The Challenger

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At Les Halles, "the belly of Paris," 250 market women left their stalls last week, crowded into a schoolroom where a plainly dressed woman, obviously and proudly pregnant, talked about food and coal. Her tone was conversational, her words easy to understand. She knew what interested them, did Jeannette Vermeersch. Listening to her was like a chat around a kitchen table. It was hard to realize that Jeannette Vermeersch might be the next First Lady of France.

She spoke of Maurice Thorez (pronounced tore-ezz), to whom she had borne two sons (9 and 4) and whom she had at last married a few months ago. People said that he was Vice President of France. Jeannette Vermeersch denied it, with biting political irony rather than wifely indignation: "Where would he get the money? The Communist Party allows its deputies to keep only 8,500 francs [$70] out of their monthly salary of 30,000 francs [$250]. And this year rich capitalists are not helping Maurice Thorez give 35,000-franc presents to mistresses."

She praised the other five Communist ministers in the present Government for working indefatigably for recovery. A heckler, referring to last winter's electric power crisis, wanted to know why it was necessary to have a Communist Minister of Production in order to cut off the electric current. Thorez' wife retorted that two factors, lack of coal and the drought, had caused the power shortage. Production Minister Marcel Paul had spurred the miners on to increase coal production until it exceeded the prewar level. Then salty Jeannette Vermeersch added with a wink: "And, comrades, we don't believe in God--but it rained. Today there is plenty of current."

Quick Shift. From Paris had flowed a generous measure of the ideas that nourished Western democracy. Were Parisians hungry enough to forget their heritage of freedom? Jeannette Vermeersch and Maurice Thorez were betting that they were. Frenchmen everywhere, nearly as food-and fuel-conscious as the women of Les Halles, last week heard Communists making down-to-earth campaign speeches with little mention of Marxist ideas. By stressing the black market that fed the rich and starved the rest, Party Boss Thorez hoped he could make enough Frenchmen forget the less immediate but not less important issues involved in this Sunday's national elections.

In last month's constitutional referendum the party had blundered badly. It failed to prevent the Catholic M.R.P. from lifting the referendum campaign out of petty details and up to the plane of principle. The Reds were beaten as soon as the M.R.P. succeeded in showing voters the connection between undemocratic provisions in the Communist-drafted constitution and a possible future Communist dictatorship. Freedom v. slavery is not a choice that Frenchmen find hard to make.

Thorez was quick to realize his mistake. At 9:30 on "referendum night," the big four of the French Communist Party were sitting around a rickety wooden table in an office on the top floor of the Humanite building in the rue d'Enghien. Most political experts believed that the results could not safely be predicted until midnight. Came a discreet tap on the door and a youth entered bearing a slip of paper. It was the result of the vote in the Ivry-sur-Seine district, Communist stronghold on the outskirts of the city, Thorez' own electoral fief. At Ivry the constitution had been carried by 14,705-to-6,783. The majority was 2,000 less than Thorez had hoped for. He turned to the three others--Jacques Duclos, Andre Marty, Leon Mauvais--and said: "We are beaten. In one hour there will be a meeting of the Political Bureau."

At midnight, while the other parties and observers were still hesitating about the outcome of the referendum, the Communist Party had already accepted its defeat, defined and blamed certain errors which had contributed to that defeat, and laid down its new strategy.

First--the U.S. For a TIME correspondent last week Thorez summed up the foreign policy side of the new strategy. In the course of an interview, he whipped out a pen, wrote:

"By the side of those with whom she fought against the Nazi oppressor, and in particular the United States, England, the Soviet Union, France hopes to build a new world, based on democracy and collective security. It is a union of free peoples which permitted victory, and this union sealed in a common sacrifice can guarantee peace. The United Nations organization appears to us the most efficient instrument against the threat of aggression."

Thorez not only put the United States first, he underlined the two words with a quick stroke of his pen. Then he smiled engagingly.

Soothing Syrup. In domestic policy the new Communist line is equally placatory. Thorez insists that the present stage of French development calls for a democratic regime and that the only ambition of the Communist Party is to be the most democratic of French parties. It follows, he says, that the French Communist Party will govern only if it gets the support of a majority of the French people. On nationalization of industry, the last Assembly went almost as far as the Communists want to go, except that they would like to see all--rather than some--heavy industry taken over by the state. The Communists will not oppose a clause in the constitution upholding the sanctity of private property. They seek no capital levy on the rich and, above all, they insist that no orders whatever are received from Moscow.

This double dose of soothing syrup is intended to lull certain suspicions which France has about its Communist Party. A Frenchman who considers joining it or following it asks himself whether it is a French party, an international party or a Russian party. Charles de Gaulle engraved this doubt on French minds when he gave it as a reason for refusing to give the Communists the ministries of Foreign Affairs, War or Interior (police). The French remember, too, the Communist record between the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and the German attack on Russia. Thorez himself symbolized that record by deserting the French Army in September 1939 and making his way to Russia.

Nevertheless, millions of patriotic Frenchmen refuse to deny the patriotism of French Communists because of the Reds' really glorious record in the Resistance (once Russia was in the war). Leaders of anti-Communist parties have until very recently softened their attacks on Red leaders because they remember the years of danger shared.

Yet the suspicion of Moscow control will not down, nor will the French fear of a Communist police state on the Russian model. In vain (to date) Thorez has cried: "Different countries, different methods."

Out in the Open. The French Communists have forged an instrument that is indeed different in its techniques from the Russian party or those of Britain and the U.S. In Russia (and in the Eastern European states it controls) the party is an arm of the police power, spying on the people, weeding out whatever might compete with the delusions of Kremlin propaganda. In Britain and the U.S., Communism is part pressure group, part underground conspiracy carried on by men who conceal their faith.

But no one looks under the bed for the French Communist Party; it is in it. With 1,000,000 members, 5,000,000 voters, six ministers in the Cabinet, the French party is the first Communist Party in any nation to make a serious bid to win a majority through democratic processes. The consummate skill which the French Communists show in using democratic methods does not, of course, mean that the party is moving in the direction of democracy. The party organizers have merely learned another language in which to pursue totalitarian aims.

This week's election of a new Constituent Assembly is a critical test of that effort; from what happens at France's polls the whole Western world may learn how strong the Communist threat is. The result depends largely on the skill of the men who lead the French Communists.

Memory of a Tomb. At the top--unquestionably--is Maurice Thorez. He started at the bottom. Son and grandson of a miner, he was born in 1900 at Noyelle-Godault in the Pas-de-Calais. "My earliest memory is of a mining accident, of plain white wooden coffins placed in neat rows on the floor of the shed. I remember men, women & children running in all directions, colliding, pushing, returning to where they started, and sweating gendarmes guarding the pit gates against the shrieking, weeping, hysterical crowd which knew that hundreds of its menfolk were condemned to slow death, entombed beneath the earth."

At ten he remembers a miners' hunger march. His mother represented the women of Noyelle. In the riots that ensued, one of the workers was killed by the police.

Other memories were happier. He played the flute at miners' social gatherings (he still thinks he's pretty good at it). He watched the pigeons of his village win the Sunday afternoon races. (He says the Noyelle pigeons still win.) He became a Socialist at 19, a union leader before he was 21. When the French Socialists split down the middle on the question of affiliating with the Communist International, Thorez was on the left. When he was 25 he was a member of the Political Bureau.

He led the life of a militant Communist leader--in & out of jail, in & out of Russia. He developed into one of the party's most effective orators. Most of all, from his childhood on, Thorez read everything he could lay his hamlike hands on. Today he can gallop through a technical book, or one on philosophy or art, and then give without a stumble a half-hour precis of its contents. In lectures and debates at the Sorbonne, in meetings of legal and philosophical societies, he shines--a grinning, grown-up Quiz-kid with a cowlick over his forehead.

A Laughing Marxist. When the Communists entered the Government, some naive rightists assumed that power would mellow their driving determination. Thorez shows no sign of softening. His 5 ft. 10 in., 165-lb. body is solid and strong, his blue eyes clear. As vice president of France, he sits in the fussy luxury of the Hotel Matignon, which Austro-Hungarian ambassadors occupied before 1914. The Gobelin tapestries on the walls neither fit nor affect his revolutionary ardor. He doesn't even know the name of the Roman Emperor whose bust faces him. When Thorez laughs (he is one of the few Marxists who laugh), his bellow shakes the air, and the imperial chandelier tinkles.

Thorez' greatest political liability--his absence from France during the war--is also his greatest political asset. It carried him and Jeannette Vermeersch to Russia. (How, they said last week, "is still a secret." But they did not deny that a Russian bomber might have taken them over part of the journey.) Thorez was living in Russia during the war, when the Russian Communist Party made a successful experiment which the French party is trying to repeat. Moscow fought the war with nationalist, not Communist, slogans. Would this technique be feasible outside the U.S.S.R.? The boys are now trying it out.

German Communists are yelling for the Ruhr more loudly than any other Germans; French Communists are yelling for the Ruhr more loudly than any other Frenchmen. It pays on both sides of the boundary, and doesn't matter much to Moscow, which knows that the Ruhr's fate will be decided by the Big Three, not by France or Germany. Of course, on questions really important to Moscow, foreign Communists reverse their nationalist line. For instance, genuine French nationalists see a military advantage in France's participation in a Western bloc of nations. But French Communists bitterly oppose a Western bloc because it might interfere with Russia's Eastern bloc. Thorez' job is to concoct just the right mixture of nationalist and pro-Soviet policy.

His Russian experience and his broader view of how to foster world revolution by nationalist slogans give him the edge on his inferiors in the party hierarchy.

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 Andre 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 Leon 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 Franc,ois Billoux (43), a Thorez disciple, now Minister of Reconstruction, and sleek, full-lipped Waldeck Rochet (40), who was a shepherd in the hills of SaOne-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. (Confederation Generale 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.

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."

Andre 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 Stihle, 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 Andre Le Troquer, a one-armed veteran cried:

"Maurice Thorez deserted, going through Switzerland and Germany into Russia, while other Frenchmen like Leon 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."

These bold words were long overdue, but still they would not fill French bellies. Perhaps an even better (and more belated) campaign argument was the billion-dollar U.S. loan that Socialist Leon Blum was bringing back from Washington after ten weeks of negotiation and 21 months of liberation.

It had taken the U.S. a long time to realize that hunger and history worked together, and that a Communist victory in France would push the Western world's frontier with Russia back from the Elbe to the Atlantic.

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