Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [34]
Duclos could not assert party discipline until de Gaulle granted Thorez an amnesty for his desertion at the beginning of the war and allowed him to return from Moscow with clear instructions. For the moment, however, Thorez could only fret in impatience in Moscow. The General did not even bother to reply to his telegrams. He simply passed a message back by his representative in Moscow that any delay was the fault of the British, who controlled the air route via Cairo.
While Tillon and his followers wanted to maintain the Resistance in arms as a force for political change, Duclos was far more cautious. The party, however, could still increase its power by installing its own candidates in key positions wherever possible. One way was to lead the call for popular justice against traitors and then, during the ensuing purges, denounce anti-Communists as collaborators and replace them with their own people. More and more reports arrived from all over France of last-minute massacres carried out by the Germans. There had also been incidents of German officers who let political prisoners go, but they received less attention at a time when most news was so grim.
On 1 September, the French and foreign press was given a tour of the Gestapo’s torture chambers in the rue des Saussaies, just behind the Ministry of the Interior on the Place Beauvau. In a relentless campaign, L’Humanité did all it could to exploit stories of massacre and torture to their utmost. The implication was that Vichy and its officials had been involved in every crime: directly, indirectly or by association.
New arrivals in liberated Paris were seeking out old friends. One of Hemingway’s first visits was to Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. He was sad to find that in 1941 the Germans had forced her to close down her bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, so this part of expatriate Left Bank life was over. But at least she had survived, having spent six months in an internment camp.
In the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, people discussed their different wartime experiences, or heard about events from which they had been separated by censorship or distance. Raymond Aron described the bombing of London. Far worse tales had also begun to emerge, like that of the Warsaw uprising and the first rumours of the death camps.
Some people resurfaced in astonishing new roles. Right-wing anti-Semites appeared full of stories of the Jews or Communists they had saved from the Gestapo. Among the members of what was mockingly known as the ‘RMA’ – the resistants of the month of August – there were characters who, having denounced fellow citizens to the Germans, now denounced fellow collaborators with such venom that people dared not speak out against them.
It was a time for making new friends. Camus introduced Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Father Bruckberger, the FFI chaplain, whom they found in his white Dominican habit, smoking his pipe and drinking corrosive punch in the Rhumerie Martiniquaise. They also met the writer Romain Gary, and Lise Deharme, a poet whose salon was frequented by the rump of the Surrealist movement. Black American soldiers were greeted in Saint-Germain by Parisians starved of jazz, and the warmth of the welcome prompted a number of them to wonder whether to stay there instead of returning to the States.
It was a time of debate, ideas and conversation. Jean Cocteau and his friends held court in the bar of the Hotel Saint-Yves in the rue Jacob, where Cocteau, like Picasso, was famous for his monologues. For Cocteau, ‘the spoken word was his language and he used it with the virtuosity of an acrobat’.
It was also a period of feast and famine. Tobacco hunger, only partially assuaged by packets of Camel thrown from passing jeeps, was far more noticeable