Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

observed. ‘It took about half an hour to approach the house. All the members of the Embassy were in their smart uniforms, and Madame Bogomolov was in full evening dress. There were lights everywhere and cinema operators. Everybody was photographed as they went in and again upstairs while shaking hands with the Ambassador and the Ambassadress. I was conducted by a junior member of the staff to a special room set apart for the more privileged guests, where there was any amount of vodka and caviare, the others being allowed only inferior sandwiches and hardly any drink.’ For Duff Cooper, however, the evening, when he did manage to fight his way out through the crush in the outer room, proved to be memorable in other ways: it was the night he fell in love with the writer Louise de Vilmorin.
    While Duff Cooper had diversions whenever de Gaulle proved particularly intractable or rude, Georges Bidault bore the brunt of his unpredictable head of government. De Gaulle, who seldom consulted his Foreign Minister or even kept him informed of his private
démarches,
made policy ‘uneasy to conduct or even formulate’.
    Over the next fifteen months, Bidault was constantly apologizing in private to the British and American ambassadors for de Gaulle’s provocations. They had much sympathy for his difficult position. Caffery reported a series of Bidault’s complaints against de Gaulle, and remarked that the Foreign Minister had added ‘that there is absolutely no one else in sight and that it must be admitted that de Gaulle loves France, even if he doesn’t like Frenchmen’.
    Under the strain, Bidault began drinking too much – in diplomatic circles, he soon acquired the nickname of ‘In Bido Veritas’ – and in November, de Gaulle nearly refused to take him on an important mission abroad.
    Bidault’s life was not made easier by the distinctive and unusuallyslow character of the French diplomatic service. The Quai d’Orsay had still not caught up with the change in the balance of world power. While three diplomatic bags a week went to London, only three a month went to Washington. French diplomats were also noticeably out of touch with what was going on in their own country. But nobody could dispute their erudition. It was a service in which the elegant composition of a report seemed to be of far more concern than its contents.
    François Mauriac feared later that the literary constellation of ‘Claudel, Alexis Léger, Giraudoux and Morand has created a kind of cerebral cramp, with the result that after them the diplomatic machine has suffered from intellectual anaemia, to be cured only by blood transfusions from the École Normale Supérieure’.
    After the Liberation, key administrative posts were given to the handful of career diplomats of outstanding talent who had not served Pétain, such as Hervé Alphand. The junior ranks were purged and repopulated with those who had a good war record, like the novelist Romain Gary, who had been a Free French aviator.
    Foreign ambassadors were much encumbered by the social round. Official and semi-official lunches took up most of the middle of the day, since they could run to seven or eight courses, even at a time of desperate shortage. At one interminable meal Duff Cooper agreed with his neighbour, Jean Monnet, who ‘was most indignant about the length of the menu, and said that it was feasts like this that gave people passing through Paris such an entirely false idea of the true position’.
    In the autumn of 1944, the visitor who preoccupied Duff Cooper most was Winston Churchill. Once again, he was horrified to hear that the Prime Minister proposed to arrive in Paris without a word to de Gaulle beforehand. He even had to beg Churchill not to visit General Eisenhower at SHAEF, because without an invitation from the provisional government his arrival on French soil would be taken as yet another insult. Finally, with the help of Massigli and Bidault, de Gaulle was persuaded to accept a visit from the British Prime Minister on 10 November, so that Churchill would be in Paris for the First World War commemoration of 11 November.
    Churchill arrived in fine form at Le Bourget, where he was met by the Communist Minister for Air, Charles Tillon, and then taken to theapartments reserved for state guests at the Quai d’Orsay. The British Prime Minister was thrilled to find that he had a gold bath, while Anthony Eden’s was only silver.
    Churchill’s presence in Paris had been