Palace Doors

For four years the French Senate counted among its members two Communists--Jean Clamamus and Marcel Cachin. In the rowdier Chamber of Deputies there were 72 Communists (TIME, Jan. 22). Last week Parliament got around to adding up the recantations which Premier Daladier demanded last October.

A dozen Communist deputies were found to have condemned "Soviet treason." They could remain in the Chamber. Most of the others had organized a French Workers' & Farmers' Party. That was held to be a mere subterfuge; they were ousted. Andre Marty, fiery Communist expert on the French Army, had disappeared. Deputy Leader Maurice Thorez had deserted from the Army. They both lost their citizenship.

Of the two Senators, M. Clamamus had condemned the Hitler-Stalin pact; that saved him his job. But M. le Senateur Cachin, aging Communist organizer and leader, member of the Communist International presidium at Moscow, had created a problem by doing and saying exactly nothing. Onetime professor of literature at Bordeaux, erudite and witty, never one to take to the streets for demonstration, this tired, stoop-shouldered veteran perhaps hoped he could save his job on the basis of past deeds for the Third Republic. At World War I's start M. Cachin, Left-wing Socialist editor of Humanite, rang the bells for patriotism, called Kaiser Wilhelm II "that mad dog." An expert on Italian radical movements, he later encouraged Editor Benito Mussolini, of Milan's Socialist journal Popolo d'ltalia, to plug hard for Italy's entry into the war on France's side. To Editor Cachin was assigned the delicate mission of seeing that French money found its way into Editor Mussolini's pants. But afterwards, in 1920, on a trip to Moscow, Marcel Cachin became a convert to Communism. And like most converts, he became more Communist than Lenin.

Even so, the Senate hesitated to oust him. While the 60 Workers' & Farmers' deputies were being expelled without further fuss, a Senate committee decided to examine Senator Cachin to determine the extent of his "heresy" from patriotism. But the aged Senator, behind closed doors, refused stanchly to renounce the Communist International, so the committee had no choice but to vote unanimously to admit him no more to Luxembourg Palace.

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