Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (37 page)

The speech at Bayeux, the American ambassador reported, ‘struck a more responsive chord throughout the country than its reception by the phlegmatic Norman audience indicated’. The meeting took place in heavy rain, with General de Gaulle bareheaded and in a uniform without decorations. He warned the French against their unfortunate inclination to divide into parties; but the event gave a strong impression of a military movement with the uniformed presence in de Gaulle’s entourage of Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, General Juin and General Koenig, as well as Malraux, Palewski and Soustelle.

The speech was important. De Gaulle put forward his idea of what the Constitution of the French Republic should be. It was, in many ways, the blueprint for the Fifth Republic, which he finally established after his return to power in 1958.

De Gaulle remained suspect in the eyes of many potential followers, particularly those who had supported Marshal Pétain, because he had made deals with the Communist devil during the war and had gone to Moscow to sign a pact with Stalin. These suspicions were soothed a year later, when the General took up an openly anti-Communist position. De Gaulle, despite his dislike of two superpower blocs, helped to bring French politics into the frame of the Cold War.

For the second time in thirty years, Paris found itself hosting a modern Congress of Vienna. First came the meeting of foreign ministers of the Big Four in May 1946, to be followed by the sixteen-nation peace conference, which continued in bursts from August until mid-October.

The Quai d’Orsay and the embassies were very busy. Jacques Dumaine, the
chef de protocole,
was continually going out to Le Bourget or Orly to meet distinguished visitors. He summed up the diplomatic contest at that time in terms of a poker game: ‘We do not know if Stalin is playing poker with good cards and unlimited funds; but we can only realize that his American opponents are standing and that the British cannot double their stakes.’ His wife was about to have a baby and he worried about what life held in store for their child with a future ‘full of foreboding’.

On 24 April, Dumaine was at Orly to greet James Byrnes, the Secretary of State, with the American delegation, which included Senator Tom Connally and Senator Vandenberg. ‘After twenty-four hours on the aeroplane they still managed to look their normal, cheerful, well-shaven selves, while their wives appeared as fresh as ever with their orchids.’ That afternoon, Dumaine had to wait at Le Bourget for Molotov, who arrived ‘looking neat and scrubbed like a country doctor. His expression is hesitant and relatively gentle, but his actions are distrustful and forbidding.’

Ernest Bevin arrived the following morning and the first meeting of the Four took place late that afternoon in the Palais du Luxembourg, now almost entirely repaired.

The conference opened far more smoothly than most people had expected, but after a week or so became bogged down in the usual fashion. Some issues were more interesting, such as what to do with the former Italian colonies, including Libya and Cyrenaica. Bevin wanted to give them complete independence, but the French were alarmed at the effect that this might have on their own North African colonies. Molotov then retreated from an agreement he had made on Italy the previous September and Byrnes became very angry. As it was the 1 May public holiday, Bevin, acting as chairman, insisted on a break. ‘The next item,’ he announced, ‘is a half-holiday which will be passed unanimously.’

The break did little to unblock the accumulating log-jam of differences. ‘Agreement was reached on one subject,’ the British ambassador recorded testily the next day, ‘the future of the Pelagosa and Pianosa islands, which contain one lighthouse and no inhabitants.’ Duff Cooper was in a bad mood because his new love, Gloria Rubio, had just had to fly to New York at short notice. It was also almost impossible to remain awake after heavy official lunches. Bevin, who had noticed Duff Cooper drop off to sleep, said, ‘Tell Duff I’ll call him if anything happens’, then added to those around him, ‘He’s the most sensible man in the room. It’s all a waste of time.’

The real nightmare of such conferences were the huge banquets, such as the one given for the delegates at the Sorbonne. The
place-à-table
always seemed to ensure that large numbers of people had neighbours with whom they shared no common language. Madame Bidault had to talk to Molotov through an interpreter sitting behind them. ‘I had Mme Duhamel on my left,’ wrote Duff Cooper, ‘who is always very nice and pleasant to talk to. She had Guroff, the Russian ambassador in London, the other side of her, who knows a little English but no French and with whom she couldn’t exchange a word… Mrs Bevin, opposite me, was between Dr Roussy, president of the Sorbonne, and Thorez, neither of whom could say a word that she could understand.’

As well as the official round there was also a semi-official round, prompted partly by the large number of newspaper proprietors and editors attracted to Paris. Some wielded enormous influence, often without the knowledge to use it well. Henry Luce, founder of
Time
magazine, was a shy man, ill at ease and sentimental. ‘Luce is a queer duck,’ wrote David Bruce on a subsequent occasion. ‘He gives the impression that he soaks up what one is saying without becoming mentally wetted by it. His youthful missionary background and his later enormous influence and affluence, combined with other factors, have complicated his personality. He appears driven by ambition and fanaticism to extremes of judgement.’ Henry Luce came round to the British Embassy, where he met Louise de Vilmorin and promptly fell ‘madly in love with her’. Duff Cooper was very amused, but he had more sympathy for Henry Luce than for Luce’s wife, Clare. Caffery had brought her over to the British Embassy after dinner in the first winter after the Liberation. ‘She is as pretty as ever,’ he wrote then, ‘and as self-satisfied, as tiresome, and as foolish.’ He had much more time for Mrs Ogden Reid, wife of the proprietor of the
New York Herald Tribune
and the real controller of the newspaper. ‘Mrs O.R. is a very sensible and well-balanced woman. She is what America has best to offer at the present time – and that is very good. Her husband is a drunken jackass and brays like one.’

At the conference table, self-fulfilling suspicions were developing rapidly on both sides. Whenever the Americans stood up to Stalin over breaches of the Yalta agreement, he feared their confidence was based on a secret plan to use the atom bomb. He ignored the massive demobilization of their forces across the world.

At the same time, the Americans underestimated Stalin’s paranoia and therefore misjudged his obsession with establishing a protective
cordon sanitaire
round the Soviet Union. They assumed that his moves towards controlling those countries of Central Europe and the Balkans occupied by the Red Army were motivated entirely by ideological imperialism. His refusal on 1 March to withdraw troops from northern Iran, within striking distance of the oilfields, was defensive in the context of his paranoid mentality.

Five days after the 1 March deadline, Churchill made his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. The reaction of the American press and public was unfavourable at the time. Truman refused to be drawn into the ensuing debate, though he and senior officials in the United States government were already starting to think along similar lines. They had been strongly influenced by George Kennan, the Kremlinologist at their Moscow Embassy. He had sent a long telegram analysing the Soviet threat, which was a prelude to the policy of containment which he elaborated the following year.

In Paris the Turkish ambassador, a shrewd observer, said that the Russian failure to evacuate Persia as agreed ‘was an irretrievable mistake because it resulted in the Americans developing a foreign policy’. It may not have actually developed the policy, but it certainly concentrated minds upon it. This would lead to the so-called Truman Doctrine in the spring of 1947, when America took over responsibility for the defence of Greece and Turkey on the collapse of British power in the region.

There are much stronger grounds for tracing the development of the Cold War to Germany, which, even in its ruined and occupied state, remained the focus of Stalin’s nightmares. George Kennan acknowledged that Russia’s fears were understandable, in view of her terrible history of invasion by Mongol, Pole, Swede and French, as well as the two waves of German occupation within the last thirty years.

Duff Cooper, who sympathized with the French fear of Germany – which was inevitably similar to that of the Soviet Union – was alarmed to hear in late May that the British chiefs of staff wanted ‘a strong Germany to fight Russia’. Two years before, when still in Algiers, he had submitted a plan for a European bloc based on Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He had vigorously pushed the idea; but Anthony Eden, terrified of upsetting Stalin, had opposed it. Cooper argued that at the end of the war the Russians would not be afraid of a Western European bloc. What terrified Stalin was the idea of a Western bloc dominated by the Americans and linked to a reconstructed Germany.

The French had started to harbour well-grounded suspicions that American and British service chiefs wanted to build up Germany. These hardened in June 1946, following articles by Walter Lippman and a speech by Ernest Bevin. The French were very uneasy about developments in Germany. Renseignements Généraux had recently reported ‘
une certaine nervosité
’ between Anglo-Saxons and Russians in Berlin.

The Soviet Union kept an even closer watch on developments in the three western zones of Germany. Ponomarev’s department was given a special responsibility for this. One striking point emerges from Ponomarev’s paper to Molotov and Malenkov on the subject: the French Communist Party was of interest at this time only because it might influence events in Germany. The Kremlin complained that despite having eight posts in the government, the French Communist Party ‘has not taken any steps to change the policy of the French occupation authorities’ which ‘protect fascist and reactionary elements’. Clearly the Kremlin failed to appreciate the fact that the French Communists had little control over the French army.

The conference of foreign ministers resumed in mid-June, with James Byrnes in residence at the Meurice and Ernest Bevin at the George V. Almost immediately, the conference was thrown into panic by reports from Washington that the Red Army was going to take over Trieste and then advance westwards across northern Italy towards southern France. Even Bevin felt inclined to believe the story, because Molotov had been in such a strange mood that day. This flutter of nerves coincided with de Gaulle’s speech at Bayeux.

Despite this dramatic start, Molotov’s perpetual stalling slowed proceedings until Bevin and Byrnes developed a guillotine tactic to bring things to a conclusion. Byrnes was to be chairman and he would insist either upon the immediate settlement of each outstanding subject or else its relegation to the peace conference. Despite the scepticism of many, the plan cooked up by Byrnes and Bevin to accelerate business worked and invitations were issued to the sixteen nations who were to convene for the full conference in August.

During that diplomatic summer, the centre of Paris had started to lose the look of wartime privation. The bicycle-powered
vélo-taxis
were a conveyance of the past. Five thousand proper taxis were now available in Paris. Before, only people with a government pass or a doctor’s certificate could use one. Now they were available to anybody who could afford the hefty fare. In the Tuileries gardens, children enjoyed rides on donkeys, or in little carts pulled by goats with jingling harnesses. Baby-carriages had also reappeared, having taken a considerable battering during the Occupation, when they were used for the transport of everything fromlogs and coal to turnips.

The great hit of the season was the musical
Auprès de ma blonde,
with Yvonne Printemps and her husband, Pierre Fresnay. It was a sophisticated comedy of family manners – with lavish costumes by Lanvin – working backwards in time from the 1930s to the
belle époque
of the 1890s.

As August approached, the centre of Paris became almost empty with the departure of 750,000 Parisians on summer holiday – a further sign of the gradual return to normality. The influx of foreigners was not entirely due to the conference. The Golden Arrow train service, from Victoria Station in London to the Gare du Nord, had been resumed in April; and an air terminal had been opened at the Invalides, heralding a new era of travel.

The great assembly of diplomats and journalists from around the world provided trade for more than hotels and restaurants and nightclubs. Nancy Mitford wrote to one of her sisters: ‘I’m told the
maquereaux
[pimps] stop the Peace Conference people practically as they leave the Luxembourg and offer them
l’Amour Atomique
. Aren’t they heaven?’

The entertainment circuit swung into action once again. On 9 August, Bogomolov gave a party for Molotov with ‘more class distinction than ever’. The top thirty guests were ushered into ‘a
cul-de-sac
room shut tightly against all others’ with Molotov and the Americans and British ‘cracking jokes over the vodka’ like the members of ‘an exclusive gentlemen’s club’, until Vyshinsky spoilt the impression by getting extremely drunk.

The following day Cy Sulzberger organized a lunch in honour of Senator Tom Connally in a private room at La Rue’s. He asked Mrs Connally for suggestions about possible menus. It appeared that there was only one: dry martinis, steak, French fries. Sulzberger also invited Raymond Offroy from the Quai d’Orsay. “‘Old Tawm” cheered up a bit with the cocktails,’ Sulzberger wrote later, ‘but still seemed somewhat sulky, although looking most impressive with his black string tie and white mane of hair.’ When ‘a real steak’ arrived, he ‘warmed perceptibly. After a few munches he turned to me solemnly and asked: “Cy, where’s Westphalia?”