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Lesser Lights. No. 2 man, short, fat Jacques Duclos is the party's parliamentary expert and also its official authority on international matters. He is a brain-truster, a figurer of acute angles—Stalin's sheepdog, ready to run & bark at his master's "Go!", cutting out any testy old ram that refuses to trot with the fold. It was his editorial blast (TIME, Aug. 6), which U.S. Reds accepted as the ungarbled word from Moscow, that led to the party's expulsion of Earl Browder. It was Moscow speaking again when Duclos scolded Palmiro Togliatti for the Italian Communists' refractory stand on Trieste (TIME, May 6). In France, however, his chief asset is his ruthless, efficient leadership of the Communist underground during the occupation. He is the man the rank-&-file would probably choose if (unthinkably) they were allowed to pick their own leader.
Third, by several lengths, is André Marty, a fiery, forceful demagogue, the kind of Communist that conservatives see in nightmares. Marty, who led the mutiny of the French Black Sea fleet in 1919, belongs to the days of sheer troublemaking by riot and strike, the pristine days when the party often meant what it said.
No. 4, almost unknown outside France, is beetle-browed Léon Mauvais (38), who was elected to the party's Central National Committee only four years after he joined the party in the general strike of 1925. Mauvais is the party's best administrator and organizer, a colorless, powerful general manager.
Two rising new leaders are short, soft-voiced François Billoux (43), a Thorez disciple, now Minister of Reconstruction, and sleek, full-lipped Waldeck Rochet (40), who was a shepherd in the hills of SaÔne-et-Loire when he was eight. Rochet, the party's agricultural expert, represents its rising strength among the peasants.
Wheels Going Round. The French Communist Party, which these men direct, is one of the most efficient political machines known to history. Although only one out of every eight or ten union members is a Communist, Red leaders control 30 out of France's 40 industrial unions, including the three biggest: steelworkers (891,780), builders (510,190) and railwaymen (387,648). Six of the 13 directors of the C.G.T. (Confédération Générale du Travail, the central labor organization) are avowed Communists and several others are sympathizers.
Communist strength is not confined to labor or to the big cities. It spreads all over France (see map). Out of 90 departments of France, 89 have active Communist sections. Even the elegant Neuilly section of Paris has 42 cells, held together under the chairmanship of Lucien Sorlin, a thin, intense worker who has stayed in one two-room flat and one party for 24 years.
Sorlin is doing well: of the 33,000 registered voters in Neuilly, 200 were registered Communist in 1936, 1,000 last October. He has experts for everything: a lady doctor as chief of feminine propaganda; a professor for the education committee; lawyer, students. . . . His chief of propaganda is an elderly bourgeois who last week declined to give his name, said he was "a man of letters and a world traveler." He was, too.