OUT FROM FRANCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 81, 3 October 1944, Page 6

OUT FROM FRANCE

OPPONENT OF VICHY

. M. Louis Marin, the old French politician who only a short time ago was intriguing in Vichy against Marshal Petain and the Germans, was engaged in the same patriotic task recently in a London hotel bedroom, hungrily gathering news of the Allied world at war after almost four years in Ger-man-isolated France.

Old acquaintances who knew M. Marin as a Deputy since 1905' and a Minister in three Cabinets would scarcely have recognised him. His drooping moustache ■ was gone. His once snowy hair was dyed the yellow of his youth. And his trademark, a flowing polka-dot cravat, was replaced with a plain necktie, states a London message in the "New York Times." M. Marin was registered at the hotel under a pseudonym. "I feel strange," he said, fingering the spot where his tie used to spill over his vest. Thus in disguise, the 73-year-old Deputy left France a night before he was due to be arrested, and spent twenty-five days getting to London, where'de Gaullists welcomed him as the most distinguished politician to leave France since the collapse, a living vestige of the last Republican Parliament and one of the courageous handful who voted at Bordeaux in 1940 to continue the war against the Germans. " • -:...

M. Marin brought a.broad view of the political situation in France. "They are waiting for the invasion. The scene is set," he said, explaining that a popular uprising against Germany was "very possible." But it would depend, he added, .on how, when, and where the Allies' landings were made.

There are only two classes of people in France, he said, "collaborationists and anti-collaborationists," and there are very few of the former. All the rest, he declared, are de Gaullists.

Asked why few of the political figures had come to London, he explained that they had returned to their constituencies to help people with local problems. He predicted that they would be useful as centres of authority when the invasion came.

M. Marins expected to join the Provisional Consultative Assembly at Algiers, and probably the Committee of National Liberation as an outstanding representative, of the right.