ae By JOSEPH STAROBIN Most any Sunday morning ad be strolling through market urbs of Paris toward the Weve ‘places where the farmers Vevetanie brought in their fresh of bles and where hundreds ae Sewives, baskets in hand, Shak xamining the food-stalls, Mites their, heads at high ‘ Vendors wine with the noisy : conta there — at the end of the orey ane Street, with its one- oe Uildings in the grey and a and yelllow colors — will Young fellow in a beret, his shawl Jacket loose but a red Bet the collar, the stub of a He wae at the corner of his lips. be shouting I’Humanite ++. Voici, votre ’Huma avin _He is ‘likely to be di sae brisk sale of the Sunday organ Y l'Humanite, the official France, the Communist Party of ee how it is at the markets, Same ed any weekday it’s the ps .,the subway and bus the athe at the approaches to The ya es, large and small. Tale dors are young and old, bers of female. They are mem- ups. one of the proudest single / Case ae the French working for 4° CDH, or “Committees ite 5 Circulation of ’Human- ~ than 40 Which there are no less ne 2200 devoted participants. ne © may be Communist party is ‘Mber, *S the 8, Many are not. But it Sale a Who make possible the ‘the Some half million copies Sunday paper. New yeld Callender of The Sih . < Times admitted on the _/Versary of I‘Humanite i be estern Europe. It was fig aul Socialist leaders who de- has hee, Warmakers in 1914, and i Majorite directed ever since the fomeg” of the Socialist Party ee Ok eysnaranite is more than a Sx op ae it is an institution. Its gute et Pages are pasted up hi GS. pains billboards of the “Ths 4, 20d small villages. It liheg nual track meets and pub- Patty en annual Almanac. It at- fing, Million picnickers on the of wy,,.0f September in the Mery. goa nCenNES, where the dancers and top-flight turn food and. wine at ; moth, and as the evening Pandan ‘ers and fathers and ir tts and the kids turn Man candies kvwards at the Ro- Work, “Sand the Chinese ‘fire- a annual brings out tens bf uett People at hundreds Panty» all or “parties for the Py The Cer Paris and its He soeiny These are highlights of 4 Most « Season. — if, Ae essive is the diversity Om for ite’s interests. It finds Tenby den ports of National As- Naga ” gq Cates and the details of tikes | mands, stoppagea and — Aeks, ate Shops and on the a wMehogyy Talized reports on ‘quete of wads of ates avels to China or an an (an inquiry) into the ‘Soy cultural workers of ‘Will find their place \e Y Jean Jaures, one of - Botner, Unds roll and there | 4 se e Hume, ancl campaign - © MORE THAN JUST A NEWSPAPER Humanite-an_ institutio % ae S A PARTIR DE DEMAIN chaque. vendredi L 1.8 PHumaniteé caus présente LES PROGRAMMES DE ‘| 2 pages de programmes radio-télévision : Hu ORGANE CENTRAL Dy/PARTI COMMUNISTE FRANGAIS INO HEURES DU MATIV: Vire Teun een VAIL JEAN JAURES LANT-COUTURIER : wee emscram MARCEL CACHIN ox?paca| ©‘ eer de Tannte ene ae —_ = ‘Tirage précédent < 165.006 anite 10 FEVRIER 1955 Ta TUR, 33-00 (18 ADRESSE , 37. BUE DU LOUVRE PARIS (=) an APPEL DU SOVIET SUPREME Pinay en difficulté s’accroche Décision ce matin sur son maintien ou son retrait aux peuples et aux parlements i z at a! H Fore ad 1 i contre le réarmement de “LES LECONS | \siemaéne reyancharde DE L'HISTOIRE™ ix ey monde, jig fermement ¢ BOULGANINE: ¢ L’année 1955 verra une nouvelle augmentation du bien-étre du peuple soviétique » - Le maréchal JOUKOV eee reser pervert bai ae tmagerty tespecs reirroque ministre de la Défense se lninne dey Affaires Geran- Mais i Goat qrelle ef: ion Sowitti vé- firme son pendance. ‘ i rigahentreiene oy = es rere gest cz| MALENKOV, vice-président du Conseil Soret en coe tanh et Towptcherax pas des poorpedl preadre te « murct am 3 eRe: Seaayes fe ate Place: COURTADES | ye Sosie Reprincd ce te aifnieiie, bier, pour Pinay : ke MRF. vefuse de participer & ux ferait avtamt; les le malre do Saint-Chamond; FUDSR en 3 mais vont trée divieée; be parti socialiste o @¢f fal és gouvernement préaidé | yu'a we discat Biot MULGT. of COT! won opposition, = ‘ Le gos et Pélectricité sont dey le we ‘Portion of front page of L’Humanite of Feb. 10, 1955 + alongside the most sensational murder-story of the moment. The editorial, often signed by a top political leader, will be on the front page every day, but there is room too for the photo of some prominent personality — maybe a Cuban poet. or a cham- pion Italian bicycle rider — who is passing through Paris and has dropped in for a cocktail on’ VHumanite’s seventh floor bar. Reports on the opening of a new play, the showing of new paintings, will have their place alongside the terrace of headlines which spell out the progress of the campaign to halt west Ger- man rearmament. And there will be room for the latest manifesto _ of the Communist party or the General Confederation of Labor, which are sometimes brief, and sometimes may take a solid page but always pack a wallop that is felt as far away as the Depart- ment of State in Washington. There is usually a running ser- jalization of a novel from the treasure-house of French culture, perhaps Victor Hugo . or Alex- andre Dumas; maybe it is a So- viet novel, or, some years ago, Underground Stream by Albert Maltz and The Great Midlands, by Alexander Saxton. * L‘Humanite has a way of tel- ling news ina series of headlines which also launch crusades. It has a breathless. quality (some- times too much so) and its front page may have as many as. 20 separate items, cartoons, photos and two-line squibs as well as the editorial. And the editorial is al- ways.a polemic, an argument with some idea, a dissection of some issue, a call to action, an expres- sion of confidence. The paper 1s kaleidoscopic in its treatment rather than intensive. It is a mir- ror of Paris, of France, of the world. Putting out such a paper each day becomes quite a challenge to its editors and staff. Apart from. Cachin, the daily political direction falls on Etienne Fajon, member of the Communist politi- cal bureau and of the National Assembly. The editor-in-chief is the young miner’s son and Com- X\ , munist Central Committee mem- ber, Andre Stil, who manages to turn out a novel or so every year besides. The staff works in a seven-story building taken over from the . Nazis at gun-point in the last days of the Resistance; it has a modern press and a fleet of trucks and motorcycles, and quite a sys- tem of the latest intercom gadgets between offices. In addition to its 40 or more staff members I’‘Humanite depends on 2,500 cor- respondents. who are actually workers in the shops, the docks, tthe fields. This is a new develop- ment, having grown from only 250 some four years back. Each day an average of two photos. and some 30 news items and articles from this correspond- ence-corps appears in the paper. * Yet the French Communists are far from satisfied either with ‘Humanite’s circulation or -its contents. Last November an en- tire central committee session was devoted toa going over of the paper. Decisions for major changes were taken. While the Sunday edition’s circulation ‘is at ~ half a million, the daily paper's sale has been falling in recent years. Before the war, the French Communists had only two daily papers, and now they have 15, with a combined daily circulation of 500,000, so that I’Humanite no longer needs to serve a nation- wide audience. It is also true that in Paris there is an inde- pendent daily, edited by the Pro- gressive deputy, Emmanuel D’As- tier, who cooperates with the Left and whose paper reaches some 150,000 each day. But all that doeg not quite explain I’Hu- manite’s decline to an average of 125,000 a day. In Fajon’s report to the central committee two problems were stressed: the techniques and me- chanics of higher circulation, and a drastic improvement in I’Hu- ma’s quality. To get higher sales, each party branch must take re- sponsibility for the paper. There must.be an assignment of sales- people, drawing upon pensioners and those temporaty unemploy- edjy workers will have to come to the job an hour earlier each day; it all means “a truly political ap- proach” to the job, as the Com- munists say. But the chief problem, and this is the true burden of Fajon’s re- port; is a change in the paper’s contents. | 2 age Fajon discussed and rejected the theory whereby a worker's paper ought to be edited like a commercial paper, with the idea of selling as many commodities as possible by whatever means. He also dismissed the concept that 'Humanite was being written only for the most active Commun- ists and hence could afford to be dry-as-dust and scholastic. “It is not by their dryness that Communists ought to distinguish themselves from others,” Fajon said. ' In his view, the real trouble is that I’‘Humanite is “not popular enough, not lively enough, not of sufficient human inter The tone of the paper is “too.stern and sometimes boring.”.. And these weaknesses arose from something deeper: Too many writ- ers were trying to embody all the ideas of the party in every single news article. They were writing by “sacred formulae, with a ster- eotyped vocabulary” which makes for monotony. ‘There is a sort of paralyzing fear of not using the ‘same terms as are employed by the official party documents,” Fajon said. ‘ ” - Once a writer has assimilated the over-all line of political thought, the problem was to de- scribe “concrete, living reality,” to draw upon the “life of the factory, the home, the street and the world,” and to leave it to ‘ éach writer to “proceed from the heart, with verve, and with a style. of his own, and a language under- standable by the masses, and al- ways’ enriched by a reading of the masters of French journdl- ism.” ; ze : Fajon noted that the faults he’ described were not peculiar to” 'Humanite; at a-conference of Soviet journalists. in December 1953, the Communist leader Nik- ita Khrushchev had made similar points about Soviet newspapers. ‘ It was necessary, in short, to make a break in the style of writ- ing, to overcome all the “frozen”. tendencies, to achieve . greater- flexibility both in the: presenta- - tion and in the paper’s produc tions. Bex Z Fajon spelled out. this. criticism. for the paper’s various depart- ments. He criticized the domes- tic political page as inadequate. He urged a return to special features for women and the young. He called for a better sports page, with more attention to the activity of organized work- ers themselves. He dressed down the cultural page for “scholastic language and boring disserta- tions” often overlaid with a “mass of publicity.” : _ One of his notable requests of the party was that its outstand- ing figures in the fields of the arts, the sciences, literature and Political life must be assigned to contribute to ’Humanite. Since the intellectual debate with op- ponents is always raging in France, the best people would have to throw themselves into the fray. : It is on this basis that ’Human- ite’s readers and editors alike are confident of a stronger paper, a rising circulation and an_ even greater prestige in the big bat: tles which lie just ahead in France. ; : _ PACIFIC TRIBUNE —- AUGUST 19, 1955 — PAGE 9