Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

week of VE Day, just at the time when France was demanding more coal from the Ruhr on top of the 50,000 tons already allocated. ‘They do not seem to be taking any very active steps to put their own house in order,’ the SHAEFreport concluded. Inevitably, another unfavourable comparison was made with the German determination to get back to work.
    The French Communist Party was quick to exploit the reservoir of anti-American feeling. Some of the rumours spread were ludicrous, yet gained a measure of credence. The Communist minister, François Billoux, claimed that during the fighting the United States air force had bombed heavily ‘in a premeditated plan to weaken France’. Another rumour even claimed that the Americans had been so angry about the Franco-Soviet pact signed in Moscow that they had allowed the German Ardennes offensive to penetrate into France purely to give the French a fright. Other rumours, rather closer to the truth, concerned a wave of crime by American servicemen and deserters.
    Galtier-Boissière wrote: ‘it appears that they are American deserters, who, with sub-machine-guns in hand, are playing at Chicago movies’. The Germans had been the ‘
Fridolins
’; now the Americans became known as ‘
les Ricains
’.
    At a dinner at the British Embassy, General Legentilhomme, the military governor of Paris, painted a terrifying picture to the Englishwoman beside him. American servicemen were ‘barbarians, worse than the Russians, you simply cannot imagine,
chère madame,
how appalling the situation is’. Coincidentally a British diplomat, driving back with his wife from a dinner party, found a street cordoned off by men armed with sub-machine-guns ready to rob the occupants of any car which passed. Reacting quickly, he accelerated, forcing them to jump for cover.
    There is no way of telling whether these hold-ups were carried out by military personnel or by civilians who had got hold of uniforms. Military police apparel was the most sought after. Clearly, French deserters and former
fifis
were also involved in some of the attacks. The director-general of the Sûreté Nationale described this ‘increase in armed attacks’ in a strong letter to the Minister of the Interior. On one evening alone, seven armed robberies had been carried out in the capital, two of them by American soldiers.
    The generosity the French displayed towards the Americans and British had been unstinted in the early days, going far beyond the bottles of champagne hidden until the Liberation. ‘We’ve been waiting for youfor so long,’ they had said over and over again, with genuine emotion. But then, as Malcolm Muggeridge observed, everybody ends up by hating their liberators. The writer Alfred Fabre-Luce wrote of ‘an army of drivers, with no indication of rank, who threw cigarettes to onlookers as if to an African crowd’.
    The French indeed felt themselves very poor relations. The quantity of vehicles alone was a painful reminder of the French army in 1940, trudging to war after being delivered to a railhead in cattle trucks. The US army seemed to run not just on gasoline, but also on baked beans, coffee, cigarettes and packets of almost everything imaginable; not just cookies, candy and condoms, but also sachets of stew and mashed potatoes, permanganate to sterilize the water, tins of peanut butter and condensed milk, doughnut-making machines mounted on army trucks, and, of course, K rations. French children swarmed round their vehicles, begging for chewing gum. Soon the drivers of trucks painted on their tailboard: ‘No Gum Chum’.
    The American influence in Paris became unmistakable. Some typically French bars were transformed, in an attempt to attract the rich liberators. Windows were darkened, iron chairs changed for comfortable upholstered ones, and the waiters in their black waistcoats and long white aprons were replaced with smiling girls. As a final touch, these new venues were given names like ‘New York’ or ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’.
    Many disliked the way French youth appeared infatuated with all things American – detective stories, films, clothes, jazz, bebop, Glenn Miller. This fascination represented both a yearning to escape from the poverty and dilapidation around them and a preference for American informality after the stuffiness of Vichy. But it also struck a deeper chord, the legend of a new world offering a vision to the old. ‘America symbolized so many things!’ wrote