FRANCE: Red Schism

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Harry Truman's increased pressure on world Communism extended all the way to Paris' Place de Châteaudun, where a beggar was plaintively singing: J'attendrai. Fernand Lurçat, who had lost a leg in a Nazi concentration camp and was now a night watchman at Communist headquarters, felt the international tension. Irritably, he hobbled out and told the beggar to shut up. "On discute,là-haute" (They're deliberating, up there), explained Lurgat.

They were deliberating, passionately and bitterly—the 37 men who form the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, the world's most important outside Russia. Truman's speech on Greece and Turkey had opened up an old and deep cleavage in the party leadership. Maurice Thorez, party secretary and boss, who sat at the head of the table, thought that that committee meeting would decide whether French Communism would keep its 1,300,000 followers and gradually increase in power (as he wanted), or would again become an underground party of a few hundred thousand militants. After three hours, Maurice Thorez lost, in such a way that his humiliation was next day made gallingly public.

"L'oeil de Moscou." Thorez called the meeting Wednesday night because he knew that he and four other Communist Ministers in the French Government faced a party revolt on the Indo-China issue. The five Ministers had gone along with 'the rest of the Cabinet in approving funds to fight Communist Ho Chih-minh's rebellion in faraway Viet Nam. Next day these expenditures were to be reviewed by the French Assembly. Thorez and the other Communist Ministers could scarcely vote to disapprove an action in which they had participated. But the party dissidents wanted Thorez and friends, along with other Red Deputies, to do just that.

The most vocal spokesman for the anti-Thorez faction was Andre Marty, who led the mutiny of the French Black Sea Fleet in 1919 and who yearns for a return to dark, dramatic glory. But through the haze of smoke (mostly from cheap Gauloise and Celtique cigarets), the man the committeemen watched most closely was not Thorez or Marty, but a dark, stooped Algerian—Laurent Casanova.

Once Thorez' secretary and later a hero of the Resistance, Casanova never forgave his old boss for bowing to Charles de Gaulle when the latter disarmed the Communist-directed militia after liberation. In recent months Casanova has spoken in the private councils of the party with an uncompromising authority, far above that to which his nominal party position would entitle him. Observers think they know why. They call Casanova "L'oeil de Moscou"—Moscow's eye.

Through the Smoke. About midnight someone opened a window to clear the smoke, and rain came spitting in through the protective iron bars attached to the sill. No. 2 Party Leader Jacques Duclos was nervous. His thick lips did not bare his gold teeth in the famous smile. When he upset an ashtray he scurried on all fours under the table to retrieve it. Reluctantly, with Moscow's Eye upon him, Duclos stood by Thorez. Casanova, tense, never seemed to smoke, letting the cigarets burn down in his fingers. His main speech took 40 minutes, almost a quarter of the meeting. He and Marty stressed three arguments: