Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [112]
De Gaulle had far more serious causes for concern than the Levant, or his disastrous foray in the Val d’Aosta. The food situation was so bad that the Minister of the Interior sent a secret telegramon 7 July 1945 to the Governor-General of Algeria, urgently demanding two shiploads of sheep to avert a crisis. Beans and lentils were shipped in from South America. The country had less than two weeks’ supply of grain. And this was summer. The winter would be far worse.
France’s economy was in a disastrous state, but de Gaulle paid little attention to financial matters. Whether or not he ever uttered the famous remark ‘l’intendance suivra’ – ‘the baggage train will follow’ – is an academic question, but this was certainly his attitude. His two ministers responsible for economic affairs, Pierre Mendès-France and René Pleven, became locked in disagreement in the winter of 1944, when he summoned them to his residence in the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday afternoon to discuss their opposing points of view. Pleven did not want a strict fiscal policy because of the hardship it would cause in the short term. He put his case simply and plausibly in under half an hour. Mendès-France, a far cleverer man, argued passionately for over two hours that unless the French government had the courage to stop paying inflationary wage settlements, it would never rise out of its present state of destitution. The result of this meeting was that never again would de Gaulle allow anyone to talk to him about economics for three hours.
Mendès-France’s plan was absolutely correct in fiscal terms, but the country and the government coalition could not have withstood the political effects of the misery it would have caused. France’s financial salvation, like that of the rest of Europe, lay not within her own resources but in the generosity or self-interest of richer nations. Yet the primary objective of de Gaulle’s next trip abroad was not to raise loans, but to persuade the Americans to let France have the left bank of the Rhine and her share of an internationalized Ruhr.
Bidault told Duff Cooper that ‘with de Gaulle in his present frame of mind the less travelling the General did in foreign countries the better’. But de Gaulle’s trip to the United States at least did not turn out a disaster.
On 21 August, after the trial of Marshal Pétain was out of the way, de Gaulle set off for Washington, accompanied by Bidault, General Juin and Gaston Palewski. The future peace of Europe, he told President Truman, would be guaranteed by reducing Germany to a collection of minor states restricted to agriculture, while France was built up as the industrial giant of Europe. De Gaulle dismissed Truman’s view that the problem in establishing peace was essentially economic. Truman listened politely. He even put up with de Gaulle’s little lecture on ‘why France saw the world in a less simplistic manner than did the United States’.
De Gaulle might have taken a slightly different line if he had been aware of a briefing document given to Truman before their meeting. This report, if it deserves the term, conveyed in a series of crude caricatures the attitude still prevalent in US government circles. It summarized France thus: ‘A country which, from the highest in the government down to the poorest peasant, is sitting back waiting for something to happen; which is completely unaware of American sympathy and aid; in which the cost of living permits only the rich to really subsist; a country where the young, from the best to the lowest families, live and thrive on the black market; a country with such an inferiority complex that frank discussion is difficult if not impossible; a country convinced that the United States and Russia will have to fight it out in a war in the near future, and which is convinced that in the interim the Communists will control Europe.’ This diatribe ran on for three