Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949 by Antony Beevor Read Free Book Online

the greatest resentment felt towards the London Gaullists was provoked by their implication that to have remained in France in 1940, rather than joining the General in London, somehow represented a lapse of duty.
    As part of his attempt to create an effective umbrella organization, Moulin recruited Georges Bidault, a Catholic of the centre-left, to be the head of the Resistance’s public information branch, the Bureau d’Information et de Presse.
    Another of Moulin’s initiatives was to set up a sort of constitutional think-tank, the Comité Général d’Études, to prepare the governmental structure of post-war France and its relationship with the Allies. Members of this body, almost all lawyers, included several future ministers: François de Menthon and Pierre-Henri Teitgen, the first two Ministers of Justice of liberated France, Alexandre Parodi, and Michel Debré, a future Prime Minister.
    The most important of these developments came in September 1942, when the military wings of Combat, Libération and Franc-Tireur joined to become the Armée Secrète. De Gaulle immediately gave it his blessing. In his eyes the Secret Army was a vital step towards bringing the Resistance within the framework of a reconstituted regular armed service. That many French Resistance groups had worked with the British from early on was, in his eyes, akin to treachery.
    The British, on the other hand, were relieved that the Resistance had grown up in three different ways: the groups backed by SOE and the Secret Intelligence Service, the Gaullist groups and the Communists. This, they felt, reduced the chance of a civil war between Gaullists and Communists. The British were able to provide radio sets as well as transport, whether by Lysander landings on moonlit nights or by parachute drops. Passy claimed that the British always reserved the larger share of whatever planes, weapons and funds were available for their own operations, while Free French operations were kept on short rations. And yet the fact that London could provide support, however meagre, meant that the misunderstandings, suspicions and exasperations that were bound to develop between ‘
les gens de Londres
’ and ‘
les gens de l’intérieur
’ never resulted in a permanent rupture.
    In November 1942, the possibility of Communists and Gaullists working together was greatly improved by their common anger at the Americans’ deal with Darlan. Neither Bogomolov, Stalin’s ambassador to the exiled governments in London, nor the old Comintern controller, Georgi Dimitrov, considered the decision of the French Communists to sign an agreement with the Gaullists ‘a good idea’. But since Stalinexpressed little interest in France, and since communications to and from enemy-occupied territory were far from easy, Dimitrov left things as they were.
    Soon afterwards the Communist Party’s military organization, Franc-Tireurs et Partisans Français (FTP), decided to associate itself with the Secret Army, thus acknowledging, at least in theory, General de Gaulle’s military authority. For the Communists it was also the only way to receive British arms drops, and their insistence on this point led to many wrangles. But this was purely for form. The French Communists within France saw the future Liberation in a totally different fashion from the Gaullists. They saw the retreat of the Germans from France as the signal for an uprising and complete social revolution. Far from accepting de Gaulle’s orders, they wanted their FTP to become the basis for a ‘democratized’ French army after the Liberation. To further this policy, they agreed to unite with other Resistance groups, while infiltrating ‘sub-marines’, or covert Communists, into key positions. Nowhere were they more successful in this than in Paris, where they soon controlled the capital’s Comité de Libération, a form of local provisional administration which they hoped would take over everything before Gaullist