The Man in the Hotchkiss

Like a proud papa recounting the feats of his offspring, the Communist organ L'Humanite* 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.

Up the Chimney. Two days later, the government began cracking back in earnest. While armed police stood ready to block any demonstration at the lie de la Cite, where Duclos was being held, other police searched the Duclos home. Next day, the police raided Communist headquarters all over France. As 400 cops leaped from vans outside the massive stone building marked Comite Central du Parti Communiste in Paris, three lookouts slammed the door. A moment later, dense smoke began pouring from the chimney. By the time the police broke in half an hour later, most of the evidence was gone. Other raids were more productive. Lyon yielded a rich crop of stolen French army seals, handy for forging identity papers. Clermont-Ferrand and Toulon produced enough nuts, bolts, clubs, buckshot and shoemakers' knives to equip a hundred riots.

In protest, the Communists called a wave of strikes. Most were flops: France is in better political health than it has been for some time, and there has been a decline in mass support of the Reds. Even so, the Communists who polled 26 1/2% of the vote at the last elections could still make plenty of trouble.

* For other news of L'Humanite not printed in L'Humanite, see PRESS.

* Who made U.S. headlines in 1945 by writing an obviously made-in-Moscow attack on Earl Browder which resulted in Browder's dismissal as top U.S. Communist and his replacement by William Z. Foster.

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