Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (46 page)

Contradictory signals were coming out of the Gaullist camp. While one of the General’s associates reassured the American Embassy that he was not anxious ‘to pull the rug at this moment’, he himself announced, ‘we haven’t arrived at the Rubicon to go fishing’. Jacques Soustelle told a contact in the US Embassy on 3 November that de Gaulle did not want to come to power before the hard winter was over; and Gaston Palewski repeated the same message the following day. Ten days later, Colonel Passy was sighted at lunch with de Gaulle and Soustelle. There was also a belief, shared, it would seem, by both de Gaulle’s entourage and the Americans, that the Communists were trying to provoke a crisis ‘that would bring de Gaulle to power before de Gaulle [was] ready’.

Paul Ramadier, worn down, continued in office only in answer to President Auriol’s pleas. The results of the municipal elections had been a severe blow to his position and morale. In the second week of November, he suffered from a heavy bout of flu just as he came under pressure from his MRP partners for a change of ministers to counter the Gaullists. Finally, on the afternoon of 19 November, he offered his resignation again, having heard that he did not have the full support of his own party. This time President Auriol had to accept it. The next morning (the day of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip of Greece in Westminster Abbey), France was without a government and paralysed by strikes.

Léon Blum, seventy-four years old and still frail from his imprisonment in Germany, appeared the only candidate who might muster sufficient support. On 21 October, in his speech to the National Assembly proposing his candidacy as head of government, he warned of the double danger facing the political system. When the votes were counted shortly before midnight, Blum was nine short of the minimum. Robert Schuman, the Minister of Finance, was told: ‘It’s your turn.’ The following afternoon Schuman received his majority, with only the Communist Party and the semi-official Gaullist group of deputies opposing his candidature.

Schuman, an austere Catholic bachelor and a firm moderate, had a slightly crooked, rubbery-looking face, with a bald crown and large ears. Once, when a junior official failed to recognize him, he raised his hat and said that surely he recognized the cranium, it had been caricatured enough in the newspapers. Schuman came from Lorraine, which meant that during the First World War he had been obliged to serve in the Kaiser’s army – a turn of fate which the Communists used shamelessly in their attacks on him. The other knife which they twisted mercilessly was his very brief service in Pétain’s first administration in July 1940. They did not mention the fact that Schuman was one of the first politicians arrested by the Germans.

The other key member of the government was Jules Moch, who took over as Minister of the Interior. Moch, with his round tortoiseshell glasses, pinched face and toothbrush moustache, looked like a provincial schoolmaster. He was a
polytechnicien
, pitiless with statistics and mathematical calculations. Yet his predecessor Édouard Depreux described him as ‘a sensitive man, loyal and faithful to his friends’, and, most significant for the times he was about to live through, he possessed ‘a profound sense of the State’. The Communists found it hard to attack him: as a Jew, an anti-cleric and a Socialist, his loathing of Vichy had been unfeigned, and his son had been killed by the Gestapo.

Moch faced the hardest ministerial task since the Liberation. The autumn coal strike, with stocks still depleted from the previous terrible winter, made the government extremely vulnerable. The miners from the north of France were in combative mood when colonial troops were ordered in to protect the pits fromsabotage, but the ‘
gueules noires
’, as the miners called themselves, received an unexpected boost. Spahis from the garrison at Senlis stacked their rifles on the platformat Lens station and refused to take them up, despite threats from officers. The Ministry of the Interior quickly sent in CRS riot police to seize their weapons and force the Spahis into a train which returned them to barracks.

At the Bully coalfield, some thirty German prisoners of war in their field-grey overcoats joined the attack on the CRS. A number of carbines were seized from them, and three CRS were taken prisoner by the miners. They were apparently so frightened that they told their captors all they knew. A Resistance veteran was disgusted: ‘Do you realize that we had friends who died under torture having not said a word?’ The miners released them, but held on to their identity cards so that they could be pursued if they broke their promise to say nothing to their superiors.

The idea of Spahis and Germans helping the miners aroused great hopes of international solidarity. The Communist Party press encouraged its followers to see this struggle as the last push needed to overthrow a tottering regime.

As the strike hardened and miners’ families were left without money for food, the party organized the evacuation of their children to Communist households elsewhere. Miners who defied the strike call and continued to work were called ‘canaries’ because they were yellow. Their wives were often ambushed outside shops by the wives of strikers.

When Moch took over as Minister of the Interior on 24 November, he suffered from a shortage of riot police to deal with the outbreaks of violence. He also found that he had inherited an over-centralized system, never designed to cope with simultaneous emergencies right across the country. The situation was desperate, but this very fact forced the government to be courageous.

The Ministry of the Interior was in a state of pandemonium. Moch had to be in constant contact with up to ninety prefects of
départements
. Many prefects, afraid of getting no reinforcements from the Ministry of the Interior, turned to the general commanding their military district and, without informing Paris, asked him for troops. Others who had been instructed to send help to one of their besieged colleagues either questioned their orders or delayed implementing them in case their own area erupted. During the last week of November and the first week of December, the ministry received an average of 900 telegrams a day. In one twenty-four-hour period, Moch subsequently informed the prefects, the number rose to 2,302. Since most of these signals were in code, the cipher clerks were submerged.

Moch was so short of men that at one point he found himself sending bodies of riot police of fifty or fewer from one part of the country to another and back again. The station at Brive, for example, was finally relieved by fifty men from a CRS company based in Agen and 100 men allocated to the Massif Central. Even more alarming, Moch found that, in spite of his predecessor’s purges, several CRS units still contained so many Communists from the FTP that they were completely unreliable and had to be disbanded.

‘The strikes were called,’ Moch wrote in a debriefing paper for the prefects, ‘because the economic situation gave the working class real grievances. * The Communist Party showed great cleverness in exploiting these legitimate grievances to set in motion an overall movement which had a definite political and international character, and one of whose main objectives was that of discouraging American aid to Europe.’

The US Embassy became extremely perturbed at the determination of the Communist union leaders. The way that the strikers broke machinery in factories, to make sure that scab labour could not be brought in, indicated a determination to sabotage the economy before the Marshall Plan could take effect. James Bonbright, Douglas MacArthur Jnr and Ridgway Knight begged Caffery to help finance Force Ouvrière, a non-Communist breakaway from the CGT; but Caffery refused to contemplate such intervention in France’s internal affairs. In fact, funding was found elsewhere and passed through the American trades union movement.

The atmosphere of violence grew more oppressive. Henri Noguères, editor of the Socialist Party newspaper
Le Populaire
, received a warning from Moch that the Communists might attempt a commando raid on the newspaper. Knowing that the police were too short-staffed in Paris to offer permanent protection, Moch sent round two containers of weapons from the Ministry of the Interior so that the staff of the paper could defend the building themselves. Leading figures in de Gaulle’s Rassemblement also felt in danger from surprise attack. ‘The Colonel sleeps with a great gun by his bed,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to her mother, ‘far more frightening than anything, as you can imagine he has no idea about guns!’

By a curious stroke of fate, a prominent figure associated with de Gaulle was killed in an accident a few days later. On 28 November, a dark foggy day on which snow fell in Paris, news arrived in the evening that General Leclerc, the city’s liberator three years before, had died in an air crash aged only forty-four. A rumour rapidly circulated that somebody had put sugar in the petrol. Some compared his death to that of General Sikorski. ‘The whole population of Paris,’ wrote Nancy Mitford, in a sweeping generalization, ‘is certain it was sabotage and it’s done the Communists a lot of harm.’ She was, no doubt, repeating the Colonel’s firm belief.

Palewski, whose brother-in-law was also killed in the crash, had dined with Leclerc a week before his death. He claimed that Leclerc had said that evening, ‘We are all in danger now.’ Rumours, almost certainly beginning in the wilder fringes of the Rassemblement, spread that Leclerc had even urged de Gaulle to seize power. The fact that
L’Humanité
devoted only a couple of lines to the announcement of Leclerc’s death somehow seemed to confirm Gaullist suspicions that the Communists had been responsible.

At the same time as Leclerc’s death, public order operations took on an increasingly military aspect. The Ministry of the Interior was in constant contact with the Ministry of War, exchanging information and discussing options. French troops in the north were strengthened to stop Belgian Communists slipping across the border to sabotage the mines and prevent them from reopening. But even the army did not have enough men for the tasks allotted. Altogether 102,000 reservists from the classes of 1946 and 1947 had been recalled from the middle of November. In addition, the French army had reformed the Senegalese troops guarding German prisoners of war into a further nine battalions ready for deployment. But even these reinforcements were not considered sufficient; the government announced on 30 November that it was recalling another 80,000 reservists from the class of 1943.

In Paris, there had been comparatively few disorders. A minor insurrection took place in the 18th
arrondissement
when an officer of the fire brigade led 300 young Communists in an attempt to capture the telephone exchange. Before the assault the Communists, many of them sons of railway workers, smashed all the police telephones in the area. Those who escaped arrest were forcefully reprimanded by their superiors in the party for having acted without orders. The Prefect of Police, Roger Léonard, could hardly believe his luck that the Communists did not try more such adventures. He had only 150 policemen left in reserve to cover the whole city.

The capital was particularly vulnerable to strike action. For those coming into the centre of Paris to work by métro or suburban rail, life became almost intolerable. ‘The train is jammed and often obliged to stop, either by sabotage or by the women and children of the strikers lying down on the tracks.’ Strikes in the public services included the mail, refuse collection and power supplies. Cooking became impossible, electricity was cut without warning as it had been the previous winter, and water pressure dropped so low that the top floors of buildings failed to get even a trickle from the tap.

The real threat lay outside Paris. Moch felt forced to elaborate a contingency plan which would concentrate all his forces on Paris and the routes from the capital to Le Havre, Belgium, Lyons and Marseilles. The rest of the country outside these Y-shaped corridors would be effectively abandoned until sufficient troops could be brought back from Germany.

On 29 November, the day after General Leclerc’s air crash, the Palais Bourbon – cordoned off by troops and police – became the scene of the most violent exchanges ever seen in the National Assembly. The Schuman government presented a group of measures to defend the Republic, including an anti-sabotage bill. During these days Robert Schuman impressed everyone with his air of calm. Jules Moch was equally resolute. He knew that he had less than a week to bring the country under control. If public order collapsed, then de Gaulle might make a move which could trigger the Communists into civil war. But de Gaulle preferred to stand back while his two enemies, the Communists and the government, fought it out.

In the
hémicycle
of the National Assembly the Communists yelled insults at Robert Schuman and his government. Schuman’s service in the German army in the First World War was thrown at him.

‘There’s the Boche!’ cried Duclos.

‘Where were you a soldier in 1914, Prime Minister?’ shouted Charles Tillon, one of the Black Sea mutineers of 1920.

‘Prussian! German!’ screamed Alain Signor, the author of the cringing letter to Stepanov in the Kremlin.

The barrage of insults swelled and slackened in the course of the marathon sessions. Deputies of other parties flung back their own jibes, reminding the Communists of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler. Every resentment and suspicion from the Occupation surged to the surface.

Sunday, 30 November, the second day of the session, was very cold and foggy. The streets of Paris were empty. ‘All seems quiet today,’ wrote the British ambassador in his diary. ‘It isn’t revolution weather.’ Marie-Blanche de Polignac refused to cancel her traditional Sunday-night musical salon.

Monday was another day of fog. No aeroplanes could land or take off, so, with the train strike, no diplomatic bags could get through. Roger Martin du Gard, demoralized by cold meals and the lack of water and heating, found the atmosphere of the city ‘sinister’; he could not wait to escape to Nice as soon as the trains began to run again. Nancy Mitford, who swung like many between alarm and disdain for alarmists, expressed her exasperation at the way the British press were reporting the French troubles with a streak of
schadenfreude
. ‘I told the
Times
man,’ she wrote to her sister Diana, ‘he really must point out that blood is not actually pouring down the gutters.’ The electricity failed again, and Artur Rubinstein’s concert that night took place by candlelight.