VICTORY FESTIVAL IN FRANCE

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21810, 16 June 1936, Page 11

VICTORY FESTIVAL IN FRANCE

* COMMUNISTS ORGANISE DEMONSTRATION ! TRICOLOURS AND RED FLAGS LONDON, June 14. i The Paris correspondent of the , “Daily Mail” says that, marking the ! termination of the majority of the I strikes, hundreds of thousands of j employees, who are resuming toj morrow, marched in orderly files from the workshops. Bodies of imen afterwards returned to many factories and spent hours in removing revolutionary mural drawings and notices. The Paris correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian” says that while racegoers, representing half of Paris, went to Chantilly to see the French Derby, the other half spent the afternoon at a “Victory Festival” organised by the Communist partv at Buffalo in a vast open-aii stadium in the working class suburb of Montrouge. Everything was well organised, with flags and banners Jon a colossal scale. I One hundred thousand crowded {the grandstands and 100,000 stood in I the sunny arena, which was bisected bv a raised gangway leading to the speakers’ forum. Tricolours alternated with red flags, and banners, inscribed “A Free, Strong, and Happy France,” floated at each end iof the stadium. Everyone wore red {emblems. A huge picture of the (late Henri Barbousse adorned the (speakers’ platform, and a band 1 played, revolutionary tunes, while squads of victorious strikers, bearing banners displaying hammer-and-sickle badges, paraded the gangway a- the crowds cheered for the Soviet. Suddenly four great flags were b oken from fla-gpoles in the middle of the arena. These were examples i of the newly devised national flag of i Soviet France, namely, a red field (quartered with the tricolour and the [Communist hammer and sickle between the golden letters “ILF.” on the fly. . . Here was the strange vision of a new France in the making. When ! the names of 22 victims of Fascism who had been killed in street fights during the last two years were read out, a drum tapped out a requiem after each name, and a band finally played the Russian Funeral March. The speakers delivered addresses triumphantly recording the result of the strikes, and prophesying a m- a prosperous future for the workers.-