Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [55]
Members of the government constituted in the second week of September were to suffer many surprises – often with their appointments. Georges Bidault was the first to admit that he was an extraordinary choice for Minister of Foreign Affairs. ‘This adventure was unexpected,’ he wrote, ‘and strongly tinged with paradox.’ Having led a clandestine existence during the Occupation up to his time as head of the National Council of the Resistance, he had not the slightest idea of what had been going on in the outside world.
Pierre-Henri Teitgen, erstwhile professor of law at the University of Montpellier and member of the Resistance’s Comité Général des Études, found to his astonishment that he had been appointed Minister of Information. He commandeered a fine building on the Avenue de Friedland which the Wehrmacht had converted into a cinema. He asked one man he knew and trusted to be his secretary-general and another to be his chef de cabinet.
Starting from scratch, Teitgen faced fewer difficulties than some of the more well-established ministries. The burnt-out tank was still blocking the entrance to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when de Gaulle’s senior diplomats, René Massigli and Hervé Alphand, arrived on 29 August. They discovered bloodstains on the main staircase and strips of German army shirts torn up to clean rifles in corners of its empty, echoing reception rooms. Eventually a few timid officials who had served the Vichy regime put in an appearance, not knowing whether they would be shot, imprisoned, or given back their old jobs.
Apart from the handful who rallied to de Gaulle, the Quai d’Orsay was still, as Alphand wrote, ‘peuplé de Vichy’. In 1940, the majority of officials had continued to work for what they thought was the government of France. This almost certainly prejudiced de Gaulle against the Quai d’Orsay as an institution. Two days before D-Day, de Gaulle had confided to Duff Cooper that Roland de Margerie – who had been Vichy’s representative in Shanghai – was the man he found it hardest to forgive. ‘He could have helped me so much, saved me from many of the mistakes I made. If he had come then he would be Minister for Foreign Affairs now.’
Alphand’s most vivid memory of those first weeks in the Quai d’Orsay was the lonely figure of Georges Bidault, hugging himself in an overcoat in front of a wood fire in an immense and empty reception room. The Germans had taken all the important files back to Berlin when they retreated, as well as most of the typewriters and filing cabinets. This booty was then shipped to Moscow in 1945 after the fall of Berlin.
Most of the other ministries were in a similar position. Writing paper was in such short supply that they had to use up the remaining batches of Vichy letterhead, striking out ‘État Français’ at the top and typing in ‘République Française’ underneath. In some departments this embarrassing practice had to continue until the trial of Marshal Pétain the following summer.
It was not just government ministries which were short of essential equipment. Hospitals lacked thermometers as well as drugs and bandages. In the terrible winter of 1944–5, there was little plaster of Paris left to mend the bones, brittle from malnutrition, which broke so easily in falls on the icy streets.
The cold spell which started during the Ardennes offensive at the beginning of January and continued throughout most of the month was one of the worst that France had suffered for a long time. On 20 January 1945, the American ambassador sent the following telegram to Washington: ‘There has been snow on the ground for 17 days; previous record 10 days. It is still snowing – water frozen to hydroelectric plants – ice-breakers unable