B8
PARTISAN REVIEW
revelations have thrown-at least I hope they have-all those who
take part in Communist action into an abyss of confusion and shame.
Those corpses, those tortures, those martyrs-neither the posthumous
rehabilitations nor the official speeches will make us forget them. . .."
And as Pierre Herve had done before him, Cesaire denounced the French
Party for having remained obdurate and incorrigibly Stalinist: "All the
other Communist parties are in ferment-in Italy, Poland, Hungary,
China. And in the midst of this raging storm, the French Party stands
still, contemplates itself and declares that it is satisfied with itself."
Those who have not wavered in their loyalty have only the bitter
comfort that they are once again being subjected to a moral blockade,
standing alone against a world of enemies. Their ultimate argument–
as advanced by Aragon's wife Elsa Triolet, in almost stammering prose–
is that it is precisely in such difficult situations that men of courage
separate themselves from the cowards, "as was the case under the occu–
pation, when we defied the Nazis."
But the comparison could not have been more unhappily chosen.
The Poles, with the entire Communist intelligentsia in accord, in the
face of great peril put an end to that subjection to Moscow, which the
French Party leadership does not dare question even today. The Hun–
garians-and among them many Communists, including writers who,
like the Polish ones, are well known in French Leftist circles-dare
even today, with their co,untry under Russian occupation, to raise their
voices in behalf of freedom.
If
one is really to hark back to the Nazis,
the years of occupation, and the struggle for liberation, clearly it is not
in the editorials of
Lettres Franfaises
today that the tradition of the
Resistance is being carried on.
When Pierre Herve called upon the Party leadership no longer to
oppose the trend toward de-Stalinization, and not to doom itself to
isolation at the very moment it was striving for a popular front, he
was attacked not only by the Party bureaucrats and petty inquisitors,
but also by a world-renowned philosopher, who was not even a Party
member, but who felt that Herve's criticisms had gone too far-Jean–
Paul Sartre. Although Herve had written out of a conviction that he
was not alone, Sartre met his book with a cry of
"Vae Soli,"
admonish–
ing him in these priestly words: "He who tries to go all alone beyond
the dogmas, remains behind them." In other words, to think correctly,
one must think with the masses. At the same time, however, Sartre
reproached the Party bureaucrats for having created such heretics by
their own obduracy, and arrived at a peculiar theory, according to
which the Party is always right objectively, while its stupid intellectuals
