In September 1930, Lejeune was warmly thanked by a MOPR official, who wrote: ‘I acknowledge receipt of the 2000 francs you send me and thank you wholeheartedly. Your gesture is worthy of a combatant of the Paris Commune who has remained faithful to the cause of the proletariat. I have transferred the 2000 francs to the Red Aid fund devoted to alleviating the lot of political prisoners and their families.’
In Lejeune’s correspondence we detect a mixture of militancy and pragmatic materialism. On 21 October 1930, L’Humanité wrote to ‘Comrade Lejeune’, residing at the Home for Old Bolsheviks, in Moscow:
[Your letter] brings good news from you and shows that your morale is more than excellent. I agree completely that the socialists can hardly feel ‘satisfied’ with their ‘victory’ in Belleville; they have now been reduced to using any means to struggle against Communism. As for us, our campaign was excellent and despite the fact that [Maurice] Thorez was not elected, we are very happy with the result. The contribution of 80 francs to L’Humanité instead of Red Aid was a small error which is easily rectified. We will send you the coffee and chocolate, and all that you ask for in the letter.
This correspondent gives a rather rose-tinted image of the heavy defeat for the PCF’s general secretary in the former Communard stronghold of the 20th arrondissement. These poor results were severely criticised by the Comintern and followed by a shake-up at the top of the French Party.
Curiously absent from the surviving correspondence at this time is the Communists’ conquest of the municipality of Bagnolet. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the village had changed beyond recognition, with the establishment of wood, metal and glue manufacturers there. The croquants and their orchards were wiped out by industrialisation, while the radicalised workers who replaced them would make of Bagnolet, until as late as 2014, one of the bastions of the ‘Red Belt’.
In 1931, Lejeune received 50 roubles from the MOPR for his manuscript of ‘memoirs’. Also in that year, Elena Stasova, the organisation’s president, wrote him a letter of thanks for the generous donation he had made to help ‘revolutionary militants who have fallen victim to White Terror and Fascism’. Those 31,000 francs, she said, represented what he had been ‘obliged to save with difficulty throughout an entire working life in order to benefit from it in old age. But today, to you the old combatant of seventy-one, the former convict abused by Versaillais reaction, the Proletarian Revolution gives hospitality and guarantees you a better old age than the one afforded by savings made under the capitalist regime’.
For Stasova, Lejeune had been a pioneer of the revolutionary movement, who struggled to defend the first attempt at workers’ government made by the Communards; indeed, ‘the beaten Commune was not vanquished, for since Red October until today it has continued victorious.’ Now that he was in the USSR, Lejeune could see ‘that for which you fought in your youth and for which you have devoted all your life as a militant: the workers’ and peasants’ state, Socialist Society’. His ‘magnificent’ donation brought succour to the victims of the revolutionary struggle, but it was also ‘a sign of trust in the Revolutionary Homeland, in the construction of socialism of which you can admire the victorious march’. Finally, it constituted ‘an example and an appeal to the workers of the entire world, and in particular the workers of France who must struggle against French imperialism, rampart of world counter-revolution’.
That said, in the course of the 1930s, as the ‘brown beast’ of fascism became ever more menacing, Lejeune’s messages to Paris seem to have been largely focused on material demands. On 7 September 1933, months after Adolf Hitler had taken power, L’Humanité wrote to Moscow: ‘We acknowledge receipt of your letter asking for a sum of 2,000 to 3,000 francs. You are well aware of the exchange problems which sadly will not allow us to send you so rapidly the sum requested; nevertheless, we will strive to satisfy you.’ On 6 December 1933, another missive attempted to reassure him:
You asked comrade Sandberg to procure for you, in Paris, a whole series of objects. We have hastened to give this comrade all the facilities and possibilities she needed to make the purchases requested. We are convinced that you will be very pleased when comrade Sandberg delivers the various small items you wanted … Our wish is that you should keep in excellent health for a long time, our old Communard who remains one of the last living symbols of the Paris Commune.
In light of all this, it does not seem that the veteran was badly treated. Stasova wrote to him in November 1934: ‘I am very glad that you had a pleasant journey and that you have had a good rest in the sanatorium in the Caucasus. I hope that you have gathered enough strength to comfortably bear the winter in Moscow.’
But this living symbol was voracious. In December 1934, around the time of the assassination of Leningrad party boss Kirov, Lejeune heard as follows from Paris: ‘You know, life at l’Humanité is not without difficulties, we often have trouble paying our bills; a seasoned militant like yourself is sufficiently aware of all these issues for us not to have to insist on them any more.’ All the same, the comrades did their best: ‘We send you warmest wishes for the New Year. Our comrade is bringing you a few treats: 2 bottles of wine, 2 bars of chocolate, some pears, 2 tins of sardines, some biscuits, as well as some pocket money.’ In July 1935, Lejeune was reassured that ‘L’Humanité bears no hard feelings towards you.’
Indeed, on the symbolic level, Lejeune had increasing importance for the Cause. Cachin and Marty would soon be in Moscow for the Seventh (and final) Congress of the Comintern, which would decide upon the new line of a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism; the two leaders planned to drop in on Lejeune. His old Communard comrades in Moscow were now dead: the songwriter Achille Leroy, who had been invited in October 1927 to the festivities of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, died in Moscow in 1929 (despite his expressed wish to return to Paris). That year also saw the death of Henri Fourcade, another Communard who had been living in the USSR for some years. In 1935, with the passing of the poet Gustave Hinard, Lejeune seemed to be the last Communard left. This was not entirely true: still alive in France were Emile Chausse (born in 1850) and Pierre Vidal (born in 1851); but Chausse was a long-standing socialist councillor in Paris, and Vidal had quit politics at the end of the nineteenth century, after a period of exile in Hungary and Romania. Neither man fitted the narrative demanded by the Comintern (and both would die in 1941, before Lejeune).
As an illustration of Lejeune’s new symbolic importance, in September 1935 he was one of those who paid their last respects to the open coffin of the novelist Henri Barbusse, who was abruptly taken ill after a visit to the Moscow Zoo. Much was made of the premature disappearance of the author of Under Fire, one of the most eminent of the French intellectuals then promoting the notion of an anti-fascist ‘popular front’. In the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory, his guard of honour included Nikolai Bulganin, president of the Moscow Soviet, Nikita Khrushchev, Elena Stasova and American Communist leader Earl Browder. The journalist Alexander Koltsov paid homage to his French colleague. According to L’Humanité, after ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Muscovite workers had reverently filed past the coffin, there remained only ‘the closest friends: a delegation of the Central Committee of the PCF, led by Thorez and Marty; a delegation of Young Communists from France led by Raymond Guyot; the delegation of French Communists living in Moscow. Among them could be made out the old Communard, comrade Lejeune.’1
The coffin was transported from Moscow, via Pilsudski’s Poland and Hitler’s Germany, to Père-Lachaise, thus inaugurating this Communist enclave in the cemetery. In Monde, the international weekly founded by Barbusse, François Beaupréau described the coffin’s welcome: ‘The crowd of Paris, the real Paris, enters the great cemetery. And everyone’s thoughts associate the Wall with Barbusse … Along the walls of Père-Lachaise, the endless queue stretches out like a fresco, where all the labouring classes, all the disinherited and all men of courage and hope are represented. … Union! Liberty! Peace!’2
From now on, as the Last Communard, Lejeune carried on his ageing shoulders an important and prestigious responsibility – even though a representative of the Friends of the Commune, Valette, wrote to him in October 1935: ‘Dear friend Lejeune, the letter of 1931 addressed to the nursing home in Petrolovska near Moscow was returned to me with the comment: “unknown”! We would be very happy if you could, for the Museum of the Commune, send us your news and your memoirs.’
But what explains the sometimes tense exchanges between Lejeune and L’Humanité, the newspaper founded by Jaurès and once under the patronage of Camélinat? Were these just the – completely human and understandable – caprices of an extremely old man (especially for a worker born in 1847)? Or did his incessant demands hide a slightly darker reality?
Once in the USSR, Lejeune had come under the protection of André Marty, son of a veteran of the Narbonne Commune who had been condemned to death in absentia. A hero of the Black Sea mutiny in 1919, Marty became secretary of the Comintern in France and political commissar of the International Brigades in Spain (for which he earned the sobriquet ‘the butcher of Albacete’). In December 1940, now serving as one of the PCF’s exiled leadership and tasked in Moscow with looking after the welfare of the Last Communard, Marty wrote appreciatively:
Lejeune is one of the last true fighters of the Paris Commune … He has always taken part in the revolutionary workers’ movement, organised for a period in the revolutionary socialist party of [Edouard] Vaillant. During the first imperialist war Lejeune, already very old, violently denounced the socialists’ participation in government and support for the war. From the very beginning he was on the side of the October Revolution.
Because of his long-standing admiration for the Last Communard, Marty had become exasperated by the old man’s situation, and, as early as 1935, wrote a ‘Note on the situation of comrade Adrien Lejeune, former Communard’. Here it transpired that given the donation of his securities to L’Humanité, it had been agreed in the course of 1932 between comrade Lejeune, the managers of MOPR and Marty that:
1) a – All that comrade Lejeune asks for, of whatever nature, will be immediately given to him (food, for example, wine, chocolate, etc), and if the purchases must be made in valuta [hard currency], they will be made in valuta.
b – The Directorate of the MOPR is charged with applying this decision.
2) To my knowledge, this decision has always been applied; regular visits are made to Lejeune by officials of the MOPR.
3) This decision has been made because comrade Adrien Lejeune has been continually surrounded by old women whose sole aim is to sponge off the old Communard. Currently he has next to him a woman who gives herself the title of former wife of the Communard Hinard, who died in Moscow about two years ago [sic]. She is a woman from Odessa, and it is she who is always pushing ‘father’ Lejeune to ask for his money.
If, Marty continued, the PCF was ready to do anything for comrade Lejeune, ‘it is not ready to give money to an adventuress who has scandalously been allowed to latch onto the old Communard.’ Since ‘1928’, this woman ‘has not ceased to make the most insolent requests of the PCF’s representatives in Moscow’. Her very letter indicated her state of mind. It was completely false to say that comrade Lejeune had to pay special fees for personnel and hospitalisation: he was at the Kremlin hospital and all his expenses were covered by the MOPR. It was clear that the person who wrote the letter ‘has always had one essential goal: to have money, not to improve the situation of old Lejeune but for her personal interests, which have nothing to do with the revolutionary workers’ movement’.
Just a month previously, she had caused a ‘violent scandal’ by declaring that Cachin and Marty ‘went to the theatre every evening in Moscow and could not be bothered to go and see Lejeune’. On the basis of previous decisions, it was shortly to be verified whether Lejeune had indeed continued to receive what he requested. In Marty’s opinion, the only response to make to comrade Lejeune was to ‘continue to give him all he desires, whatever the demands he makes, but measures must be taken not to enrich at our expense the adventuresses prowling around him’. We know nothing more about these ladies.
Throughout this uneasy time of vigilance and suspicion, the French Communists continued to supply the Last Communard. On 3 December 1935, the chief administrator of L’Humanité wrote to announce the immediate despatch of 2,000 francs. On 17 July 1936, Lejeune was promised that a delegation of the Friends of the USSR would ‘bring a parcel containing all the objects you asked for’. On 13 September 1936, as Stalin’s Terror extended its grasp in Moscow and beyond, one comrade Planque wrote: ‘I have therefore bought for you: 3 flannel shirts; 4 pairs of woollen socks; 2 cotton bonnets; 2 sponges; to which I shall add half a kilo of chocolate and as much coffee, to be sent Monday morning. I will also include the glass and rubber tubes.’ But only a month later, the correspondent at L’Humanité sighed: ‘We are very upset by the comments in your letter, for you know perfectly well that we do all we can to satisfy all your requests.’ A few weeks later again, Planque had more comforting news: ‘In a few days’ time a delegation will leave here for the 19th anniversary of the October Revolution. I hope to contact one of the comrades of this delegation and will ask him to bring you a few delicacies from the great Paris of the Commune, which made so many capitalist bandits tremble sixty-five years ago.’ Planque therefore remained a good friend. On 26 April 1937, he wrote: ‘[Comrade Villiot] will bring you two bottles of wine, two bars of chocolate, a box of dates, a few bananas and a small coffee filter-machine, enough for a cup. Oh damn! I notice I’ve forgotten the coffee!!! How absent-minded I am.’
This eminent old Communard could be exasperating, but his very existence had to be celebrated. On 3 June 1937, to mark Lejeune’s ninetieth birthday, Marcel Cachin and Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote to him in the name of L’Humanité:
It is with joy that we wish, on this occasion, to express the sympathy of all the comrades at L’Humanité, happy in the knowledge that you are in good health despite your advanced age, and feel surrounded by the affection and concern of our brothers in the Land of Socialism. We know that you follow as ardently as ever the struggles and successes of our Communist Party and the Popular Front in France. We are sure that you rejoice in the immense progress achieved by our Party, which bring to you in old age the revenge for the difficult struggles you waged in the past. What better wish could we send, Dear Comrade, on the occasion of your birthday, than that you may for many years yet admire the gigantic achievements of victorious Socialism in the Land of the Soviets, and that you may witness, in our country, the triumph of the cause to which you have devoted your long and courageous life as a proletarian militant.
There were also elogious messages from the Friends of the USSR, the Communist parliamentary group, and this one from the MOPR, couched in the language of those Stalinist times:
We wish you long life, dear Adrien Lejeune, in our happy, joyful and prosperous Soviet land. We sincerely wish you live long enough to see the total victory of the working class over the fascist beast, and see with your own eyes the victorious flag of the Paris Commune fly over every country.
Long live the veteran of the Paris Commune, Adrien Lejeune!
Long live the heroic proletariat struggling against fascism!
Long live the Great Socialist State of workers and peasants!
Long live the home of the world socialist revolution and the Third Communist International!
Long live the Communist Party under the Great Leader of Nations, comrade Stalin!
Marty also wrote to Lejeune of the ‘living symbol of the implacable struggle of the proletariat and people of Paris against the exploiters’. He concluded: ‘While we wait to receive you in our liberated Paris, may you, the undefeated combatant from the last barricade, on the rue des Pyrénées, receive, dear comrade Lejeune, my most cordial, fraternal and revolutionary congratulations.’ In the context of the Spanish Civil War, where Marty was carving out his own brutal reputation as a paranoid and ruthless political commissar of the International Brigades, the choice of a barricade in the rue des Pyrénées was all the more symbolic.
Meanwhile the struggle to satisfy the hero of the Commune continued. A letter of 26 October 1937 began by speaking of the ‘objects’ requested by Lejeune, before announcing ‘the terrible death of our comrade [Paul] Vaillant-Couturier’: the youthful director of L’Humanité would be buried a few metres from the tomb of Barbusse. On 7 December 1937, it was nervously explained that a comrade who was to bring Lejeune more stuff had fallen ill: ‘We are sure you will not be angry with us for this small delay outside our control. You know how much the life of a newspaper is full of unpredictable events of all kinds, and we hope the parcel you receive will please you.’ But despite these efforts, the newspaper had to grovel to him four days later: ‘We are very upset by your remarks suggesting that we have neglected to do the favour you asked of us, and we hope that after receiving this letter, you will no longer be angry with us.’ On 12 January 1938, the hapless Planque tried to put these minor contretemps into perspective: ‘You’ll have read about our great victory at Teruel! If our Spanish Comrades could buy the weapons they need, this war would quickly be over with the defeat of Franco and a stunning victory for the Republican Armies. But despite all that, their victory is certain.’
In Lejeune’s files in Moscow, there is no mention of any gift to the children of Spanish Republicans. That said, the Soviet journalist Alexander Kukhno, in an article published in 1967 in Literaturnaya Gazeta, asserts that Lejeune did make a gesture of solidarity towards the Republicans: ‘In 1937–1938, the Communard Lejeune, aged ninety, followed with great concern and anxiety the events unfolding in Spain, constantly asking for news of those who took part in the first battles against the fascists. He asked for news of the Spanish children at [the home] Simiaza. He gave his last savings to the MOPR.’3 According to Kukhno, it was at the sanatorium of Barvikha that Lejeune made the acquaintance of Isidoro Acevedo, a writer from Asturias born in 1876, co-founder of the Spanish Communist Party, who had organised hospitals on the front line as well as the evacuation to the USSR of the children of Republicans.
But despite the tireless efforts of the comrades at L’Humanité, and this new friendship with Acevedo, Lejeune did not perhaps feel completely at home in the Land of the Soviets. On 13 June 1938, in a confidential report to comrade Andreyev of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Bogdanov, chief of the Central Committee of the MOPR, wrote:
We do not know where you get the information that the old Communard Lejeune died two years ago. At that time he resided in the Ilyich Home in Moscow before being transferred to the sanatorium at Mikhailovskoye. At present he is in the Kremlin clinic and will return to Mikhailovskoye in a few days’ time. Given there are no French comrades in the MOPR, we ask you to ensure that French comrades come to visit him. Mikhailovskoye is sixty kilometres from the city and sometimes he feels very lonely.
On 29 October 1938, in an ‘urgent and confidential’ letter, Bogdanov wrote again to Andreyev, insisting he arrange for members of the French and Spanish delegations to the October anniversary celebrations to visit Lejeune in his sanatorium:
In the past, delegates always visited him, yet the delegation that came for the 1 May celebrations did not make the journey, which greatly disappointed comrade Lejeune. What’s more the Central Committee of the MOPR of the USSR request that you make sure that the Spanish delegates led by Morato, currently residing at the Savoy Hotel, visit comrade Lejeune.
Despite these difficulties and disappointments, tributes were still paid to the Last Communard. After the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Edouard Chenel, secretary for the Fraternal Association of Veterans and Friends of the Paris Commune, asked him to autograph his menu for the banquet of May 1939. On 1 May 1939, comrade Lejeune – ‘heroic participant in the immortal Commune!’ – received the homage of his companions at the sanatorium of Barvikha.
Indeed, Lejeune and many Russians he encountered could count themselves lucky. Of those who had paid homage to Henri Barbusse in September 1935, Nikolai Bulganin survived the Great Terror and would enjoy a long political career well beyond the end of the Second World War. Elena Stasova, despite her courageously outspoken defence of some victims of Stalinist repression, would also prosper. But this contrasted cruelly with the fate of the journalist Mikhail Kolstov, Stalin’s special correspondent in Spain, who was arrested for his pains and shot in 1940. In the last great show trial of the Terror, the ‘doctors’ trial’, the unfortunate accused were implicated in the death not only of Maxim Gorky, but of Barbusse himself. Paradoxically, Barbusse’s hagiography of Stalin had long since been withdrawn from the shelves, just as many of the Great Leader’s ‘friends and companions’, notably Karl Radek, had themselves fallen into disgrace.
The year of 1939 brought new crises for the Communist movement. After the rout of the Spanish Republicans, and in the face of the equivocations of Franco–British diplomacy, Stalin signed a non-aggression treaty with his erstwhile mortal enemy, Hitler. A friendship pact would follow. According to the new Comintern line, any defensive war waged by the remaining Western democracies would be ‘imperialist’. As a consequence of this breakneck U-turn, the French Communist Party was outlawed in its homeland. Its leaders, Thorez, Duclos and Marty, took refuge in the USSR.
As for the Last Communard, he seemed to be in good shape and loyal to the line defined by the party. At the end of 1940, after the calamitous fall of the Third Republic, André Marty described him thus:
At the current moment, comrade Lejeune continues to follow political events and shows an excellent class spirit. For example, although he cannot read, due to his weakening eyesight, he expresses opinions, on the break-up of the Popular Front, the attitude of the Socialists, of the Daladier government, on the attitude of the Communist deputies, that are absolutely correct and clear ideas; it is even astonishing that, at his age, he has kept such clarity of mind and such a memory. Whilst a certain number of old Communists have passed themselves off as Communards, Lejeune, who fought in the 20th arrondissement on the last barricades, has always been extremely modest in every way.
But behind this flattering report hid a sadder reality, which Marty described to the Comintern in a confidential report. Lejeune was currently in the Kremlin Clinic. For twenty-five days now, the crisis which had required his hospitalisation was over. Despite this, he was still in his sick ward, subject to hospital regulations, in particular those concerning visits. Various organisations continued the discussion about him which had been ongoing for several years. The sanatorium at Barvikha had in fact refused to take him back, because the MOPR had not paid for the last eight months he spent there. At the present time, all expenses were paid, while the MOPR continued to raise the ‘eternal Lejeune problem’ with the various organisations that might be interested.
Since Marty’s opinion had been asked for, he had to point out that it was difficult to justify the treatment of Lejeune. Back in 1928, the Central Committee of the French Communist Party had decided to ask the MOPR if it could take care of the five or six old Communards who were living in France in ‘a very bad situation’. On the agreement of the organisations concerned, Lejeune was sent to the USSR with the other comrades. After their death, he had remained alone.
Until around 1936, Marty went on, Lejeune had been installed in the Home for Old Revolutionaries, in Moscow itself. He was very happy there, because other old comrades spoke French; furthermore, the food was quite acceptable. But since 1936 Lejeune had been thrown from one side to another and the MOPR had not settled his situation other than in a strictly administrative way. Lejeune was in an excellent state of health for someone his age. No organ was impaired: he could live ‘for another eight or ten years’. His eyesight was deteriorating and his deafness quite pronounced, but the brain was ‘excellent’. Nevertheless, Lejeune had lately grown progressively weaker, and Marty suggested two reasons for this. Firstly, there was his permanent isolation in a hospital bedroom:
He hears French spoken, at best, for one hour every ten days. It is difficult in these conditions for bitterness not to invade him and influence his physical state. The only regular visits he receives are those of the French typists, myself, and for two months now [PCF representative] Raymond Guyot. I proposed for example that the MOPR could select groups of Soviet French-speaking comrades from the French language schools in Moscow, and task them with at least fortnightly visits. That would mean two visits per year for each group. It has been impossible for me to obtain even a reply to this proposal. When there is a celebration (18 March, 7 November), and the MOPR thinks of it, a delegation goes to visit Lejeune; they smile at one another, shout ‘Vive la Commune’ and then leave the old comrade all on his own.
Another reason for his ill-health was the fact that comrade Lejeune was ‘a French worker. Thus Russian cuisine does not please him any more than German cuisine, and as no one can understand his observations (since the cuisine is different) he hardly eats, and therefore becomes weaker.’ No account had been taken of his previous life: ‘For example, the French worker drinks wine at every meal; this does not make him a drunkard, for in France, the regions in which wine is not drunk are those that produce the most alcoholics, intoxication being almost unknown in the wine-producing departments of the Midi. Now, Lejeune, as a French worker, would like a bottle of wine from time to time: forbidden!’
Given that nothing had been organised for three or four years to ensure he enjoyed some intellectual and social life, on several occasions he had been surrounded by French-speaking people he naturally trusted, but ‘who stole nearly everything he had’. ‘Like all French workers’, Lejeune liked ‘his little personal effects’. Since 1910, he had owned a big watch of little value. In 1939, the glass broke. For three months the MOPR was incapable of replacing the glass, so that old Lejeune no longer knew what time it was and lived ‘like a prisoner (or an animal)’. It was Marty who had the watch repaired. A month later Lejeune was taken to hospital, the glass broke again, and no one bothered to have it repaired. Almost all of his cherished personal objects had disappeared. When he asked for a pair of shoes, the MOPR bought him one, but they were so tight that it was torture for him to walk. Everything that might lighten his life was provided ‘in an administrative fashion and as if they were doing him a favour [underlined in the original]’.
Marty concluded that ‘the best provisional solution’ for comrade Lejeune would be to house him among veterans of the Revolution, some of whom he knew (there were Italian comrades) and who spoke French. But there would have to be a highly qualified nurse on hand, and ‘the possibility of a rapid light surgical intervention when necessary’. The definitive solution would be, ‘as soon as circumstances allow it, his return to France’.
In his post-scriptum, Marty noted angrily that, on the occasion of the 18 March 1940 commemoration, the MOPR had sent one of its officials to visit Lejeune. Immediately afterwards, this official wrote an article entitled ‘We Shall Win! On the occasion of the 69th anniversary of the Commune’, and signed it ‘Adrien Lejeune’. The Press Section of the Communist International let it be printed without even informing Marty. This article, published in the Rundschau (a Comintern organ based in Stockholm), was ‘a schematic, lifeless text, full of clichés plus a quotation from Marx’. As could be expected in these febrile times, it was immediately picked up on by the French socialists, in Le Peuple, organ of the CGT, on 18 April 1940, who took advantage of it to ridicule Lejeune. Now, after talking it over with him, Marty had proposed an interview under the title ‘The Communard Who Saw Three Wars’, containing ‘only Lejeune’s opinions, tidied up, of course, but very lively and very relevant to today’. The problem was that the comrades who ‘looked after’ Lejeune considered him ‘to have regressed to childhood, and they write articles with his signature that not a single French militant will believe to be by Lejeune’.
In the Le Peuple article, the anonymous socialist journalist laid into the alleged remarks of the Last Communard and his fellow exiles. For him, Lejeune, Thorez and Marty were behaving like ‘auxiliaries of Nazi propaganda’. Not much needed to be said about Marty’s article; taking the form of a letter to American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, ‘it is a ferocious digression on the “abominable existence” that, according to him, is suffered by the refugees “abandoned” by Blum and Jouhaux, “valets of the French bourgeoisie”, “threatened with death every day, every minute”. No less than that.’ These ‘grotesque lies’, addressed to a country which had little knowledge of things in Europe, sought to invite the thousands of workers of the New World to come out ‘against the unjust and reactionary war’ waged by capitalism, in other words to ‘take the side of Hitler’s Germany, in association with the USSR. Marty has not changed profession.’ Thorez’s contribution to the same anniversary Rundschau issue had an altogether different character, according to Le Peuple:
The ‘son of the people’ attacks the Communists who had the sense to react against Stalinist policy. The deserter flies into a rage against his former friends whose names we won’t please him by citing: N… is a police informer; G…, an informer; V… and G… are opportunists; C…, an arriviste; D…, a failure … But you can already see a campaign against disillusioned Communists emerge: they are very close to being accused of Trotskyism and to being, in their turn, described as ‘lubricious vipers’.
The pick of the bunch was ‘a certain Lejeune (André [sic]) – has anyone ever heard of him? – who seems to be, in this team, the main one assigned to spreading muck. This individual attacks in particular Blum and Jouhaux, decreed public enemies number 1, in whom are revived the “villains of Versailles”, because they are their “despicable descendants”, “moral avatars” and a “treacherous rabble.”’ In short, ‘the escapee from Bobigny or Arcueil has used the anniversary of the Commune as a pretext to unleash his filth. It would be useless to remind him what the Commune was, and what part was played in it by patriotic revolt against the German invader. He is quite incapable of understanding this, since he and his friends recommend and organise treason in the face of the enemy.’4 By describing Lejeune as an ‘escapee’ from the red Parisian suburbs of Bobigny or Arcueil was the journalist hinting at an uncomfortable truth, that of Lejeune’s relative ‘cowardice’ during the Bloody Week?
During the uneasy peace between the Comintern and Nazi Germany, the Communist line on the Commune – and therefore the official declarations of the Last Communard – were extremely ambiguous. On the seventieth anniversary of the Commune, in 1941, M. Wolf, secretary of the Comintern Youth, wrote to Lejeune to express the youth section’s ‘ardent young Communist salutations’:
We salute in you those who, seventy years ago, fought heroically on the barricades against counter-revolution, for workers’ power, for freedom. Today, because of the Bourgeoisie’s treason, the French people is again going through difficult times. But the experience of the glorious Paris Communards taught the French people a great deal and the day is not far off when, guided by the Communist Party, it will rise up against its oppressors and achieve freedom. We hope that you, dear comrade Lejeune, will see the day when the French people will fulfil the dreams of the Paris Communards and build a free and happy Soviet France.
Lejeune replied as follows to his ‘young friends’:
What a joy it is to see you, the free and strong generation of socialism, the young generation which grows up in the sun of the Stalinist Constitution. Seventy years ago, we, the proletarians of Paris, also tried to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish working-class power, but we were broken because of our weakness and lack of experience. What we did not succeed in doing has been achieved by the proletariat of Russia under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin. So increase the power of the Land of Socialism, absorb the great doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, reinforce the international links with the world proletariat. That is the guarantee of future victories. Long live the hope of the workers of the world, the great Stalin!5
During this strange and tortured period, the Nazis were never directly attacked by the Communists. In June 1940, the PCF leader Jacques Duclos arrived in Paris in a diplomatic car which had followed the triumphant march of the Wehrmacht into the city. He would try, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with German Ambassador Otto Abetz the legalisation of the Party and its press. The PCF gave priority to defending Stalin’s Soviet Union and resisting French ‘reactionaries’, be these the SFIO or the Radical Party or the collaborationist regime newly established in Vichy. The clandestine L’Humanité of 18 March 1941 declared that the ‘Paris Communards have been avenged by the party of Lenin and Stalin. They will also be avenged by the people of Paris and the whole of France. Long live the Paris Commune. Glory to its martyrs.’ There were parallels between 1871 and 1941, wrote Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos, and ‘the capitalists of today are the worthy heirs to the Versaillais’:
Seventy years ago, the workers of Paris seized power: it was the grandiose epic of the Paris Commune. The workers of France salute, with their Communist Party, the indestructible memory of the heroes of the Commune whose emancipatory struggle they continue against capitalism. But if French proletarians find inspiration from the lessons given in 1871 by the Communards, if they wish to follow the glorious example given in 1917 by the Bolshevik party which, under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, turned the great dream of the Communards into a living reality by establishing socialism on a sixth of the globe, on their side the capitalists are the worthy heirs of the Versaillais of 1871. Today, like seventy years ago, only one thing counts for the capitalists, and that is the defence of their interests and class privileges.
It was fear of the working class that had chased the capitalists of 1871 into the arms of Bismarck, and it was once more fear of the working class, fear of the people of France which, in 1940, pushed the French ruling classes to ‘throw themselves into the arms of Hitler’. It was through their ‘class spirit’ that French capitalists, betraying the national interest, had led France to war and defeat. In 1940, the Italian and German leaders openly boasted of their participation in the Spanish Civil War to bring down the Republic and destroy the Popular Front, but ‘they could not have succeeded without the help of Chamberlain and Blum’. Chamberlain and Daladier, who, ‘right up until the last minute, thought they could turn Hitlerite Germany against the USSR’, wanted above all to liquidate the Spanish Popular Front through the crushing of the Republic; it was then ‘necessary to demolish the French Popular Front, with the complicity of Blum, Dumoulin and other traitors’. Duclos and Thorez revealed that on 1 July 1939, the ‘sinister’ Georges Bonnet had announced to Abetz’s predecessor in Paris the forthcoming campaign of anti-Communist repression in France, and that Daladier had spoken to his entourage of a ‘seven-year war’, his aim being above all to destroy the PCF and force the French people under the ‘darkest of dictatorships’. The PCF leaders understood that the Blums, Gamelins and Pétains had all given their approval to this policy, which could not but lead France to a humiliating defeat.6
The issue of 25 May 1941 quoted Communard poet Eugène Pottier, evoked the traditional Montée au Mur to commemorate the Bloody Week, and denounced ‘defeatists and traitors’:
In 1870–1871, the heads of the military betrayed France; they rolled up like lapdogs at Bismarck’s feet and could only find the strength to drown the heroic Paris Commune in blood. Today, yet again, bribed military chiefs betray our Patrie. Pétain and Darlan, despised by the people and transformed into prison warders, are turning France into a Hitlerite colony. They are ready to shed French blood for the invader of our national soil. In France, the Communist party led the fight against the treaty of Versailles which oppressed the German people and we are sure that there exist forces in Germany which will rise up against the super-Versailles imposed on our country by the Third Reich. … Against this policy, the people of France are gradually organising the Front of the Resistance; the workers, in order to defend their salaries, are joining trade unions; the peasants feel the need to unite; everywhere the anger of the nation is rising against our oppressors and against the traitors in their pay.7
Here we observe a crucial shift in the discourse of the PCF: they no longer attack the socialist ‘traitors’, while the ‘Hitlerites’ are now described as an enemy. But they still attack the Western ‘imperialists’: ‘Messrs Chamberlain and Daladier likewise told us that they were struggling for democracy when they were turning France into a vast penitentiary. We were the only ones to oppose the Daladier–Chamberlain war. There will be more of us to organise the Front of National Resistance against the war of Hitler–Darlan.’8
The same underground issue of L’Humanité spoke of the last Sunday in May, the traditional day of pilgrimage by the people of Paris to Père-Lachaise in honour of the heroes of the Commune. If France had still been free, rather than suffering from the ‘dual oppression of the invader and his lackeys’, it would have been in their hundreds of thousands that Parisian workers would have marched that Sunday, 25 May 1941, ‘at the call of the Communist Party’, past the Mur des Fédérés. Instead France, oppressed and humiliated, was deprived of all its rights: ‘German and French plutocrats, the Krupps and the Schneiders, the Siemens and the Lehideux harbour the same hatred of the Paris Commune whose memory lives on in workers’ hearts.’
However, the article continued, on the anniversary days of the Bloody Week, the women of Paris, heirs to the glorious women fighters of the Commune, did march to the Mur des Fédérés and lay flowers in memory. They brought their children and showed them this Wall in front of which our forefathers fell, crying ‘Vive la Commune’. In front of this Wall, the young generations had made a solemn vow to follow the example of the heroes of 1871. It was in different conditions that the people would made their sacred pilgrimage to Père-Lachaise, ‘their fists clenched with anger as they think of our imprisoned, our deported, but also with hearts swollen with hope at the thought that nothing can prevent the heroic struggle of our great Communist Party for the liberation and independence of France.’
At the bottom of the page was a small article on life in the land of really existing Socialism: ‘In 1941, wages are going to be increased by 6 per cent in the Soviet Union. In 1941, social and cultural spending will be up by 14.6 per cent in relation to 1940 … This is how Soviet power cares about the labouring masses. In the USSR, it is well-being and abundance that reign; in France, as in the other capitalist countries, it is misery and oppression.’9
This ambiguous line, which did not yet call openly for armed resistance against the Nazi occupier, was also expressed in La Vie Ouvrière, the PCF organ in the Nord zone, which was under direct military rule and had just experienced a wave of Communist-inspired miners’ strikes. In its special issue to mark 1 May 1941, the paper declared:
In 1871, to break the Commune, the Versaillais requested and were granted the support of Bismarck. In 1918, to crush the German revolution, the capitalists across the Rhine asked for and received the military support of the French imperialists. In 1941, to protect themselves from the people’s anger, the French capitalists have recourse to the support of the Hitlerite armed forces. Shielded by their bayonets, they are imposing the most odious reactionary regime on the people of France. All freedoms are suppressed. The politicians of the bourgeoisie, the socialist and reformist leaders offer up the most repugnant spectacle you could imagine. Yesterday hysterical chauvinists, today they prostrate themselves at the victor’s feet. They are trying to drag wounded France into another war. Some on the side of Germany, others on the side of England.
This delicate balancing act was further elaborated upon in another special issue of La Vie Ouvrière entitled ‘Vive la Commune!’ Under the headline ‘The face of treason’, the traitors of 1871 – ‘Bazaine, Galliffet, Thiers, Fabre, etc’ – were put back to back with those of 1941 – ‘Darlan, Laval, de Brinon, Déat, Dumoulin, etc’. The editorialist declared:
This year, Paris and France will have other reasons to celebrate the anniversary of the Commune. As in 1871, the country has been dragged into an imperialist war. As then it is suffering under the yoke of occupation. As in 1871, the ‘elite’ of the big bourgeoisie betrays, and treats with the invader through fear of the people … To recover the freedom and independence of the entire country; to use all the resources of France for the satisfaction of its inhabitants’ needs; to restrain the financial and industrial powers who are stuffing their faces after defeat, just as they got fat before and during the war; to place the people’s destiny back into its own hands; that is what the French people want, and that is what the Paris Commune will inspire in them.
However, the French people did not express that desire ‘through the excesses of a frenzied chauvinism like the one that was found up until June 1940 in the hysterical manifestations of the traitors of today. For them, the German people is not responsible for the barbaric acts of its imperialists. They know that, after all is said and done, the entente between peoples will be achieved against capitalism and the warmongers of all countries. The Commune had its first revenge in 1917, on a sixth of the globe. The time is coming when other successes, in other countries, will come to avenge our 30.000 dead.’10
But everything was about to change. On the solstice of 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against his recent Bolshevik allies. The world, and Stalin’s position, were going to be transformed: as Moscow was threatened, Soviet Russia called for armed struggle by all the Communist Parties of occupied Europe, wherever they may be. This new situation came as a relief for anti-fascists who had found the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact a bitter pill to swallow. It would not, however, make the last days of the Last Communard any easier.