Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Frankfurt. This gave him formal authority ‘to effect movement into France in case of serious disturbance there provided that such a move in your opinion is essential to provide for security repeat security of US Forces or to secure supplies essential to them’. A reconnaissance by selected officers was permitted before the referendumof 5 May.
    A signals officer in Washington, recognizing the telegram’s potentially explosive nature, contacted the code room of the State Department,suggesting that the message should be cleared on their side. An urgent meeting was called by the European department’s senior experts, John Hickerson and James Bonbright, who took the representatives from the War Department to see Dean Acheson, the Assistant Secretary of State. They reminded him that, whatever the right-wing rumour-mongers in France might be saying, a Communist coup was most unlikely.
    Acheson and his colleagues expressed a very strong view that ‘General MacNarney should not be given discretionary authority to move troops into France’. They pointed out that ‘US troops moving into France to widely scattered places, in the event of civil trouble might well be misunderstood, give rise to incidents involving them, and, at the worst, might even cause the Communists to appeal to the Soviet Union and send for help on the grounds that the United States had intervened’. Not even Acheson and his subordinates in the State Department appeared to be aware of articles 3 and 4 in the Franco-Soviet pact signed by Bidault and Molotov in December 1944. That obliged either France or the Soviet Union, in the event of a threat, to take ‘all necessary measures to eliminate any fresh menace coming from Germany’. The nationality of the menace had not been specified.
    The State Department team drafted an alternative set of instructions which they took to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 1.30 p.m. The Joint Chiefs were only prepared to make minor modifications to the original instruction to General MacNarney. Neither side would compromise further, so that afternoon Admiral Leahy, the former ambassador to Marshal Pétain, took both drafts to the President for his decision. Truman, to Acheson’s appalled disbelief, backed the War Department.
    Acheson drafted a telegramto Caffery in Paris. He warned himof the situation and told him that their attempts to stop the War Department instruction had failed – but then he cancelled the signal before it was sent. This is surprising since, to the State Department’s dismay, MacNarney’s authority to move troops into France remained in force, even after Monday, 6 May, passed off without any disturbances. If Caffery ever heard of the War Department instruction, from either Acheson or anyone else, he certainly did not tell any of his colleagues.
    The only satisfaction the State Department could extract from this deeply disturbing episode was in a later communication debunking thecries of wolf in Germany which had led to such an extraordinary state of affairs. On 5 June, a top-secret signal was sent to Robert Murphy, the President’s representative in Germany: ‘As you may already know the information planted… is entirely phony. The source belongs to an extreme Right Resistance group in France desiring to stir up trouble and obtain American arms and funds.’

20
    Politics and Letters
    In the lead-up to the referendum on 5 May 1946, all was fair in war and politics. Right-wing rumour-mongers claimed, without producing evidence, that the Kremlin was financing the French Communist Party. The Parti Républicain de la Liberté spread the word that the Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, was having an affair with Marie Bell of the Comédie-Française and sending her vast bouquets of orchids costing 50,000 francs. Galtier-Boissière was unconvinced. He did not see ‘the nation’s perfect baby, so carefully watched by the party, paying court while escorted by six bodyguards toting sub-machine guns’.
    The draft of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic proposed that most power should rest in the hands of the Assembly, while the Senate should be abolished. The Assembly would also have the power to appoint both the prime minister and the president, whose powers would be purely ceremonial. Cardinal Suhard called upon the faithful to ‘vote and vote well’ against a left-wing and anti-clerical Constitution. Suhard’s message was repeated from pulpits in cathedrals and churches across