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PARTISAN REVIEW
could possibly emerge only after several years of Russian occupation, as
was the case with the Hungarian Party. But it is not the only instance of
stagnation in French political life. Morin wrote in another essay that
in France, Socialists and Communists live by mutual coprophagia–
each thrives on the excrements of the other: "the murderers of Buda–
pest," and "the oppressors of Algeria and the aggressors against Egypt."
It would be most unfair to equate the sins of the Socialist govern–
ment and those of the Communists, to see the attack on Suez or even
the Algerian policy as on a par with the Russia action in Hungary.
But this much may be said: the Socialist party as it is today, after
governing France for eleven months, does not particularly attract those
who leave the Communist party for serious reasons, and who seek
another political and spiritual community. These defections wiii lead
only to an increase in the number-we cannot say in the weight-of
the "homeless men of the Left" in whom so much good wiii and so
many political and moral energies and hopes go to waste, and who end
up merely marking time.
That France itself, without the help of the Magyars, had not long
ago done away with or seriously damaged this obsolete, stagnant, and
completely puppet-like Party, which had not brought about a political
strike for years, is not reassuring. It would be absurd to expect that
now, after Budapest, everything wiii happen by itself. It is true that
French democracy today is not faced, as it was during previous crises,
by individual Communists who have undergone a change of heart,
bm
by a mass phenomenon or at any rate by innumerable individual cases,
which might easily develop into a mass phenomenon. But to take advan–
tage of this change, French society would have to change itself. In
Hungary, the explosive self-dissolution of the Communist Party, the
majority of whose members have become fighters for freedom, has
revolutionized society. Today, when Communism as a militant faith
and a militant community is entering a major crisis, only two camps
emerge in France--the nationalists and those for a European Union.
French Communism, which described itself both as an ultra–
nationalism and as the only concrete form of internationalism, is dying.
Its dead weight will continue to paralyze France for a long time to
come. But when the energies that have until now been bound up with
Communism and wasted, are turned toward other goals, many stag–
nations may come to an end, not just the Communist one. In Western
as in Eastern Europe, the end of Communism is the beginning of a
revolution.
Francois Bondy
