Half-Way Spot
Emmanuel's political position lies somewhere between U.S. policy and the Communist line. It is frankly far from both. "I am not exactly a friend of U.S. foreign policy," he writes, "though I see we have to deal with it as we can, for the time being, until Western Europe has recovered a power of its own."
But his disillusion with all manifestations of Communism, heightened by his trip to the Balkans in 1947, has been repeatedly expressed in French newspapers. In October 1949, he wrote four articles two of them vehemently attacking what he called the Communist suppression of the individual. The third article attacked the U.S. foreign policy as hypocritical. The fourth compared the U.S. and Russia and found no chance for faith or for the individual in the policies of either country.
Soon after these articles appeared in Le Monde, both sides reacted. The U.S. Embassy protested, and Emmanuel was shifted from his job with the American service of the French Broadcasting system. From the Communists came a long caustic, open letter of reproach and attack, by Claude Roy in Les Lettres Francaises.
End of an Alliance
Emmanuel appears to have drifted gradually from his wartime alliance with the Communists, rather than to have made a sudden break. He did not sign, for instance, petitions defending Joliot-Curie, attacking France's Indo China policies, or protesting the Atlantic Pact-petitions considered in France to be Communist inspired.
Yet as late as 1949 he was on friendly personal terms with French Communists, and he is certainly not entirely on the American side of the cold war.
Albert Chamber, French Consul-General in Boston, and Mrs. Hsley both think that Emmanuel's experience with the U.S. Embassy last summer may stifle what they believe was a genuine affection for this country. Mrs. Hsey says: "Emmanuel came last year with friendship and love of America in his heart. We have altenated that man. America has lost a friend."
In His Own Words--
"I am convinced that you (the U.S.) are a powerful though adolescent nation, whose vitality may lead you to the best as well as to the worst... Historically, you were pushed too soon on the foreground of the world scene; it is a tragic responsibility, which you deserve in some ways, not in all... I am prepared to acknowledge that leadership, with due restrictions coming from my deep contact with another superiority: the European one...
"During the resistance movement I worked closely with communists... I believed there was something to be done with them after the war. We tried: we went as far as we could; we failed. Seen from Washington, it seems perhaps a mistake to have tried; seen from here it is a tragedy to have falled, and to measure what communism is becoming even among old friends..." Pierre Emmanuel, letter to the CRIMSON, December 18, 1949