Repercussions in Paris

...Leftists will not rally to it even if it eventually takes an independent stand—they will increase their demands...

...More important is the article by Andre Wurmser published not in Lettres Francaises—which is not an official Communist publication—but in France Nouvelle, which is...

...No, answers Jean Daniel, "when a reality serves as alibi for our adversaries it does not thereby cease to be a reality...

...Now he must also learn that Communist opinion is unimportant compared to the necessities of power...

...Mitterand has said so, and even Guy Mollet, who has recently been so anxious to maintain good relations with the PC (since it got him his re-election in the Pas-de-Calais), has said as much...

...We have remained impotent before an act which has destroyed one of our generation's greatest hopes, the hope represented by a country animated in its entirety by the two words which have nourished us for 50 years: socialism and liberty...

...He is the one who spoke the celebrated words at the Kravchenko trial, to the effect that "I swear that there are no concentration camps in the U.S.S.R.," and before the tribunal, speaking of Marguerite BuberNeuman, "You are not about to believe what a displaced person tells you...

...I happen not to have been in Paris during these last weeks, but in Geneva, where I am writing these lines...

...What our May revolution tried, however confusedly, to do—something like reconciling Marx and Kropotkinwe could have hoped to see attempted by the highest echelons in a unanimous country...

...A crime has been committed, but is it a war crime...

...His meaning is not clear...

...But the diversity of opinions which has been expressed by the Party or its usual spokesmen shows that its unity is only a facade...

...WE WERE ACCUSTOMED to seeing the Communists and their friends in every country of the world quickly forget the "errors," even the "crimes," of the Soviet Union, attributing them sometimes to "capitalist encirclement," sometimes to the "cult of personality...

...and the third time, while maintaining its support of the Czechoslovak Party, mingled with expressions of its concern over the Czech policies, it rejoiced over the Moscow "accord...

...the tragic decision of the month of August is wrong not only in our opinion, but according to our law, the law of Communists around the world...

...It is no longer a question of an "infantile disorder," of a slight disturbance which the internal discipline and monolithic unity of world Commu nism would suffice to repair...

...There were a thousand of us there, maybe two thousand...

...What could we do...

...And he adds that on the contrary it is by keeping quiet about Prague that one encourages American intervention in Vietnam...

...The French PC, already deeply shaken by the events of last May and the grave defeat it suffered in the elections, today finds itself in the most difficult situation of its lifetime...

...This likelihood is demonstrated by the fact that a Communist party such as the French PC (Parti Communiste Frangais), which was so obstinately faithful to Moscow through all the historic vicissitudes of these last years, should be troubled to the extent it is today...

...Neither the old factional crises of its history, which evoke names like Frossard, Barbe, and Celor (names that no longer mean anything to today's militants), nor the small Titoist contagion which in its time infected some intellectuals, nor even the squalls set off by the Khrushchev report and the 20th Congress had repercussions comparable to those of the second Prague coup...

...Waldeck-Rochet must have explained all this to Brezhnev when he went to Moscow...

...Instead, we have seen it all destroyed, as so many of our hopes have been...

...The PC is certainly not unanimous in its disapproval of Moscow, and a sizable fraction of its apparat is leaning toward unreserved approbation of the occupation of Prague...

...Everyone has demonstrated in his way...

...For the moment the result is that the French PC finds itself once more in the isolation from which it had escaped with such difficulty in the past years...

...But it is very likely that things will be different this time, and that the "error" or "crime" of 1968 will mark the beginning of a profound evolution in the history of world Communism...

...What more is there to say...

...Its present internal crisis cannot be compared to any it has previously undergone...

...With its staircase ornamented by pots of geraniums and white daisies it looked like the entrance to a casino...

...One evening I went to a demonstration of solidarity with the Czechs in front of the Cathedral of Saint Pierre...

...No one can predict how so profound a crisis will end...

...Obedience to the Soviet Union will alienate needed outside support and will create an internal crisis as grave as would disobedience...

...And Aragon was responsible for the following in Lettres Francaises: "We cannot conceive of socialism assuming an aspect of military constraint, of survival of the fittest, of censure, of suffocation...

...He has accepted everything, without hesitation, Stalinization and de-Stalinization, anti-Semitism, and Budapest...

...The French PC, moreover, finds itself in that dramatic kind of situation where every initiative, whatever it is, can only do it harm: whether the Party approves or disapproves, whether it lets some speak and imposes silence upon others, whether it detaches itself from Moscow or remains attached—whatever it does, it is sure to lose on all fronts...

...But Aragon, after all, is only an intellectual who has already been trying to regain his liberty for several years...

...But Roger Garaudy, a member of the Central Committee, in an interview given to a Czech newspaper when this was still possible, stigmatized the occupation of Prague and demanded a "clean sweep at the Kremlin...

...The accords between it and the Federation of the Left—itself moribund and perhaps even defunct after this last blow—are no longer conceivable...

...PROTESTS AND CENSURE mean nothing, as everyone knows...

...Did he mean to bring the Dubcek-Brezhnev affair before the Russell tribunal— which has kept so strangely silent about Biafra where the most horrible war crimes are committed every day...

...then it "disapproved...

...France's PC has expressed three opinions through its official organs, the Central Committee and the Politburo: at first it "condemned" the invasion...

...one plays into the hands of reaction...

...Sartre, with his usual awkward and confused generosity, has declared the Prague coup a "war crime...

...Jean Daniel, who has always spoken for unity, spoke last week of the Soviet "bloody bureaucracy...

...Perhaps someone in high places has made him understand that such cynicism, even if it was in the Gaullist manner, was nevertheless excessive under the circumstances and, even wo_se, maladroit...

...Elementary truths, no doubt, but they deserve to be spoken...

...Wurmser, in his articles for L'Humanite and in all his public activities, has always been one of those journalist-writers who remain docile under any provocation, to the extent that the word "docility" is no longer applicable—conformity has become second nature to him...

...Today, in an official Party newspaper, he writes...

...As for the reaction in other French circles, on the Right and on the Left, it has been unanimously condemnatory, even if there is on the part of the Right a suspect kind of joy mixed with the condemnations, or on the part of the Gaullists disappointment at seeing France's foreign policy destroyed in a single day, after the destruction of her domestic policy in several weeks in May...

...He takes issue in L'Observateur with the argument which has been appearing here and there that by attacking the U.S.S.R...

...A crime has certainly been committed, but without even the excuse of war, and this kind of confusion of terms is not useful...

...If M. Michel Debre was fiim in his conversation with the Russian ambassador, this did not prevent him from saying that the Czech affair was no more than an "accident in passing" on the road to accord...

...And we have done nothing because history has made us impotent...