The Horror of Love

by Lisa Hilton

  The ‘chronic weakness’6 of France immediately after the liberation was manifest at a profound material level. Some 460,000 buildings had been destroyed, 1,900,000 damaged and over a million families found themselves homeless. The industrial infrastructure was in an appalling condition, with half the railway lines out of use, fuel supplies scarce and machinery, where it was not destroyed altogether, dilapidated and out of date. Agriculture, too, lacked machinery, and fertilizer and serviceable land (93 million cultivated hectares had been lost). Poor productivity in both spheres sent the public debt soaring to almost 2,000 billion francs by 1946. Correspondingly, the cost of living tripled, and gross prices increased by three and a half times.

  The most severe problem was the shortage of food. The actress Arletty, who was sent to Fresnes for collaboration, had incensed the public not merely by cohabiting with her German lover at the Ritz, but by enjoying gourmet blow-outs there while the rest of the country starved. The government had only a tiny margin for manoeuvre, as the satisfaction of ‘basic alimentary needs’ was the touchstone by which it needed to conjure a durable popularity.7 According to the rhetoric of the dying Vichy regime, the wicked Germans had been absconding with the fruits of the sacred Gallic soil, hence when they were defeated, abundance would return. Neither the provisional government, the Resistance, nor the British were prepared to contradict this fallacy too precisely, yet the agricultural crisis had to be solved before the country lost patience.

  Nancy Mitford, wearing her self-declared rose-coloured spectacles, refused to acknowledge the fact that for most French people, the size of the ration had become an obsession. In a letter to Lady Redesdale she gaily announced that bread was no longer rationed, an absolute fabrication. The bitter winter of 1944-5, followed by heavy spring frosts, left a deficit of one third below requirements for bread, meat, butter and milk. Bread shortages were acute, as production had fallen from 63 million quintaux (a measure of 100 kilogrammes) to 42 million. From December 1945 to May 1947, the ration was 250 grammes per person per day, the equivalent of roughly four and a half pieces of modern sliced bread. Between September 1947 and May 1948 this was reduced to 200 grammes, then rose again to 250 until bread was eventually taken off the ration (despite Nancy’s absurdly premature rejoicing) in 1949. The government introduced price controls and requisition of urgent supplies such as milk and attempted to repress the flourishing black market, but it was galling for law-abiding families to keep their children on little more than bread and the weekly ration of 60 grammes of meat when black-market goods were ubiquitous and the wealthy and unscrupulous still dined in opulent restaurants. Nancy’s strict adherence to wartime regulations in London appeared to have been quite forgotten, and she revelled in black-market goodies, even as Gaston was attempting to deal with the repercussions of the many protests in French towns, where angry women assembled waving signs reading: ‘Nos gosses ont faim’ (‘our kids are hungry’). The battle France now faced, government publicity claimed, was production, but slogans like ‘Off with our jackets and up with our hearts’ did little to relieve the anguish of mothers serving out pathetic rations to weak and malnourished children.

  The challenges confronting the provisional government were overwhelming, but nothing could be effectively achieved without concord at ministerial level. On 21 October 1945, France went to the polls. In her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy has fun with the absurdly volatile and bathetic fluctuations of fortune of the French government. ‘M. Moch, M. Pleven and M. Bidault all tried to form governments and all duly failed. Then Bouche Bontemps tried again and was accepted by the Chambre the very day before our dinner party.’ For now, though, it was Gaston’s career that was at stake and Nancy wrote of her ‘mule-like’ struggle to remain in the Rue Bonaparte until the elections were over. She described the question of the elections to Randolph Churchill in a passage that might have come from the novel: ‘Everywhere you come across groups of people saying “Moi Oui-Non” “et moi Oui-Oui” and on all the walls is chalked up the Oui-Non of the Communists. Only real old Faubourg fogies will vote Non-Oui.’

  The nation had to decide whether the Constituent Assembly (the legislative arm of the government) should be given supreme or limited power. The’ ‘Oui’ of the Communists represented their determination that party power should be more democratically reflected, while the ‘Non’ of the moderates and Gaullists corresponded to a wish for greater executive authority and a more limited role for the assembly, founded on the conviction that it was the limitation of such authority that had led to the collapse of 1940. The Communist plan to empower the assembly was based on their position as the strongest political force in the country. Membership of the party had increased from 400,000 to 900,000 in the previous two years. Revolutionary rhetoric was still much in evidence, directed especially at the ‘Fascist fifth column of Vichy’, but since it presently seemed possible that power might be obtained by constitutional means, the party leader, Maurice Thorez, had proved himself a firm supporter of De Gaulle. Much to the disgust of some members, who had joined in the belief that a French victory would inaugurate a socialist Utopia, Thorez had maintained a Gaullist line, emphasizing the need to bring the épuration sauvage to an end and concentrate on production. With the goal of building parliamentary muscle, the Communists proposed an amalgamation with Leon Blum’s Socialist party in the summer of 1945, though this was rejected in August, with the Socialists maintaining that coalition was more in accordance with the spirit of the Conseil National de la Résistance. Nevertheless, the Communists had good reason to hope that their ‘Oui-Non’ would achieve a mandate, for De Gaulle’s popularity was severely on the wane.

  The wretched condition of most of the French population was understandably laid at De Gaulle’s door, and though, as Duff Cooper observed, the general’s politique de panache was rather popular, there was also a feeling that his high-handed refusal to engage in party politics and his emphasis on foreign affairs was causing him to neglect the real sufferings of the people, especially with regard to the economy. ‘De Gaulle has his head in the clouds and his feet in the shit’ ran one Parisian graffito. Rather than blame the sainted general, however, many chose instead to vilify the sinister éminence grise of the Rue St Dominique, Gaston Palewski. The newspapers, Nancy reported, never criticized De Gaulle directly. Instead ‘all the attacks, and they are many and venomous, are directed against Palewski who is presented as … an enemy of the people’. The initials on ministers’ official cars, GPRF (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française) were popularly deemed to stand for ‘Gaston Palewski Regent de France’. De Gaulle was well aware of the tendency to blame the entourage rather than the leader, but he hardly leaped to Gaston’s defence.

  It was true that in the vertical hierarchy of De Gaulle’s office, where Gaston assembled the service chiefs each morning in his own room to discuss the day’s programme and give instructions, ‘everything passed through him’. One colleague estimated that it was difficult to imagine the unique place Gaston occupied in French politics in 1944–5. ‘He was the only one who at any moment could push open the door of [De Gaulle’s] office, the only one to find himself constantly by his side … he transmitted requests and delivered instructions, directed projects and proposed nominations, smoothed over corners and interpreted silences.’8 The harmony between the two men, the confidence, trust and unity of reasoning, seems to have been extraordinary, which makes it all the more surprising that so many Anglophone accounts of De Gaulle’s career barely acknowledge Palewski’s presence. Contemporaries agreed that Gaston was the man who had best understood De Gaulle’s ‘profound aspirations’, and while the significance of their relationship may not have been appreciated by the majority of French people, and has been neglected by a number of historians, there were many who understood its importance at the time.

  Arguably, Gaston’s relationship with De Gaulle was the most significant of his life, but he was never pompous about it. Just before the elections, he ac
companied the general on a three day visit to Belgium for what was effectively a public-relations exercise. The Belgian government needed to consolidate public support for the reign of the new regent, Prince Charles, and had planned a series of processions, receptions and visits. In turn, Gaston believed it would be a good opportunity to confirm De Gaulle’s popularity abroad. Jacques Dumaine, chief of protocol at the Quai d’Orsay, called on Gaston before a dinner at the Embassy to find him struggling with a sock suspender, balancing a letter on his knee, his boiled shirt hanging up ready. ‘His smile showed obvious delectation’ as he explained that the letter was from a Belgian friend, declaring that what ex-King Leopold had lacked was a Palewski at his side. ‘Delicious, ’ was Gaston’s verdict on this dubious compliment.

  As the vote drew nearer, Gaston fell ill. Rose Palewski had been concerned about his health earlier in the year – he was driving himself too hard, she thought – and on 15 October Nancy wrote to her sister Diana that he was in agony from an abscess on his spine. A dose of penicillin had him back at his desk within twelve hours, but the tension created by the enormity of France’s difficulties and the increasing scepticism towards the provisional government produced a strained and despondent atmosphere at the Rue St Dominique. There were rumours that De Gaulle was heading for a crippling defeat. Gaston, however, kept up a serene façade, reiterating his perfect faith in the general’s authority.

  Yvonne de Gaulle tactfully chose a black ensemble to cast her vote in the sixteenth arrondissement. This was the first time women were represented among the 25.7 million French citizens who voted on 21 October. The Communists won 26 per cent of the vote, the MRP 24.9 per cent, the Socialists 23.8 and the ‘Moderates’ 13.3. Of the 586 available seats in the assembly, the Communists would thus take 161 and the MRP and the Socialists 150 apiece. On 6 November, Gaston delivered the letter from the president of the provisional government remitting his powers to the assembly. It was on 13 November that the assembly was to vote on the re-election of the general as the leader of the government. Rather ominously, Winston Churchill, fresh from his own defeat at the hands of the Labour party, decided to pay a call in Paris en route for a holiday in the south of France. Gaston attended a lunch with Churchill and his daughter, De Gaulle, and his aide Captain Guy and Duff and Diana Cooper. At this crisis of his leadership, De Gaulle showed himself at his best. ‘He was smiling, courteous, almost charming, ’ wrote Duff, ‘and on this day and almost at the hour when his whole future was at stake, not only was he perfectly calm but one might have thought he was a country gentleman living far from Paris. There were no interruptions, no telephone calls or messages, no secretaries hurrying in and out.’ Churchill would remain at table reminiscing bibulously until half-past three, but even though the assembly had convened at three, De Gaulle remained implacably courteous. Duff declared that he had never liked or admired him so much.

  With the exception of the son of former prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who abstained, the assembly voted unanimously to retain De Gaulle as prime minister. A second motion ruled that ‘Charles de Gaulle a bien merité de la patrie.’ This was an extraordinary honour, and the confirmation ought to have been a moment of triumph, the political vindication for which De Gaulle had waited so long. Yet the party politics he so disliked and distrusted allowed no space for satisfaction. Reasonably, the Communists demanded major ministerial posts for their candidates, posts with which De Gaulle was determined not to invest them. By 16 November he had threatened to resign, and staff at the Rue St Dominique were instructed to clear their desks. The next day, in a radio broadcast, the general asserted that he had no intention of giving the Communists power in security matters, foreign policy or the military.

  The new journal Bref (appropriately named – it didn’t last long) was in no doubt as to who was really in charge. The first issue featured a colour portrait of Gaston with the headline ‘Is the man who governs France Gaston Palewski?’. Stanley Karnow, the correspondent for Time magazine, nicknamed him ‘Monsieur Lavande’, a reference to his rather enthusiastic use of cologne, but also to his role of ‘sweetening’ De Gaulle’s policies. It caught on – Nancy cut out a cartoon of a towering general striding through a field of mud with a portly Palewski spraying perfume in his wake.

  On 19 November, Gaston received an officer’s rank in the order of the Légion d’Honneur, which had him literally dancing for joy in his office, but while he celebrated with a few neatly executed entrechats, the diplomatic choreography was taking a tortuously modern turn. As Gaullist supporters marched down the Boulevard Raspail calling for Thorez to resign, the Palais Bourbon was surrounded by police. Jacques Duclos, the parliamentary leader of the Communists, denounced De Gaulle for his betrayal of his party and the ‘75,000’ martyrs it had offered to France. (Gaston’s friend, the diarist Galtier-Boissière noted drily that of the 29,000 people executed by the Germans, 75,000 of them were Communists.) Although the Socialists banded with the MRP to support De Gaulle, it was clear that the general’s autocratic methods would not be tolerated and he was forced to accept an eventual compromise which, on 21 November, saw Thorez made vice-president of the Conseil des Ministres and Communists appointed to Labour, National Economy and Industrial Production. De Gaulle fudged his claim that he would not entrust a Communist with defence by giving Armaments to Charles Tillon, while classifying the post as economic and retaining overall responsibility for the armed forces. Four ministers were chosen from the Socialists and MRP, one radical, and René Pleven, Jacques Soustelle and Andre Malraux from among De Gaulle’s supporters.

  The general’s government barely lasted a month. By January, Gaston’s efforts to reconcile the argumentative ministers were becoming ever more frantic. De Gaulle was belligerent, even crude where he needed to be conciliatory, while Gaston’s ‘tenacious humility in the face of this wall of pride’ was described by one witness of the ministerial meetings as quite beautiful.9 On 17 January, the general summoned Gaston and explained that he intended to resign. ‘To my last day, ’ Gaston wrote of this moment, ‘I will reproach myself for not having insisted sufficiently that he did not follow through this plan.’ De Gaulle knew that Gaston would be out of a job and said that he would find him an embassy or a position on the Conseil d’Etat, to which offer Gaston claimed he replied, with great nobility, ‘There are many of our companions who have fought from the beginning and had nothing. It is right that your principal collaborator should leave with nothing.’

  On 20 January 1946, Gaston personally carried the letter of demission of De Gaulle’s government to the president of the Constituent Assembly. The general had retired to the villa at Neuilly and Gaston refused all requests to interview him. He was out of a job, and almost worse still, as he remarked that night at a dinner with the Due de Brissac at the home of the art collector Jean Groult on the Avenue Foch, out of a car. How to romance his ‘pretty ladies’ if he was unable to offer them a ride home? ‘Now you will have a holiday and be able to devote more time to the pursuit of love, ’ wrote Nancy from Blomfield Road. ‘Oh dear.’

  At the beginning of the year, Gaston spent a good deal of time at an office on the Quai Branly used by former members of De Gaulle’s Cabinet. Elisabeth de Miribel, the first woman to join the Free French in London and now part of the general’s staff, remembered it as an exciting but exhausting time. Weekends and evenings were devoted to planning a ‘restoration’, and Gaston keenly kept up his diplomatic contacts, though not always diplomatically. At two Gaullist rallies, in June and September, he denounced a regime in which party mercantilism took priority over the interests of the nation. Discussing the Marshall Plan with Jefferson Caffery, he claimed that the United States was supporting weak regimes in liberated countries to further its own ends.

  ‘Would you have me recommend to my government that France should not benefit from the Marshall Plan?’ retorted Caffery.

  As a Frenchman, Gaston replied, he could hardly want to deprive his own country, he merely wished to point out th
e results of US intervention, which would be to mask from the French people the real extent of the political challenges ahead. As much from necessity as from taking advantage of the opportunity to express such views, Gaston now accepted journalism commissions from the New York Free World (and later ParisPresse), but his main professional preoccupation between 1946 and 1947 was the establishment of a new political party that would work to sustain the Gaullist vision. Gaston told De Gaulle of an encouraging conversation with Caffery, who had explained that the United States was resolved to do nothing for France as long as the government involved or was influenced by Communists. A French political landscape liberated from Marxist thinking, a debate that could demonstrate its coherence, was needed in order to attain American help. In Caffery’s view, therefore, there was no better way of achieving this than putting in train the measures advocated by De Gaulle. Along with Malraux, Soustelle, Jacques Baumel and Colonel Rémy, Gaston set about drafting a fresh manifesto.

  The statutes of the RPF (Rassemblement du Peuple Français) were entered at the Prefecture on 29 May 1947. Gaston Palewski was one of the seven signatories. Offices were established at 5 Rue de Solferino, the site of the present Institut Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle wished the RPF to be a movement, rather than a conventional party, and ‘double membership’ was thus available to those who already belonged to other parties, with the exception of Communists. The aims of the RPF were drawn from an analysis Gaston had prepared for the general, expressing the contradictory aspirations that characterized the public. The French, Gaston wrote, were attracted by the idea of a strong state, controlled by a firm leader; conversely, they were obsessed with the idea of liberty to the point where it created the divisions presently tearing the nation apart. The RPF would combat the party regime insofar as it empowered ‘anonymous societies’ (effectively nationalizations on party lines) at the expense of the individual, promote constitutional reform which enlarged executive power and oppose the advance of Communism. The ‘long, difficult, joyful fight’ was on.