Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [57]
The shortage of coal was so serious that well before the winter started urgent telegrams began arriving at the Ministry of the Interior from prefects, warning of the consequences. On 29 October a signal reached the Place Beauvau stating that Rouen had less than four days’ supply left. The train due had not yet arrived, and even when it did it would take three days to unload it. There was suspicion in the provinces that Paris was receiving privileged treatment. ‘We are most unhappy,’ the mayor of Rouen wrote to the Minister of the Interior, ‘to see Paris with theatres, cinemas and métro running long after working hours while Rouen suffers in its ruins without any help.’
One of the most striking items in the mass of data provided by opinion polls during the period following the Liberation was that its sample rated the confiscation of illicit profits as the top priority for ministers to tackle. It even topped the issue of food supply.
Communists, working on the Stalinist theory of sabotage – that every setback must be the work of a fifth column – had no doubt where the fault lay. ‘The insufficient purge has left the controlling levers of industry and government departments in the hands of people who collaborated with fascism before and during the Occupation.’ Even the government, while needing to keep experienced administrators in their posts, was privately forced to acknowledge that injustices remained. The minister initially responsible for reconstruction admitted that the government faced ‘un problème délicat’. The companies which had worked with the Germans were the best equipped – in finance, manpower and raw materials – to tackle the daunting tasks faced by France. Many of the larger construction companies had not even existed at the start of the war; now they assumed ‘une importance anormale’. Meanwhile, ‘patriotic’ companies which had refused to work with the Germans were very weak.
The Communist Party’s threats of reprisal against collaborationist industrialists had begun well before the Liberation and were repeated in L’Humanité as the Allies approached Paris. ‘The directors of the Renault factories must be made to pay for the lives of Allied soldiers killed as a result of their enthusiasm to equip the enemy.’ Louis Renault was arrested and sentenced on 23 September for having sold over 6 billion francs’ worth of material to the German army. The sixty-seven-year-old industrialist died a month later in Fresnes prison. His wife claimed he had been murdered; the doctors said it was a stroke. Marius Berliet, head of the truck manufacturers, and his sons were imprisoned in Lyons without trial, but they were hardly the worst offenders. Renault, Citroën and Peugeot had between them manufactured nearly 93,000 vehicles for the Wehrmacht, while Berliet had produced only 2,239. The banker Hippolyte Worms was another important figure to be arrested. Yet the vast majority of industrialists who had worked for the Germans, including the builders of the Atlantic Wall, escaped untouched.
Companies were confiscated and nationalized, some because they had genuinely collaborated, others because unavoidable collaboration provided the excuse to nationalize key industries. The Communists, once Charles Tillon became Minister for Air, were determined to have a fully nationalized aircraft and transport industry.
Surrounded by revolutionary rhetoric and the threat of nationalization, French industrialists’ and employers’ groups, known generically as le patronat, sent a memorandum to de Gaulle complaining about the campaign. It insisted that it had ‘fulfilled its duty to the nation by keeping the means of production on French soil while carrying