Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [203]
‘A second clandestine channel,’ wrote the KGB defector Aleksei Myagkov (a source considered reliable by British intelligence), ‘was KGB activity. Using its agents among journalists and officials of the various agencies in France’, as well as among members of the Association France-URSS, ‘it propagated actively among politicians the theme that the country’s political independence suffered from the fact that it was a member of NATO and that foreign troops were stationed on its territory, especially American troops. The same line of thought was canvassed among French citizens recruited in political circles.’
When de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s military structure on 1 July 1967, the decision was ‘received with great satisfaction in Moscow’. The leaders of the KGB ‘did not hide their satisfaction at this recognition of the fact that they too had played their part in these events’. It is still impossible to assess how effective that part might have been, but the KGB clearly regarded it as a major success: from 1968 the operation was used as ‘an instructive example in KGB officer courses’.
De Gaulle’s supporters may have acclaimed him as the Liberator of France, but the General preferred to see himself in the monarchical role as unifier of the country and healer of national wounds. He never forgot that the role of Vichy was potentially more traumatic than the defeat of 1940 or the German occupation, because Vichy was the creation of France itself.
The trials and purges after the Liberation had failed either to satisfy the aggrieved or to convince the population of their fairness. But uneasy consciences about both the Occupation and the épuration helped de Gaulle create a myth of national unity – a version of events which took root because it expressed what the majority of the population needed to believe.
The transfer of Jean Moulin’s remains to the Panthéon in December 1964 was the apotheosis of the myth that France had liberated herself and thus wiped out the shame of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle managed to manipulate the Resistance into looking like a tolerably well-drilled military unit under his command. The ceremonies took place over two days. On the first, the remains of Jean Moulin lay in state at the Martyrs’ Memorial, guarded by relays of Compagnons de la Libération. At ten o’clock in the evening the casket was taken in procession through the heart of Paris to the steps of the Panthéon, where it was guarded all night by veterans of the Resistance.
On the following day, André Malraux, with de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou beside him, delivered a eulogy from a tribune facing the casket. His speech focused more on General de Gaulle, le premier résistant, than on Jean Moulin, his commander in the field. The notion of the Resistance as an army of the state fighting a foreign enemy was the great myth’s way of diverting attention away from the aspect of civil war. A march-past followed, with units from the Garde Républicaine and the three services. For this part of the ceremony, de Gaulle, Pompidou and Malraux moved from their tribune to the steps of the Panthéon, beside the casket – so that the parade could ‘salute in one single motion both the mortal remains of Jean Moulin and the President of the Republic’.
The myth was not really challenged until after the events of May 1968, when a new generation began to ask uncomfortable questions. Some of them were slanted, some of them made no allowance for the realities of the Occupation, but the process had to be gone through. Marcel Ophuls’s documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié, released in 1969, was one of the first films to confront the less heroic aspects of the Occupation. This provoked much anger among the older generation. The film was banned from French television. Whatever its flaws, Le Chagrin