Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [178]
The submission of intellectuals to dogma may have seemed stultifying to an outsider, but the party was clever. It knew how to flatter young writers. Maurice Thorez took Pierre Daix aside after a meeting to congratulate him on his novel La Dernière Forteresse. For a young Communist, this was the greatest moment of his life. Thorez’s companion Jeanette Vermeersch then featured Daix on the cover of the party’s magazine for women, Femmes françaises.
The party also knew how to flatter fellow-travellers and manipulate sceptics who could still be useful. Georges Soria, one of its senior journalists, explained at his meeting in the Kremlin in September 1948 that Julien Benda, the author of La Trahison des clercs, was judged useful because, ‘even though he was against Marxism and Communism, he supported the party’s present policies in France’. Soria went on to explain that they had set up various magazines, ‘Pensée in particular, precisely to attract fellow-travellers such as Benda’.
The first great post-war test of Communist loyalty arrived in the spring of 1948. Almost overnight, Marshal Tito, the hero and role model of Communist members of the French Resistance, was declared a traitor. The accusations against Tito even extended to ‘hiding White Russian officers who tortured and killed the mothers and fathers of Bolsheviks during the Revolution’.
The French party leadership had a very clear idea of the situation and was only too keen to follow Moscow’s orders. Yet some party members, including Louis Teuléry, the former member of Tillon’s ministerial cabinet, did not conceal their feelings that Tito had been wronged. They paid for their views with summary expulsion. Teuléry was privately warned by a friend, ‘they’re going to accuse you of being a Trotskyist’. After he was ejected, his comrades, a number of them old friends from the Resistance, refused to speak to him– or their wives to his wife – for over thirty years.
Several hundred members of the French Communist Party were expelled. The novelist Marguerite Duras also left at this time. Daix swallowed the brutal change in the party line because men he respected, such as Charles Tillon, had accepted it without a murmur. ‘You’ve got to know how to grit your teeth,’ Casanova had told him.
The prostration of some intellectuals before the party could provide moments which were beyond satire. Just after the war, Jacqueline Ventadour (later the wife of the painter Jean Hélion) was married to Sinbad Vail, Peggy Guggenheim’s son, who founded the literary magazine Points. She was then a Communist and a member of the same cell as Victor Leduc, the philosophy professor in the section idéologique. Leduc was married to Jeanne Modigliani, the daughter of the painter and a close friend of both Jacqueline and Sinbad. The austere and fanatical Leduc had renounced all wealth, so Jeanne, desperate to leave their squalid little apartment, needed a deposit to move to a slightly better one and borrowed the money secretly from Sinbad. But when Leduc discovered that she had borrowed from an American capitalist, he became hysterical with fear that the party might find out. Sinbad and Jacqueline had to swear never to say anything to anybody, and Leduc went round begging money from party comrades to pay them back.
At the time of Tito’s break with Stalin, Sinbad and Jacqueline went to dinner with Victor and Jeanne. Several leading French Communist intellectuals were there, as well as the Hungarian cultural attaché, the writer Zoltÿn Szabó. The conversation inevitably locked on to the subject of Tito, arch-criminal and traitor. Someone, forgetting that Sinbad Vail was not a party member, asked him what he thought. Sinbad, exasperated by the grotesque conversation, said that he still considered Tito a great man. A shocked and frightened silence fell. Eventually, it was broken by a low, rumbling laugh from the Hungarian: he had never seen anything so funny as the terrified faces of these French intellectuals.
Sartre at this