Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

2,000 army officers, mainly from the FFI, who were regarded as Communists or fellow-travellers, many had already been sidelined through such devices as the so-called ‘Opération de Tarbes’. This simply involved posting officers of left-wing sympathies to outposts like Tarbes in the Pyrenees, where they languished in non-existent jobs with no access to confidential information.
    March 1947 was an eventful month in Paris as well as in Washington. On the very day that Truman addressed Congress, the French Communist Party found itself in a difficult position on the issue of Indo-China, where fighting had broken out the previous December between French forces and Ho Chi Minh’s followers led by General Giap. Moscow’s instructions on the subject were explicit. Communist deputies had to support the Viet-Minh and oppose the policy established by Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu.
    On 18 March, the Assembly stood in silence in memory of the French servicemen killed in Indo-China. François Billoux, the CommunistMinister of National Defence, remained seated. This immediately became an issue of patriotism.
    The more the Communists were isolated, the more they drew in upon themselves. Communist speeches in the National Assembly took up the most time, not so much because of their content, but because their deputies, forming a claque, would applaud their leaders’ speeches at every pause. One cynic remarked that their hands were hard not from manual labour, but from clapping.
    A number of factors encouraged General de Gaulle to return to the political arena in the spring of 1947. One of the most immediate was Ramadier’s appointment of Billoux as Minister of National Defence. De Gaulle’s sense of destiny – he once said that each day he spent several minutes wondering how his actions would be seen by history – told him that the people of France would recall him to power very soon.
    To the relief of his supporters, de Gaulle began to spend more and more time in Paris. They dreaded the three-hour drive out to Colombey-les-deux-Églises. The atmosphere of the house, La Boisserie, was as lugubrious as its setting. There the chain-smoking General worked on his memoirs, surrounded by wartime memorabilia, his collection of swords, and signed photographs of former world leaders, while ‘Madame de Gaulle clicked away with her knitting needles as the rain battered against the windows’.
    In Paris, de Gaulle established his headquarters at La Pérouse, the hotel near the Arc de Triomphe which his wartime secret service had used as its first headquarters at the Liberation. On Sunday, 30 March 1947, he made a speech at Bruneval in Normandy, the site of a commando raid during the war. As an official commemoration, the meeting attracted the presence of the British and Canadian ambassadors, as well as detachments from their countries’ armed forces. Yet the idea for this event had come from Colonel Rémy, as a way of assembling former members of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s new banner. Ramadier was exasperated, but any attempt by the government to restrict the ‘Liberator’ – as the Gaullists called their leader – looked churlish. The Communists, meanwhile, claimed his audiences were composed of ‘ladies in mink coats and old colonels smelling of mothballs’.
    De Gaulle finally decided to go ahead with the plan for creating amass movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. ‘
On va refaire la France Libre
’ was a popular cry among his wartime associates, ‘
les hommes de Londres
’. But their tendency to refer to the new movement by its initials, the RPF, displeased the General. That sounded like yet another of the political parties he loathed so much. He insisted on calling it ‘
le Rassemblement
’.
    The creation of the RPF was announced to the people of France at Strasbourg on 7 April. Soustelle set up the first group in the capital of Alsace that evening. A week later, the movement was officially registered. The Strasbourg celebrations were again linked to a semi-official event which drew the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, from Paris. He and de Gaulle inspected a guard of honour together, which confirmed Communist suspicions. But both French and Russian Communists were wrong to assume that Caffery’s attendance signalled that the American government was planning to back de Gaulle. In normal circumstances Caffery always punctiliously refused to meet de Gaulle, making an exception only for