THE
CRISIS IN
COMMUNISM
93
munism. This movement, like all mass movements, includes the best
elements side by side with less good ones, but the crucial factor in it
is the genuine feeling of indignation that has spread very widely inside
the ranks of the Communists themselves. The Communists who had
preserved a good conscience in the face of all criticisms have lost this
good conscience with Hungary. A foreign army that suppresses a whole
nation awakens in France memories of the Nazi occupation, and the
general amazement at a struggle whose continuation seems unbelievable,
arouses the need to do something courageous on one's own part. France
today is full of people who were never Communists, who are ashamed of
their inability to do something for Hungary. The Communists have at
least this much of an advantage over them, that they can do something–
namely, weaken Communism by breaking with it. The feeling of thus
contributing something to a struggle which has suddenly altered all
perspectives helps them, today, to get over the great "fear of being
alone." But what will they do tomorrow?
A talented novelist of Albert Camus' circle, Jean Bloch Michel,
asks this question, above all in relation to workers who leave the Party,
because, perhaps erroneously, he thinks that the intellectuals will some–
how find their way. He writes:
We know what it means to break with the Party, to many workers for
whom it was the entire content of their lives. To break with the Party
means the worker has not only to renounce that which up until then
he has regarded as the truth, but also, in most cases, to lose his friends,
to find himself alone. Much more alone than the intellectual-just look
at Sartre-who slips from one camp to the other without losing any–
thing, except, one should like to hope, some illusions about himself.
But what Bloch Michel says about the militant workers, is also
true of many intellectuals who are not "prominent," and we have seen
that even a professor at the College de France trembles with fear lest
the Party even censure him, let alone expel him. The fear may in many
cases be despicable, and when a Paris physician who demanded the exe–
cution of his Moscow colleagues and prepared to rejoice over it, today
gradually begins to doubt whether everything
L'Humanite
tells him is
really true, it is difficult to have much sympathy with his worries. But
whereas the Party is an enormous collective body, the hundreds, the
thousands who separate themselves from it partly or completely, are
all individual cases; each of them is "a spiritual refugee" who needs
protection, understanding, a new home. True enough, the French Com–
munist Party, as it manifests itself in its official organs, is conducted on
a repulsively low level, and is
in
a state of stagnation from which it
