Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Molotov’s absence meant that everything was ‘unanimously agreed’. Meetings often lasted less than two hours, instead of whole days. This did not necessarily mean that everyonebehaved in an exemplary fashion. According to Isaiah Berlin, who had joined the British delegation on the orders of Lord Franks, the European attitude towards the American offer was that of ‘lofty and demanding beggars approaching an apprehensive millionaire’. There was also a tendency to revert to national stereotype. At one point the Italian delegate exclaimed dramatically, ‘If we do not get this, there will be blood on the streets of Rome!’ The Swedish delegate, Dag Hammarskjöld, replied, ‘Maybe you… er… exaggerate a little?’
    The Marshall Plan conference concluded on 15 July to everyone’s satisfaction, but two causes for friction had surfaced. The British government’s attempt to maintain the limit on Jewish emigration to Palestine – this was the time of the
Exodus
affair – had brought it into conflict with the French, who had allowed the refugees to embark in southern France, despite an agreement to the contrary.
    Bidault and his officials in the Quai d’Orsay were far more disturbed to hear that the Americans were planning to come to some private agreement with the British over Germany. Bevin tried to explain the state of affairs, but with little success. On returning to the embassy, he and Duff Cooper asked Caffery and Averell Harriman, who happened to be in Paris, to come round. The Americans were told that Bevin had been forced to admit that talks about Germany had been taking place, even though General Lucius Clay had ‘strongly objected to any communication being made to the French on the subject’.
    The next morning, 17 July, Bevin went to say goodbye to his French counterpart. ‘Bidault seemed sad and tired,’ wrote the British ambassador, ‘but he didn’t know the worst.’ Only late that morning did Duff Cooper himself hear that ‘an Anglo-American agreement has been concluded for the raising of the German level of industry, the handing over of management to the Germans and other things’. This, he knew, would be ‘a terrible blow to the French’.
    When the news was broken that afternoon to Chauvel, Alphand and Maurice Couve de Murville at the Quai d’Orsay, ‘it was very badly received’. De Gaulle’s fears expressed on that winter afternoon at Marly to Hervé Alphand had materialized within eighteen months. Germany, not France, was to be revived as the motor for European recovery. The next step was not hard to guess: Germany would become the centrepieceof America’s counter-Soviet strategy. The Clay–Robertson agreement, as it was called after the names of the American and British military governors in Germany, provoked the headline in
L’Humanité
: ‘French Mothers Must Start Trembling Again’.
    The summer brought a fresh influx of visitors. One of them was Señora Eva Duarte de Perón, who had come on an official visit – the perfect opportunity to take Dior’s New Look back to Argentina. As a matter of courtesy, the French government awarded her a minor decoration: what used to be called a ‘dinner medal’. Hervé Alphand made the presentation at the Quai d’Orsay; but when Evita Perón took off her thin summer coat, she revealed a dress cut so low that Alphand simply could not decide where to pin it. Finally he opted for a point between bosomand waist.
    The most striking play of 1947 was, without doubt, Jean Genet’s
Les Bonnes
. His idea of writing a play about two maids who plotted to murder their mistress dated back to the autumn of 1943. Genet denied that it was based on the notorious case of the Papin sisters before the war and, although there were superficial parallels with reality, the plot was entirely his own.
    Bérard and Kochno first talked to Louis Jouvet, the great actor who was also the director of the Théâtre de l’Athénée, about Genet’s play when they were all down in the Midi. Jouvet refused to consider the idea until after he returned to Paris; on his return, however, he found himself assailed by other fervent believers in the play, including Cocteau and Marie-Blanche de Polignac. Cocteau handed over the manuscript ‘as though it were a treasure’.
    During its run from the spring, it provoked a fury among audiences and reviewers. Genet even punched the critic of
Le Figaro
for what he wrote. Sartre and other friends supported him loyally, so