Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

France. The Archbishop of Bordeaux stated outright that Catholics must refuse to ratify the Constitution. This produced fears in the centre that intervention from the Church would play into Communist hands.
    The most ingenious piece of black propaganda was mounted by the Communists just over two weeks before the elections. They arranged for one of their prominent union leaders to be arrested on the basis of charges originally laid against him by the Vichy government. TheMinistry of the Interior had nothing to do with the arrest. According to a ‘competent source’, it was carried out by officers from the Communist-infiltrated Prefecture of Police.
    The outcry in the party’s press was predictable, claiming that Vichy reactionaries were still in control and that the Pétain regime was working frombeyond the grave. The whole operation was a great success, to the frustration of Édouard Depreux, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, whom the Communists loathed. Henaff, the union leader, was released amid triumphant demonstrations, while Depreux was left subtly tainted with Vichyism. But it would not be long before Depreux began to organize an effective revenge.
    The Communists demanded a ‘
Oui
’ in favour of the draft Constitution, but they allowed, and then even encouraged, the May referendum to be turned into a ‘plebiscite for or against Communism’. Some rich ‘
paniquards
’ planned to leave France if they won. The American ambassador was scathing about the fatalistic assumption that ‘the Cossacks would soon be arriving on the Place de la Concorde’.
    De Gaulle was one of the very few to predict that the Communists would lose, whatever the opinion polls said. He told his secretary Claude Mauriac, the son of François, that the Communists had made a major mistake. Out of sheer over-confidence, they had allowed the tables to be turned at last. Until then, the left had managed to manipulate and define issues in terms of fascism and anti-fascism. Now, for the first time, the issue was Communism and anti-Communism. ‘And that’s a development of capital importance for the future,’ said the General. He had the hugely satisfied air of a man who had put together a clever plan. ‘I managed to tie a good-sized saucepan to their leg with the referendum,’ he said. It was one of the very few electoral measures he had been able to achieve in the face of the Constituent Assembly.
    In the week before the referendum, the walls of Paris were scrawled with ‘
Oui
’ or ‘
Non
’ in chalk, often crossed out by the other side. In the 16th
arrondissement
well-dressed little girls with buckets and brushes were seen scrubbing out the
Oui
s. In a less elegant part of the city, a green metal
vespasienne
urinal bore the more anarchic slogan:
    Voter OUI, voter NON
Vous serez toujours les CONS!
    No May Day in Paris was complete without the scent of lily-of-the-valley. Traders came into Paris that morning with great baskets of the flowers on their arms tied into little bunches, and everyone wore sprigs of it in their buttonholes. After the May Day parade from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation, there was a Communist Party rally at six o’clock in the Place de la Concorde. As Thorez addressed the great crowd in the evening sunlight, he was watched from above. Baron Élie de Rothschild and other friends had brought field-glasses for this purpose to a drinks party on the roof garden of Donald Bloomingdale’s penthouse at the Crillon Hotel only a few yards away.
    ‘I have little doubt that there will be a majority of Ouis,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary on Sunday, 5 May, the day of the election. ‘All my friends of the right say it will be the end of France, which of course is nonsense.’
    The following morning, 6 May, the date on which American troops were ready to move into France, the narrow victory of the
Non
s was confirmed. After the Communists’ great efforts, it was seen as a significant setback for them. ‘De Gaulle was right,’ Claude Mauriac wrote in his diary.
    The American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, then under way, did not hide its jubilation during a dinner at the Quai d’Orsay. Jacques Dumaine, although also relieved by the outcome, felt they were seeing things only in black and white. ‘They imagine that France is divided into two camps of which one will overcome the other’, and thus they deliberately ignored ‘the heterogeneous free-for-all which is the