Thorez `a Paris!

Walls and sidewalks in Paris' famed Red Belt (workers' suburbs) were scribbled with bold white slogans: Thorez `a Paris!--"Thorez back to Paris!" Thus French Communists high-pressured the Gaullist Government for return of the Communist Party's prewar secretary, the onetime coal miner who is now an exile in Moscow.

Maurice Thorez had been the ideological father of Leon Blum's Popular Front. In the middle '30s Frenchmen called him "the French Stalin." During the period of the Russo-German pact, he had condemned France's "imperialist" war against Nazi Germany. When the Daladier Government outlawed the French Communist Party in September 1939, Thorez deserted from the Army, went underground.

When the Germans invaded Russia-- Thorez stopped whistling the Internationale, started whistling La Marseillaise. From Moscow, where he and his family had a two-room apartment, he broadcast to the French Resistance. He urged cooperation with De Gaulle. But General de Gaulle remembered that Thorez was a military deserter, would not permit him to return to liberated France.

The Communists claimed that Thorez had gone A.W.O.L. to save his life. Last week they defied the Gaullist Government by nominating Thorez for the expanded Consultative Assembly.

This action put General de Gaulle on the spot. If he did not permit the seating of Thorez, he could be attacked for arbitrary interference by the executive in legislative affairs. But Thorez' return would give a developing leftist opposition to De Gaulle its shrewdest leadership.

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