Word: duvalls
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...wife did not want him to write the letter; she was sure it would only get them all into trouble. But Jean Duval, factory worker, had made up his mind. "Gentlemen," he wrote to editors of the conservative Paris newspaper Le Monde, "you often criticize the U.S.S.R. . . . Well! in France one sees 'terror' and 'famine,' yes, famine...
...Duval went on to explain that he was the father of six children, made 3,500 francs ($10) a week-scarcely enough to buy food for his family for three days. "If there is a straw mattress in the U.S.S.R., it is a plank in France," he continued. "I tell my children that the employers and the government are nothing but bandits . . . Hate, hate, hate, that is what I teach my children . . . Farewell, gentlemen, eat well, a day will come soon, for we have nothing to lose...
...Cells. The gentlemen in Le Monde's offices printed the letter in full and sent a reporter to investigate the letter writer's story. Jean Duval,* the reporter found, was an enrolled Communist. He had been a plumber, but World War I injuries had made him unfit for his trade, and he had gone to work as an unskilled laborer. During the Nazi invasion in World War II he fled Paris, lost all his belongings. Because of bureaucratic technicalities he received none of the allotments for war victims. Le Monde's reporter described Duval's home...
...Jean Duval's extreme plight is not typical in France today, but there still are thousands of French workers who, despite the country's ECA-financed recovery, are only slightly better off than Duval.* It is among their bitter ranks that the Communists win their votes. France's Communist Humanité promptly turned Duval's story into ready political capital. When readers of Le Monde started sending money and gifts to Duval, Humanité snorted: "The workers want no alms . . ." Later it added: "Plumber, take the gifts in money and kind that the grand bourgeois...
...Duval County, Fla. added up its 1948 records, found that it had 1,346 marriages and 1,442 divorces...