As the students stood talking they were joined by scores of passers-by, among them Louis Aragon, that venerable bard and prophet of the Communist Party, the man who had sung paeans of praise to OGPU and Stalinism, and who had come to take his place among those who “remind me so movingly of my own youth.” A group of students recognized him and greeted him with cries of “Long live OGPU! Long live Stalin, the father of all the people!”
The Aragon episode, in itself banal and without political importance, nevertheless shows how politically aware the young demonstrators had become. They would have no truck with members of a party whose official organ, L’Humanité, had launched what could only be called a smear campaign against French youth. The revolutionary movement did not deny the importance, and even the necessity, of a dialogue with the rank and file of the Communist Party, but it did try to unmask the opportunist strategy and counterrevolutionary attitude of its leaders, including Louis Aragon, the poet laureate of the personality cult. He could not make himself heard simply because those participating in the “teach-out” knew that he had nothing in common with them. His bold assertion that he was in the Party “precisely because he was on the side of youth” merely turned him into a laughing stock. By refusing to act honestly for once in his life, and to denounce the machinations of his Party, he threw away his chance to join the student movement, and incidentally saved his leaders a great deal of embarrassment.
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from Gabriel Cohn-Bendit & Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative (London: Penguin, 1968/1969), pp 61-62.
RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: The OGPU were the secret police under Stalin.
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