The British, too, were facing these postwar years of austerity with ration books and stoicism, but a strong domestic Communist Party generating strikes lent an added complication to the French situation. There was a profound fear in 1948 that communism might win the ‘Cold War’, a new term now being used to describe deteriorating relations between America and the Soviet Union. Nancy Mitford told Evelyn Waugh about her terrors of the Russian invasion: ‘I am quite simply frightened. I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children, I can take a pill and say goodbye.’
The divisions in French society, even if not discussed, ran deep, not just between Gaullists, who argued that resistance was pure patriotism involving personal sacrifice for the public good, and communists, who believed that resistance embodied an idea of social revolution, but among the many in France who had suffered during the war years, including racial and political déportés, Jews who had been in hiding throughout the war, refugees, labour conscripts, foreigners who could not prove French nationality, Gypsies and a miscellaneous population of those whom Vichy had decided were undesirable.
New laws in August 1948 created two different titles for persecution victims: the more prestigious one of déporté or interné de la Résistance was reserved for resisters and involved higher benefits than the lesser one of déporté or interné politique, which was for victims without resistance credentials. This distinction meant that Jews, Gypsies and other racial déportés were classified as victims, who would not qualify for the higher title; and that women who might, for example, have sheltered evading airmen or others on the run but had not joined one of the officially recognized military formations, also might not qualify. In addition, there was also the question of what constituted a ‘combatant’ – a word which resonated with military glory from the First World War since resisters who could prove that they were combatants, rather than civilians, were able to claim not only higher financial payments but also certain privileges such as the useful carte du combatant. It was for that reason that one woman who had survived Auschwitz described her fellow camp survivors as ‘Combatants without Weapons’. She maintained that withstanding Nazi dehumanization was a type of combat. For most women, their activities may have been equally risky and dangerous and in Nazi eyes deserving of punishment, but that did not entitle them to use the word ‘combatant’.
The laws, far from resolving issues, merely pushed them aside for a while. Political divisions were also papered over rather than healed. Some believed that the capitalists had profited from the war, as shown by businesses such as Renault, which had collaborated to help the Nazi war machine and so had flourished, while the communists had resisted and suffered. But the communists were able to draw on extra support from, unpredictably, the anti-American right wing, who may not have objected so loudly to the German Occupation but who saw the United States as the new occupying power. Paul Morand wrote to Josée de Chambrun, still belligerently fighting to clear her dead father’s name: ‘What a tonic to see such magnificent pleasures in the midst of destitute Europe propped up by the Marshall Plan … and to enjoy splendid entertainments for which we are indebted neither to a couturier nor to an aunt, pimp, spy or the Coca-Cola Corporation.’ Morand’s friend, Misia Sert, similarly railed against ‘the banality of France becoming Americanized’, while the French communist newspaper L’Humanité asked: ‘will we be coca-colonized?’ Even the arch-British diplomat Harold Nicolson joined in, insisting it was not that the Europeans ‘were anti-American, just that they were frightened that the destinies of the world should be in the hands of a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate, the emotions of a spinster and the brain of a pea hen’.
But such negative attitudes did little to stem the appeal of Paris for individual American tourists, never sure if they were welcomed, envied or resented or all three, just hungry to enjoy its charms once more aided by the buying power of the strong dollar. The capital was, slowly, becoming a fashionable destination for well-heeled young American girls to visit as part of their education. Norine Murphy, just twenty, and her twenty-two-year-old sister Marilyn were in the vanguard in the summer of 1948 at a time when many American parents felt that the war was insufficiently distant for safety. The Murphy parents were, however, concerned enough that they sewed a supply of dollar bills into the girls’ shoulder pads, partly to ensure that they could buy food but also to bribe a border guard should they have to leave suddenly, a real worry at the time. On the Queen Elizabeth, the sisters noticed the teenage actress Elizabeth Taylor, almost the only other young woman on board, with her mother, and the three American girls took tea and played cards together most days.