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Nevertheless, millions of patriotic Frenchmen refuse to deny the patriotism of French Communists because of the Reds' really glorious record in the Resistance (once Russia was in the war). Leaders of anti-Communist parties have until very recently softened their attacks on Red leaders because they remember the years of danger shared.
Yet the suspicion of Moscow control will not down, nor will the French fear of a Communist police state on the Russian model. In vain (to date) Thorez has cried: "Different countries, different methods."
Out in the Open. The French Communists have forged an instrument that is indeed different in its techniques from the Russian party or those of Britain and the U.S. In Russia (and in the Eastern European states it controls) the party is an arm of the police power, spying on the people, weeding out whatever might compete with the delusions of Kremlin propaganda. In Britain and the U.S., Communism is part pressure group, part underground conspiracy carried on by men who conceal their faith.
But no one looks under the bed for the French Communist Party; it is in it. With 1,000,000 members, 5,000,000 voters, six ministers in the Cabinet, the French party is the first Communist Party in any nation to make a serious bid to win a majority through democratic processes. The consummate skill which the French Communists show in using democratic methods does not, of course, mean that the party is moving in the direction of democracy. The party organizers have merely learned another language in which to pursue totalitarian aims.
This week's election of a new Constituent Assembly is a critical test of that effort; from what happens at France's polls the whole Western world may learn how strong the Communist threat is. The result depends largely on the skill of the men who lead the French Communists.
Memory of a Tomb. At the top—unquestionably—is Maurice Thorez. He started at the bottom. Son and grandson of a miner, he was born in 1900 at Noyelle-Godault in the Pas-de-Calais. "My earliest memory is of a mining accident, of plain white wooden coffins placed in neat rows on the floor of the shed. I remember men, women & children running in all directions, colliding, pushing, returning to where they started, and sweating gendarmes guarding the pit gates against the shrieking, weeping, hysterical crowd which knew that hundreds of its menfolk were condemned to slow death, entombed beneath the earth."
At ten he remembers a miners' hunger march. His mother represented the women of Noyelle. In the riots that ensued, one of the workers was killed by the police.
Other memories were happier. He played the flute at miners' social gatherings (he still thinks he's pretty good at it). He watched the pigeons of his village win the Sunday afternoon races. (He says the Noyelle pigeons still win.) He became a Socialist at 19, a union leader before he was 21. When the French Socialists split down the middle on the question of affiliating with the Communist International, Thorez was on the left. When he was 25 he was a member of the Political Bureau.