Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

table, then took their meals in the kitchen. One visitor described the place as ‘
tristement petit-bourgeois
’. It had a private cinema because Communist leaders (with the exception of Laurent Casanova) did not dare venture out to public places. The house also had a very uneven art collection. All the works had been donated and dedicated to
le camarade Maurice
by painters who were party members.
    In 1945 the French Communist Party, then at the height of its influence, decided to push forward its most ambitious strategy: taking over the Socialist Party through amalgamation. The theme of working-class unity held a tremendous appeal at that time for the majority, especially theyoung, who had no experience of Communist ruthlessness in the pursuit of power.
    Jacques Duclos declared that only enemies of the people were opposed to the unity of the working class: Socialists who resisted it were ‘scissionists’. But veterans, such as the Socialist leader Léon Blum, remembered only too well the Spanish Communist Party’s attempts to swallow the Spanish Socialist Party in 1936, early in the Civil War. They also remembered the Communist takeover of the CGT trades union federation in the name of working-class unity.
    The American Embassy kept a watch on these developments. Captain David Rockefeller, the assistant military attaché, maintained close touch with members of the Renseignements Généraux, one of the Ministry of the Interior’s police intelligence networks. These officers persuaded him that the best bulwark for the Socialists to resist the Communists was the recently reformed Union Démocratique Socialiste de la Résistance. Although left-wing, it had proved its staunchly anti-Communist position by expelling Pierre Villon, a party member. Rockefeller predicted that if the Socialists and their allies stood firm, the Communists would have little alternative but to pull out of the government and sabotage ‘efforts to bring about economic recovery’.
    Blum and his colleagues at the head of the Socialist Party felt uneasy. The Communists looked as though they would win either way. If a majority of Socialists agreed to unification, the Communists would be able, through unscrupulous use of their superior organization, to take over every important post and win control. On the other hand, if Blum and his supporters managed to win the vote against unification, the issue might well split the Socialist Party, as had happened in Spain nine years before. The Communists would then win over the Socialist left wing and most of their young members. Their only hope was to play for time.
    Communist attempts to establish a monopoly of working-class leadership were damaged from an unexpected direction. The centrepiece of their propaganda in 1945 was the heroism of the Red Army. But when the party strove to win over the recently returned prisoners of war and deportees, it discovered that many had returned to France horrified by the rape, looting and murder they had witnessed in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Their stories spread. Communist leaders in Paris were beside themselves with rage. ‘No word against the Red Army mustbe permitted!’ thundered André Marty at a mass meeting. Posters appeared attacking those ‘cynical Hitlerian scoundrels’ who had infiltrated themselves ‘to spread anti-Soviet calumnies’ against ‘the soldiers of the glorious Red Army who have saved the civilized world’.
    The Kremlin, on the other hand, demonstrated little concern. Stalin’s lack of interest in France continued beyond the end of the war. After the red flag was raised over the ruins of Berlin, his main preoccupation was the establishment of a
cordon sanitaire
of satellite states controlled by the Red Army. Never again would he be vulnerable to a surprise attack from Germany.
    One of the best indications of how loose the relationship between the Kremlin and the French Communist Party had become appears in the stenographic account of a meeting of the international section on 15 June 1945. Stepanov, the official dealing with the French Communist Party, felt that its leaders were losing their way. ‘For the whole period of the Liberation,’ he told Ponomarev and his committee, ‘one can say that the Communist Party acted in a very intelligent and very clever way. The party did not allow itself to be isolated from the rest of the resistance movement and the other parties…[Yet] one gets the impression that the Communist