Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

to the Communist Party that the population will have coal this winter.’
    The government and its officials could hardly believe their luck at Thorez’s responsible line, although they had no illusions about the party’s simultaneous efforts at infiltration. A very senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for its intelligence network in the country – he claimed to have 5,000 agents throughout France keeping a close eye on Communist activities – reported to the American Embassythat the party was devoting its efforts to planting members wherever they could wield influence. They were having much less success than they had hoped in the armed forces, but were managing to take effective control of the CGT trades union movement. On the other hand, ‘Every week they continue to support us is time gained and strengthens our position.’
    For a materialist party, totally cynical in matters of
Realpolitik,
the Communists devoted an astonishing amount of effort – and ruthless politicking – to the cultivation of myths and heroic symbols. In January 1945, the party had launched a campaign to have their star writer of the pre-war years, Romain Rolland, buried in the Panthéon. They lobbied, too, to get party members into the Académie Française. But nowhere had they been quicker off the mark than to have streets and métro stations renamed after their Resistance heroes.
    Following the Stalinist model, a personality cult was developed around Maurice Thorez. Thorez, whatever one may think of his politics, was a man of impressive talents. His enemies may have seen his muscular, rubbery face as a mask of deceit, but as a devout Stalinist he believed in the necessity of lies. A miner by birth and by trade, he overcame his lack of education by sheer force of will, developing a formidable concentration.
    He was acclaimed by the French Communist Party as ‘the son of the people’, also the title of his official autobiography – almost making him sound like the Christ of the proletariat. Yet, to demonstrate his place in the Communist universe, this was the same man whose request in Moscow to Dimitrov for permission to be interviewed by a journalist was dismissed as curtly as if he had been a clerk asking for an extra holiday.
    On his fiftieth birthday, schoolchildren came to sing: ‘Our Maurice is fifty years old – happy, happy birthday – for Jeannette, for their children – for his mother!’ Jeannette Vermeersch, his companion and the mother of his children, was portrayed as a model of proletarian courage. The poverty of her childhood was recounted as the Stalinist equivalent of a Bible story. She too cultivated the legend, and her fiery oratory was modelled on that of La Pasionaria, whom she greatly admired.
    The other, perhaps unsurprising, paradox came with the Communist Party’s commercial empire. The opportunities for expansion had been greatly increased at the Liberation, when buildings belonging to collaborationist organizations were expropriated. The party’s daily newspaper
L’Humanité,
for example, took over the building in the rue d’Enghien which had belonged to the populist newspaper
Le Petit Parisien
.
    The party owned a bank, the Banque du Nord, and a shipping line, France Navigation, which had been taken over during the Spanish Civil War, and was almost certainly bought with part of the gold reserves of the Spanish Republic, used to purchase Soviet military supplies.
    The party’s publishing empire was huge, both in Paris and in the provinces. It had twelve daily newspapers and forty-seven weeklies. In addition, the Communist-run coalition, the National Front, had seventeen weeklies, all tightly controlled. Instructions for ‘political orientation’ were issued each day to all provincial newspapers controlled by their front organization.
    The flagship of the party’s property empire was ‘le 44’, the great brick headquarters in the rue Le Peletier. It was well defended by at least half a dozen security guards, all picked members ready against a surprise attack by fifth columnists.
    Party leaders also expected assassination attempts. Thorez was driven each day to ‘le 44’ in a heavily armoured limousine accompanied by bodyguards. The moment they arrived outside, the bodyguards and the security members from inside the building would form a human screen so that Thorez could hurry inside safely. At Thorez’s house, a small château at Choisy, the bodyguards served at