Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [225]
We are extremely grateful to the late Mrs David Bruce for kindly lending illustration 18. The remainder come from the albums of Lady Diana Cooper and her family, and if any photographer or archive owns the copyright of any of them, they should contact the publisher.
* The idea for a union in fact came from a Frenchman, Jean Monnet, one of the most influential men of his age. This remarkable economic planner, then in London on an arms-purchasing mission, had already won the complete trust and respect of both Churchill and Roosevelt. He later inspired the Victory Plan in the United States.
* When the Bishop of Arras was arrested after the Liberation, the British Embassy in Paris reported that ‘much surprise was expressed [by the Vatican] at the accusations against the Bishop of Arras since he has had the reputation at the Vatican of holding extreme democratic views’.
* That day Leclerc’s division lost seventy-one men killed and 225 wounded; thirty-five armoured vehicles were destroyed, along with 117 other vehicles.
* Estimates of the number killed vary greatly. Many seem too high. The Archives de la Ville de Paris record 2,873 Parisians, including inhabitants of the inner suburbs, killed during the month of August.
* In the first opinion poll carried out since before the war, the Institut Français d’Opinion Publique found that per cent of its sample in Paris claimed to have been present that day. ‘C’est un plébiscite’ was a widespread comment.
* One of Palewski’s bodyguards remarked that he had ‘more nicknames than a boules club in Marseilles’. The bodyguards knew him as ‘la Lavande’ from the overpowering strength of his eau de toilette. In Le Canard enchaîné he was known as ‘Lodoiska’ – the nickname given to the censorship; politicians called him ‘l’Empereur’, while the female secretaries, of whom the vast majority had no doubt received his energetic attentions, referred to himironically as ‘le beau Gaston’.
* De Gaulle’s right-wing opponents, who claimed he was a Soviet puppet at this time, were much mistaken. The detailed briefing document for this visit, prepared by Dimitrov for Molotov and Stalin, leaves no doubt: ‘Although his outward attitude towards the [French] Communists is correct, he is prepared to use all possible means of hidden struggle against them.’
* De Gaulle, however, was seen as relatively uninterested in the fate of the deportees. Marguerite Duras could not forgive him for having said on 3 April: ‘The days of tears are past. The days of glory have returned.’
*In fact there were only ninety-one cases in Paris, and only seventy-seven Parisians died of it that year, half the figure of twenty years earlier.
*MRP stood for ‘Mouvement Républicain Populaire’.Le Canard enchaîné pretended that it stood for ‘Machine à Ramasser les Pétainistes’.
†Popova’s delegation of ten women was supposed to represent a cross-section of Soviet womanhood. It included a sculptress, a writer, a medical scientist, an actress, a professor, the director of the Lenin Library, a hero of the Soviet Union and a worker.
* Teitgen makes no mention in his memoirs of his meeting with the American ambassador and protests vehemently, but unconvincingly, that de Gaulle exerted no influence in the handling of the Pétain case.
* An agreement on sharing military intelligence was concluded in Paris on 3 July 1945 between General Bloch-Dassault (brother of the aircraft manufacturer Marcel Dassault) and Brigadier-General Betts of US military intelligence, but the United States handed over very little. They too were influenced by the British distrust from 1940, when the French insisted on keeping their antiquated code system, which the Germans had read with such ease.
* Marie-Madeleine finally blew this agent’s cover