Depreux’s next move, ten days later, was to deprive the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, the riot police, of its light machine-guns and mortars. The CRS had a strong Communist presence, through party members from the Resistance who had joined from the FFI. The French Communist Party immediately denounced this measure as an attempt to leave the Republic defenceless against would-be military dictators.
François Mitterrand, the new minister for Anciens Combattants et Victimes de la Guerre, also impressed many by the stamina and effectiveness of his efforts to reduce Communist control within his jurisdiction. This had grown up during Laurent Casanova’s time in the ministry.
In the Ministry of War, the Communists’ chief enemy, General Revers, managed to resist all the calls for his removal from the post of chief of staff of the French army. Revers, while punctiliously polite to the new Minister of National Defence, swiftly removed Communists or fellow-travellers from sensitive appointments. He also purged the Gendarmerie Nationale, which came under the ministry’s control. Of the 2,000 army officers, mainly from the FFI, who were regarded as Communists or fellow-travellers, many had already been sidelined through such devices as the so-called ‘Opération de Tarbes’. This simply involved posting officers of left-wing sympathies to outposts like Tarbes in the Pyrenees, where they languished in non-existent jobs with no access to confidential information.
March 1947 was an eventful month in Paris as well as in Washington. On the very day that Truman addressed Congress, the French Communist Party found itself in a difficult position on the issue of Indo-China, where fighting had broken out the previous December between French forces and Ho Chi Minh’s followers led by General Giap. Moscow’s instructions on the subject were explicit. Communist deputies had to support the Viet-Minh and oppose the policy established by Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu.
On 18 March, the Assembly stood in silence in memory of the French servicemen killed in Indo-China. François Billoux, the Communist Minister of National Defence, remained seated. This immediately became an issue of patriotism.
The more the Communists were isolated, the more they drew in upon themselves. Communist speeches in the National Assembly took up the most time, not so much because of their content, but because their deputies, forming a claque, would applaud their leaders’ speeches at every pause. One cynic remarked that their hands were hard not from manual labour, but from clapping.
A number of factors encouraged General de Gaulle to return to the political arena in the spring of 1947. One of the most immediate was Ramadier’s appointment of Billoux as Minister of National Defence. De Gaulle’s sense of destiny – he once said that each day he spent several minutes wondering how his actions would be seen by history – told him that the people of France would recall him to power very soon.
To the relief of his supporters, de Gaulle began to spend more and more time in Paris. They dreaded the three-hour drive out to Colombey-les-deux-Églises. The atmosphere of the house, La Boisserie, was as lugubrious as its setting. There the chain-smoking General worked on his memoirs, surrounded by wartime memorabilia, his collection of swords, and signed photographs of former world leaders, while ‘Madame de Gaulle clicked away with her knitting needles as the rain battered against the windows’.
In Paris, de Gaulle established his headquarters at La Pérouse, the hotel near the Arc de Triomphe which his wartime secret service had used as its first headquarters at the Liberation. On Sunday, 30 March 1947, he made a speech at Bruneval in Normandy, the site of a commando raid during the war. As an official commemoration, the meeting attracted the presence of the British and Canadian ambassadors, as well as detachments from their countries’ armed forces. Yet the idea for this event had come from Colonel Rémy, as a way of assembling former members of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s new banner. Ramadier was exasperated, but any attempt by the government to restrict the ‘Liberator’ – as the Gaullists called their leader – looked churlish. The Communists, meanwhile, claimed his audiences were composed of ‘ladies in mink coats and old colonels smelling of mothballs’.
De Gaulle finally decided to go ahead with the plan for creating a mass movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. ‘On va refaire la France Libre’ was a popular cry among his wartime associates, ‘les hommes de Londres’. But their tendency to refer to the new movement by its initials, the RPF, displeased the General. That sounded like yet another of the political parties he loathed so much. He insisted on calling it ‘le Rassemblement’.
The creation of the RPF was announced to the people of France at Strasbourg on 7 April. Soustelle set up the first group in the capital of Alsace that evening. A week later, the movement was officially registered. The Strasbourg celebrations were again linked to a semi-official event which drew the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, from Paris. He and de Gaulle inspected a guard of honour together, which confirmed Communist suspicions. But both French and Russian Communists were wrong to assume that Caffery’s attendance signalled that the American government was planning to back de Gaulle. In normal circumstances Caffery always punctiliously refused to meet de Gaulle, making an exception only for occasions such as this.
A propaganda struggle had meanwhile broken out at a wonderfully trivial level. When Nancy Mitford had wanted to dedicate her unexpectedly successful novel The Pursuit of Love to her adored ‘Colonel’, Gaston Palewski, he had been flattered and told her to put his full name in the dedication, not just his initials. He regretted this bitterly when the Communists realized that Nancy Mitford was the sister of Unity Mitford. In February, a Communist publication produced an inaccurate article under the equally inaccurate headline, ‘Sister of Hitler’s mistress dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’. It was followed by several other pieces. Palewski, fearing the General’s wrath, persuaded Nancy to go abroad until the fuss died down. She obediently departed into temporary exile and wrote to him from Madrid in the middle of April, ‘Like the Archangel Gabriel, you chase me away from heavenly Paris.’ But to turn the tables on the Communists, she said she would dedicate her next book to Jacques Duclos – ‘Let him laugh that one off.’
By the end of April the Socialist Prime Minister, Paul Ramadier, had come to think that it might be possible after all to govern without the Communists. The end of tripartisme was accelerated by the contradiction of Communist deputies voting against the government in which their own leaders were ministers. Ramadier, with studied courtesy, insisted on the principle of collective responsibility within a government.
On 25 April, an unofficial strike at the Renault factories spread with great speed, taking the Communists by surprise. They accused Trotskyists of fomenting trouble, but the strike gained such support that Communist leaders had to shift their position if they were to retain any credibility among the workers. The party’s politburo denounced the government’s refusal to raise wages. Thorez, the Vice-President of the government, did not worry about such a flagrant paradox. He refused to believe that Ramadier contemplated an administration without Communist ministers.
He was not alone in this attitude. Gaullists were certain that the Socialists would find it impossible to continue. This led them to the optimistic notion that the resulting crisis could be solved only by their leader sweeping back to power. Left-wing Socialists, meanwhile, never imagined that such a momentous step could be taken without their agreement.
Bidault, on his return from Moscow, did not hide his feelings about Molotov and Stalin in front of his Communist colleagues in the Council of Ministers. Thorez promptly voiced his support for Stalin and rejected the government communiqué. On the eve of the 1 May demonstration, Ramadier summoned General Revers. He asked him to put the army on a discreet state of alert and to prepare military transport in case a general strike took place. Armoured vehicles from the 2e DB were brought in from Rambouillet and concealed in the École de Guerre.
The decisive day came on Sunday, 4 May. The Communists had formally withdrawn support from the government’s pol
icy of freezing wages, so Ramadier had called a vote of confidence in the National Assembly. Supported by the Christian Democrat MRP, he won by a strong margin –360 votes to 186. Soon after nine o’clock that evening, Communist ministers were summoned to a meeting of the Council of Ministers at the prime ministerial residence, the Hôtel Matignon. Ramadier was polite, but inflexible. Thorez refused to resign, so Ramadier read out the section of the Constitution which gave him the right to withdraw portfolios. Thorez and his four colleagues left the room. The remaining ministers sat there, astonished at how easy it had been.
This realignment was not limited to France. In Belgium, Communist ministers had left the government in March; while in Italy, they had been forced out in April. Western Europe was clearly entering a new stage.
Paul Ramadier had a less exacting duty to perform six days later – the presentation of the Médaille Militaire to Winston Churchill. The Médaille Militaire is France’s highest military decoration and can be presented only by a man who already holds it. Ramadier was an impeccable choice, having won the decoration as a sergeant during the defence of Verdun.
Churchill, dressed in the uniform of his old regiment, the 4th Hussars, was met at the entrance to the great courtyard of the Invalides by a small guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. He was then marched forward to where Ramadier awaited him with a whole battalion, drawn up in review order. Churchill wept with emotion during Ramadier’s speech.
That evening, President Auriol organized a dinner in Churchill’s honour at the Élysée Palace. ‘Churchill,’ wrote Jacques Dumaine in his diary, ‘his tail-coat plastered with decorations and a cigar sprouting from the middle of his smile, strolled down the Faubourg Saint-Honoré on his way to the banquet. This was a sight which brought everyone to their windows, and cheering broke out as he passed.’ The old statesman was delighted by the apocryphal story that any holder of the Médaille Militaire, if incapacitated by drink, had the right to be driven home without charge by the police.
The next day, Churchill received a rousing welcome from the crowds at the march-past at Vincennes celebrating the second anniversary of Germany’s defeat. Afterwards, Duff Cooper took him off to lunch at the Château de Saint-Firmin at Chantilly. There, he met Odette Pol Roger, one of General Wallace’s three daughters who were so famed for their beauty that they were known as the Wallace Collection. Madame Pol Roger became Churchill’s last flame.
Ramadier’s government had also offered a Médaille Militaire to General de Gaulle, but he had refused it brusquely. He also refused Auriol’s invitation to the dinner in Churchill’s honour. Although he could not admit it, Ramadier’s effective stand against the Communists had exasperated him. He refused to change his tune, however. ‘Make no mistake,’ he said to Claude Mauriac, ‘we are right into a Weimar Republic.’
De Gaulle’s pact with Stalin three years before had blackened him in the eyes of many potential followers on the right. But at Rennes on 27 July, he openly attacked the ‘separatists’. He described the French Communist Party as ‘a group of men whose leaders place the service of a foreign state above everything else. I say this all the more forcefully because I myself have tried, up to the limits of the lawful and possible, to attract them to the service of France.’
While de Gaulle compared Ramadier’s administration to Weimar, the Communists compared RPF mass meetings to the Nuremberg rally. Nancy Mitford went to the Vélodrome d’Hiver on 2 July to see her adored ‘Colonel’ speak to a huge crowd. Palewski was a far greater success than anyone expected. Claude Mauriac wrote that ‘he was suddenly transfigured’. Malraux followed. His speech began in its habitual way, difficult to understand, but then ‘finding its rhythmlittle by little, as a torrent finds its bed. And then emerged a great prophetic voice which electrified the whole audience, the voice of a sage, of a poet, of a religious leader.’
25
The Self-FulfillingProphecy
On Saturday, 7 June 1947, the American Secretary of State, General Marshall, made a speech at Harvard on receiving an honorary degree. Never has a short reply of thanks at a university had such significance. Marshall, without fully warning his officials, had decided that this was the moment to make the most important foreign policy statement of the post-war era.
The terrible winter of 1946 had revealed Europe’s inability to raise itself out of penury. Economic collapse was imminent, with political disaster almost certainly close behind. Marshall declared that the United States must make a huge effort to combat ‘hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos’. But the initiative ‘must come from Europe’, because ‘it would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically’.
The message behind General Marshall’s speech at Harvard had a wide parenthood, including Eisenhower, Jean Monnet and Dean Acheson; but the formulation, which brilliantly avoided all the mines in such a dangerous field, was entirely his. Most important of all, he carefully made a point of extending the project to all of Europe, including countries occupied by the Red Army.
Marshall’s brief address electrified the governments of Europe, once they grasped its significance. It offered their only hope. Russia, laid waste by the German invasion, was in no state to help. France had no currency reserves left and a balance of payments deficit of 10 billion francs. Since September 1944 it had received close to $2 billion in credits for coal, food and raw materials, but this had done no more than enable the country to survive. The Marshall Plan offered the chance to rebuild. ‘Examples of such solidarity are very rare in history,’ wrote Hervé Alphand. But behind the scenes the State Department insisted that ‘the United States must run this show’.
Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, was reputedly the first to leap at the opportunity. After a weekend of discussion and deliberation, he sent a ‘Most Immediate and Top Secret’ telegram to Duff Cooper in the middle of the night, instructing him to discuss the matter with Bidault in the morning. A week later Bevin himself flew over to Paris, with a large contingent of advisers fromvarious ministries. The city was still gripped by an endless succession of strikes. After dinner at the British Embassy with Ramadier, Bidault, Massigli, Chauvel, Alphand, Marjolin and Monnet, the discussions continued. ‘There was almost entire agreement on the line that we should take,’ Duff Cooper wrote the next morning. ‘The important thing is the approach to the Russians. They must be invited to participate and at the same time they must be given no opportunity to cause delay. This will not be easy.’
On 27 June, a conference between Bidault, Bevin and Molotov to discuss the Marshall Plan opened at the Quai d’Orsay. The air was oppressive from the heatwave which had reduced Paris to torpor, and the atmosphere was further weighed down by Molotov’s suspicions. He was certain that some sort of trap had been laid for him by Bidault and Bevin at their private meeting ten days before. Soviet confidence had not been helped by an ill-judged statement for the press which had been released by the Quai d’Orsay before the Russians were told what was happening.
Bevin, despite the heat, was in excellent spirits. Molotov, as expected, used blocking tactics from the start. Bidault described his intention as ‘flagrante et obstinée’. (Molotov did not say ‘Niet’ but ‘No K’, thinking that this was the antonymfor OK.)
A great stormon the night of Saturday, 28 June, broke the heat, but the atmosphere was even heavier on Monday morning. Ignoring the aims of the proposal, Molotov read a prepared statement based on a telegramwhich had obviously just arrived from the Kremlin, demanding that the United States government should say in advance how much it was prepared to give and whether Congress would agree.
That evening Jefferson Caffery came round to the British Embassy to compare reactions. Bevin, on Duff Cooper’s urging, ‘impressed upon him the importance of helping France at this juncture’. But Caffery’s reply was unequivocal: if the Communists got back into the government, France wouldn’t get a dollar from America. It wa
s, as Duff Cooper put it, ‘an interesting evening’.
Bevin’s mind was also made up. Bidault’s attempts to bridge the chasmbetween themand the Soviet Union were a waste of time. They would brook no further obstruction from Molotov. By the next morning, he had decided to ‘go straight ahead with the French and to issue invitations to all the nations of Europe to join in’. That afternoon Duff Cooper flew to London to brief the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Attlee agreed with everything that Bevin was doing and asked for advice on the next step. Cooper replied that the circumstances did not require a meeting of the Cabinet, but a firm statement of support would no doubt be appreciated by the Foreign Secretary.
The conference ended abruptly on 3 July. Alphand wrote in his diary the next day, ‘seeing Molotov descend the steps of the Quai d’Orsay, I said to myself that we were entering a new era which could last for a long time and even take a dangerous turn’.
No time was wasted. Twenty-two countries in Europe were invited to a conference just over a week later to formulate a European plan for presentation to the United States government. If any government from behind the Iron Curtain expressed interest, that interest soon declined after pressure from Moscow. Nobody was surprised. The important point was to maintain a momentum of cooperation. ‘All is going well so far,’ noted the British ambassador on 7 July, ‘and the Ramadier government survives.’
On 11 July, foreign ministers began to assemble for the conference, which took place in the dining roomof the Quai d’Orsay. The table was so long that it was impossible to hear what was said at the far end, but despite the acoustic problems Molotov’s absence meant that everything was ‘unanimously agreed’. Meetings often lasted less than two hours, instead of whole days. This did not necessarily mean that everyone behaved in an exemplary fashion. According to Isaiah Berlin, who had joined the British delegation on the orders of Lord Franks, the European attitude towards the American offer was that of ‘lofty and demanding beggars approaching an apprehensive millionaire’. There was also a tendency to revert to national stereotype. At one point the Italian delegate exclaimed dramatically, ‘If we do not get this, there will be blood on the streets of Rome!’ The Swedish delegate, Dag Hammarskjöld, replied, ‘Maybe you… er… exaggerate a little?’
Paris: After the Liberation 1944-1949 Page 33