Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [149]
Caffery feared that Depreux had overplayed his hand. His dramatic version of the plot had allowed the Communists to exploit the ‘plot to [a] maximum, smearing all present and potential anti-Communist elements – General de Larminat, General Koenig, General de Gaulle and even widening the attack to include the MRP, “party of the Cassocks and the reactionary West”’.
Depreux’s next move, ten days later, was to deprive the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, the riot police, of its light machine-guns and mortars. The CRS had a strong Communist presence, through party members from the Resistance who had joined from the FFI. The French Communist Party immediately denounced this measure as an attempt to leave the Republic defenceless against would-be military dictators.
François Mitterrand, the new minister for Anciens Combattants et Victimes de la Guerre, also impressed many by the stamina and effectiveness of his efforts to reduce Communist control within his jurisdiction. This had grown up during Laurent Casanova’s time in the ministry.
In the Ministry of War, the Communists’ chief enemy, General Revers, managed to resist all the calls for his removal from the post of chief of staff of the French army. Revers, while punctiliously polite to the new Minister of National Defence, swiftly removed Communists or fellow-travellers from sensitive appointments. He also purged the Gendarmerie Nationale, which came under the ministry’s control. Of the 2,000 army officers, mainly from the FFI, who were regarded as Communists or fellow-travellers, many had already been sidelined through such devices as the so-called ‘Opération de Tarbes’. This simply involved posting officers of left-wing sympathies to outposts like Tarbes in the Pyrenees, where they languished in non-existent jobs with no access to confidential information.
March 1947 was an eventful month in Paris as well as in Washington. On the very day that Truman addressed Congress, the French Communist Party found itself in a difficult position on the issue of Indo-China, where fighting had broken out the previous December between French forces and Ho Chi Minh’s followers led by General Giap. Moscow’s instructions on the subject were explicit. Communist deputies had to support the Viet-Minh and oppose the policy established by Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu.
On 18 March, the Assembly stood in silence in memory of the French servicemen killed in Indo-China. François Billoux, the Communist Minister of National Defence, remained seated. This immediately became an issue of patriotism.
The more the Communists were isolated, the more they drew in upon themselves. Communist speeches in the National Assembly took up the most time, not so much because of their content, but because their deputies, forming a claque, would applaud their leaders’ speeches at every pause. One cynic remarked that their hands were hard not from manual labour, but from clapping.
A number of factors encouraged General de Gaulle to return to the political arena in the spring of 1947. One of the most immediate was Ramadier’s appointment of Billoux as Minister of National Defence. De Gaulle’s sense of destiny – he once said that each day he spent several minutes wondering how his actions would be seen by history – told him that the people of France would recall him to power very soon.
To the relief of his supporters, de Gaulle began to spend more and more time in Paris. They dreaded the three-hour drive out to Colombey-les-deux-Églises. The atmosphere of the house, La Boisserie, was as lugubrious as its setting. There the chain-smoking General worked on his memoirs, surrounded by wartime memorabilia, his collection of swords, and signed photographs of former world leaders, while ‘Madame