with Thorez, 132, 204, 240– 1, 259 in Peace Movement, 196, 267, 272 see also Casanova – Servin affair Casanova – Servin affair, 91, 246, 248, 258–72, 279 Catelas, Jean, 143 Catholic Church, Catholics, 18 – 19, 28, 213, 228–9, 238 outstretched hand, 113– 14, 280

342

MAURICE THOREZ

Catroux, Georges, 190 Celor, Pierre, 79, see also Barbe´ –Celor affair Cerreti, Giulio (Paul Allard), 109, 123, 136, 141, 146, 151, 226– 7 Ce´saire, Aime´, 239– 40 CFLN, see Comite´ franc
ais de Libe´ration national CFTC, see Confe´de´ration franc
aise des travailleurs chre´tiens Comite´ franc
ais de libe´ration nationale CGT, see Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail CGTU, see Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail unitaire Chaban-Delmas, Jacques, 218 Chaintron, Jean, 170, 201, 241 Chaplin, Charlie, 148 Charonne me´tro station, 275 Chautemps, Camille, 101– 2, 125– 7 Chevalier, Maurice, 4, 229 Cheve`nement, Jean-Pierre, 290 Chiang Kai-shek, 62 Chiappe, Jean, 81, 90, 102 China, Chinese, 2, 62, 71, 199– 200, 206 Communist Party, 235, 243, 245, 270– 1 relations with Thorez, 231, 239, 269, 272, 277– 8 see also Mao Zedong Chistyakovo, 75 Choisy-le-Roi, 171, 179, 212, 255, 258 Churchill, Winston, 153, 158 civil service reform, 169, 171 Clamamus, Jean-Marie, 228 Clark, Sir Archibald, 157 Clemenceau, Georges, 133, 229 Cle´ment, see Fried, Eugen Clugnat (Creuse), 22 – 3, 278 Cocteau, Jean, 237 Cogniot, Georges, 152, 163, 214, 222–3, 286 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 287 Cold War, 4, 8, 13, 16, 177, 184, 203, 216, 251 and colonialism, 251 and French politics, 11, 162, 195– 200 and Gaullism, 256 and leadership cults, 124, 185–6 U-2 spy plane, 270 Warsaw Pact, 238, see also Marshall Plan collective leadership (in communist movement), 216, 223, 225, 259, 261, 278

collective security, 110, 118, 121, 128, 135, 175 Colliard, Lucie, 35 Cominform, 157, 163, 187, 189– 90, 193, 196, 198, 287 closure of, 223 Szklarska-Pore˛ba conference, 182– 4 Comintern, Communist International, 3 –4, 39, 47, 79, 81 – 2, 85 4th Congress (1922), 38 5th Congress (1925), 48, 51 – 3 6th Congress (1928), 77, 91 7th Congress (1935), 10, 111– 12 6th Plenum (1926), 64 – 5 7th Plenum (1926), 68 – 9 8th Plenum (1927), 70 9th Plenum (1928), 77 11th Plenum (1931), 87– 8 12th Plenum (1932), 71, 94, 126 13th Plenum (1933), 97– 8 and Popular Front, 100– 1, 105– 6, 110– 11, 114– 15 and Spain, 117– 18, 119– 121, 123 and victory of Hitler, 95 – 6 and war, 132, 134– 5, 137, 140– 1, 145– 7, 149, 152 conditions of membership, 10, 26 –8, 34, 42, 57 Conference on Organisation (1925), 51, 55 – 6; (1926), 64 delegates to France, 7, 10 – 11, 48 – 50, 55, 60 – 1, 88 – 9, 122 dissolution, 10, 154– 5, 174 expulsion of Trotsky, 75 – 76 French Commission, 37, 64 – 5, 72, 77 –8, 84, 87 – 8, 94 – 5, 172 operations in Ufa, 150– 1 tensions with Thorez, 11, 72 – 74, 92 – 4, 109, 112, 119, 127–8, 138, 142, 232, 287 united front strategy, 35 –8 Comite´ de la Troisie`me Internationale (CTI), 26– 7, 28 – 9, 31, 34 Comite´ franc
ais de Libe´ration nationale (CFLN), 155– 7 Comite´s syndicalistes re´volutionnaires (CSR), 32 Common Market (the), 280 Common Programme, 113, 275, 287

INDEX Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 93 13th congress (1924), 50 16th congress (1930), 84 – 5 19th congress (1952), 208, 234 20th congress (1956), 221– 4 21st congress (1959), 247 22nd congress (1961), 277 centrality of, 52, 183 conflict over de-Stalinisation, 235– 6, 271 conflicts in 1920s, 46 – 7, 61 – 2, 64, 71 international department, 155, 190 Communist Party, see Parti communiste franc
ais Companys, Lluis, 121 Confe´de´ration franc
aise des travailleurs chre´tiens (CFTC), 95, 171, 211, 241, 266–8 Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail (CGT), 3, 25, 32, 43, 58, 95, 171, 196, 207, 210–11, 258, 267 and Algeria, 265– 6 and battle of production, 165– 7 membership, 26, 162, 241 reunification, 111 strikes (1920), 29; (1934), 102– 3; (1936 – 8), 115– 6, 128; (1947 – 8) 179– 81, 192– 5; (1953), 207– 8 Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail unitaire (CGTU), 32, 40, 44, 84, 85, 95, 111 12 October 1925 strike, 58 – 59 and PCF, 60 – 1, 95 miners’ federation, 32, 36, 42 – 3 repression of, 81, 83 Corsica, 149, 255, 278 Cot, Pierre, 170 Courcelles, 15, 32 Courrie`res pit disaster, 16 – 17, 28, 133 Courtade, Pierre, 226, Courtois, Ste´phane, 7, 88, 90 Cremet, Jean, 60 – 1, 63 – 5, 71 Creuse (la), 3, 22 – 24, 278 Croix-de-Feu (les), 101, 113, 125, 146 Croizat, Ambroise, 169, 180–1 CSR, see Comite´s syndicalistes re´volutionnaires CTI, see Comite´ de la Troisie`me Internationale, cult, cultism, 3 – 4, 12, 123– 6, 186– 7, 231–2, 234– 5, 278, 284 birthday celebrations, 201– 3, 278 of miner, 15 – 16

343

of Pe´tain, 202 of Stalin, 1, 186, 215, 222– 4, 242, 271, 277 of Thorez, 20, 23, 101, 129, 168, 205, 216, 219– 20, 225, 259, 261, 277, 286 see also de Gaulle Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakians, 128, 147, 182, 209, 254, 287 d’Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel, 227– 8 Daladier, E´douard, 102– 4, 108– 9, 112, 137, 141, 217, 229 as prime minister, 128, 132– 5 Dallidet, Arthur, 135, 202 Darlan, Franc
ois, 152– 3 Davidenkov, Sergei, 203 de Beauvoir, Simone, 229, 240, 268 de Gaulle, Charles, and 4th Republic, 247, 255, 276, 280, 287 and 5th Republic, 165, 167–9, 173, 175, 207 and Algerian War, 263– 4, 266, 272, 274– 5 and Soviet Union, 159– 60, 192, 256– 7, 265, 269– 70 and Thorez, 13, 256, 286 and Thorez’s desertion, 136, 157– 9, 186 cult around, 4, 202 foreign policy, 262–3 in wartime, 145– 7, 149– 57, 163, 174, 183, 187– 9 de Retz, Cardinal, 280 Debre´, Michel, 263, 269 Debusscher, Daniel, 182 Delacroix, Euge`ne, 198 Daladier, E´douard, 102, 103– 4, 108– 9, 112, 128, 132– 5, 141, 217, 229 Delbos, Yvon, 112 Deng Xiaoping, 272 Denmark, 167 Derogy, Jacques, 228 Desrumeaux, Martha, 121 –2 de-Stalinisation, 13, 109 after 20th Congress, 227, 230, 233, 239, 241, 243 after 22nd Congress, 277– 8, 282 after Stalin’s death, 215 le retard, 289 Desusclade, Cle´ment, 56, 60

344

MAURICE THOREZ

dictatorship of the proletariat, 94, 176– 7, 279, 288, 291 Diderot, Denis, 213, 248 Dien Bien Phu, 217, 251 Dimitrov, Georgi, and Popular Front, 11, 101, 108– 10, 114– 15 after dissolution of Comintern, 157, 160, 182 as Comintern leader, 105– 6, 152– 55 in wartime, 132, 134– 5, 138– 44, 145– 51 funeral, 199 relations with Thorez, 119– 20, 125, 127– 8, 137, 155– 6 Djilas, Milovan, 183, 187– 91 Doize, Pierre, 223 Donetz, 75 – 6, 210 Doriot, Jacques, 56, 66, 78, 80, 95 anti-colonialism, 57 – 8, 71 conflict with Thorez, 60 – 5, 102, 104– 5 drift to fascism, 105– 6 municipal leader, 94 opposition to class against class, 71, 76 –7, 85, 109 Dormoy, Marx, 116 Douai, 14 – 15, 18, 25, 54 Doumergue, Gaston, 104, 108 Dreyfus Affair, 10, 23, 140 Dubus, Arthur, 28, 39 – 40, 41, 43 Duclos, Jacques, 104, 120, 124, 174, 185, 192, 236, 260, 265 and Algeria, 252 and Casanova – Servin Affair, 260, 265 and Lecoeur Affair, 205 and Marty– Tillon affair, 188– 90, 210 and Popular Front, 109, 115– 6, 126– 7 and Thorez’s resignation, 258– 9 and Twentieth Congress, 215, 223–4, 226, 233, 235 as fugitive, 80 – 1 as PCF official, 88, 98, 123, 134, 172, 192, 214 at Cominform conference, 182– 3 comintern ‘bio’, 19 during Thorez’s illness, 208, 211 in wartime, 134– 6, 139, 144, 150– 1, 159 international visits, 223, 239, 243– 4 presidential candidate (1969), 288

relations with Thorez, 173, 214, 216, 221, 258– 9 see also: Affaire des pigeons; Appeal of 10 July (1940); Humanite´ (l’) affair (1940) Ducoulombier, Romain, 27 Duras, Marguerite, 198 Dutilleul, E´mile, 120 Dutilleul, Mounette, 135– 6, 172 Dutouquet, Cle´mence, 14 Eberlein, Hugo, 85 E´conomie et Politique, 262 Eden, Anthony, 211 Egypt, 254, see also Suez crisis Ehrenburg, Ilya, 190 Eisenhower, Dwight, 262, 265, 270 elections, 74, 93, 111, 182, 188, 252, 258, 288, 290 1919 legislative, 26 1922 Pas-de-Calais canton & municipal, 32 – 3, 35, 38 1924 legislative, 46, 50, 55 – 6 1925 canton, 59 – 60, 64 1926 Nord by-election, 18, 67– 8, 72, 104 1928 legislative, 76, 80 1930 Belleville by-election, 86 – 7 1932 legislative, 94, 101 1934 canton, 107– 9 1936 legislative, 113– 14, 118, 228 1945 & 1946 Constituent Assembly, 168, 173 1946 legislative, 169, 176– 7 1956 legislative, 221, 252 1958 legislative, 247– 8, 257 1962 legislative, 276 1965 presidential, 276, 287 1967 legislative, 287 E´luard, Paul, 162 Engels, Friedrich, 32, 177, 213 Estonia, 145, 197 E´toile nord-africaine (ETA), 250, see also Algeria eurocommunism, 176, 288 European Defence Community (EDC), 217–8 Fajon, E´tienne, 182, 206, 209, 214, 235, 258, 273 Farge, Yves, 196

INDEX Farkas, Miha´ly, 238 farmers, see peasantry fascism, fascists, 10, 61, 65, 84, 118 activity by, 55, 101– 2, 105 campaign against, 2, 62, 93, 100, 104, 106, 108– 11 communist analysis of, 61, 76, 84, 90, 96, 103– 4, 107, 113, 127, 144, 250 description of de Gaulle as, 207, 248, 255– 7, 266 description of Hungarian revolution as, 238– 40 international campaign against, 95 – 6, 108 war against, 128, 132– 3, 147, 149, 155, 183 Faure, Paul, 95, 108, 111 Fe´de´ration de l’E´ducation nationale (FEN), 266, 268 Feix, Le´on, 209, 251, 260 Fenzy, Henri, 33 Ferrat, Andre´, 79, 81 Fils du Peuple, 5 –6, 16, 19 –25, 149, 205, 285 1937 edition, 123, 126, 129 1949 edition, 202 1959 edition, 5, 265, 278 1970 edition, 286, see also Fre´ville Flandin, Pierre-E´tienne, 108, 110, 112 FLN, see Front de libe´ration nationale Fonteyne, Jean, 136 Force Ouvrie`re, 195, 268 Foucault, Michel, 82 Fougeron, Andre´, 20, 198, 236 France Nouvelle, 262– 3 Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), 151, 158, 175 freemasons, freemasonry, 37 – 8 French Communist Party, see Parti communiste franc
ais French Front, after war, 165, 194, 288 during Popular Front, 11, 101, 118– 19, 127 in wartime 152, 158 French Revolution 10, 79, 148, 151, 177, 290 commemoration of, 66, 132 legacy, 27, 107, 111– 2, 122 French Union, 171, 179, 251– 2, 254

345

Fre´ville, Jean, 123, 170, 202, 227– 8, 242, 248 Fried, Eugen, 7, 11, 88, 120, 196 and Popular Front, 109, 114– 5 death, 161 in wartime, 134– 7, 146, 148, 161 relationship with Thorez, 88 – 9, 91, 92 – 3, 95, 98, 122 Frischmann, Georges, 233, 241 Froissart, Rene´, 28, 32 – 3 Front de libe´ration nationale (FLN), 251–5, 263–4, 268, 272, 275 Front National (Le Pen), 264, 290 Front National (Resistance), 146– 7, 152, 155, 188, 194 Frossard, Ludovic-Oscar, 26 – 7, 34, 37 Frunze, Mikhail, 56 Gagra, 204, 208 Gallagher, Willie, 192 Gambetta, Le´on, 30, 71 Garaudy, Roger, 255, 278, 284 Garreau, Roger, 151, 157, 159 Garrez, Fre´de´ric, 52 Gaullism, communist analysis of, 194, 256–7, 260, 263, 276, see also de Gaulle German Democratic Republic (GDR), 193, 222, 264 German occupation, 2 – 3, 16, 105, 140– 7, 156, 161, 164, 167 collaboration with, 159, 180 communist negotiations with, see Humanite´ (l’) affair Germany, Germans, 42, 82, 101, 105, 127, 137, 256, 287 attack on Soviet Union, 147, 149–50, 153, 158 Communist Party, 62, 85, 87, 107– 8 in Great War, 22– 3, 25, 28 London and Paris conferences, 217– 18, 252 occupation of France, 2, 139– 45, 151–2, 156– 7, 161 post-1945 settlement, 175, 195– 7 Revolution (1919), 48 Ruhr occupation, 39 – 40 Soviet policy towards, 110– 11, 132– 3, 135– 6, 140, 145– 7, 158 Thorez’s visa (1953), 210

346

MAURICE THOREZ

Thorez’s visits, 95 – 6, 222, 224, 264 victory of Hitler, 95 – 7, 118 see also European Defence Community; German Democratic Republic; Nazism Gero¨, Erno, 238 Ginollin, Denise, 143 Giraud, General Henri, 153, 155– 6 Girault, Suzanne, 48, 51 – 2, 55, 58, 60, 62– 4, 73 Gitton, Marcel, 98, 107, 120, 139 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 237, 244 Gottwald, Klement, 109 Gouin, Fe´lix, 169 Grenier, Fernand, 152– 3, 156– 7, 188 Grotewohl, Otto, 222 Groupe ouvrier et paysan franc
ais (GOPF), 135–6 Groupe parlementaire pour la protection de la natalite´ et de la famille, 228 Guesde, Jules, 23, 229 Guingouin, Georges, 209 Guittonneau, Benjamin, 6 Guomindang, see Kuomintang Guralsky (Abraham Heifetz), 48, 50– 4, 56 Guyot, Fernande, 275 Guyot, Raymond, 79, 173, 192, 201, 206, 209, 225, 233, 243– 4, 275 in wartime, 135, 141, 149 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 289 He´nin-Lie´tard, 15, 28, 32 – 3, 40, 136, 193 Herriot, E´douard, 55, 61, 108, 112, 133, 135–6, 174 Hindenburg, Paul von, 62 Ho Chi-Minh, 179, 244 Hobsbawm, Eric, 9 Holland, see Netherlands Hollande, Franc
ois, 117, 275 Honel, Maurice, 129 Honnert, Robert, 114 Hotel Lux, 8, 56, 84 Hoxha, Enver, 245, 269– 72, 278 Hue, Robert, 289 Hugo, Victor, 22, 198 Humanite´ (l’) affair (1940), 143– 4, 172 Humbert-Droz, Jules, 35 – 7, 47 – 8, 72 – 3 Hungary, Hungarians, 9, 154, 199 1919 Revolution, 88, 222

1956 Revolution, 3, 220, 237– 42, 246, 248, 279 Communist Party, 182 Iba´rruri, Dolores (La Pasionaria), 154 imprisonment, of PCF members, 29, 58, 71, 136, 139 of reservists, 267 of Thorez, 3, 74 –5, 81 – 3, 122, see also Sante´ (la) Information Bureau of Communist and Workers’ Parties, see Cominform Institut Maurice Thorez, 288–9 International Brigades, 119– 20, 123, 128, 209, 239, see also Spain International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties (1960), 271–2 Italy, Italians, 48, 109, 147, 199, 215, 222 Communist Party, 2 –3, 10, 35, 157, 167, 182– 3, 240 tensions with PCF, 109, 192, 242– 5, 260, 270, 279– 80 visits by Thorez, 226– 7, 263 see also Togliatti Ivry, 104, 107, 170 birthday exhibition (1950), 1 – 2, 92, 201, 257 central committee (January 1945), 164, 175, 190 election campaigns, 80, 94, 221, 276 funeral, 285– 6 residence, 122, 258 street names, 278 Jaure`s, Jean, 10, 23, 26, 55, 185, 290 Jeanson, Francis, 268 Jerram, Guy, 41, 43, 53 – 4, 77, 83 Joliot-Curie, Fre´de´ric, 3, 162 Joliot-Curie, Ire`ne, 3 Jouhaux, Le´on, 29, 32 Juvenal, 213 Kaganovich, Lazar, 119 Kamenev, Lev, 47, 62, 64, 121 Kennedy, John F., 276 Khrushchev, Nikita, and art, 282– 3 and Chinese communists, 245 and de Gaulle, 256– 7, 262, 264– 5 and Hungarian Revolution, 237–9

INDEX and Thorez’s politics, 4, 176, 199, 222–3, 226– 7, 248, 280, 289 de-Stalinisation, 215, 235, 242– 3, 277– 8 secret speech, 9, 46, 129, 221, 223– 5, 230– 4 socialising with Thorez, 212–13, 244, 269, 271– 2, 277 visits to France, 269– 70 Klotz, Professor Henri-Pierre, 212, 230 Korean War, 196, 206, 216– 17 Kosygin, Alexei, 277 Kriegel, Annie, 4, 12, 16, 27, 42, 90, 141, 143 Kriegel-Valrimont, Maurice, 226, 262– 3 Kun, Be´la, 222 Kuntsevo, 138, 150, 153 Kuomintang, 62, 245 Kuusinen, Hertta, 264 Kuybyshev, 150 L’Inge´nieur Bakhirev, 265, 269 La Pasionaria, see Iba´rruri, Dolores La Vie est a` Nous, 113– 4 Lacoste, Robert, 166, 252 Lagroua Weill-Halle´, Marie-Andre´e, 228 Langevin, Paul, 163 Larbaaˆ, 250 Lareppe, Pierre, 252 Latvia, 48, 145, 197 Laval, Pierre, 90, 110, 112, 149– 50 Lazar, Marc, 88 Le Cannet, see Les Escarrasses Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 286 Le Le´ap, Alain, 208 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 264 Le Pen, Marine, 290– 1 Le Troquer, Andre´, 169, 217 League for the Rights of Man, 37 – 8, 62 Leclercq, Henri, 32 – 3 Lecoeur affair, 91, 205, 207, 215– 17, 259 Lecoeur, Auguste, 165, 167, 169, 200, 203, 208–10, 214, see also Lecoeur affair Lefebvre, Georges, 3 Lefebvre, Henri, 231 Le´ger, Fernand, 3, 124, 237 museum, 245, 282, 284 Moscow exhibition, 282– 3 Le´ger, Nadia, 237, 241, 245, 261, 282– 4 Lenin Peace Prize, 269, 272

347

Lenin, V. I., 31, 37, 48, 163, 174, 192, 227–8, 253, 271, 278 apartment in rue Marie Rose, 270, 281 death, 46 – 7, 102, 105, 204, 223 testament, 75, 222, 225 see also Leninism Leningrad, 242, 244, 271 Leninism, 110– 11, 138, 164, 177, 201, 213, 215, 224, 226, 234, 259, 267 Les Escarrasses, guests at, 236– 7, 241– 2, 247– 8, 256, 259 move from, 283– 4 routine at, 212– 13, 251, 258 work at, 221, 226, 240, 245, 257, 265 Lesser, Manassa, see Russell, Sam Leyris, Pierre, 237 library, Thorez’s, 7, 9, 21, 211, 213, 229, 251, 284 Liebknecht, Karl, 222 Lille, 41, 56, 80 –1, 84, 121, 136 by-election (1926), 18, 67 – 8, 104 CGT congress (1921), 32 PCF Fifth Congress, 66 –7, 107, 249 Lithuania, 145, 197 Lominadze, Vissarion, 91 – 2 London and Paris Conferences (1954), 251– 2 Longo, Luigi, 226 Longuet, Jean, 24, 26 Loriot, Fernand, 28 – 9, 59 – 60 Lozeray, Henri, 84, 91 – 2 Lozovsky, Alexander, 24, 105 Luxembourg, 167 Luxemburg, Rosa, 222, 225 Lyautey, Marshal, 57 Lysenko, Trofim, 201 Madagascar, 179 Magnien, Serge, 267 Maillot, Henri, 253 Malenkov, Georgy, 210, 213, 215 Manuilsky, Dimitri, 64 – 5 and Class against Class, 76 – 7, 85 – 8, 94 – 5, 117 and Popular Front, 105– 6, 110, 114 in Paris, 37, 61 – 3, 91 in wartime, 138– 40, 145– 6, 150, 152, 154– 7, 160 Mao Zedong, 2, 269 and Khrushchev, 220, 270 and Thorez, 222, 231, 245, 278

348

MAURICE THOREZ

Marchais, Georges, 272– 3, 281, 287– 9 Marseille, 34, 46, 192, 202, 281, 285, 288 Marshall Plan, 181, 183, 192– 4 Marty, Andre´, 58, 94, 104, 124, 144, 209 expulsion from PCF, 209– 10 imprisonment, 26, 71, 74 – 5, 82 in Algeria, 156– 8 in Comintern leadership, 92, 96, 111– 12, 114, 172, 200 in PCF leadership, 56, 58, 102, 172, 185, 205– 6 in Spain, 119 –20 in wartime, 135, 141– 2, 145– 6, 149– 151 relations with Thorez, 73, 89, 98, 115, 138, 153, 155, 173, 183, 186– 9, 192 see also Marty – Tillon affair Marty – Tillon affair, 91, 209– 10, 215, see also Marty, Andre´; Tillon, Charles Marx, Karl, 24, 32, 111, 213 Mason, Timothy, 12 Maspero, Franc
ois, 268 Massin, Brigitte & Jean, 224 Mauriac, Franc
ois, 124 Mauvais, Le´on, 172, 241, 271, 273 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 241– 2 Me´lenchon, Jean-Luc, 290– 1 Membœuf, Aurore Marie (Thorez’s first wife), 41, 79, 81–4, 104, 121–2, 148, 163, 170 Mende`s France, Pierre, 217– 19, 221, 255, 257, 266 Merlot, Andre´, 243–4 Meunier, Pierre, 170 Mikhailov, Boris, 60 Mikoyan, Anastas, 234, 237 Milhau, Jean, 205 militarism, 23, 30, 110 military service, 110, 267 Thorez’s, 21, 26, 30 – 2 Millerand, Alexandre, 30, 249 mines, miners, 14 – 15, 19 – 20, 22, 40, 79– 80, 178, 200 as PCF members, 28, 31 – 2, 36 battle for coal, 165– 7 Courrie`res disaster, 16 – 17, 133 in Soviet Union, 75 – 6 strikes, 26, 29, 116– 17, 192, 195, 211, 216, 276 Thorez as miner, 6, 17 – 19, 25, 32, 68 trade unionism, 34, 42 – 3, 58

Mitterrand, Franc
ois, 3, 172, 221, 276, 287–8, 290 Moquet, Guy, 202 Mollet, Guy, 38, 221, 224, 236, 252, 254, 266 Molotov, Vyacheslav, and Khrushchev, 213, 215, 223, 235, 237, 243– 4, 277 and Stalin, 78, 84, 140, 145 and Thorez, 78, 190, see also Molotov – Ribbentrop pact Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, 4, 11, 138, 169, 182, 189, 196– 7 as touchstone, 173, 189 Thorez’s reaction, 13, 131– 2 Monatte, Pierre, 28 – 9, 35, 50 – 1, 59 Monmousseau, Gaston, 29, 58, 61, 65, 71, 82, 98, 192, 244 Montand, Yves, 213 Montesquieu, 229 Mont-Vale´rien fortress, 21 Morgan, Claude, 162, 240 Morgan, Kevin, 12, 124, 186, 201 Morocco, 252 Rif War, 2 – 3, 56 – 60, 62, 249 Moscow, visits by Thorez, (1925), 18, 55–6; (1926), 64–5; (1927), 72–3, 75–6; (1928), 77–8; (1929), 79; (1930), 84–5; (1931), 87; (1932), 93–5; (1933), 93, 97–8; (1934), 105–6, 109; (1935), 111–12; (1936), 119; (1939–41) 137–49; (1942), 152; (1943–44) 153–60; (1947), 190–3; (1950–1) 203–4; (1952), 208; (1953), 210–11; (1956), 222–4; (1957), 244–5; (1959), 269; (1960), 271–2; (1961–62) 282–3 Moulin, Jean, 170 Mouvement de la Paix, see Peace Movement Mouvement re´publicain populaire (MRP), 168, 217 Munich agreement, 128, 131– 2, 186 Mussolini, Benito, 10, 110, 132, 140, 250 Naegelen, Marcel-Edmond, 217 Nagy, Imry, 238, 242 Naltchik, 204 Naples, 161, 263, 282 National Front, see Front National nationalisations, 113, 115, 130, 165, 177–8, 180

INDEX Nazism, Nazis 101, 107, 118, 197, 217 appeasement, 128, 186, 196 occupation of France, 2 – 3, 16, 21, 65, 202, 205– 6, 282 PCF negotiations with, 105, 143, 180 PCF policy towards, 95 –7, 110, 131–2, 135– 6, 140, 143– 5 see also Humanite´ (l’) affair; Molotov – Ribbentrop pact Neizvestny, Ernst, 283 Netherlands (The), 147 Nikolaeva, Galina, 265 Nizan, Paul, 139 Norway, 147, 167 Noyelles-Godault, 14 – 16, 18, 22, 25 – 6, 28, 33, 41, 141, 282 PCF branch, 21, 29, 31 – 2, 34 – 6, 38 – 9, 53 Odessa, 263, 282, 285 Oradour, 254 Organisation arme´e secre`te (OAS), 275 Painleve´, Paul, 61 Paris Commune, 10, 111, 124, 140, 177, 279 Parmelin, He´le`ne, 240, 268 Parti communiste franc
ais (PCF), foundation (Tours, 1920), 10, 27 – 9, 31, 36, 39, 297n 2nd congress (Paris, 1922), 36– 7 3rd congress (Lyon, 1924), 46 – 7 4th congress (Clichy, 1925), 51, 55, 57 5th congress (Lille, 1926), 66–7, 107, 249 6th congress (Saint-Denis, 1929), 79 7th congress (Paris, 1932), 93 8th congress (Villeurbanne, 1936), 113 9th congress (Arles, 1937), 126, 250 10th congress (Paris, 1945), 164– 6, 172, 174– 5 11th congress (Strasbourg, 1947), 181, 185, 187 12th congress (Gennevilliers, 1950), 185, 198, 200 13th congress (Ivry-sur-Seine, 1954), 214, 216 14th congress (Le Havre, 1956), 235–6, 239, 254 15th congress (Ivry-sur-Seine, 1959), 247, 258, 260– 1, 263

349

16th congress (Saint-Denis, 1961), 272– 3 17th congress (Paris, 1964), 280– 1, 284– 5 18th congress (Levallois-Perret, 1967), 287 19th congress (Nanterre, 1972), 287– 8 20th congress (Saint-Ouen, 1976), 288 membership figures, 34, 54, 85, 116, 129, 162, 198, 241, 245– 6, 276 Parti d’unite´ prole´tarienne (PUP), 83, 94 – 5 Parti populaire franc
ais (PPF), 105 Parti socialiste autonome (PSA), 266– 7 Parti socialiste unifie´ (PSU), 266– 8 Pas-de-Calais, 3 activity by Thorez, 32 – 33, 36, 166 formation of PCF, 28, 31 Thorez as federation secretary, 39 – 44, 46, 50 – 4 Patriotic Guard, 159, 163– 4, 187, 190 Paul, Marcel, 168 pauperisation theory, 216, 218 –19, 224, 230, 236, 248, 262– 3, 280 Peace Movement, 197, 200, 205, 207, 269, 276 Amsterdam –Pleyel Movement (1932 – 33), 94, 96 and Algerian War, 259, 267– 8, 275 Paris Congress (1949), 196 Stockholm Appeal, 199– 200 Wroclaw Congress (1948), 198 peasantry, 66 – 7, 87, 100, 107, 114, 116, 143, 180, 207, see also Renaud Jean Pennetier, Claude, 19 Pe´tain, Philippe, 4, 30, 57, 140, 150, 153, 171, 202, see also Vichy regime Petit, General Ernest, 157 Petrovna, Nina, 269– 70 Piaf, E´dith, 286 Piatnitsky, Osip, 56, 64, 105 Picasso, Pablo, 212 and de-Stalinisation, 226, 240 and Fils du Peuple, 5 and Peace Movement, 196, 244 and socialist realism, 198, 283 as PCF member, 3, 162, 290 relationship with Thorez, 237, 241, 245, 248 sketch of Stalin, 236, 242 Pieck, Wilhelm, 154, 193 Pignon, E´douard, 240

350

MAURICE THOREZ

Pivert, Marceau, 116 Plato, 213, 227 Plissonnier, Gaston, 271, 284–5 Poincare´, Raymond, 67, 69 Poland, Polish, 48, 118–19, 147 as people’s democracy, 132, 176, 182, 197 de-Stalinisation, 220, 235, 237– 9, 242– 3, 262 in wartime, 131, 134, 136, 147, 158 Solidarnosc, 288 visits by Thorez, 193, 211, 222, 224 Pope John XXIII, 280 Pope Pius XI, 114 Popular Front, and colonialism, 250– 2 as reference point, 4, 11, 164– 5, 167–8, 177, 183, 207, 262, 275, 284, 287– 9 campaign for new Popular Front (1953 – 56), 216– 19, 220– 1, 249 PCF participation in government, 114– 15, 125– 130 see also Blum, Leon; Comintern; Duclos, Jacques; Fried, Eugen; Manuilsky, Dimitri; Radical Party; Stalin, Joseph; Socialist Party Prenant, Marcel, 174– 5, 200– 1, 248 Pre´vert, Jacques, 240 Pronteau, Jean, 226, 262 Pruja, Jacques, 171 Pudal, Bernard, 19, 213 Racamond, Julian, 109 Radical Party, Radicals, and Cartel des Gauches, 55, 61, 101 and communists, 62, 67 – 8, 74, 76, 96, 115, 126– 8, 146, 160 and Popular Front, 11, 100, 111, 115, 117 and Thorez, 108–9, 112– 3, 125, 141–2, 170, 177 see also Daladier, E´douard; Herriot, E´douard radio broadcasts, 8, 150– 1, 153, 158 rafle du Ve´l’ d’Hiv, 151, 163 Rajk, La´szlo´, 9, 199, 238 Ra´kosi, Ma´tya´s, 154, 238 Ramadier, Paul, 162, 178– 9, 181, 193, 218–19 Ramette, Arthur, 112, 134– 6, 141, 173, 189

Rassemblement du peuple franc
ais (RPF), 188, 207, see also Gaullism Ray, Man, 212 reading habits, Thorez’s, 7, 22, 82, 200, 212–13, 222, 265, 269, 280 Rebe´rioux, Madeleine, 268 Red Army, 152, 191, 197 –8, 237, 239, 242, 278 referenda, 1946 (May & October), 169, 173, 176 1958 (September), 247, 257, 260, 262, 274 1961 (January), 272 1962 (October), 276 religion, see Catholic Church Renaud Jean, 77 – 8, 86, 109 Renault car plant, 116, 180–1, 192– 3 Renoir, Jean, 113 resignation as general secretary, Thorez’s, 89– 90, 93, 97– 8, 247– 9, 258– 260, 273, 280 Resistance (The), 162, 187–8, 197, 202, 227 credentials of Thorez, 174– 5, 281 during war, 142– 3, 145– 7, 151– 2, 156– 7, 159– 60, 164– 5 figures involved in, 2, 170, 172– 3, 196, 198, 200– 1, 209, 227 Ridgway, General Matthew, 206– 7 Rif War, see Morocco Robrieux, Philippe, 6 – 7, 17, 21, 37, 51 –2, 81, 103, 171 Rochet, Waldeck, 188, 235, 243, 258, 271 deputy general secretary, 273, 275, 281 general secretary, 276, 285– 7 Rokossovsky, Konstantin, 237 Rolland, Romain, 94 – 5 Roncalli, Angelo, see Pope John XXIII Roosevelt, Franklin D., 153 Rosmer, Alfred, 28, 51, 59 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 213, 229, 322n Roy, Claude, 213, 240 Ruhr internationalisation of, 175 invasion of, 39 – 40, 44, 56, 96 Russell, Sam (Lesser, Manassa), 137 Russia, Russians, see Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Moscow, visits by Thorez; Russian Revolution; Soviet Union

INDEX Russian Revolution, 9, 34, 39, 46, 48, 123, 163, 174 anniversaries, 56, 190, 244 impact on French socialism, 26 – 7 impact on Thorez, 24 – 5 Sacco and Vanzetti, 77 Saint-Denis, 51, 79 –80, 94, 105 Saint Just, 151 Salacrou, Armand, 237 Salan, General Raoul, 255 Salengro, Roger, 116 Sallaumines, 15, 80 Sante´ prison, 29, 71, 75 – 6, 78, 81, 136, 208 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 117 Sarraut, Albert, 70, 74 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 198, 213, 240, 268 Saumoneau, Louise, 28 Sauvage, Franc
ois, 52, 54, 56, 63 –4 Schu¨ller, Richard, 73 Schuman, Robert, 195 Secchia, Pietro, 215 Second International, see Socialist International Secours rouge international (SRI), 81 – 3 Section franc
aise de l’Internationale ouvrie`re (SFIO), see Socialist Party Se´guy, Georges, 258 Sellier, Louis, 40, 47, 83 Semard, Pierre, 48, 58, 60, 62 – 6, 71, 76 –9, 86, 161 Serge, Victor, 82, 213 Servin, Marcel, 170, 200, 209, 214, 235, 242, 247, 254 see also Casanova – Servin affair Se´verac, Jean-Baptiste, 95 Simenon, Georges, 212 Sirot, Ste´phane, 8 Slansky, Rudolf, 209 Smigly-Rydz, General Edward, 118– 19 Soboul, Albert, 3 Sochi, 204, 282, 285 social fascism, 51, 71, 84, 90, 93, 96, 102, 107, 113 Socialist International, 27, 96, 119 Socialist Party, Socialists (SFIO) proposals for fusion, 155, 165 reconstituted by Mitterrand, 3, 287– 8 Thorez as member, 3, 25, 28 – 9

351

Thorez’s negotiations with 58, 93 – 6, 101, 106– 8, 168, 178 socialist realism, 198, 236– 7, 282 Solidarite´ franc
aise, 101 Sorbonne-Lettres (PCF cell), 248, 262 Souvarine, Boris, 28– 9, 31, 34– 5, 46 – 51, 53, 59, 64 Soviet Union, and Algerian War, 254, 264 and capitalist west, 70, 199, 223, 245, 270, 277 and France, 110– 11, 154, 158 –60, 256– 7, 287 and Nazi Germany, 131 –2, 146– 7 construction of ‘socialism’, 186, 244, 269, 277, 288 purges, 56, 91 – 2, 121, 125, 199, 208–9, 222, 235, 238, 242 Thorez’s loyalty towards, 6, 8, 9, 112, 195, 197– 8, 213, 244, 275 see also Communist Party of the Soviet Union; de-Stalinisation; Moscow, visits by Thorez; Stalin, Joseph Spain, Spanish, 57, 154, 281 civil war, 1– 2, 117– 19, 123– 5, 128, 130 International Brigades, 137, 200, 239 visits by Thorez, 120– 1 Stalin, Joseph, and Cold War, 186, 199– 200, 216– 17 and Comintern, 10, 75, 112, 128, 154– 5 and France, 152– 3, 157– 9, 194, 251 and PCF, 56, 64 – 5, 91 – 3, 98, 101, 142– 3 and Popular Front, 101, 105– 6, 110– 11, 119, 128 and Second World War, 132, 134– 5, 140, 145, 149 and Spain, 121 and Tito, 190, 198– 9, 224 as Soviet leader, 47, 62, 64, 70, 76, 138, 222, 226 death, 210, 236 loyalty of Thorez, 1, 8, 84 – 5, 100, 112, 149, 185, 201, 208 meetings with Thorez, 160– 1, 164, 182, 190– 2, 204– 5, 206 opinion of Thorez, 119 see also cult, cultism; de-Stalinisation; Stalinism

352

MAURICE THOREZ

Stalinism, Stalinists, as organisational model, 88, 93, 172 as political system, 5, 7, 10, 51, 65, 177, 186, 227, 267, 279– 80 ideology, 198 PCF commitment, 2, 12, 239, 278, 289 Thorez’s commitment, 4, 6, 201, 231, 242, 248, 271, 274, see also cult, cultism, de-Stalinisation; Stalin Stavisky, Serge, 101– 2 Steeg, The´odore, 90 Stepanov (Stoyan Minev), 78, 85, 87, 105, 145, 151, 155, 190 Marty’s letter to, 173, 183, 187 Stil, Andre´, 207– 8, 210, 215, 240 students, against Algerian War, 248, 266– 7 attitude of Thorez, 268, 280 in 1956, 238 protests in 1968, 287 see also Union of Communist Students (UEC); Union nationale des e´tudiants de France (UNEF) Suez crisis, 241 Suslov, Mikhail, 190, 215 syndicalism, see trade unionism Syria, 57, 62 Syrtsov – Lominadze affair, 91 – 2 Taittinger, Pierre, 55 Tardieu, Andre´, 81, 90, 103 Taslitzky, Boris, 205 Tha¨lmann, Ernst, 62, 107 Third Force, 181, 195 Third International, see Comintern Thorez, Aurore (Thorez’s first wife) see Membœuf, Aurore Thorez, Cle´mence (Thorez’s mother), see Baudry, Cle´mence Thorez, Jean (Thorez’s second son), 136, 149–50, 244 Thorez, Louis (Thorez’s adoptive father), 15, 20, 22, 141 Thorez, Louis (Thorez’s brother), 15, 21, 28, 152, 161, 282 Thorez, Maurice junior (Thorez’s first son), 79, 81, 83, 104, 122, 148, 205

Thorez, Paul (Thorez’s third son), 4, 19– 20, 147–8, 150– 1, 153, 171, 204, 213, 236, 283 Thorez, Pierre (Thorez’s fourth son), 162, 212 Tillon, Charles, 169, 173– 4, 181, 196, 205, 209, see also Marty – Tillon affair Times (The), interview with Thorez, 175– 7, 223, 243, 279, 287 Tirana, 269 Tito, Josip, 227, 239 conflict with Stalin, 190– 1, 198– 9 relationship with Khrushchev, 223, 234– 5, 242 Titoism, Titoists, 186, 199, 209, 238, 240, 266, see also Tito Togliatti, Palmiro, 45, 157, 227, 256, 279 and PCF politics, 65, 77 – 8, 109, 133, 145– 6, 158, 189, 259 de-Stalinisation, 221, 223, 233– 5, 239– 40 during war, 141, 150– 1 relationship with Thorez, 11, 151, 226– 7 trade unionism, 17, 27, 53, 61 relationship with PCF, 66, 72, 87 – 8, 219, 259 Thorez as trade unionist, 42 –4, 58 – 9, 117 trade union unity, 59, 95, 111, see also Confe´de´ration franc
aise des travailleurs chre´tiens; Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail; Confe´de´ration ge´ne´rale du travail unitaire; Force Ouvrie`re Tre´and, Maurice, 123, 134, 136, 143– 4 Treint, Albert, 35 and Doriot, 61, 64 – 5 and Girault, 55, 60, 62 – 63, 73 conflict with Souvarine, 47 – 50 Triolet, Elsa, 3, 240– 2, 212 Trotsky, Leon, and France, 24 and PCF, 10 – 11, 31, 34, 47 – 9, 65 and Thorez, 50, 64, 75– 6, 222 conflict with Stalin, 47, 52, 70, 78, 146 see also Trotskyism Trotskyism, Trotskyists, 280, 290 and PCF, 55, 173, 214, 231, 234 and Thorez, 6, 45, 49 – 52, 64 in Soviet Union, 56, 75 – 6, 121 Truman, Harry S., 178

INDEX Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 242, 278 Tunisia, 252 Turkey, 145, 285 Ufa, 45, 138, 150– 2 Ulbricht, Walter, 154, 222, 224, 227, 244, 264 Union de la gauche socialiste (UGS), 266 Union des femmes franc
aises (UFF), 172 Union des jeunes filles de France (UJFF), 132 Union nationale des e´tudiants de France (UNEF), 238, 266– 8, see also students Union of Communist Students (UEC), 268, 279–80, see also students United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations, 254 United States of America (USA), 2, 77, 134, 158, 175, 251 and French capitalism, 158, 206, 209, 262– 3 as Cold War enemy, 183, 188, 191, 194, 196– 7, 245, 270 wartime alliance, 152–3, 175, 181 Urban, Joan Barth, 147, 154 USSR, see Soviet Union Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Claude, 172 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 66, 82, 121, 163 Varna, 282, 285 Vasilevsky, Lev, 146 Vassart, Albert, 83 – 4 Ve´lodrome d’hiver (Ve´l’ d’Hiv), 125, 127, 151, 163 Vermeersch, Ernestine (me´me`re), 20, 255, 282 Vermeersch, Jeannette, 190, 193, 259, 284 and cult, 23, 205, 231 and de-Stalinisation, 225, 240, 269, 278 archives, 7, 24 birth control, 228 family life, 122, 147– 9, 212, 255 holidays, 123, 132, 182, 281– 2, 285 in PCF leadership, 172– 3, 201, 214– 15, 221, 243, 270, 281, 287 in Soviet Union, 190, 208– 9, 211– 12, 272 in wartime, 134– 6, 150

353

relationship with Thorez, 6, 8, 84, 104, 163, 203, 222, 241 Versailles Treaty, 40 Vichy regime, 22, 29, 140, 151, 155 civil service, 171 legacy, 217, 290 resistance against, 152– 3, 164, 206 Vidali, Vittorio, 222 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 267– 8 Vietnam, Vietnamese, 71, 179, 196, 206, 217, 252 Viet Minh, 251 Vinogradov, Sergey, 256– 7, 273, 283 Vinogradov, Vladimir, 204, 208 Virlouvet, E´tienne, 170 Voltaire, 213, 229 Von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 131, see also Molotov – Ribbentrop pact Warsaw, 132, 193, 211, 222, 237, 240, 243, 252 Werth, Alexander, 150 Weygand, Maxime, 140 Wieviorka, Annette, 8, 42, 51 – 2, 81, 104, 208 World Federation of Trade Unions, 270 Wurmser, Andre´, 285 Yalta, 271, 282 Young Communists, 31, 57, 74, 77 – 8, 85, 104, 160 Youth International, 91 – 2 Yugoslavia, Yugoslavs, 147, 182, 187, 197, 232, 245 criticisms of PCF, 183, 187, 190 relations with Soviet Union, 191, 198–9, 223– 4, 234 see also Tito; Titoism Zetkin, Clara, 31, 65 Zhdanov, Andrei, 142, 182– 3, 187, 189–90 death, 208 Zinoviev, Grigory, 37, 47, 61 – 5, 68, 70, 121 Zola, E´mile, 14 – 15, 22, 229 Zyromski, Jean, 107

Plate 1 Head shaven while on the run from police, c.1929. Credit: Thorez’s personal file, Comintern archives. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History.

Plate 2 Campaigning during the Belleville by-election, October 1930. Thorez is standing behind the desk. Credit: q Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet.

Plate 3 Centre-stage at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress, July 1935. To Thorez’s right is Georgi Dimitrov. Credit: Photo by Laski Diffusion/Getty Images.

Plate 4 Saluting the crowd on 14 July 1936. To his right is Socialist leader Le´on Blum. Behind, obscured by Thorez’s waving arm, is Radical leader E´douard Daladier. Credit: Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

Plate 5 Spain, February 1937. Pictured with members of the International Brigades in Albacete. Credit: ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy Stock Photo.

Plate 6 A communist view of gender roles. With Jeannette Vermeersch and their son Jean, late 1936. Credit: Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

Plate 7 ‘La Barbe’. Clandestine in Moscow, late 1940. Credit: Thorez’s personal file, Comintern archives. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History.

Plate 8 9 September 1944. Andre´ Marty at the rostrum during the first PCF mass meeting in Paris after the city’s liberation. The banner proclaims ‘Maurice Thorez must return to Paris’. Behind the stage, the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes fly alongside the Hammer and Sickle. Credit: Photo by LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty Images.

Plate 9 Pencil sketch by Pablo Picasso, 23 May 1945. Credit: q Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2017. Plate 10 Speaking at a PCF rally before the onset of the Cold War. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

Plate 11 27 November 1946. Meeting of Central Committee and communist parliamentarians, with a banner demanding a Thorez premiership for ‘the security and renaissance of France’. Thorez’s portrait shares the platform with those of other PCF leaders. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

Plate 12 Thorez in his ministerial office, 1946. Part of the PCF campaign to promote him as a statesman, worthy to be prime minister. Credit: Photo by David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

Plate 13 ‘The Party of Maurice Thorez’. Rally at Ivry to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, 28 April 1950. Credit: Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images.

Plate 14 Le Bourget Airport, 11 November 1950. One month after a stroke, Thorez is lifted into a Soviet plane for treatment in the Soviet Union. Credit: Photo by Walter Carone/Paris Match via Getty Images.

Plate 15 22 December 1955. Campaigning in Paris during the legislative elections, with lighting carefully positioned to hide his paralysed right side. Credit: Photo by Philippe Le Tellier/Paris Match via Getty Images.

Plate 16 21 December 1956. At the opening of Picasso’s exhibition in Nice, a month after the artist put his name to a letter criticising the PCF’s response to the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Credit: Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo.

Plate 17 2 August 1963. On the quay at Yalta, after arriving for his final summer vacation in the Soviet Union. To Thorez’s right is Mikhail Suslov. Jeannette Vermeersch is behind the two men. Credit: SPUTNIK/Alamy Stock Photo.