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June 20 - August 31, 2025
The British emissary was the Conservative MP Harold Macmillan. De Gaulle, with no idea of Macmillan’s brief, was initially suspicious. In fact Macmillan quickly got the measure of Giraud’s inadequacies, viewing him as ‘an old-fashioned, but charming colonel, who would grace the Turf Club’.70 On
Under Monnet’s influence, on 14 March Giraud delivered what he later called the ‘first democratic speech of my life’.
Two factors encouraged de Gaulle to hold his ground. The first was that troops from the regular French army in North Africa had starting defecting to the Free French forces of Leclerc.
There was no further impediment to de Gaulle leaving. As for the CNR, it met in conditions of ultra-secrecy on 27 May in a flat in the Rue du Four on the Paris Left Bank. Under the chairmanship of Jean Moulin, eight Resistance leaders and the representatives of eight political parties supported a motion calling for a provisional government to be established under the leadership of de Gaulle. By the time the news reached London on 4 June, de Gaulle was already in Algiers.
Giraud’s tactics for ‘unmasking’ de Gaulle could hardly have been more maladroit. At a press conference in Ottawa, he made remarks praising some achievements of National Socialism.
Again Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: ‘What does recognition mean? One can recognize a man as an Emperor or as a Grocer.’3 In the end, each Allied government chose a different formula, somewhere between these extremes.
To do this, it would be necessary to amalgamate the Gaullist London-based National Committee with the existing – and largely Pétainist – administration in Algiers. What worried some Gaullists was how this would affect the nature of ‘Gaullism’. Would it be absorbed by ‘Algiers’ or would ‘Algiers’ be transformed by ‘Gaullism’? The future of Gaullism remained an open question.
Nowhere was de Gaulle more willing to be pragmatic than in the reorganization of the army. His priority was to create an effective fighting force to allow the French to participate in the Allied victory. This meant amalgamating the original Free French forces, which numbered 50,000 by the summer of 1943, with the regular army in North Africa, which numbered 700,000.
There was a striking example of this in November when yet another crisis exploded in the Middle East. The elections that the French had promised to the populations of Syria and Lebanon ever since June 1941 finally took place in September 1943. They resulted in the victory of nationalist candidates. Encouraged by Spears, the new Lebanese ‘government’ announced its intention to abolish the mandate unilaterally.
Despite the rivalries and different political origins of its leaders, the non-Communist Resistance shared the conviction that France had been betrayed by her elites in 1940, and that it was the role of the Resistance not only to expel the Germans but also to spearhead a social and political regeneration of post-war France.
In December 1943 de Gaulle ordered the internment of Boisson, who had fired on the Free French at Dakar, and of Pierre-Etienne Flandin, who had been Pétain’s premier for three weeks at the end of 1940. The decision to intern these individuals outraged Churchill and Roosevelt. Roosevelt remained grateful to Boisson for having rallied West Africa to the Americans at the end of 1942; Flandin was an old friend of Churchill from before the war (despite having supported the Munich Agreement).
During the negotiations with de Gaulle in November 1943, the Communist Central Committee asked why he would not allow Thorez to come to Algiers from Moscow. If it was held against Thorez that he had deserted in 1939 how was this different from de Gaulle who had ‘deserted’ in 1940?
De Gaulle may now have felt confident that he had sufficiently domesticated the Resistance. If so, he had not fully grasped how rapidly the Communists were extending their influence over
Although de Gaulle never missed an opportunity to alert the Allies to the Communist threat, he did not take it as seriously as he pretended. Corsica had offered a test case of what might happen at the Liberation.
This was not the first time that he had speculated about carving a new state of Wallonia out of French territory. Even if such an idea was not official American policy, it revealed Roosevelt’s assumption that France would be treated after the war as a defeated nation, not as a partner in victory.
Had it been worthwhile? Everything de Gaulle refused on 6 June, he had conceded three days later. At the height of the conflict, Cadogan commented: ‘We always start by putting ourselves in the wrong, and then de Gaulle puts himself more in the wrong. He deserves to lose the rubber.’18 It
Taking his leave of Montgomery, de Gaulle had casually remarked to him that Coulet and three other people would be staying behind in Bayeux. Montgomery, who did not grasp the significance of this information – ‘I have no idea what is their function’
Just before leaving, de Gaulle told Coulet, ‘Don’t give them any politics; that is not what they want.’ Coulet followed this advice. He found himself dealing with citizens who mostly harboured no negative feelings towards Pétain. Even the leader of the local liberation committee had a portrait of Pétain in his house. The bishop was ardently Pétainist and what worried him most was that Coulet was Protestant.
Juin’s slow progress up the Italian peninsula in the face of tenacious German opposition did not have the epic quality of Leclerc’s marches across the desert or of Koenig’s David against Rommel’s Goliath at Bir Hakeim, but it was the first time that de Gaulle could justifiably claim that his armies were playing a part in the Allied victory.
(What de Gaulle did not know was that Roosevelt passed on the submarine at Christmas to his youngest grandchild Curtis. When his wife pointed out that it was not proper to dispose in this way of a present from a head of state, Roosevelt replied that de Gaulle was only head of ‘some French committee’.)38
Jacques Chaban-Delmas,
Pierre Villon,
Maurice Thorez
By 9 September, de Gaulle had formed his new government. It was a careful balance of Free French, resisters, former politicians (providing they had not blotted their copybook under Vichy) and civil servants or experts.
De Gaulle had no illusions about the conduct of his compatriots under Occupation but his priority was national unity. Cynicism towards humanity in general inured him against being vengeful towards individuals in particular.
In March 1944 in a speech in Algiers, de Gaulle floated publicly a different plan for a ‘sort of Western grouping’. This would be a ‘strategic and economic federation’ including Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, and also the Ruhr and Rhineland, with Britain associated if she wished to be. The Channel, the Rhine and the Mediterranean would be the ‘arteries’ of this grouping. Massigli was instructed to study the idea.29 This was different in two ways from de Gaulle’s suggestion to Monnet, because it seemed to envisage British participation, and because the adjective ‘western’ implied that the
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No detailed proposals could be drafted without some idea of what the Allies were thinking, but already it was clear that de Gaulle’s preference was to eliminate any central German authority – breaking Germany up into some form of pre-1870 confederation – to incorporate the Rhineland and the Saar into France, and to find a way of neutralizing the industrial might of the Ruhr.
What may have annoyed the General, since he valued professionalism and orderly working habits, was that Bidault’s were erratic and his lifestyle bohemian. He often received journalists in his dressing gown and it was soon common knowledge in Paris that he was often the worse for drink.
Despite these tensions French armies fought hard in Lorraine and Alsace during the winter of 1944. De Lattre’s troops took Mulhouse on 21 November and Leclerc liberated Strasbourg on 23 November (despite the order that de Lattre should have this honour so as to have a victory to match Juin’s in Rome and Leclerc’s in Paris). The liberation of Strasbourg was a hugely symbolic moment, allowing Leclerc to respect the famous oath he had taken at Kufra four years earlier.
But neither threats nor charm worked in this case, and the French had to leave Stuttgart. One result of the mini-crisis over the city was to poison his relations with a new President who harboured none of the anti-Gaullist animus of his predecessor.
For this reason, in January 1944 the CFLN had organized a major conference at Brazzaville to discuss the future of Black Africa. This event later won de Gaulle the reputation of a prophet of decolonization, but the truth is more complicated than the ‘myth of Brazzaville’.
Ferhat Abbas
New Caledonia).
Despite these signs that de Gaulle’s ideas were not fixed, for the moment French foreign policy seemed to have reached an impasse. De Gaulle, over Stuttgart, Val d’Aosta, Syria, Indo-China, had antagonized almost everyone. Oliver Harvey, the most consistently pro-Gaullist Foreign Office official, commented after the Syrian crisis: ‘De Gaulle has shown himself to be impossible. We can never have normal relations with such a man.’
In reality de Gaulle’s intransigence had always been tempered by a strong dose of pragmatism. On several occasions he pushed the Free French to the brink of rupture with the Allies and then drew back.
In truth the rhetoric of the Resistance about moral and social ‘revolution’ was vague when it came to details. In March 1944, the CNR had produced a programme centred on the idea of universal welfare and extensive nationalizations.
Boris had the support of the Socialist André Philip6 and also of the talented young politician Pierre Mendès France. In 1932, Mendès France, on the left wing of the centrist Radical Party, had been the youngest député in parliament. Unusual among French politicians for his interest in economics, Mendès France first met Boris while serving in a junior capacity in Blum’s short-lived second government in 1938.
De Gaulle’s provisional government did carry out some nationalizations in the months after Liberation – of the Renault car factory and some coal-mining companies – but these were motivated more by the urge to punish their owners for collaboration than by any coherent strategy for structural reform of the economy.
The most important legacy of the Revolution of 1789 for French political culture was a suspicion of executive authority.15
Moderate monarchists, converted to the inevitability of a republic, managed to introduce elements to dilute the principles of republicanism in what became the Republic of 1875.
Michel Debré,
the age of 32 it seemed that my life had found its reward and also its completion.’22 Although at their second meeting five months later he had failed to convince de Gaulle of the urgency of tackling constitutional issues, Debré was invited in March 1945 to join the General’s cabinet.
Not far behind, with 4.5 million votes, came the Christian Democrat Party, the MRP (23 per cent and 152 seats). This was a new party founded to give a voice to the many Catholics who had played a role in the Resistance. It included resisters like Bidault and members of the Free French like Maurice Schumann.
The real conflict came next. As de Gaulle prepared to form his government, Thorez demanded that, as the largest party, the Communists should be granted the three key ministries of the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Defence.
On 19 November, he summoned the Canadian Ambassador in the middle of the night to explore the possibility of going to Canada as a private citizen for a period if he proved unable to form a government.33
Coming from a monarchist family, he carried in his head a longer history of France where the Republic was only one of the forms assumed by the state. In the Bayeux speech the word ‘state’ appears eleven times and the word ‘republic’ is never mentioned except to recall the failed precedents of the First, Second and Third French Republics, and those of Weimar and Spain.
De Gaulle equally gave no encouragement to Capitant, who had set up after the Bayeux speech a movement calling itself the Union Gaulliste to campaign for de Gaulle’s ideas.
Just as de Gaulle was predicting the end of France, he was planning his next move. He realized that he had played his cards badly in 1946. As he remarked on various occasions during these days, ‘we are going to have to begin again from zero.’
Although de Gaulle changed his mind because everything else had failed, he still hoped initially that the RPF would remain above party. Its members were not required to leave whatever party they belonged to. But the other political parties rapidly squashed any idea of ‘dual membership’. The Communists and Socialists were obviously never going to allow it, and the MRP quickly moved to forbid it as well. Two prominent MRP members, Edmond Michelet and Louis Terrenoire, both of whom had been in the Resistance, were expelled from their party when they chose to join the RPF.
As well as attacking the Communists as an internal enemy, the RPF also offered a positive alternative to Marxist class struggle by developing a distinctive social doctrine. This was encapsulated in the idea of an ‘association’ between employers and workers, capital and labour.
