Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

escorted across the Channel by no fewer than forty-eight Spitfires. A police motorcycle escort swept his motorcade to the Arc de Triomphe, where he laid a wreath on the grave of the unknown soldier. He then joined the advance party of his staff in the Berkeley Hotel. The British Embassy, Pauline Borghese’s palace in honey-coloured stone on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was undamaged; but there was no water or electricity, and its reception rooms were still piled with the furniture of families who had fled Paris in June 1940.
    Next morning, Duff Cooper went to see Bidault at the Quai d’Orsay, and recorded their meeting in his diary: ‘He seemed curiously young and somewhat overcome by his responsibilities, admitting himself that he knew nothing, and had had no experience. On the whole I liked him,but whether he will prove a big enough man for the job I am inclined to doubt.’
    It was not long before Duff Cooper found himself in a position he knew well from Algiers: being ground between the millstones of Churchill and de Gaulle. One of the first messages from the Foreign Office warned that Churchill wanted to pay a visit in about three weeks. Back went the reply that the Prime Minister must not think of coming until he had recognized de Gaulle’s government and received a proper invitation from the General himself. Churchill still saw France as part of the Allied war zone and not as a sovereign country.
    The United States government was equally tactless. Duff Cooper was told privately by the Quai d’Orsay that the Americans had nominated an ambassador to France without even asking for the provisional government’s agreement and that Bidault was deeply offended.
    Until Roosevelt was prepared to recognize his government officially, de Gaulle would not see either the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, or Duff Cooper, even though his own ambassador in London, René Massigli, had been received by the King and had been to stay in the country with Churchill. De Gaulle was holding up the process of recognition by refusing to agree to a temporary division of France between a war zone, which came under the authority of SHAEF, and a zone of the interior.
    Eventually, after a last-minute flurry of confusion, the final barriers were removed and at five o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, 23 October, the United States, Great Britain, Russia and Canada simultaneously recognized the provisional government. ‘At
last
!’ noted the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, exasperated that Admiral Leahy, the elderly bachelor ambassador to Vichy who had so influenced Roosevelt against de Gaulle, had managed to hold things up for so long. ‘What a fuss about nothing! Due to that spiteful old great-aunt Leahy. Hope he’s feeling pretty sick!’
    That evening, Duff and Lady Diana Cooper were invited to dine with the General. The Coopers took Beatrice Eden, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, with them. Other guests at the General’s residence in the Bois de Boulogne included Bidault, General Juin, François Mauriac and Gaston Palewski. The atmosphere remained resolutely gloomy, with very little conversation. De Gaulle refused to reply when Duff Coopermentioned the recognition of the provisional government; and when the ambassador persisted, saying that he hoped the General was glad the whole process was over, de Gaulle shrugged and said that it would never be over. Duff Cooper sat next to Madame de Gaulle, who never took her eyes off her husband and said nothing the whole evening.
    This ‘extremely frigid and dreary party, worse even than his entertainments usually are… should have been a gala evening,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary, ‘but gala is not a word included in the vocabulary of General de Gaulle’. On their way home in the car afterwards, Beatrice Eden observed that usually the things that one dreaded were not as bad as one expected, but this had proved far worse. When Duff saw Massigli in London a few days later and described the evening, his counterpart roared with laughter. As they both knew well from experience, de Gaulle was at his most churlish when nursing his wounded pride. It also did not help that he clearly believed small talk to be a vice. Perhaps the key to this, as a senior member of the Quai d’Orsay pointed out to Duff, was his excessive shyness.
    De Gaulle was forced to take some part in social life, but it was alien to his nature. Diana Cooper had already found in