FRANCE: Hate, Hate, Hate!

His wife did not want him to write the letter; she was sure it would only get them all into trouble. But Jean Duval, factory worker, had made up his mind. “Gentlemen,” he wrote to editors of the conservative Paris newspaper Le Monde, “you often criticize the U.S.S.R. . . . Well! in France one sees ‘terror’ and ‘famine,’ yes, famine.”

Duval went on to explain that he was the father of six children, made 3,500 francs ($10) a week—scarcely enough to buy food for his family for three days. “If there is a straw mattress in the U.S.S.R., it is a plank in France,” he continued. “I tell my children that the employers and the government are nothing but bandits . . . Hate, hate, hate, that is what I teach my children . . . Farewell, gentlemen, eat well, a day will come soon, for we have nothing to lose . . .”

Two Icy Cells. The gentlemen in Le Monde’s offices printed the letter in full and sent a reporter to investigate the letter writer’s story. Jean Duval,* the reporter found, was an enrolled Communist. He had been a plumber, but World War I injuries had made him unfit for his trade, and he had gone to work as an unskilled laborer. During the Nazi invasion in World War II he fled Paris, lost all his belongings. Because of bureaucratic technicalities he received none of the allotments for war victims. Le Monde’s reporter described Duval’s home: “One icy cell, then another. One large iron bed, a blanket thin like blotting paper. No sheets, no table, no chairs . . . The walls —when you touch them, your hands come away wet.”

Jean Duval’s extreme plight is not typical in France today, but there still are thousands of French workers who, despite the country’s ECA-financed recovery, are only slightly better off than Duval.* It is among their bitter ranks that the Communists win their votes. France’s Communist Humanité promptly turned Duval’s story into ready political capital. When readers of Le Monde started sending money and gifts to Duval, Humanité snorted: “The workers want no alms . . .” Later it added: “Plumber, take the gifts in money and kind that the grand bourgeois of Le Monde will throw you, then spit in the faces of those people.”

Toward the Salt Mines. Le Monde’s editors got Duval a better job and a decent home. That, it seemed, was all that was needed to win Duval’s soul away from the gospel of hate. When a party delegation called on Comrade Duval and asked him to sign a statement denouncing the “bourgeois” who had helped him, he flatly refused. His wife told the Reds: “We have been living here for years and you have never paid attention to us or done anything for us. And you come only now when somebody else is trying to help us.”

Among the letters which continued pouring into Le Monde’s office was one from a Rumanian refugee in Paris which pointed a sharp political moral to Duval’s story. Wrote he: “If our poor plumber had had the ‘happiness’ to be born in the U.S.S.R. [and had written such a letter as he wrote to Le Monde], he would not even have had time to say his goodbyes to his numerous family before undertaking the hard, long trip toward the salt mines.”

*A fictitious name. Le Monde withheld the writer’s real one. *France’s legal minimum wage is 15,000 francs a month ($43), which is what Duval makes. A schoolteacher has a starting salary of 16,000 francs, an army captain makes 28,000, a judge gets as little as 30,000.