Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

registered under the
nom de guerre
of Colonel Warden and followed ‘
une véritable cure de Pommery Rosé 1934
’, to use the words of Monsieur Roger, the
chef sommelier,
who had to beg for more supplies.
    Britain remained in the grip of rationing for much longer than France, and appeared no closer to pulling itself out of destitution. The chief obstacle to travel, for those who were prepared to respect the law, was the £25 travel allowance imposed by the Labour government. More and more Britons began to flout it in their desperation to escape the greyness and austerity of Attlee’s Britain, which, in comparison with France, seemed to have progressed little beyond Nissen huts, short-back-and-sides and suet pudding. The appeal of Paris fashions, boulevard cafés and sumptuous food became overwhelming.
    From May 1948, American citizens had been allowed to bring home 400 dollars’ worth of goods, but the real boom in tourism began in the summer of 1949. By then, travel arrangements were easier and Europe slightly better prepared. ‘We are informed that 3 million tourists are upon us,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh in April 1949. ‘The Ritz say they have no roomuntil 10th October.’
    ‘Americans in Europe,’ Letitia Baldrige wrote home from her job in the United States Embassy, ‘do create harm and ill-will often. I hate to think of the careless, complaining, spoiled people who flounce through these struggling countries making the Europeans feel even more embittered and inferiority-complexed.’ The main objection among Europeans of the old school, however, seemed to be sartorial. ‘You should have seen them in the Ritz here as I did this morning,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to Waugh at the end of August, ‘all dressed up in beach clothes.’
    To greet the invasion of dollar-packing tourists, shops in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had arranged window displays on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fresh oranges and bananas symbolized ‘greed’, a point which may have been lost on tourists from a land of plenty, while at Lanvin ‘envy’ was represented by a headless mannequin in formal brocade and weighed down with jewellery. Cartier even laid in ‘gold swizzle sticks at 11,000 francs and a semi-automated version at 21,000’, appliances which horrified the French.
    People were drawn to Paris for a combination of reasons, whether shopping, sightseeing, the inspiration and excitement of the place or simply curiosity. For those who had dreamed of the Montparnasse era, the voice of the nightclub singer Jacqueline François singing ‘
La Vie en Rose
’ was enough to make them feel ‘like a young Scott Fitzgerald character sopping up the romance of Paris’.
    The city also symbolized sexual liberty, from the sequinned G-strings of the Folies Bergère to the excitement of seeing the art student revellers from the Quat’zarts Ball. On the night of 5 July, they swarmed across Montparnasse ‘dressed, or rather underdressed,’ noted the American ambassador when his car was good-naturedly overrun, ‘as Indians or Japanese warriors, with smears of paint, the only visible garments being loin cloths’.
    But while the younger American longed for such liberty, his stuffier compatriots expressed shock and disapproval. French indiscipline – political, sexual, hygienic and gastronomic – provided subjects for much moral condemnation. In the summer of 1948, the first trickle of tourists criticized the seemingly endless political crisis as one Cabinet after another failed from July to September. And puritanism was outraged by the waste of
grande cuisine
at a time when France as a whole wassupposed to be ‘on welfare handouts’. Even the gastronomic extravagance of the French middle class struck many of them as immoral, and they did not keep their views to themselves. Often their censure was influenced by their own inability to cope with rich and unusual food. Laden with remedies for upset stomachs, they had a horror of squatting over a hole in the floor. Nor was their concern with hygiene helped by the water shortages in the summer drought of 1949.
    The French were not the only ones taken aback by opinionated or self-absorbed tourists. In June 1949, a young American woman staying at the Ritz rang David Bruce at the United States Embassy to ask him ‘to have her mattress changed as it was too lumpy’. Later Bruce was accosted at a party by a New York model who demanded to be introduced to some