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Scenes
de la vie en rouge
Andree Levesque, Scenes de la vie en rouge: l'epoque de Jeanne Corbin, 1906-1944, Montreal: Les Editions du Remue-Menage, 1999.
For reasons that some future historiographer might like to ponder, women have made an unusually significant contribution to the recent rewriting of the history of Canadian communism. Andree Levesque of McGill University, Montreal, must be considered the doyenne of a group containing Ruth Frager, Carmela Patrias, Joan Sangster, Mercedes Steedman, Merrilee Weisbord and others. She has followed up a monograph on communists and socialists 'et leurs ennemis' in the province of Quebec with this valuable study of the life and times of middle-level Communist Party of Canada (CPC) cadre Jeanne Corbin. She has thoroughly excavated archives in Russia, France and Canada for biographical material on Corbin, but there is simply not enough of it to sustain a full-scale biography on the order of David Frank's recent fine work on Cape Breton communist James B McLachlan. Instead, splicing together mainly biographical chapters with a general chapter on the CPC in the Third Period and a thematic chapter on 'des femmes dans un parti d'hommes', she offers a view of the party from its middle levels.
Jeanne Corbin was an ethnic oddity (and something of a prize) in the CPC. Born in France, raised from an early age in Alberta, and completely bilingual, she was quintessentially 'Canadian' in a party almost entirely comprised of 'foreigners' who spoke neither of Canada's two native tongues. In her early twenties she gave up a career as a schoolteacher to become a full-time party activist, in which position she remained until hospitalised with tuberculosis in 1942. Levesque portrays her as a typical female militant of the first generation of Canadian communists; a woman who (very much in the manner of her mentor, Rebecca Buhay) appreciated the rough-and-ready sexual equality practiced by the CPC (at least towards women like her, who were 'sans souci domestique, sans enfants a elever et sans mari a qui render les comptes'); who generally subordinated gender issues to the class struggle, and who deferred readily to the highest Stalinist obligation – to defend the Soviet Union. She comes alive most vividly in Chapter III, 'Montreal, 1930-32', which draws heavily on party records seized by the Canadian state in August 1931. Corbin spent these Third Period years mainly in Montreal as secretary of the Quebec provincial section of the Canadian Labour Defence League (CLDL), the national section of Willi Muenzenberg's International Red Aid. Her job was hectic: the party's constant emphasis on the need to make a political breakthrough in 'la belle province' was more than matched by the Quebec authorities' determination to keep it out by any means necessary. Party cadres to tended to look on this particular posting rather in the manner of ambitious British politicos sent to the Northern Ireland office.
Writing in the sympathetic vein of much recent American and British historiography (but with full cognisance of the imprint of Stalinism on the CPC), Levesque manages to convey Corbin's ebullience and good humour as she and her comrades (including the very able Glaswegian — and needless to say, unilingual — district secretary Jim Litterick) tried to make bricks with very little straw. A photograph of the CLDL offices in Montreal 'après une descente de la police' deftly captures the particular difficulties of organizing in 'District Two'. Yet, while sympathetic to men and women struggling to impose themselves on intractable situations, the author is sensitive to their submission to the party's evasions and untruths. She shows how the party press could turn a near-fiasco of a demonstration in Montreal into a near-triumph, even as the organizers of the demonstration were subjecting themselves to fierce 'self-criticism' over 'their' failures when they might more properly have been scoring the party line. Indicting the Comintern's tactical invasiveness in prescribing what industrial and 'red union' cadres could and couldn't do, she cites Brigitte Studer in concluding that 'Cette perte d'autonomie s'observe dans tout le movement communiste' at the time. However, she perhaps exaggerates the Comintern's ability to bend local cadres to its will. She actually notes a textile industry strike at which some of Jeanne Corbin's Montreal comrades (notably future Communist MP and 'Atom Spy' Fred Rose) adapted and even ignored nonsensical central directives based on the sectarian international line.
Levesque continues her discussion of such issues into a useful account of Corbin's work among the hardrock miners and lumberworkers of Northern Ontario between 1932-39. (There is clearly a rewarding local study of the CPC in Timmins, the 'reddest' of the Ontario mining towns, waiting to be written, by the way.) However, once the book enters the Popular Front years, it is generally less satisfactory. Corbin melts more and more into the background, and one suspects she was not a natural Pop Fronter. Levesque notes that unlike some who joined the CPC at this time (membership rose from 5,500 in 1934 to 15,000 in 1937), Corbin displayed little anxiety about the Moscow Trials and none about the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Instead, she took these blows in her stride, secure in the knowledge that the Soviet comrades knew best. Between 1939 and 1942, Corbin disappears entirely, though that is not surprising given that the party, having rather uncomfortably swallowed the USSR's 'imperialist war' line, had gone underground voluntarily in November 1939 and been declared illegal in June 1940. She surfaces again in 1942, when she entered hospital in a vain attempt to recover from tuberculosis; she died in 1944 — the year Streptomycin was discovered. Levesque's chapter on this period brings out some of Corbin's interior life through a collection of personal letters to a woman comrade, but it sits rather oddly with the rest of the book, and I found myself thinking that here the 'life' should have been complemented more by the 'times', which were very interesting ones for the CPC, resurrected as the Labour-Progressive Party.
That criticism apart, I have learned a good deal from Scenes de la vie en rouge (not least that my knowledge of French has grown shakier over the years), a book which makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning historiography of Canadian communism.
