Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (32 page)

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.

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 would 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.’

De Gaulle began to realize that his hopes for post-war France were frustrated from within as well as from without. When the Consultative Assembly debated the crisis in the Levant on 17 June, he was appalled to find that the bulk of the criticismwas directed, not against the British, but against his own government and France’s traditional policy in the region. On the evening of 26 June he told General Pierre de Bénouville, a hero of the Resistance, that he ‘intended to retire from politics altogether’. Bénouville then repeated this to Louise de Vilmorin ‘under the seal of secrecy’ – but she relayed the news to her lover, the British ambassador.

De Gaulle had far more serious causes for concern than the Levant, or his disastrous foray in the Val d’Aosta. The food situation was so bad that the Minister of the Interior sent a secret telegramon 7 July 1945 to the Governor-General of Algeria, urgently demanding two shiploads of sheep to avert a crisis. Beans and lentils were shipped in from South America. The country had less than two weeks’ supply of grain. And this was summer. The winter would be far worse.

France’s economy was in a disastrous state, but de Gaulle paid little attention to financial matters. Whether or not he ever uttered the famous remark ‘
l’intendance suivra
’ – ‘the baggage train will follow’ – is an academic question, but this was certainly his attitude. His two ministers responsible for economic affairs, Pierre Mendès-France and René Pleven, became locked in disagreement in the winter of 1944, when he summoned them to his residence in the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday afternoon to discuss their opposing points of view. Pleven did not want a strict fiscal policy because of the hardship it would cause in the short term. He put his case simply and plausibly in under half an hour. Mendès-France, a far cleverer man, argued passionately for over two hours that unless the French government had the courage to stop paying inflationary wage settlements, it would never rise out of its present state of destitution. The result of this meeting was that never again would de Gaulle allow anyone to talk to him about economics for three hours.

Mendès-France’s plan was absolutely correct in fiscal terms, but the country and the government coalition could not have withstood the political effects of the misery it would have caused. France’s financial salvation, like that of the rest of Europe, lay not within her own resources but in the generosity or self-interest of richer nations. Yet the primary objective of de Gaulle’s next trip abroad was not to raise loans, but to persuade the Americans to let France have the left bank of the Rhine and her share of an internationalized Ruhr.

Bidault told Duff Cooper that ‘with de Gaulle in his present frame of mind the less travelling the General did in foreign countries the better’. But de Gaulle’s trip to the United States at least did not turn out a disaster.

On 21 August, after the trial of Marshal Pétain was out of the way, de Gaulle set off for Washington, accompanied by Bidault, General Juin and Gaston Palewski. The future peace of Europe, he told President Truman, would be guaranteed by reducing Germany to a collection of minor states restricted to agriculture, while France was built up as the industrial giant of Europe. De Gaulle dismissed Truman’s view that the problem in establishing peace was essentially economic. Truman listened politely. He even put up with de Gaulle’s little lecture on ‘why France saw the world in a less simplistic manner than did the United States’.

De Gaulle might have taken a slightly different line if he had been aware of a briefing document given to Truman before their meeting. This report, if it deserves the term, conveyed in a series of crude caricatures the attitude still prevalent in US government circles. It summarized France thus: ‘A country which, from the highest in the government down to the poorest peasant, is sitting back waiting for something to happen; which is completely unaware of American sympathy and aid; in which the cost of living permits only the rich to really subsist; a country where the young, from the best to the lowest families, live and thrive on the black market; a country with such an inferiority complex that frank discussion is difficult if not impossible; a country convinced that the United States and Russia will have to fight it out in a war in the near future, and which is convinced that in the interim the Communists will control Europe.’ This diatribe ran on for three pages. It recommended that de Gaulle should be ‘sent back to France with a sufficiently striking and publicized diplomatic victory to ensure the continuance of his government’, provided he agreed to certain commitments, and that ‘a sizeable American armed force should be kept in France to protect our lines of communication and supply to our occupying force in Germany’.

‘Conclusion: The French people in their present desperate and discouraged state resemble to a frightening degree the German people twelve years ago. Another really bad winter and the Allies may find that they have substituted the double cross of Lorraine for the crooked cross of Munich. This would not necessarily be de Gaulle’s personal desire – but events might force his hand. It behoves us to move fast and forcefully.’

President Truman was fortunately not burdened by Roosevelt’s historic dislike of de Gaulle, and on the whole their meetings passed off well. But there was one element in this document with which Truman firmly agreed, and that was the protection of military lines of communication. A year later he was to show that he would be prepared to move troops into France to secure the rear of the American forces in Germany, without informing the French government until the very last moment.

The ‘full and free’ elections for which Roosevelt had originally wanted to wait before recognizing de Gaulle finally took place on Sunday, 21 October 1945. Combined with the elections for a Constituent Assembly was a referendumon the basis for a new Constitution. Only the Radicals wanted to retain the discredited Third Republic. The main question for a Fourth Republic was whether the Assembly should be given supreme powers, as the Communists especially demanded, or restricted powers, as de Gaulle insisted. Sixty-six per cent of the electorate agreed with him that the Assembly’s powers should be restricted, for it was widely held that France’s capitulation in 1940 was due to the weakness of the executive power under the Third Republic.