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By Root 621 0

began doing what Icchok Finkelsztajn had dreamed of for more than twenty-five years—cleaning the buildings of Paris. Slowly, building by building, Paris brightened into limestone shades of cream and beige. At first it was not even noticeable to Finkelsztajn and the other old guard on Rue des Rosiers, but the new cleaning policy had another side to it that was to profoundly affect the Jews of the Pletzl. Not only were buildings to be cleaned, but the slummy areas in the central eastern part of the city, especially the fourth arrondissement, were to be restored and improved. What Finkelsztajn thought of as the Pletzl, the government called the Marais, the swamp. The area had, in earlier centuries, been a swamp or at least a marshy area along the Seine, providing swans and other wild birds for the feast tables of the aristocrats. But by the sixteenth century the aristocrats had ruined their own game preserve, draining it and building large private homes. The section deteriorated after the revolution, when the aristocracy lost its standing. The rose-garden street became the heart of a crowded immigrant slum.

Now the government wanted to restore the area, buying properties as they became available and renovating them. When a property goes up for sale in Paris, the city has the option of buying at a fair market price. The market price in that part of Paris was very little for a dilapidated sixteenth-century building, and few but the government had the capital to restore such large, ancient properties. Slowly, the city began buying up the Marais. If anybody was thinking about it, they would have known that a Jewish immigrant-based social phenomenon like the Pletzl was not going to be part of the government's urban planning.

The Paris face-lift was a small part of De Gaulle's larger scheme to restore “the glory of France.” This was to be accomplished partly by rewriting history, a Gaullist project that began in 1944, when he persuaded the Allies to let him enter Paris and pretend that the French Army had liberated France from the Germans. De Gaulle had argued that France needed to believe this to restore its pride and confidence and achieve stability. Myth-building also required forgetting not only about the Vichy collaboration but about the role of the Resistance in the war. The war between the Resistance and the collaborators had been a civil war between Frenchmen, and the lynching and even the legal trials of collaborators were, in his view, threatening France with a continuing civil war.

According to the De Gaulle version, World War II was much like World War I, and the French in unison had fought and defeated the Germans for the greater glory of all France. He always emphasized the 1918 armistice celebration and played down anniversaries of World War II victories, in which France had played only a minor role. The betrayals of French Jews by their fellow Frenchmen, the history of deportations, the fact that there were French concentration camp survivors—all that was inconvenient for the Gaullist myth.

Nevertheless, De Gaulle did not have particularly bad relations with French Jews. He was remembered as a leader who had worked closely with many Jews in the fight against Petain. Politicians did not think about “the Jewish vote,” which to this day is thought to be an American concept. Even on policy toward Israel, the sentiments of French Jews were not a key factor one way or the other. Mendes-France felt that he had to prove that he did not favor Jews because he was Jewish. De Gaulle had nothing to prove, and Jewish interests were not an issue for him.

As it happened, his relations with Israel greatly pleased French voters, Jews and non-Jews alike. There was probably no foreign leader with whom De Gaulle had a better relationship than David Ben-Gurion. France had hated the British Mandate because it was British, and from the beginning it had been a strong backer of the State of Israel. De Gaulle continued this policy. In 1961, France provided Israel with sixty-two state-of-the-art jet fighters, the Mirage III, and five years