Paris: After the Liberation 1944-1949

by Antony Beevor

  The Paris police struggled to push back the crowds in the rue Royale to make way for a ceremonial appearance of the Garde Républicaine on horseback, as they came trotting down from the Madeleine; but their arrival was as chaotic as the scenes around them. Their full-dress uniform, the shining cuirasses and dragoon helmets with long horsehair plumes, was dramatically offset by the fact that almost every soldier had ‘at least one girl riding behind him on the horse, clinging to his Napoleonic uniform and screaming’.

  As evening advanced, a strong breeze arose and the flags flying from the tops of public buildings cracked in the wind. The crowds below continued to sing the Marseillaise, ‘Madelon’, the ‘Chant du départ’ and the songs of the Resistance. Red Army officers, easily recognizable by their thick shoulder-boards, were congratulated; but when a White Russian friend of Simone de Beauvoir began to chat with a group of Soviet soldiers in their own language, they demanded severely what she was doing in Paris and why she was not in the Motherland.

  Castor and a couple of friends went up to Montmartre to finish the evening at the Cabane Cubaine. Afterwards they were given a lift home in a jeep. They felt slightly flat. ‘This victory had been far away from us; we had not been waiting for it, as we had the Liberation, in a feverish anguish of anticipation.’ At midnight a fanfare of trumpeters from the Paris fire brigade sounded the ceasefire. Others also felt that, unlike the Liberation, there was an artificial side to the celebration, partly because they were ‘too exhausted to applaud a finale for which we had waited too long’, but also because General de Gaulle’s emphasis on France’s glorious role did not ring true. They did not feel like victors.

  The only people likely to feel triumphant were the Communists, basking in the reflected glory of the Red Army and the conviction that the party would be in power in the near future.

  In 1945, the French Communist Party was the most powerful political organization in the country, controlling a number of front organizations – the National Front, the Union of French Women, the Union of French Republican Youth, a veterans’ association and most of the largest unions within the CGT, the Confédération Générale du Travail. But there were some striking weaknesses, especially in Paris and its suburbs, where membership had not even climbed back to the level of 1938. Benoît Frachon, the Communist head of the CGT trades union movement, reported to Moscow: ‘the principal reason… is due to a certain temporary disappointment among workers. The workers were counting on a fundamental revolution in France and on social liberation immediately after the Germans were chased out.’ But what Frachon does not mention is that the loss of workers in the ceinture rouge suburbs was greater than acknowledged. Their loss was partly camouflaged by the number of intellectuals joining the party in central Paris.

  Many workers had indeed become Communists during the Resistance in the belief that victory would lead to revolution. The astonishment and disgust of many could hardly be contained when Maurice Thorez, on his return to France, called for increased production and – from the most famous deserter of 1939 – the creation of a powerful French army.

  None of this, of course, meant that the French Communist Party had become a bourgeois party, even if some of its leaders, especially Thorez, may have been lulled into a certain embourgeoisement by the trappings of power. But their policy, until they received different instructions from Moscow, remained a dual-track one. On one side, the party consolidated its position within the system of parliamentary democracy in order to install as many of its members as possible in positions of influence. And with the party’s vote rising to close to a third of the total, the possibility of reaching power through constitutional means was not to be ruled out. Meanwhile, on the other side, revolutionary morale was kept up by attacks on collaborators and ‘the fascist fifth column of Vichy’.

  The continuing obsession with the fifth column was partly inspired by the campaign to remove more of the opposition – it was also the classic Stalinist method of accounting for setbacks due to incompetence – but the belief in a fifth column of Vichyist saboteurs was quite genuine.

  Despite growing tensions between the party and General de Gaulle, Communist ministers stayed in the government, and Thorez proved himself a highly useful ally. At Waziers on 21 July 1945, he shocked his audience by telling them that the hunt for collaborators must come to an end, and that there were far too many strikes. On 1 September, Duclos proclaimed that Thorez’s speech at Waziers had raised coal production: ‘It’s thanks to the Communist Party that the population will have coal this winter.’

  The government and its officials could hardly believe their luck at Thorez’s responsible line, although they had no illusions about the party’s simultaneous efforts at infiltration. A very senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for its intelligence network in the country – he claimed to have 5,000 agents throughout France keeping a close eye on Communist activities – reported to the American Embassy that the party was devoting its efforts to planting members wherever they could wield influence. They were having much less success than they had hoped in the armed forces, but were managing to take effective control of the CGT trades union movement. On the other hand, ‘Every week they continue to support us is time gained and strengthens our position.’

  For a materialist party, totally cynical in matters of Realpolitik, the Communists devoted an astonishing amount of effort – and ruthless politicking – to the cultivation of myths and heroic symbols. In January 1945, the party had launched a campaign to have their star writer of the pre-war years, Romain Rolland, buried in the Panthéon. They lobbied, too, to get party members into the Académie Française. But nowhere had they been quicker off the mark than to have streets and métro stations renamed after their Resistance heroes.

  Following the Stalinist model, a personality cult was developed around Maurice Thorez. Thorez, whatever one may think of his politics, was a man of impressive talents. His enemies may have seen his muscular, rubbery face as a mask of deceit, but as a devout Stalinist he believed in the necessity of lies. A miner by birth and by trade, he overcame his lack of education by sheer force of will, developing a formidable concentration.

  He was acclaimed by the French Communist Party as ‘the son of the people’, also the title of his official autobiography – almost making him sound like the Christ of the proletariat. Yet, to demonstrate his place in the Communist universe, this was the same man whose request in Moscow to Dimitrov for permission to be interviewed by a journalist was dismissed as curtly as if he had been a clerk asking for an extra holiday.

  On his fiftieth birthday, schoolchildren came to sing: ‘Our Maurice is fifty years old – happy, happy birthday – for Jeannette, for their children – for his mother!’ Jeannette Vermeersch, his companion and the mother of his children, was portrayed as a model of proletarian courage. The poverty of her childhood was recounted as the Stalinist equivalent of a Bible story. She too cultivated the legend, and her fiery oratory was modelled on that of La Pasionaria, whom she greatly admired.

  The other, perhaps unsurprising, paradox came with the Communist Party’s commercial empire. The opportunities for expansion had been greatly increased at the Liberation, when buildings belonging to collaborationist organizations were expropriated. The party’s daily newspaper L’Humanité, for example, took over the building in the rue d’Enghien which had belonged to the populist newspaper Le Petit Parisien.

  The party owned a bank, the Banque du Nord, and a shipping line, France Navigation, which had been taken over during the Spanish Civil War, and was almost certainly bought with part of the gold reserves of the Spanish Republic, used to purchase Soviet military supplies.

  The party’s publishing empire was huge, both in Paris and in the provinces. It had twelve daily newspapers and forty-seven weeklies. In addition, the Communist-run coalition, the National Front, had seventeen weeklies, all tightly controlled. Instructions for ‘political orientation’ were issued each day to all provincial newspapers c
ontrolled by their front organization.

  The flagship of the party’s property empire was ‘le 44’, the great brick headquarters in the rue Le Peletier. It was well defended by at least half a dozen security guards, all picked members ready against a surprise attack by fifth columnists.

  Party leaders also expected assassination attempts. Thorez was driven each day to ‘le 44’ in a heavily armoured limousine accompanied by bodyguards. The moment they arrived outside, the bodyguards and the security members from inside the building would form a human screen so that Thorez could hurry inside safely. At Thorez’s house, a small château at Choisy, the bodyguards served at table, then took their meals in the kitchen. One visitor described the place as ‘tristement petit-bourgeois’. It had a private cinema because Communist leaders (with the exception of Laurent Casanova) did not dare venture out to public places. The house also had a very uneven art collection. All the works had been donated and dedicated to le camarade Maurice by painters who were party members.

  In 1945 the French Communist Party, then at the height of its influence, decided to push forward its most ambitious strategy: taking over the Socialist Party through amalgamation. The theme of working-class unity held a tremendous appeal at that time for the majority, especially the young, who had no experience of Communist ruthlessness in the pursuit of power.

  Jacques Duclos declared that only enemies of the people were opposed to the unity of the working class: Socialists who resisted it were ‘scissionists’. But veterans, such as the Socialist leader Léon Blum, remembered only too well the Spanish Communist Party’s attempts to swallow the Spanish Socialist Party in 1936, early in the Civil War. They also remembered the Communist takeover of the CGT trades union federation in the name of working-class unity.

  The American Embassy kept a watch on these developments. Captain David Rockefeller, the assistant military attaché, maintained close touch with members of the Renseignements Généraux, one of the Ministry of the Interior’s police intelligence networks. These officers persuaded him that the best bulwark for the Socialists to resist the Communists was the recently reformed Union Démocratique Socialiste de la Résistance. Although left-wing, it had proved its staunchly anti-Communist position by expelling Pierre Villon, a party member. Rockefeller predicted that if the Socialists and their allies stood firm, the Communists would have little alternative but to pull out of the government and sabotage ‘efforts to bring about economic recovery’.

  Blum and his colleagues at the head of the Socialist Party felt uneasy. The Communists looked as though they would win either way. If a majority of Socialists agreed to unification, the Communists would be able, through unscrupulous use of their superior organization, to take over every important post and win control. On the other hand, if Blum and his supporters managed to win the vote against unification, the issue might well split the Socialist Party, as had happened in Spain nine years before. The Communists would then win over the Socialist left wing and most of their young members. Their only hope was to play for time.

  Communist attempts to establish a monopoly of working-class leadership were damaged from an unexpected direction. The centrepiece of their propaganda in 1945 was the heroism of the Red Army. But when the party strove to win over the recently returned prisoners of war and deportees, it discovered that many had returned to France horrified by the rape, looting and murder they had witnessed in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Their stories spread. Communist leaders in Paris were beside themselves with rage. ‘No word against the Red Army must be permitted!’ thundered André Marty at a mass meeting. Posters appeared attacking those ‘cynical Hitlerian scoundrels’ who had infiltrated themselves ‘to spread anti-Soviet calumnies’ against ‘the soldiers of the glorious Red Army who have saved the civilized world’.

  The Kremlin, on the other hand, demonstrated little concern. Stalin’s lack of interest in France continued beyond the end of the war. After the red flag was raised over the ruins of Berlin, his main preoccupation was the establishment of a cordon sanitaire of satellite states controlled by the Red Army. Never again would he be vulnerable to a surprise attack from Germany.

  One of the best indications of how loose the relationship between the Kremlin and the French Communist Party had become appears in the stenographic account of a meeting of the international section on 15 June 1945. Stepanov, the official dealing with the French Communist Party, felt that its leaders were losing their way. ‘For the whole period of the Liberation,’ he told Ponomarev and his committee, ‘one can say that the Communist Party acted in a very intelligent and very clever way. The party did not allow itself to be isolated from the rest of the resistance movement and the other parties…[Yet] one gets the impression that the Communist Party, although it is acting correctly from a tactical point of view, has no strategic perspective and no strategic objectives.’

  Ponomarev disagreed. Thorez was right to ‘avoid premature actions and anything which risked provoking conflicts which will play into the hands of internal forces of reaction allied with external forces in the form of the English and Americans. The French Communist Party’s situation therefore is much more complicated than that for each Communist Party where our Red Army is present and where we have been able to bring about democratic changes. The proximity of the Soviet Union plays a role which is not small, and other circumstances play their parts too, but the decisive fact is the presence of the Red Army.’ Like Stalin, Ponomarev focused primarily on the cordon sanitaire imposed at gunpoint. But in 1947, Stepanov’s analysis would turn out to be the more accurate, with the French Communist Party caught on the wrong tack.

  18

  The Abdication of Charles XI

  The problems of France’s leadership were summarized in graffiti on the walls of Paris: ‘De Gaulle has his head in the clouds and his feet in the shit’. Duff Cooper put the situation rather more gently: ‘De Gaulle is much blamed for internal difficulties which are not really his fault, whereas his follies in foreign affairs, his politique de panache etc. are rather popular.’

  There was little to be cheerful about in the second half of 1945. At a time when France showed no signs of rising out of its material misery, some of General de Gaulle’s comments sounded uncharacteristically fatuous. ‘When I asked him about the recent municipal elections,’ Jefferson Caffery reported to Washington on 15 June, ‘he said that the people voted for this and that party, but all the people voted for de Gaulle. Then he went on to say what a remarkable reception he had received in Normandy; “as I receive everywhere I go”, he added.’

  Most people tended to blame de Gaulle’s entourage, especially Gaston Palewski, for this state of affairs. Others felt this was unfair. According to Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, de Gaulle was well aware of such criticisms, and used to say: ‘When people are discontented, it’s the fault of the entourage.’ Léon Blum, who admired de Gaulle, defined the problem rather differently. De Gaulle, he said, was ‘a hypersensitive loner, and his close circle must be afraid to tell him what they think’.

  De Gaulle had also begun to lose the confidence of industrialists and the liberal professions, partly because of his anti-American obsession, but also because he refused to tackle the problem of the economy. In some exasperation Monick, the governor of the Bank of France, told one foreign diplomat that Belgium was handling its affairs far better than France. De Gaulle’s following was narrowing towards committed loyalists from the war, the more reactionary elements in the army and, with an irony that was typical of the guerre franco-française, the natural supporters of Marshal Pétain, who saw de Gaulle as their bulwark against the Communists.

  In May, anti-colonialist disturbances in Syria threatened France’s position in the Levant. De Gaulle was certain that General Spears, until recently Britain’s minister to the Lebanon and Syria, had inspired a plot to expel the French. Spears had certainly been provocative during the war, and other British officials in the region did little to calm the situation. Yet although the British wo
uld have liked to supplant France in the area before the war, London saw no future there in 1945. Afraid that France’s attempts to reimpose her rule would inflame the whole Middle East, the British government issued an ultimatum that French troops in Syria must return to barracks.

  De Gaulle, impotent in the face of British military power there, became convinced that the British were determined to undermine him in other ways. He even claimed that while ‘England was preparing the decisive blow in the Levant’, she was pushing ‘Washington to pick a quarrel with Paris’.

  Whether out of frustration at events in Syria or in an unrelated attempt to increase French territory at the peace conference, de Gaulle had moved French troops across the Italian border into the Val d’Aosta. Once again, he did not inform his Foreign Minister what he was doing. Bidault was furious and embarrassed by such a pointless adventure in the face of the Americans. On 6 June, President Truman sent a strong message demanding the withdrawal of all French troops and cut off military supplies. Diplomats in Paris, certain that de Gaulle was on a suicide course, started to refer to him as ‘Charles le Temporaire’. A week later, de Gaulle was forced into a humiliating retreat.

  The following day, he was due to confer the Cross of the Liberation on General Eisenhower, but at the last moment Eisenhower was told that he could not bring any British officers, because of the dispute over the Levant. Eisenhower said that, as Supreme Allied Commander, he would be bringing Air Marshal Tedder and General Morgan, two of his deputies, and if this did not suit General de Gaulle, he would not come. De Gaulle had to back down.

  Palewski, apparently on de Gaulle’s behalf, passed a message via Louise de Vilmorin to Duff Cooper, saying that they both regretted that ‘owing to recent events their relations with the British Embassy could not be what they had been in the past’, but they wished the ambassador to know that they still had nothing but the friendliest feelings towards him personally. Duff Cooper was not impressed: ‘This seems to me – I must say – the most extraordinary procedure. I am surprised that de Gaulle lends himself to it.’