Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (35 page)

In electoral terms, the new right-wing parties amounted to very little. The largest was the Parti Républicain de la Liberté, an ‘anti-Communist vehicle’ to bring together elements from the pre-war right and supporters of Marshal Pétain. It had a following in Paris, but was very weak outside the city.

At this time when, in Caffery’s words, the situation was becoming ‘favourable to chaos and to men on horseback’, royalist hopes swelled. The Comte de Paris believed that he could unify the nation. Posters appeared on the walls in Paris: ‘
Le Roi… Pourquoi pas?
’ – a curiously diffident message in an age of political passion.

Colonel Passy was strongly against the idea of Americans or British helping right-wing groups. At a dinner with Brigadier Daly, he rightly identified the Socialist Party as the best political force to resist the Communists. But on other matters he was less prescient. The chief danger to France at the time consisted of right-wing coup attempts, which, however amateur and unlikely to succeed, risked playing straight into the hands of the Communists.

The main danger of trivial events getting out of hand stemmed from the fact that in France everyone in military and official circles seemed to be spy-obsessed. It was a legacy of the Occupation and the Resistance. ‘
C’est la clandestinité qui mène l’affaire,
’ a French intelligence chief acknowledged to a British colleague.

But the real problems being faced by British intelligence were in London. In 1944 Kim Philby, who later turned out to be one of the Soviet Union’s star spies, had been put in charge of the new anti-Soviet department in SIS. When Muggeridge sent back to London a report, passed to him by a ‘Colonel A’ (presumably Colonel Arnault) on the extent of Communist infiltration in the French government, an instruction came back from Philby to disregard any material from this clearly unreliable source. Philby then sent Muggeridge a questionnaire on the measures being taken by the French against Soviet infiltration. Ironically Passy’s organization, then under attack as an anti-Communist stronghold, thought it wiser not to cooperate. Even so, Passy considered most of the questions ridiculously simple – some of the answers, he said, could be found in the telephone directory. He and Soustelle suspected a British double-bluff.

Philby came to Paris at least twice. He came first in the winter of 1944–5 to visit Muggeridge, and stayed with him at the Avenue de Marigny. He paid another visit in May 1946. ‘Philby, the Communist specialist of MI6, came to see me,’ recorded Duff Cooper. ‘He hadn’t much to say that I didn’t know already.’ Yet Philby muddied the waters once more. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who had revived part of her ‘Ark’ intelligence network from the Resistance for use against the Communists, had kept in touch with John Bruce-Lockhart, the SIS representative in Paris. She had shown him transcripts of the most recent French Communist Party politburo meetings, and explained that she needed a substantial sum of money each month if this source was to continue. The SIS representative was convinced that the transcripts were genuine, and the senior director in London, Kenneth Cohen, who had supervised Marie-Madeleine’s operations in the war, also believed in them. But the final decision lay with the head of the section dealing with International Communism – Kim Philby. He declared that the transcripts were forgeries, mainly on the grounds of what he claimed was unconvincing Marxist-Leninist phraseology. Since he was the expert, SIS chiefs in London were not prepared to override his opinion. Fortunately, Marie-Madeleine had concealed her source well and Philby was never in a position to betray it.*

The Americans fared little better in the spring of 1946. The flood of rumours made it impossible to identify real threats. A report even circulated that the Russians were ready to invade France by parachute: D-Day would take place on 26 March. At the same moment, General Revers warned the British military attaché that ‘the Communists would create incidents on the Spanish frontier’ to force a war with Franco and get the Russians to intervene. Revers, a fanatical anti-Communist, may also have been the source of a later rumour about international brigades training near the Pyrenees to fight in the Greek civil war. In fact, the danger in the area came from the opposite direction: extreme right-wing elements within the French army had been hoping to get the Spanish army to strike across the border at Communist
maquis
groups.

The American ambassador passed back such stories to Washington in a weary tone. ‘The circulation of alarmist reports,’ he wrote, ‘is facilitated because the average Frenchman after the years of German occupation is prone to believe and to repeat as gospel almost any rumor no matter how fantastic it may seem. Indeed, since the Liberation stories have circulated with varying degrees of intensity that “a Communist coup is planned for next month”; often specific dates are mentioned.’ American military intelligence staff in Paris, with the honourable exception of Charlie Gray, were far less sceptical.

There can be little doubt that American intelligence in Europe was hopelessly ill-informed. A briefing on ‘Clement [
sic
] Fried the principal agent of Stalin in France’ warned that Fried was still very elusive. ‘Prior to the war he seldom slept in the same domicile for more than a few nights and was not known to more than eight or ten members of the French Communist Party.’ Fried – whose name was Eügen, not Clement – had indeed been the French Communist Party’s Comintern controller and Maurice Thorez’s mentor, but there was a very good reason for his elusiveness in 1946: the Gestapo had shot him dead in Belgium three years before.

It is greatly to Jefferson Caffery’s credit that he resolutely continued to discount the growing rumours of an impending Communist coup in the lead-up to the referendum of 5 May. ‘While it is difficult to state with certainty the origin and purpose of such reports, they are being circulated in American military and other circles particularly by anti-Communist French elements.’ All too often the very people circulating these reports ‘subsequently approach us informally with a view to obtaining financial or other assistance for the coming elections’.

He further argued that ‘an armed Communist uprising would not seem probable in the immediate future since the Communists would stand to lose much more than they might gain by such a gamble’. On the other hand, the Communists would certainly profit from an ‘abortive attempt’ by the ‘lunatic fringe of the Right’. This would enable them to pose as ‘the defenders of democracy against an attempt at dictatorship’.

Unfortunately, the War Department refused to heed the ambassador’s warnings that all these rumours leading up to the referendum on 5 May should be ignored. It had received a report that the Communists planned to stage a
coup d’état
after fomenting trouble on Monday, 6 May, the day after the referendum.

In the early hours of Friday, 3 May, the War Department sent a top-secret ‘eyes only’ signal to General MacNarney, Commanding General of US Forces European Theater, based in Frankfurt. This gave him formal authority ‘to effect movement into France in case of serious disturbance there provided that such a move in your opinion is essential to provide for security repeat security of US Forces or to secure supplies essential to them’. A reconnaissance by selected officers was permitted before the referendumof 5 May.

A signals officer in Washington, recognizing the telegram’s potentially explosive nature, contacted the code room of the State Department, suggesting that the message should be cleared on their side. An urgent meeting was called by the European department’s senior experts, John Hickerson and James Bonbright, who took the representatives from the War Department to see Dean Acheson, the Assistant Secretary of State. They reminded him that, whatever the right-wing rumour-mongers in France might be saying, a Communist coup was most unlikely.

Acheson and his colleagues expressed a very strong view that ‘General MacNarney should not be given discretionary authority to move troops into France’. They pointed out that ‘US troops moving into France to widely scattered places, in the event of civil trouble might well be misunderstood, give rise to incidents involving them, and, at the worst, might even cause the Communists to appeal to the Soviet Union and send for help on the grounds that the United States had intervened’. Not even Acheson and his subordinates in the State Department appeared to be aware of articles 3 and 4 in the Franco-Soviet pact signed by Bidault and Molotov in December 1944. That obliged either France or the Soviet Union, in the event of a threat, to take ‘all necessary measures to eliminate any fresh menace coming from Germany’. The nationality of the menace had not been specified.

The State Department team drafted an alternative set of instructions which they took to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 1.30 p.m. The Joint Chiefs were only prepared to make minor modifications to the original instruction to General MacNarney. Neither side would compromise further, so that afternoon Admiral Leahy, the former ambassador to Marshal Pétain, took both drafts to the President for his decision. Truman, to Acheson’s appalled disbelief, backed the War Department.

Acheson drafted a telegramto Caffery in Paris. He warned himof the situation and told him that their attempts to stop the War Department instruction had failed – but then he cancelled the signal before it was sent. This is surprising since, to the State Department’s dismay, MacNarney’s authority to move troops into France remained in force, even after Monday, 6 May, passed off without any disturbances. If Caffery ever heard of the War Department instruction, from either Acheson or anyone else, he certainly did not tell any of his colleagues.

The only satisfaction the State Department could extract from this deeply disturbing episode was in a later communication debunking the cries of wolf in Germany which had led to such an extraordinary state of affairs. On 5 June, a top-secret signal was sent to Robert Murphy, the President’s representative in Germany: ‘As you may already know the information planted… is entirely phony. The source belongs to an extreme Right Resistance group in France desiring to stir up trouble and obtain American arms and funds.’

In the lead-up to the referendum on 5 May 1946, all was fair in war and politics. Right-wing rumour-mongers claimed, without producing evidence, that the Kremlin was financing the French Communist Party. The Parti Républicain de la Liberté spread the word that the Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, was having an affair with Marie Bell of the Comédie-Française and sending her vast bouquets of orchids costing 50,000 francs. Galtier-Boissière was unconvinced. He did not see ‘the nation’s perfect baby, so carefully watched by the party, paying court while escorted by six bodyguards toting sub-machine guns’.

The draft of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic proposed that most power should rest in the hands of the Assembly, while the Senate should be abolished. The Assembly would also have the power to appoint both the prime minister and the president, whose powers would be purely ceremonial. Cardinal Suhard called upon the faithful to ‘vote and vote well’ against a left-wing and anti-clerical Constitution. Suhard’s message was repeated from pulpits in cathedrals and churches across France. The Archbishop of Bordeaux stated outright that Catholics must refuse to ratify the Constitution. This produced fears in the centre that intervention from the Church would play into Communist hands.

The most ingenious piece of black propaganda was mounted by the Communists just over two weeks before the elections. They arranged for one of their prominent union leaders to be arrested on the basis of charges originally laid against him by the Vichy government. The Ministry of the Interior had nothing to do with the arrest. According to a ‘competent source’, it was carried out by officers from the Communist-infiltrated Prefecture of Police.

The outcry in the party’s press was predictable, claiming that Vichy reactionaries were still in control and that the Pétain regime was working frombeyond the grave. The whole operation was a great success, to the frustration of Édouard Depreux, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, whom the Communists loathed. Henaff, the union leader, was released amid triumphant demonstrations, while Depreux was left subtly tainted with Vichyism. But it would not be long before Depreux began to organize an effective revenge.

The Communists demanded a ‘
Oui
’ in favour of the draft Constitution, but they allowed, and then even encouraged, the May referendum to be turned into a ‘plebiscite for or against Communism’. Some rich ‘
paniquards
’ planned to leave France if they won. The American ambassador was scathing about the fatalistic assumption that ‘the Cossacks would soon be arriving on the Place de la Concorde’.

De Gaulle was one of the very few to predict that the Communists would lose, whatever the opinion polls said. He told his secretary Claude Mauriac, the son of François, that the Communists had made a major mistake. Out of sheer over-confidence, they had allowed the tables to be turned at last. Until then, the left had managed to manipulate and define issues in terms of fascism and anti-fascism. Now, for the first time, the issue was Communism and anti-Communism. ‘And that’s a development of capital importance for the future,’ said the General. He had the hugely satisfied air of a man who had put together a clever plan. ‘I managed to tie a good-sized saucepan to their leg with the referendum,’ he said. It was one of the very few electoral measures he had been able to achieve in the face of the Constituent Assembly.

In the week before the referendum, the walls of Paris were scrawled with ‘
Oui
’ or ‘
Non
’ in chalk, often crossed out by the other side. In the 16th
arrondissement
well-dressed little girls with buckets and brushes were seen scrubbing out the
Oui
s. In a less elegant part of the city, a green metal
vespasienne
urinal bore the more anarchic slogan: