20. My Expulsion From France¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky recounts the circumstances of his 1916 expulsion from France with a sardonic, forensic eye. The core narrative thrust is a polemical unmasking: his expulsion was not a legitimate act of wartime security, but a sordid frame-up orchestrated by the Tsarist secret police and executed by a compliant French state. Trotsky opens with a mordant observation on the order’s bizarre longevity across thirteen years of world-shattering change—the war, the fall of empires, the redrawing of borders—while the petty police decree of Minister Malvy endured. He cites contradictory evidence: the French military mission in Moscow placed officers at his disposal in 1918; Herriot visited him in 1922 and laughed when Trotsky jokingly recalled the ban; Ambassador Herbette greeted him cordially at the Shatura power station in 1925. Yet, as one police inspector told him, “Governments come and go, but the police remain.”
The chapter’s key claim is that the campaign against his paper, Nashe Slovo, was waged not against its internationalism but its revolutionary opposition to tsarism. Trotsky details the censor Chasles, a timorous functionary who crossed out even the obituary of Count Witte, while the Tsarist navy’s official organ published insolent attacks on the French republic. In a reported dialogue with a grey-haired French diplomat, Trotsky presses the contradiction: “Didn’t your ancestors make a mistake then in chopping off Louis Capet’s head?” The diplomat’s reply—“We are at war”—is the regime’s alibi for subservience to the Tsar.
The decisive evidence concerns the Marseilles incident. Prime Minister Briand told deputy Jean Longuet that Nashe Slovo was found on Russian soldiers who murdered their colonel. Trotsky reveals this was a provocation by a Tsarist agent, Vining, who distributed the paper to soldiers whether they wanted it or not, then triggered mutinies. The frame-up was confirmed by the paper’s patriotic enemies. Trotsky’s open letter to Jules Guesde had already surmised an agent-provocateur; the investigation proved him right. But the war was on, the Tsar was an ally, and Vining could not be exposed. Trotsky was expelled, refused passage through England and a visa from Switzerland, and finally escorted to Spain by two police inspectors. He concludes with a caustic flourish: if the order were subjected to dactyloscopic examination, it would bear Vining’s fingerprints.