Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

material.
    Monnet won the trust of virtually everyone he met. In all the major Western countries, he made friends with the leading bankers, industrialists, administrators and diplomats through small private dinner parties where the principal theme of conversation was the post-war reconstruction of Europe.
    Monnet, although untalented as a public speaker, possessed a rare gift of finding the most telling argument for each person. ‘You talk of greatness,’ he had said to de Gaulle towards the end of the war, ‘but the French today are pygmies. There will only be greatness when the French assume the stature to justify it. For that, it is necessary to modernize, because the French aren’t modern.’
    He returned to the theme in the second half of 1945. France had to transform itself if the country was to command any respect in the modern world. De Gaulle told him to prepare detailed recommendations. He liked the idea of a strategy which aimed to make France rather than Germany the industrial giant of Europe. On 5 December, Monnet submitted a five-page memorandum to de Gaulle. It was approved by the Council of Ministers on 3 January 1946. The decree was counter-signed by nine ministers, including four Communists. Monnet’s brilliant drafting allowed almost everyone – from industrialist to Communist – to read his own politics into the plan and agree with its objectives.
    The Commissariat Général du Plan was rapidly established, with the help of Gaston Palewski. To avoid ministerial jealousies and manoeuvring, Monnet worked directly under the Prime Minister. He kept his staff small and very unministerial in style. Eighteen modernizationcommissions were set up, but the key in Monnet’s mind was steel production. The previous record for production had been in 1929. Monnet’s objective was to reach the same level by 1950, then rapidly exceed it by 25 per cent. De Gaulle dreamed of achieving France’s domination of European industry by using coal exacted from the Ruhr, but the Americans were firmly opposed to a new version of the reparations which had embittered Germany after the First World War.
    The plan was over-ambitious with France’s catastrophic lack of fuel, raw materials and spare parts; and a ruthless application of priorities – a guns-before-butter approach – was politically unthinkable when the overwhelming majority of the population lived in such misery. But Monnet’s infrastructure would be in place and ready when, in 1947, the Marshall Plan offered the French the opportunity to rebuild their future.
    Two days after Christmas, the franc was drastically devalued. The official rate, maintained since the Liberation at 50 to the United States dollar and 200 to the pound sterling, plummeted to 120 to the dollar and 480 to the pound. Jacques Dumaine noted with regret that in comparison with other currencies, France was now eighty-four times poorer than in 1914.
    New Year’s Day 1946 was a beautiful day of winter sun in Paris, but the cold, brittle light did not flatter the chief actors at General de Gaulle’s reception for the diplomatic corps. Many people were suffering from influenza. De Gaulle ‘was looking ill,’ observed one onlooker, ‘and Palewski was looking even worse’.
    The two men had good reasons for looking exhausted – Palewski mainly from his attempts to calm de Gaulle. The night before, the Socialists began demanding a 20 per cent cut in the defence budget, just when the government was sending reinforcements to Indo-China as British troops withdrew.
    De Gaulle was disgusted that the political parties had recommenced ‘their games of yesteryear’. To confirm his worst suspicions, the Constitutional Commission in the Palais Bourbon was determined to make sure that the President of the Fourth Republic would be entirely dependent upon the National Assembly. De Gaulle ‘felt bound up like Gulliver by the Lilliputians’.
    Two days later, on 3 January, the General was forced to relax: themarriage of his daughter Elisabeth to Commandant Alain de Boissieu, formerly of Leclerc’s 2e DB, took place that day. After the wedding the bride’s parents left for a holiday at the villa of Yvonne de Gaulle’s brother at Cap d’Antibes. There, de Gaulle read and walked in the pine groves which surrounded the villa. He could not stray far, for reporters had tracked them down and tried to photograph every appearance.
    De Gaulle apparently said to his host and brother-in-law, Jacques