Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

from its conception. This time he was able to insist on the Constitution he wanted, with almost all the power concentrated in the hands of the President. The Fifth Republic, with politicians reduced to rude mechanicals, was patently his creation.
    His distrust of the British and the Americans had continued to burn strongly over the years. In 1961, President Kennedy sent a highly secret message for de Gaulle’s eyes only to Paris by special courier. The missive informed the French President that the CIA had just started to debrief a Russian defector, and he had produced the names of Soviet moles high in the French administration. If President de Gaulle would like to select a senior English-speaking officer with intelligence experience, his nominee could come to the United States and sit in on the relevantdebriefing sessions. De Gaulle promptly summoned General Jean-Louis de Rougemont, who was then head of the army’s intelligence staff, to the Élysée Palace. He emphasized to Rougement the great secrecy of the whole affair and explained in detail what he should do. ‘In any case,’ said de Gaulle, ‘you must see whether this isn’t a trap.’
    ‘The Russians?’ asked Rougemont.
    ‘No, the Americans!’ replied de Gaulle in exasperation.
    Because de Gaulle’s attitude to the Americans had not changed, neither had the Kremlin’s strategy towards France. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet politburo allotted the task of persuading France to leave NATO to Boris Ponomarev.
    Ponomarev worked in close liaison with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1965 and 1966, Gromyko launched a diplomatic campaign to encourage France to sign as many treaties and agreements as possible on a range of issues. These included a deal by which Russia would take the French colour television system and a Soviet offer to launch French satellites on Soviet rockets. Couve de Murville visited the Soviet Union at the end of October 1965; the subjects to be discussed included the improvement of relations between the two countries, European questions and the German problem. In June 1966, de Gaulle accepted an invitation to visit Moscow not long after an agreement on sharing nuclear research was reached. At the end of September, a Franco-Soviet Chamber of Commerce was established in Paris, and eleven days later a technical collaboration deal was reached between Soviet industry and Renault-Peugeot. All these moves were accompanied by a Franco-Soviet friendship offensive launched in the Soviet and French Communist press.
    ‘A second clandestine channel,’ wrote the KGB defector Aleksei Myagkov (a source considered reliable by British intelligence), ‘was KGB activity. Using its agents among journalists and officials of the various agencies in France’, as well as among members of the Association France-URSS, ‘it propagated actively among politicians the theme that the country’s political independence suffered from the fact that it was a member of NATO and that foreign troops were stationed on its territory, especially American troops. The same line of thought was canvassed among French citizens recruited in political circles.’
    When de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s military structure on 1 July 1967, the decision was ‘received with great satisfaction in Moscow’. The leaders of the KGB ‘did not hide their satisfaction at this recognition of the fact that they too had played their part in these events’. It is still impossible to assess how effective that part might have been, but the KGB clearly regarded it as a major success: from 1968 the operation was used as ‘an instructive example in KGB officer courses’.
    De Gaulle’s supporters may have acclaimed him as the Liberator of France, but the General preferred to see himself in the monarchical role as unifier of the country and healer of national wounds. He never forgot that the role of Vichy was potentially more traumatic than the defeat of 1940 or the German occupation, because Vichy was the creation of France itself.
    The trials and purges after the Liberation had failed either to satisfy the aggrieved or to convince the population of their fairness. But uneasy consciences about both the Occupation and the
épuration
helped de Gaulle create a myth of national unity – a version of events which took root because it expressed what the majority of the population needed to believe.
    The transfer of Jean Moulin’s remains to the Panthéon in