Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

in my opinion, he’s a good Frenchman. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t put him in prison.’ Then Stalin’s eyes narrowed in one of his smiles. ‘At least not straight away!’
    ‘The French government,’ replied de Gaulle haughtily, ‘treats its citizens according to what it expects of them.’
    Thirty-six hours before Thorez had left for Paris, Stalin had summoned him to the Kremlin for only the second audience granted to the leader of the French Communist Party in five years. His parting advice, after warning Thorez against de Gaulle’s reactionary and dictatorial nature, was to remind him that the overriding priority in France must be national unity to bring about the downfall of Hitler. The underlying message was clear. And Thorez, totally subservient, did not miss it.
    Stalin was not simply afraid of the United States cutting off supplies to him if the French Communists caused trouble. A Communist revolution in their rear might also give the Americans an excuse for making a separate peace with the German general staff, or even – the worst nightmare of all – a military alliance against Soviet Russia. And as the conference at Yalta was to show less than eight weeks later, Stalin had started to equate France with Poland. He would insist on being given a clear hand in Soviet-occupied Poland, which was right behind the Red Army’s front line, and in exchange, he had demonstrated his willingness not to cause problems in France, which constituted the rear area of the Western Allies.
    The Franco-Soviet agreement was finally signed at four in the morning after a compromise formula had been reached over Stalin’s puppet government for Poland. Bidault, having collapsed from alcohol at the banquet, was hastily revived. With Stalin and de Gaulle standing behind, the two Foreign Ministers signed. ‘
Il faut fêter cela!
’ Stalin insisted, and more food and vodka were brought in.
    There had been several gaffes during the visit to Moscow, such as de Gaulle’s mention of Pierre Laval’s pact with Russia in 1935. There were also several taunts from the Russian side. Ilya Ehrenburg, almost certainly on Stalin’s instructions, presented de Gaulle with a copy of his novel about the collapse of 1940,
La Chute de Paris
. Yet on the delegation’s return to Paris a week before Christmas, everybody seemed to consider it a great success, even though, to the amusement of Hervé Alphand, accounts differed wildly.
    De Gaulle was more sanguine. The agreement signed in Moscow might not have had a great effect on the international stage, and he hadfailed to achieve support for French claims to the west bank of the Rhine, but he could hardly have hoped for a better domestic insurance policy. Maurice Thorez, having reached France in his absence, had not called the French Communist Party to the barricades during his major speech on 30 November, but had demanded blood, sweat, increased productivity and national unity. The Communists of the Resistance could hardly believe their ears, but next day the party press confirmed his words. They quite clearly represented the Kremlin line.
    The notion of revolution in France became even less likely over the next two weeks. On 17 December, the day de Gaulle returned from Moscow, news of Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s offensive in the Ardennes reached Paris.
    Much of the panic came from stories of English-speaking German commandos causing chaos far behind the lines. Identity documents were not sufficient at checkpoints. Anyone in American uniform was asked about baseball, while those in British uniform were challenged with ‘How much is a pint?’ or ‘What does LBW stand for?’
    In the expectation of parachute attacks on Paris, troops arrived to defend public buildings and a curfew was imposed from eight in the evening until six in the morning. Wild rumours spread that Strasbourg had been retaken, even that the Germans were beyond Sedan, a name with terrible echoes of 1870. For the French, the fear of another German invasion was not so much for their own safety – although some refugees left Paris – but anger at the prospect of collaborators getting away with it. The rejoicing in Fresnes prison among the pro-German element who believed they would soon be liberated was very rash. There were many – not just former members of the FFI – who were determined that collaborators would not live to welcome the Germans to Paris again.
    Christmas 1944 was not joyful: 3 million men