Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 by Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper

congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces. There was a single exception; one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, de Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him– towering and alone; the rest, prostrate.’ There were others, such as Alexandre Parodi, who remained upright, but with all eyes fixed on de Gaulle; he alone appeared majestic, fearless and untouchable.
    The incident confirmed de Gaulle in his determination to disarm the FFI at the earliest opportunity. There could be no further doubt that they represented a bigger danger to public safety than the rump of any ‘fifth column’ of
miliciens
. Disturbances presented a double threat. ‘Public order is a matter of life and death,’ he told a visitor to the rue Saint-Dominique a few days later. ‘If we do not re-establish it ourselves, foreigners will impose it upon us.’ The American and British forces now appeared to be seen as ‘foreigners’ rather than allies.
    At half past eleven, during a second night of celebration, the air-raid sirens sounded. The Luftwaffe had arrived on a revenge attack, bombing at random. A hospital was seriously damaged. So too were the spirit warehouses of Les Halles des Vins. The orange glow against the night sky could be seen from all over Paris.
    On the day of liberation, it seemed as if almost every French Communist had converged on party headquarters at 44 rue Pelletier, always known as ‘le 44’. Those released from prison turned up at the six-storey building in search of news, and most had gone into one of the nearby cafés in the hope of discovering who had survived the terrible years and who had not. The entrance was protected by sandbags, a legacy from the building’s last occupants, the Milice.
    Six days later Jacques Duclos, Thorez’s deputy and stand-in, summoned a meeting of the party’s central committee. Only some twenty members met that night, including Professor Joliot-Curie, the scientist who had made Molotov cocktails in the Sorbonne. Four tables had been arranged in a rectangle, ‘like a marriage feast’. The veteran Communist Marcel Cachin presided. Behind his head a proclamation decorated ostentatiously with tricolour flags listed the members of the central committee who had ‘died for France’. From another wall, a photograph of Stalin watched over them.
    Duclos’s fellow members of the French Communist Party’s wartime triumvirate were Benoît Frachon, who was to prove a skilful leader of the Communist trades union movement in the post-war years, and Charles Tillon, a hard and resourceful man who had been the real leader of the Communist Resistance during the Occupation. Duclos feared his influence and soon arranged for him to be one of the Communist ministers in de Gaulle’s government. This would restrict his freedom of action and also remove him from the real centre of power within the party itself.
    Duclos, when he faced his colleagues, was in an embarrassing position. It was he who had directed the approach to the German authorities in 1940, invoking the Nazi–Soviet pact, to arrange for the reappearance of the party newspaper
L’Humanité
and the release of Communist prisoners. In exchange he had offered to put France back to work. Tillon had ridiculed the idea that French Communists would thus receive preferential treatment. ‘For shit’s sake, do you really think that in Paris the Germans will see you as Russians?’
    Duclos was a little man, almost risible in the eyes of someone like Tillon. His round face with round glasses made him look like a complacent
petit-bourgeois
; but the impenetrable smile and the clever little eyes hinted at why he was such a formidable survivor. He knew that the faithful follower of the party line, as laid down in Moscow, would come out on top in the end. The Comintern had been officially disbanded in May 1943, mainly to please the American government and encourage the huge flow of Lend-Lease aid.