Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

dangerous to let the Communists have the Ministry of War for six months. Palewski was certain that they would turn the army round and stage a
coup d’état
.
    Talk of
coups d’état
became infectious. A rumour ran round the next morning that de Gaulle, not the Communists, was planning to seize power with the backing of the army. The Communists restricted themselves to a vigorous complaint at de Gaulle’s refusal to make one of their members Minister of War. The party warned that de Gaulle should not ‘consider us as second-rate Frenchmen’. It had nominated General Joinville, an officer promoted from the FFI, as its candidate. Joinville, a well-known Communist sympathizer, was anathema to the regular army.
    At the rue Saint-Dominique it was a day of negotiation, as political leaders arrived in groups or singly in answer to the General’s summons. Meanwhile, the deputies in the Palais Bourbon waited in a fever of impatience, rumour and speculation. Throughout the country there was deep disquiet. Many feared that de Gaulle had played his hand so badly that he would be forced to give in to all the Communist demands. The directorate of Renseignements Généraux provided updated situation reports on the mood of the people every few hours.
    When de Gaulle himself finally emerged that evening to go home, he faced a barrage of questions as to whether a government would be formed the next day. Confining himself to one of his Delphic evasions, he said: ‘One has the right to hope that.’
    Of all the politicians visiting the rue Saint-Dominique that day, the most uncommunicative were the two Communist leaders, MauriceThorez and Jacques Duclos. The next morning, a police spy in Communist Party headquarters – identified in the reports of the Renseignements Généraux only by the code XP/23 – overheard Duclos on the way to a politburo meeting say to a colleague: ‘Yesterday we were tricked. Today all we can do is try to get one ministry more than the Socialists.’
    In the end a compromise was reached. The Communists did not get a ‘decisive portfolio’ – either the Ministry of the Interior, Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of War – but Charles Tillon was made Minister for Armaments. Maurice Thorez was made vice-president of the Council of Ministers, a deputy premiership which was meaningless, and the Communists received three other portfolios: Industrial Production, National Economy and Labour. According to Bidault, the Communists then became very cooperative.
    The winter did not improve. There was a feeling in government circles of a slide in slow motion towards disaster. From 10 December, the electric current in Paris was cut off either in the morning or during the afternoon. It also often failed in the evening, leaving parties in darkness and lifts out of order.
    André Malraux, whom de Gaulle had appointed his Minister of Information in the new Council of Ministers, prophesied at an embassy lunch party on 3 December ‘that the Communists would attempt to obtain power by force within the next twelve months and that they would fail’.
    De Gaulle was thinking along similar lines. A conversation he had with Jefferson Caffery on 6 December was significant, because it revealed the fundamentally flawed state of his thinking, which was to persist for a number of years.
    ‘There are only two real forces in France today: the Communists and I. If the Communists win, France will be a Soviet Republic; if I win, France will stay independent.’
    ‘Who
will
win?’ Caffery asked.
    ‘If I get my breaks at all, especially in the international field, I will win. If France falls, every country in Western Europe will fall too, and all the Continent will be Communist.’
    *
    Paradoxically, during this period of drift one of the most decisive developments in France’s post-war history took place. It was brought about by Jean Monnet, the least pretentious of great men.
    Monnet, who came from a prosperous family of Cognac producers, had deep roots in the countryside yet believed passionately in industrial modernization. This ‘father of the European Community’ was the most admired and influential planner of the century, yet he possessed no formal qualifications. He joined the arms-purchasing committee on the outbreak of war, then after the fall of France Churchill recruited him for similar work in the United States, where he became the chief author of Roosevelt’s Victory Plan to produce an overwhelming output of military