Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (68 page)

We are extremely grateful to the late Mrs David Bruce for kindly lending illustration 18. The remainder come from the albums of Lady Diana Cooper and her family, and if any photographer or archive owns the copyright of any of them, they should contact the publisher.

* The idea for a union in fact came from a Frenchman, Jean Monnet, one of the most influential men of his age. This remarkable economic planner, then in London on an arms-purchasing mission, had already won the complete trust and respect of both Churchill and Roosevelt. He later inspired the Victory Plan in the United States.

* When the Bishop of Arras was arrested after the Liberation, the British Embassy in Paris reported that ‘much surprise was expressed [by the Vatican] at the accusations against the Bishop of Arras since he has had the reputation at the Vatican of holding extreme democratic views’.

* That day Leclerc’s division lost seventy-one men killed and 225 wounded; thirty-five armoured vehicles were destroyed, along with 117 other vehicles.

* Estimates of the number killed vary greatly. Many seem too high. The Archives de la Ville de Paris record 2,873 Parisians, including inhabitants of the inner suburbs, killed during the month of August.

* In the first opinion poll carried out since before the war, the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique found that per cent of its sample in Paris claimed to have been present that day. ‘
C’est un plébiscite
’ was a widespread comment.

* One of Palewski’s bodyguards remarked that he had ‘more nicknames than a boules club in Marseilles’. The bodyguards knew him as ‘
la Lavande
’ from the overpowering strength of his eau de toilette. In
Le Canard enchaîné
he was known as ‘Lodoiska’ – the nickname given to the censorship; politicians called him ‘
l’Empereur
’, while the female secretaries, of whom the vast majority had no doubt received his energetic attentions, referred to himironically as ‘
le beau Gaston
’.

* De Gaulle’s right-wing opponents, who claimed he was a Soviet puppet at this time, were much mistaken. The detailed briefing document for this visit, prepared by Dimitrov for Molotov and Stalin, leaves no doubt: ‘Although his outward attitude towards the [French] Communists is correct, he is prepared to use all possible means of hidden struggle against them.’

* De Gaulle, however, was seen as relatively uninterested in the fate of the deportees. Marguerite Duras could not forgive him for having said on 3 April: ‘The days of tears are past. The days of glory have returned.’

*In fact there were only ninety-one cases in Paris, and only seventy-seven Parisians died of it that year, half the figure of twenty years earlier.

*MRP stood for ‘Mouvement Républicain Populaire’.
Le Canard enchaîné
pretended that it stood for ‘Machine à Ramasser les Pétainistes’.

†Popova’s delegation of ten women was supposed to represent a cross-section of Soviet womanhood. It included a sculptress, a writer, a medical scientist, an actress, a professor, the director of the Lenin Library, a hero of the Soviet Union and a worker.

* Teitgen makes no mention in his memoirs of his meeting with the American ambassador and protests vehemently, but unconvincingly, that de Gaulle exerted no influence in the handling of the Pétain case.

* An agreement on sharing military intelligence was concluded in Paris on 3 July 1945 between General Bloch-Dassault (brother of the aircraft manufacturer Marcel Dassault) and Brigadier-General Betts of US military intelligence, but the United States handed over very little. They too were influenced by the British distrust from 1940, when the French insisted on keeping their antiquated code system, which the Germans had read with such ease.

* Marie-Madeleine finally blew this agent’s cover in 1954, when the first itemon the agenda of the politburo meeting was to discuss the minutes of the latest meeting of the French National Defence Committee. She arranged for the publication of these minutes, which caused a national outcry, followed by the arrest of the Permanent Secretary of the Defence Committee.

* Gouin’s government had not only set about reorganizing the intelligence service as the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage. It had also put an end to the Gaullist proconsuls from the Liberation, the Commissaires de la République.

* One could hardly blame Koestler for being pleased at such figures, especially since he had heard that ‘the French Communist Party had orders to buy up every single copy of
Le Zéro et l’infini
immediately’, so in this way he was being ‘enriched indefinitely from Communist Party funds’.

* Félix Gouin sued Farge for the allegations in his book
Le Pain de la corruption
, but lost the case in March 1948, a setback which finished off any lingering political ambitions.

* Joanovici was a Bessarabian Jew who had come to France in 1925, where he built up a successful scrap-metal business. During Depreux’s investigations, Joanovici was arrested, but then released. He fled to the American zone of Germany in 1947. He was finally put on trial in 1949, condemned to five years in prison and fined 600,000 francs.

* Aimé and Marguerite Maeght had made their first lucrative deals in the art world by bartering food for paintings during the Occupation (Marguerite’s parents were in the grocery business). In this way, they were able to acquire a number of works by Bonnard and Matisse.

* Even though Caffery revealed to Bevin and Duff Cooper that France would almost certainly not receive economic aid if Communists were allowed to become ministers again, there is absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that Ramadier had been blackmailed in the spring by the US government into expelling them from his administration.

* Wages had risen by 17 per cent while prices had increased on average by 51 per cent.

* The French were the most successful in their endeavours. Jean Monnet persuaded David Bruce that the government should be allowed to divert Marshall Plan funds into industrial regeneration.

* Representatives of the New York school had first exhibited in the Galerie du Luxembourg in 1947, but Jackson Pollock’s first show in Paris, organized by the art critic Michel Tapié, took place only in 1951.

* The newspaper
Combat
on 12 May, following ‘the night of the barricades’, warned that Paris would become ‘
Budapest-sur-Seine
’.

* The final digits of the NARA document reference give the date of receipt by month, day and year: thus dossier no. 851.00/12-448, was received on December 4,1948.

Abetz, Otto,

34

,

64

,

85

,

133

,

135

,

137

,

143

,

156

Académie Française,

137

,

173

,

199

,

373

Acheson, Dean,

228

,

276

,

285

,

356

,

357

–8,

359

,

360

Action Française,

137

Airaud, Arthur,

81

Alcan, Louise,

146

Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT),

29

,

36

Alphand, Hervé,

101

,

114

,

119

,

120

,

215

–16,

245

,

288

,

289

,

322

and Marshall Plan,

286

Alsop, Susan Mary

Patten, Mrs William

Altman, Georges,

334

Amado, Jorge,

336

Amery, John,

66

Amery, Leo,

66

Amouroux, Henri,

87

Anouilh, Jean,

140

,

179

,

184

Antelme, Robert,

146

,

148

Aragon, Louis,

18

,

111

,

138

,

141

,

142

–3,

152

,

158

,

177

,

183

–4,

221

,

332

,

373

,

376

–8,

388

Argenlieu, Admiral Thierry d’,

54

,

238

,

279

,

307

Arletty (Léonie Bathiat),

85

,

133

–4,

136

,

365

,

380

Armée Secrète,

25

,

28

Aron, Raymond,

59

and

178

,

248

,

323

,

329

–30,

344

Artaud, Antonin,

175

Arzt, Richard,

151

Association France-URSS,

355

,

382

Astier de la Vigerie, Baron Emmanuel d’,

21

,

339

Astier de la Vigerie, General Baron François,

21

Astier de la Vigerie, Baron Henri,

21

Astruc, AlexAndré,

140

,

315

,

318

Attlee, Rt. Hon. Clement,

182

and Marshall Plan,

287

Audiberti, Jacques,

312

Auriol, President Vincent,

255

,

274

,

283

,

298

,

306

,

359

Auzello, Claude,

50

,

51

Ayen, Duchess d’,

186

Ayer, A. J.,

74

,

95

,

174

Baker, Josephine,

61

–2,

367

Baldrige, Letitia,

362

Baldwin, James,

352

Balenciaga, Cristóbal,

253

Ballard, Bettina,

253

,

255

Balmain, Pierre,

257

,

308

Barbie, Klaus,

28

,

385

Barrault, Jean-Louis,

133

,

179

,

372

Bath, Daphne, Marchioness of,

111

–12

Battle, Lucius,

357

–8

Baumel, Jacques,

95

Beach, Sylvia,

34

,

59

Beaumont, Comte Étienne de,

256

Beaurepaire, André,

252

Beauvoir, Simone de,

28

,

51

,

54

–5,

60

,

61

,

73

,

74

,

125

,

126

,

130

,

141

,

173

,

174

–80,

216

,

232

,

313

–14,

342

-3,

344

on youth,

170

and VE Day,

197

a day in the life of,

234

–5

and Koestler,

246

–8,

294

and Capote,

350

Beckett, Samuel,

152

,

178

,

329

Bedell-Smith, General Walter,

126

Belmondo, Paul,

136

,

180

Benda, Julien,

143

,

333

Benes, President Eduard,

322

Benoist-Méchin, Jacques,

132

,

137

,

141

,

166

,

168

Bénouville, General Pierre de,

27

,

205

,

308

,

323

,

326

,

379

Bérard, Christian,

71

,

180

,

252

,

253

,

256

,

289

,

313

,

318

Béraud, Henri,

138

Berliet, Marius,

104

Berlin, Isaiah,

79

,

153

,

288