Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [110]
Communist attempts to establish a monopoly of working-class leadership were damaged from an unexpected direction. The centrepiece of their propaganda in 1945 was the heroism of the Red Army. But when the party strove to win over the recently returned prisoners of war and deportees, it discovered that many had returned to France horrified by the rape, looting and murder they had witnessed in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Their stories spread. Communist leaders in Paris were beside themselves with rage. ‘No word against the Red Army must be permitted!’ thundered André Marty at a mass meeting. Posters appeared attacking those ‘cynical Hitlerian scoundrels’ who had infiltrated themselves ‘to spread anti-Soviet calumnies’ against ‘the soldiers of the glorious Red Army who have saved the civilized world’.
The Kremlin, on the other hand, demonstrated little concern. Stalin’s lack of interest in France continued beyond the end of the war. After the red flag was raised over the ruins of Berlin, his main preoccupation was the establishment of a cordon sanitaire of satellite states controlled by the Red Army. Never again would he be vulnerable to a surprise attack from Germany.
One of the best indications of how loose the relationship between the Kremlin and the French Communist Party had become appears in the stenographic account of a meeting of the international section on 15 June 1945. Stepanov, the official dealing with the French Communist Party, felt that its leaders were losing their way. ‘For the whole period of the Liberation,’ he told Ponomarev and his committee, ‘one can say that the Communist Party acted in a very intelligent and very clever way. The party did not allow itself to be isolated from the rest of the resistance movement and the other parties…[Yet] one gets the impression that the Communist Party, although it is acting correctly from a tactical point of view, has no strategic perspective and no strategic objectives.’
Ponomarev disagreed. Thorez was right to ‘avoid premature actions and anything which risked provoking conflicts which will play into the hands of internal forces of reaction allied with external forces in the form of the English and Americans. The French Communist Party’s situation therefore is much more complicated than that for each Communist Party where our Red Army is present and where we have been able to bring about democratic changes. The proximity of the Soviet Union plays a role which is not small, and other circumstances play their parts too, but the decisive fact is the presence of the Red Army.’ Like Stalin, Ponomarev focused primarily on the cordon sanitaire imposed at gunpoint. But in 1947, Stepanov’s analysis would turn out to be the more accurate, with the French Communist Party caught on the wrong tack.
18
The Abdication of Charles XI
The problems of France’s leadership were summarized in graffiti on the walls of Paris: ‘De Gaulle has his head in the clouds and his feet in the shit’. Duff Cooper put the situation rather more gently: ‘De Gaulle is much blamed for internal difficulties which are not really his fault, whereas his follies in foreign affairs, his politique de panache etc. are rather popular.’
There was little to be cheerful about in the second half of 1945. At a time when France showed no signs of rising out of its material misery, some of General de Gaulle’s comments sounded uncharacteristically fatuous. ‘When I asked him about the recent municipal elections,’ Jefferson Caffery reported to Washington on 15 June, ‘he said that the people voted for this and that party, but all the people voted for de Gaulle. Then he went on to say what a remarkable reception he had received in Normandy; “as I receive everywhere I go”, he added.’
Most people tended to blame de Gaulle’s entourage, especially Gaston Palewski, for this state of affairs. Others felt this