Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

was not nearly big enough. So the following week the duke went to Chaumet, the jewellers in the Place Vendôme, with 350,000 of the farmer’s francs in a paper bag, and bought a huge ring. This time the farmer was delighted, reassuring the duke that he still had 7 million francs tucked away in his cupboard.
    François Mauriac wrote that the government’s efforts against the black market resembled those of ‘the child St Augustine saw on a beach who wanted to empty the sea with a shell’. Paul Ramadier, the Ministerof Supply, demanded that the Sûreté Nationale initiate ‘
la plus active répression
’. Ramadier bore the brunt of the government’s unpopularity for the lack of food. He was soon known as ‘Ramadan’ and the daily rations as ‘
Ramadiète
’. His ministry became the target for demonstrations by committees of housewives, usually organized by the Communists. At the Hôtel de Ville, 4,000 women chanted, ‘Milk for our little ones!’ And at a mass meeting at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the crowd yelled, ‘
A mort!
’ every time Ramadier’s name was mentioned.
    The Prefect of Police received orders to crack down. In the second week of March checkpoints were put up on all roads leading into the city, an operation that was quickly dubbed ‘the Siege of Paris’. But the first priority was to cut the traffic in provisions, brought in by ‘suitcase-carriers’, who purchased food directly and illegally from Norman farmers. Ripening Camembert, twenty to a suitcase, and the blood from joints of freshly slaughtered animals dripping from the luggage racks made such a sickly and overpowering smell in trains that even the normal French obsession about draughts was overcome and the carriage windows left open.
    Over two days, Luizet mounted a large-scale operation with his police at the Gare de Montparnasse to search the suitcases of all travellers returning from the rich agricultural regions of north-western France. But the travellers were so angry that a virtual riot developed. ‘In the circumstances,’ Luizet reported to the Minister of the Interior, ‘I felt obliged to give the order to my men to stop this sort of control operation.’
    While the day-to-day struggle for food continued in the towns and cities, France’s task of reconstruction was overwhelming for a bankrupt economy and was kept afloat only by heavy American aid and loans. Factories had been destroyed or stripped by the Germans, the major ports bombed into rubble and twisted steel. There were still millions of mines to clear. SHAEF reported that 1,550,000 buildings had been destroyed, almost exactly twice as many as at the end of the First World War. There was also a severe lack of building materials and timber, much of the available stock having been used up by Allied forces.
    The shortage of coal was so serious that well before the winter started urgent telegrams began arriving at the Ministry of the Interior from prefects, warning of the consequences. On 29 October a signal reachedthe Place Beauvau stating that Rouen had less than four days’ supply left. The train due had not yet arrived, and even when it did it would take three days to unload it. There was suspicion in the provinces that Paris was receiving privileged treatment. ‘We are most unhappy,’ the mayor of Rouen wrote to the Minister of the Interior, ‘to see Paris with theatres, cinemas and métro running long after working hours while Rouen suffers in its ruins without any help.’
    One of the most striking items in the mass of data provided by opinion polls during the period following the Liberation was that its sample rated the confiscation of illicit profits as the top priority for ministers to tackle. It even topped the issue of food supply.
    Communists, working on the Stalinist theory of sabotage – that every setback must be the work of a fifth column – had no doubt where the fault lay. ‘The insufficient purge has left the controlling levers of industry and government departments in the hands of people who collaborated with fascism before and during the Occupation.’ Even the government, while needing to keep experienced administrators in their posts, was privately forced to acknowledge that injustices remained. The minister initially responsible for reconstruction admitted that the government faced ‘
un problème délicat
’. The companies which had worked with the Germans were the best equipped – in finance, manpower and raw materials – to