Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

kept secret, but news spread with astonishing rapidity on the morning of Armistice Day as he drove in an open car from the Quai d’Orsay to meet de Gaulle. Churchill was well buttoned up against the cold in RAF greatcoat, and beaming from under the uniform cap. After the two leaders left the rue Saint-Dominique for the Arc de Triomphe, ‘the reception had to be seen to be believed’, Duff Cooper wrote in his diary. ‘It was greater than anything I had ever known. There were crowds in every window, even in the top floors of the highest houses and on the roofs, and the cheering was the loudest, the most spontaneous and the most genuine.’
    As Churchill and de Gaulle laid wreaths on the grave of the unknown soldier, members of their entourage glanced up at the umbrella of Spitfires circling over Paris to guard against any marauding German fighters. The crowds were more than ten deep when the two men began their walk down the Champs-Élysées to the dais from where they would take the salute. They all chanted: ‘
Vive Churchill! Vive de Gaulle!
’ De Gaulle raised both arms, Churchill made the V-sign, unleashing further roars of approval. They presented ‘a curious pair,’ observed Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘the one so rotund and merry, the other so tall and grave; like Mr Pickwick and Don Quixote’.
    The march-past was led by General Koenig, with a band from the Brigade of Guards playing ‘The British Grenadiers’. There were also kilted Canadian pipers,
goums
from the Atlas mountains, a detachment from the Royal Navy and the Garde Républicaine in their cuirassier uniforms on black chargers.
    Almost as important as the public enthusiasm was the relaxation of tensions between the two leaders. Both de Gaulle and Churchill were ‘in the happiest of humours’. After a lunch for sixty people at the rue Saint-Dominique, they went upstairs for discussions. De Gaulle, Palewski, Massigli, and Coulet and Chauvel from the Quai d’Orsay sat on one side of the table, facing Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper and Alec Cadogan of the Foreign Office on the other. The conversation lasted ‘for about two hours – Winston talking most of the time in his uninhibited and fairly intelligible French. He speaks remarkably well, butunderstands very little. There was not an unpleasant word said, although nearly every subject, including Syria, was covered.’ Yet despite moments of real warmth – almost affection of the sort an estranged couple shows in the relief of making things up – de Gaulle was about to make advances in a different direction.
    Three days before Churchill arrived in Paris, de Gaulle had told Bogomolov that he would like to visit the Soviet Union to discuss relations with Marshal Stalin. De Gaulle knew that the Americans and the British would soon be discussing a post-war settlement with the Russians and he did not want France to be left out. *
    On 24 November 1944, the day after General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division entered Strasbourg amid scenes like those in Paris the previous August, Charles de Gaulle took off by plane for Moscow. His party included Gaston Palewski, Georges Bidault and General Juin, together with a number of senior officials from the Quai d’Orsay.
    Their slow progress along North Africa and across the Middle East to Baku represented its own form of humiliation. The head of government’s obsolete two-engine aircraft broke down with embarrassing frequency. De Gaulle’s party left their aircraft in Baku, mainly because of the bad weather. Allotted the old-fashioned train of the tsarist commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, they then embarked on an even slower journey north across the steppes to Moscow. They were banqueted at every stop amid appalling misery and war damage. In the ruins of Stalingrad the Russians were still digging corpses out of the frozen ground two years after the battle. One day, in the compartment of the train, after glancing out at the endless winter landscape, de Gaulle observed drily that the journey was taking so long that he hoped there would not be a revolution in his absence.
    Descriptions of Stalin at this time focus on his sloping rectangular forehead, his pale complexion and large, slanted, gleaming eyes. Theway his skin was stretched tightly over his cheeks when he smiled increased the impression of a mask. De Gaulle summed him up memorably as a ‘Communist dressed up as a field marshal, a dictator ensconced in his scheming, a conqueror with an air of