WANTED: A FRENCH TITO
MUHLEN, NORBERT
Wanted: A French Tito By MORSERT MUHLEN PARIS. WAITRESS shook rny hand when I returned to the table on the coffee house terrace where I had sat many times for many years before the war. "I...
...now, they sit all evening over a glass of beer...
...I was enlightened by the mwimin...
...In the next half hour the following sales were made at the street corner: one de Gaullist paper, three Communist neighborhood weeklies, six bunches of flowers and countless Camemberts, sausages, bottles of red wine, vegetables, fruits, meat cuts...
...What we need is a leader," said the mail-carrier at my table...
...My waitress was bitter: "During the Front Populaire and right after the Liberation, everybody had a few drinks every day...
...In a dream, he is shown "trying" the Founding Fathers, proclaiming: "Little I care about Washington and Lincoln...
...Their leaders are blamed for their "exaggerated internationalism" as their submission to Moscow is censured...
...I am the law...
...And they pay practically no rent...
...In the new Soviet movie, The Battle for Stalingrad, FDR is shown quarreling with Churchill, who is pictured as dead-set against an invasion of Europe...
...That . America wants to erect a world dictatorship of the dollar, that the Atlantic pact means war, and that America is a country without civilization, these three slogans appeal deeply to a people which feels insecure in its freedom, its peace and its culture...
...The Moscow movie Journal, Cinema Art (No...
...Buy my Hewers, ladles, ttiey are lovely...
...The cries of the three groups on the street corner converged into one—Buy L'Humanite, the Voice of the Comunist Party...
...Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky, September 4, 1892...
...The American millionaires ' Just maka us work for them.' ' When I tried to explain what the Marshall Plan had dene for France, that it wesgthe little people who paid for it, that fiobody in America wanted to enslave France, the three gentlemen gave me a look reserved tor harmless idiots...
...that's a clever trick to turn us into an American colony...
...You don't know le bu*in***man Americmin...
...Oh yes, I have," she said, "I even have a few grey hairs now...
...Yes, Paris has changed a lot," the waitress said when she brought my beer...
...who dared assert that Soviet movies were artistically far better in the 1920s and 1930s...
...Nobody knows who this French Tito could be...
...that's why ha made the Marshall Plan...
...Most of the workers and small employees with whom I talked haven't bought a new suit or pair of shoes for years: Their general appearance is shabby, with the famous French elegance now a rarity in even the most fashionable neighborhoods...
...Neither have you, Mademoiselle," I assured her quickly, as she was waiting for it...
...e The same publication has a long poetic appraisal of the Communist trial in New York...
...but whoever he may be, he will be welcomed by many...
...She further compensates the frustration of her national power by a show of arrogance against the "rich barbarians" from overseas—a satisfactory defense mechanism...
...The people in the market place before us shopped with that concentrated seriousness which Parisian...
...I did notice...
...4. 1949), lashee out against a courageous Soviet critic, Sutyrin...
...Shaw is a very talented and witty writer, but he Is worth absolutely nothing when it comes to economics end politics...
...The Soviet magazine, Science and Life, devotes a long article to provyng that "Mendelian genetics are in the service of American racism...
...On the opposite corner two other youths similarly dad in abbreviated hiking outfits sold the Communist daily end a Communist neighborhood weekly...
...This prejudice is steeped in emotional antagonism against the United States...
...21, 1949) equates the work of modern "reactionary" artists such as Henry Moore and Salvador Dali with "those who praised Hitler and are now praising Franco," and calls their work a representation of "ideas of bellicose Imperialism, the thirst for world domination, cosmopolitanism, soologlcal hatred of man, and denial of culture...
...Many Frenchmen today dislike and distrust America and Soviet Russia at least, to an equal degree...
...Oh, how awful," she said with sincere sympathy...
...Yes, a French Tito," came the answer from three voices in general agreement...
...France feels hurt by the fact that it must be helped—and national honor is best preserved when the generosity of the giver is explained by his sinister selfishness...
...I asked...
...And your descendants are the first Victoriously to attain Communism...
...who is "sabotaging" Soviet art by declaring that Soviet mbvlee cannot show conflicts of real, everyday life...
...the party masses (which, in France, is not an empty phrase) want party politics in which the interests of French workers precedes the interests of the Soviet Union...
...Are you all right Sir...
...Sort of Tito...
...1949) celebrates the 190th birthday of Pushkin with a poem on "Pushkin in the Collective Farm...
...Isn't it awful...
...It alio viciously attacks another critic, N. Otten...
...With the Socialists having lost enormously in importance and standing, the Communists appear to many today as the only working-class party in France...
...If the French Left has developed a more skeptical attitude toward the Soviet Union, this change affected only slightly the evaluation of the native Communists...
...Buy the authentic words of General de Gaulle...
...Ogoniok (No...
...They hawked a weekly with the "authentic words of General de Gaulle...
...Right in the middle, between both groups, a young woman with the grainy blonde hair and the heavy body of Breton farm women offered flowers for sale—nice little cheap bunches of corn flowers and daisies...
...I haven't seen you for a while, Sir," she said, as if I last had been there ten days ago, and not ten years ago...
...clad in the very shorts and military blouses which the Hitler Youth made fashionable in Franco, which American fashion reporters never told us about, and which give French street crowds today a New Look strangely reminiscent of Germany in the last pre-Hitler years...
...give only to matters of food and love...
...A sample stanza: "Behold—the people's efforts • Merge with your glory...
...only a few things like sugar, rice, certain cheeses, are still relatively hard to get...
...At a street corner stood two young men...
...I haven't met a single Frenchman who doeB not have similar ideas about the Marshall Plan and, about American politics...
...Roosevelt is made to tell his Soviet friends...
...And Paris has changed a lot, nothing is the same airy more, didn't you notice...
...Allan Dana...
...IN AMERICA TODAY, there is little comprehension of the antagonistic, if not hostile attitude which broad French groups feel toward America...
...Almost monopolizing the old French custom of German-baiting, transferring France's traditional anti-British feelings to the Americans, saving the honor ants* the independence of the nation from Wall Street, keeping alive the wartime division between resisters and collaborators, waving alternately the red shirt of Resistance and the red flag ef social revolt, they are considered only by a very small minority for what they really are—the party of Moscow, while the majority sees them as true French radicals...
...A leader who is more on the side of the workers than General de Gaulle," the husband of the concierge added...
...This is a wrong conclusion...
...he wants to draw profits from us...
...Since I came from America, they explained to me why it was America's fauR that things were so bad in France today...
...the twenty-year-old rent ceilings are still valid while the nominal buying power of the franc has dropped to about a twentieth of its prewar value...
...But after food is bought, little remains of one's salary...
...e Stamp experts claim that they have established that the postal stamps used by the Chinese Communists are printed in the Soviet Union—in obvious violation of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945...
...When Communists are brought into court, Medina rages wild, breaks pencils, and bites his lapel...
...The Moscow Ticker "Premier Stalin is the mainstay of peace In Europe...
...The Marshall Plan," you know," said the mail-carrier...
...A Communist who thinks only of France, and who gives us back what we lost," the newsman proclaimed...
...And now the foreigners want to take over, and to start a new war...
...B. Shaw to Konni Zilliacus, The New York Times, July 28, 1949...
...and since pro-Soviet sentiment has indeed decreased in the last two years in France, Americans conclude that simultaneously there must have been an increase in friendship toward, or at least understanding of, America...
...A. few old acquaintances from the neighborhood joined me at my table: the mail-carrier, the newsman, and the husband of the concierge, an office boy in his fifties who was a Socialist before the war...
...THE WORKERS ARE EATING again, as well as they did before the war...
...I have been in America," I explained...
...but yau haven't changed much...
...Finally, a very skillful Communist propaganda has succeeded in establishing a firmly anti-American image even among non-Communists...
...G...
...The Literary Gazette (June 15...
...Woe to mankind if someone should ever inake us quarrel with Russia...
...and besides this socioeconomic monopoly, they pose with succesful play on the mass mind as a truly national, highly patriotic party...
...This lack' of comprehension stems partly from the simplification with which America divides the world into two fronts of the cold war...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 33
