Life in France during the Cold War

For this blog post, I decided to interview my dad to find out what life in Europe was like during the Cold War. I asked him what the single event in the Cold War that he most remembered, and why. His answer was the Six-day War between Israel and Egypt that in fact was one of the "hot wars" that were the products of the Cold War.

He said that the war seemed to be a localized conflict in the Middle East, but was in fact a manifestation of the Cold War that was going on between the USA and the USSR. In the Six Day War, the USA sided with Israel, and the USSR, with Egypt. During the entirety of the war, my dad's parents wouldn't speak to him at all, not even at family meals, because they were constantly listening to the radio, trying to find out the latest news regarding the conflict.

One reason for this may be the fact that people in France were very paranoid about a Communist invasion, not such much in the government, like the USA, but in a military sense. There was a widespread and widely believed rumor that it would only take East German tanks a total of 24 hours to drive from the Berlin Wall to Paris. Coupled to this was the fact that my dad grew up in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine, a region that had been invaded half a dozen times in the last century.

In conclusion, the main emotion of the Six Days' War, and the Cold War in general, was a sense of paranoia, and imminent crisis, because of Western Europe's proximity to the USSR. This feeling was probably even worse than that in the USA because the USA at least was isolated from the rest of the world by the oceans.