Postwar

Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs.

200

This acronym had a distinct political use: by reviving the name of an eighteenth-century French silver coin it helped assuage Parisian discomfort at having to acknowledge West Germany’s emerging primacy in the affairs of Europe.

201

Quoted in Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods (NY, Oxford, 1996), p. 180.

202

Most notoriously on October 17th 1961, when the French police murdered an estimated two hundred Algerians, many of them drowned in the Seine, following a protest march through Paris. The Chief of Police at the time was Maurice Papon, later indicted and found guilty of crimes against humanity for his collaboration in the wartime rounding up and despatch of French Jews to Auschwitz. See Epilogue.

203

The Provisionals took their name from the April 24th 1916 declaration in Dublin, when the insurrectionists proclaimed a provisional government.

204

It was estimated at the time that the cost of maintaining a British presence in Northern Ireland was ?3 billion per annum, at a time when London was hard pushed to balance its budget.

205

The unimpeachably law-abiding French Socialist Party even formed a ‘Committee for the Defense of Human Rights’ in the Federal Republic, offering to provide expertise and practical help to defendants accused of terrorist acts there.

206

As in Germany, the police had actually found the leaders at one point, only to lose them again. Arrested in 1974, Renato Curcio escaped from prison in February 1975, only to be recaptured eleven months later.

207

Initially released, Negri was re-arrested in 1983. In June 1984 he was tried and condemned to thirty years in prison.

208

One such network, the infamous ‘P2 Lodge’, was a mysterious Masonic web of right-wing politicians, bankers, soldiers and policemen, organized by Licio Gelli, a former militant in Mussolini’s ‘Social Republic’ from 1943 to 1945. Its 962 members included thirty generals, eight admirals, forty-three parliamentary deputies, three active Cabinet Ministers and a fair cross-representation of the highest ranks of industry and the private banking sector.

209

West European punk left a particularly ugly aftertaste in the waning years of Communist Eastern Europe, where it was taken up by nihilistic underground bands cynically fastening on to a heritage of political and musical dissidence for their own ends. In a repellent blend of pornography and political incorrectness, the Spions, a Hungarian punk group of the Eighties, recorded ‘Anna Frank’: ‘A little forced intercourse before they come and take you away, Anna Frank! Make love to me! Anna Frank! Cry you bitch! Anna Frank! Otherwise I’ll give you up! Anna Frank—the boys are waiting for you.’

210

In Britain this trend could be traced to longstanding enthusiasms for vegetarianism, ‘authentic’ building and clothing materials and the like—often overlapping with networks of socialist societies and rambling clubs: the Left’s response to the hunting, shooting and fishing of the conservative set. In continental Europe the cultures of both Left and Right reflected a very different history. Whereas Britain’s Good Food Guide was founded and edited by Fabian socialists and presented from the outset as a contribution to class warfare on the gastronomic front, France’s Guide Michelin was always and only a commercial enterprise, albeit directed to much the same audience.

211