Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (33 page)

As for the elections to the Assembly, predictions on the outcome were mixed. Many people expected the middle class to vote Socialist as the best way of keeping out the Communists. But the conservative vote went elsewhere: to the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, headed by Maurice Schumann. Although impeccably liberal and resistant, the Catholic MRP bore out the jibe that it was a ‘Machine à Ramasser les Pétainistes’, because after the collapse of Vichy, no credible right-wing party remained. This deficiency falsified the post-war political spectrum from the start.

The MRP did very well in traditionally conservative areas such as Brittany, Normandy and Alsace, and gathered in the considerable quantity of Pétainists in Paris. These were the first general elections in which women had the right to vote, a fact which undoubtedly benefited the MRP, for, as all the polls showed, women were generally more conservative and pious than men.

The final result gave the Communists 159 seats, the Socialists 146 and the MRP 152. The Communists and Socialists could have formed an absolute majority between them, but in August the Socialist Party conference had rejected the proposals for a merger. The Socialists wisely insisted that a tripartite coalition was the only solution for the country. They could even argue that this was the expression of the charter of the Conseil National de la Résistance, which had been filled with well-meaning generalities about unity and
progressisme
.

Although all passed off quite smoothly, de Gaulle was disenchanted by the return of the party system. He frankly disliked the mechanics of constitutional government, especially since the size of the support for the Communist Party – 5 million votes representing just over 26 per cent of the total – made it the largest in France. The Communists had more than tripled their vote since 1936. Not surprisingly, they expected an appropriate level of representation in the Council of Ministers.

The opening session of the Constituent Assembly took place on 6 November 1945, in the
hémicycle
of the Palais Bourbon. A week later the Assembly was to vote on whether to re-elect de Gaulle as head of government. It also happened to be the day that de Gaulle invited Winston Churchill to lunch. Churchill was passing through Paris on his way to the south of France, for a holiday after his defeat by Labour. The party consisted of the de Gaulles, Captain Guy (de Gaulle’s faithful aide-de-camp), Palewski, Churchill and his daughter Mary, and Duff and Diana Cooper. ‘I never liked or admired [de Gaulle] so much,’ recorded Duff Cooper in his diary. ‘He was smiling, courteous, almost charming, and on this day and almost at the hour when his whole future was at stake, not only was he perfectly calmbut one might have thought he was a country gentleman living far away from Paris. There were no interruptions, no telephone calls or messages, no secretaries hurrying in and out, no sign that anything was happening although Winston insisted on staying till three thirty, talking about the past, and the Assembly was meeting at three.’

De Gaulle, as events turned out, had little to fear. He was voted head of government by a unanimous vote of the Assembly accompanied by a motion that ‘
Charles de Gaulle a bien mérité de la patrie
’, a rare honour in French history. This was, at least in theory, the crowning moment of his wartime achievements. It made the ensuing plunge into crisis all the more dramatic.

Two days later de Gaulle received Thorez and rejected his demands for ministerial posts. He, de Gaulle, was forming the government, not the Communist Party. Thorez then wrote and published a reply, saying that de Gaulle had insulted ‘
le caractère national de notre parti et de sa politique
’ and the memory of their ‘75,000’ martyrs. (As Galtier-Boissière put it, out of the 29,000 French men and women executed during the Occupation, 75,000 had been Communist.)

The following day, 16 November, de Gaulle encouraged a rumour that he was about to resign. But this exercise in brinkmanship had not been thought through: he was painting himself into a corner. He broadcast a speech on 17 November, saying that he would not entrust the Ministry of the Interior to a Communist and give them control over security matters, nor would he trust them with foreign policy, nor with the armed forces. Senior officials were dismayed by this pointless provocation.

Two days later François Mauriac, in
Le Figaro,
emphasized that without de Gaulle at the head of government, France would fall under the influence either of the Anglo-Saxons or of the Soviet Union. That same day, 19 November, Gaullist groups demonstrated on the Boulevard Raspail, chanting: ‘It’s de Gaulle we need! Down with Thorez!’ The Palais Bourbon was sealed off by a cordon of troops and police set up roadblocks in many parts of Paris. The Communist Party, on the other hand, as Luizet reported to the Minister of the Interior, had evidently ordered its members to be very discreet.

Behind the military cordon, the general drift of the debate in the National Assembly went against de Gaulle. Despite expressions of admiration for the General, the message was clear. He had to accept a more or less equal division of ministerial posts between the three major parties.

That night, a depressed Gaston Palewski dropped in at the British Embassy. Everything, he thought, would be over in two days. Duff Cooper asked whether it really would be so dangerous to let the Communists have the Ministry of War for six months. Palewski was certain that they would turn the army round and stage a
coup d’état
.

Talk of
coups d’état
became infectious. A rumour ran round the next morning that de Gaulle, not the Communists, was planning to seize power with the backing of the army. The Communists restricted themselves to a vigorous complaint at de Gaulle’s refusal to make one of their members Minister of War. The party warned that de Gaulle should not ‘consider us as second-rate Frenchmen’. It had nominated General Joinville, an officer promoted from the FFI, as its candidate. Joinville, a well-known Communist sympathizer, was anathema to the regular army.

At the rue Saint-Dominique it was a day of negotiation, as political leaders arrived in groups or singly in answer to the General’s summons. Meanwhile, the deputies in the Palais Bourbon waited in a fever of impatience, rumour and speculation. Throughout the country there was deep disquiet. Many feared that de Gaulle had played his hand so badly that he would be forced to give in to all the Communist demands. The directorate of Renseignements Généraux provided updated situation reports on the mood of the people every few hours.

When de Gaulle himself finally emerged that evening to go home, he faced a barrage of questions as to whether a government would be formed the next day. Confining himself to one of his Delphic evasions, he said: ‘One has the right to hope that.’

Of all the politicians visiting the rue Saint-Dominique that day, the most uncommunicative were the two Communist leaders, Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos. The next morning, a police spy in Communist Party headquarters – identified in the reports of the Renseignements Généraux only by the code XP/23 – overheard Duclos on the way to a politburo meeting say to a colleague: ‘Yesterday we were tricked. Today all we can do is try to get one ministry more than the Socialists.’

In the end a compromise was reached. The Communists did not get a ‘decisive portfolio’ – either the Ministry of the Interior, Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of War – but Charles Tillon was made Minister for Armaments. Maurice Thorez was made vice-president of the Council of Ministers, a deputy premiership which was meaningless, and the Communists received three other portfolios: Industrial Production, National Economy and Labour. According to Bidault, the Communists then became very cooperative.

The winter did not improve. There was a feeling in government circles of a slide in slow motion towards disaster. From 10 December, the electric current in Paris was cut off either in the morning or during the afternoon. It also often failed in the evening, leaving parties in darkness and lifts out of order.

André Malraux, whom de Gaulle had appointed his Minister of Information in the new Council of Ministers, prophesied at an embassy lunch party on 3 December ‘that the Communists would attempt to obtain power by force within the next twelve months and that they would fail’.

De Gaulle was thinking along similar lines. A conversation he had with Jefferson Caffery on 6 December was significant, because it revealed the fundamentally flawed state of his thinking, which was to persist for a number of years.

‘There are only two real forces in France today: the Communists and I. If the Communists win, France will be a Soviet Republic; if I win, France will stay independent.’

‘Who
will
win?’ Caffery asked.

‘If I get my breaks at all, especially in the international field, I will win. If France falls, every country in Western Europe will fall too, and all the Continent will be Communist.’

*

Paradoxically, during this period of drift one of the most decisive developments in France’s post-war history took place. It was brought about by Jean Monnet, the least pretentious of great men.

Monnet, who came from a prosperous family of Cognac producers, had deep roots in the countryside yet believed passionately in industrial modernization. This ‘father of the European Community’ was the most admired and influential planner of the century, yet he possessed no formal qualifications. He joined the arms-purchasing committee on the outbreak of war, then after the fall of France Churchill recruited him for similar work in the United States, where he became the chief author of Roosevelt’s Victory Plan to produce an overwhelming output of military material.

Monnet won the trust of virtually everyone he met. In all the major Western countries, he made friends with the leading bankers, industrialists, administrators and diplomats through small private dinner parties where the principal theme of conversation was the post-war reconstruction of Europe.

Monnet, although untalented as a public speaker, possessed a rare gift of finding the most telling argument for each person. ‘You talk of greatness,’ he had said to de Gaulle towards the end of the war, ‘but the French today are pygmies. There will only be greatness when the French assume the stature to justify it. For that, it is necessary to modernize, because the French aren’t modern.’

He returned to the theme in the second half of 1945. France had to transform itself if the country was to command any respect in the modern world. De Gaulle told him to prepare detailed recommendations. He liked the idea of a strategy which aimed to make France rather than Germany the industrial giant of Europe. On 5 December, Monnet submitted a five-page memorandum to de Gaulle. It was approved by the Council of Ministers on 3 January 1946. The decree was counter-signed by nine ministers, including four Communists. Monnet’s brilliant drafting allowed almost everyone – from industrialist to Communist – to read his own politics into the plan and agree with its objectives.

The Commissariat Général du Plan was rapidly established, with the help of Gaston Palewski. To avoid ministerial jealousies and manoeuvring, Monnet worked directly under the Prime Minister. He kept his staff small and very unministerial in style. Eighteen modernization commissions were set up, but the key in Monnet’s mind was steel production. The previous record for production had been in 1929. Monnet’s objective was to reach the same level by 1950, then rapidly exceed it by 25 per cent. De Gaulle dreamed of achieving France’s domination of European industry by using coal exacted from the Ruhr, but the Americans were firmly opposed to a new version of the reparations which had embittered Germany after the First World War.

The plan was over-ambitious with France’s catastrophic lack of fuel, raw materials and spare parts; and a ruthless application of priorities – a guns-before-butter approach – was politically unthinkable when the overwhelming majority of the population lived in such misery. But Monnet’s infrastructure would be in place and ready when, in 1947, the Marshall Plan offered the French the opportunity to rebuild their future.

Two days after Christmas, the franc was drastically devalued. The official rate, maintained since the Liberation at 50 to the United States dollar and 200 to the pound sterling, plummeted to 120 to the dollar and 480 to the pound. Jacques Dumaine noted with regret that in comparison with other currencies, France was now eighty-four times poorer than in 1914.

New Year’s Day 1946 was a beautiful day of winter sun in Paris, but the cold, brittle light did not flatter the chief actors at General de Gaulle’s reception for the diplomatic corps. Many people were suffering from influenza. De Gaulle ‘was looking ill,’ observed one onlooker, ‘and Palewski was looking even worse’.

The two men had good reasons for looking exhausted – Palewski mainly from his attempts to calm de Gaulle. The night before, the Socialists began demanding a 20 per cent cut in the defence budget, just when the government was sending reinforcements to Indo-China as British troops withdrew.

De Gaulle was disgusted that the political parties had recommenced ‘their games of yesteryear’. To confirm his worst suspicions, the Constitutional Commission in the Palais Bourbon was determined to make sure that the President of the Fourth Republic would be entirely dependent upon the National Assembly. De Gaulle ‘felt bound up like Gulliver by the Lilliputians’.

Two days later, on 3 January, the General was forced to relax: the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth to Commandant Alain de Boissieu, formerly of Leclerc’s 2e DB, took place that day. After the wedding the bride’s parents left for a holiday at the villa of Yvonne de Gaulle’s brother at Cap d’Antibes. There, de Gaulle read and walked in the pine groves which surrounded the villa. He could not stray far, for reporters had tracked them down and tried to photograph every appearance.

De Gaulle apparently said to his host and brother-in-law, Jacques Vendroux, that the reason for coming down was to make sure that if he did resign, the country would not think that the decision had been taken on the spur of the moment.