Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [165]
Susan Mary Patten was deeply embarrassed when the playwright Henri Bernstein came up and said, almost within Robert Schuman’s hearing, ‘Well, thank God you Americans have at last declared yourselves for de Gaulle. Bravo for Mr Dulles.’
Perhaps provoked by Dulles’s praise of de Gaulle, Jules Moch made sure that the Americans appreciated the efforts made to defend Republican order; but his main objective was to put pressure on the United States to hasten financial aid to France before unrest erupted again. With Caffery, he was, of course, preaching to the converted. The ambassador’s reports to Washington extolled Moch’s ‘courageous and energetic measures which have tended to bolster the government’s and his own prestige’. But he also believed firmly that without the announcement of the Marshall Plan, the Schuman government would never have been able to inspire sufficient determination among its officials and political colleagues to resist the Communist onslaught.
The Minister of the Interior did not rest on his laurels during the remaining months of that winter. He bombarded the prefects with briefing papers and plans for improving the countrywide security apparatus. Political Orientation Instruction No. 1 of 26 December 1947 set out the background to the recent strikes. In it Moch warned that the majority of the population still faced real hardship and that the Communists would make the most of it. The civil authorities must therefore expect renewed disorders next year, probably between mid-February and mid-March, because that would be the period of greatest scarcity of foodstuffs and coal. (In fact the next serious wave of unrest did not come until June.)
Moch hurried forward his predecessor’s programme of eliminating Communists from the Paris police and the CRS riot police. Such was the success of this procedure that the balance was entirely reversed. By the summer of 1948, it was estimated that 19,000 out of 23,000 policemen in the capital were anti-Communist. The Ministry of the Interior meanwhile altered the distribution of CRS riot police around the country so that more were deployed close to the main danger areas – the coalfields of the north and the larger industrial centres of the east. Moch also asked the Ministry of War to formnew squads of Gardes Républicaines from the gendarmerie. In critical regions, the army was to allocate infantry battalions as permanent reserves for security duties.
The idea of commanders of military regions exercising control was anathema to Moch. He said that he wished to avoid ‘the psychological and political disadvantages which often accompany a declaration of martial law’, but he also did not trust anybody else, certainly not the Ministry of War, to control civil unrest. Neither he nor Robert Schuman lost sight of the fact that only a real improvement in the standard of living would reduce the power of the Communists, and that depended on the Marshall Plan.
27
The Great Boom of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
The bars, bistros and cafés of Paris had long acted as intellectual incubators, but never so much as in Saint-Germain after the war. An extraordinary array of talent had come together in two square kilometres of Paris at a time when the cross-fertilization of ideas had never seemed more exciting and important, when every art appeared on the point of a new departure. This could not have happened without places in which people could meet, talk, argue and write, from morning until late at night.
The ideas were new, but the café setting was reassuringly familiar. Whether the floor was of wood or tiled, whether the triangular ashtrays