Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 by Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

psychological warfare. In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir overheard two collaborators in a café talking of the trial. ‘It’s our trial,’ said one. His companion agreed. It brought home to many others, notably the writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, that the side they had backed was now liable to lose.
    Pucheu, the first collaborator to face the official justice of the victors, died in defiance. He insisted on giving the orders to the firing squad himself. But documents discovered after the Liberation proved without doubt that, as the Communists suspected, he had been guilty of picking out hostages to be executed by the Germans.
    Operation Torch, coming after Alamein and followed by Stalingrad, gave a tremendous encouragement to the early Resistance groups, both ‘
les gens de Londres
’ and ‘
les gens de l’intérieur
’, who endured the whole Occupation. But during 1943, severe setbacks soon followed inside France, where the fight between the Gestapo and the Milice on one side and the Resistance on the other became increasingly violent.
    Jean Moulin, having achieved his aim of unifying the Resistance in May, sensed that the Gestapo was closing in. He had already warned the BCRA in London that somebody should be ready to replace him. In answer to his request for a deputy, General de Gaulle’s military assistant, Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, volunteered and parachuted in. Serreulles made contact with Moulin in Lyons on 19 June. But two days later, Moulin was trapped by the Germans in the hillside suburb of Caliure. He died after severe torture supervised by Klaus Barbie.
    Serreulles, although finding himself in an almost impossible position, quickly re-established contact with the leaders of the different movements making up the Secret Army.
    De Gaulle’s most pressing concern was not the Resistance but his relationship with the two Anglo-Saxon leaders. Roosevelt, still advised by Admiral Leahy, his former ambassador to Vichy, that Pétain was the only man to unite the country, went ahead with preparations for the administration of French territory as if neither de Gaulle’s government-in-waiting nor the Resistance existed. Already officials were being trained in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the acronym which Gaullists feared and loathed most: AMGOT – Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories.
    De Gaulle, in spite of his anger, did not lose his ability to calculate the odds. He threatened to withdraw all cooperation if AMGOT was imposed on liberated France. Americans in the European theatre, including Eisenhower, knew that any attempt to introduce military government against the mass of the people would be disastrous.
    Three days before D-Day, on 3 June 1944, the French National Liberation Committee in Algiers proclaimed itself to be the provisional government of the French Republic. De Gaulle and his staff then flew to England, arriving the next morning to hear that the Allies had entered Rome and that the invasion of France was imminent.
    Churchill, although determined to be magnanimous towards de Gaulle, was in a state of subdued frenzy waiting for the invasion. With a disastrous lack of tact, he told de Gaulle that he had sent for him to broadcast to France. Even the more diplomatic Eisenhower, under renewed pressure from Roosevelt, reverted to the American position that de Gaulle and his colleagues counted for nothing until elections were held. On the morning of the invasion, Churchill heard that de Gaulle had refused to broadcast to the French people or to provide liaison officers to accompany the Allied forces. All his resentment and frustration burst forth. He accused de Gaulle of treason to the cause and raged about sending him back to Algiers in chains. American and British officials were horrified that the volatile chemistry between national leaders should have exploded at such a moment. ‘It’s pandemonium,’ a senior French diplomat noted in his diary. Finally Eden calmed Churchill, while