The Violence of Fear

"I can understand everything up to the time of Marx's Communist Manifesto" confessed a prominent French Communist to his comrades, "but anything after that --well, I just don't know any more."

Such was the confusion that pervaded France's Communist Party, long the most Stalinist outside the Iron Curtain, on the eve of its first congress since Khrushchev pulled the plug on Stalin last February. The workers, taught to regard pale ex-Miner Maurice Thorez as a French Stalin, were in ferment; the intellectuals, a small but important faction because of their contacts with influential fellow travelers, were distraught and openly disobeyed party rulings. The party cell at Paris' Lycee Voltaire, for example, continued to welcome former L'Humanite Editor Pierre Herve, though he had been kicked out of the party for criticizing its subservience to Russia. Would the party be forced to bend with the prevailing wind?

Last week, as a three-man French Communist delegation returned from a visit to the Kremlin, the new line was laid down for this week's congress in Le Havre: the French Communist Party was going to go right on being tough. "A few isolated voices in our own ranks," thundered Maurice Thorez, "have echoed enemy noises. Some have taken opportunist positions, become liquidators, and even repeated the worst lies of our adversaries." Stalin should not be castigated too severely, explained L'Humanite Boss Etienne Fajon, one of the Moscow pilgrims, for he had only "used unworthy methods for a just and victorious struggle."

A few days later stocky Auguste Lecoeur, once considered a logical successor to Thorez, but drummed out of the party in 1954 for criticizing party strategy, was scheduled to speak in the northern French town of Henin-Lietard, where he had once been a Communist Deputy. Lecoeur is busy these days trying to promote an independent leftist movement. The Communist Party issued orders: "All workers will prevent Lecoeur from performing his nefarious piece of work." When the doors of the hall opened, a crowd of 1,000 Communist bullyboys, who had descended on Henin-Lietard, rushed to the stage and, to the accompaniment of Communist harpies crying "Kill him! Hang him!", beat Lecoeur to a bloody pulp. Editorialized L'Humanite: "The renegade Lecoeur got the reception he deserved." Editorialized Paris' conservative Figaro; "Such fury can have only one explanation: fear."

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