Amid economic hardship and violent attacks by the far right, the French Popular Front collapsed in 1938, and the Spanish Republic was defeated in 1939. Nazi anti-Jewish policies were rampant in the Third Reich. The military might of Hitler’s Germany and its thirst for territorial conquest were a cause for concern. The Munich Agreement, intended to preserve peace, led to the dismantling of Czechoslovakia and opened the doors of Europe to Hitler.
Many sensed that war was imminent, but the surprise would be devastating: On August 23, 1939, a military and diplomatic non-aggression pact was signed in Moscow between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s USSR ( the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). From then on, Hitler had a free hand in the East. The world was stunned, as the USSR had been seen as the most resolute bulwark against Nazism.
The French Communist Party ( PCF) follows the political line of the USSR: the pact is supposed to prevent a full-scale war.
Anti-communism and anti-Soviet sentiment were running rampant, particularly in France. A very violent internal crisis was rocking the PCF and its members. The activists of the M.O.I., who were staunchly anti-fascist, were, for the most part, in a state of shock.
Following the pact, Communist publications, including the daily newspaper *L’Humanité*, were banned on August 26 by the French government led by Édouard Daladier.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland. The French were mobilized. On September 3, 1939, following this invasion, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Naïe Presse affirmed the determination of progressive Jewish immigrants to stand alongside the French people.
Nine months later, following the armistice signed between France and Germany, a demarcation line would divide France into two large zones.
In the face of the conflict, the French Communist Party expressed its support for national defense, and Communist members of parliament voted in favor of military appropriations. At the same time, on September 4, 1939, *Naïe Presse* published an editorial by Adam Rayski that clearly called for a relentless struggle against fascism and the Nazis.
On September 17, following the German army, the Soviet army in turn entered Poland. The Party quickly made a strategic shift: it endorsed the Soviet invasion and adopted the new position of the USSR andthe Communist International. The conflict was then presented as a war between capitalist countries (France and Great Britain, as well as their adversary, Germany, were pitted against one another). It was also described as an imperialist war.
This shift in the direction of the Soviet Union and the PCF caused unease among many communists, particularly among members of the M.O.I.
