ABSTRACT
Two leading Soviet ideologists, Comrades Ponomaryov and Sagladin, were present in St-Ouen at the Twenty-Third Congress of the French Communist Party, and this appeared symptomatic for the newly established harmony between Marchais and Moscow. The Communists were no longer in the forefront. The stronger the general Left became, the weaker its particular Communist sector. Under the leadership of Maurice Thorez the French party was markedly more Stalinist than the Italian; and when it made its break—the French rather military term for it is Detachemenf—the Italian post-Stalinist period was quite different from the uncompromising Gallo-Communist nationalism of the French comrades. Against the onset of a new ''frost'' there had been the warnings of several hundred intellectuals, in old Party magazines, in newly-established reviews, even in the bourgeois media; but there was little left of this ''contestation'' when the well-oiled machinery of the Party got into gear.
