Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [160]
The other key member of the government was Jules Moch, who took over as Minister of the Interior. Moch, with his round tortoiseshell glasses, pinched face and toothbrush moustache, looked like a provincial schoolmaster. He was a polytechnicien, pitiless with statistics and mathematical calculations. Yet his predecessor Édouard Depreux described him as ‘a sensitive man, loyal and faithful to his friends’, and, most significant for the times he was about to live through, he possessed ‘a profound sense of the State’. The Communists found it hard to attack him: as a Jew, an anti-cleric and a Socialist, his loathing of Vichy had been unfeigned, and his son had been killed by the Gestapo.
Moch faced the hardest ministerial task since the Liberation. The autumn coal strike, with stocks still depleted from the previous terrible winter, made the government extremely vulnerable. The miners from the north of France were in combative mood when colonial troops were ordered in to protect the pits fromsabotage, but the ‘gueules noires’, as the miners called themselves, received an unexpected boost. Spahis from the garrison at Senlis stacked their rifles on the platformat Lens station and refused to take them up, despite threats from officers. The Ministry of the Interior quickly sent in CRS riot police to seize their weapons and force the Spahis into a train which returned them to barracks.
At the Bully coalfield, some thirty German prisoners of war in their field-grey overcoats joined the attack on the CRS. A number of carbines were seized from them, and three CRS were taken prisoner by the miners. They were apparently so frightened that they told their captors all they knew. A Resistance veteran was disgusted: ‘Do you realize that we had friends who died under torture having not said a word?’ The miners released them, but held on to their identity cards so that they could be pursued if they broke their promise to say nothing to their superiors.
The idea of Spahis and Germans helping the miners aroused great hopes of international solidarity. The Communist Party press encouraged its followers to see this struggle as the last push needed to overthrow a tottering regime.
As the strike hardened and miners’ families were left without money for food, the party organized the evacuation of their children to Communist households elsewhere. Miners who defied the strike call and continued to work were called ‘canaries’ because they were yellow. Their wives were often ambushed outside shops by the wives of strikers.
When Moch took over as Minister of the Interior on 24 November, he suffered from a shortage of riot police to deal with the outbreaks of violence. He also found that he had inherited an over-centralized system, never designed to cope with simultaneous emergencies right across the country. The situation was desperate, but this very fact forced the government to be courageous.
The Ministry of the Interior was in a state of pandemonium. Moch had to be in constant contact with up to ninety prefects of départements. Many prefects, afraid of getting no reinforcements from the Ministry of the Interior, turned to the general commanding their military district and, without informing Paris, asked him for troops. Others who had been instructed to send help to one of their besieged colleagues either questioned their orders or delayed implementing them in case their own area erupted. During the last week of November and the first week of December, the ministry received an average of 900 telegrams a day. In one twenty-four-hour period, Moch subsequently informed the prefects, the number rose to 2,302. Since most of these signals were in code, the cipher clerks were submerged.
Moch was so short of men that at one point he found himself sending bodies of riot police of fifty or fewer from one part of the country to another and back again. The station at Brive, for example, was finally relieved by fifty men from a CRS company based in Agen and 100 men allocated to the Massif Central. Even more alarming,