Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [71]
The generosity the French displayed towards the Americans and British had been unstinted in the early days, going far beyond the bottles of champagne hidden until the Liberation. ‘We’ve been waiting for you for so long,’ they had said over and over again, with genuine emotion. But then, as Malcolm Muggeridge observed, everybody ends up by hating their liberators. The writer Alfred Fabre-Luce wrote of ‘an army of drivers, with no indication of rank, who threw cigarettes to onlookers as if to an African crowd’.
The French indeed felt themselves very poor relations. The quantity of vehicles alone was a painful reminder of the French army in 1940, trudging to war after being delivered to a railhead in cattle trucks. The US army seemed to run not just on gasoline, but also on baked beans, coffee, cigarettes and packets of almost everything imaginable; not just cookies, candy and condoms, but also sachets of stew and mashed potatoes, permanganate to sterilize the water, tins of peanut butter and condensed milk, doughnut-making machines mounted on army trucks, and, of course, K rations. French children swarmed round their vehicles, begging for chewing gum. Soon the drivers of trucks painted on their tailboard: ‘No Gum Chum’.
The American influence in Paris became unmistakable. Some typically French bars were transformed, in an attempt to attract the rich liberators. Windows were darkened, iron chairs changed for comfortable upholstered ones, and the waiters in their black waistcoats and long white aprons were replaced with smiling girls. As a final touch, these new venues were given names like ‘New York’ or ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’.
Many disliked the way French youth appeared infatuated with all things American – detective stories, films, clothes, jazz, bebop, Glenn Miller. This fascination represented both a yearning to escape from the poverty and dilapidation around them and a preference for American informality after the stuffiness of Vichy. But it also struck a deeper chord, the legend of a new world offering a vision to the old. ‘America symbolized so many things!’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir. ‘It had stimulated our youth. It had also been a great myth – an untouchable myth.’
12
Writers and Artists in the Line of Fire
When the Allies disembarked in Normandy, Alfred Fabre-Luce saw their landing craft as Viking ships in a new invasion. Along with other right-wing writers, journalists, actors and artists likely to be accused of collaboration, Fabre-Luce had to decide whether to stay or flee, but he appeared more relaxed than most. At a literary funeral during the uneasy interregnum of that summer, when writers of the intellectual Resistance were moving back to Paris, he noted that ‘one could see side by side François Mauriac “already returned” and Drieu la Rochelle “not yet departed”’.
The tension increased during late July and early August. The actor and dramatist Sacha Guitry, like several others at risk, began to receive scribbled death threats. The Spanish ambassador, José Lequerica, at a dinner on 17 August, offered Guitry a visa for Spain. He made a similar offer to Drieu la Rochelle, but both declined: Drieu because he felt his fate awaited him in Paris, not in exile; and Guitry because he believed his popularity would protect him. (His optimism was excessive, if one goes by an Institut Français d’Opinion Publique poll: 56 per cent of the sample wanted him punished.)
As well as writers such as Céline and Lucien Rebatet who escaped to Sigmaringen, a few sought shelter elsewhere. The elderly Alphonse de Châteaubriant, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1911, elected to live out a hermit’s existence in a forest of the Austrian Tyrol. He was on the Resistance’s wanted list because he had been a member of the central