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Tribulations of a Party Line

The French Communists and Indo-China
By Bernard B. Fall
April 1955
Article Summary and Author Biography

BERNARD B. FALL, a young Frenchman who spent 1953 in research in Indo-China and has since received his Ph.D. in international relations from Syracuse University; author of "The Viet-Minh Régime."

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THE varying positions taken by the French Communist Party towards the war in Indo-China have provided a striking example of the difficulties and contradictions which a party encounters when it tries to conciliate its local political objectives with the over-all grand design of proletarian revolution woven by the Soviet Union. Its actions, of course, also created a dilemma for the other parties in the French Parliament. As Léon Blum said: "We always find ourselves face to face with the insupportable anomaly represented by the insertion into the French body politic of a foreign nationalist party."[i]

Actually, the French Communist attitude as regards Indo-China was far from clear until the abortive Moscow Conference of the foreign ministers in April 1947. Until then, "tripartism" had been the watchword in France. The Communist chieftain, Maurice Thorez, was Vice-Premier and Minister of State, another Communist was Minister of Armaments, and other Communists, under one governmental combination or another, held important levers as Ministers of Labor, Reconstruction, Public Health. Indeed, the whole political outlook in 1946 and early 1947 seemed ideally suited to the eventual peaceful and orderly inclusion of France into the ranks of the "People's Democracies." Naturally, she would also have brought the French overseas territories into the Soviet orbit, thus permitting them--like more backward Soviet Central Asian areas--to "reach Socialism while bypassing capitalism."

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