Walls and sidewalks in Paris' famed Red Belt (workers' suburbs) were scribbled with bold white slogans: Thorez à Paris!"Thorez back to Paris!" Thus French Communists high-pressured the Gaullist Government for return of the Communist Party's prewar secretary, the onetime coal miner who is now an exile in Moscow.
Maurice Thorez had been the ideological father of Leon Blum's Popular Front. In the middle '30s Frenchmen called him "the French Stalin." During the period of the Russo-German pact, he had condemned France's "imperialist" war against Nazi Germany. When the Daladier Government outlawed the French Communist Party in September 1939, Thorez deserted from the...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
