ANDRE MALRAUX
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or Thaelmann, because they speak in the name of the prisoners; the
same ones who hide their generosity as if they were ashamed of it; as
if generosity were incompatible with intelligence; the same ones who
in numbers of three hundred come to hear explanations of Marx and
who swell to thirty thousand when they pay their homage to
Dimitroff- the only homage which they possess - the sacrifice of one
evening at the cinema. Against the government which exiles you, all
a re with you. You belong to those proscribed persons of whom they
cannot make an emigre . In spite of all that is said , printed, shouted,
the Russian Revolution is for them a bloc, and all that heroism that
shook the Winter Palace now feels itself humiliated by your solitude.
• • •
Once again destiny clutches you between its bloody fingers. A
few days after the hopeless attack of the Austrian workers, one
French government withdraws the hospitality which another French
gove rnment had extended to you. You do not mean enough to make
them remember their obligations . You are still worth sufficient to ex–
tract such obligations. But they could have expelled you without
resorting to morality or virtue .
It
is you who have not lived up to
your obliga tions. You have formed the Fourth International. You
can count in the world today members by the hundreds, much more
dangerous than the Third International which has two million or
than the Second , without considering that the French bourgeoisie
would do well at this moment to forget the Internationals and to
build against the nationalisms . You write in
La
Verite
what you have
never ceased doing. You have betrayed France, to whom you are
under no obligation - which of course is not the case of the Grand
Dukes on the Riviera. And you have been discovered (as if your
house has not always been watched by the police), thanks to the sur–
prising "nose" of a police reader of Simenon. They could have spared
themselves this grotesque abuse: to free the hostages, there is no
need to spit into their faces, even though that may be the custom . An
"anonymous" note in
Le
Matin
explains, in clear language although
with that special sordidness characteristic of the military tone, "We
have had Trotsky." Since what they wanted "to have" in you was the
Russian revolutionist, let us remind them that there are still one
hundred sixty million to be "had ." But what we must say to these one
hundred sixty million is that whatever doctrinal differences may ex–
ist between the government of the Soviet Union and yourself, we
must recognize every revolutionist in danger as
one of ours;
that what
