Word: thorez
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...C.N.R. energies to be absorbed by the Assembly. ¶ The tension between the Provisional Government and the Communists. By disbanding the leftist Patriotic Militia, Charles de Gaulle had openly clashed with them (TIME, Nov. 13). Now he offered them a sizable sop. By special decree his Government pardoned Maurice Thorez, Secretary of the French Communist Party, father of the 1936 Popular Front. Shortly after war was declared, Thorez left France, was convicted of desertion from the French Army in 1939. Now his return was expected soon. In Paris, Thorez will sit as one of the 14 Communist delegates...
...Maurice Thorez had been the ideological father of Leon Blum's Popular Front. In the middle '30s Frenchmen called him "the French Stalin." During the period of the Russo-German pact, he had condemned France's "imperialist" war against Nazi Germany. When the Daladier Government outlawed the French Communist Party in September 1939, Thorez deserted from the Army, went underground...
When the Germans invaded Russia- Thorez stopped whistling the Internationale, started whistling La Marseillaise. From Moscow, where he and his family had a two-room apartment, he broadcast to the French Resistance. He urged cooperation with De Gaulle. But General de Gaulle remembered that Thorez was a military deserter, would not permit him to return to liberated France...
...Communists claimed that Thorez had gone A.W.O.L. to save his life. Last week they defied the Gaullist Government by nominating Thorez for the expanded Consultative Assembly...
This action put General de Gaulle on the spot. If he did not permit the seating of Thorez, he could be attacked for arbitrary interference by the executive in legislative affairs. But Thorez' return would give a developing leftist opposition to De Gaulle its shrewdest leadership...