Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [174]
Rumours of war intensified again. American diplomats and officers who had been in Berlin talked of ‘Custer’s last stand’ during visits to Paris. Bogomolov, the Russian ambassador, did not disguise the menace. ‘You’re following a very bad policy,’ he said to a journalist. ‘You’ll repent of it before long, before the end of the year.’
France was returning to a state of turmoil reminiscent of the previous autumn. On 25 June, the day after the blockade of Berlin started, fighting broke out in Clermont-Ferrand. The Communists, according to Moch, tried to drive government forces out of the town. No fewer than 140 policemen were wounded, a number of them with acid burns.
In August, French forces became involved in the air-bridge by constructing a new airport at Tegel in their zone of Berlin. The Communist Party launched a poster campaign and a wave of demonstrations with such slogans as ‘Down with the anti-Soviet War’, ‘The French people will never fight the Soviet Union’. Dockers in the Communist stronghold of Le Havre, following Lecoeur’s instructions, refused to unload military supplies for the US army. The renewal of political strife at home and events in Berlin provoked even greater fears and a flight of capital.
That summer, leaders of the Rassemblement were even more conscious of a threat to them than they had been the previous November. General de Bénouville had an unexpected and anonymous visitor one night. It turned out to be Colonel Marcel Degliame, a Communist leader whomhe had known in the Resistance. ‘Don’t ask why I’ve come to see you,’ said Degliame. ‘But are you able to defend yourself?’
The Communists at this time went beyond minor acts of sabotage to disrupt Rassemblement meetings. Groups of militants attacked whenever the opportunity presented itself. The Gaullist service d’ordre did not hesitate to respond. After Communist attacks round Nancy and Metz, members of the Rassemblement were proud to have sent ‘some forty Communists to hospital’.
One of Malraux’s aides told an American Embassy official that the RPF had decided ‘to schedule meetings for other regions of France where Communists might attempt serious obstructions’. Caffery reported to Washington that the Communists appeared to be trying to bait the Gaullists into a false move.
De Gaulle’s whistle-stop tour of south-eastern France in September was the Rassemblement’s answer to the Communist challenge. After a well-ordered start on the Côte d’Azur, the Rassemblement’s organization fell apart disastrously in Grenoble. On the evening of 17 September, de Gaulle reached the outskirts of Grenoble, where, in a brief ceremony, he placed a wreath on the war memorial. Next morning, as he drove into the town, his entourage found that nails had been scattered all over the road. When they entered Grenoble, a large and noisy Communist demonstration greeted them. Virtually no Rassemblement escort was in place and few police were to be seen. Soon de Gaulle’s car came under attack as missiles of every sort were hurled from windows. The mayor of Grenoble, a member of the RPF, was hit at de Gaulle’s side.
That afternoon, de Gaulle made his speech as planned. But afterwards, as he was leaving the town, the RPF marshals were attacked by Communists with such violence that they sought refuge in a gymnasium. The police are said to have stood back while the Communists attempted to set the gymnasium ablaze. A group of RPF stewards arrived to help the besieged group and opened fire, as did some of the Gaullists inside the building. Several people were wounded in the firing and one Communist was killed.
There