Moving Day

No sooner had Premier Robert Schuman's government beaten the Communist-fomented "state of insurrection" than the antiCommunist revolt in the ranks of French labor gathered speed. The blowoff came sooner than many observers had expected.

Force Ouvriere, the anti-Communist movement within the Communist-bossed C.G.T. (TIME, Dec. 22), last week called an "extraordinary national conference" in Paris. Some 250 delegates crowded into a bare, smallish meeting hall on the Left Bank. Pouchy old Leon Jouhaux, Socialist co-secretary-general of the C.G.T., sat near a radiator to keep warm. He wore a grey sweater under his blue suit, and a grey hat pulled over his eyes. Old Leon has a bad heart and he looked tired.

All day and all night one speaker after another demanded secession from the C.G.T. Their members, they said, wanted a breakaway from Communist leadership and they wanted it now.

Leon Jouhaux was sad. He had devoted 38 years of his life to building up the C.G.T. He wanted the Force Ouvriere rebels to wait until the September union elections, when he thought control of the C.G.T. could be wrested from the Reds. When he ended his speech a few hands clapped out of respect for the Old Man. But a speaker who followed him and echoed his sentiments got boos and catcalls. At 11 p.m. Jouhaux shuffled wearily from the hall.

At dawn the conference passed a resolution, approved by 52 of the 71 unions represented: "The conference denounces and condemns the grave acts of violence committed against the workers [by the Communists] during the recent political strikes. . . . The conference resolves to form without delay a new labor federation outside the C.G.T., which has deliberately violated its own statutes."

Jouhaux and his four non-Communist lieutenants on the C.G.T.'s executive board submitted their resignations. Then they moved out of the C.G.T.'s, yellow limestone headquarters on the Rue La Fayette and the four lieutenants set up shop in a grey two-story building on the Rue Mademoiselle, flanked by a bakery and a barbershop. Jouhaux refused to take the top post. He may change his mind, but if he does not, the likeliest leader is small, dark, shy Robert Bothereau, 51, a metal worker and longtime Jouhaux follower.

By next spring the new federation may have 2,000,000 members--as many as, or more than, the Communist remnant of the C.G.T. proper, which once (early in 1947) boasted 6,000,000 members. It was evident that Premier Schuman, who was recently photographed at a carnival gaily throwing balls, had thrown much more than that at French Communism. He had not only beaten the insurrection; he had shaken the patriotic and moderate elements of French labor out of Red control. The shrunken C.G.T. could not be a nightmare any longer; it could only be a nuisance.

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