Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (45 page)

It is astonishing that Jacques Duclos, a veteran of the Comintern, did not perceive the full implications of Zhdanov’s speech. When called upon to speak, his account of the French Communist Party’s activities since the Liberation was complacent in the extreme. Zhdanov left the ritual humiliation of the French Communist Party to the Yugoslav delegation of Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas. Duclos was horrified at the depth of the trap into which he had fallen. His only chance was to grovel without hesitation.

The point of the conference was already clear. Zhdanov, on Stalin’s orders, was setting up a neo-Comintern, to be called the Cominform, to mobilize foreign Communist parties to defend the Soviet Union against a reconstituted Germany and the economic backing to an American hegemony in Europe – the ‘Plan Truman–Marshall’. ‘France has sacrificed half of its autonomy,’ claimed Zhdanov, ‘because the credits offered it by the United States in March 1947 were conditional upon the elimination of the Communists from the government.’ * France and England were therefore ‘the victims of American blackmail’.

Zhdanov quoted their leader. ‘Comrade Stalin has said: “In short, the policy of the Soviet Union to the German problem boils down to the demilitarization and the democratization of Germany. These are the most important conditions for installing a lasting and solid peace.” This policy of the Soviet Union towards Germany meets the frenetic resistance of the imperialist circles in the United States and England. America has broken with Roosevelt’s old course and is switching to a new policy – to a policy of preparing new military adventures.’

Duclos returned to Paris shaken and angry. Soon after his arrival, a meeting of the French politburo was called to discuss the débâcle. Duclos summed up the conclusions: ‘Zhdanov said that whether Communists were in government or in opposition was a problem of no interest, and we had been far too preoccupied with it. The only objective is to destroy the capitalist economy and systematically to unify the living forces of the nation. In future the Kremlin will be completely indifferent to whether or not Communists are in or out of government, but all parties must fight against economic aid from the United States. He also insisted on the need to destabilize the government.’

Thorez must have had to suppress a grim smile when remembering Stalin’s personal instruction in late 1944 not to rock de Gaulle’s boat, and the subsequent approval of their policy from Ponomarev. But he, like Duclos, was too old a hand to complain. There was no time to be wasted. The whole of the French party had to be turned round. Even if they won in the next elections, they could not even contemplate entering government, because it would ‘look too much like a compromise’.

The Cominform was to be based in Belgrade ‘to avoid problems’, such as the ‘calumny’ that the Kremlin controlled foreign Communist parties and the ‘lie’ that the new organization was simply the old Comintern under fresh colours. This plan did not last long – Tito was pronounced a heretic the following year – but the basic arrangements, especially the newly tightened control over foreign Communist parties, were unaffected. ‘Information on attack groups, training schools for cadres and arms depots will be collated there [in Belgrade],’ stated the Kremlin report. ‘Paris and Rome can put forward their proposals but they must follow the decisions taken by the Cominform in Belgrade. Duclos underlined the importance of this, because Moscow will completely control the activity of the French Communist Party.’

To comply with the order to prepare for clandestine activity, if not civil war, Auguste Lecoeur received orders from Thorez to make all necessary arrangements. Lock-up garages were acquired, as well as vehicles which could not be traced to any member of the party. Secret printing presses and radio transmitters were obtained or reconditioned. Groups with expert engravers were told to start preparing sets of identity papers, passports and ration books. Weapons hidden since the autumn of 1944 were dug up and oiled.

Most people remained untouched, ignorant of such dangers, but some hint tainted the atmosphere. Koestler and Mamaine Paget returned to Paris at the end of September, just when the Cominform was meeting in Poland. On the evening of 1 October 1947, they met André Malraux and his wife, Madeleine, in the bar of the Plaza-Athénée, which, according to Mamaine, was ‘full of glamorous demi-mondaines in extravagant clothes’. Malraux, after much indecision, decided to take them to the Auberge d’Armailhès. There they ate caviar and blinis and
soufflé sibérien,
and drank vodka. Malraux became rather drunk. He told them ‘that in using his reputation as a man of the Left to help the reactionaries he was taking a big gamble, in which he believed he would succeed; but if he didn’t (i.e. if de Gaulle, once in power, did not act as Malraux thought he should) he would feel he had betrayed the working class and there would be nothing left for him but to
se faire sauter la cervelle
. When K. said “What about the General’s entourage?” Malraux replied “
L’entourage du Général, c’est moi
.” We thought this rather silly, but were later told that Malraux is in fact the only man who dares to give de Gaulle advice, who sees his speeches before he makes them, etc.’

Exactly a week later, Albert Camus and his wife, Francine, gave a picnic dinner for Koestler and Mamaine. Everyone brought food and drink. Koestler, with his compulsive generosity, which could seem ostentatious, brought a cold roast chicken, a lobster and champagne for the others, and shrimps and clams for himself and Mamaine. They were accompanied by Mamaine’s twin sister, Celia, and the American journalist Harold Kaplan. The other guests were Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Koestler, who had seen little of Sartre since the attack on his book in
Les Temps modernes
the previous autumn, could not resist another skirmish. When Harold Kaplan left, Sartre attacked the American as ‘anti-semitic and anti-negro and anti-liberty’. Koestler was so furious ‘that he let fly at Sartre and said who are you to talk about liberty, when for years you’ve run a magazine which was
communisant,
and thus condoned the deportation of millions of people from the Baltic states?’ According to Mamaine Paget, ‘Sartre was a bit taken aback by this, and as the atmosphere had anyway become intolerable we left.’

Koestler wrote a letter of apology to Sartre the next morning. He ‘received in return a long letter in his small, neat hand, which was both endearing and characteristic’. Yet as events soon showed, Sartre’s friendships, partly as a result of Simone de Beauvoir’s influence, could not transcend politics.

Koestler’s dislike for Simone de Beauvoir became intense: ‘At times she reminded me of the
tricoteuses
.’ On his return to Wales, he decided to write an article on Parisian intellectuals ‘in which Le Petit Vieux Ivan Pavelitch, leader of the Existenchiks, and Simona Castorovna and other friends play their parts’.

Yet Sartre himself still stood out against the Communists. In the July issue of
Les Temps modernes
he had written: ‘Stalinist policy is incompatible with an honest approach to the literary profession.’ The Communist attacks on him even encouraged Ramadier’s government to offer the editorial board of
Les Temps modernes
a weekly programme on the radio. But a scathing satire on the Gaullists after the RPF enjoyed a sensational victory in October at the municipal elections caused a bitter row. Some suggested that Sartre should be imprisoned, but de Gaulle, who had a French respect for ideas, replied, ‘
On n’embastille pas Voltaire
.’ The most angry of all the General’s entourage was André Malraux: he was determined to take revenge.

*

De Gaulle did not hide his disdain for Ramadier’s coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats, which became known as the Third Force because it stood between Gaullism on the right and Communism on the left. He rather hoped for a general strike, which he was certain would cause the collapse needed to persuade the country to call him back to power. His ‘
égocentrisme vertigineux
’, as Claude Mauriac described it, seemed to be reinforced by the success his Rassemblement was enjoying. His speech at an RPF rally at Vincennes on 5 October, an attack on Soviet dictatorship, was reported back to Washington as ‘a spectacular success’ – an opinion widely shared.

Other RPF meetings were less decorous, especially when held in working-class areas. Gaston Palewski had ‘a wonderful new tease for the Communists,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Diana Mosley. ‘He makes the chief agitator come on to the platform and then says now I only want to ask one question –
si les blindés russes envahissaient la France
[if Russian tanks were to invade France] would you fight to defend
le territoire
? So the poor
type
doesn’t know what to reply and it always ends up in a free fight!’ On 17 October, when a Socialist yelled at Thorez that he was a deserter, the burly ex-miner punched him hard in the face and then left his bodyguards to continue the thrashing.

The greatest triumph for the RPF came with the results of the municipal elections on Sunday, 19 October. Rassemblement candidates won 38 per cent of the vote against the Communist Party’s 30 per cent. The Socialists achieved only 19 per cent. Such a result, compounded by an even greater swing to Gaullist candidates in the second round, lifted conservative hearts.

A few days later, at lunch at the Escargot, Duff Cooper and Louise de Vilmorin heard the latest news of the Rassemblement from Malraux, who told them that the Gaullists were ‘very pleased with the story that when the results of last Sunday’s elections were coming out on the radio [the General] switched it off and played patience’.

Whatever the Gaullist successes, the real struggle was developing between the Communist Party and the CGT on one side and the government on the other. The Communist objective was to destroy the French economy before the Marshall Plan could be made to work.

Britain, which still had the commitments of a world power, reached the point of bankruptcy in October; and Europe as a whole faced ruin that winter after the drought and disastrous harvest. The question for many, ever since Vyshinsky had accused the Americans and the British of preparing to fight, was not whether the Marshall Plan would have a chance to work, but whether the third world war would break out first. Madame de Gaulle timidly broke into a lunch-time discussion to suggest that there might be an enemy parachute drop round Colombey-les-deux-Églises in the first few hours of hostilities.

Almost all gatherings in Paris that autumn had a nervous edge. ‘People talk only of the imminence of war!’ wrote Roger Martin du Gard to André Gide, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. ‘People don’t doubt that it will happen, they only discuss how soon it will start. It is hard to react against this atmosphere of inevitable catastrophe!’ Offcials and ambassadors at parties found themselves buttonholed by frightened women and men who asked how many days it would take the Russians to reach the Channel ports or the Pyrenees.

Cold War fever had affected both sides of the Atlantic. It was depressing, wrote Duff Cooper to the British Foreign Secretary, but not surprising, that even Bidault should be catching it, ‘when supposedly responsible people, such as the American Senator Bridges, shout down the dinner table at the American Embassy – “Say, Monsieur Bidault, we want to know what you’re going to do when we drop our first atomic egg on Moscow.”’

The unrest which France had experienced in the summer of 1947 appeared minor by the autumn. On 28 October, a pitched battle took place in the streets round the Salle Wagram near the Place de l’Étoile. Anti-Communists organized a meeting in the hall – used until quite recently by GIs for Tuesday dances – to denounce Stalin’s crimes. Some 10,000 Communist counter-demonstrators advanced to attack. But large forces of police, gendarmerie and CRS riot squads managed to maintain their cordon round the area. The heavy fighting left one killed and 300 injured, including Communist municipal councillors and mayors. The police were almost as tough in their treatment of press photographers and newsreel teams.

That day had also seen a stormy session in the Assembly. Jacques Duclos had accused the government of being Pétainist valets of the United States. ‘It was a remarkable parliamentary performance,’ wrote one observer. ‘He succeeded in goading everybody else to fury while remaining perfectly calm himself.’

Two weeks later, Marseilles erupted in riots. The Communists, exploiting a rise in tramfares, led an all-out attack on the new Gaullist mayor, Maître Carlini, the winner in the municipal elections. The law courts were sacked by a mob intent on releasing prisoners arrested in earlier demonstrations. The crowds then converged on the Hôtel de Ville, which they took by storm, and proceeded to beat up Carlini. Things were so bad that Gaston Defferre, the Socialist baron of the city, did not dare go out in a car without a sub-machine-gun on his lap.

On 17 November, the mining regions of the north and the Pas-de-Calais came out on strike, demanding pay rises to catch up with inflation. Within five days every coalfield in France had been closed down. The situation was equally volatile in Paris and its suburbs. Metalworkers, including those at Renault, came out on strike in the middle of November, demanding a 25 per cent pay increase. De Gaulle warned his entourage that the franc would collapse. There was only one consolation for the government. The purges of the Paris police seemed to have worked. Depreux felt confident enough to send them in to clear the Citroën works occupied by strikers.

De Gaulle became increasingly convinced that his return to power was at hand. Ramadier’s government of Socialists and Christian Democrats seemed to be cracking up, so the General tried to treat the municipal election results as a referendumwhich had produced a vote of confidence in the Rassemblement. He demanded the dissolution of the Assembly and a general election. But this only strengthened the determination of the Socialists and the MRP to resist him.