From The Russo-German Alliance August 1939-June 1941, A. Rossi, 1951
It was in France . . . that the Communists made the most intensive and systematic efforts to spread defeatism. The French Communist Party wavered for a few days, torn between orders from Moscow and sheer inertia at having to leave positions which it had defended from 1935 right up to the eve of the German-Soviet pact. Under the influence of Gabriel Peri the Communist Parliamentary Party voted for the military credits at the sitting on 2nd September, 1939, but it soon toed the �line.� The turning point came at the beginning of October when Florimond Bonte and Arthur Ramette sent their letter from the �Workers and Peasants Group� to President Herriot. This was an incident of outstanding important in Hitler�s peace campaign. It was for this reason that the first number of the French underground paper Cahiers du bolchevisme . . . could finally hail the letter to Herriot as lining up �The Party, publicly ;and dramatically, against the war.�From then right up to the end they were to follow the �party line,� as laid down in October in an article by George Dimitrov, the secretary of the Communist International, and by two further documents in particular which developed its main theme : Maurice Thorez� interview with the correspondent of the British Communist paper, the Daily Worker (3rd November, 1939) a; Andre Marty�s Open Letter to M. Léon Blum. In his interview the secretary of the French Communist Party explained that if he had deserted, it was because he wished �to remain at his post in the class war which the people had to fight against the war-mongers, the fascists and the capitalist exploiters.� The Communist journalist was a little disturbed by this attitude. If it became general, who would be left in France or at the front to fight against the war ? Thorez reassured him. If he himself had deserted, it was because �the leadership of the party had to be secured against any eventuality,� but the vast majority of militant Communists would carry on with their jobs where they were, since their work �lay among the soldiers in the army, the workers in the factories, the peasants in the villages, the refugees in the evacuation centres, the wives of the men who had been called up everywhere.�.1
They did, in fact, carry on with their work, both in the country and at the front. In the country the leading Communists began a campaign for �immediate peace� and did their utmost to stir up an anti-war movement among the people, making use of every possible means, legal, in so far as action of this kind was possible, and illegal. Through, for instance, the declaration which Florimond Bonte was about to read out just before he was expelled from the Chamber des Deputes. It was, however, printed by the Party press. . . .
1 Thorez� interview was published in one of the clandestine numbers of Humanite and in the Cahiers du bolshevisme . . . Its tile in this review was �Maurice Thorez speaks . . . Statement on the struggle against the imperialist war.�Boston : Beacon Press, 1951, pages 101 -103.