Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

intersection in the centre.
    On hearing the news in the National Assembly, Communist deputies expressed no regret for the victims. They accused the government of having carried out the sabotage, and compared the incident to the Nazis setting fire to the Reichstag and blaming the Communists. Such tactics did themlittle good. Newsreel cameras had been rushed to the site of the crash. Their slow pans across the wreckage created stark black-and-white images of carriages split open, revealing battered corpses inside. One commentator, in a voice vibrant with anger, talked of an ‘abominable attack’ carried out by ‘anonymous criminals’. These newsreels, shownin cinemas all over the country, had a powerful effect. The derailing of the express immeasurably strengthened the hand of the government.
    On the day after the session ended in the Assembly, Maurice Thorez went north to talk to the miners of Hénin-Liétard and rally their spirits. He made no mention of the derailment. While he was absent, a grenade – a German grenade – exploded in the garden of his residence at Choisy-le-Roi. It was most probably an attempt to divert attention from the victims of the train crash.
    Perhaps the most decisive effect of the rail disaster was the split it produced among strikers over the question of violent methods. The postmen, who had just returned to work, were given police protection. Other workers still out on strike came under increasing pressure from their wives to resume work before Christmas. Distrust of the Communist Party’s intentions spread even more rapidly after the crash. These suspicions proved well founded. Not long before his death in 1993, Auguste Lecoeur admitted calmly in interviews with the film-maker Mosco that sabotaging the French economy and splitting France politically was simply part of ‘the struggle against American imperialism’.
    A growing number of workers resented being used by the Communists for political ends and demanded secret ballots on whether or not to continue the strike. At first the Communists resisted this by intimidation, but by the second week of December the pressure had become too great. ‘Under these circumstances,’ wrote Moch in his debriefing document to the prefects, ‘the Communist directors of the CGT no longer had any choice but to begin strategic withdrawals or suffer a total defeat. If they had delayed another forty-eight hours in giving the back-to-work order they would have lost complete control of the CGT membership. The end of the strike must therefore be considered as a Communist withdrawal, implying a serious check but not a definite defeat.’
    General Leclerc’s funeral service was planned for 8 December in Notre-Dame. The event had taken on strong political overtones in the circumstances. ‘All Leclerc’s boys are pouring into town,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister. ‘It is like mobilization – there will be 2,000 of them in Notre-Dame.’
    President Auriol and most of the diplomatic corps attended. ‘The ceremony was fine and impressive,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary, ‘butthe twelve other unhappy coffins detracted from the grandeur of the central figure without gaining any themselves. One regretted their presence yet felt doubly sorry for themon that account. A man’s funeral is his last appearance and he ought to have the stage to himself.’ The British ambassador then led the diplomatic corps on foot from Notre-Dame to the Invalides through two heavy showers. Leclerc’s loss would be felt most in the direction of French policy in Indo-China. He was one of the few realists left in a senior position. His strong advice that the French should negotiate independence with Ho Chi Minh had embittered relations with his superior, Admiral d’Argenlieu. Politicians in Paris, even in the Socialist Party, felt obliged to support d’Argenlieu. They had not grasped how much the world had changed.
    The last strike collapsed on the morning of 10 December. The headline in
L’Humanité
– ‘This morning, 1,500,000 combatants returned to work as a group’ – represented a desperate attempt to paint defeat as victory of a sort. Huge mounds of refuse still lay in the streets of Paris.
    That night Duff and Diana Cooper gave their farewell ball at the British Embassy, and it turned out to be the ‘gala occasion it could not have been the week before’. Nancy Mitford wrote to her mother that the embassy had received 600 acceptances, ‘in spite of