forgotten that at_a decisive time... It is not true that Thorez responded to de Gaulle's appeal, Thorez and Togliatti were lined up with Stalin. They acted in accordance with the commitments made by Stalin to American and British imperialism at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam, In consequence the capitalist state and economy were saved in western Europe,
- -. De Gaulle summarizes in his letter only what he stated much more explicitly in his memoirs: .
. “Taking into account previous circumstances, events since then, the necessities of today, I hold that the return of Maurice Thorez as head of the Communist party can yield more advantages at present than ditfioulties. *
"Tnasmuch as in place of revolution, the Communists seek pre~ ponderance ina parliamentary regime, society runs - Less risk, oo.
“as for Thorez, while trying to. advance the affairs of Commun= ism, on many occasions he was to serve the public interest. On his. return to France, he helped put an end to the last vestiges of the 'patriotic militiat whom some of his people obstinately sought to maintain in a new underground, Insofar as the gloomy, hard rigidity of his party permitted him, he opposed the attempts at encroachment of the liberation committees and the acts of violence to which the overexcited groups turned. _Among-.the workers -~- they were numerous -particularly the miners, who listened to his harangues, he did not stop advocating the slogan of working to the utmost and of producing, cost what it might. Was this simply a. political tactic? It's not my business to figure it out. It was enough for .me that France benefited," (Le Salut, pp. 100-101.)
"I have not forgotten," said de Gaulle. The Italian bourgeoisie also has not forgotten that from. 1943 to 1948 Togliatti rendered similar service, that he even got his party and the workers who followed it to accept the Concordat tying the Vatican to the Italian Republic, Thus the president of the: Italian Council, Moro, the Christian Democrat, did not hesitate to offer to the Italian Communist party an Italian army plane to take Togliattits assistant to the body of the dead secretary in order to return it to Italy. De Gaulle, in most revealing terms, and Moro in a spectacular gesture, showed that they understood the essential role played by the Communist parties: createa to overthrow the bourgeois onder , they saved it at a crucial moment. ” Thorez and Togliatti, through the role which they had their parties play, through entering the bourgeois governments, saved capitalism not only in France and Italy but, -if the struggle of the Greek partisans at the time be recalled, probably the whole sector of Europe located along the Mediterranean, without mentioning the wider conse~ quences.
The forward march of the socialist revolution took a more com-= plicated road. Saved in the West thanks to the betrayal of the workers leaders, world capitalism still did not have sufficient forces to crush. the Chinese Revolution, which in turn gave a gigantic impulse to the colonial revolution, The revolutionary thrust throughout the world in turn has tended to break the myth on which the Communist parties have lived since they were subjected to Stalinism. Currents
are appearing among them hostile to the reformist politics and seeking a revolutionary outcome,
Thorez and Togliatti have passed from the scene precisely as the crisis breaks out, after thirty years of monolithism, bringing to an end the period during which they ruled in their parties, The crisis is a world-wide one, intimately linked with the Sino-Soviet conflict, It brings to an end the domination of the Soviet bureaucracy over the sector of the workers. movement linked with the Russian Revolution, The old bureaucratized leaderships are doomed, New revolutionary leaderships, after long and painful tests, will emerge. They, looking back at Togliatti and Thorez and their kind, will say, like de Gaulle, but with quite an opposite feeling, “We have not forgotten. 2