Word: thorez
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gaulle engraved this doubt on French minds when he gave it as a reason for refusing to give the Communists the ministries of Foreign Affairs, War or Interior (police). The French remember, too, the Communist record between the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and the German attack on Russia. Thorez himself symbolized that record by deserting the French Army in September 1939 and making his way to Russia...
...suspicion of Moscow control will not down, nor will the French fear of a Communist police state on the Russian model. In vain (to date) Thorez has cried: "Different countries, different methods...
Memory of a Tomb. At the top-unquestionably-is Maurice Thorez. He started at the bottom. Son and grandson of a miner, he was born in 1900 at Noyelle-Godault in the Pas-de-Calais. "My earliest memory is of a mining accident, of plain white wooden coffins placed in neat rows on the floor of the shed. I remember men, women & children running in all directions, colliding, pushing, returning to where they started, and sweating gendarmes guarding the pit gates against the shrieking, weeping, hysterical crowd which knew that hundreds of its menfolk were condemned to slow death, entombed...
...watched the pigeons of his village win the Sunday afternoon races. (He says the Noyelle pigeons still win.) He became a Socialist at 19, a union leader before he was 21. When the French Socialists split down the middle on the question of affiliating with the Communist International, Thorez was on the left. When he was 25 he was a member of the Political Bureau...
...life of a militant Communist leader-in & out of jail, in & out of Russia. He developed into one of the party's most effective orators. Most of all, from his childhood on, Thorez read everything he could lay his hamlike hands on. Today he can gallop through a technical book, or one on philosophy or art, and then give without a stumble a half-hour precis of its contents. In lectures and debates at the Sorbonne, in meetings of legal and philosophical societies, he shines-a grinning, grown-up Quiz-kid with a cowlick over his forehead...