The New Crisis of French Communism:

...For the first time in their history, the Western Communist parties have come up against aging as a specific phenomenon...

...Its author, Pierre Herve, informs us that the fanatical ideology expressed in Communist writings does not necessarily produce a better or more noble society, that Communist bureaucrats harbor no sympathy for independent thought among intellectuals, and that the Soviet Encyclopedia does not always deal accurately with historical facts...

...The author feels his way forward from quotation to quotation, constantly concerned to demonstrate that his ideas are Communist orthodoxy itself, an orthodoxy from which the party is today deviating...

...He makes this clear in the following remarkable passage: "The fact that these ideas are expressed here is significant...

...In the early postwar years, he was the party's most lively and vigorous controversialist...

...The New Crisis of French Communism Rebel says French party lags behind Soviet CP By Francois Bondy Paris The most widely discussed book in France, a best-seller among the season's politico-philosophical essays, is called La Revolution el les Fetiches...

...All remains on a superficial and casual level until an article appears in the party press, in the style of a dogmatic thesis, and the party members learn that the final result of the discussion not only is correct but was always correct...

...Herve became assistant editor of l'Humanite...

...Little is done, writes Herve, to make known in France the discussions which are taking place in the Soviet Union...

...40 years old...

...He is a formalist, and interprets as lack of respect what is in fact only life asserting its claims...

...If a Communist felt himself alone in sensing these forebodings, would he have dared to formulate and to publish them...

...was still a member of the Communist party at the moment of publication (though he has since been expelled...

...How many intellectuals [in the party] write one thing and say the exact opposite in private conversation...

...On the whole, the road which l'Humanite's editorial-writer has traveled is more interesting than the ideas at which he has, for the time being, arrived...

...Why is the French Communist party more dictatorial, more fanatical, less intellectual than the Russian...

...It was Herve who, in Louis Aragon's paper Ce Soir, wrote the long series of articles on the "Zionist world conspiracy" against the Soviet Union, following the confessions of the Moscow doctors...

...In the weekly Action, founded by the Communists as a vehicle for intellectual discussion and later allowed to lapse because it became too intellectual, Herve blasted Albert Camus...

...There is an 'underground spirit' abroad in Communism today, whose influence may extend very far...

...It is the anti-Communist publications which carry reports and argue about them, while the French Communists argue back...

...The motto of the book itself is a Stalinist dictum: "Science admits no fetishes...

...Later...

...He is inclined to despise what is new in the present, and stubbornly tries to force it into the obsolete frame of yesterday's thinking...

...The writers he attacked welcomed the opportunity to debate with an authentic and talented Communist party spokesman-the party's intellectual prodigy...

...In Pierre Herve, as in the recent intellectual controversies in Poland, Hungary and other satellites, we can see that they have also generated an intellectual "crisis of Communism" which should not be underrated...

...he is proud not of what he does but of what he embodies, what time is treating so unjustly...

...An old man often regards himself, and rightly, as the representative of a glorious past...

...Many will say that then the Communists would be really dangerous, for it is primarily their self-insulation in a spiritual ghetto that has prevented them from making real inroads into non-Communist society...

...There are intellectuals who hunt down the 'evil spirit' all the more vehemently the more they feel its stirrings within themselves...

...Why, he asks, has the French Communist party maintained the extreme rigidity of posture prescribed for Communists during Stalin's last years, a blind loyalty to Lysenko's science and Zhdanov's esthetics...

...Despite these circumstances, his signature gradually disappeared from the columns of the Communist press, and it was learned that he had turned to a bourgeois way of life by taking a teaching post at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris...

...There is no escape from it: A man's life is of limited duration, and generations grow older as individuals do...

...We know that the "thaw" since Stalin's death, and the many new developments in the Communist world, have engendered what many have regarded as an intellectual "crisis of anti-Communism...

...What makes this essay so remarkable is the identity of its author...

...The Social Democratic parties went through this experience in the years preceding the First World War, and it cannot be said that they found an ideal solution to the problem of their aging tribunes, theoreticians and leaders...

...What would happen if the French Communist party were to take Helve's advice to heart and really speak in a more tolerant, less fanatical and inflammatory fashion...

...Herve speaks not as an individual, but in the name of many...

...But it may also be that more liberal methods are incompatible with totalitarian aims, and that the logic of intellectual freedom might rapidly disintegrate the passion and myth of Communism...

...Jean-Paul Sartre, Francois Mauriac and others...

...Herve...

...Nothing is said which is not backed up by several quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin and occasionally Stalin...

...And why has it reacted so infrequently and reluctantly to the more relaxed cultural policy since Stalin's death, to Lysenko's demotion, the discovery of "collective leadership," and the more liberal stirring in Russian literature...

...the most violent attacks on the "fascist Tito" came from his pen...

...The contents of the book add nothing new to the conventional criticism of Communist party practices, while its style is largely of the same stuff as conventional party literature...

...But it seemed as though the party, precisely because it sensed in him a heretic, forced him to ever more disagreeable tasks...

...None of Herve's criticisms will hit the Communist party in a more sensitive spot than his remarks on the "senile disorders" of Communists: "They tend to forget that Lenin's Bolshevik party was founded more than half a century ago, and that the Communist parties of the West, which were established in the Twenties, reached maturity in the Thirties...

...Without being aware of it, his touch turns everything gray...

...Is it the result of mental laziness on the part of bureaucrats, who thereby reflect that French immobilisme which they condemn in everyone else...

...He loves commemorative celebrations, and loves them all the more the fewer there are to appreciate their significance as he does...

...The most amusing part of Herve's book is the contrast it draws between Soviet "liberalism" and French Communist totalitarianism...