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handful around De Gaulle, the Jews, and after June 22, 1941, the Com–
munists, who on orders from the Kremlin were able to acquire strategic
posts, organize non-party groups under their command, and carryon an
incessant propaganda which pictured the desperate defense of the Soviet
Union against its erstwhile partner as a defense of France. After the
liberation the Communists exploited their position of prestige very
cleverly. Since from mid-1941 on, their opposition had been total, they
could intimidate the vast majority which had adjusted itself at one time
or another to what seemed to be the irrevocable decisions of history.
They were aided in this by the natural tendency of many Frenchmen to
extenuate and reinterpret their behavior under the Vichy regime in order
to escape punitive measures, and by the almost universally shared hope
that the Soviet Union would alter its policy as a result of the common
struggle against Hitlerism from which it had suffered so much. Since
the most overtly reactionary and conservative groups in France had
been most conspicuously identified with Vichy, there was little opposition
to those aspects of \,he domestic program of the Communists, even by
the De Gaullists, which sought to strip reactionaries of the right of
their power.
The eloquent and, if properly construed, damning fact that the
Soviet Union and the Communists everywhere had actively collaborated
with the Nazis, that the French Communists had sabotaged the war
effort until Hitler took the initiative against Stalin, that the French
Communists were in reality Soviet Maquis not French patriots, could
not be used against the Communists because of the bad conscience of
most Frenchmen and the seeming futility of raking up the past. De
Gaulle, who immediately after the liberation was in a position to brand
them for what they in effect were-a Soviet fifth column-out of ignor–
ance or policy failed to do so, and when he later turned against them
he had already alienated other groups in France. By this time Com–
munist propaganda had already done its work in selling many non–
Communists the Soviet myth despite the fact, perhaps because of the
fact, that France had been liberated by the Americans and English and
not by the Red Army.
How powerful the Communist position was in France can be
gathered from the rights of extra-territoriality which the Soviet Union
enjoyed until recently, including the existence of its own concentration
camps to which kidnapped men and women who had acquired French
citizenship were taken. So pervasive at the time was the process of
Communist infiltration into all government positions and other strategic
posts that Koestler's observation that the Communist Party of France
