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He led the life of a militant Communist leader—in & out of jail, in & out of Russia. He developed into one of the party's most effective orators. Most of all, from his childhood on, Thorez read everything he could lay his hamlike hands on. Today he can gallop through a technical book, or one on philosophy or art, and then give without a stumble a half-hour precis of its contents. In lectures and debates at the Sorbonne, in meetings of legal and philosophical societies, he shines—a grinning, grown-up Quiz-kid with a cowlick over his forehead.
A Laughing Marxist. When the Communists entered the Government, some naive rightists assumed that power would mellow their driving determination. Thorez shows no sign of softening. His 5 ft. 10 in., 165-lb. body is solid and strong, his blue eyes clear. As vice president of France, he sits in the fussy luxury of the Hotel Matignon, which Austro-Hungarian ambassadors occupied before 1914. The Gobelin tapestries on the walls neither fit nor affect his revolutionary ardor. He doesn't even know the name of the Roman Emperor whose bust faces him. When Thorez laughs (he is one of the few Marxists who laugh), his bellow shakes the air, and the imperial chandelier tinkles.
Thorez' greatest political liability—his absence from France during the war—is also his greatest political asset. It carried him and Jeannette Vermeersch to Russia. (How, they said last week, "is still a secret." But they did not deny that a Russian bomber might have taken them over part of the journey.) Thorez was living in Russia during the war, when the Russian Communist Party made a successful experiment which the French party is trying to repeat. Moscow fought the war with nationalist, not Communist, slogans. Would this technique be feasible outside the U.S.S.R.? The boys are now trying it out.
German Communists are yelling for the Ruhr more loudly than any other Germans; French Communists are yelling for the Ruhr more loudly than any other Frenchmen. It pays on both sides of the boundary, and doesn't matter much to Moscow, which knows that the Ruhr's fate will be decided by the Big Three, not by France or Germany. Of course, on questions really important to Moscow, foreign Communists reverse their nationalist line. For instance, genuine French nationalists see a military advantage in France's participation in a Western bloc of nations. But French Communists bitterly oppose a Western bloc because it might interfere with Russia's Eastern bloc. Thorez' job is to concoct just the right mixture of nationalist and pro-Soviet policy.
His Russian experience and his broader view of how to foster world revolution by nationalist slogans give him the edge on his inferiors in the party hierarchy.