Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

the fact that almost everysoldier had ‘at least one girl riding behind him on the horse, clinging to his Napoleonic uniform and screaming’.
    As evening advanced, a strong breeze arose and the flags flying from the tops of public buildings cracked in the wind. The crowds below continued to sing the Marseillaise, ‘Madelon’, the ‘
Chant du départ
’ and the songs of the Resistance. Red Army officers, easily recognizable by their thick shoulder-boards, were congratulated; but when a White Russian friend of Simone de Beauvoir began to chat with a group of Soviet soldiers in their own language, they demanded severely what she was doing in Paris and why she was not in the Motherland.
    Castor and a couple of friends went up to Montmartre to finish the evening at the Cabane Cubaine. Afterwards they were given a lift home in a jeep. They felt slightly flat. ‘This victory had been far away from us; we had not been waiting for it, as we had the Liberation, in a feverish anguish of anticipation.’ At midnight a fanfare of trumpeters from the Paris fire brigade sounded the ceasefire. Others also felt that, unlike the Liberation, there was an artificial side to the celebration, partly because they were ‘too exhausted to applaud a finale for which we had waited too long’, but also because General de Gaulle’s emphasis on France’s glorious role did not ring true. They did not feel like victors.
    The only people likely to feel triumphant were the Communists, basking in the reflected glory of the Red Army and the conviction that the party would be in power in the near future.
    In 1945, the French Communist Party was the most powerful political organization in the country, controlling a number of front organizations – the National Front, the Union of French Women, the Union of French Republican Youth, a veterans’ association and most of the largest unions within the CGT, the Confédération Générale du Travail. But there were some striking weaknesses, especially in Paris and its suburbs, where membership had not even climbed back to the level of 1938. Benoît Frachon, the Communist head of the CGT trades union movement, reported to Moscow: ‘the principal reason… is due to a certain temporary disappointment among workers. The workers were counting on a fundamental revolution in France and on social liberation immediately after the Germans were chased out.’ But what Frachon does not mention is that the loss of workers in the
ceinture rouge
suburbs wasgreater than acknowledged. Their loss was partly camouflaged by the number of intellectuals joining the party in central Paris.
    Many workers had indeed become Communists during the Resistance in the belief that victory would lead to revolution. The astonishment and disgust of many could hardly be contained when Maurice Thorez, on his return to France, called for increased production and – from the most famous deserter of 1939 – the creation of a powerful French army.
    None of this, of course, meant that the French Communist Party had become a bourgeois party, even if some of its leaders, especially Thorez, may have been lulled into a certain
embourgeoisement
by the trappings of power. But their policy, until they received different instructions from Moscow, remained a dual-track one. On one side, the party consolidated its position within the system of parliamentary democracy in order to install as many of its members as possible in positions of influence. And with the party’s vote rising to close to a third of the total, the possibility of reaching power through constitutional means was not to be ruled out. Meanwhile, on the other side, revolutionary morale was kept up by attacks on collaborators and ‘the fascist fifth column of Vichy’.
    The continuing obsession with the fifth column was partly inspired by the campaign to remove more of the opposition – it was also the classic Stalinist method of accounting for setbacks due to incompetence – but the belief in a fifth column of Vichyist saboteurs was quite genuine.
    Despite growing tensions between the party and General de Gaulle, Communist ministers stayed in the government, and Thorez proved himself a highly useful ally. At Waziers on 21 July 1945, he shocked his audience by telling them that the hunt for collaborators must come to an end, and that there were far too many strikes. On 1 September, Duclos proclaimed that Thorez’s speech at Waziers had raised coal production: ‘It’s thanks