The Pattern of Communist Revolution: A Historical Analysis by Hugh Seton-watson

Author:Hugh Seton-watson [Seton-watson, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781014083579
Google: fbYiAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Methuen
Published: 1953-01-15T12:00:55+00:00

France And Italy

In Western Europe powerful resistance movements developed in France and Italy, in which communists played an important part. Good communications and scarcity of remote mountainous or forest terrain favoured the invaders, and made guerrilla action less easy than in the Balkans or Asia. Instead sabotage, espionage and subversive propaganda were well used. The political results of the resistance movements were not the same as in the Balkans, as both France and Italy were liberated not by Soviet but by Anglo-Saxon armies, which required them as bases from which to pursue the Germans in the later stages of the war.

In France several conspiratorial groups were formed early in 1941, both in the zone of German occupation and in Vichy territory. These established contact with General de Gaulle’s Free French Committee in London, though their relations with it were not always smooth.4 It was not until the German invasion of Russia that the communists became active resisters. The prestige of the Soviet Union made the party once more attractive to the workers, and it was able to enlist recruits. The communists participated in other organisations, but kept their cadres distinct from those of their allies. The most important body which came under communist control was the Front National. This included individuals of conservative opinions and bourgeois social origin as well as workers and men of the left, but it was created on communist initiative, and the key positions in it were held by communists. Its main strength was in the zone of German occupation. Its military organisation was called Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, and in it the communist control was still stricter than in the Front. On Vichy territory too the communists entered the existing resistance groups.

1 The ‘people’s government’ of 1918 was headed by the veteran Galician socialist, Ignacy Daszyński. It was replaced, after discussions with Pibudski, by the more moderate government of Moraczewski. See above, p. 65.

2 See above, p. 73.

3 The most authoritative work on the Polish resistance movement is General Bόr-Komarowski, Secret Army, 1950.

4 There is a brief account of the early stage of the resistance movement in H. Michel, Histoire de la resistance, Paris, 1950.

The communists and the F.T.P. were not content with mere underground organisation and preparation for action in the future when military circumstances would be favourable, which had been the policy of the older resistance movements: they urged immediate military action against the invaders on as large a scale as possible. This of course corresponded to the communist tactic in the Balkans. It could be expected to draw into the struggle large numbers of more or less non-political persons, who could be captured for the Communist Party by patriotic slogans. It would lead to reprisals and atrocities which would embitter all patriots and create an extremist mentality. It would drive the conservative and the propertied into collaboration with the Germans, or at least with Vichy, and so facilitate the communists’ aim of identifying national liberation with social revolution. Finally it would increase German military commitments in the West, and so relieve pressure on the Soviet Union.

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