Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (49 page)

The Tabou’s meteoric rise was matched by the speed of its fall. Complaints to the authorities about the noise and disturbance grew. The club was obliged to close at midnight and soon it was attracting more tourists than
Germano-pratins
. The great period of the Tabou had lasted less than a year, but its effect spread. Imitation Tabou clubs sprang up in different parts of France, from Toulouse in the south-west to Charleville in the Ardennes.

Other clubs soon appeared in Paris to take the Tabou’s place. Marc Doelnitz was commissioned to decorate and launch the Vieux-Colombier in the cellar of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. And in June 1948, the Club Saint-Germain opened. Boris Vian joined Marc Doelnitz in making the Club Saint-Germain the newest attraction. All the great jazzmen passing through Paris – including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis – came as Vian’s guests.

By the summer of 1948, the tourist invasion of Saint-Germain was well and truly under way. The curious came to the Café Flore and asked to see the table of Monsieur Sartre (who had long since fled to the bar of the Pont-Royal). Janet Flanner described the place as ‘a drugstore for pretty up-state girls in unbecoming blue denim pants and their Middle Western dates, most of whom are growing hasty Beaux-Arts beards’.

That autumn, left bank and right bank met in a new venture, the ballet
La Rencontre,
which began playing to packed houses at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This told the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx: choreography by Lichine, music by Henri Sauguet and programme notes by Sartre. The ballet was set in a huge shadowy circus, and had one of the last sets completed by Bérard before his death early the next year. The Sphinx, on a high platform under a trapeze, was played by the seventeen-year-old Leslie Caron, wearing a black body-stocking; the performance launched her career.

Another modern adaptation of Greek tragedy was attempted in a film by Alexandre Astruc, called
Ulysse, ou les mauvaises rencontres
. It was filmed in the Vieux-Colombier theatre, in the cold, foggy months of 1948, and the list of participants is a tribute to a time when successful people were prepared to take part in an adventure simply because it appealed to them as curious or amusing. Jean Cocteau played Homer, Simone Signoret was Penelope to Marc Doelnitz’s Ulysses, and Juliette Gréco was Circe. Jean Genet was to have been the Cyclops, but he pulled out and Astruc was obliged to take the role himself. There were no rehearsals and ‘Astruc was the only one who understood what was going on’.

Gréco had not yet sung professionally and still thought of herself as an actress. Yet Anne-Marie Cazalis was convinced that she should sing and said so to Sartre as they were walking back after dinner one night. Sartre laughed and said: ‘If she wants to sing, then she should sing.’

Gréco was walking in front of them. Irritated by this exchange, she said over her shoulder that she had no intention of becoming a singer. Sartre asked why not, to which Gréco replied: ‘I don’t know how to sing, and also I don’t like the songs that one hears on the radio.’

‘Well, if you don’t like them, what sort do you like?’

She mentioned the names of Agnès Capri and Yves Montand. Sartre had the last word. ‘Come round to me at nine tomorrow morning.’

The next morning when Gréco arrived at the rue Bonaparte, Sartre had looked out a pile of poetry books for her. Among the poems she chose were ‘
C’est bien connu
’ by Queneau and ‘
L’éternel féminin
’ by Jules Laforgue. Sartre also gave her a song he had written for
Huis clos
. He told her to visit the composer Joseph Kosma, who lived in the rue de l’Université. Kosma wrote the music for the Queneau poem (renamed ‘
Si tu t’imagines
’), for ‘
L’éternel féminin
’ and for Sartre’s poem ‘
La rue des blancs manteaux
’. These were to be among the songs for which Juliette Gréco is still remembered – along with her rendering of Prévert’s ‘
Les Feuilles mortes
’, also set to music by Kosma.

At about the same time, Marc Doelnitz had been asked to resuscitate the most famous Parisian cabaret from between the wars, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. The Occupation, the rise of Saint-Germain and the death of its creator, Louis Moyses, had left it almost defunct.

Doelnitz hired a dancer, a singer and a trombone player, but what he needed was a star. There were no funds to hire Edith Piaf, Yves Montand or Charles Trenet, so he decided to risk all on creating one: Juliette Gréco. Gréco had many recommendations apart from a good voice. She had so often featured in the popular press that people stopped her in the street and asked for her autograph, and – perhaps what Doelnitz relied on most – she had an unconscious magnetism.

The irony is that when Gréco found success as a singer, it was not in Saint-Germain-des-Prés but on the right bank in the rue du Colisée, off the Champs-Élysées. She had only a few days’ rehearsal and her first-night nerves were immeasurably intensified by the fact that
le tout Saint-Germain
had crossed the river to applaud her début. The next night was the real test, because the audience was exclusively
rive droite
. Juliette Gréco had made no concessions to the conventional idea of how a female entertainer should dress: she wore black trousers, her bare feet slipped into golden sandals. The ladies of the audience in their little feathered hats were affronted: ‘Is it done to show oneself in public dressed like that?’ Yet even they were seduced and walked out into the night humming ‘
Si tu t’imagines
’.

To some, Gréco’s move to the right bank seemed like a defection. She did not in fact stay there long. Within a few weeks she was in the South of France with Claude Luter’s band. By the end of 1949 the great days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés were over; nevertheless, the party had been memorable. ‘In Paris, perhaps one needs a war to launch a
quartier,
’ remarked Jacques Prévert.

The year 1948 was the most dramatically dangerous of the Cold War. Today, after the sudden collapse of Soviet power, it is increasingly hard to imagine the fear people felt of a new world war and another occupation, this time by the Red Army. Events had accelerated in such a way that, for many, the Marxist-Leninist claim of historical inevitability began to appear invincible.

Nancy Mitford might have laughed at the Windsors in 1946 for advising people to put their jewels in a safe place and get out of France, but in March 1948 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh in a very different mood. She was convinced that the Russians would invade at any moment. ‘Unable to be angry with them, I am quite simply frightened. I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children, I can take a pill and say goodbye.’

After the collapse of the strikes, the French Communist Party prepared to go underground again. Auguste Lecoeur, the miners’ young leader who had directed Communist security with such effective ruthlessness during the Resistance, had not wasted time since receiving his instructions after the Cominform meeting at Sklarska Poreba in Poland.

Communist dockers in major ports were delegated to block work on ships bringing military supplies to the US forces in Europe. Intelligence was the key to clandestine warfare on both sides, so networks of informers were re-established, many from wartime groups. Party members in the postal workers’ unions organized the interception of mail to important figures. The most useful moles were unidentified party members in the security services, especially the Renseignements Généraux, and junior officials in the Ministry of the Interior.

The Prague coup on 20 February acted as the clearest signal in the West that the Cold War had really started. The diplomat Hervé Alphand saw the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia as similar to that of Hitler in March 1939, only rather less crude. The democrats in the Czech government played what was probably an impossible hand very badly. They tendered their resignations in protest at the action of the Communist Minister of the Interior; they assumed that this would force President Beneš to dismiss him along with the Communist premier, Klement Gottwald. But the Communists, under Soviet direction, simply seized the opportunity. A Communist mass rally threatened civil war, and Beneš gave in, allowing Gottwald to form a new government composed of Communists and fellow-travellers. Jan Masaryk, the non-Communist Foreign Minister, fell from a window of the Czernin Palace to his death shortly afterwards. Although this tragedy was probably suicide from despair and the intolerable pressure put on him by the Communists, many people in Paris were struck by the coincidence that Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Kafka’s
The Trial
was playing at the Théâtre de Marigny.

On 23 February, three days after the Prague coup, the London conference on the future of Germany assembled. Hervé Alphand and Couve de Murville took the Golden Arrow boat train from Paris. The Siberian weather – a cutting wind and flurries of snow – seemed symbolic of the times. Their relief at reaching Claridge’s dwindled on finding that coal was as short in Britain as it was in France.

The Prague coup had one positive effect for Western Europe. It had shocked Washington and saved the implementation of the Marshall Plan from any further prevarication. Congress approved the bill with uncharacteristic rapidity. The coup also concentrated the minds of European governments. On 17 March, the Brussels Treaty was signed between France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Truman announced his full support to Congress that very day. A year later this developed into the Atlantic Pact, the basis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Most European leaders now accepted that, for their own survival, ‘they had to engage the United States in Europe’.

*

In France, the Communists faced a problem of strategy. They did not know whether to concentrate their attacks on the government or on de Gaulle. They followed the Kremlin’s instructions and depicted the government as a second Vichy with the Americans as the new occupying power, yet a gut instinct made them fear de Gaulle more. Jacques Duclos called for ‘the dissolution of de Gaulle’s illegal and fascist paramilitary organization aimed at the establishment of a dictatorship’.

Large groups of Communists turned up to disrupt meetings of the RPF. After Raymond Aron was shouted down by students, Malraux organized a much bigger meeting, but this time with a large contingent of the Rassemblement’s
service d’ordre
of volunteer security guards to demonstrate ‘that we had the strength to impose respect, and to hold our meetings when and wherever we wanted’.

De Gaulle behaved as though the Rassemblement was the only force which could prevent the Communists from seizing power. He still could not acknowledge the role that Schuman and Moch had played in holding the pass against them in November. The United States Embassy, however, continued to be impressed by the government’s firmness. Caffery reported that Schuman and Moch ‘have given very careful thought, in the event of a new Communist offensive, to outlawing the Communist Party and arresting all of its leaders who can be apprehended’.

Alarmist rumours continued to circulate in April, with stories of arms parachuted into the Lyons area: some thought for Communists, others thought for the right, others suspected Zionist agents. But the Americans were now confident that France would not collapse. Marshall Aid should start to have an effect within the next year.

The Gaullists offered prefects their ‘shock troops’ for any action against Communists. The prefects, however, knew that they would be in trouble from the Minister of the Interior if they accepted. The government even asked Jefferson Caffery not to have any meetings with de Gaulle. The ambassador sympathized and, after consultation with Washington, passed a message via General de Bénouville. General de Gaulle was warned that any attempt by him to unseat the Schuman government would be seen ‘as proof of placing personal ambition before the vital interest of his country’.

The message was received and digested. Ridgway Knight, Caffery’s political adviser, had a private meeting with Colonel Passy, who assured him that de Gaulle would take power illegally only in the event of a Soviet invasion, or of the failure of the government of the day to resist a Soviet ultimatum.

Passy also tried to assure Knight that the hotheads in the RPF were leaving the movement to join paramilitary groups on the far right. Knight, however, was much better informed than Passy realized. Although there was a basis of truth in the claim that some of these elements had started to drift away, Knight knew the White Russian chief of staff of the Gaullist
service d’ordre
in Paris, Colonel Tchenkeli, who had told him about all the extreme right-wing groups the Gaullists could call upon.

De Gaulle’s speeches became increasingly concerned with foreign policy, and in the spring of 1948 that meant Germany. His address on 7 March to a Rassemblement gathering at Compiègne had demanded once again that Germany should be split into separate states. The Reich must not be re-created. But within two weeks, events in Germany began to overtake him.

On 19 March, forty-eight hours after France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgiumand Luxembourg had signed the Treaty of Brussels, Marshal Sokolovski, the Soviet commander in Germany, walked out of the Allied Control Commission in Berlin. The gesture signalled the end of wartime cooperation.

Robert Schuman, meanwhile, was uneasy at the speed with which his Foreign Minister was coming round to American and British views on Germany. Bidault had been encouraged by Churchill the previous October to accept the inevitability of reconciliation.

Within the French government, Georges Bidault was indeed the driving force for change, even if a number of his colleagues saw him more as a wagon hitched to an Anglo-American express. The London Accords on Germany were ratified in the National Assembly by a majority of only fourteen votes after the debate on 16 June. The most implacable opposition came from the Communists on one side and from de Gaulle and his followers on the other. De Gaulle, in a radio broadcast on 10 June, claimed that the London Accords involved ‘the formation of a Reich at Frankfurt’ and that nothing could ‘prevent the growth of a totalitarian state in these circumstances’.