Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949

PENGUIN BOOKS

PARIS AFTER THE LIBERATION

‘There is hardly any aspect of French life during that period which

the authors do not explore, always with compelling liveliness and

omnivorous zeal. I shall return gratefully to it again and again’

Alistair Horne,
European

‘This book, like the city it discusses, oscillates satisfyingly between

blunt history and roistering gossip’ Frank Delaney,
Sunday Express

‘After Antony Beevor’s
Crete
and Artemis Cooper’s
Cairo,
the

excellence of their joint
Paris After the Liberation
should have come as

no surprise. De Gaulle’s race for Paris makes one hold one’s breath;

then the skein brilliantly unravels. Every shade of collaboration is

traced and – brand-new – the details of Russian control of the French

Communist Party’ Patrick Leigh Fermor,
Spectator

‘An entrancing read’ Richard Lamb,
Spectator

‘A beautifully written book about a vast tapestry of military, political

and social upheaval, remarkably well researched, wise, balanced, very

funny at times… I was a witness to events in Paris in the first

desperate, glorious, mad weeks, and this is just how it was’

Dirk Bogarde

‘A perceptive portrait of Paris in its heyday’ J. G. Ballard,
The Times

‘This valuable newbook… a true
vade mecum
of an era’

Paul Ryan,
Irish Times

‘This is a wondrous account that thoroughly matches the brilliance of

its subject’
Boston Globe

‘A splendid chronicle of the political, social and cultural forces that

were unleashed by the war and that played themselves out in Paris in

an acrimonious battle for the future of France’
Philadelphia Enquirer

‘Fascinating’ Alan Massie,
Daily Telegraph

‘In the 1940s, France went to war with herself yet again, and the tale,

told with relish by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper in this

fascinating book, is calculated to stir mixed feelings in the devoutest

Francophile’ David Coward,
New York Times

‘A rich, grim but often funny and always marvellously intelligent

venture into the French past as well as our own’

S. J. Hamrick,
Chicago Tribune

‘A thoroughly professional job in reconstructing the sensations of

Paris in the years after the liberation of 1944, skilfully balancing

historical narrative with social analysis, and tempering the appalling

with the absurd’ Jan Morris,
Independent

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Antony Beevor wrote his first novel when he lived in Paris for two years. His works of non-fiction include
The Spanish Civil War, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance,
which received the 1993 Runciman Award,
Stalingrad,
a No. 1 bestseller which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize in 1999, and its companion volume,
Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. Stalingrad
and
Berlin
between them have sold well over 2 million copies, with both books translated into twenty-four foreign languages.
Crete, Stalingrad
and
Berlin
are also all published by Penguin.

Artemis Cooper’s work includes
Cairo in the War 1939–1945
and
Writing at the Kitchen Table,
the authorized biography of Elizabeth David, both of which are published by Penguin. She has also edited two collections of letters:
A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper
and
Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper
. Her grandfather, Duff Cooper, was the first post-war British ambassador to Paris, and his private diaries and papers provide one of the unpublished sources for this book.

Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper were both appointed Chevaliers de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. They are married and have two children.

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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www.penguin.com

First published by Hamish Hamilton 1994

First published in Penguin Books 1995

Revised edition published in 2004

This edition published 2007

1

Copyright © Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1994, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

To our parents

PREFACE

PART ONE

1
The Marshal and the General

2
The Paths of Collaboration and Resistance

3
The Resistance of the Interior and the Men of London

4
The Race for Paris

5
Liberated Paris

6
The Passage of Exiles

7
War Tourists and Ritzkrieg

8
The
Épuration Sauvage

PART TWO

9
Provisional Government

10
Corps Diplomatique

11
Liberators and Liberated

12
Writers and Artists in the Line of Fire

13
The Return of Exiles

14
The Great Trials

15
Hunger for the New

16
After the Deluge

17
Communists in Government

18
The Abdication of Charles XI

PART THREE

19
The Shadow-Theatre: Plots and Counter-Plots

20
Politics and Letters

21
The Diplomatic Battleground

22
The Fashionable World

23
A Tale of Two Cities

24
Fighting Back against the Communists

25
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

26
The Republic at Bay

27
The Great Boom of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

28
The Curious Triangle

29
The Treason of the Intellectuals

PART FOUR

30
Americans in Paris

31
The Tourist Invasion

32 Paris sera toujours Paris

33
Recurring Fevers

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

Few countries love their liberators once the cheering dies away. They have to face the depressing reality of rebuilding their nation and their political system virtually from scratch. Meanwhile, black-marketeers and gangsters thrive on the chaotic interregnum which we now call ‘regime change’. This reinforces the sense of collective shame, just when people want to forget the humiliation of having had to survive by moral cowardice, whether under a dictatorship or under enemy occupation. So liberation creates the most awkward debt of all. It can never be paid off in a satisfactory way. Pride is a very prickly flower.

So too is nationalism, as this post-Liberation period in France shows only too well. Nobody was more prickly than General de Gaulle at the idea of slights from his Anglo-Saxon allies. To judge by the transatlantic rows which continually reignite, this is clearly a ‘recurring fever’, to use Jean Monnet’s phrase. Yet in the post-war world, we were led to believe that the need for national identities would wither away. The Cold War suppressed most national problems within its international straitjacket. Then other developments, whether the United Nations, the European Union or even the contentious process of globalization, pointed to a further fading of national consciousness. But if anything, one finds in our increasingly fragmented world that many people, terrified of drowning in anonymity, seize hold of tribal or national banners even more firmly. And the idealistic notion that international organizations can rise above national interests and intrigue has also proved to be a complete delusion.

One could well argue in the light of recent events that the Franco-American relationship had never really recovered from 1944. One might also say that the liberators were rather too thick-skinned, while the French were too thin-skinned; that American businessmen wanted to leap in to exploit the market, while the French wanted to revive their own battered industry; that the GIs, ‘ardent and enterprising’ in their attempts to fraternize with local girls, simply created resentment and jealousy, especially since Frenchmen had no cigarettes or stockings to offer. The clash of the free market with the moral rationing of war socialism was bound to provoke deep discontent, whether in matters of love or of food. Frenchmen, and above all Frenchwomen, did not really blame the great film star Arletty for having a lover in the Luftwaffe. But they could not forgive her for staying with him in the Ritz, which meant that she had enjoyed access to the best food available when the rest of them went short. Hunger was indeed as powerful a motive for jealousy as unrequited love. The German writer Ernst Junger, serving in Paris as a Wehrmacht officer, had observed in the Tour d’Argent restaurant that food was indeed power.

The Occupation was a time of genuine suffering for almost all the French, and it is wrong for those who never experienced it to make sweeping moral judgements in retrospect. Nevertheless, the difficulties, both moral and physical, were such that many myths sprang up afterwards, and they certainly need to be examined. General de Gaulle himself instinctively realized the need when he made perhaps the most emotional speech of his life from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on 25 August 1944, the day of its Liberation: ‘Paris! Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated! Liberated by herself, liberated by her people, with the help of the whole of France, that is to say of “
la France combattante
”, the true France, eternal France.’

There was not the slightest mention of American or British help in the Liberation. In the eyes of the Allies, this was a churlish and grotesque rewriting of history; nevertheless, it was an inspired message, creating an image of national unity where none existed and binding the sorely wounded pride of the country. Yet the people most put out by this speech were not the Allies, who had come to expect such Franco-centricity by then, but members of the Resistance. They were dismayed by de Gaulle’s deliberate attempt to praise them only as part of ‘
la France combattante
’, essentially the armed forces commanded by de Gaulle from outside, and making no mention of ‘
la France résistante
’, the secret army at home. Symbolism had become immensely important. This resentment signified more than the continuation of a power struggle between de Gaulle’s Free French, who had returned from honourable exile, and the ‘people of the interior’, who had stayed behind, but then joined the Resistance later.