Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

France’s relationship with the Soviet Union was a little different. France and Russia had been in and out of alliances together for the past half century and Russia still held a special place in French public affection: opinion polls in post-war France consistently revealed a substantial reserve of sympathy for the Soviet Union.5 French diplomats in the aftermath of German defeat could thus hope that a natural concordance of interests—shared fear of Germany and suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’—might translate into sustained Soviet support for French diplomatic goals. Like Churchill, De Gaulle thought and spoke of the USSR as ‘Russia’ and reasoned in grand historical analogies: on his way to Moscow in December 1944, to negotiate a rather meaningless Franco-Russian Treaty against any revival of German aggression, the French leader observed to his entourage that he was dealing with Stalin as François Ie had with Suleiman the Magnificent four centuries earlier: with the difference ‘that in sixteenth-century France there wasn’t a Muslim party’. Stalin, however, did not share French illusions. He had no interest in serving as a counterweight to assist the French in offsetting the foreign policy heft of London and Washington, though this was only finally made clear to the French in April 1947, at the Moscow gathering of Allied foreign ministers, when Molotov refused to back Georges Bidault’s proposals for a separate Rhineland and foreign control of the Ruhr industrial belt. Yet...