Word: vermeersch
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...France's Jeannette Vermeersch, who started as a mill hand in Lille, lived for years with Maurice Thorez, eventually married him. She has the reputation of being a hard, intelligent party worker. Rank & filers like her for being a roughhewn, no-nonsense kind of a wife to Thorez (and to Communism), who can talk about the price of butter...
Many of the women had spent years fighting for Communism as members of the party, among them Bulgaria's Tsola Dragoicheva and Jeannette Vermeersch Thorez (sturdy helpmeet of France's Communist leader). A self-declared exception was the U.S.'s small, intense Muriel Draper,* noted dilettante whose salons in London and Manhattan were once brilliantly haunted by the world's famous, from Henry James to Gertrude Stein. Amid her drably dressed fellow delegates she appeared in a white-stitched black linen Clare McCardell creation. She explained that the dress was really quite inexpensive. (She always...
...Lost Spring. Marshall's first stop was Paris, where President Vincent Auriol gave a dinner in his honor at the Elysée Palace's somber Salle Murat. On the guest of honor's right sat Jeannette Vermeersch Thorez, longtime mistress and now wife of France's Communist boss. The First Lady of French Communism speaks no English, and Marshall has forgotten most of his French; so hardly a syllable passed between the table companions in the flickering candlelight, while Jeannette vigorously concentrated on her dinner (Consomme Camelia, Timbale Joinville, Jambon d'York, Baltimore Laitue...
Quick Shift. From Paris had flowed a generous measure of the ideas that nourished Western democracy. Were Parisians hungry enough to forget their heritage of freedom? Jeannette Vermeersch and Maurice Thorez were betting that they were. Frenchmen everywhere, nearly as food-and fuel-conscious as the women of Les Halles, last week heard Communists making down-to-earth campaign speeches with little mention of Marxist ideas. By stressing the black market that fed the rich and starved the rest, Party Boss Thorez hoped he could make enough Frenchmen forget the less immediate but not less important issues involved in this...
Thorez' greatest political liability-his absence from France during the war-is also his greatest political asset. It carried him and Jeannette Vermeersch to Russia. (How, they said last week, "is still a secret." But they did not deny that a Russian bomber might have taken them over part of the journey.) Thorez was living in Russia during the war, when the Russian Communist Party made a successful experiment which the French party is trying to repeat. Moscow fought the war with nationalist, not Communist, slogans. Would this technique be feasible outside the U.S.S.R.? The boys are now trying...