Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

and the Resistance was still unresolved. French Communists had rightly suspected during the Occupation that his policy, aided by the British, was to ‘deform’ the popular nature of the Resistance and ‘prevent at any price a true national insurrection’. They even tried to claim that the Allies had held back from Paris in August 1944 in the hope that the Germans would crush the largely Communist-inspired insurrection. This was also a shameless attempt to counter criticism of the Red Army’s failure to come to the aid of Polish nationalists during the Warsaw uprising.
    De Gaulle, with a great deal of justification, was convinced that the Communists had wanted to seize power just before Leclerc’s troops reached the city. ‘De Gaulle,’ wrote Georgi Dimitrov in a briefing for Molotov and Stalin, ‘is afraid of the French Communists and considers their activity a threat to his authority, but he is obliged to take into consideration their power established during the clandestine struggle.’
    Even after the triumph of the Liberation, the provisional government’s authority remained tenuous, especially in the provinces, cut off from the capital by the destruction of roads, bridges and railway lines. De Gaulle also knew that if France was to have any claim to a seat at the conference table alongside the Americans, British and Russians, then all her available troops, both regular army and freshly brigaded FFIcontingents, had to make a conspicuous contribution to the war effort by continuing the advance on Germany. He therefore could not hold back regular troops to assure law and order. This also meant leaving in place the rest of the FFI and ‘patriotic militias’, which often contained the least reliable and the most politicized elements.
    Travelling across France was not easy, even for a government official with car, petrol coupons and every
laissez-passer
imaginable. At towns and villages, vehicles would be stopped by militiamen or a sort of ‘committee of public safety’ who would not only study the documents of all passengers in laborious detail but often subject them to an examination in patriotism. Paris, like Madrid in 1936, may have had great symbolic importance, but decrees issued there carried little weight in the countryside, especially in the south-west.
    Well before the invasion of Normandy, General de Gaulle and his entourage had foreseen the main problems they would face. Several months before D-Day they had begun to select men to take over from Vichy officials in the provinces and re-establish Republican legality before it was usurped by revolutionary committees.
    The provisional government could never hope to produce a fresh and untainted state apparatus to drop into place all over France. It had to work with existing institutions, most of them compromised. To curb the excesses of popular justice, gendarmes, even if they had worked with the Germans, were needed on the streets. The vast majority of magistrates who had sworn allegiance to Marshal Pétain would have to return to their courtrooms. Civil servants who had loyally served the Vichy régime were required back at their desks. And to revive the pulverized economy, factories had to be restarted with managers who had in many cases collaborated with the Germans. The instruments charged with this difficult programme, each responsible for a region, were called Commissaires de la République.
    Their first priority was to provide food and essential services for the population. Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, who remained with the Ministry of the Interior as Commissaire de la République at large, emphasized that food was the key to almost everything. Without it, public order would collapse.
    Neither law nor order existed in many areas during the first few months of the
épuration
. In November, some twenty former membersof the Resistance broke into a prison. They seized a colonel who had commanded a reprisal expedition against the
maquis
and, contemptuously ignoring the fact that he had been spared the death sentence by de Gaulle, shot him in a nearby field. Louis Closon in the north of France had to cope with 30,000 liberated Red Army prisoners of war who had ‘a provoking attitude, considering themselves to be in conquered territory’. But probably the most chaotic situation in the whole of France existed in the south-west, around Toulouse.
    ‘At the time of the Liberation,’ wrote the philosopher A. J. Ayer, on a semi-official tour of the