Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [152]
De Gaulle’s pact with Stalin three years before had blackened him in the eyes of many potential followers on the right. But at Rennes on 27 July, he openly attacked the ‘separatists’. He described the French Communist Party as ‘a group of men whose leaders place the service of a foreign state above everything else. I say this all the more forcefully because I myself have tried, up to the limits of the lawful and possible, to attract them to the service of France.’
While de Gaulle compared Ramadier’s administration to Weimar, the Communists compared RPF mass meetings to the Nuremberg rally. Nancy Mitford went to the Vélodrome d’Hiver on 2 July to see her adored ‘Colonel’ speak to a huge crowd. Palewski was a far greater success than anyone expected. Claude Mauriac wrote that ‘he was suddenly transfigured’. Malraux followed. His speech began in its habitual way, difficult to understand, but then ‘finding its rhythmlittle by little, as a torrent finds its bed. And then emerged a great prophetic voice which electrified the whole audience, the voice of a sage, of a poet, of a religious leader.’
25
The Self-FulfillingProphecy
On Saturday, 7 June 1947, the American Secretary of State, General Marshall, made a speech at Harvard on receiving an honorary degree. Never has a short reply of thanks at a university had such significance. Marshall, without fully warning his officials, had decided that this was the moment to make the most important foreign policy statement of the post-war era.
The terrible winter of 1946 had revealed Europe’s inability to raise itself out of penury. Economic collapse was imminent, with political disaster almost certainly close behind. Marshall declared that the United States must make a huge effort to combat ‘hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos’. But the initiative ‘must come from Europe’, because ‘it would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically’.
The message behind General Marshall’s speech at Harvard had a wide parenthood, including Eisenhower, Jean Monnet and Dean Acheson; but the formulation, which brilliantly avoided all the mines in such a dangerous field, was entirely his. Most important of all, he carefully made a point of extending the project to all of Europe, including countries occupied by the Red Army.
Marshall’s brief address electrified the governments of Europe, once they grasped its significance. It offered their only hope. Russia, laid waste by the German invasion, was in no state to help. France had no currency reserves left and a balance of payments deficit of 10 billion francs. Since September 1944 it had received close to $2 billion in credits for coal, food and raw materials, but this had done no more than enable the country to survive. The Marshall Plan offered the chance to rebuild. ‘Examples of such solidarity are very rare in history,’ wrote Hervé Alphand. But behind the scenes the State Department insisted that ‘the United States must run this show’.
Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, was reputedly the first to leap at the opportunity. After a weekend of discussion and deliberation, he sent a ‘Most Immediate and Top Secret’ telegram to Duff Cooper in the middle of the night, instructing him to discuss the matter with Bidault in the morning. A week later Bevin himself flew over to Paris, with a large contingent of advisers fromvarious ministries. The city was still gripped by an endless succession of strikes. After dinner at the British Embassy with Ramadier, Bidault, Massigli, Chauvel, Alphand, Marjolin and Monnet, the discussions continued. ‘There was almost entire agreement on the line that we should take,’ Duff Cooper wrote the next morning. ‘The important thing is the approach to the Russians. They must be invited to participate and at the same time they must be given no opportunity to cause delay. This will not be easy.’
On 27 June, a conference between Bidault, Bevin and Molotov to discuss the Marshall Plan opened at the Quai