Red, White & Cellule

In industrial plants and mines scattered throughout France, fresh proletarian unrest appeared last week. In all some 7.000 workers "folded arms" in strikes--as compared to more than 1,000,000 few months ago when it was a case of getting wages upped and winning vacations (TIME, June 8 et seq.). The new strikes were in sympathy with the new Spanish Cabinet headed by out-and-out proletarian Premier Francisco Largo Caballero (see p. 22). In Paris an imposing delegation from the French Metal Workers' Union bearing a petition with 2,000 signatures waited on French Premier Leon Blum, demanding that he send aid to the Spanish Reds. "Whom do you take me for, Messieurs?" retorted Socialist Blum. "My efforts to obtain the neutrality and non-intervention of the powers in Spain have only just borne fruit. Do you suppose I would reverse my policy?"

The workers departed vowing that unless M. Blum does reverse his policy he will face a general strike in France. 'Meanwhile French parties of the Right raised a great howl because Spaniards who were driven from Irun by the victorious Whites last week were permitted to enter France on the Atlantic coast and put aboard "sealed trains" which soon delivered these Reds back into Spain at the other end of the Pyrenees on the Mediterranean coast at anarchist Barcelona. The Blum Cabinet, striving to maintain its precariously neutral position, explained that these Reds were only receiving the customary humane treatment accorded refugees, and that anyhow most of them paid for their tickets on the "sealed trains." The penniless were carried free. On the other hand Spanish Reds who escaped to Portugal were driven back into Spain to be executed by the Whites.

In Reims last week occurred the first important street battle between gangs of French Reds & Pinks and gangs of French Whites of the new anti-Communist Party founded by tough, barrel-chested ex-Communist Jacques Doriot, Mayor of St. Denis, a Paris suburb, and a French Deputy. In 1932 he visited Russia, conferred with Moscow leaders, returned to France vigorously critical of Stalin, and was therefore expelled from the French Communist Party. Nonetheless his St. Denis working class constituents have twice more re-elected him although he was opposed and vituperated by Communist candidates. Today this stocky, muscular anti-Communist with hands rough from manual work stands in France against Capitalist "big business" against Marxist ''class war," for ardently nationalist French "trust busting" and for a French application of "corporativism"--i. e., a Parliament whose members each represent a guild or unit in the national economy, a plumber being the deputy of plumbers, etc. Thus far jobless middle class youths have been his chief recruits, for the French bourgeoisie are beginning to think that the more or less aristocratic Croix de Fen of Col. null de La Rocque will never get anywhere. Similarly the Reds & Pinks are beginning to fear Worker Doriot as they never feared La Rocque. Last week the Communists and Socialists decided in Reims to send their Popular Front gangs bursting into the homes of Mayor Doriot's followers to give them a thrashing lesson. The Whites, led in person by Doriot who had gone to Reims on a speaking tour, gave battle in the streets with clubs and paving stones, and 50 Frenchmen were knocked out before order was restored by police.

From Paris last week astute Editor Charles Grey of Britain's candid weekly The Aeroplane reported after visiting French aircraft plants: "Every factory in France has for several years past turned into what is called a cellule of some sort of Communist organization about which few people know anything. The head of the factory knows of the cellule in his own factory and he knows who is the Chef de cellule. But he never knows what is the organization to which his Chef de cellule reports or which issues orders to the Chef.

"The most that one can gather is that the Chefs de cellule of a certain area themselves form a sort of superior cellule which has another Chef who again reports to and takes his orders from somebody higher up.

"If a workman refuses to belong to the cellule "he is quietly told to get out, and if he refuses to get out then things begin to happen to him. His tools disappear or break in his hands or the machine on which he is working blows up, or things fall on him, and in a general way his life is made unbearable. Consequently the men join the cellules for the sake of peace and quietness and to be allowed to get on with their jobs and draw their wages. And when the people above declare a strike-- contrary perhaps to the wishes of the workmen's own Trade Unions--the cellules must obey.

"Behind all this is the feeling that things are going to blow up. . . . The true strength of France lies in the fact that the land belongs almost entirely to small owners, the petit proprietaire of whom we hear so much. But unfortunately if the Communists get the command in France as they have done in Russia the petit pro-prietaire will merely become the hated kulak. And as there is no Siberia to which to send him he is likely to have a worse time than the Russian kulak.

"Anyhow we can rest assured that no French aircraft manufacturer would willingly send aeroplanes to the Communist rulers of Spain. If the Army party won they would not pay for the machines, and if the Army lost the Communists would repudiate all debts to capitalists."

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