Posted on 06/09/2007 6:44:44 PM PDT by blam
Cash-strapped Communists hawk treasures
By Kim Willsher in Paris, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:56am BST 10/06/2007
It was once France's biggest political party, feared by the bourgeoisie and the CIA alike as a red menace with the power to spark another revolution.
The party is considering selling Mona Lisa with Moustache
Nicolas Sarkozy's sweeping victory in last month's presidential election, however, and the prospect of another landslide for his party in the parliamentary elections - with the first round today - have spelled disaster for the French Communist Party.
So bad were the presidential election results that the "people's" party is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy.
Famously supported by poets and intellectuals including Pablo Picasso, the surrealists André Breton and René Magritte and poet Louis Aragon, the Communists were historically never short of a few francs. But they were always secretive about their funding, partly because some of it came from the KGB.
Now the party has been forced to admit things are "seriously tight", after claims that it plans to sell the family silver, including its emblematic Paris headquarters - a listed building designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer - and valuable art including Mona Lisa with Moustache by Marcel Duchamp.
In the "catastrophic" election campaign, party leader Marie-George Buffet ran up a £3.7 million bill that yielded less than two per cent of the votes. Under France's complex system of political funding, the collapse of support meant only £550,000 was reimbursed by the state, rather than the £5.4 million the party would have received had it won at least five per cent of the national vote.
It could get worse. Opinion polls predict Mr Sarkozy's party will take between 400 and 460 of the 577 seats in the Assemblée Nationale. The opposition Socialist Party, which is in disarray, is praying for a "symbolic" minimum of 120 seats.
That would leave the Communists on the brink of disaster, with predictions that they will hold as few as four of their current 21 seats in the parliamentary elections, thus losing the privileges and funding given to official parliamentary groups, which need at least 20 MPs to receive public cash.
According to Le Monde newspaper, the director of a "large modern art museum" said he had been visited by a Communist Party delegation, asking him to value the large Fernand Léger fresco, Liberty I write your name, which hangs in the party headquarters. "I was led to believe they were in the process of selling their last assets," he said.
A member of the party told the newspaper: "It's true, we're scraping around in the bottom of drawers so we don't have to sell the family jewels."
The Communists built a property portfolio thanks to decades of funding from Moscow which, until 1990, was estimated to have sent about £1 million a year. Much has since been sold, but the party still owns several apartments, including one used by Lenin during a visit to Paris.
Jean-Louis Frostin, the party treasurer, said its finances were "very stretched, but not bled dry", adding: "None of the works of art given to us over the years has been valued, because they are not for sale." He said the HQ "hasn't been valued either".
The party's 90,000 members pay about £4 million in dues every year, said Mr Frostin, who admitted that cuts were planned to the 55 full-time staff. The party's spokesman, Olivier Dartigolles, said: "I promise you that at the next meeting the electricity won't have been cut off."
The Communists' parlous position is a far cry from 1958 when their candidate, Georges Marrane, came second to Charles de Gaulle. In 1967 the party won 22.5 percent of the vote in legislative elections.
In the first round of the 1969 presidential elections, the Moscow-backed Communist Party candidate came third behind the Right's Georges Pompidou, and the centrist candidate.
At the height of their power, the Communists ruled in coalition administrations and could make or break governments. When they ordered a strike, hundreds of thousands brought France to a standstill.
But by the mid-1980s the party, established in 1920 by supporters of Russia's Bolshevik Revolution and opponents of the First World War, was in decline.
A pity really, Comrade can you spare a few francs to help a fellow COMINTERN member out?
Communism is bankrupt. And this is news?
We should be so lucky with our democrats and RINOS.
Picasso was never really much of a communist. Picasso was only interested in what was good for Picasso.
He was too selfish, self-centered and narcissistic to much believe in the good of the common man.
The political beliefs of artists and poets can generally be taken cum grano salis.
ping
So, the Communist Party is hoping that some guilt-ridden capitalists will send a few Francs their way?
Next, the Communists will see what happens when the French markets are opened up for competition.... I hope that the Buchannanite protectionists here take note of the magic that will hit France over the next 4 years.
“You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on / into the dustbin of history!”
Leon Trotsky
LOL!
Wow, kind of makes you sad does’nt it?LOL
Back in Paris, the new Picasso turned up at the theater with his kid gloves, canes, tall hats, capes, and dinner clothes, and the linings gave you a little silk flash every time he wheeled about the lobby to chat with one of his hellish new friends . . . Our old pal Braque shook his head sadly . . . At least Derain had had the decency to confine himself to a blue serge suit when he was being lionized in London, and he had stuck to the company of local bohos in his off hours . . . But Picasso—Braque was like that incorruptible member of the Cénacle of the rue des Quatre Vents, Daniel D’Arthez, watching the decay of Lucien Chardon in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. With a sigh Braque waited for his old comrade Pablo’s imminent collapse as a painter and a human being . . . But the damnedest thing happened instead! Picasso just kept ascending, to El Dorado, to tremendous wealth but to much more than that, to the sainted status of Picasso, to the point where by 1950 he was known at every level of opinion, from Art News to the Daily News, as the painter of the twentieth century. As for Derain and his blue serge suit and Braque and his scruples—the two old boys, both very nearly the same age as Picasso, i.e., about seventy, were remembered in 1950 chiefly as part of the pit crew during Picasso’s monumental victory.— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word.
Reading it and LIVING it are two completely different things!
Thanks, I had frgotten about Tom Wolfe’s book.
Picasso did some great paintings in his early years, but later, he turned out endless reams of crap. He was venal.
I probably wouldn’t be able to buy any of their valuable crap, but I would be willing to steal it from them.
Why don’t they turn it all over to the state where they think it belongs.
Ok, at least they are not planning to sell Napoleon’s private parts again.
I saw that Napoleon’s descendants were selling a sword that he carried into victory in his Italian campaign. Is his family communists?
We could sell them a rope...
See your statement and raise you all of Hollywood.
Treason seems rampant in our country today. I’m stunned that so many people seem incapable of understanding the menace of future Islamofascist nukes being set off in our country and what it bodes for their and our survival.
Why would anyone embrace their own death or suicide?
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