Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [162]
The capital was particularly vulnerable to strike action. For those coming into the centre of Paris to work by métro or suburban rail, life became almost intolerable. ‘The train is jammed and often obliged to stop, either by sabotage or by the women and children of the strikers lying down on the tracks.’ Strikes in the public services included the mail, refuse collection and power supplies. Cooking became impossible, electricity was cut without warning as it had been the previous winter, and water pressure dropped so low that the top floors of buildings failed to get even a trickle from the tap.
The real threat lay outside Paris. Moch felt forced to elaborate a contingency plan which would concentrate all his forces on Paris and the routes from the capital to Le Havre, Belgium, Lyons and Marseilles. The rest of the country outside these Y-shaped corridors would be effectively abandoned until sufficient troops could be brought back from Germany.
On 29 November, the day after General Leclerc’s air crash, the Palais Bourbon – cordoned off by troops and police – became the scene of the most violent exchanges ever seen in the National Assembly. The Schuman government presented a group of measures to defend the Republic, including an anti-sabotage bill. During these days Robert Schuman impressed everyone with his air of calm. Jules Moch was equally resolute. He knew that he had less than a week to bring the country under control. If public order collapsed, then de Gaulle might make a move which could trigger the Communists into civil war. But de Gaulle preferred to stand back while his two enemies, the Communists and the government, fought it out.
In the hémicycle of the National Assembly the Communists yelled insults at Robert Schuman and his government. Schuman’s service in the German army in the First World War was thrown at him.
‘There’s the Boche!’ cried Duclos.
‘Where were you a soldier in 1914, Prime Minister?’ shouted Charles Tillon, one of the Black Sea mutineers of 1920.
‘Prussian! German!’ screamed Alain Signor, the author of the cringing letter to Stepanov in the Kremlin.
The barrage of insults swelled and slackened in the course of the marathon sessions. Deputies of other parties flung back their own jibes, reminding the Communists of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler. Every resentment and suspicion from the Occupation surged to the surface.
Sunday, 30 November, the second day of the session, was very cold and foggy. The streets of Paris were empty. ‘All seems quiet today,’ wrote the British ambassador in his diary. ‘It isn’t revolution weather.’ Marie-Blanche de Polignac refused to cancel her traditional Sunday-night musical salon.
Monday was another day of fog. No aeroplanes could land or take off, so, with the train strike, no diplomatic bags could get through. Roger Martin du Gard, demoralized by cold meals and the lack of water and heating, found the atmosphere of the city ‘sinister’; he could not wait to escape to Nice as soon as the trains began to run again. Nancy Mitford, who swung like many between alarm and disdain for alarmists, expressed her exasperation at the way the British press were reporting the French troubles with a streak of schadenfreude. ‘I told the Times man,’ she wrote to her sister Diana, ‘he really must point out that blood is not actually pouring down the gutters.’ The electricity failed again, and Artur Rubinstein’s concert that night took place by candlelight.
On the third day of the marathon session in the National Assembly a Communist deputy, Raoul Calas,