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Concierges of Neuilly's swank apartment houses proselytize domestic servants. In workers' districts party propaganda does not shy from argot, but Sorlin takes care that his organizers mind their grammar and diction, lest bourgeois members be offended.
Devil into Savior. A more spectacular example of Communist organizing technique is the ancient town of Albi in southwestern France. For centuries the people of Albi have blown fine glassware. To them and their peasant neighbors a year ago a Communist was no more welcome than the Devil himself. But last winter Albi's glass furnaces were cold. The local party unit explained the situation to HQ in Paris. Thorez in person cajoled his Pas-de-Calais miners into producing extra coal for little Albi. It was Tammany Hall with freight trains instead of Christmas baskets, and, like Tammany, it worked. Thorez presided at the opening of the glassworks and Albi greeted him as its savior. His fame spread from Albi through the Department of Tarn. Result: once-conservative Tarn was almost evenly divided in last month's referendum vote.
To Hell with Them. French Communists, buttonholed last week at random and asked why they had joined the party, gave answers like these:
Raymond Mathieu, 22, clean-cut, bespectacled law student: "I was brought up with Socialist ideas, my family prepared the groundwork. I joined the Communist Party because it's dynamic."
André Le Plantier, 50, meek-eyed bank teller: "At the liberation, when I saw the sacrifices they made for France, I felt a moral obligation. . . ."
Marguerite Stihlé, timid, toothless mother of 14 children: "I'm a Protestant . . . my husband got sick. ... I asked the church for help but they put me off. One day they even asked me for a contribution. I said 'To hell with them' and we all joined the Communist Party."
Hunger & History. Marguerite Stihl#233;'s addled protest was important. Thousands of Frenchmen were voting Communist to express discontent and opposition, even though the Communists are in the Government. Maurice Thorez knows well that hunger is his most effective fellow traveler. By focusing attention on France's economic ills he draws French attention away from the issues of dictatorship and Russian control.
Up until two weeks before the referendum, most French politicians unwittingly played Thorez' game by blandly pretending that they believed in the C.P.'s essential patriotism. But now French politics was warming up. Last week Socialist Interior Minister André Le Troquer, a one-armed veteran cried:
"Maurice Thorez deserted, going through Switzerland and Germany into Russia, while other Frenchmen like Léon Blum stayed in France to defend their country. A leader shouldn't quit when his men are in danger. To shout: 'Thorez to power' is to serve the cause of Russia."
The M.R.P.'s Minister of Justice Pierre-Henri Teitgen, a legendary figure (known as "Tristan") in the Resistance, put the anti-Red case in even more fundamental terms: "Between us and materialist Communism there is no possibility of any sort of a pact."