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Other industries followed. The Communist Party was, however, wary about throwing its weight behind the strike at Renault, having had its hands burned there the year before. Paris was less affected by strikes than the previous year; most of the city’s population continued to work as usual. For Samuel Beckett, it was probably his most fertile period. He started to write Waiting for Godot on 9 October 1948, as an escape from his unsuccessful novels. He finished it less than four months later, on 29 January 1949.

Once more, the main centres of unrest were the coal-mining districts in the north of France. On 20 October the region was placed under a state of siege. Hundreds were arrested, including the Communist deputy René Camphin. Miners occupied the shafts and winding gear, having barricaded the entrances to the pits. They claimed that they were maintaining the mines, but after the sabotage of machinery the previous year Moch refused to take their word for it. Troops and armoured vehicles were brought back from the army in Germany to break down the barricades.

The war of attrition, which spread to the heavy industry of Lorraine and elsewhere, continued into November. The new British ambassador reported to London, ‘France is the present front line in the Cold War.’ Moch was as resolute as the year before: only unconditional surrender would be accepted. ‘The government has decided to maintain order with the greatest energy and re-establish the authority of the state,’ the Minister of the Interior reminded one of his colleagues. The new Prime Minister, Henri Queuille, formally instructed Jules Moch to forbid all prefects and inspectors-general ‘any sort of negotiation with the unions’ without his authority.

Moch received enough reports to convince him that he was dealing with a foreign-controlled operation directed against the Republic. He was determined to track down the source of Communist Party funds used to prolong the strikes. In a message marked ‘Très Secret’ to the Secretary of State for Finance, he asked him to investigate all ‘import licences without payment’. He was convinced that the Soviet Union was exporting goods via roundabout routes, which French Communist commercial fronts then sold off, never having paid for them.

Predictions of civil war and the return of de Gaulle produced a strong sense of déjà vu. Raymond Aron, at a curiously mixed dinner party – it included Bevin’s deputy, Hector MacNeill (who had brought his protégé Guy Burgess with him to Paris), Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, and Esmond and Ann Rothermere – predicted ‘six months of strikes and misery, then the return of de Gaulle’. Gaullists, both by belief and by self-interest, tended to talk up the degree of disorder.

Although the General’s personal popularity was waning, the elections of 7 November proved a surprise success for the Rassemblement. General Leclerc’s widow, Madame de Hauteclocque, ‘accepted a place on an RPF ticket because she was assured that she would not be elected and was much astonished to find herself in office’. Yet the Rassemblement was doomed to decline, because the autumn of 1948 marked the last frenzy of civil war paranoia. Despite all de Gaulle’s predictions, the Fourth Republic had not crumbled.

Meanwhile, the Communists no longer stood a chance of achieving power by constitutional means. After the Prague coup and the threats over Berlin, the majority of France’s population, whether they liked the idea or not, knew that their only place now was within the Western camp. Right into the 1960s, however, France remained the KGB’s ‘main target’ in ‘its policy of working for an internal split in NATO’. The man given the responsibility for forcing France to leave NATO was none other than Boris Ponomarev.

29

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Within the mainly left-wing circles of French intellectual life, a David and Goliath conflict between a handful of libertarians on one side and a pro-Stalinist majority on the other was starting to make itself felt. Only when the Cold War began to develop its own Manichaean logic