"On the 27th of May, 1952 the American General Matthew Ridgway disembarked in France to take up his new post as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. The next day, there were massive demonstrations in Paris organized by the Mouvement pour la paix, a front group for the Parti communiste français PCF. The Mouvement pour la paix and the PCF accused 'Ridgway the plague' of war crimes, due to his alleged use of biological weapons in the Korean War. During clashes between demonstrators and the forces of order, two protestors were killed. The state moved against leading Communists it believed responsible for the internationally embarrassing demonstrations. The editor in chief of the party paper l'Humanité, André Stil, was arrested on 25 May, and charged under a law which prohibited 'provoking armed or unarmed crowds'. On the evening of the 28th, the police arrested the Deputy Secretary-General of the PCF, Jacques Duclos. In the boot of Duclos' Hotchkiss car, the authorities discovered a 7.65 mm pistol; a baton; a short-wave radio capable of picking up police signals; a map showing strategic locations around Paris; and, two dead pigeons. In his desk, an incriminating note for the secretariat of the political bureau of the PCF was found, reading 'We work for the certain defeat [of the French Army] in Vietnam, in Korea, in Tunisia.' For Charles Brune, the serving Minister of the Interior and a member of the centrist Radical Party, this was evidence of what French anti-communists had long been trying to prove: the PCF was a treasonous organization, planning the overthrow of the French Republic. He maintained that the deceased fowl were carrier pigeons, murdered to conceal their true purpose: the delivery of conspiratorial messages to Moscow. Duclos was incarcerated in the prison de la Santé in Paris, where many of his fellow communists had been held by the Germans and the Vichy regime during the Second World War. Brune also announced that all Communists then in public service would be dismissed"-- Provided by publisher.