"I can understand everything up to the time of Marx's Communist Manifesto" confessed a prominent French Communist to his comrades, "but anything after that well, I just don't know any more."
Such was the confusion that pervaded France's Communist Party, long the most Stalinist outside the Iron Curtain, on the eve of its first congress since Khrushchev pulled the plug on Stalin last February. The workers, taught to regard pale ex-Miner Maurice Thorez as a French Stalin, were in ferment; the intellectuals, a small but important faction because of their contacts with influential fellow travelers, were distraught and openly disobeyed party rulings....
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