A Communist Party in Action

An Account of the Organization and Operations in France

Recent events in the United States have shown the workings of little-known elements of the Communist Party, like the secret section whose members are unknown to the rank and file. All this and much more is explained in Rossi’s remarkable disclosure of the entire structure of the Communist Party of one country—in this case France—where we are able to see the Party as it acted under the varying pressures of peace, war, and armistice; how it operates as a legal part of the political scene; how readily it can go underground; how the members are schooled in its principles (an hour-a-day reading of the primary Party books is required); how the overall directives are issued and carried out; how a mass following was to be recruited from the disaffected veterans of the lost war, distraught housewives and families of prisoners, from labor unions and peasants in the Catholic hinterland.

This book, based on published and unpublished sources, provides a vast fund of information about the whole range of Communist activities, from the secret instructions that foresaw, in the early days of the German occupation, that the Nazi tolerance of the Party in France would be short-lived to advice on how to meet a comrade with the least chance of being observed. It shows why Party members returning from prison must always be regarded with suspicion, and how and through what means the eventual seizure of the government was to take place. These observations are based on the operations of the French Communist Party, but they apply with only minor changes to the Communist parties of all the Western countries, with their dexterous capacity for maneuver and their unrelenting pursuit, ruthless and with no holds barred, of the ultimate goal of the seizure of power.