BACK TO WORK

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 166, 15 June 1936, Page 7

BACK TO WORK

FRENCHMEN CELEBRATE SOVIET INFLUENCE. IN BANNER DISPLAYS.

(United Press Association. —By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) Received June 15, 12.35 p.m. LONDON, June 14. The Daily Mail’s Paris correspondent says that, marking the termination of the majority of the strikes, hundreds of thousands of employees who are resuming to-morrow marched in orderly files from the workshops. Bodies ol men afterwards returned to many factories and spent hours removing revolutionary mural drawings and notices.

The Manchester Guardian’s Paris correspondent 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 Party at the Velodrome Buffalo, a vast open-air stadium in the working-class suburb of Montrogue. Everything was well organised, with flags and banners on a colossal scale. A hundred thousand crowded the grandstands and 100,000 stood in the sunny arena, which was bisected by 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 of the stadium. Everyone wore red emblems. A huge picture of the late Henri Barbousse adorned the speakers’ platform. A band played revolutionary tunes while squads of victorious strikers, bearing banners displaying the hammer and sickle badges, paraded the gangway as the crowds cheered for the Soviet. Suddenly, four great Hags were broken from the flagpoles in the middle of the arena. These were examples of the newly devised national flag of Soviet France, namely a red field quartered with the Tricolour and Communist hammer and sickle between the golden letters R.F. The Guardian’s correspondent says there was a strange vision of a new France in the making. The names of 22 victims of Fascism killed in street fights in the past two years were read out as a drum tapped a requiem after each name, the band finally playing the Russian Funeral March. Speakers delivered addresses, triumpantly recording the result of the strikes; and prophesying a more prosperous future for the workers.

SITUATION IMPROVES. MANY DISPUTES SETTLED. PARIS, June 13. The strike situation has greatly improved, and strikers are everywhere returning to work. With the metal workers’ dispute settled, it is generally hoped that the back of the strike is broken. The employees in the Citroen and Renault works have formally evacuated the factories. The Renault employees, dressed in carnival costumes, held a procession of flower-laden taxi cabs to celebrate their victory. Similar demonstrations took place in many suburbs. Work generally will be resumed on Monday, although builders and painters, Parisian store assistants, insurance clerks and river and canal boatmen are still standing out. Paris dockers came out, joining the boatmen. Twelve hundred employees of the Nieuport areoplane works have begun to stay in. The stoppage movement has spread to Morocco, where native sugar refiners and metal workers have struck. The Government declares that the industrial situation lias improved.