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From Workers’ International News, Vol.3 No.5, May 1940, p.14.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In a previous issue we reported the arrest of a group of French Trotskyists. Now we learn that two comrades previously arrested, the youth leaders Bourdois and Chuvin of Marseilles, have been sentenced to two years each. Comrade Lucien Weitz, the National Secretary of the Workers and Peasants Socialist Youth League (JSOP) – who had been arrested before the outbreak of the war itself – has had an additional sentence of four years hung on him.
Recently the leaders of even the “moderate” Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (PSOP) – which had “purged” itself shortly before of the revolutionary Minority (including Lucien Weitz, Daniel Guerin and the Trotskyists) – have been seized by the Government.
The arrest of the PSOP leaders is, in a sense, ironical. For the latter, a combination of freemasons and pacifists, refused to prepare for illegal work and insisted on carrying on as if the war had not broken out and as if no dictatorial regime had been installed. In fact, they had voted to expel the revolutionary Minority because the Minority, demanding that the party carry out in action its resolution for revolutionary struggle against war (revolutionary defeatism), adopted at the last convention of the PSOP, had pointed cut that such action was possible only by illegal means and had proceeded in the localities where it was in control to act accordingly. Even the expulsion of the revolutionary defeatists and all the “legalism” of the freemason leaders of the PSOP could not save them from Daladier’s axe.
The revolutionary PSOP Minority, under the leadership of Daniel Guerin – author of the brilliant work Fascism and Big Business – and Lucien Weitz, as well as the Trotskyist comrades who entered that party a year ago, have now joined in a body with the Committees of the Fourth International for joint work and for the building of a united party, on the programme of the Fourth International.
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