Maurice Thorez

1900-1964

“It’s not communism that expropriates the peasant’s field, or the merchant’s store, that ruins the small and medium industrialists, helpless to put up with the competition of the trusts. It’s not communism that set alight class struggle. But it’s capitalism that destroys the property of the little people in order to take it over; that buys at a low price the labor of the worker and makes weigh upon him the full weight of oppression and coercion. War, economic crisis, unemployment, the expropriation and ruin of the middle classes are not our doing. They are the result of the private property of the great means of production, which has become — after having been a stimulant — a hindrance to economic life and progress. The property of the great means of production is the only one that should be socialized, if we want to lay down the base for a rational economy.” The Popular Front.

Biography

Works

For the Organization of the United Front of Anti-Fascist Struggle, 1934

From exile 1940-44:

Telegram: Party Work After the French Defeat, 1940
Telegram: Limit relations with Occupation Authorities, 1940
Telegram: Liberation France linked Victory USSR, 1941

Paris Has Liberated Itself, Moscow Radio, 1944
Long Live the Unity of the French Nation, Moscow Radio, 1944
Interview of February 2, 1945, L’Humanité, February 3, 1945
Forward for the Triumph of the Republic!, speech 2 October, 1945
We will win the battle of production, speech 1 March 1946

From Thorez’s Autobiography: Fils du Peuple (1960)