The wrench was almost as hard for those who took the decision to leave because they could no longer swallow the lies and ‘serrer les dents’. For some this came with the show trials in Eastern Europe, for many more it came in 1956. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes on 26 February at the Twentieth Congress, yet the French Communist Party, still irredeemably Stalinist, tried to pretend that nothing had happened. The news was entirely suppressed in L’Humanité, while every other newspaper was full of the story.
Jacqueline Ventadour-Hélion, who had read Khrushchev’s speech in Le Monde, raised the issue at the next party meeting she attended. There was an embarrassed silence, then the subject was rapidly changed. Afterwards, a cadre told her firmly that ‘not all truths should be spoken aloud’. This, for her, was the time to leave. She was already under suspicion for having visited friends in the United States. Communists were not allowed visas – she had in fact obtained one through a friend in the American Embassy who took a more relaxed view of the regulation – so in the party’s logic she was therefore a supporter of John Foster Dulles. Unlike those who hated the idea of losing their party card, she felt an immense sense of liberation when it was torn up.
That autumn, during the Suez crisis, Soviet tanks crushed the rising in Hungary. Furious demonstrators attacked the Soviet Embassy. In the crowd, General de Bénouville encountered Colonel Marcel Degliame, the Communist who had come to him on that night in 1948 to warn him to be prepared against an attack.
Crowds also surrounded Communist Party headquarters, where the security guards were ready. A more serious attack was mounted against the offices of L’Humanité. Groups climbed over the roofs and threw Molotov cocktails. Inside, staff and other Communist volunteers, who had come in to help defend the place, put out fires and ejected any attackers who managed to break in. They hurled what missiles came to hand: bottles from the canteen, chairs, even a bust of Karl Marx, which was said to have flattened one assailant. The most effective were hunks of metal newspaper type. Three Communists were killed in the disorders and the days of the Resistance were recalled once again. L’Humanité claimed afterwards, in an effort to dignify the events, that workers loyal to the party had rushed into Paris from the ‘ceinture rouge’ to defend ‘their party, their newspaper… just as one throws oneself into a fire to save one’s wife and children’.
The events of 1956 led to a dramatic decline in the Communist Party’s influence on intellectual life in Paris. This did not mean that the left-wing intelligentsia’s fascination with revolutionary violence slackened. Over the next decade, new idols and theorists – including Mao, Marcuse and Che Guevara – were raised up to take the place of Stalin.
Paris continued to be a cultural and literary Mecca for the rest of the world. The patronnes of cheap hotels in the Quartier Latin still grumbled and failed to prosper. Gabriel García Márquez, who had arranged for his employer, the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, to send him to Paris, moved into a maid’s attic room on the top floor of the Hotel de Flandre in the rue Cujas. There he lived off cold spaghetti, smoked three packets of Gauloises during the course of a working night, and squeezed sideways against the radiator as he tried to summon up the tropical heat of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The result was La Mala Hora, hammered out on an old typewriter. A photograph of his fiancée, Mercédes, back in Barranquilla pinned to the wall was the only decoration.
He had no radio, or the money to buy newspapers, and his source of information on Castro’s revolt against Batista was the poet Nicolas Guillen, who used to yell the latest news from his window. The only luxury was a drink behind the steamed-up windows of La Chope Parisienne amid silent chess players. On Christmas Night 1957, he saw snow for the first time in his life. He ran out and danced wildly among the large soft flakes.
Madame Lacroix, the patronne of the Flandre, was indeed tolerant. Not only did she allow García Mÿrquez credit for a whole year, she permitted the then unknown Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to stay for two years without paying. At one point García Märquez was reduced to begging in the streets when El Espectador went bankrupt. But one day he was encouraged by a curious incident. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel he spotted Hemingway, still his literary idol, across the street. Without thinking, he called out his name: ‘Emming-way!’ Ernest Hemingway did not look round, he just raised his hand. Yet the optimistic young South American sensed this gesture as a benediction.
Coincidentally, a new wave of writers from the United States had reached the Latin Quarter at the same time. Several members of the Beat generation, including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, established themselves in what became known as the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. Their ambition was to meet Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose novel Voyage au bout de la nuit had excited and influenced them. Ginsberg and Burroughs, having arranged an introduction through his editor, went to pay a call on him in the run-down suburb of Meudon. It was to be a visit of homage rather than a literary discussion.
Since his return from Denmark, Céline had not had many visitors, except Arletty, who had corresponded with him during his exile and had remained a faithful friend. She understood his cafards; besides, the two had more in common than their origins in Courbevoie. Arletty made a recording of his Death on the Instalment Plan and he wrote a scenario for her called Arletty, jeune fille dauphinoise, a sort of picaresque adventure in the eighteenth-century manner, rather reminiscent of Candide. But Céline did not have long to live: he died on 1 July 1961, the same day as Hemingway.
France’s tortuous relationship with the United States was not improved in 1954, when the unwinnable war in Indo-China ended in ignominious defeat at Dien Bien Phu. French dominion over North Africa was also doomed. A fatal combination of bigotry, weakness, wilful shortsightedness, political inconsistency and bad faith was leading to a series of humiliations which together were tantamount to the defeat of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle appeared as the only candidate able to rescue France from the consequences of national pride and then proceed to rebuild it.
The bitter turmoil in Algiers allowed him to return to power in the virtually unopposed coup d’état of May 1958. Colonel Passy immediately flew to his old wartime haunt of London as the General’s envoy to the intelligence community. Passy arranged a discreet lunch with the former SIS chief of station in Paris, who was now in charge of the European department. He chose the Savoy, where, to remind himself of the gastronomic curiosities of London, he ordered kippers and a bottle of Bass beer. The purpose of his visit, however, was to ask his old colleagues to spread the message that de Gaulle had come to power only to solve the Algerian crisis. He had absolutely no intention of staying on.
The General, however, had every intention of staying on. His return allowed him to end the Fourth Republic, which he had despised from its conception. This time he was able to insist on the Constitution he wanted, with almost all the power concentrated in the hands of the President. The Fifth Republic, with politicians reduced to rude mechanicals, was patently his creation.
His distrust of the British and the Americans had continued to burn strongly over the years. In 1961, President Kennedy sent a highly secret message for de Gaulle’s eyes only to Paris by special courier. The missive informed the French President that the CIA had just started to debrief a Russian defector, and he had produced the names of Soviet moles high in the French administration. If President de Gaulle would like to select a senior English-speaking officer with intelligence experience, his nominee could come to the United States and sit in on the relevant debriefing sessions. De Gaulle promptly summoned General Jean-Louis de Rougemont, who was then head of the army’s intelligence staff, to the Élysée Palace. He emphasized to Rougement the great secrecy of the whole affair and explained in detail what he should do. ‘In any case,’ said de Gaulle, ‘you must see whether this isn’t a trap.’
‘The Russians?’ asked Rougemont.
‘No, the Americans!’ replied de Gaulle in exasperation.
Because de Gau
lle’s attitude to the Americans had not changed, neither had the Kremlin’s strategy towards France. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet politburo allotted the task of persuading France to leave NATO to Boris Ponomarev.
Ponomarev worked in close liaison with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1965 and 1966, Gromyko launched a diplomatic campaign to encourage France to sign as many treaties and agreements as possible on a range of issues. These included a deal by which Russia would take the French colour television system and a Soviet offer to launch French satellites on Soviet rockets. Couve de Murville visited the Soviet Union at the end of October 1965; the subjects to be discussed included the improvement of relations between the two countries, European questions and the German problem. In June 1966, de Gaulle accepted an invitation to visit Moscow not long after an agreement on sharing nuclear research was reached. At the end of September, a Franco-Soviet Chamber of Commerce was established in Paris, and eleven days later a technical collaboration deal was reached between Soviet industry and Renault-Peugeot. All these moves were accompanied by a Franco-Soviet friendship offensive launched in the Soviet and French Communist press.
‘A second clandestine channel,’ wrote the KGB defector Aleksei Myagkov (a source considered reliable by British intelligence), ‘was KGB activity. Using its agents among journalists and officials of the various agencies in France’, as well as among members of the Association France-URSS, ‘it propagated actively among politicians the theme that the country’s political independence suffered from the fact that it was a member of NATO and that foreign troops were stationed on its territory, especially American troops. The same line of thought was canvassed among French citizens recruited in political circles.’
When de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s military structure on 1 July 1967, the decision was ‘received with great satisfaction in Moscow’. The leaders of the KGB ‘did not hide their satisfaction at this recognition of the fact that they too had played their part in these events’. It is still impossible to assess how effective that part might have been, but the KGB clearly regarded it as a major success: from 1968 the operation was used as ‘an instructive example in KGB officer courses’.
De Gaulle’s supporters may have acclaimed him as the Liberator of France, but the General preferred to see himself in the monarchical role as unifier of the country and healer of national wounds. He never forgot that the role of Vichy was potentially more traumatic than the defeat of 1940 or the German occupation, because Vichy was the creation of France itself.
The trials and purges after the Liberation had failed either to satisfy the aggrieved or to convince the population of their fairness. But uneasy consciences about both the Occupation and the épuration helped de Gaulle create a myth of national unity – a version of events which took root because it expressed what the majority of the population needed to believe.
The transfer of Jean Moulin’s remains to the Panthéon in December 1964 was the apotheosis of the myth that France had liberated herself and thus wiped out the shame of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle managed to manipulate the Resistance into looking like a tolerably well-drilled military unit under his command. The ceremonies took place over two days. On the first, the remains of Jean Moulin lay in state at the Martyrs’ Memorial, guarded by relays of Compagnons de la Libération. At ten o’clock in the evening the casket was taken in procession through the heart of Paris to the steps of the Panthéon, where it was guarded all night by veterans of the Resistance.
On the following day, André Malraux, with de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou beside him, delivered a eulogy from a tribune facing the casket. His speech focused more on General de Gaulle, le premier résistant, than on Jean Moulin, his commander in the field. The notion of the Resistance as an army of the state fighting a foreign enemy was the great myth’s way of diverting attention away from the aspect of civil war. A march-past followed, with units from the Garde Républicaine and the three services. For this part of the ceremony, de Gaulle, Pompidou and Malraux moved from their tribune to the steps of the Panthéon, beside the casket – so that the parade could ‘salute in one single motion both the mortal remains of Jean Moulin and the President of the Republic’.
The myth was not really challenged until after the events of May 1968, when a new generation began to ask uncomfortable questions. Some of them were slanted, some of them made no allowance for the realities of the Occupation, but the process had to be gone through. Marcel Ophuls’s documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié, released in 1969, was one of the first films to confront the less heroic aspects of the Occupation. This provoked much anger among the older generation. The film was banned from French television. Whatever its flaws, Le Chagrin et la pitié was such a powerful piece of documentary cinema that it helped launch a younger generation of researchers into digging, sifting and re-examining material – not an easy task with the archives still firmly closed. Despite the obstacles, it soon became clear that the real shame of the Vichy years was the regime’s treatment of Jews.
In 1978, an interview in L’Express with the octogenarian Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, caused an outcry. Although he had been condemned to death in absentia in 1947, the French authorities had never requested his extradition from Spain. Darquier, who was still violently anti-Semitic, spoke of his surprise at the hatred against him in France, while the man responsible for the infamous round-up of Jews in Paris – René Bousquet, the former head of the Vichy police – was pursuing a very successful career as a banker.
In 1980, three former SS officers testified that the deportation of Jews from France had received enthusiastic assistance from Vichy officials. Many people still refused to believe it; but the Germans’ testimony was proved true by the most determined and successful sleuth of war crimes in France, Serge Klarsfeld. After meticulous research in German archives, Klarsfeld found that the Occupation authorities had kept minutes of meetings with senior Vichy officials helping with the deportation of Jews. The most devastating concerned Adolf Eichmann’s visit to Paris at the beginning of July 1942. René Bousquet not only agreed that his police should undertake the arrests but proposed that the deportations should cover non-French Jews throughout the country. Klarsfeld also revealed the telegrams Bousquet had sent to the prefects of départements in the unoccupied zone, ordering them to deport not only Jewish adults but children whose deportation had not even been requested by the Nazis.
Bousquet was an administrator, not an anti-Semitic ideologue. He claimed that he acted as he did in order to save French Jews, and it is true that the number sent to Auschwitz was lower than the Germans expected. But the fact remains that he and his men were responsible for the infamous round-up which took nearly 13,000 Jews to the Vélodrome d’Hiver on 16 and 17 July 1942, including 4,000 children.
Bousquet’s untroubled and prosperous existence was disturbed by the Darquier interview. He was forced to resign from his various positions and Jewish demonstrations took place outside his apartment building in the Avenue Raphaël. He was not committed for trial, however, until 1989, when he was charged with crimes against humanity. The inquiry was still in progress when, on 8 June 1993, a fifty-year-old mental patient called Christian Didier gained entry to Bousquet’s flat and shot him dead.
Paul Touvier, the head of the Vichy Milice in Lyons and a close associate of Klaus Barbie, was sentenced to death after the Liberation. He escaped, and traditionalist Catholic groups sheltered him for years. He received a pardon from President Pompidou in 1971, but went back into hiding in 1981 when it became clear that he could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. He was finally arrested in 1989, but prevarications in the judicial system continued to delay his trial and sentence of life imprisonment in April 1994. He died in prison in 1996.
Information also emerged about Maurice Papon, who had been general secretary of the Gironde with special responsibility for Jewish Affairs from 1942 to 1944. On his orders, 1,690 Jews – including 130 children und
er thirteen – were sent to the detention centre of Drancy. By 1944, however, Papon realized that Vichy was doomed. He started passing information to the Resistance, which earned him a place among the Anciens Combattants de la Résistance.
Papon suffered remarkably few problems after the Liberation. He became the Prefect of the Paris police soon after de Gaulle’s return to power, and in October 1961 he was in charge when 11,000 Algerians were arrested for demonstrating in Paris. Some sixty of these prisoners were said to have been killed over the next few days, and most of the bodies were dumped in the Seine. Papon went on to become Minister of the Budget under President Giscard d’Estaing. His career came to a halt only in 1981, when Le Canard enchaîné published documents showing his responsibility for the deportation of the Jews.
Such was the reluctance of the French establishment to see this case come to court that it took sixteen years of legal wrangling before Maurice Papon, then aged eighty-seven, stood trial in Bordeaux. He was the first high-ranking French official to stand trial for complicity in crimes against humanity, and in 1998 he was found guilty of complicity in the deportation but not murder of the Jews. Papon’s lawyers appealed, but in 1999 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in 2002 on health grounds.
The civil war among historians is unlikely to end for some time. Older and more conservative writers, who have retained their respect for Marshal Pétain, refuse to accept that Vichy was a fascist regime. In the narrow sense of the term, it cannot be defined as fascist: it was too reactionary and Catholic, despite its lip service to a National Revolution. But in the broader sense, the personality cult of the Marshal, the anti-Jewish laws, the paramilitary organizations and the total lack of democratic rights could justify the label. This more forgiving school also feels that far too much has been made of the photographs of Pétain’s meeting with Hitler at Montoire in 1940. ‘Mitterrand,’ said one, ‘shook the hand of Milosevic – a war criminal – so why should Pétain not have shaken Hitler’s hand at Montoire?’ Their greatest regret is that Pétain did not protect his reputation by fleeing to North Africa in November 1942, when the Germans invaded the unoccupied zone.
Paris: After the Liberation 1944-1949 Page 44