Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

shocking could be found in Brittany fishing ports, where trawler owners could make more money from selling their allocation of fuel on the black market than by sending their boats to sea.
    On the other hand, a failure to maintain rationing would have triggered dangerous unrest and brought down any government which attempted to follow such a course. The inequalities were far more terrible in France than they were in Britain, where the rationing system as a whole was more thoroughly and effectively applied. It could be argued, however, that the efficiency of the system contributed greatly to Britain’s slow economic recovery afterwards.
    The French economy, with its unofficial slide towards the free market which caused such misery, found itself in a much better position to take off in 1949 once foreign aid arrived in sufficient quantity to kick-start commercial activity. ‘It’s a triumph for private enterprise,’ wrote Diana Cooper, ‘although in the long run they may succumb from immorality.’

24
    Fighting Back against the Communists
    ‘It looks as though the Communists are having everything their own way everywhere,’ wrote the British ambassador in 1946. ‘They have the great advantage of knowing what they want.’ This belief was widespread, but not entirely true. French Communist leaders were still receiving remarkably few instructions from Moscow, and they had been lulled into a false sense of security by their comparative successes within the democratic system.
    Communist strength on paper appeared almost overwhelming. Benoît Frachon, during his secret conversations with Politburo member Mikhail Suslov in Moscow in June, claimed over 5.5 million members in the Communist-controlled trades union movement. Even if this figure was inflated, his assertion that ‘through the CGT, the French Communist Party influences the working class’ was largely true.
    The French Communists, however, did their best to hide their control of the CGT, as a senior member of the party acknowledged in a letter to the Kremlin. ‘After the CGT Congress we ended up with a committee of seven communists and six reformers. This was conditioned by our situation: we must not hand ammunition to our reactionary enemies allowing them to describe the CGT as Communist.’
    In his report to Suslov, Frachon did not paint a very optimistic picture. It is of course possible that this was a defensive measure after Ponomarev’s demand that the party intervene in the running of the French zone of Germany. Communist influence within the army was ‘very weak’, Frachon told him. The army was ‘full of Vichyists’, whichexplained ‘the reactionary policy of the French military administration in Germany and Austria’. He then added that whatever the influences within the army, ‘I do not believe that the reactionary forces are planning to use the army against us in a
coup d’état
.’
    De Gaulle’s increasingly palpable presence in the political wings began to alarm both the left and the centre. After the speech at Bayeux in June 1946, the General permitted René Capitant to found the Union Gaulliste. It was a way of testing the waters without risking his own dignity. This prototype virtually collapsed under its own sudden success, attracting half a million members and twenty-two members of the Constituent Assembly by September. The Communists renewed their accusations that ‘
le général factieux
’ wished to return as a dictator. The Christian Democrats of the MRP also began to worry that the Gaullists might poach their supporters.
    Bidault, the MRP’s first Prime Minister, hoped to make an alliance with de Gaulle; but the General was inflexible. He concentrated his ire upon the new draft of the Constitution. His displeasure was hardly surprising. The latest draft did give some additional powers to the President, and the Senate was replaced by a Council of the Republic; but all real power still lay in the hands of the Assembly. Politically, de Gaulle was making the same mistake as the Communists had in May: he was turning the referendum on the Constitution into a vote for or against himself. When polling booths closed on 13 October, there were 3 million more abstentions than in the May referendum, but the draft Constitution for the Fourth Republic was approved. The General was scathing. Only 35 per cent of those eligible to vote had supported the draft Constitution. This encouraged him to plan his own mass movement.
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