Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [33]
On the day of liberation, it seemed as if almost every French Communist had converged on party headquarters at 44 rue Pelletier, always known as ‘le 44’. Those released from prison turned up at the six-storey building in search of news, and most had gone into one of the nearby cafés in the hope of discovering who had survived the terrible years and who had not. The entrance was protected by sandbags, a legacy from the building’s last occupants, the Milice.
Six days later Jacques Duclos, Thorez’s deputy and stand-in, summoned a meeting of the party’s central committee. Only some twenty members met that night, including Professor Joliot-Curie, the scientist who had made Molotov cocktails in the Sorbonne. Four tables had been arranged in a rectangle, ‘like a marriage feast’. The veteran Communist Marcel Cachin presided. Behind his head a proclamation decorated ostentatiously with tricolour flags listed the members of the central committee who had ‘died for France’. From another wall, a photograph of Stalin watched over them.
Duclos’s fellow members of the French Communist Party’s wartime triumvirate were Benoît Frachon, who was to prove a skilful leader of the Communist trades union movement in the post-war years, and Charles Tillon, a hard and resourceful man who had been the real leader of the Communist Resistance during the Occupation. Duclos feared his influence and soon arranged for him to be one of the Communist ministers in de Gaulle’s government. This would restrict his freedom of action and also remove him from the real centre of power within the party itself.
Duclos, when he faced his colleagues, was in an embarrassing position. It was he who had directed the approach to the German authorities in 1940, invoking the Nazi–Soviet pact, to arrange for the reappearance of the party newspaper L’Humanité and the release of Communist prisoners. In exchange he had offered to put France back to work. Tillon had ridiculed the idea that French Communists would thus receive preferential treatment. ‘For shit’s sake, do you really think that in Paris the Germans will see you as Russians?’
Duclos was a little man, almost risible in the eyes of someone like Tillon. His round face with round glasses made him look like a complacent petit-bourgeois; but the impenetrable smile and the clever little eyes hinted at why he was such a formidable survivor. He knew that the faithful follower of the party line, as laid down in Moscow, would come out on top in the end. The Comintern had been officially disbanded in May 1943, mainly to please the American government and encourage the huge flow of Lend-Lease aid. It simply continued to function under the same leader, Georgi Dimitrov, but under another name: the International Section of the Central Committee.
The French Communists of the Resistance, many of whom had left the party during the Nazi–Soviet pact, failed to appreciate this. They now wanted to launch a revolution on the back of the Liberation, but few had stopped to wonder whether or not it might suit Comrade Stalin’s strategy. The reason why Stalin never gave the French Communist Party the order to start a revolution was quite simple. It was not in the interests of the USSR. A French Communist attempt to seize power in the rear of the Western Allies as they prepared to invade Germany would have caused a major breach with the United States. Stalin still needed the massive American logistic support to the Red Army to keep coming, especially the Studebaker and Dodge trucks which had transformed its mobility. Meanwhile, his great fear was that the Americans and British might make a secret peace with Hitler, and a French Communist uprising in their rear might provide them with an excuse.
French historians, with remarkably few exceptions, appear to have been unable to see the Communist failure to seize power after the Liberation in anything other than French terms. It is, of course, much less surprising that most of the Communists