Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

insurance in these uncertain times.
    The Jockey Club, at 2 rue Rabelais, quickly offered membership to a number of senior American and British officers. The British military attaché, Brigadier Denis Daly, received ‘the impression that members of the Jockey Club had very probably supported the Pétain régime’ and that they felt it would be ‘wise to have the support of the British and the Americans during the months to come’. At lunch, the Duc de Doudeauville plied Daly with questions about the menace of the Red Army. When Daly said that there was no doubt that the war could nothave been won without the Russians and that from a ‘realistic point of view’ the Allies should therefore be grateful, Doudeauville appeared ‘considerably shaken’.
    This highly advantageous state of affairs for Allied officers was soon somewhat curtailed. For example, British officers were no longer allowed into restaurants in uniform, since most of the good ones depended on black-market produce. To circumvent this inconvenience, Maxim’s in the rue Royale was taken over as an officers’ club, and Albert, the
maître d’hôtel
who had bowed to their tables almost every German officer from Reichsmarschall Goering down, was soon doing the same for their enemies. The French army, not to be outdone, took over Ciro’s as an officers’ club, and Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf went to sing there.
    With a large number of British and American officers avid for Parisian cooking, restaurants reopened with startling speed. For the richer officers, Prunier and the Méditerranée in the Place de l’Odéon were soon serving fresh seafood in a triumph of black-market enterprise over appalling communications. Lucas Carton in the Place de la Madeleine, perhaps the greatest of all Parisian restaurants, possessed an outstanding advantage over its rivals. Having bricked up its wine cellars (which run right under the Place de la Madeleine itself) just as the Germans entered Paris in 1940, it could still offer the very best vintages.
    Parisian nightlife was in great demand, especially among those on leave from the front. At least 60 per cent of the audience at the Folies Bergère were in uniform. Soldiers were attracted to the
bals publics
or dance halls, which, having been banned throughout the Occupation, reopened with the Liberation. The most popular were the establishments on the rue de Lappe near the Place de la Bastille and the numerous
bals musette
around the edge of the city. The musicians were amateurs, working part-time, who gave rousing versions of popular songs on accordions and percussion instruments.
    The next tier up –
les dancings
– included the more sophisticated dance halls and nightspots from the Moulin de la Galette to some of the smarter places on the Champs-Élysées, employing almost all the capital’s 1,500 professional
musiciens de danse
. At the top were places like Monseigneur in the rue d’Amsterdam, an ornate and expensive establishment, heavily White Russian, with Tzigane violinists serenading the diners. You went to Monseigneur, remarked one of MarthaGellhorn’s characters in her collection of short stories
A Honeyed Peace,
only if ‘beginning a romance’.
    The revival of public dancing was short-lived. At the end of October the provisional government banned it again, this time in response to a press campaign claiming that too many families were in mourning to permit such levity. On 16 January, cabarets and nightclubs were also closed.
    The Syndicat des Artistes Musiciens de Paris denounced the measure as ‘a prudery out of touch with the virility demanded by the war’. Dancing, they argued, had never been forbidden in London throughout the Blitz or the VI rocket attacks, because the authorities realized how important it was for morale. Dance halls used less electricity, because their customers did not like too much brightness, and gaiety must be kept up in the capital: ‘
Afin que PARIS reste PARIS!
’ But protests were in vain. Dancing in public places was not permitted again until April 1945, just before the German surrender, and even then organizations representing deportees and prisoners of war objected.
    Many of the most expensive nightclubs ignored the January ban, but they received a shock the night after it came into effect. The police raided six establishments and took a total of 300 customers off to unheated cells in police stations. One of the clubs targeted was the Monseigneur. Those