Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

the fact that no letters have been delivered for a week’.
    Churchill flew over from London on the morning of the party. He arrived to a beautiful day. News of his presence caused huge crowds to gather outside the embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, chanting their demands for his appearance. He went out to address them in his inimitable version of the French language and received an exuberant ovation – ‘a thing he always enjoys’, his host noted with amused affection.
    The party began at half past ten. Virtually all the
corps diplomatique
came. The ‘conspicuous exceptions’ were the Russian, Polish and Yugoslav ambassadors. Churchill, beaming, in white tie and full decorations, entered the salon where his parents, Lord Randolph Churchill and Jenny Jerome, had been married. On his arm was the beautiful Odette Pol Roger in a spectacular red satin dress.
    Guests wandered in admiration through the high-ceilinged and gilded reception rooms. Like Churchill, all the men were in white tie with fulldecorations, the ribbons and sashes vivid against the black tail coats and starched white waistcoats. Diana Cooper had invited several designer friends – Dior, Balmain, Rochas and Molyneux – and they looked at their own and other creations with a critical eye.
    Susan Mary Patten wore a dress by Schiaparelli – ‘heavy ivory grosgrain, with an enormous bustle, very
Lady Windermere’s Fan
’. Christian Dior bowed to her and said, ‘That is one of the greatest dresses I have ever seen, and I wish it were mine.’
    The Gaullists there that night, such as Gaston Palewski and Pierre de Bénouville, were puffed up by John Foster Dulles’s statement the day before that General de Gaulle was ‘the coming man in France’. Dulles had even made a point of ignoring Bidault at the London conference. Jefferson Caffery was one of many who were exasperated at this clumsy intervention in French politics. Support for de Gaulle would have been more to the point in 1944; in December 1947 it simply came as an insult to Schuman and Moch, whose determination and stamina during the previous two and a half weeks had won the respect of even Malraux and Palewski.
    Susan Mary Patten was deeply embarrassed when the playwright Henri Bernstein came up and said, almost within Robert Schuman’s hearing, ‘Well, thank God you Americans have at last declared yourselves for de Gaulle. Bravo for Mr Dulles.’
    Perhaps provoked by Dulles’s praise of de Gaulle, Jules Moch made sure that the Americans appreciated the efforts made to defend Republican order; but his main objective was to put pressure on the United States to hasten financial aid to France before unrest erupted again. With Caffery, he was, of course, preaching to the converted. The ambassador’s reports to Washington extolled Moch’s ‘courageous and energetic measures which have tended to bolster the government’s and his own prestige’. But he also believed firmly that without the announcement of the Marshall Plan, the Schuman government would never have been able to inspire sufficient determination among its officials and political colleagues to resist the Communist onslaught.
    The Minister of the Interior did not rest on his laurels during the remaining months of that winter. He bombarded the prefects with briefing papers and plans for improving the countrywide security apparatus.Political Orientation Instruction No. 1 of 26 December 1947 set out the background to the recent strikes. In it Moch warned that the majority of the population still faced real hardship and that the Communists would make the most of it. The civil authorities must therefore expect renewed disorders next year, probably between mid-February and mid-March, because that would be the period of greatest scarcity of foodstuffs and coal. (In fact the next serious wave of unrest did not come until June.)
    Moch hurried forward his predecessor’s programme of eliminating Communists from the Paris police and the CRS riot police. Such was the success of this procedure that the balance was entirely reversed. By the summer of 1948, it was estimated that 19,000 out of 23,000 policemen in the capital were anti-Communist. The Ministry of the Interior meanwhile altered the distribution of CRS riot police around the country so that more were deployed close to the main danger areas – the coalfields of the north and the larger industrial centres of the east. Moch also asked the Ministry of War to formnew