Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (54 page)

Harriman was fortunate in key members of staff. He managed to persuade Milton Katz, the Harvard law professor, and David Bruce, the lawyer and diplomat, to join him in Paris. He was also extremely lucky that France appointed Robert Marjolin, a brilliant financial civil servant, to be secretary-general of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Marjolin needed all his skills in dealing with the high-handed and eccentric Sir Edmund Hall-Patch, the British chairman of its executive committee.

The young American professionals arriving in Paris to staff the ECA were all eager to save Europe from famine and Communism and to have the time of their lives. ‘The boys had all been through the war,’ wrote a secretary at the United States Embassy, ‘and felt cheated of a knowledge of life. Before they settled down to an executive desk, they wanted to savor a taste of something they might never have again.’

In their enthusiasm, these young men felt that even out-of-order elevators and erratic telephones possessed a certain exotic charm. The envy of the French, however understandable, was the trickiest thing they had to come to terms with. Hard currency gave Americans the choice of the best apartments and pushed up prices for others; while they shipped over everything unobtainable in Europe, notably cars and shoes. ‘How will you recognize me?’ asked a young American, on the telephone to the French family who were to meet him at the railway station. ‘By your shoes,’ was the immediate reply.

The quality of American officials varied greatly. There were those who knew France well and spoke the language admirably, while others barely spoke French at all. Many could not pronounce the name of the French Prime Minister, Henri Queuille, and just referred to him as ‘Kelly’. This became a joke, and even French-speakers at the embassy picked it up.

Some members of the ECA responsible for direct contact with the French were incapable of reading a set speech and understanding the questions put to them afterwards. On 3 December 1948, a senior member of its information service gave a lecture on the philosophy of the Marshall Plan. The arguments were so incompetently put over that virtually everything he said was easily ridiculed by a French philosophy professor who was a member of the Association France-URSS and almost certainly a Communist. So embarrassing was this spectacle that the Minister of the Interior wrote to Robert Schuman, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, begging him to advise the American ambassador of ‘the need to send out only talented speakers, who know our language properly and are able to reply without difficulty to questions which might be put to them’.

The Communist campaign was relentless. ‘At times,’ remembered a member of the ECA’s public relations staff, ‘we could not show a film on the Marshall Plan without getting a brick through the screen.’

David Bruce, the ECA chief of mission, had no problems with the language after his experience of France before and during the war. He was appointed ambassador after the departure of Jefferson Caffery, but returned to the United States for discussions at the State Department before taking up the post. On 10 May 1949, a strategy meeting on France was held with Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State since Marshall’s retirement, Philip Jessup, George Kennan, Chip Bohlen and Bob Murphy. ‘The presentation of the United States’ viewpoint was thoroughly and exhaustively discussed,’ Bruce recorded drily in his diary. He was sceptical about any approach which smacked of American intervention.

On 14 May, David Bruce landed at Le Bourget to an official reception and was driven into Paris with a motorcycle escort. ‘The Embassy flag fluttered bravely atop a fender,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and I think the bystanders were somewhat baffled by the lone funereal old Cadillac car, surrounded by helmeted police, speeding with unknown occupants to an unknown destination.’

David Bruce and his wife, Evangeline, were on their way to 2 Avenue d’Iéna, a house built by President Grévy in the 1880s and purchased by a previous American ambassador. ‘It is a large, typically French, rich, bourgeois dwelling of the later nineteenth century, with a small but attractive garden. On the ground floor, it is well disposed for large receptions and dinners. Upstairs, the bedrooms are rather appalling, and it is not nearly as attractive or as well furnished as those in most good Paris homes. However, it is a joy to be here.’ One of the joys turned out to be the chef, Robert. A ‘simple Sunday night dinner’ prepared by Robert consisted of onion soup, a timbale of lobster with thick wine sauce, followed by chicken and salad.

Bruce went over the mission’s domestic arrangements thoroughly. There had been trouble with the Marine guards, now quartered in the Hotel Continental. Bruce wanted them in civilian dress. This was not a time to allow America to be characterized as a proconsular power, whatever the realities of its economic hegemony.

He had little time to read himself into the job. Within a fortnight of his arrival, foreign statesmen began to assemble for the Conference of Foreign Ministers. This was to be held in the Palais Rose on the Avenue Foch – ‘Boni de Castellane’s ostentatious monstrosity’ – and followed the usual set pattern. The four delegations, headed by Dean Acheson, Vyshinsky, Robert Schuman and Ernest Bevin, were seated in an inward-facing square. Acheson’s aide, Lucius Battle, described Vyshinsky as ‘sinister, tight, gaunt, with the beadiest eyes I have ever seen’. Bruce was most impressed by Schuman: ‘What a fine man he is, sympathetic, direct, intelligent.’ Dean Acheson was rather fond of the ebullient Bevin. Years later, he told Lucius Battle that he infinitely preferred being called ‘My boy’ by Bevin than ‘Dean dear’ by Anthony Eden.

The proceedings at the Palais Rose were almost unbearably tedious. After Vyshinsky had talked for forty-five minutes in Russian, his speech had to be translated by a member of the Soviet delegation into English, and to make matters worse, this interpreter was utterly incompetent. At one point Lucius Battle turned to Chip Bohlen and asked: ‘Haven’t they got a better interpreter than this?’ Bohlen, a fluent Russian-speaker himself, replied: ‘Everyone in their delegation speaks better English! This is the water torture, designed to drive us all crazy!’ The Americans soon installed their own interpreter, who translated while Vyshinsky spoke. ‘The Russians went on with their English translation,’ remembered Battle, ‘but at least it gave us forty-five minutes to talk and plan, while the Russian interpreter droned on.’

Dean Acheson, ‘after a steady four and a half hours at the Council’, acknowledged that ‘his ass was tired’. As light relief, the Bruces took him and Luke Battle to the Monseigneur, with its ‘dozen violinists, a cellist, a pianist, a harpist and heaven knows what other players’. But although the choice of this White Russian establishment had never been intended as a political statement, it almost turned into one when Acheson became very exuberant on champagne and rose to his feet.

‘I want to drink a toast to the Berlin airlift,’ he announced.

‘Luke, make him sit down!’ ordered Bruce, afraid that matters might get out of hand. If a journalist was present and word got out, the Communist press would have a field day.

‘But how?’ asked Battle, looking up at his towering boss.

‘Pull him down by his pants.’

Battle heaved, as instructed, and the Secretary of State dropped back into his seat with surprise, but without a diplomatic incident.

Even if Bruce could play little effective part in the Conference of Foreign Ministers, he soon found that the power of the American ambassador in France was very great, almost embarrassingly so, now that the importance of economic aid was finally appreciated. In striking contrast to the aloofness which de Gaulle had shown his predecessor, French prime ministers came to consult him even over the composition of a new government. At the same time, Bruce did what he could to restrain Washington’s compulsion to direct affairs. On Friday, 10 June, exactly a month after the strategy meeting on France, he was against putting pressure on the French to grant Indo-China unrestricted independence. He felt it could only provoke them into a more obstinate frame of mind.

The reason for the ambassador’s power was very simple. After a late lunch at the Travellers’ the previous Monday, 6 June, Bruce had returned to his office to work on a speech for the next day. The telephone rang. It was Maurice Petsche, Queuille’s Minister of Finance, asking him to come round for an urgent meeting. Bruce agreed. The reason was not hard to guess. ‘As usual,’ he noted in his diary after seeing Petsche, ‘there is a financial crisis, and the government wants to borrow 80 billion francs.’

Bruce admired Petsche for his courage in the face ill-health – ‘his ankles are swollen, his face is purple’ – and for his refusal to give in to members of his own party who objected bitterly to his stand on taxes and agricultural prices. Petsche’s character, shamelessly original for a politician, appealed to Bruce. When Petsche remarked that his Prime Minister, Queuille, was ‘an adorable man’, Bruce observed in his diary: ‘that term would seem odd if one of our Cabinet officers were to apply it to a President’.

The Bruces were also amused by Petsche’s contempt for the dietary advice of doctors. Evangeline Bruce remembers a lunch where Petsche, explaining that he was on a special regime, was served an ungarnished truffle the size of a small fist as his entrée. His health was so bad that his friends expected his death at almost any moment, but with an inexplicable resilience (curiously reminiscent of France’s economy) his body somehow continued to function in defiance of all received wisdom.

Americans were struck by the way that food played such a ritualistic part in French political life. The day after Petsche asked for the American loan, President Auriol gave a magnificent lunch for Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Chip Bohlen, Bob Murphy and David Bruce at the Élysée Palace. ‘The chef is famous,’ noted Bruce, ‘and the lunch consisted of cold eggs Lucullus, suprême de sole Gallière, poulet grillé Béarnais, fonds d’artichauts Marigny and soufflé glacé Petit Duc.’ He also approved of the wines: Château Carbonnieux 1936, Mouton Rothschild 1940 and Mumm Cordon Rouge 1937.

As if to balance an indulgence reminiscent of the
belle époque,
members of the American Embassy, with the rest of the diplomatic corps, assembled in Notre-Dame the next day for Cardinal Suhard’s memorial mass: a ritual impregnated with the defiant spirit of
vieille France
. General de Gaulle’s interdiction of nearly five years before – Suhard’s punishment for according Pétain’s Minister of Propaganda a mass after his assassination by the Resistance – was an unmentioned, looming memory.

Bruce, however, was soon preoccupied with the Coca-Cola War, which took a decisive turn just after the Bruces came back from a long weekend visit to Château Lafite with Élie and Liliane de Rothschild.

Two senior executives of the Coca-Cola Company, Farley and Makinsky, came to see the ambassador on his return. They told him that they were pushing ahead with their plans to sell Coca-Cola in France. The French government was continuing to resist because of protests from small wine producers, urged on by the Communist Party’s campaign against ‘
la Coca-colonisation de la France
’. So emotional had the whole issue become that many wine producers really believed the claim that soft-drink imports would destroy their livelihoods.

To bar Coca-Cola from the French market was a flagrant violation of the Marshall Plan agreement on free trade. Yet David Bruce, while angered by the dishonest antics of the Communists and the protectionist lobby, was almost as exasperated with his own countrymen. ‘It is a clear case of discrimination,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and we have protested vigorously against it, although I think that the Company’s advertising proposals are psychologically extremely stupid.’ Coca-Cola apparently wanted to ‘engage in their usual advertising displays, including among other features a blazing sign on a 142-foot tower. They have relinquished, rather regretfully, the idea of using the Eiffel Tower.’

The Communist Party in France openly proclaimed that American culture was stifling the nation. Laurent Casanova announced that Henry Miller’s pornography and American crime stories were attacking the soul of France. He would have sounded like an arch-conservative if the target of his hatred had not been the United States and its influence. Yet, as one or two writers have pointed out, the Communists’ xenophobic conspiracy theory owed much to a right-wing, anti-masonic tradition.

To complete this curious reflection of right-wing prejudices, the magazine
Action,
run by Communist writers such as Pierre Courtade and Roger Vailland, attacked ‘the pederasts of the American intelligentsia in Saint-Germain-des-Prés’. In all seriousness it went on to recount: ‘The other day a cavalry colonel in civilian clothes was the recipient of undisguised propositions, even though he was accompanied by his charming wife.’ It was just what one would have expected from a reactionary monarchist publication.

For some time, the sale of Coca-Cola was portrayed in the Communist press as not far short of drug-peddling to infants: ‘Each evening, a Coca-Cola truck stops at the entrance to the Square des Innocents, in the 1st
arrondissement,
and the driver distributes bottles to unaccompanied children who drink it on the spot.’

Once the war ended, the urge to travel as a civilian, not a soldier, became strong. In Britain, there was a longing to escape the austerity of war, socialism and bomb damage. Only a very few, however, were in a position to afford and arrange such a luxury. In the late summer of 1945 Winston Churchill, recovering from his defeat in the general election, went to stay at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. He registered under the
nom de guerre
of Colonel Warden and followed ‘
une véritable cure de Pommery Rosé 1934
’, to use the words of Monsieur Roger, the
chef sommelier,
who had to beg for more supplies.