Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [108]
The continuing obsession with the fifth column was partly inspired by the campaign to remove more of the opposition – it was also the classic Stalinist method of accounting for setbacks due to incompetence – but the belief in a fifth column of Vichyist saboteurs was quite genuine.
Despite growing tensions between the party and General de Gaulle, Communist ministers stayed in the government, and Thorez proved himself a highly useful ally. At Waziers on 21 July 1945, he shocked his audience by telling them that the hunt for collaborators must come to an end, and that there were far too many strikes. On 1 September, Duclos proclaimed that Thorez’s speech at Waziers had raised coal production: ‘It’s thanks to the Communist Party that the population will have coal this winter.’
The government and its officials could hardly believe their luck at Thorez’s responsible line, although they had no illusions about the party’s simultaneous efforts at infiltration. A very senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for its intelligence network in the country – he claimed to have 5,000 agents throughout France keeping a close eye on Communist activities – reported to the American Embassy that the party was devoting its efforts to planting members wherever they could wield influence. They were having much less success than they had hoped in the armed forces, but were managing to take effective control of the CGT trades union movement. On the other hand, ‘Every week they continue to support us is time gained and strengthens our position.’
For a materialist party, totally cynical in matters of Realpolitik, the Communists devoted an astonishing amount of effort – and ruthless politicking – to the cultivation of myths and heroic symbols. In January 1945, the party had launched a campaign to have their star writer of the pre-war years, Romain Rolland, buried in the Panthéon. They lobbied, too, to get party members into the Académie Française. But nowhere had they been quicker off the mark than to have streets and métro stations renamed after their Resistance heroes.
Following the Stalinist model, a personality cult was developed around Maurice Thorez. Thorez, whatever one may think of his politics, was a man of impressive talents. His enemies may have seen his muscular, rubbery face as a mask of deceit, but as a devout Stalinist he believed in the necessity of lies. A miner by birth and by trade, he overcame his lack of education by sheer force of will, developing a formidable concentration.
He was acclaimed by the French Communist Party as ‘the son of the people’, also the title of his official autobiography – almost making him sound like the Christ of the proletariat. Yet, to demonstrate his place in the Communist universe, this was the same man whose request in Moscow to Dimitrov for permission to be interviewed by a journalist was dismissed as curtly as if he had been a clerk asking for an extra holiday.
On his fiftieth birthday, schoolchildren came to sing: ‘Our Maurice is fifty years old – happy, happy birthday – for Jeannette, for their children – for his mother!’ Jeannette Vermeersch, his companion and the mother of his children, was portrayed as a model of proletarian courage. The poverty of her childhood was recounted as the Stalinist equivalent of a Bible story. She too cultivated the legend, and her fiery oratory was modelled on that of La Pasionaria, whom she greatly