Treasonable Intentions

On the tricky scale of Moscow's favor, Maurice Thorez has had his ups & downs. When French Communists are ordered to smile on their own countrymen, Thorez is up; when they are ordered to show their fangs, he is down. He was down last week, but since, as secretary general, he was still the titular head of the French party, he was instructed to read a statement embodying the latest shift in the party line--a statement he had had no hand in preparing.

Obediently, Thorez read it to the comrades of the Central Committee:

"If the common efforts of the freedom-loving French do not succeed in bringing our country back into the camp of democracy and peace, if later our country should be dragged against its will into a war against the Soviet Union, and if the Soviet army, defending the cause of freedom and socialism, should be brought to pursue the aggressors onto our soil, could the workers and people of France have any other attitude toward the Soviet army than has been that of the peoples of Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia?"

Weasel words had burrowed into the syntax of this passage, but the implication was clear. A further statement from the Central Committee made it clearer: "The people of France place themselves resolutely, and in all circumstances, in the camp of the Soviet Union and her heroic army."

After Laval. Frenchmen have known for a long time what many of them like to forget: that, in case of a war in which France and Russia found themselves on opposing sides, the French Communists would do their utmost to hamstring the French war effort. The novelty was that the comrades should flaunt their treasonable intentions so openly.*

In the National Assembly, a non-Communist deputy asked if Thorez was "a candidate for the post formerly held in this country, when occupied by a foreign army, by a certain Pierre Laval." The Assembly, of which Thorez is a member, summoned him to explain himself. He repeated almost word for word the statement he had made to the Central Committee. Another nonCommunist, referring to Thorez' notorious army desertion in 1939 and subsequent run-out to Moscow, interrupted him when he reached the phrase, "If later our country should be dragged . . . into a war," and finished the sentence for him: "Je ficherais le camp [I would beat it]." Thorez flushed, but he made no retort.

The more menacing face which French Communism was showing to France and the world had been assumed on orders from Moscow which were transmitted to the French Communist Party through a minor employee in the Czech embassy./- Last week s statements were framed by the party's Political Control Commission, a body formed some months ago after Rumania's Pauker and Bulgaria's Dimitrov had castigated the French comrades, at a Cominform meeting, for "bourgeois tendencies." The commission has become the most powerful organ in the French apparatus, outranking the Central Committee and even its Politburo. Maurice Thorez is not a member of the Control Commission.

"Vote for Peace!" Last month the commission began a purge of provincial Communist leaders, particularly in the coal-mining north, where the heresy of "Titoism" has been gaining ground. When Armand Moche, president of the miners' union of the Nord Department, was dismissed, he shouted, "You are leading France to ruin!" and stalked out, slamming the door.

The commission also decided to fight in the French cantonal elections (March 20 and 27) on a peace platform. Hundreds of thousands of election posters have been shipped out, to be plastered on walls all over France. Say the posters: "Marshall-ized France has been dragged into a costly, dangerous and criminal policy of preparation for war." And, in the poster's largest lettering: "VOTE FOR PEACE!"

Smoked Out. Premier Queuille's government was aroused. The thoroughly anti-Communist Minister of Interior, Jules Moch, sent his political police out on a series of raids. The army intensified its loyalty screening of officers and soldiers, picked up a major and a captain on charges of trafficking in army documents.

TIME'S Paris Bureau Head Andre La-guerre cabled: "The Communists are being smoked out. There are 99 chances in 100 that France will have to face and solve her Communist problem before the free world can solve its bigger problem.

"Recent weeks have shown that Frenchmen can be lulled into thinking that, after all, there might be no disagreeable problem to solve. The drama of the French Communists, pointed up by the week's events, is this: that Western firmness compels Moscow to compel the French Reds to show their true colors. Strangely tragic --but not pitiable--figures, the French Communists are thereby forced to encompass their own destruction."

* In Italy, similar intentions were flaunted last week by Palmiro Togliatti: "As to the hypothesis that the Russian army would pursue on our territory an aggressor, I think that Italian people....would have the evident duty to aid in the most efficient way the Soviet army, in order to give that aggressor the lesson he deserves" In Britain, Communist Boss Harry Pollitt threatened sabotage in case of war with the Soviet Union.

/-Until recently, the Rumanian embassy had provided a channel, but the Rumanians who operated it were discovered, and told to get out of France.

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