Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (41 page)

Those with peasant relatives not too far from Paris stood a much better chance of obtaining provisions. The less fortunate needed all their wits to survive. As during the Occupation, you had to resort to ‘
le Système D
’ – the D standing for
débrouiller,
getting yourself out of trouble by any means necessary. This encompassed everything from raising rabbits and hens to dealing on the black market, selling items stolen from work and, above all, avoiding the cash economy. Almost everyone exchanged goods and services. Prostitutes, garage mechanics, plumbers and artisans rarely received payment in cash. Even factory workers were often given produce from the factory in lieu of wages. It was not surprising that the government had such trouble in collecting taxes.

Penury afflicted those on fixed incomes as well as industrial workers. Outside the Ritz, the wife of an American diplomat who threw away a half-smoked cigarette was deeply embarrassed to see a well-dressed old man pounce upon it. There was even a trade in cigarette butts, sold in tens. Those on low salaries defended themselves as best they could. Conductors on overcrowded trains required a tip if they were to find you a seat, a practice which provoked members of the middle class to complain that this was extortion.

Certain shopkeepers, especially butchers, were notorious for increasing their profits by holding back supplies and offering them to richer customers. ‘If you want some entrecôte, Madame, there is some –
au prix fort
.’ At Barbizon, outside Paris, half a dozen of the best properties were bought up by butchers. One butcher, visiting a house for sale, offered 3.5 million francs in used notes on condition that the owners were out by the next day. In January 1946, the Minister of Supply ordered the Prefect of Police to arrest four leading members of the Syndicat de la Boucherie, but this was little more than a gesture.

The greatest scandal of all, at a time when the wine ration was only three litres per adult per month, concerned the disappearance of large quantities of wine imported by the Ministry of Supply from Algeria. As usual, the law-abiding saw little wine, while everyone else profited – fromthose who registered at several wine shops to multiply their ration, or kept a dead relative on the books (‘The dead generally take their drink dry,’ remarked the secretary-general of the Confédération des Agriculteurs), right up to the major wholesalers, who are alleged to have made huge profits selling the produce abroad. The Minister of Supply, Yves Farge, sacked all forty members of the directorate dealing with wine, but their faults probably stemmed more from inexperience than deliberate wrongdoing. The
épuration administrative
had removed many competent officials; their places had often been taken by candidates with a good Resistance record but little aptitude for the job.

The affair grew fast, implicating more and more prominent names from the Socialist Party until even the former Prime Minister, Félix Gouin, was dragged into it. The only people who really benefited from the great wine scandal of 1946 were the press, who had a field day.*

Almost everyone caught with black-market produce claimed that he was the father of a large family and was just trying to feed his starving little ones. Many no doubt spoke the truth, but at least half the population seemed to be pilfering or dealing in one form or another. A gang of schoolboys at the Lycée Condorcet – their chief was thirteen and a half years old – was found to be buying chewing gum in bulk from the Americans and selling it at huge profits. The group’s treasurer was caught with 10,000 francs on him.

Nobody stuck scrupulously to their own trade when they could get hold of something else to resell ‘
au prix fort
’. Galtier-Boissière’s barber offered him American chocolate for 800 francs. A couple of days later his wife, Charlotte, told himthat she had at last managed to get hold of some fish.

‘Where was that?’

‘At the butcher I go to.’

Those with good connections in the catering trade always managed to survive. During the Occupation, for example, Roland Petit’s ballet troupe, whose star was Zizi Jeanmaire, were fed free at the restaurant in Les Halles owned by Petit’s father, who was immensely proud of his son’s success. Diplomats, senior officers and officials with cars and a petrol allowance found a farmer as their regular supplier, and drove out at weekends to buy supplies of eggs and butter and perhaps a ham. They did not even bother to hide their purchases because cars, especially official vehicles, were seldom stopped.

Diplomats certainly did not undergo any hardships. ‘I’m suffering today from a baby hangover,’ wrote one guest after a party at the Turkish Embassy. ‘The Turk did us proud – the board over-groaned. I would have been ashamed “
en pleine révolution
”, for that is how these days are referred to here – to show such langoustes, such pink foie gras – oysters in such quantities – only wings and breasts of chicken floating in a Turkish cream of nuts.’

A few people were shamelessly flippant about the situation. Noël Coward described in his diary a dinner for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: ‘I gave them a delicious dinner: consommé, marrow on toast, grilled langouste, tournedos with sauce béarnaise, and chocolate soufflé. Poor starving France.’ Some found such attitudes hard to forgive. Yves Montand, singing in Le Club des Cinq, was so angered when a customer just below the stage ordered a whole lobster, picked at it, then ground out his cigar in the half-eaten carcass, that he punched him.

Resentment was fuelled because there were three sets of rules, one for the poor, one for the rich and another for the Americans and British. Smart Parisians with places in the country were able to supplement the tiny meat ration by bringing back game to the city. Since few deer had been culled after the surrender of firearms under the Occupation, large supplies of venison were available provided you could lay hands on ammunition. Every shot had to count, since the ration was twenty cartridges a year. A woman in Paris was overjoyed to discover two boxes of pre-war cartridges under a pile of books in her attic. She was able to convert these, via a complicated barter with a friend who was a first-class shot, into ‘two pheasants, a kilo of butter and a roast of veal’.

The British and Americans were even more privileged in the winter of 1946, with the black-market rate reaching 250 francs to the dollar and 1,000 to the pound sterling. This was at a time when a housekeeper-cum-cook could be found for 2,500 francs a month. A number of diplomats and journalists made honourable attempts to have nothing to do with the black market. The daughter of Cy and Marina Sulzberger was not even allowed to play with the children of parents who resorted to it. Bill Patten forbade any use of the black market in his household. He explained to their cook, Madame Vallet, how to toast K ration biscuits. As soon as he had left, she went straight to Susan Mary and informed her flatly that they must use the black market, but Monsieur need not know about it.

The pressure to succumb was overwhelming when almost everybody else accepted that under
le Système D
rules were there to be broken. When Susan Mary Patten went to an employment agency to hire a maid, the
patronne
immediately said with a gleam in her eye, ‘
Naturellement Madame aura les provisions de l’armée américaine
.’ The significance of US army rations had been obvious from the beginning, even though they came in inconvenient quantities once every six weeks – huge cans of processed vegetables, fruit juice, bacon, powdered egg and army powdered milk known as Klim. There was little choice, but for the French it was like treasure at a time when one grapefruit cost the equivalent of four days’ pay for a skilled worker. Susan Mary Patten’s housekeeper ‘caressed the cans, almost crying’.

In the autumn of 1946, prostitutes had an even greater need to resort to
le Système D
. To the horror of men and most of the medical profession, brothels became illegal.

Paris brothels were sometimes known as
maisons d’illusions,
the sort of euphemism which foreigners had come to expect of the city. The more technical definitions were
maisons de tolérance,
where the prostitutes lived, ate and worked; and
maisons de rendez-vous,
where ‘the women come to work as prostitutes usually during the afternoon’.

The police vice squad – the Service des Moeurs – was responsible for enforcing the many regulations. Windows and shutters were to be kept closed; on the ground and first floors, the shutters had to be solid wood, not louvred; each inmate had to be registered with the police and in possession of an up-to-date medical card, or
carnet sanitaire
; and inspections had to be carried out twice a week by a designated doctor.

On 13 April 1946, the new law outlawing brothels was passed, to take effect on 6 October. One of the principal motives behind this measure had nothing to do with morals or with health. Marthe Ricard, a councillor of the Ville de Paris and one of the MRP candidates elected to the Constituent Assembly, had in fact introduced the bill ordering the expropriation of brothels and their conversion for use by impecunious students. There was a desperate shortage of accommodation for students in Paris, but this only complicated the debate over the advantages and disadvantages of registered brothels.

The main battle seems to have focused on the medical question. If official brothels were suppressed, then the 7,000 registered prostitutes would simply swell the number of ‘clandestines’ out on the streets, and disease would spread rapidly. But most of those who supported the measure did so because they found the old system – under which ‘
les pouvoirs publics organisaient la prostitution
’ – morally reprehensible and open to police abuse.

For many traditionalists, the legislation was tantamount to an attack on French culture. Pierre Mac Orlan said, ‘It’s the foundation of a thousand-year-old civilization which is collapsing.’

Galtier-Boissière was another with a nostalgia for the gossip and banter of brothel life. His favourite
maisons de tolérance
were in the rue Sainte-Apolline and the rue Blondel, and included Aux Belles Poules (one of the ones on the list provided for American troops) and Aux Belles Japonaises. He used to take the painter Jean Oberlé and Claude Blanchard, his great friends and colleagues on the
Crapouillot
magazine, with him. They were much less enchanted than their bear-leader, who was fascinated by Paris’s underworld –
le Milieu
– and used these sorties to gather colour and dialogue for a novel. ‘In most of these brothels,’ wrote Oberlé, ‘the inmates struck me as ghastly in appearance, violently made-up, and their gaudy silk shifts camouflaged what were in most cases sad bodies.’

Oberlé and Blanchard were much happier accompanying Galtier-Boissière to the rougher
bals musette
– to the As de Coeur in the rue des Vertus, to La Java in the Faubourg du Temple and to the Petit Balcon in the rue de Lappe. The three men would find a table and order one of the staple drinks – a
diabolo-menthe
or a glass of acidic white wine. After the end of each dance, while the musicians rested for a moment, the
patron
would shout out: ‘
Passons la monnaie!
’ and go round to collect the coins, dropping them in a bag round his waist. Once he had made the collection, he would call up to the three musicians in their balcony – accordionist, banjo player and harpist: ‘
Allez, roulez!
’ And off the couples would go in another waltz or a java. Prostitutes taking a break from their pitch on the street would push past the tables to dance a few circuits of the well-waxed parquet floor purely for pleasure, not to find custom.

Any illusion in the summer of 1946 that France had come through the worst was shattered a few months later, during a winter often described as the worst of the century. For many, the memory of the cold far outlasted memories of hunger. The disastrous shortages of heating fuel – some areas received only a third or a quarter of their allocation – left schools as well as offices unheated. Children had such bad chilblains that they could not write, and secretaries in the Quai d’Orsay could only type wearing mittens. Nancy Mitford was unable to work at home. She wrote to Gaston Palewski – the telephones were not functioning – begging three or four logs because her hands were so cold she could hardly hold a pen. ‘Every breath is like a sword,’ she wrote to one of her sisters.

In the need to cut electricity consumption, all illuminated signs were forbidden, shop windows left unlit and streetlights turned off arbitrarily. In fact so little warning was given of power cuts that, in hospitals, surgeons in mid-operation frequently found themselves abandoned in darkness.

Once again connections helped, even when unintended. Susan Mary Patten was deeply embarrassed when an American general, having noticed a chilblain on one of her fingers during a dinner at the Windsors’ overheated house, sent round the next morning a work party of German prisoners of war to unload a truck of coal for her.

The vicious circle continued. Blizzards halted coal production and trains bringing fuel. Pipes froze, burst, poured forth and refroze in huge icicles. ‘I never saw anything like the burst pipes in this town,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to her sister Diana, ‘every house a waterfall.’

Each morning dozens of small children, well wrapped up except for their knees blue above thick socks, set off to buy milk, clutching metal billycans. The threat of tuberculosis meant that the milk was boiled in a huge metal vat set up in the
laiterie,
and the shopkeeper poured the steaming milk ration into the can with a ladle which held exactly one litre.

*

Rationing in times of great shortages will always create a black market and there are all too many examples of its counter-productive effects in France. One of the most shocking could be found in Brittany fishing ports, where trawler owners could make more money from selling their allocation of fuel on the black market than by sending their boats to sea.