The Man in the Hotchkiss

Like a proud papa recounting the feats of his offspring, the Communist organ L'Humanité* ticked off the high spots of 20 days of anti-American activity in France. Item: at Revel, in Haute-Garonne, "300 peasants tore up surveyors' markers at a new military airbase." Item: at Saint-Quentin, "youth made a fire of joy out of the tracts and brochures of the [American] occupation." Item: at Toulouse, "street parades against the arrival of munitions . . . from across the Atlantic."

Flagrante Delicto. These were only warmups for the arrival in Paris of General Matthew Ridgway to take over command of the NATO forces from Dwight Eisenhower. On the day of Ridgway's arrival, Paris blossomed like a dandelion field with hostile messages: "Ridgway go home," "Ridgway, the microbial killer." There was a small riot at Aix-en-Province, a bigger one at Bordeaux; the biggest of all was set for Paris' Place de la Republique, despite a specific ban by the Ministry of the Interior.

By mid-afternoon some 8,000 French security police, gendarmes and mobile guards, with helmets, Tommy guns, gas masks and rifles, were ready in the square. That evening, Communists by the thousands tore loose with stones, iron bars, clubs, broken bottles and metal chairs there and at other salients—the Gare du Nord, the Gare de 1'Est and a Metro station appropriately named Stalingrad.

Here & there, in the thick of the battle, police glimpsed a huge, black Hotchkiss sedan with an outsize radio aerial. At 10 p.m. they stopped the car and ordered out its occupants. They turned out to be National Assemblyman Jacques Duclos, 56, a pudgy onetime pastry chef who is now acting chief of the French Communist Party (while Chief Maurice Thorez convalesces on the Black Sea), his wife Gilberte, a burly bodyguard, a chauffeur—and two dead pigeons. Police believed the birds were homing pigeons hastily killed. Mme. Duclos insisted that they were the gift of a friend—for stewing with fresh green peas. She didn't explain what use was to be made of the short-wave radio, the rubber-covered truncheon or the loaded automatic also found in the car. Next day, France's top Communist,* caught flagrante delicto, was led before a justice of the peace and held for "attempt against the security of the state" (maximum but unlikely penalty: Devil's Island). Holding his handcuffs aloft, Duclos told reporters: "There's democracy for you, messieurs; admire it!" More than 700 other rioters were arrested that same night; more than 200 were wounded and one Communist rioter lay dead.