Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

but with an inexplicable resilience (curiously reminiscent of France’s economy) hisbody somehow continued to function in defiance of all received wisdom.
    Americans were struck by the way that food played such a ritualistic part in French political life. The day after Petsche asked for the American loan, President Auriol gave a magnificent lunch for Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Chip Bohlen, Bob Murphy and David Bruce at the Élysée Palace. ‘The chef is famous,’ noted Bruce, ‘and the lunch consisted of cold eggs Lucullus, suprême de sole Gallière, poulet grillé Béarnais, fonds d’artichauts Marigny and soufflé glacé Petit Duc.’ He also approved of the wines: Château Carbonnieux 1936, Mouton Rothschild 1940 and Mumm Cordon Rouge 1937.
    As if to balance an indulgence reminiscent of the
belle époque,
members of the American Embassy, with the rest of the diplomatic corps, assembled in Notre-Dame the next day for Cardinal Suhard’s memorial mass: a ritual impregnated with the defiant spirit of
vieille France
. General de Gaulle’s interdiction of nearly five years before – Suhard’s punishment for according Pétain’s Minister of Propaganda a mass after his assassination by the Resistance – was an unmentioned, looming memory.
    Bruce, however, was soon preoccupied with the Coca-Cola War, which took a decisive turn just after the Bruces came back from a long weekend visit to Château Lafite with Élie and Liliane de Rothschild.
    Two senior executives of the Coca-Cola Company, Farley and Makinsky, came to see the ambassador on his return. They told him that they were pushing ahead with their plans to sell Coca-Cola in France. The French government was continuing to resist because of protests from small wine producers, urged on by the Communist Party’s campaign against ‘
la Coca-colonisation de la France
’. So emotional had the whole issue become that many wine producers really believed the claim that soft-drink imports would destroy their livelihoods.
    To bar Coca-Cola from the French market was a flagrant violation of the Marshall Plan agreement on free trade. Yet David Bruce, while angered by the dishonest antics of the Communists and the protectionist lobby, was almost as exasperated with his own countrymen. ‘It is a clear case of discrimination,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and we have protested vigorously against it, although I think that the Company’s advertising proposals are psychologically extremely stupid.’ Coca-Cola apparently wanted to ‘engage in their usual advertising displays, including amongother features a blazing sign on a 142-foot tower. They have relinquished, rather regretfully, the idea of using the Eiffel Tower.’
    The Communist Party in France openly proclaimed that American culture was stifling the nation. Laurent Casanova announced that Henry Miller’s pornography and American crime stories were attacking the soul of France. He would have sounded like an arch-conservative if the target of his hatred had not been the United States and its influence. Yet, as one or two writers have pointed out, the Communists’ xenophobic conspiracy theory owed much to a right-wing, anti-masonic tradition.
    To complete this curious reflection of right-wing prejudices, the magazine
Action,
run by Communist writers such as Pierre Courtade and Roger Vailland, attacked ‘the pederasts of the American intelligentsia in Saint-Germain-des-Prés’. In all seriousness it went on to recount: ‘The other day a cavalry colonel in civilian clothes was the recipient of undisguised propositions, even though he was accompanied by his charming wife.’ It was just what one would have expected from a reactionary monarchist publication.
    For some time, the sale of Coca-Cola was portrayed in the Communist press as not far short of drug-peddling to infants: ‘Each evening, a Coca-Cola truck stops at the entrance to the Square des Innocents, in the 1st
arrondissement,
and the driver distributes bottles to unaccompanied children who drink it on the spot.’

31
    The Tourist Invasion
    Once the war ended, the urge to travel as a civilian, not a soldier, became strong. In Britain, there was a longing to escape the austerity of war, socialism and bomb damage. Only a very few, however, were in a position to afford and arrange such a luxury. In the late summer of 1945 Winston Churchill, recovering from his defeat in the general election, went to stay at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. He