Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [1]
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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,
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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