IN A RECENT TALK GIVEN BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF Commerce in Paris Monsieur Michel Debré identified three forms of political oppositions : programmatic opposition typical of the ‘Anglo-Saxon countries’ opposition to the regime, prevalent in the Third and Fourth French Republics and revolutionary opposition, directed against the social and economic order. Unless the French Communist Party, he noted, accepts the republican regime based on peaceful alternations of the government and unless, he added for good measure, it ceases to be influenced by an outside power, it cannot become an ‘opposition’. The only opposition that is acceptable, he concluded – and nobody who knows Mr Debré's political career under the Fourth Republic can miss the irony – is the one that recognizes the legitimacy of the institutions and acts for the purpose of replacing the government.

WITH THE RECENT PUBLICATION OF A SUBSTANTIAL PART OF THE ‘Prison Notebooks’, Gramsci studies may safely be said to have ‘come in from the cold’. While Isaac Deutscher goes too far in his claim for ‘the oblivion to which Gramsci's memory was consigned during the Stalin era’, considerable parts of his political career remained obscure, and evidence of his disagreement with many of the orthodoxies of his time, and with PCI decisions associated with them, has only recently been forthcoming. Publication of his writings has had in general to wait for the ideological relaxation which followed the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Publication of his work in the Soviet Union itself was initiated in 1957, and a three-volume selection eventually appeared. In Yugoslavia, a Selected Works appeared in 1959. Yet it was evident that even in an era of declared de-Stalinization, Gramsci's writings could remain something of an embarrassment to communist orthodoxy.