This background explains the triumph of the RPF at the municipal elections of October 1947. Obtaining 40 per cent of the vote – a stunning result for a movement that had not existed six months earlier – it won control of thirteen of the largest cities in France including Paris (where de Gaulle’s brother Pierre became the chair of the municipal council), Bordeaux (where Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who had been de Gaulle’s military delegate to Paris in 1944, became mayor), Marseilles, Lille and Strasbourg. The
