Communist Funfest

Long plagued by an image of gray stolidity, the French Communist Party has lately been going all out to acquire a more human look. The party newspaper, L'Humanite, has taken to dressing up its dreary polemics with color pictures for weekend editions. The staid old Paris Communist headquarters, with its fortress-like steel doors, has been abandoned for a new glass-fronted building, designed by Brazilian Communist-sympathizer Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brasilia. But nowhere has the new look been more evident than in the party's annual Festival of Humanity.

Capitalist Showcase. Since 1966 the two-day fete had been held annually in Paris' leafy Bois de Vincennes. Last spring, however, the Gaullist-dominated Paris city council withdrew permission for use of the park on the grounds that the fair was too disruptive to strollers. The Communist mayor of La Courneuve, in Paris' northern suburbs, quickly came to the rescue, offering 116 acres of parkland for the festival. More than 600,000 fairgoers, including such celebrities as Actress Melina Mercouri, braved intolerable traffic snarls to reach the site. Once there, bourgeois families crowded shoulder to shoulder with party sympathizers wearing Vietnamese coolie hats or sporting FREE ANGELA DAVIS buttons while walking along Ho Chi Minh and Karl Marx avenues.

Mostly it was nonpolitical fun, with innumerable flea-market stalls, 350 restaurant-cafes, a huge motorcycle rally, ice follies, fireworks, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Soviet Navy Chorus. The festival also featured what may well have been the year's best pop concert, with appearances by The Soft Machine and Singer Joan Baez. Shoppers could look over everything from hams, furniture, suits and house trailers to computers from IBM, Burroughs and Control Data. Computers? Certainly. Communists control 1,100 of France's 38,000 municipalities and, like mayors of more conservative stripe, they are rapidly turning to computers to help ease their administrative burdens. As the conservative newspaper Le Figaro noted: "This fiesta of socialism is a showcase for capitalism."

Horsecarts and Hypocrites. In fact, the fair offered politics as well as pommes frites. Hulking busts of Lenin sold for $4.50. There was a 15-hour marathon in the central committee tent where party leaders held political discussions with all comers. A horse-drawn street theater had a cart full of guillotine-bound "Communards" hurling defiance at costumed cavalrymen; the purpose was to commemorate the 1871 Paris Commune, which controlled the city for 71 days before its primitive brand of Communism was crushed by troops.

Zim Lines, the Israeli shipping firm, was expelled because its booth advertised tourism in Arab territories now occupied by Israel. Although Singer Joan Baez was paid her usual fee and won applause for talking about her "pacifist-anarchist" views, she eventually announced that she regretted having performed for the party. It seems she learned that the Communists, anxious to win votes by looking respectable, had resoundingly denounced France's 1968 student upheavals, of which she heartily approved. Said Baez: "The French Communist Party has done some very lousy things." She would not sing for it again, she said, "because it makes me a hypocrite." For all the polemics, the predominant atmosphere of the West's largest proletarian festival was decidedly bourgeois. The take from the fair, which is divided between the central party, L'Humanite, and local cells, totaled more than $4,000,000 in 1970, and attendance at this year's funfest was up 20%. Money, after all, helps make the party competitive in the electoral market, and the Communist share of France's vote generally runs 20% or even higher.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.