Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949 Read Free Page B

shortages. Spears and the British minister, Oliver Harvey, looked round at the deputies and senators at other tables. Spears reflected, ‘with some annoyance as a Conservative’, that the only politicians prepared to continue the fight against Germany were ‘in the main Socialists’. But the chief object of his loathing was the turncoat Pierre Laval. The very appearance of the squat Laval, with his toad-like features, decaying teeth and greasy hair, made hatred easy.
    Any officials who stepped outside their hotels were mobbed by refugees anxious for news of the German advance or of relatives in the army. Accusations of incompetence, cowardice and even treason rang out, for that mood of ‘
Nous sommes trahis!
’ had started to gain hold. The British consulate was besieged with refugees, including many Jews, desperate to get away. One rumour was not false: German aircraft had dropped magnetic mines in the Gironde estuary, virtually sealing off the port of Bordeaux.
    By Sunday, 16 June, Reynaud found resistance to the
capitulards
almost impossible to maintain. It was already hard for a civilian politician to challenge the opinion of military leaders, and he did not have de Gaulle’s support at this stage, having sent him on a mission to London. Marshal Pétain had a huge following in the country, and he knew the strength of his position.
    Every hope rapidly proved false. An appeal for help to President Roosevelt turned out to have been ridiculously optimistic. Reynaud thought that Churchill’s last-minute proposal of an Anglo-French Union, which was backed by de Gaulle, might save the situation. The Pétain faction saw it as a plot by Britain to make France one of her dominions. * One Pétainist minister, Jean Ybarnegaray, exploded: ‘Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.’ Towhich Reynaud replied: ‘I prefer to collaborate with my allies than with my enemies.’ Pétain himself dismissed the whole idea angrily, describing it as ‘a marriage with a corpse’!
    Reynaud’s opponents then went on to support the proposal of another minister, Camille Chautemps, that Hitler’s terms should be requested and considered. Chautemps, the Prime Minister in 1933, tainted by the corruption exposed in the Stavisky scandal, was one of the most notorious of those Third Republic politicians who treated their country ‘as if it were a commercial company going into liquidation’. Reynaud promptly offered his resignation to President Albert Lebrun. Afterwards, Pétain went up to Reynaud, offering his hand, and said that he hoped that they would remain friends. Reynaud was entirely taken in by his manner. He decided to stay in France in case President Lebrun called on him to form another government. The idea that Marshal Pétain would agree to his arrest within a matter of weeks, put him on trial, imprison him and later allow him to be handed over to the Germans was inconceivable.
    At ten o’clock that night de Gaulle, who had flown straight back to Bordeaux from London in an aeroplane provided by Churchill, touched down at Mérignac airport still full of hope for the Anglo-French Union. He had not yet heard how things had gone at the Cabinet meeting. An officer waiting for him on the tarmac warned him of Reynaud’s resignation. The news that President Lebrun had appointed Marshal Pétain as the next Prime Minister followed half an hour later. The shock can be imagined. De Gaulle was no longer a minister. He reverted, at least in theory, to the rank of temporary brigadier-general. But Pétain’s appointment, signalling the victory of the defeatists, removed any doubt from his mind. Whatever the consequences, he must return to England to continue the fight.
    To make sure that he left France safely, he had to be careful. Weygand loathed him, both personally and politically. Any attempt by an officer to continue the struggle which the commander-in-chief had been so keen to abandon would be treated as mutinous.