PARIS LETTER
121
he recounts the various stages by which he broke with the Communist
monthly
Europe.
But at the same time we also have the nostalgic ones,
who lose their bearings in the heady air of freedom and dream of getting
back inside the four walls of orthodoxy. Such a one is Claude Roy.
In an article in
Le M onde
on the situation of the intellectual who
finds himself at odds with the party leadership, he speaks of the "non–
antagonistic contradiction" which separates him from Maurice Thorez.
This contradiction, you will recall, grew out of the Hungarian Revo–
lution, and the disagreement among leftist intellectuals as to its causes
and goals. It was in this connection, as Claude Roy reminds us,
that Maurice Thorez wrote ("with a tinge of sadness that seemed to
me sincere," he adds) that "the events in Hungary may have caused
confusion in the thinking of some of the weaker elements among the
advanced intellectuals." It would seem that Claude Roy, one of these
weaker elements, is trying to strengthen himself. By courageously con–
demning the trifling anecdotes of Jacques Lanzmann he has given proof
of a loyalty for which no doubt he hopes he will be suitably recompensed.
In this he is mistaken. He will be expected not only to do more
but better. As a model he should take the one "advanced intellectual"
whose weaknesses are always certain to be but passing ones-to wit, Louis
Aragon. Aragon went so far as to petition President Kadar to grant
a pardon to the two Hungarian writers, Gali and Obresowski, who
were sentenced to die. As of now, he regrets having showed such weak–
ness and has conveyed as much to a special envoy of a Hungarian news–
paper. His conscience troubles him. "The writers and poets, and some
of the more level-headed younger elements in France have now grasped
the meaning of the events that took place in Budapest last October.
These writers and poets and young intellectuals know now that the re–
bellion was clearly anti-revolutionary in character." Since Louis Aragon
had never expressed the slightest doubt that such was not the case, even
at the time of the worst Soviet repression, obviously no one expected
him to come forward now with such platonic remarks as these. But that
is not all. "I regret," he told the Hungarian journalist, "that I inter–
ceded in behalf of the writers Gali and Obresowski, sentenced to die by
a people's tribunaL" And so Louis Aragon has left nothing undone to
lessen the "non-antagonistic contradiction" which separates him, not
from his own party, which he has never left, but from one of the most il–
lustrious representatives of this party, the Honorable Mr. Kadar, Presi–
dent of Hungary.
Jean Bloch-Michel
