The Horror of Love (25 page)

‘Very possibly.’

A proper residence had also to be found for the De Gaulle family. Gaston located a suitable house on the Rue Champ d’Entraînement on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, but De Gaulle was equally stubborn on the question of furniture, refusing to make use of the national collection. Gaston prevailed upon his friendships with the palace dealers to create a home of such prettiness that Mme de Gaulle, with her usual charm, confessed it was rather grander than she should have liked. As a stopgap country residence, Gaston appropriated a building in the grounds of Louis XIV’s old pleasure house at Marly, which Tante Yvonne declared to be gloomy and insufficiently simple, so he was also obliged to find workmen to restore the De Gaulles’ old home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises in the Haute Marne, which had been sacked by the Germans.

Despairing at Mme de Gaulle’s insistence on provinciality
avant tous
, Gaston harried builders to complete the job as fast as possible which, given an almost complete lack of transport, raw materials and manpower, was a depressing task and one for which Mme de Gaulle never showed herself in the least bit grateful. Gaston himself was never less than charming about Yvonne, describing her ‘perfect simplicity and modesty’ and the ‘great service she had rendered to her country’ in discharging the general from all mundane concerns, permitting him complete freedom to concentrate on the ‘immense duties’ for which he was responsible. But the fact was that Mme de Gaulle never liked him. She was too plain for Gaston to bother to charm her, and she sensed and resented this lack of acknowledgement, though Gaston, who was well aware of her rancour, was not above
making use of it when it suited him to keep Nancy at arm’s length.

Rather more pressing than interior décor was the issue of maintaining order, with which the provisional government struggled in the face of the reprisals against collaborators known as the
épuration sauvage
. A legal framework for the purging of collaborators, the
épuration legale
, had been established by an ordinance passed in Algiers in 1943 and in March the following year five principal collaborationist offences were identified: participation in collaborationist organizations, co-operating in propaganda, denunciation or black-market activities and, rather vaguely, any form of ‘zeal’ towards the Germans. In August 1944, the offence of
indignité nationale
, ‘national unworthiness’, was added, covering any action considered harmful to the unity of France or to constitute neglect of national duty. Anyone found guilty of the latter could be sentenced to
dégradation nationale
in which civic, professional and particularly political rights were stripped away. Four categories of court, three civilian and one military, were set up to deal with the accused.

In total, 300,000 cases were investigated, 100,000 of those in Paris alone, as collaboration in the capital had been the most widespread and discernible. Nearly 7,000 death sentences, almost half in absentia, were passed, though only 791 executions actually took place. Almost 50,000 people, by contrast, lost their rights under
dégradation nationale
. While their dossiers were processed, accused
collabos
were interned in the camps and prisons where Vichy had held Jews and Resistants. Though the system had been rigorously formulated, its efficient implementation was almost impossible, not least due to an initial lack of magistrates, as only a single judge could be produced who had refused to swear allegiance to Pétain’s regime. Bureaucratic inadequacy, which saw thousands of innocent people wait months for their cases to be called, was exacerbated by hideous overcrowding, disease and corruption in the prisons. Inexperienced administrators were often incapable of understanding the laws they were obliged to apply, while many local resistance
committees, spurred on by the hysterical outpourings of hatred that immediately followed the liberation and subsequently the return of deportees, simply ignored government officials altogether.

Still, the
épuration legate
produced a few Mitfordesque jokes. In 1946, Nancy wrote to Gaston of a party for the reopening of the Tower of London. ‘Violet [Trefusis] said, “When we got to the Traitor’s Gate I heard two well-known voices and it was Emerald and Daisy.”’ Nancy’s friend Daisy Fellowes, the daughter of an American heiress and a French duke, and married first to the Prince de Broglie, was distinguished in many ways, as a beauty, magazine editor, writer and mistress to Duff Cooper, among others (possibly including Gaston himself), but the war had not been her finest hour. Two of her daughters, Jacqueline and Emmeline, were punished for collaboration. Emmeline was incarcerated for five months at Fresnes prison, where she shared a cell with a group of prostitutes who spent their time shimmying their breasts at the men’s wing opposite by way of diversion. Jacqueline had her head shaved in reprisal for the denunciation of Resistants by her Austrian husband Alfred Kraus. Daisy failed to rise to her daughter’s defence in the manner of one mother of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been over-enthusiastic in consorting with the enemy. ‘Why cut her hair off for it? She’s just as willing to go to bed with Americans.’

Other members of the Parisian
beau monde
tried to keep up to the mark of chic even in the unpromising confines of the Conciergerie. Comte Jean de Castellane, the brother of the famous socialite Boni de Castellane, was informed that he had to surrender his shoelaces and braces to a guard. ‘If you remove my braces, ’ he announced, ‘I shall leave immediately.’
²
Sacha Guitry departed for the camp at Drancy in flowered pyjamas accessorized with a panama hat. Inside, he met his ex-wife, prompting him to remark that ‘one’s mishaps never come singly’.
³
The most famous
collabo
riposte, attributed to everyone from the film star Arletty to Coco Chanel, was the proud declaration
of a woman accused of sleeping with Germans: ‘My ass is international, but my heart is French!’

The
épuration sauvage
left no room for even gallows gaiety. It seemed as though the French were so appalled by their collective guilt that they turned on themselves in a grisly penance which produced outrages similar to those perpetrated by the Nazis. One commentator in 1947 suggested that ‘it was as though we were afraid of the very amplitude of the crime’.
⁴
Neighbours denounced one another, none more zealously than those who had turned their coats at the last minute to escape retribution, and hastily convened courts of Resistants bayed for
collabo
blood. Across twenty-two
départements
, over a hundred summary executions were carried out, while the total figure (confirmed by a Gendarmerie survey in 1952 and then by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War) was approximately 10,000, of which 8,867 were discovered to have been the direct responsibility of the Resistance.

Malcolm Muggeridge, who was serving with the British forces in Paris, described the ‘horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality’ of the self-appointed ‘purge’ gangs. Women were often a particular focus for atrocities. Jean Cocteau recalled seeing a woman being paraded entirely naked down the Avenue de la Grande Armée, one of the wide boulevards leading off the Arc de Triomphe. ‘They tore at her, they pushed her, they spat in her face … She was covered in bruises and carried around her neck a placard “I had my husband shot”.’
⁵
At the Drancy internment camp, many women were raped, while shaven heads proclaimed their owners’ shame long after the liberation. Allied Forces were reluctant to intervene, seeing the
épuration
as a peculiarly French issue. It therefore represented a direct challenge to the authority of the provisional government. As De Gaulle observed, ‘nothing is more wounding than weakness, ’ and the ‘purification’ demonstrated not only the lack of control the provisional government was able to exercise but precisely the kind of disunity that would impede the general’s aim of establishing France once more as a living and dignified nation.

The ‘chronic weakness’
⁶
of France immediately after the liberation was manifest at a profound material level. Some 460,000 buildings had been destroyed, 1,900,000 damaged and over a million families found themselves homeless. The industrial infrastructure was in an appalling condition, with half the railway lines out of use, fuel supplies scarce and machinery, where it was not destroyed altogether, dilapidated and out of date. Agriculture, too, lacked machinery, and fertilizer and serviceable land (93 million cultivated hectares had been lost). Poor productivity in both spheres sent the public debt soaring to almost 2,000 billion francs by 1946. Correspondingly, the cost of living tripled, and gross prices increased by three and a half times.

The most severe problem was the shortage of food. The actress Arletty, who was sent to Fresnes for collaboration, had incensed the public not merely by cohabiting with her German lover at the Ritz, but by enjoying gourmet blow-outs there while the rest of the country starved. The government had only a tiny margin for manoeuvre, as the satisfaction of ‘basic alimentary needs’ was the touchstone by which it needed to conjure a durable popularity.
⁷
According to the rhetoric of the dying Vichy regime, the wicked Germans had been absconding with the fruits of the sacred Gallic soil, hence when they were defeated, abundance would return. Neither the provisional government, the Resistance, nor the British were prepared to contradict this fallacy too precisely, yet the agricultural crisis had to be solved before the country lost patience.

Nancy Mitford, wearing her self-declared rose-coloured spectacles, refused to acknowledge the fact that for most French people, the size of the ration had become an obsession. In a letter to Lady Redesdale she gaily announced that bread was no longer rationed, an absolute fabrication. The bitter winter of 1944-5, followed by heavy spring frosts, left a deficit of one third below requirements for bread, meat, butter and milk. Bread shortages were acute, as production had fallen from 63 million
quintaux
(a measure of 100 kilogrammes) to 42 million. From December
1945 to May 1947, the ration was 250 grammes per person per day, the equivalent of roughly four and a half pieces of modern sliced bread. Between September 1947 and May 1948 this was reduced to 200 grammes, then rose again to 250 until bread was eventually taken off the ration (despite Nancy’s absurdly premature rejoicing) in 1949. The government introduced price controls and requisition of urgent supplies such as milk and attempted to repress the flourishing black market, but it was galling for law-abiding families to keep their children on little more than bread and the weekly ration of 60 grammes of meat when black-market goods were ubiquitous and the wealthy and unscrupulous still dined in opulent restaurants. Nancy’s strict adherence to wartime regulations in London appeared to have been quite forgotten, and she revelled in black-market goodies, even as Gaston was attempting to deal with the repercussions of the many protests in French towns, where angry women assembled waving signs reading:
‘Nos gosses ont faim’
(‘our kids are hungry’). The battle France now faced, government publicity claimed, was production, but slogans like ‘Off with our jackets and up with our hearts’ did little to relieve the anguish of mothers serving out pathetic rations to weak and malnourished children.

The challenges confronting the provisional government were overwhelming, but nothing could be effectively achieved without concord at ministerial level. On 21 October 1945, France went to the polls. In her last novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, Nancy has fun with the absurdly volatile and bathetic fluctuations of fortune of the French government. ‘M. Moch, M. Pleven and M. Bidault all tried to form governments and all duly failed. Then Bouche Bontemps tried again and was accepted by the Chambre the very day before our dinner party.’ For now, though, it was Gaston’s career that was at stake and Nancy wrote of her ‘mule-like’ struggle to remain in the Rue Bonaparte until the elections were over. She described the question of the elections to Randolph Churchill in a passage that might have come from the novel: ‘Everywhere you come across groups of people saying “Moi
Oui-Non” “et moi Oui-Oui” and on all the walls is chalked up the Oui-Non of the Communists. Only real old Faubourg fogies will vote Non-Oui.’

The nation had to decide whether the Constituent Assembly (the legislative arm of the government) should be given supreme or limited power. The’
‘Oui’
of the Communists represented their determination that party power should be more democratically reflected, while the
‘Non’
of the moderates and Gaullists corresponded to a wish for greater executive authority and a more limited role for the assembly, founded on the conviction that it was the limitation of such authority that had led to the collapse of 1940. The Communist plan to empower the assembly was based on their position as the strongest political force in the country. Membership of the party had increased from 400,000 to 900,000 in the previous two years. Revolutionary rhetoric was still much in evidence, directed especially at the ‘Fascist fifth column of Vichy’, but since it presently seemed possible that power might be obtained by constitutional means, the party leader, Maurice Thorez, had proved himself a firm supporter of De Gaulle. Much to the disgust of some members, who had joined in the belief that a French victory would inaugurate a socialist Utopia, Thorez had maintained a Gaullist line, emphasizing the need to bring the
épuration sauvage
to an end and concentrate on production. With the goal of building parliamentary muscle, the Communists proposed an amalgamation with Leon Blum’s Socialist party in the summer of 1945, though this was rejected in August, with the Socialists maintaining that coalition was more in accordance with the spirit of the Conseil National de la Résistance. Nevertheless, the Communists had good reason to hope that their ‘Oui-Non’ would achieve a mandate, for De Gaulle’s popularity was severely on the wane.