Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [107]
As darkness fell, the most famous monuments in the centre of Paris – the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine and the Opéra – were illuminated for the first time since the beginning of the war, the Opéra in red, white and blue lights. The fountains were also reconnected and lit up.
The Paris police struggled to push back the crowds in the rue Royale to make way for a ceremonial appearance of the Garde Républicaine on horseback, as they came trotting down from the Madeleine; but their arrival was as chaotic as the scenes around them. Their full-dress uniform, the shining cuirasses and dragoon helmets with long horsehair plumes, was dramatically offset by the fact that almost every soldier had ‘at least one girl riding behind him on the horse, clinging to his Napoleonic uniform and screaming’.
As evening advanced, a strong breeze arose and the flags flying from the tops of public buildings cracked in the wind. The crowds below continued to sing the Marseillaise, ‘Madelon’, the ‘Chant du départ’ and the songs of the Resistance. Red Army officers, easily recognizable by their thick shoulder-boards, were congratulated; but when a White Russian friend of Simone de Beauvoir began to chat with a group of Soviet soldiers in their own language, they demanded severely what she was doing in Paris and why she was not in the Motherland.
Castor and a couple of friends went up to Montmartre to finish the evening at the Cabane Cubaine. Afterwards they were given a lift home in a jeep. They felt slightly flat. ‘This victory had been far away from us; we had not been waiting for it, as we had the Liberation, in a feverish anguish of anticipation.’ At midnight a fanfare of trumpeters from the Paris fire brigade sounded the ceasefire. Others also felt that, unlike the Liberation, there was an artificial side to the celebration, partly because they were ‘too exhausted to applaud a finale for which we had waited too long’, but also because General de Gaulle’s emphasis on France’s glorious role did not ring true. They did not feel like victors.
The only people likely to feel triumphant were the Communists, basking in the reflected glory of the Red Army and the conviction that the party would be in power in the near future.
In 1945, the French Communist Party was the most powerful political organization in the country, controlling a number of front organizations – the National Front, the Union of French Women, the Union of French Republican Youth, a veterans’ association and most of the largest unions within the CGT, the Confédération Générale du Travail. But there were some striking weaknesses, especially in Paris and its suburbs, where membership had not even climbed back to the level of 1938. Benoît Frachon, the Communist head of the CGT trades union movement, reported to Moscow: ‘the principal reason… is due to a certain temporary disappointment among workers. The workers were counting on a fundamental revolution in France and on social liberation immediately after the Germans were chased out.’ But what Frachon does not mention is that the loss of workers in the ceinture rouge suburbs was greater than acknowledged. Their loss was partly camouflaged by the number of intellectuals joining the party in central Paris.
Many workers had indeed become Communists during the Resistance in the belief that victory would lead to revolution. The astonishment and disgust of many could hardly be contained when Maurice Thorez, on his return to France, called for increased production and – from the most famous deserter of 1939 – the creation of a powerful French army.
None of this, of course, meant that the French Communist Party had become a bourgeois party, even if some of its leaders, especially