Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

tackle the daunting tasks faced by France. Many of the larger construction companies had not even existed at the start of the war; now they assumed ‘
une importance anormale
’. Meanwhile, ‘patriotic’ companies which had refused to work with the Germans were very weak.
    The Communist Party’s threats of reprisal against collaborationist industrialists had begun well before the Liberation and were repeated in
L’Humanité
as the Allies approached Paris. ‘The directors of the Renault factories must be made to pay for the lives of Allied soldiers killed as a result of their enthusiasm to equip the enemy.’ Louis Renault was arrested and sentenced on 23 September for having sold over 6 billion francs’ worth of material to the German army. The sixty-seven-year-old industrialist died a month later in Fresnes prison. His wife claimed he had been murdered; the doctors said it was a stroke. Marius Berliet, head of the truck manufacturers, and his sons were imprisoned in Lyons without trial, but they were hardly the worst offenders. Renault,Citroën and Peugeot had between them manufactured nearly 93,000 vehicles for the Wehrmacht, while Berliet had produced only 2,239. The banker Hippolyte Worms was another important figure to be arrested. Yet the vast majority of industrialists who had worked for the Germans, including the builders of the Atlantic Wall, escaped untouched.
    Companies were confiscated and nationalized, some because they had genuinely collaborated, others because unavoidable collaboration provided the excuse to nationalize key industries. The Communists, once Charles Tillon became Minister for Air, were determined to have a fully nationalized aircraft and transport industry.
    Surrounded by revolutionary rhetoric and the threat of nationalization, French industrialists’ and employers’ groups, known generically as
le patronat,
sent a memorandum to de Gaulle complaining about the campaign. It insisted that it had ‘fulfilled its duty to the nation by keeping the means of production on French soil while carrying out managerial resistance on an unrecognized scale. It must protest against the myth that France was saved by the working class alone.’ But such arguments were disingenuous. Only a distinguished minority of managers sabotaged the work and the justification for maintaining production implied that France’s long-term interests lay with a continuing German occupation rather than eventual liberation.
    In the climate of the moment, with the right seen as morally bankrupt after Vichy and the Occupation, there was a strong tide of opinion in favour of change for the sake of change. The achievements of the Resistance and the fraternity of the Liberation should be pushed forward into peacetime, to create a more equitable society. This political instinct or emotion was described as
progressisme
– a word which was convenient for Communists, who did not want to alarm potential fellow-travellers or right-wing socialists who feared Communist plans, but did not yet dare say so openly.
    For those across Europe who had lost so much,
progressisme
seemed to offer the only way forward, leaving behind both the moral ambiguities of the war and the misery of the Depression in the 1930s. But conservatives and political free-thinkers who questioned such assumptions saw it as a slide towards Communism. Aldous Huxley, viewing a destroyed Europe from the United States, expected a
Pax Sovietica
to spreadacross the whole continent. He, like many, feared that it would be impossible ‘to put Humpty Dumpty together again’ except in a ‘nightmarishly totalitarian and pauperized form’.

10
    Corps Diplomatique
    General de Gaulle’s anger in Toulouse against Colonel Starr had really been an explosion of resentment against the Allied leadership. His obstinacy and readiness to take offence had not been eased with the triumph of the Liberation. The French
en masse
had acclaimed him as their leader, yet the Allies continued to delay formal recognition of the provisional government. At Roosevelt’s insistence (and almost certainly on the advice of Admiral Leahy, his former ambassador to Vichy), this delay extended for nearly two months after the Liberation of Paris. The fact that the ambassadors of the ‘Big Three’ were already in place only irritated de Gaulle more.
    The British ambassador, Duff Cooper, whomde Gaulle already knew from Algiers, landed at Le Bourget airport in a Dakota on 13 September, having been