EIGHTEEN

After the Liberation

The Fourth French Republic was arguably the most successful of all French republics, except that it failed.

—The First Indochina War, R. E. M. Irving

Algeria is France.

—François Mitterrand, 1954

THOSE THREE HEADY DAYS 24–26 August 1944 in Paris were followed, alas, by a period in which the French inflicted upon themselves wounds almost as painful as those they had suffered under the Occupation itself. Even before the last Germans left theépurations began in which vengeance, and the settling of personal scores, was often inextricably mixed with justice. The first victims, understandably, were the German troops themselves, often lynched or stood up against a wall as they emerged from their strongholds with hands raised. Then came the alleged collabos.What particularly struck Allied eye-witnesses was the brutality with which women were treated. The shaving of heads, seen all over France, was perhaps the last indignity. Jean Cocteau records being shocked by the sight of one woman, “completely naked,” on the Avenue de la Grande Armée: “they tore at her, they pushed her, they pulled her, they spat in her face. Her head had been shaven. She was covered in bruises and carried around her neck a placard: ‘I had my husband shot.’ ”

Writers, journalists, actors and artists were among the first to be affected—while industrialists who had worked for the Germans, strangely enough, seemed to escape. Many individuals were held without charges or documentation until in September de Gaulle finally intervened. He appointed an inspector of prisons and internment camps, gradually punishing excesses, but nevertheless the épurations continued. Once again délation played its role as neighbour denounced neighbour. All crimes and evils were, of course, heaped on the head of Vichy and the old Marshal, currently awaiting his fate in Sigmaringen. The beautiful Arletty, who had just made Les Enfants du Paradis, deprived of her Luftwa fe lover and suite in the Ritz, was arrested in September. What was held against her was not so much that she had slept with a German senior officer, but that she had dined with him at the Ritz when other Parisians were hungry. Occasionally the accused bit back with spirit; to wit one horizontale who declared unashamedly, “mon cul est international, mais mon coeur est toujours français!”; or, as the mother of one seventeen-year-old complained: “Why ever cut off her hair for it? . . . She’s just as willing to go to bed with the Americans!”¹

Allied soldiers, too, were shocked by the head shaving. Malcolm Muggeridge, still working with MI6 in Paris, was struck by the “horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality” of the young members of the FFI who invited him to join them on one of their nightly vigilante sweeps. Muggeridge adds acidly, of the exaggerated protestations of bonne foi during the Occupation, that he “scarcely ever met a Frenchman who had not, at some point or other in the war, had at least one RAF pilot hidden in his attic . . . I often reflected, our Air Force would have been so huge that we should have won the war before it began.”² The épurations stuck in his mind as “one of the more squalid episodes in France’s history.”

When in 1945 the surviving deportees began to trickle back from German concentration camps, their appalling condition aroused another acute wave of anti-collabo feelings. After newsfilms had been shown of the horrors of liberated Belsen, two gaols were stormed and collaborators taken out and lynched. The trials of the grands collabos ground on through 1945 and 1946. Brasillach was shot, despite a plea from fellow writers for clemency; he was spurned by Sartre and de Beauvoir but supported by the noble Camus, who—unlike the former—had taken up arms with the Resistance, and begged for “justice without hatred.” The public figures brought back from Sigmaringen as well as gangsters like Bonny and Lafont were all executed. Doriot was killed in 1945 when his car was strafed by Allied aircraft. Céline, fleeing to Denmark, somehow escaped the firing squad, getting away (in 1950) with a sentence of one year in prison that would have been unimaginably light five years previously.

In the summer of 1945, in the Palais de Justice, began the trials of the leaders of Vichy, Pétain and Laval. To foreign observers, it seemed like a trial of Vichy itself, as the French, denied access to anything that could be described as a newspaper during the Occupation, learned of its realities for the first time. Feelings towards Pétain palpably tilted as the iniquities committed in the name of Vichy came to light. The old hero of Verdun, fallen into such disgrace, refused to speak in his own defence. The only time when his face—according to an American journalist present—took on “a marble mask of shame” was when the prosecution revealed the deportation of 120,000 Jews, of whom only 1500 returned. The trial ended in August, the day after the end of war, with the Marshal disappearing for life into the fortress prison of the Île d’ Yeu. He died there, aged ninety-five, six years later. A more disgraceful farce was the show-trial, beginning in October, of the hated Pierre Laval. It reminded some of “a cross between an auto-da-fé and a tribunal during the Paris terror.”³ Screaming back at his prosecutors, Laval dominated the court, comporting himself with formidable courage up to the very moment when, barely resuscitated from taking cyanide, he died lashed to a chair before a firing squad at Fresnes Prison.

A murmur of low-voice sympathy for the two leaders betrayed the depressing reality that the Resistance had represented but a small minority, compared with the “silent and massive acquiescence” of the rest of France. This despite 30,000 Frenchmen killed by the Germans and the milice during the Occupation. The real number of those killed afterwards in the course of the épurations has never actually been verified; it varies from a high of 105,000 for all France down to a recent estimate of only 9000 summary executions, mostly carried out before the Allied Normandy landings, plus 767 death sentences carried out after lawful trials. This would make the épuration in France more “moderate” than in Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark. The jury is still out. However, in Paris alone there were 100,000 arrests. In lieu of prison a quarter of all defendants were sentenced to the newly coined penalty of “National Indignity.” In the measured opinion of the authors of Paris after the Liberation, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, “theépuration was both too harsh and too weak. The failure to pursue some of the greatest criminals, particularly those responsible for the deportation of the Jews . . . created greater trouble in years to come.” Trials went on until the end of 1948; though, at the time of writing, the shameful secrets continue to come out—to wit the trials in the 1990s of Papon and Bousquet, who somehow not only managed to escape the net but rose to high estate in France subsequently.

AFTER THE LIBERATION OF PARIS, the Wehrmacht had retreated back across the Rhine, leading the over-optimistic to recall 1918 and to assume that collapse would follow in short order. But in December 1944 von Rundstedt struck back hard in the Ardennes. When the Americans recoiled westwards, briefly it looked to the French as if there might be a replay of 1940. News emerged that Eisenhower was locked into his headquarters by over-zealous security, fearful of a German Fifth Column attack, and rumours spread of a major breakthrough with Strasbourg retaken. Once more the overloaded refugee cars made their appearance on the roads. There followed the harshest winter since 1940—and so soon after the euphoria of August. Gas and coal shortages meant that there was neither heating nor even cooking. For a family of three, a week’s ration came to half a pound of meat, three-fifths of a pound of butter. The irrepressible chansonniers produced a song entitled “Sans beurre et sans brioches”—a pun on the brave Bayard, “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.”⁴ By the end of 1945, even wine was rationed to one litre per adult per month, and it was not finally unrationed till mid-1948. Even then some of it was watered down—or what French wits call “baptised.”

Largely through US military racketeers, the black market assumed giant proportions; sometimes even the trucks disappeared into its void along with the food they brought, threatening the Allied advance into Germany. There was nothing black-market cigarettes could not buy. To François Mauriac, government efforts against black markets resembled those of “the child Saint Augustine saw on a beach who wanted to empty the sea with a shell.” ⁵ Intelligently, the government gave up, in contrast to the law-abiding British who put their faith, not in their own enterprise, but in the austere queue mentality of socialism.

Unlike the aftermath of other national catastrophes that had laid France low, her recovery was agonisingly slow and halting. Bridges, roads, railways, industries had been destroyed by war. The Germans had taken out crops and farms, two-thirds of the country’s trucks and railway rolling-stock, and over 1½ million buildings were destroyed. Among her neighbours, even Britain was hardly better off; for the best part of five years the continent’s only source of relief was America. There were still 800,000 French skilled factory workers serving as slave labour in Germany, another million or more in the prisoner-of-war camps, plus the deportees. Altogether there were estimated to be 4 million more women than men in France as the war ended—many in mourning. Shop windows were empty. Newspapers were reduced to a sheet or two. Over the course of 1946 even the cost of being ill and dying rose by over 40 per cent. There was officially no petrol—except for doctors and taxi drivers. Ancient cars ran, flatulent, crepitating and farting, either with great gas bags lashed to their roofs, or with coke burners hanging off the back—these were my first recollections of the France I discovered as a young soldier in 1947.

OF VICTORY THERE WAS HARDLY A SIGN. Morally, four years of Occupation had left behind it a universal torpor. VE-Day came and went with modulated elation. As one tired, middle-aged veteran remarked with weary cynicism: “that great world insomnia which is war has come to an end once again.” Such enthusiasm as there was at the ending of the war in Europe was greatly tempered by the return of 300 women from Ravensbrück, met by General de Gaulle—who wept. Eleven had died en route from East Germany; too much suffering showed in the survivors’ faces and bodies. Compensation of a pitiful ff1000 per returnee seemed derisory. Many were disgusted by what they discovered of a return to self-centred pre-war ways, of national life beginning already to suffer from party political wrangles.

Bourgeois former Vichyite préfets and politicians smugly congratulated themselves on “victory,” and grumbles of revolution continued from among the Communists, who felt de Gaulle had cheated them. As the “hot” war moved, almost without break or seam, into the “Cold War” the situation grew tenser. With VE-Day the Communist Party was convinced that it would soon be swept into power. Its boss, Maurice Thorez, who had spent the war conveniently in Moscow, having deserted from the French Army in 1939, declared menacingly, “We are in favour of revolution, tomorrow . . . We are not going to help the capitalist regime to reform itself.”⁶ It set the scene for the Fourth Republic. Mme. de Gaulle momentarily expected a Russian para drop on her at home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. It all tended to prove just how right de Gaulle had been—and the Allies wrong—to have taken over in August 1944. He had indeed saved France from the fate that Greece, plunged into civil war, suffered after her liberation from the Germans.

In October 1946, a referendum duly killed off the Third Republic, after seventy-six turbulent years. A contemporary press cartoon showed a pitiful “Marianne,” on being brought baskets of votes on her deathbed, wailing “and not one love letter in the lot.” Whereas the Third Republic had started off life so rich that, even after the depredations of the Franco-Prussian War, it easily paid off its debt to the enemy, the Fourth Republic was so poor that it had to begin by borrowing from her American ally. In the view of one (female) observer, it was a bit like “a woman with three hands, two left and one right”—the two left hands being constituted by the Socialists and the alarmingly powerful Communist Party, the right by the Catholic, moderate conservative Mouvement Républican Populaire (MRP). In the running conflict between these elements, governments came and went, twenty of them between 1945 and 1954; M. Pleven succeeded M. Queuille, who then replaced M. Pleven, who in turn pushed out M. Queuille—all in the space of thirteen months. When asked by an American senator what happens when French governments “run out of horses,” President Auriol replied, “We go back to the original ones!” Thus were the old hacks of the Third constantly recycled. For the next decade and a half, “this absurd ballet,” as de Gaulle called it, would render government by political democracy all but impossible in France.⁷

WHEN DE GAULLE ASSUMED THE REINS in August 1944, his view—stated with sublime modesty—was that “I was France, the State, the Government . . . that moreover was why, finally, everyone obeyed me.” And—like Louis XIV and Napoleon I—he was determined there should be no rivalry to the central authority of the state. But when he found that he would not, in fact, be “obeyed” by the returning players from the Third Republic and that the authority of the government would constantly be challenged, in January 1946 (on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution) he pulled out, into a retirement that he said was “like Longwood.” When asked what he intended to do, he replied, laconically: “J’attends!” Before embarking on the long wait, which would last twelve years, he left a stern New Year’s Day warning: “I predict you will bitterly regret having taken the road you have taken.” France would regret. At the Palais Bourbon the Fourth Republic lurched on, from crisis to crisis. Unpopular Premier André Marie, who survived just one month in the summer of 1948, owing to his pious name, had his brief regime rudely christened “the government of the Immaculate Deception.” Certainly there was little enough political virginity in the Fourth Republic; a few years later I well remember graffiti painted up on walls within clear sight of the Assembly: “À bas les dé-putains!”⁷⁵

FOOD SHORTAGES CONTINUED for at least another two years after the war, hand in hand with a sense of gloom—and a bitterly anti-German feeling, much more so than in Britain.⁷⁶ There was constant fear of a Communist, Soviet-backed takeover. 1947 was a year of paralysing strikes with, at one point, 3 million workers out across the country. Then, suddenly, a reversal occurred when in December Communist miners in the north derailed a train, killing sixteen people. On every street corner in the capital, armed police guarded against further atrocities, as the arrival of the news caused universal revulsion. The derailment of the Paris-Tourcoing express caused a significant turnaround of political sentiment. “We have had a brush with civil war and, given the possibility of Soviet intervention, with war itself.”⁸ So President Vincent Auriol wrote in the last pages of his diary for that year, but “despite that France has begun her recovery.”

The following year, the creation of NATO brought military security to France; Marshall Aid brought the beginnings of new prosperity. Despite the burgeoning post-war graffiti of “Ami, go home,” the Minister of Finance had the good nature to confess in Paris that a “great lifting of the heart goes from us towards the generous American people and towards its leaders.” Rationing had ended; there were traffic jams in Paris, and the first influx of American tourists since 1929; the franc was soaring, the dollar—overloaded by its generosity—sinking. Nevertheless, endless strikes continued to paralyse the French economy. At first they had an economic and social background; then demonstrations were sparked (by the Communists) against NATO, then on the more universally unpopular issue of German rearmament, from 1953; from 1955 onwards it was the Algerian War. Many work stoppages were politically motivated by the Communists, who already in 1946 began pressing for an immediate wage increase of 25 per cent—others sparked off by incredibly trivial causes. One such was the strike of August 1953, set off by two postmen who inadvertently did a Watergate on an incomplete draft of a government economic initiative, which, they thought, specifically omitted postmen. They brought out all the postal workers, followed in sympathy by 4 million Frenchmen, and the country was at a standstill.

Ingeniously, year after year, the farmers and the middle classes, as well as the very rich, somehow avoided paying taxes with impunity. Inflation ran wild, resulting in a regular devaluation of the franc. In 1951 alone (so Edgar Faure, premier for just two months, told the Assembly), France’s cost of living rose 39 per cent. By 1953 prices stood at twenty-three times their pre-war levels. While United States industrial production had doubled since 1929, Britain’s had risen by 54 per cent and war-shattered Germany’s by 53 per cent, France’s had expanded by a mere 8 per cent. Everything conspired to lower morale: an alarming number of Frenchmen sought refuge in alcoholism, and this in turn slashed at productivity. For several decades the French economy made practically no headway.

BRITONS COULD WATCH PIOUSLY, but outside the popular gaze some outstanding civil servants, products of France’s admirable Polytechnique and École Nationale d’Administration, were laying remarkable long-term economic and industrial plans. (Under Attlee’s Socialists and Churchill’s Conservatives, no such similar providential thinking was in process in London—alas.) Already in December 1945, at the Hôtel Bristol, Jean Monnet and a small staff of brilliant men were at work contemplating what was to become, eventually, the Schumann Coal and Steel Pool, the forerunner of the EEC and the European Union. For the first time in 150 years, France was offering actually to help the Germans re-create their basic industries in conjunction with France’s, so as to provide a new foundation for peace and prosperity in Europe. In June 1950 there was a first meeting, at the Quai d’Orsay’s historic Salon de l’Horloge in Paris, of the European “Six”—a six from which Britain was markedly absent. The meeting of the Six raised little excitement at the time, eclipsed as it was by the fall of yet another French government and by the Communist invasion of South Korea.

DURING ALL THE SEVENTY-SIX YEARS of the now-defunct Third Republic, France had had the German défi to contend with; now, no longer a great power, in addition to her own internal problems, she had to face Stalin’s empire menacing from Eastern Europe just a few hundred miles beyond her frontier with prostrate Germany, the demands of her British and American allies, and, it seemed likely one day, a phoenix-like Germany rearmed to meet the Soviet threat. More immediately, an exhausted France found herself fighting to hold the imperial prize of Indo-China in a war waged single-mindedly by that one-time assistant-cook from the Ritz who had attended the peace conference of 1919, and had seen the mighty colonial powers in disarray there—Ho Chi Minh. Here began what soon came to be known as France’s sale guerre—and which, of course, would lead in a direct line to America’s long involvement in Vietnam. For France it was to mean that, between 1939 and 1962, the French Army would enjoy no more than a few weeks of true peace. In the eight years that it dragged on, the running sore of the Indo-China War cost France more than the total she received in Marshall Aid, an annual 10 per cent of the national budget; was to swallow up an entire class of Saint Cyr officers every three years; and—by the time it ended—was to account for thousands more casualties than the USA lost in Korea. As Raymond Aron noted: “In order to maintain herself in Indo-China, France committed more military strength than had been needed to establish herself there.”

The same could be said later with equal truth of Algeria. As a result, France, uniquely among the western powers, expanded rather than reduced the size of her army in the immediate post-war years. From 1945 to 1947, the numbers of the French combined services fell rapidly from 1.2 million to 490,000; but from there it rose steadily back to the 1.2 million figure by 1957. The human and economic costs made the sale guerre progressively more difficult to justify. It was unwinnable—but, to politicians in the comfort of the Palais Bourbon in Paris—unlosable. De Gaulle remarked that “the determination to win the war alternated with the desire to make peace without any one being able to decide between the two.”

Whatever the motives of the politicians in hanging on to IndoChina, France’s restored army discovered a special mission for itself there. Alsace-Lorraine had long been regained, Hitler was destroyed and Germany flattened, and the European Defence Community was neither a popular nor a particularly romantic conception. The enemy (partly a hangover from Vichy and the pre-1939 traditions, but also suddenly become infinitely—and genuinely—more menacing) was now Soviet Communism. In the jungles and paddy fields of Indo-China, gradually France’s battle-hardened colonels came to convince themselves that they were defending a bastion of western civilisation against Communism. There was also an element of la gloire involved, as François Mitterrand wrote in 1957:

When the war in Indo-China broke out, France was able to believe that the 1940 defeat was nothing more than a lost battle, and that the armistice of 1945 was going to restore its power at the same time as its glory.

By May 1953, 65 per cent of a French poll declared itself for ending the war: but still the politicians ordered its soldiers to go on fighting. Following in a direct line from the 1930s, from Weygand and the Vichy Army, the officers of Indo-China blamed the politicians for all that went wrong, in this particularly unpleasant war of ambushes by unseen guerrillas. “Now we know that a French army, on no matter what territory it fights, will always be stabbed in the back,” wrote one veteran with characteristic bitterness. “We have to examine a form of warfare that is new in its conceptions and new in its practices. This is the form of warfare we call ‘revolutionary war,’ ” wrote another thoughtful philosopher-soldier, General Lionel-Martin Chassin, in 1954:

It is time for the Army to cease being the grande muette . . .⁷⁷ What can the Western nations do to avoid the accomplishment of Mao’s plan for world conquest? We must oppose a struggle based on subversion with the same weapons, oppose faith with faith, propaganda with propaganda, and an insidious and powerful ideology with a superior one capable of winning the hearts of men.

If they despised the politicians, France’s young “revolutionary” colonels educated in Indo-China also had little higher opinion of their old school generals. Perhaps rightly. At the end of 1953, the French High Command planted its main striking force in an isolated, Verdun-like position called Dien Bien Phu. General Giap took up the gauntlet, and after a fifty-six-day siege that cost the heroic French defenders 3,000 lives, Dien Bien Phu surrendered in May 1954. That was the end; a humiliating withdrawal followed. But the French Army quit IndoChina with a bad conscience gnawing at them over what they considered a base betrayal of the Catholic population there. Having turned its French Army pupils into superb warriors, the sale guerre had, moreover, also made them highly political animals, which was to have serious consequences for democracy in France during the forthcoming Algerian War.

WITH THE COLLAPSE of the Laniel government, catastrophe in Indo-China brought to power one of the ablest and most honest politicians of the Fourth Republic, a brilliant dark-horse, a Sephardic Jew with the face of a pessimistic matador, Pierre Mendès-France. He promised he would have France out of the war in thirty-three days. He was as good as his word. In the face of huge opposition, with the usual unpleasant undertones of anti-Semitism on the right, Mendès-France was able to extricate France, handing on the baton to the USA. The period of peace, the first France had known since September 1939, was to last just five months and twenty-three days. Within half a year of Dien Bien Phu, encouraged by France’s defeat there, concerted revolt broke out in Algeria.⁹

There were already uprisings to force France out of Tunisia and Morocco; however, established back in 1848 as an integral part of metropolitan France, as much as Languedoc or the Dordogne, Algeria was no mere colony, but the diamond in France’s imperial diadem. It had a million Frenchpieds noirs⁷⁸ colonials settled there—many of them for several generations—in a sea of 9 million indigenous Muslim Algerians. Demographically, the Algerian birth-rate was exploding; economically, the gulf between Algerian andpieds noirs expectations was widening. Thus, when the revolt began in November 1954, Mendès-France declared, “Ici, c’est la France!” while his Minister of the Interior, a good Socialist called François Mitterrand, took an even more hawkish line: “The only possible declaration is war . . . for Algeria is France.” However, a secondary answer to why France hung on to Algeria was the French Army, which was to make a troth out of Algérie Française.

A combination of the political dispute surrounding the war and Mendès’ unpopular attempts to wean Normandy schoolchildren from calvados on to milk—shocking meddling in an unalterable tradition— brought him down. The Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) had inadequate equipment to fight more than a series of guerrilla actions; the French had insufficient troops to be everywhere in this vast territory. So in 1956, Guy Mollet, another French Socialist, took the dramatic step of sending half a million conscripts to Algeria. The most notable effect this had was to spread popular awareness about the war to metropolitan France; much as the escalation of the USA’s commitment in Vietnam did in America. Meanwhile the FLN, with consummate skill in canvassing support within the Afro-Asian Third World, in the USA and at the UN, succeeded in internationalising what France determinedly maintained was an internal dispute. The savage war struggled on for a further six years, destroying the Fourth Republic, nearly achieving a military takeover in France, and bringing back de Gaulle as the only possible saviour.

Among the troops who fought them, first the sale guerre in IndoChina then Algeria led to a sense of alienation from civil society not unlike that between the front and the rear in 1914–18. “You don’t know these people,” wrote an officer of the colonial paras from Indo-China in 1953. “You have nothing to do with them [the metropolitan bourgeois], it’s another universe.”¹⁰ In retrospect, he no longer thought of his “period in Indo China, but of his period in France.” Things made more sense in the war; there he felt at home, and elsewhere he was “abroad.” Transposed to Algeria, it was an alienation that would rebound to hit de Gaulle—and metropolitan France—hard in the 1960s. And, as young conscripts came to be sent to Algeria, so it became increasingly difficult for domestic opinion to stand aloof from the conflict.

DESPITE THE WARS, by 1954 the French economy had put on growth. Industrial production had reached a level 50 per cent higher than it had been in 1939. During the 1950s there was also a gradual revival of commercial property values in France’s cities, but—with rents still frozen since 1914—little post-war development of offices or apartment blocks. Paris continued to remain largely as Haussmann had left it a century previously. For a new architectural impetus it had to await de Gaulle who, despite his traditionalist bent of mind, could also grasp the need for modernisation. The outstanding architectural monuments to the Fourth Republic were two great curved complexes of monotone concrete and windows, the roughly constructed UNESCO Building on the edge of the Bois (completed in 1959) and the ORTF broadcasting centre (completed between 1956 and 1963) on the Right Bank of the Seine, supposedly designed to resemble a gigantic electro-magnet. Also laid down under the Fourth was the immense Palais des Congrès project at the Porte Maillot, which seemed to reflect socialism’s passion for huge popular get-togethers, offering a cavernous theatre with over 3000 seats. Conditioning all city planning, as well as being its worst enemy, was the automobile. For years the city was heaved up as vast car parks, sometimes seven storeys deep, were burrowed under the Concorde, the Place Vendôme and almost everywhere else.

THE END OF THE WAR and the removal of the dead hand of Vichy led to an immense hunger for ideas, restricted initially only by shortage of paper. The new writing based itself in Saint-Germain-des-Près, and more specifically the bar of the Café Flore—which happened to be convenient to the residence of the great guru of Existentialism, the new religion of café au lait socialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and his consort, Simone de Beauvoir. In 1940, Sartre had been taken prisoner of war in the Maginot Line, escaping back home the following year. Sartre and his plays thrived under the Occupation; then, like many, he had claimed a marginal role with the Resistance. Though he ended the war dedicatedly in the Communist camp, his Moscow allies shocked his coterie by rating him “a jackal with a pen”—which was perhaps not an unfair description. Holding forth with a torrent of sophistry in the smoke-filled rooms of the Flore, he never lacked a captive audience of students, many of them American, who hung on his every word. Whether they understood them or not was immaterial. I recall being taken to meet the master by a left-wing playwright of Russian extraction, Arthur Adamov, who had written a play about the Commune. Smelling like a goat, he rather set the tone. If ever there was a philosopher guilty of the sin Socrates was accused of, being a false corrupter of youth, Sartre seemed to be it. His notions of liberty of the individual were totally distorted; it took Albert Camus to put a finger on the Existentialists’ fundamental contradiction—justifying a system that was totally opposed to the responsibility of the individual. In the post-war atmosphere of libertarian Paris, youth gratefully reached out to Sartre for a welcome excuse selfishly to abandon all moral prescripts of responsibility, sexually in particular. (Within this context, the advent of the pill was to remove much of the significance of Sartre.)

De Beauvoir, sometimes known as la grande sartreuse, like a prim governess with her hair austerely tied back, was ever the better writer, breaking new feminist ground with her Le Deuxième Sexe, and providing valuable material for contemporary historians with her various books of memoirs, and her criticism of the Algerian War in La Force des choses (1963). Her major work of fiction, Les Mandarins (1954), was a seminal work drawing one to study contemporary France. But it also portrayed, in its more ridiculous light, the self-satisfied and elitist intellectual left, who moved in a very narrow physical and social circle, bicycling through France in the aftermath of Hiroshima, and seriously discussing—puff, puff, pedal, pedal—whether it would be preferable to be nuked by the friendly Russians or the abhorrent Americans. Out of all this vapid theorising, Camus alone emerges with stature; a short time later he broke with Sartre and de Beauvoir over the brutality of the Soviet system; the Sartres followed in disgust after the Soviet crushing of Hungary in 1956; but the damage, the new trahison des clercs, to a whole generation of western youth had already been done. During the Algerian War the Sartres joined the powerful group of antis; rightly, they exposed the horrors of torture committed by the French Army there, but eventually came close to justifying FLN terrorism.

A literary event almost as meaningful as the sophistry of Sartre came, in 1947, when his friend Jean Genet punched a critic of Le Figaro for being rude about his play, Les Bonnes. Among the other new writers of the 1950s whose books about the past war deeply shocked Parisians were Jean Dutourd, first of all with his flaying attack on the nastiness of the petits collabos in Au bon beurre (1952), and then, three years later, with Les Taxis de la Marne, which exalted heroism at the same time as it excoriated the debility of the “men of ’40.” A few months after the publication of Au bon beurre, Parisian theatre-goers were agog with excitement at the first night of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot—even if many missed its cheerless message. Highly contemporary, but much more entertaining was Raymond Queneau’s irreverent best-seller of 1959, Zazie dans le métro,set against the backdrop of a Métro strike that was symptomatic of Paris of the era, with a horribly knowing child from the provinces, precociously aware of transvestism, lesbians, paedophilia and child prostitution—her one desire to travel on the Métro.

In an intensely hot August of 1954 the revered Colette died and was given a public funeral in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais-Royal, paid for by the state—the highest posthumous honour attainable, and the first time it was ever accorded a woman. “What a beautiful life I’ve had,” she was recorded as remarking towards the end. “It’s a pity I didn’t notice it sooner.”¹¹ During her interment at Père Lachaise, one of the most violent storms of the century broke out. Colette would have enjoyed it, thought her biographer, Judith Thurman. As Colette left the scene, so almost simultaneously a new nineteen-year-old female writer arose to fill the gap—and take France by storm—Françoise Sagan, who was both a product of, and a reaction against, the Existentialist wave. Of BonjourTristesse, her first novel, which swept Paris, François Mauriac praised its literary merit but described her as “a charming little monster.” She was a true child of the new France of the 1950s. In her romantic novels, which combined the jet-set life with vigorous support for left-wing causes, the themes of casual sexuality—somewhat in advance of the times—were all fairly similar. InBonjour Tristesse it is a manipulative adolescent; in Aimez-vous Brahms? played poignantly in the film by Ingrid Bergman in one of her most brilliant—and favourite—roles, an attractive woman trembling on the brink of forty falls for a much younger man (Anthony Perkins).

As literature, the exquisite writings of Camus—full of human feeling that totally eluded Sartre—will surely outlive him, even cut short as they were by his tragic and untimely death in a car accident in 1960, aged only forty-seven. He was one of the outstanding journalists of the 1950s and 1960s, founding Combat as a Resistance organ during the war, to continue long afterwards as a national paper—with his rallying cry that it was required of his generation to “être à la hauteur de son désespoir” (“rise up to the level of its despair”). There was also the vigorous young figure of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, launching L’Express. Known popularly just as J-J S-S, Servan-Schreiber headed the attack on French policy in Algeria, exposing the worst excesses of torture. After Algeria he went on to attack the foe of American universal power, in Le Défi américain.

IN THE WORLD OF PAINTING Picasso, forgiven—like others—his wartime career, went from strength to inventive strength (and from mistress to mistress), turning his hand to sculpture, fashioning marvellous bulls out of bits of old bicycles, broken urns and baskets. In 1949, he re-established both his pre-eminence and the claim of Paris once more to be the global art forum at an exhibition of sixty-four recent canvases; at the same time there was a retrospective of ninety works by Léger at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Five years later another major exhibition, held at the Communist Maison de la Pensée Française, ended prematurely in the face of a writ issued by the daughter of the great Tsarist art collector of pre-1917, Sergei Choukine, to regain “stolen family property” in the shape of thirty-seven canvases grabbed by the Soviets, which had been condemned as decadent, bourgeois art and had disappeared into the cellars of Moscow and Leningrad. The writ failed; but Picasso, in his new passionate attachment to the Soviets, was put on the spot. (When Khrushchev gradually relaxed things, both Picasso’s and Matisse’s “lost” works were allowed to reappear at an exhibition that made Paris gasp.) As Picasso cornered the market, so other fabled contemporaries left it. In 1954, Derain died, knocked off his bicycle aged seventy-four; a court order had recently prohibited him from “reworking” any of his old paintings, his estranged wife fearing that he might diminish their alimony value on his death. Matisse followed, in November, at eighty-four, before he could see again his masterpieces of five decades previously still buried away in the cellars of the Hermitage. He was followed, in 1955, by Léger, his funeral held under the auspices of the Communist Party, of which he, like Picasso, was a member, and by Utrillo—tragically alcoholic since the age of ten, he was much overrated as an original artist, but his canvases of a grey Montmartre still command serious prices.

One of the most popular, and unusual, exhibitions of the early post-war era was held in the Salon International de la Police, displaying counterfeits of paintings—in the wake of the exposure of the famous Dutch forger, Van Meegeren. Prices soared, and continued to soar, in the sale rooms, with true works by Juan Gris—who had tried, often successfully, to sell them at £5 a piece in his lifetime—reaching up to ff6 million by the end of 1947.

I N ONE BRANCH OF THE ARTS Paris had always led the world, and did again just as soon as wartime restrictions lifted—haute couture. Just to reclaim its ascendancy, and declare nous voici to the world, the industry put on a most remarkable exhibition even before the fighting ended, in the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan at the end of March 1945, master-minded by Robert Ricci (son of Nina), Lucien Lelong, Christian Bérard, Dior, Patou, Carven and other great names in the industry. February 1947 saw a newcomer, Christian Dior, put on his first post-war show in the Avenue Montaigne. The crush was so great that some Parisians even tried to get through the top of the house with ladders. It was that night that the “New Look,” with its tightened waists and ample skirts, was born; and Parisian haute couture was once more back on its rightful throne, never to be deposed. Dior was followed by Givenchy, Balmain, Balenciaga, Courrèges and Saint-Laurent.

BESET BY THE UNENDING ALGERIAN WAR, by the merry-go-round of collapsing governments that seemed finally to have run out of talent, and by perennial strikes, the Fourth Republic stumbled on— accompanied by the habitual run of diverse hazards and disasters. In 1952, the French suffered their worst bout of foot-and-mouth since 1939; unlike their slaughter-minded neighbours across the Channel they vaccinated the cattle—and forgot about it. In 1954, there was an epidemic of flying saucers—nicknamed Les Churchills, for no very clear reason, except that one resembled a cigar. The autumn of 1956 brought the deep humiliation of Suez—in French eyes, not loyally supported by the British, marking a caesura of distrust of her anglo-saxon allies that was never quite to be repaired. In France emotions ran far higher over Soviet intervention in Hungary than over Suez—in contrast to London, where Suez dominated the scene. Coincidental with the disastrous Suez operation, by a daring coup de main in mid-air, of highly dubious legality and without the sanction of the French government, French army intelligence hijacked Ben Bella and the entire external leadership of the FLN. It was another indication of how desperate the need was to find a solution to the Algerian situation. But the war went on. In 1957, through resorting to the toughest measures (notably torture), General Massu’s elite paras won what looked like a clear-cut military victory in the famous “battle of Algiers,” breaking up the whole FLN network in the city. But in April 1958, following one economic crisis after another, Premier Gaillard fell, leaving France without a government in the most dangerous power vacuum since 1945. The war had already toppled five governments, and was about to bring down the Fourth Republic itself.

As a final indictment on the decay of political institutions, there came the nine-day phenomenon of Pierre Poujade, a thirty-five-year-old shopkeeper from the Lot. A powerful, macho, populist rabble-rouser, who appealed to his audience by performing a kind of striptease on the platform, hurling off his jacket, pullover and finally his shirt as he warmed to his subject, Poujade created a grassroots political party out of the discontent of France’s small shopkeepers. Called unambiguously the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans (UDCA), it had unpleasantly thuggish and anti-Semitic tendencies, but swept into the Assembly on a wave of petit bourgeois discontent. Poujade urged his commerçant supporters to strike rather than pay taxes and amazed himself by picking up 2½ million votes, alongside Communist gains. The elections of January 1956 saw the worst defeat for the conventional parties of the centre since the Republic first saw the light of day. Within the year the Poujadists in the Assembly, an undistinguished lot, began to disintegrate; but Poujadism remained—in the English as well as the French vocabulary.

FOR A DOZEN YEARS since his abrupt departure from politics in 1946, de Gaulle had remained in the wilderness, fretting at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, more and more sickened at having to witness, impotent, men of the circus of the Fourth Republic seemingly dedicated to reducing France to a third-rate power, with fifth-rate pretensions. Then, just as it was the Second World War that brought de Gaulle to the forefront in 1940, and again in 1944, so it was the disastrous Algerian War that brought him back again in May 1958. His Second Coming, if one can risk blasphemy, was precipitated by a crisis in Algiers, after all the false incarnations of the Fourth Republic had proved powerless to bring peace. Tempers had been rising among the forces in Algiers since the beginning of 1958, and the last straw had come with the killing in Tunisia of three captured French soldiers, on charges of torture, rape and murder. Exasperated, the army staged a coup, beginning on 13 May with the seizure of the Gouvernement-Général building where resided the organs of civil authority. The redoubtable General Massu formed a Committee of Public Safety—sinister sounding name to any of their countrymen with a sense of history. It was the first time since June 1940 that the French military had intervened directly in national politics. A series of plots and counterplots, in Corsica and on the mainland as well as in Algeria, thrust forward an apparently reluctant de Gaulle, aged sixty-seven. De Gaulle played hard to get, calculating sagely that to acquire a modicum of legitimacy he should step forward only when a clear majority of Frenchmen seemed to want him. Over several anxious days, Paris braced itself for a possible landing of the French paras from Algeria, tough and hard-fighting men sick of the insipid principles of civilian politicians.

The army putsch in Algiers provoked rumour and confusion. Never since the bloody clashes of February 1934 had circumstances so favoured a seizure of power by the mob. On 17 May, seventy American tourists refused to leave their plane at Orly for fear of being caught up in a revolution. A week later paras from Algiers staged a bloodless takeover, and the focus of attention moved to Paris, where events now became largely a matter of constitutional haggling and a race against time before General Massu’s paras would come floating down from the skies. Police reservists (those who could be reckoned loyal) were mobilised. Trade union leaders were briefed to halt all trains in the event of a landing— with some absurdity; as someone sagely pointed out, “the paras don’t often go by train!” There was dangerous talk about arming the Communists, who claimed to be able to get 10,000 militants out on the streets at a moment’s notice. In Paris at the time, I recall it vividly as a period of extraordinary anxiety and tension, when the country seemed to tremble on the brink of civil war and anarchy. Cars flew up and down the Champs-Élysées sounding their horns, the drivers shouting “Vive de Gaulle!”; nevertheless, despite the crisis, on that warm Whit Sunday holiday of 25 May, a record number of cars still headed insouciantly out of Paris for the countryside.

Finally, on 28 May, two weeks after the Algiers putsch, Premier Pflimlin resigned; de Gaulle, returning late to his hotel, told the concierge, “Albert, j’ai gagné!” The left reacted violently, with a giant demonstration of perhaps half a million winding its way from the Place de la Nation to the Place de la République—though not nearly as violently as some feared. President Coty intervened; de Gaulle agreed to form a government.

On 1 June, he presented himself to the Assembly, and was accepted. The Communist deputies thumped their desks and shouted, “Le fascisme ne passera pas!” But 30 per cent of Communist electors deserted the party. Bizarrely, industrialists and big business also opposed de Gaulle initially—on the grounds that he stood for change. Otherwise his accession was a cause of relief, for here was a leader with purpose. As he left the Assembly and got into his car, de Gaulle seemed to be completely unaware of the rain that was sheeting down on him. In September he held a referendum to put a new constitution, containing strong powers for the president, to the nation. Sartre voiced the left’s opposition to “King Charles XI,” declaring, “I do not believe in God, but if in this plebiscite I had the duty of choosing between Him and the present incumbent, I would vote for God; he is more modest.” Nevertheless, de Gaulle won by a sweeping majority. After all the uncertainties of the last days of the Fourth Republic, and the real fears of May, the new authority and majesty ushered in by him had an immediate, and galvanising effect on the nation. On his first official visit to Paris in June, Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, noted already how the large crowds all seemed very relaxed and in a most friendly mood . . . I have never seen a French crowd cheer in such a friendly way . . . everyone is confident that the General’s policy will succeed. No one knows what it will be—all the same it commands general confidence.¹²