PARLOUR BOLSHEVIKS

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 16

PARLOUR BOLSHEVIKS

FIRE-EATING GRANDE DAME.

SOME FRENCH PUZZLES. PARIS, August 21. France has its good •share of parlour Bolsheviks—always has had them—but they have heretofore confined their activity to eating dinner with slicked-up leaders of the proletariat and agreeing present society must be destroyed while drinking tho most expensive vintages of champagne. That seemed too tame for the most aristocratic of Parisian Bolsheviks, who bears two of the oldest and proudest names in France. She is Mme. Elisabeth do Gramont, and she is also known as the ex-Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, from her divorced husband, whose name tho courts no longer will allow her officially to use. The author of several volumes of memoirs, brilliantly and piquantly written, Mme. do Gramont is a sort of international character. ' She has travelled over a good part of the globe, especially where something new was to be seen in society-building. The United States has been one object of her attention.

This curious person, aged about 60, and very much the grand lady, has given tho signal for parlour Bolsheviks to abandon tho parlour and, go down into the street. She did it herself in the monster demonstration which the combined Red parties staged in the east end of Paris on Bastille day. Behind the red ilag, in the company of the Socialist leaders, marched the grand lady exduchess. Thousands of other women were in that parade, too, but they were not grand. They were bedraggled and sweaty, in cheap calico frocks bought in tho bazaars of the ghetto. Many of them were carrying bawling children over their shoulders.

Besides Mme. de Gramont, only one namo of escutclieoned fire-eaters has become known. It is the Princess Antoine Bibesco, who was Lady Elizabeth Asquith. Her home on an island behind the cathedral of Our Lady of Paris, a stately house left from the French revolution, is a rendezvous of people with "advanced" ideas. Her special admiration is for the leader of the French Socialist party, Leon Blum. This champion of the proletariat lives in a mansion similar to hers and only a few doors away, amid the costly art objects which alone can please his aesthetic tastes.

This perverse sympathy for doctrines which, if ever applied, would ruin these people's lives, is a puzzling phenomenon to French political observers. They take it as a symptom of decadence in Paris society, and compare it with tho way in which "liberal" aristocrats in the eighteenth century were all against the established royal government and with the "plylosophers" who meant to smash it. It is also pointed out that the aristocrats of that time played with lire till they got burned. All lost privileges and wealth, and many a pretty powdered head which had listened eagerly to witty maxims demolishing all social control a few years later rolled into the sawdust basket on the scaffold of the guillotine.

More cautious political. observers find two simple explanations to the vogue of parlour Bolshevism. The first is that these people think revolutionary talk is nothing but talk and always will remain so. They lack imagination. They cannot see that the revolution might really come, nor envisage the position they then would be in. So long as it is talk they think it "amusing." It is far more fun to listen to a firebrand than to a man of sound sense. Ladies of the French aristocracy are not overburdened with critical intelligence. A few easy devastating wisecracks seem to them profound political thought.

Other parlour Bolsheviks are more practical in their calculations. They believe in backing all the horses in the race. You never can be sure, and you must not overlook the long shots. Revolution, they reason, probably never will come—certainly never will if they can do anything to stop it—but if it should they would have a place at court. At any rate, they would save something out of the wreck.