Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949
was mad to have even thought of asking Picasso for such a drawing.
‘But really, Elsa,’ Daix broke in, ‘Stalin isn’t God the Father!’
‘Yes, he is, Pierre. Nobody’s going to reflect much about what this drawing of Picasso signifies. He hasn’t even deformed Stalin’s face. He’seven respected it. But he has dared to touch it. He has actually dared, Pierre, do you understand?’
Aragon rose to the occasion and took full responsibility upon himself. It was almost as if somebody had to face a court martial for treason. But for the staff of
Les Lettres françaises,
the worst was still to come. Daix found secretaries in tears from the insults screamed down the telephone at them by loyal Communists protesting at the sacrilege. Some even said that it portrayed Stalin as cruel and Asiatic, which was what his enemies wanted.
Those who wished to revenge themselves on Aragon did not waste time. Chief among them was Auguste Lecoeur. He wanted
Les Lettres françaises
publicly condemned. Aragon prepared a suitably grovelling apology.
Communists who found themselves excluded from the party during the frenzy over the Titoist heresy were like lost souls. They had automatically been deprived of the vast majority of their friends, not having made or kept many outside the party. And they had lost all sense of purpose in their lives, along with the sense of comradeship which an embattled community provided. A true Communist used to say that he intended to die with his party membership card in his pocket – ‘
mourir la carte dans la poche
’.
The wrench was almost as hard for those who took the decision to leave because they could no longer swallow the lies and ‘
serrer les dents
’. For some this came with the show trials in Eastern Europe, for many more it came in 1956. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes on 26 February at the Twentieth Congress, yet the French Communist Party, still irredeemably Stalinist, tried to pretend that nothing had happened. The news was entirely suppressed in
L’Humanité,
while every other newspaper was full of the story.
Jacqueline Ventadour-Hélion, who had read Khrushchev’s speech in
Le Monde,
raised the issue at the next party meeting she attended. There was an embarrassed silence, then the subject was rapidly changed. Afterwards, a cadre told her firmly that ‘not all truths should be spoken aloud’. This, for her, was the time to leave. She was already under suspicion for having visited friends in the United States. Communists were not allowed visas – she had in fact obtained one through a friendin the American Embassy who took a more relaxed view of the regulation – so in the party’s logic she was therefore a supporter of John Foster Dulles. Unlike those who hated the idea of losing their party card, she felt an immense sense of liberation when it was torn up.
That autumn, during the Suez crisis, Soviet tanks crushed the rising in Hungary. Furious demonstrators attacked the Soviet Embassy. In the crowd, General de Bénouville encountered Colonel Marcel Degliame, the Communist who had come to him on that night in 1948 to warn him to be prepared against an attack.
Crowds also surrounded Communist Party headquarters, where the security guards were ready. A more serious attack was mounted against the offices of
L’Humanité
. Groups climbed over the roofs and threw Molotov cocktails. Inside, staff and other Communist volunteers, who had come in to help defend the place, put out fires and ejected any attackers who managed to break in. They hurled what missiles came to hand: bottles from the canteen, chairs, even a bust of Karl Marx, which was said to have flattened one assailant. The most effective were hunks of metal newspaper type. Three Communists were killed in the disorders and the days of the Resistance were recalled once again.
L’Humanité
claimed afterwards, in an effort to dignify the events, that workers loyal to the party had rushed into Paris from the ‘
ceinture rouge
’ to defend ‘their party, their newspaper… just as one throws oneself into a fire to save one’s wife and children’.
The events of 1956 led to a dramatic decline in the Communist Party’s influence on intellectual life in Paris. This did not mean that the left-wing intelligentsia’s fascination with revolutionary violence slackened. Over the next decade, new idols and theorists – including Mao, Marcuse and Che Guevara – were raised up to take the place of
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher