THE CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
87
Caen, who looked upon all the Moscow, Budapest, and Prague trials
as expressions of a truly progressive and truly democratic legality,
could not swallow the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Russian
armor-and as a result he was suspended for six months and "publicly
censured" by the Party. Similarly the
enfants terribles
of the Party, the
talented writers Claude Roy and Roger Vailland, were reprimanded for
their failure to understand that the Hungarian people's democracy is
today being defended by the people's friends, the Russians, against Hun–
garians all of whom are enemies of the people. A young philosopher,
Francis Rolland, teacher at the Lycee Voltaire, was expelled for having
published an article in
L'
Express
attacking the French Party leadership
as an ossified Stalinist "fraction." The fact that he had concluded his
article with an expression of his unflinching loyalty to the Soviet
Union was of no avail.
Nine months ago, Francis Rolland's colleague at the Lycee Voltaire,
Pierre Herve, editor-in-chief of
L'Humanite
and for many years a
Party favorite, was expelled for having played the trump card of Soviet
de-Stalinization and liberalization against French Stalinism in his book
La R evolution et les Fetiches
("The Revolution and
Its
Fetishes") .
The prototype of the postwar Communist heretic is not Andre Marty,
the legendary figure of the Black Sea mutiny-he recently died in
complete oblivion--or Auguste Lecoeur, who had long been the second
most powerful man in the Party (both were expelled in connection
with Eastern European trials and denounced as police agents ) , but
Herve, still under forty, and today, when hundreds of intellectuals and
thousands of workers are leaving or drifting away from the Party,
his
rebellion appears as the first timid sign of a mass defection from the
party machine. This same Herve has recently founded a "Marxist Club"
as a preliminary step toward forming a new, "genuinely Marxist"
party. He is a true heretic, for he is convinced that he represents the
true orthodoxy, and that he understands Lenin better than the men who
control the Party machine. What gave him the courage to write his
book, he says in
La Revolution et les Fetiches,
was the conviction that
he was not alone. "Would
I
have otherwise dared to formulate my
suspicions, to publish them? But there is today in Communism an under–
ground spirit whose influence reaches very far."
Well, this underground spirit has now come to the surface. Old
militants and fellow travelers are turning away from the Party with
abhorrence.
Aime C esaire,
deputy of
M artinique
and France's most
im portan t N egro
poet, on the day of the
B u d apest revolt resigned from
the
Party
and wrote
in
a
le tter to
M aurice Thorez : "K hrush chev'•
