Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

would come out on top in the end. The Comintern had been officially disbanded in May 1943, mainly to please the American government and encourage the huge flow of Lend-Lease aid. It simply continued to function under the same leader, Georgi Dimitrov, but under another name: the International Section of the Central Committee.
    The French Communists of the Resistance, many of whom had left the party during the Nazi–Soviet pact, failed to appreciate this. They now wanted to launch a revolution on the back of the Liberation, but few had stopped to wonder whether or not it might suit Comrade Stalin’s strategy. The reason why Stalin never gave the French Communist Party the order to start a revolution was quite simple. It was not in the interests of the USSR. A French Communist attempt to seize power in the rear of the Western Allies as they prepared to invade Germany would have caused a major breach with the United States. Stalin still needed the massive American logistic support to the Red Army to keep coming, especially the Studebaker and Dodge trucks which had transformed its mobility. Meanwhile, his great fear was that the Americans and British might make a secret peace with Hitler, and a French Communist uprising in their rear might provide them with an excuse.
    French historians, with remarkably few exceptions, appear to have been unable to see the Communist failure to seize power after the Liberation in anything other than French terms. It is, of course, much less surprising that most of the Communists who joined during the war completely failed to understand that the French Communist Party was not an ally of the Soviet Union; it was a totally obedient subordinate. The problem for Duclos, however, was the lack of clear guidance emanating from Moscow. France was very low on the list of Soviet priorities.
    Duclos could not assert party discipline until de Gaulle granted Thorez an amnesty for his desertion at the beginning of the war and allowed him to return from Moscow with clear instructions. For the moment, however, Thorez could only fret in impatience in Moscow. The General did not even bother to reply to his telegrams. He simplypassed a message back by his representative in Moscow that any delay was the fault of the British, who controlled the air route via Cairo.
    While Tillon and his followers wanted to maintain the Resistance in arms as a force for political change, Duclos was far more cautious. The party, however, could still increase its power by installing its own candidates in key positions wherever possible. One way was to lead the call for popular justice against traitors and then, during the ensuing purges, denounce anti-Communists as collaborators and replace them with their own people. More and more reports arrived from all over France of last-minute massacres carried out by the Germans. There had also been incidents of German officers who let political prisoners go, but they received less attention at a time when most news was so grim.
    On 1 September, the French and foreign press was given a tour of the Gestapo’s torture chambers in the rue des Saussaies, just behind the Ministry of the Interior on the Place Beauvau. In a relentless campaign,
L’Humanité
did all it could to exploit stories of massacre and torture to their utmost. The implication was that Vichy and its officials had been involved in every crime: directly, indirectly or by association.
    New arrivals in liberated Paris were seeking out old friends. One of Hemingway’s first visits was to Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. He was sad to find that in 1941 the Germans had forced her to close down her bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, so this part of expatriate Left Bank life was over. But at least she had survived, having spent six months in an internment camp.
    In the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, people discussed their different wartime experiences, or heard about events from which they had been separated by censorship or distance. Raymond Aron described the bombing of London. Far worse tales had also begun to emerge, like that of the Warsaw uprising and the first rumours of the death camps.
    Some people resurfaced in astonishing new roles. Right-wing anti-Semites appeared full of stories of the Jews or Communists they had saved from the Gestapo. Among the members of what was mockingly known as the ‘RMA’ – the resistants of the month of August – there were characters who, having denounced fellow citizens to the