Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [109]
The other, perhaps unsurprising, paradox came with the Communist Party’s commercial empire. The opportunities for expansion had been greatly increased at the Liberation, when buildings belonging to collaborationist organizations were expropriated. The party’s daily newspaper L’Humanité, for example, took over the building in the rue d’Enghien which had belonged to the populist newspaper Le Petit Parisien.
The party owned a bank, the Banque du Nord, and a shipping line, France Navigation, which had been taken over during the Spanish Civil War, and was almost certainly bought with part of the gold reserves of the Spanish Republic, used to purchase Soviet military supplies.
The party’s publishing empire was huge, both in Paris and in the provinces. It had twelve daily newspapers and forty-seven weeklies. In addition, the Communist-run coalition, the National Front, had seventeen weeklies, all tightly controlled. Instructions for ‘political orientation’ were issued each day to all provincial newspapers controlled by their front organization.
The flagship of the party’s property empire was ‘le 44’, the great brick headquarters in the rue Le Peletier. It was well defended by at least half a dozen security guards, all picked members ready against a surprise attack by fifth columnists.
Party leaders also expected assassination attempts. Thorez was driven each day to ‘le 44’ in a heavily armoured limousine accompanied by bodyguards. The moment they arrived outside, the bodyguards and the security members from inside the building would form a human screen so that Thorez could hurry inside safely. At Thorez’s house, a small château at Choisy, the bodyguards served at table, then took their meals in the kitchen. One visitor described the place as ‘tristement petit-bourgeois’. It had a private cinema because Communist leaders (with the exception of Laurent Casanova) did not dare venture out to public places. The house also had a very uneven art collection. All the works had been donated and dedicated to le camarade Maurice by painters who were party members.
In 1945 the French Communist Party, then at the height of its influence, decided to push forward its most ambitious strategy: taking over the Socialist Party through amalgamation. The theme of working-class unity held a tremendous appeal at that time for the majority, especially the young, who had no experience of Communist ruthlessness in the pursuit of power.
Jacques Duclos declared that only enemies of the people were opposed to the unity of the working class: Socialists who resisted it were ‘scissionists’. But veterans, such as the Socialist leader Léon Blum, remembered only too well the Spanish Communist Party’s attempts to swallow the Spanish Socialist Party in 1936, early in the Civil War. They also remembered the Communist takeover of the CGT trades union federation in the name of working-class unity.
The American Embassy kept a watch on these developments. Captain David Rockefeller, the assistant military attaché, maintained close touch with members of the Renseignements Généraux, one of the Ministry of the Interior’s police intelligence networks. These officers persuaded him that the best bulwark for the Socialists to resist the Communists was the recently reformed Union Démocratique Socialiste de la Résistance. Although left-wing, it had proved its staunchly anti-Communist position by expelling Pierre Villon, a party member. Rockefeller predicted that if the Socialists and their allies stood firm, the Communists would have little alternative but to pull out of the government and sabotage ‘efforts to bring about economic recovery’.
Blum and his colleagues at the head of the Socialist Party felt uneasy. The Communists looked as though they would win either way. If a majority of Socialists agreed to unification, the Communists would be able, through unscrupulous use of their superior organization, to take over every important post and win control. On the other hand, if Blum and his supporters managed to win the vote against unification, the issue might well