One night last week the speedy auto-rail train which links Paris with the rubber-manufacturing city of Clermont-Ferrand ground to an unscheduled stop five miles short of its destination. Surprised passengers stumbled over luggage piles into waiting buses and heard a guard explain: "The station at Clermont-Ferrand is in the hands of Communists." The "Akron of France" had become the scene of France's bloodiest battle since liberation.
Center of the disturbance was the Bergougnan rubber factory, where a Communist-fomented sit-in strike had been in progress two weeks. When French police arrived to enforce...
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