Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [67]
De Gaulle had a wonderful sense of history, but found it hard to stomach the vulgar fact that, without money, you could not be a major power. The greatness of France and the greatness of Britain were as doomed as their empires, which had carved up much of the world between them in the previous two centuries. Now two different superpowers were about to dominate the continent of Europe. The prospect was a bitter humiliation which he and the majority of his countrymen refused to accept. It had a disastrous effect, making them doubly determined not to give up colonial possessions. It also made them sensitive to what at times appeared like a new occupation of France, this time by the United States army.
11
Liberators and Liberated
For some time after the Liberation and even the end of the war, white-helmeted military policemen used to halt the traffic on the Place de la Concorde to give priority to US vehicles approaching the American Embassy.
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, was no thick-skinned autocrat, yet even his relationship with the provisional government suffered from the distrust which had grown up between President Roosevelt and de Gaulle during the war. The plan to install Allied rule as if France were conquered enemy territory was bound to poison any alliance.
Allied forces came ashore in Normandy comprehensively prepared. The ‘France Zone Handbook No. 16, Part III’ ostensibly dealt with ‘Local Information and Administrative Personalities’, but was in fact a guide to Parisian brothels, arrondissement by arrondissement. Prepared in May 1944, presumably from information supplied by Allied intelligence services, it warned that the list was ‘not necessarily exhaustive’ and that ‘owing to the shortage of all medical supplies’ there had been ‘a very great increase in the number of VD cases in the country’.
Whether or not foreknowledge of the brothel known as ‘Aux Belles Poules’ in the rue Blondel, or the unnamed establishment at 4 rue des Vertus (‘street of the Virtues’), or the ‘House of All Nations’ in the rue Chabanais hastened the American advance on the capital is hard to judge. But clearly American troops made good use of the information so liberally provided by their commanders, because within a year US military authorities felt obliged to print barrack posters which proclaimed: ‘Gonorrhea. Do you want a Family? 12% of all men who contract Gonorrhea become STERILE. Keep fit to go home.’
The puritan General Montgomery put brothels out of bounds to British troops and posted military police in red-light districts. This did not put a stop to business. In spite of all the summer storms, the fields next to bivouac areas were used instead.
To the dismay of French patriots, the exuberance of the Liberation was rapidly tarnished by pilfering or dabbling in the black market. For many people it was a question of survival, as it had been during the Occupation. Even Yves Farge, later the Minister of Supply, admitted that there were those ‘condemned to trade illegally or perish’. Yet the black market was at first seen as a French disgrace, both by the Allies and by the French themselves.
Early posters issued by the provisional government concentrated on the threat to French patriotism: ‘French people do not have the right to make their fellow citizens go hungry’… ‘Officers and soldiers of our Allies are astonished at the prices charged in certain shops and restaurants.’ It soon became apparent, however, to both civil and military authorities that members of the Allied forces were