Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Truman sent a strong message demanding the withdrawal of all French troops and cut off military supplies. Diplomats in Paris, certain that de Gaulle was on a suicide course, started to refer to him as ‘Charles le Temporaire’. A week later, de Gaulle was forced into a humiliating retreat.
    The following day, he was due to confer the Cross of the Liberation on General Eisenhower, but at the last moment Eisenhower was told that he could not bring any British officers, because of the dispute over the Levant. Eisenhower said that, as Supreme Allied Commander, he would be bringing Air Marshal Tedder and General Morgan, two of hisdeputies, and if this did not suit General de Gaulle, he would not come. De Gaulle had to back down.
    Palewski, apparently on de Gaulle’s behalf, passed a message via Louise de Vilmorin to Duff Cooper, saying that they both regretted that ‘owing to recent events their relations with the British Embassy could not be what they had been in the past’, but they wished the ambassador to know that they still had nothing but the friendliest feelings towards him personally. Duff Cooper was not impressed: ‘This seems to me – I must say – the most extraordinary procedure. I am surprised that de Gaulle lends himself to it.’
    De Gaulle began to realize that his hopes for post-war France were frustrated from within as well as from without. When the Consultative Assembly debated the crisis in the Levant on 17 June, he was appalled to find that the bulk of the criticismwas directed, not against the British, but against his own government and France’s traditional policy in the region. On the evening of 26 June he told General Pierre de Bénouville, a hero of the Resistance, that he ‘intended to retire from politics altogether’. Bénouville then repeated this to Louise de Vilmorin ‘under the seal of secrecy’ – but she relayed the news to her lover, the British ambassador.
    De Gaulle had far more serious causes for concern than the Levant, or his disastrous foray in the Val d’Aosta. The food situation was so bad that the Minister of the Interior sent a secret telegramon 7 July 1945 to the Governor-General of Algeria, urgently demanding two shiploads of sheep to avert a crisis. Beans and lentils were shipped in from South America. The country had less than two weeks’ supply of grain. And this was summer. The winter would be far worse.
    France’s economy was in a disastrous state, but de Gaulle paid little attention to financial matters. Whether or not he ever uttered the famous remark ‘
l’intendance suivra
’ – ‘the baggage train will follow’ – is an academic question, but this was certainly his attitude. His two ministers responsible for economic affairs, Pierre Mendès-France and René Pleven, became locked in disagreement in the winter of 1944, when he summoned them to his residence in the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday afternoon to discuss their opposing points of view. Pleven did not want a strict fiscal policy because of the hardship it would cause in the shortterm. He put his case simply and plausibly in under half an hour. Mendès-France, a far cleverer man, argued passionately for over two hours that unless the French government had the courage to stop paying inflationary wage settlements, it would never rise out of its present state of destitution. The result of this meeting was that never again would de Gaulle allow anyone to talk to him about economics for three hours.
    Mendès-France’s plan was absolutely correct in fiscal terms, but the country and the government coalition could not have withstood the political effects of the misery it would have caused. France’s financial salvation, like that of the rest of Europe, lay not within her own resources but in the generosity or self-interest of richer nations. Yet the primary objective of de Gaulle’s next trip abroad was not to raise loans, but to persuade the Americans to let France have the left bank of the Rhine and her share of an internationalized Ruhr.
    Bidault told Duff Cooper that ‘with de Gaulle in his present frame of mind the less travelling the General did in foreign countries the better’. But de Gaulle’s trip to the United States at least did not turn out a disaster.
    On 21 August, after the trial of Marshal Pétain was out of the way, de Gaulle set off for Washington, accompanied by Bidault, General Juin and Gaston Palewski. The future peace of Europe, he told President Truman, would be