Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [150]
In Paris, de Gaulle established his headquarters at La Pérouse, the hotel near the Arc de Triomphe which his wartime secret service had used as its first headquarters at the Liberation. On Sunday, 30 March 1947, he made a speech at Bruneval in Normandy, the site of a commando raid during the war. As an official commemoration, the meeting attracted the presence of the British and Canadian ambassadors, as well as detachments from their countries’ armed forces. Yet the idea for this event had come from Colonel Rémy, as a way of assembling former members of the Resistance under de Gaulle’s new banner. Ramadier was exasperated, but any attempt by the government to restrict the ‘Liberator’ – as the Gaullists called their leader – looked churlish. The Communists, meanwhile, claimed his audiences were composed of ‘ladies in mink coats and old colonels smelling of mothballs’.
De Gaulle finally decided to go ahead with the plan for creating a mass movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. ‘On va refaire la France Libre’ was a popular cry among his wartime associates, ‘les hommes de Londres’. But their tendency to refer to the new movement by its initials, the RPF, displeased the General. That sounded like yet another of the political parties he loathed so much. He insisted on calling it ‘le Rassemblement’.
The creation of the RPF was announced to the people of France at Strasbourg on 7 April. Soustelle set up the first group in the capital of Alsace that evening. A week later, the movement was officially registered. The Strasbourg celebrations were again linked to a semi-official event which drew the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, from Paris. He and de Gaulle inspected a guard of honour together, which confirmed Communist suspicions. But both French and Russian Communists were wrong to assume that Caffery’s attendance signalled that the American government was planning to back de Gaulle. In normal circumstances Caffery always punctiliously refused to meet de Gaulle, making an exception only for occasions such as this.
A propaganda struggle had meanwhile broken out at a wonderfully trivial level. When Nancy Mitford had wanted to dedicate her unexpectedly successful novel The Pursuit of Love to her adored ‘Colonel’, Gaston Palewski, he had been flattered and told her to put his full name in the dedication, not just his initials. He regretted this bitterly when the Communists realized that Nancy Mitford was the sister of Unity Mitford. In February, a Communist publication produced an inaccurate article under the equally inaccurate headline, ‘Sister of Hitler’s mistress dedicates daring book to M. Palewski’. It was followed by several other pieces. Palewski, fearing the General’s wrath, persuaded Nancy to go abroad until the fuss died down. She obediently departed into temporary exile and wrote to him from Madrid in the middle of April, ‘Like the Archangel Gabriel, you chase me away from heavenly Paris.’ But to turn the tables on the Communists, she said she would dedicate her next book to Jacques Duclos – ‘Let him laugh that one off.’
By the end of April the Socialist Prime Minister, Paul Ramadier, had come to think that it might be possible after all to govern without the Communists. The end of tripartisme was accelerated by the contradiction of Communist deputies voting against the government in which their own leaders were ministers. Ramadier, with studied courtesy, insisted on the principle of collective responsibility within a government.
On 25 April, an unofficial strike at the Renault factories spread with great speed, taking the Communists by surprise. They accused Trotskyists of fomenting trouble, but the strike gained such support that Communist leaders had to shift their position if they were to retain any credibility among the workers. The party’s politburo denounced the government’s refusal to raise wages. Thorez, the Vice-President of the government, did not worry about such a flagrant paradox. He refused to