Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In the summer of 1945, in the Palais de Justice, began the trials of the leaders of Vichy, first of Pétain, then of Laval. To foreign observers, it seemed like a trial of Vichy itself as the French, who, denied access under the Occupation to anything that could be described as a newspaper, learned of its realities for the first time. Parisian feelings towards Pétain palpably tilted as the survivors from the death camps returned home, their emaciated appearance a powerful reminder of the iniquities committed in the name of Vichy. The old hero of Verdun, fallen into such disgrace, refused to speak in his own defence. The only time when his face, according to an American journalist present, took on “a marble mask of shame” was when the prosecution revealed the deportation of 120,000 Jews, of whom only 15,000 returned. The trial ended in August, the day after the end of the world war in which Pétain’s Vichy had played so ignominious a part, with the Marshal disappearing for life into the fortress prison of the Ile de Yeu in the Bay of Biscay. He died there, aged ninety-five, six years later. More of a disgraceful farce was the show-trial, beginning in October, of the hated Pierre Laval. It reminded some of “a cross between an auto-da-fé and a tribunal during the Paris terror.” Screaming back at his prosecutors, Laval dominated the court, comporting himself with formidable courage up to the very moment when, barely resuscitated after taking cyanide, he died lashed to a chair before a firing squad at Fresnes Prison.

  Meanwhile only a very subdued sympathy for the two leaders was voiced among the gratin of Paris who had so widely supported Vichy. Out of it all began to emerge the depressing truth that the Resistance had represented but a small minority, compared with the “silent and massive acquiescence” of the rest of France. The real number of those killed in the course of the épuration has never been verified. It varies from a high of 105,000 for all France down to Robert Aron’s estimate of only 30,000 to 40,000—compared with 30,000 Frenchmen killed by the Germans and the milice during the Occupation. One more recent, French authority puts the figure at only 9,000 summary executions, most of them carried out before the Normandy landings, plus 767 death sentences carried out subsequently following lawful trials. The same author claims that the épuration in France was more “moderate” than in Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark. The jury is still out, but in Paris alone there were 100,000 arrests. In lieu of prison, a quarter of all defendants in France were condemned to that new and lingering legal formula of dégradation nationale.

  VICTORY IN EUROPE

  As de Gaulle had warned on the night of 26 August, for Paris the war was not over. Though the Wehrmacht had retreated back across the Rhine—which prompted the over-optimistic to recall 1918 and assume that collapse would follow in short order—that December Field Marshal von Rundstedt struck back hard in the Ardennes. The Americans recoiled westwards, and to the French, all too mindful of 1940, momentarily it looked as if there might be a replay. There followed that first harsh winter of the Liberation, 1944–5. Gas and coal shortages meant that there was neither heating nor even cooking. For a family of three a week’s ration came to half a pound of meat and three-fifths of a pound of butter. The irrepressible chansonniers produced a song entitled “Sans beurre et sans brioches,” a pun on the brave Bayard, “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.” Even wine was rationed to three litres per adult per month. By the end of 1945, because of lack of fuel, it was further reduced to one litre a month, and not finally unrationed till mid-1948, though even then some of it was watered, or what the French call “baptized,” spoiling quickly.

  Parisians began to grumble that things were even worse than they had been under the Occupation. Suddenly food cost still more—though, mysteriously, it was less on the black market. Largely through U.S. military racketeers, the black market assumed giant proportions—sometimes even the trucks disappeared into its maw along with the food they brought, threatening the Allied advance into Germany. There was nothing black-market cigarettes could not buy. To François Mauriac, government efforts against the black market resembled those of “the child St. Augustine saw on a beach who wanted to empty the sea with a shell.” Sensibly, the government gave up.

  This time, unlike in the aftermath of earlier national catastrophes which had laid France low, her recovery was agonizingly slow and halting. For once, la France profonde had lost her richesse. Bridges, roads, railways, industries had been ruined by war. The Germans had pulled out, destroying crops and farms, as well as taking two-thirds of the country’s trucks and railway rolling-stock. Between one and a half and two million buildings had been razed. There were still 800,000 French skilled factory workers serving as slave labour in Germany, another million or more remaining in the prisoner-of-war camps, plus the deportees. Altogether there were estimated to be four million more women than men in France as the war ended—many in mourning. Their wooden shoes continued to echo through empty streets like the sound of horses’ hooves. In smart shop windows shoes were marked “model” and were not for sale. Of luxuries there were none: Christmas-tree decorations that winter consisted of the aluminium foil dropped from Allied bombers to confuse German radar. Newspapers were reduced to a sheet or two. There was no petrol, except for doctors and taxi drivers (and except on the black market).

  Even after the German surrender in May 1945, of true victory there was hardly a sign. It was indeed an exsanguinated Paris. Morally, four years of Occupation had left behind it a universal torpor; thousands of hours of queuing seemed to have killed something of the Parisian spirit. It was a glum city, restless, anxious, cantankerous and convalescent. Theatres were packed (partly for the warmth) but the shops and grocers still empty. VE-Day came and went with muted elation. Such enthusiasm as there was at the ending of the war in Europe was greatly tempered by the return of 300 women from Ravensbrück. They were met by General de Gaulle—who wept. Eleven had died en route from eastern Germany, and too much suffering showed in the survivors’ faces and bodies.

  Politically, there were continued grumbles of revolution in Paris among the Communists, who felt de Gaulle had cheated them in August. As the hot war moved, almost without break, into the Cold War, the situation remained tense. The Communist Party was convinced that it would soon be swept into power. Its boss, Maurice Thorez, who had spent the war conveniently in Moscow, having deserted from the French army in 1939, declared menacingly, “We are in favour of revolution, tomorrow … We are not going to help the capitalist regime to re-form itself.” It set the scene for the Fourth Republic. In October 1945, France duly voted in a referendum to kill off the failed Third Republic, which had survived all of seventy-five turbulent years. Whereas the Third Republic had started off life so rich that, even after the depredations of the Franco-Prussian War, it easily paid off its debt to the enemy, the Fourth Republic was so poor that it had to begin by borrowing from America.

  In the view of one observer, it was a bit like “a woman with three hands, two left and one right”—the two left hands being constitutued by the Socialists and the fearsomely powerful Communist Party, the right by the Catholic, moderate conservative Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP). In the relentless conflict between these rivals, “whose simultaneous presence in goverment,” said the veteran Léon Blum, “is at once indispensable and impossible,” consensus on any vital issue was rarely achieved. As de Gaulle pointed out, the old political life of the Third Republic had simply started up again. Governments came and went, twenty of them between 1945 and 1954: M. Pleven succeeded M. Queuille, who then replaced M. Pleven, who in turn was pushed out by M. Queuille—all in the space of thirteen months. When asked by an American senator what happened when French governments “run out of horses,” President Auriol replied, “We go back to the original ones!” Thus were the old hacks of the Third Republic constantly recycled. For the next decade and a half, “this absurd ballet” (as de Gaulle called it) would render government by political democracy all but impossible in France.

  As de Gaulle had once declared with sublime modesty, “I was France, the State,
the government … that moreover was why, finally, everyone obeyed me.” And, like Louis XIV and Napoleon I, he was determined there be no rivalry to the central authority of the state. But when he found that he would not, in fact, be “obeyed” by the returning players from the Third Republic and that the authority of the government would constantly be challenged, in January 1946 (on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution) he pulled out, into retirement. When asked what he intended to do, he replied laconically, “J’attends!” Before embarking on the long wait, which would last twelve years, he left a stern New Year’s Day warning: “I predict you will bitterly regret having taken the road you have taken.” At the Palais Bourbon the Fourth Republic lurched on, from crisis to crisis, without him, steadily gaining the contempt of the public, just as its predecessor the Third had done. Illustrative of this contempt, the unpopular but piously named Premier André Marie, who survived just one month in the summer of 1948, had his brief regime rudely christened “the government of the Immaculate Deception.”

  FIRST SIGNS OF RECOVERY

  Like a first swallow of spring, a small harbinger of recovery came in September 1945, with the return to Paris of the Windsors—plus their 134 pieces of luggage. One American journalist thought the lines on the Duke’s face to be “the result of too much sun, not too much thought.” Totally out of touch with the France they had fled in 1940, the Duchess remarked that “Paris offered the most expensive discomfort she had ever known.” With them returned other distinguished émigré Parisians, such as Natalie Barney, back to her salon and Hellenic Temple in the Rue Jacob, while social revival in Paris revolved around the glittering Duff Coopers across the river at the British Residence.

  Food shortages continued in Paris for at least two years after the war, hand in hand with a sense of gloom and a bitterly anti-German feeling. The winter of 1946–7 was, again, horribly cold, and Parisians shivered in unheated houses. There was constant fear of a Communist, Soviet-backed takeover. Nineteen-forty-seven was a year of endless strikes, with at one point three million workers out across the country. Then, suddenly, there was a reversal when in December Communist miners in the north derailed a train, killing sixteen people. As news reached Paris, the city was paralysed by strike action, the centre virtually in a state of siege, with armed police at every intersection. Revulsion was universal, and the derailment of the Paris–Tourcoing express was something of a turning point. “We have had a brush with civil war and, given the possibility of Soviet intervention, with war itself,” so President Vincent Auriol wrote in the last pages of his diary for that year, but “despite that France has begun her recovery.”

  The following year, the creation of NATO gave military security to France, and Marshall Aid brought the beginnings of new prosperity. Fifty-three Paris theatres and five music halls had reopened and were going full blast; Josephine Baker had returned to the Folies Bergère. By 1949 rationing had ended; there were traffic jams in Paris and the first influx of American tourists since 1929; the franc was soaring, the dollar—overloaded by its generosity—sinking. Nevertheless, strikes continued endlessly to paralyse the French economy, and especially Paris. Year after year, the farmers and the middle classes, as well as the very rich, somehow avoided paying taxes with impunity. Inflation ran wild, resulting in a regular devaluation of the franc, and in 1951 spiralling prices and an overvalued currency dragged exports down 20 per cent and pushed imports up 36 per cent. For years the French economy made practically no headway.

  Britons could watch piously as France seemed to be strangling herself, but outside the popular gaze serious economic and industrial planning was under way. A number of outstanding civil servants were developing remarkable long-range schemes for the future. As early as December 1945, Jean Monnet and a small staff of brilliant men were at work contemplating what was to become the Schuman Coal and Steel Pool, the forerunner of the European Economic Community. For the first time in 150 years France was offering to assist the Germans, help them re-create their basic industries in conjunction with her own, so as to provide a new foundation for peace and prosperity in Europe. In June 1950 there was a first meeting, at the Quai d’Orsay’s historic Salon de l’Horloge, of the European “Six”—a six from which Britain was markedly absent.

  Immediately after the war against Japan ended, an exhausted France found herself at war in Indo-China, her most precious colonial possession in the Far East, a war waged single-mindedly by that former assistant pastry-cook who had attended the Peace Conference of 1919 and had seen the mighty colonial powers in disarray there, Ho Chi Minh. Each year the sale guerre in the jungles consumed vast sums of money (twice as many dollars as the U.S. gave France to pay for it) and class after class of Saint-Cyr officers (thousands more French lives than the U.S. lost in Korea). The great General who might just have brought it to a successful conclusion, de Lattre de Tassigny, died of cancer in 1952. He alone might have been intelligent enough to stave off the humiliating and decisive defeat which the French army was to suffer at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Catastrophe in Indo-China brought to power one of the ablest and most honest politicans of the Fourth Republic, the brilliant Sephardic Jew Pierre Mendès-France. In the face of determined opposition, with the usual unpleasant undertones of anti-Semitism on the right, Mendès-France was able to extricate France from the quagmire of Indo-China, handing on the baton to the U.S.

  Then, within half a year of Dien Bien Phu, encouraged by France’s defeat there, concerted revolt broke out in Algeria. There had already been uprisings to force France out of Tunisia and Morocco. However, established as an integral part of metropolitan France, Algeria was no mere colony, but the transcendent diamond in France’s imperial diadem, with a million pieds noirs (as the colonists were called) settled there. Although at first little noticed in Paris, a combination of the war in Algeria and Mendès’s unpopular attempts to wean Normandy school children from calvados on to milk and to alter the traditional drinking habits of France brought him down. The savage war struggled on for another seven and a half years, destroying the Fourth Republic, coming close to inflicting a military takeover in France, and bringing back de Gaulle as the only possible saviour. Meanwhile, as far as metropolitan France, and Paris in particular, was concerned, the conflicts in Indo-China and Algeria led to a sense of alienation among the troops not unlike that between the front and the rear in 1914–18. It was a sense of detachment that would rebound to hit de Gaulle—and metropolitan France—hard in the 1960s.

  BIDONVILLES

  During the Occupation, not surprisingly, all building and construction work in Paris came to an abrupt halt. About the only achievement was completion of a small stretch of the autoroute de l’ouest out at Saint-Cloud, which had been begun in 1935. Paris architects continued discussing the Porte Maillot development, and there were talks with Hitler’s Albert Speer on the future plans for Berlin. Out of the immense destruction which had left so many of Europe’s buildings damaged or destroyed, Paris mercifully had suffered relatively little. Nevertheless there was an acute housing shortage because of the flow of refugees from the devastated areas who reached Paris—and stuck. When the war ended, with neither funds nor material available, for ten years there was a virtual moratorium on any new work in Paris.

  Those years constituted, architecturally, a dismal period in the history of Paris, for maintenance was deplorably neglected, old buildings like the Louvre left to crumble and be blackened by smoke and eroded by pollution. Slum areas and shanty-towns continued to deteriorate alarmingly, and disgraceful bidonvilles sprang up in the areas once occupied by the old fortifications. The Chambre Syndicale de la Savonnerie revealed that in post-war Paris only 15 per cent of dwellings possessed bathrooms, and that soap consumption was the lowest in Europe—hence, concluded an American correspondent, “the popularity of Eau-de-Cologne.” Even as late as 1954 the city authorities reported that 74 per cent of the capital’s dwellings were “substandard.”

  Bringing the coldest weather in memory, the winte
r of 1954 also gave rise to a remarkable human phenomenon. So bitter was January that police found a woman frozen to death on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, an eviction notice clutched in her fist—a scene straight out of Balzac. The morgues were crammed with the frozen bodies of clochards whom even the hot air from the Métro grills could not warm. Appearing from nowhere, an unknown Jesuit priest calling himself the Abbé Pierre, a tiny bearded figure in his forties, the son of a wealthy Lyons silk manufacturer who had fought in the Resistance in the Vercors, seized the attention of all Paris. One evening, before the main feature, he leaped on to the stage of one of Paris’s largest cinemas and pleaded, “Mes amis, aidez-nous,” before describing the misery of the poor in the bidonvilles out in the unseen suburbs of Saint-Denis and Nanterre. He struck a chord; within two weeks more than a billion francs poured in from all walks of life, including sentimental prostitutes. The directors of the Métro converted three unused stations into lodgings for the homeless; Abbé Pierre took to haunting the corridors of the National Assembly, until he persuaded the Minister of Housing, Maurice Lemaire, to accompany him into the slums where a child had recently died of cold, reducing Lemaire to tears and to admitting, “It never occurred to me that we have such misery in France.” The Minister introduced a new bill to spend ten billion francs on low-cost housing. Then—typically of the Fourth Republic—the government fell, and nothing was done. Spring came, the poor disappeared from the Paris conscience, and so did Abbé Pierre.

  The outstanding architectural monuments to the Fourth Republic were two great curved complexes of monotone concrete and windows, the UNESCO Building (completed in 1959), the largest building ever commissioned in Paris by an international body (but somewhat jerry-built), and the ORTF broadcasting centre (completed between 1956 and 1963) on the Right Bank, supposedly designed to resemble a gigantic electro-magnet. Conditioning all post-war city planning in Paris, as well as being its worst enemy, was the automobile. Turning the Concorde into a one-way carrousel and a ban on hooting were only first bites at the cherry. For years the city was heaved up as vast, sometimes seven-storey-deep car parks were burrowed under the Concorde, the Place Vendôme and almost everywhere else. There were violent protests as, in 1955, the magnificent chestnuts by the Place de l’Alma disappeared, then the riverside elms, victims of the new speedway down the Right Bank.