Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

consolation for the government. The purges of the Paris police seemed to have worked. Depreux felt confident enough to send them in to clear the Citroën works occupied by strikers.
    De Gaulle became increasingly convinced that his return to power was at hand. Ramadier’s government of Socialists and Christian Democrats seemed to be cracking up, so the General tried to treat the municipal election results as a referendumwhich had produced a vote of confidence in the Rassemblement. He demanded the dissolution of the Assembly and a general election. But this only strengthened the determination of the Socialists and the MRP to resist him.
    Contradictory signals were coming out of the Gaullist camp. While one of the General’s associates reassured the American Embassy that he was not anxious ‘to pull the rug at this moment’, he himself announced, ‘we haven’t arrived at the Rubicon to go fishing’. Jacques Soustelle told a contact in the US Embassy on 3 November that de Gaulle did not want to come to power before the hard winter was over; and Gaston Palewski repeated the same message the following day. Ten days later, Colonel Passy was sighted at lunch with de Gaulle and Soustelle. There was also a belief, shared, it would seem, by both de Gaulle’s entourage and the Americans, that the Communists were trying to provoke a crisis ‘that would bring de Gaulle to power before de Gaulle [was] ready’.
    Paul Ramadier, worn down, continued in office only in answer to President Auriol’s pleas. The results of the municipal elections had been a severe blow to his position and morale. In the second week of November, he suffered from a heavy bout of flu just as he came under pressure from his MRP partners for a change of ministers to counter the Gaullists. Finally, on the afternoon of 19 November, he offered his resignation again, having heard that he did not have the full support of his own party. This time President Auriol had to accept it. The nextmorning (the day of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip of Greece in Westminster Abbey), France was without a government and paralysed by strikes.
    Léon Blum, seventy-four years old and still frail from his imprisonment in Germany, appeared the only candidate who might muster sufficient support. On 21 October, in his speech to the National Assembly proposing his candidacy as head of government, he warned of the double danger facing the political system. When the votes were counted shortly before midnight, Blum was nine short of the minimum. Robert Schuman, the Minister of Finance, was told: ‘It’s your turn.’ The following afternoon Schuman received his majority, with only the Communist Party and the semi-official Gaullist group of deputies opposing his candidature.
    Schuman, an austere Catholic bachelor and a firm moderate, had a slightly crooked, rubbery-looking face, with a bald crown and large ears. Once, when a junior official failed to recognize him, he raised his hat and said that surely he recognized the cranium, it had been caricatured enough in the newspapers. Schuman came from Lorraine, which meant that during the First World War he had been obliged to serve in the Kaiser’s army – a turn of fate which the Communists used shamelessly in their attacks on him. The other knife which they twisted mercilessly was his very brief service in Pétain’s first administration in July 1940. They did not mention the fact that Schuman was one of the first politicians arrested by the Germans.
    The other key member of the government was Jules Moch, who took over as Minister of the Interior. Moch, with his round tortoiseshell glasses, pinched face and toothbrush moustache, looked like a provincial schoolmaster. He was a
polytechnicien
, pitiless with statistics and mathematical calculations. Yet his predecessor Édouard Depreux described him as ‘a sensitive man, loyal and faithful to his friends’, and, most significant for the times he was about to live through, he possessed ‘a profound sense of the State’. The Communists found it hard to attack him: as a Jew, an anti-cleric and a Socialist, his loathing of Vichy had been unfeigned, and his son had been killed by the Gestapo.
    Moch faced the hardest ministerial task since the Liberation. The autumn coal strike, with stocks still depleted from the previous terrible winter, made the government extremely vulnerable. The miners fromthe north of France were in combative mood when colonial troops were