Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
    Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC 2 R 0 RL , England
    www.penguin.com
    First published by Hamish Hamilton 1994
First published in Penguin Books 1995
Revised edition published in 2004
This edition published 2007
1
    Copyright © Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1994, 2004
All rights reserved
    The moral right of the authors has been asserted
    Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

     
    To our parents
    Contents
    PREFACE
    PART ONE
    A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES
    1
The Marshal and the General
    2
The Paths of Collaboration and Resistance
    3
The Resistance of the Interior and the Men of London
    4
The Race for Paris
    5
Liberated Paris
    6
The Passage of Exiles
    7
War Tourists and Ritzkrieg
    8
The
Épuration Sauvage
    PART TWO
    L’ÉTAT, C’EST DE GAULLE
    9
Provisional Government
    10
Corps Diplomatique
    11
Liberators and Liberated
    12
Writers and Artists in the Line of Fire
    13
The Return of Exiles
    14
The Great Trials
    15
Hunger for the New
    16
After the Deluge
    17
Communists in Government
    18
The Abdication of Charles XI
    PART THREE
    INTO THE COLD WAR
    19
The Shadow-Theatre: Plots and Counter-Plots
    20
Politics and Letters
    21
The Diplomatic Battleground
    22
The Fashionable World
    23
A Tale of Two Cities
    24
Fighting Back against the Communists
    25
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
    26
The Republic at Bay
    27
The Great Boom of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
    28
The Curious Triangle
    29
The Treason of the Intellectuals
    PART FOUR
    THE NEW NORMALITY
    30
Americans in Paris
    31
The Tourist Invasion
    32 Paris sera toujours Paris
    33
Recurring Fevers
    REFERENCES
    BIBLIOGRAPHY
    PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    INDEX
    Preface
    Few countries love their liberators once the cheering dies away. They have to face the depressing reality of rebuilding their nation and their political system virtually from scratch. Meanwhile, black-marketeers and gangsters thrive on the chaotic interregnum which we now call ‘regime change’. This reinforces the sense of collective shame, just when people want to forget the humiliation of having had to survive by moral cowardice, whether under a dictatorship or under enemy occupation. So liberation creates the most awkward debt of all. It can never be paid off in a satisfactory way. Pride is a very prickly flower.
    So too is nationalism, as this post-Liberation period in France shows only too well. Nobody was more prickly than General de Gaulle at the idea of slights from his Anglo-Saxon allies. To judge by the transatlantic rows which continually reignite, this is clearly a ‘recurring fever’, to use Jean Monnet’s phrase. Yet in the post-war world, we were led to believe that the need for national identities would wither away. The Cold War suppressed most national problems within its international straitjacket. Then other developments, whether the United Nations, the European Union or even the contentious process of globalization, pointed to a further fading of national consciousness. But if anything, one finds in our increasingly fragmented world that many people, terrified of drowning in anonymity, seize hold of tribal or national banners even more firmly. And the idealistic notion that international organizations can rise above national interests and intrigue has also proved to be a complete delusion.
    One could well argue in the light of recent events that the Franco-American relationship had never really recovered from 1944. One might also say that the liberators were rather too thick-skinned, while the French were too thin-skinned; that American businessmen wanted to leap in to exploit the market, while the French wanted to revive their own battered industry; that the GIs, ‘ardent and enterprising’ in their attempts to fraternize with local girls, simply created resentment and jealousy, especially since Frenchmen had no cigarettes or stockings to offer. The clash of the free market with the moral rationing of war socialism was bound to provoke deep discontent, whether in matters of love or of food. Frenchmen, and