ANDRE MALRAUX
35
as a kind of crucible where different programs, philosophies, and in-
trrestsare melted down into a mild broth of humanitarian hope. From
the Colonel, then, Manuel learns "prudence, rigor, discipline." And
from Manuel the Colonel learns . . . that Communists are willing to
take lessons from the bourgeoisie, even from a police chief. And this
really sums up the whole
mystique
of the "strange fraternity." The
bourgeois element in the people's front acquires a tolerance for the
ideasof the masses; but the masses learn to act like the bourgeois, and
thus to act in their interests.
So, finally, Malraux has thrown off the death obsession-at the
expenseof the Anarchists I-and there emerges as the symbol of re-
generation, Manuel, the automatic Communist. Perhaps it is intended
that Garcia, so fertile in rationalizations, should complement Manuel,
as the super-ego complements the ego. And it is true that Garcia dis-
sociateshimself from the Communists, professing to a slight distaste
for their savage party and doctrinal pieties. But about the
content
of
thesepieties, the social and ethical implications, he raises no questions
at all. And on his own particular level, he is the chief apologist for
activism, the leading excommunicator of intellectuals. Like those un-
officialStalinist oracles in real life who would replace orthodox pole-
micswith, say, semantics, he merely substitutes the psychological mode
for the political mode; and armed with his private system of
gouts,
his invidious cults of sacrifice, dissidence,
etc.,
he manages quite as
well as the politicians to snare all the fish that are swimming in the
wrong direction. Garcia thus achieves the dignity of a social type,
short-lived, no doubt, but authentic enough while it lasts-the type
of liberal Comintern lobbyist thrown up by the stooge politics of
people's-frontism.
L'Espoir,
too, comes under that head.
