Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

and women were either dead, missing or still in German prison camps. ‘Paris is lugubrious, cold, as if empty and without a soul,’ wrote Hervé Alphand. ‘It reminds me a little of Vienna at the end of the last war, a magnificent setting without people or lights.’
    De Gaulle, quite understandably, was horrified to hear that Eisenhower considered withdrawing from the recently liberated city of Strasbourg to straighten his line. Fortunately Churchill, who was in France,joined de Gaulle and Eisenhower at SHAEF headquarters at Versailles on 3 January, and supported a compromise solution that two French divisions should be left to defend the capital of Alsace. De Gaulle was so relieved at the outcome of this conference that he wanted to issue a vainglorious communiqué. Palewski brought the draft round to the British Embassy first. Duff Cooper told him that it would not help matters at all. ‘It suggested that de Gaulle had summoned a military conference which the PM and Eisenhower had been allowed to attend.’
    Even when the German offensive collapsed, with Strasbourg saved, de Gaulle had little to be optimistic about. France was virtually brought to a halt by freezing cold. It was so cold in that January, without fuel, that Pastor Boegner wrote in his diary: ‘I felt my brain slowing down. A strange sensation not to be able to choose one’s words with the usual speed.’ But for de Gaulle, the worst blow was that France was not invited to take part in the discussions at Yalta during the first half of February.
    Roosevelt had not abandoned his old antipathy to de Gaulle. Nor had Stalin’s attitude been changed by the agreements in Moscow. The Kremlin view of France was that it was the Americans and British who had ‘chased out the Germans and liberated the country, not French armies’.
    The performance of British leaders at this time was far from their finest hour. Eden especially seemed almost morbidly afraid of irritating Stalin in any way. Yet all the most infamous agreements, from Churchill’s ‘percentage agreement’ with Stalin in October 1944 to the betrayal of Poland, have often been taken out of context. And the idea that de Gaulle’s presence at Yalta might have saved central Europe from nearly fifty years of tyranny is hopelessly misguided. It ignores the fact that the Yalta agreement was in many ways the political seal placed on the military reality established as a result of the strategy decided at the Teheran conference. And no Western government, after all the praise for the sacrifice of the Red Army, could have asked soldiers eager for demobilization to prepare to take a stand against the Russian ally.
    French resentment that Europe was being carved up without a single continental representative was understandable, although misdirected. Unfortunately, the situation was made far worse when President Roosevelt invited de Gaulle to Algiers on his way back from Yalta to tell himwhat had been agreed. De Gaulle was furious that Roosevelt could treat Algiers, which was French territory, as if it were his own property and promptly refused. Word then leaked out that Roosevelt had called him a ‘prima donna’ and this inflamed the situation further.
    French emotions, however, underwent some change in the first two months of 1945, as the Red Army advanced at a breathtaking rate. ‘The French authorities are frankly frightened,’ Caffery reported to Washington. Bidault had exclaimed: ‘Who is going to stop Attila? He is covering more territory every day.’ Even de Gaulle acknowledged that France very much needed the friendship of the United States. Caffery could not let the opportunity pass. ‘I remarked,’ he wrote, ‘that some officials of the French government do not always act as if they shared that view. He retorted by listing grievances against us, and I retorted in kind. In the end, however, we both agreed that this is definitely no time for bickering.’
    De Gaulle had a wonderful sense of history, but found it hard to stomach the vulgar fact that, without money, you could not be a major power. The greatness of France and the greatness of Britain were as doomed as their empires, which had carved up much of the world between them in the previous two centuries. Now two different superpowers were about to dominate the continent of Europe. The prospect was a bitter humiliation which he and the majority of his countrymen refused to accept. It had a disastrous effect, making them doubly