Maurice Thorez

A Biography

John Bulaitis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781845117252
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Maurice Thorez (1900-1964) was a major figure in the history of twentieth-century France and European Communism for over three decades. Under his leadership, the French Communist Party (PCF) became France's largest political party and one of the most important communist parties in the West.
Born in a mining village, Thorez left school at the age of 12 and would go on to helm the PCF in a rapid rise that paralleled Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union. After World War II, he became a minister, and briefly deputy prime minister, before the Cold War excluded communists from political power. The PCF became known as 'the party of Maurice Thorez', as a leader cult around Thorez was created that mirrored the cult of personality' around Stalin.
This book is based on a wealth of original source material, including Thorez's diaries and notebooks. John Bulaitis outlines how Thorez's political life intersected with and was shaped by key historical events. At its heart, the book explores the paradox of the mass communist movement in France: its ability to fuse attachment to the French nation with fervent loyalty to the Soviet Union and Stalinist practices.

CHAPTER 1

YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY

At the turn of the twentieth century, the mining region of northern France stretched crescent-shaped between the edge of the Artois hills and the areas around Valenciennes on the Belgium border. The village of Noyelles-Godault was situated almost exactly in the centre of this belt, 13 kilometres east of Lens and nine kilometres north-west of Douai. With 2410 inhabitants recorded in the 1901 census,¹ the old Gallic–Roman settlement had grown rapidly after the Dourges Mining Company opened its Pit No. 4 in 1867. Rows of uniformly designed, company-owned homes crammed close to mining offices, workshops and the frame containing the pit-winding gear. It was in one such house on rue Victor Hugo occupied by Clément Baudry, a 39-year-old miner, and his wife Clémence Dutouquet that the future Maurice Thorez entered the world on 28 April 1900.

The baby's mother was the couple's 20-year-old unmarried daughter, also named Clémence. The birth certificate, signed by Baudry and witnessed by two miners (one of whom signed his name with a mark), gives Clémence's occupation as ‘female worker, without profession’.² She had sometimes been hired as a domestic servant and sometimes, from an early age, worked with other girls and young women at the pithead. Thorez would recall his grandfather telling how he would carry her as a sleepy child of ten on his shoulders to the mine each morning.³

The Baudry and Dutouquet families originated in Hasnon, a small town situated around ten kilometres from Anzin. Clément and Clémence both had grandfathers who were farm labourers and grandmothers who worked spinning yarn. Clément's mother was recorded on the census as a ‘day labourer’, a casual manual worker. His father was a miner, and Clément joined him down the pit at an early age. Clément Baudry and Clémence Dutouquet married in 1883. The year following their wedding a bitter 55-day strike gripped the Anzin region and provided much of the background for Émile Zola's novel, Germinal. Radicalised by the movement, Clément became an active member of the trade union led by Émile Basly, the model for the socialist, Rassaneur, in Zola's work. The couple moved to Noyelles-Godault in the search for work in 1891.

Maurice's father was the 21-year-old Henri Breton, a member of a long-established Noyelles-Godault family. Through the generations, the Bretons had climbed the village's rickety social ladder. Henri's grandfather, a small farmer, had become a garde particulier, a guard with some police powers under French law. His father, Maurice, had opened a café and, later, ran the convenience store on the main street, which is where Henri was working when his relationship with Maurice's mother began. The couple did not marry for reasons that are unknown, though Clémence followed custom by giving her child the name of her partner's father. Maurice Baudry became Maurice Thorez almost three years later when, on 31 January 1903, Clémence married Louis Thorez, a 25-year-old miner – and ‘son of a miner’ – from the nearby village of Beaumont. Louis adopted Maurice as his son and the child grew up unaware of his natural father until an unspecified time in his teenage years.⁴

During the late 1950s, Thorez sketched on a notepad all the villages and towns he had stayed in or visited during his childhood. The list is an itinerary of mining centres – Sallaumines, Méricourt, Courcelles, Billy-Montigny – and industrial towns – Lens, Douai, Carvin, Seclin. His notes indicate that Louis and Clémence initially set up home close to Louis's family in Hénin-Liétard, an extension of Beaumont (the town is today called Hénin-Beaumont).⁵ Their first two children, Léonie (1903) and Louis (1905), were born in Hénin-Liétard.⁶ At the age of five, Maurice was looked after by his aunt in Dourges and then by his great-grandmother in Hasnon. In early 1906, the Thorez family resettled in Noyelles-Godault, in a two-up-two-down company house, 6 rue Émile Zola. Until evacuated during the opening stages of the First World War, the young Maurice lived in Noyelles-Godault and made only a few excursions beyond the region of his birth.

Childhood in a mining community

Thorez's roots in a mining community would become important elements of his authority as communist leader. French labour movement culture – heavily influenced by Zola's Germinal – viewed the miner as the archetype of working-class labour, the dangerous, collective nature of the work engendering a deep sense of community and tradition of struggle. Even complexion suggested special qualities: faces darkened by coal dust earned miners the name les gueules noires (black mouths). Communists built a cult around the miner in tandem with the cult surrounding Thorez.⁷ In this vision, the miner defended the interests of both his class and nation: he organised strikes against the Nazi occupation in June 1941, he led the ‘battle of production’ to reconstruct the national economy after the ravages of the Second World War and he was in the front line of the social conflicts that shook the country in 1947 and 1948 at the outset of the Cold War. ‘The miner loves his profession in the same way that a sailor loves the sea’, would become a thorezien phrase.⁸ He – and the image was strictly masculine – was hard-working, self-sacrificing, disciplined, compassionate and loyal to friends and family; all qualities that would become part of Thorez's constructed persona.⁹

Fils du Peuple begins with an account of the disaster at Courrières in 1906. The explosion that ripped through 110 kilometres of tunnels on 10 March led to the biggest mining catastrophe in European history: of 1664 miners in the pit at the time, 1099 were killed. Some suffered slow death through burns; others were asphyxiated by carbon dioxide fumes; many were buried alive. In grisly scenes, bodies – some horribly burnt, others missing limbs – were retrieved each day until August; some were not recovered until 1908.¹⁰ The rescue operation was poorly organised and called off too early; thirteen abandoned miners managed to reach the surface unaided after surviving twenty days on putrefied meat, bark and urine. As the funerals started in the villages, evidence grew of the mining company's disregard of safety warnings and the mourning turned to anger. Miners began a strike that would gather strength, and eventually act as a catalyst for a nationwide strike movement covering a number of industries. The government's response was to dispatch 20,000 troops into the northern mining region.

One of the villages devastated by the tragedy was Méricourt, less than five miles from Noyelles-Godault. Fils du Peuple tells how the young Maurice ‘immediately galloped’ to the scene ‘through freezing mist, as fast as [his] little legs would carry [him]’. During the strike, he attends a demonstration and is charged by mounted police. The narrative describes his initiative, community awareness, courage and even an understanding of the rescue operation – all from a child who was not yet six. Yet there is no need to accept the story at face value to recognise the impact of the catastrophe on the young boy. Thorez grew up in a region of widows, orphans and men living with hidden mental scars. Some have speculated on links between the disaster and his psychology. Annie Kriegel wonders whether it prompted ‘a repugnance for physical combat linked more profoundly to a precocious fear of death’.¹¹ Whatever its effect, Thorez's presence at Courrières connected him personally to an event that came to symbolise the suffering, as well as the resistance, of French mining communities.

There are no references to Courrières or its aftermath amongst the reminiscences in Thorez's diaries. But his entries do reveal a deep empathy with communities facing collective tragedy. In January 1958, Thorez closely followed the mining tragedy at the Plichon pit in Monceau, recording the ‘atrocious suffering’ of the injured men and, over a week, charting the rising death rate which eventually reached thirty-five. On 4 December 1959 (the feast day of the patron saint of miners, Saint Barbara), he was the first senior politician to visit Fréjus after nearly one hundred inhabitants lost their lives when the town was devastated by a breach in the Malpasset dam.¹²

The Courrières catastrophe and the strike that erupted in its wake would have direct consequences for Thorez's activity as a young communist. Miners' trade unionism had divided into reformist and anarcho-syndicalist camps in 1902. A socialist deputy with politics that fused vehement anti-clericalism and increasingly zealous nationalism, Émile Basly led his union towards a form of ‘business unionism’ that made a series of compromises with employers. A breakaway led by Benoît Broutchoux depicted him as a ‘sound potato’ made rotten through his involvement in politics. The Jeune Syndicat led by Broutchoux gathered support from around 20 per cent of trade unionists in the northern coalfields. Conflict between the two unions intensified when Basly opposed taking strike action after the Courrières explosion, urging ‘calm and discipline’.¹³ Many of the initial recruits to the Communist Party in the region would be miners who had cut their political teeth in a struggle against ‘Basly reformism’.

Thorez began working at the Dourges mine in July 1912, not long after his twelfth birthday. He was employed at the pithead as a sorter (trieur de pierres), removing dirt, stones and other impurities from the coal. Most sorters were women and children and, while legally work for under 16s was limited to eight-hours-a-day, before the First World War it was not uncommon for children to work shifts of twelve or thirteen hours.¹⁴

Thorez's first biographer, Philippe Robrieux, created a stir by claiming that the 12-year-old Thorez had not worked as a trieur but was employed by the mining company as a messenger boy.¹⁵ Historians have failed to uncover documentary evidence that confirms Thorez's status one way or the other. But Thorez regularly refers to this period in his diaries. During the fortnight before the fête of Saint Barbara, miners worked long shifts in order to earn time off for a weekend of music, dance, food and drink. In later life, Thorez would usually commemorate the feast day with a diary entry, on one occasion (1957) adding a sketch of pit-winding gear. On 4 December 1962, he recalled how ‘fifty years ago my mother gave me my first Saint Barbara bouquet plus two cigars, which I did not smoke, and a bottle of wine,’ and described how he earned 30 francs and 16 sous in the previous fortnight ‘comme trieur’. Perhaps more significantly, Thorez spoke publicly about his first job as early as 1926. During his candidature in the Nord by-election, he described himself as ‘a miner's son and grandson [who] entered the Dourges mines as trieur in July 1912 […] and worked there until August 1914’.¹⁶ Such a statement would have been foolhardy if untrue. The availability of witnesses in the region would have meant strong odds on a falsehood being exploited by political opponents during the campaign.

By all accounts, Thorez was an exceptional school student. A photograph from the early summer of 1912 shows a young Maurice in the centre of seven boys wearing celebratory bonnets and waving national flags to celebrate their graduation. A slogan on a large poster declares: ‘Vive Averlant’, who was the teacher in the Noyelles-Godault school.¹⁷ When Thorez was imprisoned in 1929, the security police drew up a dossier on the communist leader. The report noted that Averlant ‘held him up as an example for his intelligence and diligence’.¹⁸ Thorez often returned the compliment: ‘I can never utter his name without emotion and gratitude,’ he declared in 1946. ‘Monsieur Averlant gave me the taste and the desire to learn, to learn always, through books but also through life.’¹⁹

The responsibility of young communists and young workers to ‘furnish the mind with general knowledge and develop a general culture’ would become a frequent thorezien theme. Studying literature, history and science was a means to combat capitalist society's ‘intellectual decadence’, symbolised by the type of popular literature and films aimed at young people.²⁰ Thorez recollected rambling as a boy across fields to witness the first aircraft flying out of La Brayelle aerodrome, near Douai.²¹ His notebooks reveal he was among 800,000 people to visit the international textile exhibition held in 1911 at Roubaix, ‘the city of a thousand chimneys’.²² A diary entry records how on 15 February 1961 he witnessed the total eclipse of the sun in Cannes: ‘I had seen the previous occasion on leaving the class of Monsieur Averlant at half past eleven in April 1912’, he reminisced, displaying remarkable memory. The young Thorez became an accomplished cornet player and through playing in concerts travelled to venues in the region. In 1913 he attended the spectacular World Exhibition in Ghent, his only recorded excursion outside of French territory before his first trip to Moscow in 1925.

One aspect of his early life that Thorez could not hold up as a model to communist activists was religious practice. A clerical tradition persisted in parts of the northern mining belt, despite the rise of socialist ideology and the separation of the Church and State in 1905.²³ It remained strong throughout the inter-war years: two months after the election of the Popular Front government in 1936, Noyelles-Godault was the venue for an open-air Eucharist attended by 20,000 Catholics.²⁴ Thorez's notepad records some youthful pilgrimages. In 1910, he attended a service in the chapel in the Bois d'Épinoy to commemorate a twelfth-century shepherd's vision of the Virgin Mary. In 1911, he visited Notre Dame de Lorette (near Arras) to mark an eighteenth-century miracle. Four years later, the chapel would be destroyed by artillery fire and the site would, after the war, be transformed into a cemetery for 40,000 French soldiers.²⁵ The police report of 1929 claims that Thorez ‘while young regularly assisted the parish priest during mass. […] On account of his Christian fervour, he was even chosen to play the child Jesus several years in succession at Christmas.’²⁶

Thorez's youthful religious devotion leads to more than a hint of embarrassment in Fils du Peuple. The text stresses the voluntary nature of most of the young Thorez's actions, while his position as a choirboy is a result of having ‘been chosen’ by the local priest. Nevertheless, Thorez's son, Paul, later recalled how his father's ‘Catholic boyhood [was] part of our family history – not something to be ashamed of, but something we could tease him about. He always spoke of his upbringing in the church with great affection, and he took care not to pass on to us the usual stereotyped views of priests as busybodies or enemies who should be shunned or attacked.’²⁷ The older Thorez maintained a close interest in the evolution of Church dogma and steered his party to relate to developments within French social Catholicism.

There is a re...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Series Foreword
• Introduction Thorez in the Biographical Matrix
• 1. Young Man in a Hurry
• 2. The Hesitant Revolutionary
• 3. Class against Class
• 4. Popular Front
• 5. Exile in the Promised Land
• 6. In the Corridors of Power
• 7. The Party of Maurice Thorez
• 8. The Trauma of 1956
• 9. Algeria and de Gaulle
• 10. Final Years and Legacy
• Notes
• Select Bibliography