Belief and Disbelief in the Space Between, 1914-1945

Cet article s’intéresse au cheminement politique et spirituel de Douglas Hyde (1911-1996), du méthodisme au catholicisme en passant par le communisme, cheminement qui fait l’objet de son autobiographie, I Believed, publiée en 1950. Membre important du Parti communiste britannique entre 1928 et 1948, Hyde occupe une position dans l’histoire du communisme qui est à la fois typique et atypique. Son adhésion au Parti en 1928 représente une forme de « conversion » partagée par nombre de ses contemporains. Dans son propre cas, une telle démarche impliquait d’abord un rejet des valeurs non-conformistes de son milieu de naissance, à l’origine de sa décision initiale de devenir prêcheur. Malgré son implication active dans toutes les campagnes officielles, Hyde s’est cependant trouvé en décalage grandissant avec la ligne officielle du Parti. L’annonce de sa démission en 1948, consécutive à sa conversion au catholicisme, lui valut naturellement la haine de ses anciens camarades. Le triomphalisme quelque peu irritant des derniers chapitres de I Believed peut être interprété comme l’enthousiasme d’un converti tout à la joie de sa Révélation, mais aussi comme le signe que l’entreprise autobiographique de l’auteur n’était rien d’autre qu’un règlement de comptes avec le communisme. This article explores the political and spiritual journey of Douglas Hyde (1911-1996), from Methodism through communism to Roman Catholicism, as described in I Believed, his autobiography published in 1950. Hyde, a prominent member of the British Communist Party (CPGB) from 1928 to 1948, occupies a position in the history of twentieth-century communism that is at once typical and unusual. His becoming a member of the Communist Party in 1928 represented a form of “going-over” shared by many young men and women of his generation. In his particular case, this meant turning his back on the middle-class nonconformist milieu he had been born into, and which had shaped his initial project to become a Methodist preacher, and deciding instead to help forward the civil war that should lead to a Soviet-inspired revolution in Britain. Hyde’s communism, however, never sat comfortably with the official line, despite the fact that he spent almost two decades tirelessly organising all sorts of Party-led campaigns, and about ten years working as news editor for the Daily Worker. If Hyde’s resignation from the British Communist Party in 1948 was highly publicised by the media, it was mostly the official announcement of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, which he had fought savagely before and during World War Two, that met with the disbelief, and soon earned him the hatred of his former Party comrades. The rather irksome note of complacency that rings through the last chapters of I Believed may be read like the enthusiasm of the new convert who has had his Truth revealed at last; it may also disclose the fact that Hyde’s autobiographical enterprise had been nothing but a wholesale indictment of communism all along