Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

of the failure of the government of the day to resist a Soviet ultimatum.
    Passy also tried to assure Knight that the hotheads in the RPF were leaving the movement to join paramilitary groups on the far right. Knight, however, was much better informed than Passy realized. Although there was a basis of truth in the claim that some of these elements had started to drift away, Knight knew the White Russian chief of staff of the Gaullist
service d’ordre
in Paris, Colonel Tchenkeli, who had told him about all the extreme right-wing groups the Gaullists could call upon.
    De Gaulle’s speeches became increasingly concerned with foreign policy, and in the spring of 1948 that meant Germany. His address on 7 March to a Rassemblement gathering at Compiègne had demanded once again that Germany should be split into separate states. The Reich must not be re-created. But within two weeks, events in Germany began to overtake him.
    On 19 March, forty-eight hours after France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgiumand Luxembourg had signed the Treaty of Brussels, Marshal Sokolovski, the Soviet commander in Germany, walked out of the Allied Control Commission in Berlin. The gesture signalled the end of wartime cooperation.
    Robert Schuman, meanwhile, was uneasy at the speed with which his Foreign Minister was coming round to American and British views on Germany. Bidault had been encouraged by Churchill the previous October to accept the inevitability of reconciliation.
    Within the French government, Georges Bidault was indeed the driving force for change, even if a number of his colleagues saw him more as a wagon hitched to an Anglo-American express. The London Accords on Germany were ratified in the National Assembly by a majority of only fourteen votes after the debate on 16 June. The most implacable opposition came from the Communists on one side and from de Gaulle and his followers on the other. De Gaulle, in a radio broadcast on 10 June, claimed that the London Accords involved ‘the formation of a Reich at Frankfurt’ and that nothing could ‘prevent the growth of a totalitarian state in these circumstances’.
    Many senior officials were certain that de Gaulle’s view would prevail in the end. The Schuman government was clearly about to fall, and the head of the European Department at the Quai d’Orsay predicted that, within a month or two, the General would be in power.
    One part of the prediction was correct. Bidault’s signature in London led to the downfall of the Schuman government, an event which took place on 19 July. But even the ensuing political crisis did not bring de Gaulle to power. One administration after another staggered to its feet, then collapsed again. France was to be left without a stable government until 11 September. Robert Schuman was appalled at the bickering – the worst offenders were in the Socialist Party – when Europe was on the brink of war.
    In Berlin, the introduction of a new currency – the Deutschmark – in the American and British sectors on 23 June had been answered immediately with a blockade of the city by the Red Army. Marshal Sokolovski announced that Allied military government had ceased to exist. General Lucius D. Clay, the autocratic and excitable American commander, known as ‘the Kaiser’ to the State Department, wanted to fight through the Soviet zone to Berlin to reopen the city’s land corridors. Fortunately Truman rejected his pleas and decided on an airlift instead. On 29 June, the US Air Force and the RAF began their air-bridge into Tempelhof airport, with a cargo plane landing on average every eight minutes.
    Rumours of war intensified again. American diplomats and officers who had been in Berlin talked of ‘Custer’s last stand’ during visits to Paris. Bogomolov, the Russian ambassador, did not disguise the menace. ‘You’re following a very bad policy,’ he said to a journalist. ‘You’ll repent of it before long, before the end of the year.’
    France was returning to a state of turmoil reminiscent of the previous autumn. On 25 June, the day after the blockade of Berlin started, fighting broke out in Clermont-Ferrand. The Communists, according to Moch, tried to drive government forces out of the town. No fewer than 140 policemen were wounded, a number of them with acid burns.
    In August, French forces became involved in the air-bridge by constructing a new airport at Tegel in their zone of Berlin. The Communist Party launched a poster campaign