In
Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take
Three –A Daughter of The Communards?
Claudette Longuet idolized her grandfather, her maternal
grandfather, Louis Paret, called the Lyonese Jaures by his comrades in the
Socialist Party and by others as well not attuned to his political perspectives
but respectful of the power of his words nevertheless, an honorific
well-deserved for his emulation of the internationally famous French socialist
orator, Jean Jaures, who had been villainously assassinated just before the
war. Claudette had reason to idolize Papa Paret for his was a gentle man toward
his several grandchildren and so had a built-in fan club of sorts before he
even left the comfortable confines of his townhouse on the edges of downtown
Lyon.
More importantly Claudette had idolized him for his political
past, his proud working class and socialist political past. As a mere boy he had
fought on the barricades during the Paris Commune, a touchstone for all those
who survived the bloody massacre reprisals of the Thiers government carried out
by the sadistic General Gallifit. He just barely missed being transported.
Fortunately no “snitch” could place him on the barricades, although the Thiers
government was not always so choosey about such things when they had their
killing habits on. He had defended the poor Jewish soldier Dreyfus when Emile Zola
screamed for his release. He had opposed Alexander Millerand, an avowed
socialist, in joining the murderous bourgeois government when he took that
step. He tirelessly campaigned against war, signed all the national and
international petitions to prevent that occurrence, and attended all the
conferences too. Although he himself was no Marxist, his socialism ran to more
mystical and philosophical trends, he welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1905
with open arms. So, yes, Claudette, as she grew to young womanhood and began
her own search for social and political meaning, understandable took her cues
from her Papa. Moreover before the war she spent many hours in his company at
the local socialist club doing the “this and that” to spread the socialist faith
around and about Lyons.
Then the war came, that dreaded awful August 1914 when the
guns of war howled into the night and her grandfather changed, almost
chameleon-like. From a fervent anti-warrior he turned overnight into a paragon
of defense of French culture, French
bourgeois culture, as he would have previously said against, against, the Hun,
the Boche, the, the, whatever foul word he could use to denigrate the Germans,
all of them. He stood in the central square in Lyon and preached, preached the
duty of every eligible young Frenchman to defend the republic to the death, no
questions asked. And since he had that Jaures-like quality those young boys
listened and sadly went off to war, many to never return. For a while he also had
Claudette with him, for the first couple of years when he, they uttered not one
anti-war word, not one. But after about two years, after some awful battles
fought on French soil, some awful battles that were just stacking up the
corpses without let-up, she started to listen to that younger Papa voice, the
voice that thrilled her young girl-hood, and silently began to oppose the war,
to oppose her grandfather who had not changed his opinion one iota throughout the
carnage.
Claudette kept his silence until the February Revolution in
Russia in 1917 when it seemed like peace might be at hand. He grandfather
cursed the Russians whenever there was talk that they might withdraw from the
war but she saw that their withdrawal might stop the war on all fronts. Mainly
she was tired of seeing the weekly casualty lists and all the women, young and
old, in black, always black. Then in November or maybe December 1917 she heard,
heard from her new beau (a beau a little younger than her, almost just a boy,
since the men her age were either at the fronts or had laid their heads down in
some sodden ground) who had been agitating for an end to the war (and getting
hell for it from the local government, and her grandfather) that the Russians
under the Bolsheviks had withdrawn from the war. Things were sketchy, very
sketchy with the wartime censorship on but that is what she heard from him. She
talked to, or tried to talk to her grandfather about it, but he would not hear
of the damn Bolshevik rabble.
Papa Paret moreover said when peace came, and it would come,
with or without the damn Russians, since the entry of the American would take
the final stuffing out of the Germans, then everybody could go back to arguing
against war and French and German workers could unite again under the banner of
the Socialist International and maybe really end war for good. And the war did
end, and the various socialists who had just supported the massive
blood-letting in Europe and elsewhere started talking of brotherhood once again
and of putting that old peacetime International back together. Claudette though,
now more under the spell of that feisty boyfriend, was not sure that
grandfather had it right. And in the summer of 1919 when she heard (via that
same boyfriend who had already joined the French Communist Party, or really the
embryo of that party) that the Bolsheviks had convened a conference to form a
new International, a Third International, to really fight against war and fight
for socialism she was more conflicted. See she really did idolize Papa and so
she would wait and see…
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