Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [111]
De Gaulle had also begun to lose the confidence of industrialists and the liberal professions, partly because of his anti-American obsession, but also because he refused to tackle the problem of the economy. In some exasperation Monick, the governor of the Bank of France, told one foreign diplomat that Belgium was handling its affairs far better than France. De Gaulle’s following was narrowing towards committed loyalists from the war, the more reactionary elements in the army and, with an irony that was typical of the guerre franco-française, the natural supporters of Marshal Pétain, who saw de Gaulle as their bulwark against the Communists.
In May, anti-colonialist disturbances in Syria threatened France’s position in the Levant. De Gaulle was certain that General Spears, until recently Britain’s minister to the Lebanon and Syria, had inspired a plot to expel the French. Spears had certainly been provocative during the war, and other British officials in the region did little to calm the situation. Yet although the British would have liked to supplant France in the area before the war, London saw no future there in 1945. Afraid that France’s attempts to reimpose her rule would inflame the whole Middle East, the British government issued an ultimatum that French troops in Syria must return to barracks.
De Gaulle, impotent in the face of British military power there, became convinced that the British were determined to undermine him in other ways. He even claimed that while ‘England was preparing the decisive blow in the Levant’, she was pushing ‘Washington to pick a quarrel with Paris’.
Whether out of frustration at events in Syria or in an unrelated attempt to increase French territory at the peace conference, de Gaulle had moved French troops across the Italian border into the Val d’Aosta. Once again, he did not inform his Foreign Minister what he was doing. Bidault was furious and embarrassed by such a pointless adventure in the face of the Americans. On 6 June, President Truman sent a strong message demanding the withdrawal of all French troops and cut off military supplies. Diplomats in Paris, certain that de Gaulle was on a suicide course, started to refer to him as ‘Charles le Temporaire’. A week later, de Gaulle was forced into a humiliating retreat.
The following day, he was due to confer the Cross of the Liberation on General Eisenhower, but at the last moment Eisenhower was told that he could not bring any British officers, because of the dispute over the Levant. Eisenhower said that, as Supreme Allied Commander, he would be bringing Air Marshal Tedder and General Morgan, two of his deputies, and if this did not suit General de Gaulle, he would not come. De Gaulle had to back down.
Palewski, apparently on de Gaulle’s behalf, passed a message via Louise de Vilmorin to Duff Cooper, saying that they both regretted that ‘owing to recent events their relations with the British Embassy could not be what they had been in the past’, but they wished the ambassador to know that they still had nothing but the friendliest feelings towards him personally. Duff Cooper was not impressed: ‘This seems to me – I must say – the most extraordinary procedure. I am surprised that de Gaulle lends himself to it.’
De Gaulle began to realize that his hopes for post-war France were frustrated from within as well as from without. When the Consultative Assembly debated the crisis in the Levant on 17 June, he was appalled to find that the bulk of the criticismwas directed, not against the British, but against his own government and France’s traditional policy in the region. On the evening of 26 June he told General Pierre de Bénouville, a hero of the Resistance, that he