ROGER SHATIUCK
397
Like most crises, this one arose out of the convergence of
several strands that were difficult to distinguish at the time. In each
instance, there appears to be a general European development with
its French counterpart. Recognized late and poorly understood even
when most blatant in its methods and ambitions, Italian and Ger–
man fascism could sti!! get away with almost anything in the mid–
thirties. French fascism lumped together militant patriots organized
in
ligues,
royalist maneuvering, and anti-Semitism inherited from
the Dreyfus affair.
The second strand concerns the Third Communist Interna–
tional. Its strategy shifted drastically in May 1934 for reasons that
remain cloudy. After six years of bitter attacks on the non–
communist left came the apparent thaw- reconciliation, the Popular
Front, "the hand outstretched" to socialists and even willing radicals,
and an elaborate machinery of front organizations and cultural ac–
tivities . In France, the party seemed to have jumped the gun, pri–
marily through Barbusse's unpredictable yet successful activities.
His Amsterdam-Pleyel movement against fascism and war in 1932
was the first of its kind. The noncommunist Vigilance Committee of
Antifascist Intellectuals sprang up overnight after the February riots
in 1934 and set up something like an interlocking directorate with a
series of communist sponsored groups and meetings. The most im–
portant was the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists
(A.E.A.R.) that Vaillant-Couturier founded in 1932. The following
year he assigned to Aragon the joint editorship of its monthly review,
Commune,
as well as responsibility for the Maisons de la Culture.
Unlike the bleak years after 1927 when the surrealists had tried to
find nourishment in a suspicious, badly split party, in 1934 the com–
munists prepared to welcome the entire French Left into a huge pas–
ture of antifascism. There, the Left's fondness for revolutionary
slogans, its ignorance of Marxism, and its admiration for what it
thought was happening in Soviet Russia led many individuals into
highly irresponsible pronouncements and actions.
Fascism and communism were the principal ideological strands.
But there was more. A genuine, vociferous opposition of militant
Marxists and anti-Stalinist communists had existed since Trotsky's
banishment - one might even say since Bertrand Russell's
The Prac–
tice and Theory of Bolshevism
(1920) in which he called the Soviet
system "moribund" because the Party had taken over. But Trotsky
was everybody's devil- too eloquent, too shrill, too intellectual.
Russell could not be counted on: by 1932 he was endorsing Soviet
policies. (In 1945 he advocated preemptive war against the Soviet
