Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

guaranteed by reducing Germany to a collection of minor states restricted to agriculture, while France was built up as the industrial giant of Europe. De Gaulle dismissed Truman’s view that the problem in establishing peace was essentially economic. Truman listened politely. He even put up with de Gaulle’s little lecture on ‘why France saw the world in a less simplistic manner than did the United States’.
    De Gaulle might have taken a slightly different line if he had been aware of a briefing document given to Truman before their meeting. This report, if it deserves the term, conveyed in a series of crude caricatures the attitude still prevalent in US government circles. It summarized France thus: ‘A country which, from the highest in the government down to the poorest peasant, is sitting back waiting for something to happen; which is completely unaware of American sympathy and aid; in which the cost of living permits only the rich to really subsist; a country where the young, from the best to the lowestfamilies, live and thrive on the black market; a country with such an inferiority complex that frank discussion is difficult if not impossible; a country convinced that the United States and Russia will have to fight it out in a war in the near future, and which is convinced that in the interim the Communists will control Europe.’ This diatribe ran on for three pages. It recommended that de Gaulle should be ‘sent back to France with a sufficiently striking and publicized diplomatic victory to ensure the continuance of his government’, provided he agreed to certain commitments, and that ‘a sizeable American armed force should be kept in France to protect our lines of communication and supply to our occupying force in Germany’.
    ‘Conclusion: The French people in their present desperate and discouraged state resemble to a frightening degree the German people twelve years ago. Another really bad winter and the Allies may find that they have substituted the double cross of Lorraine for the crooked cross of Munich. This would not necessarily be de Gaulle’s personal desire – but events might force his hand. It behoves us to move fast and forcefully.’
    President Truman was fortunately not burdened by Roosevelt’s historic dislike of de Gaulle, and on the whole their meetings passed off well. But there was one element in this document with which Truman firmly agreed, and that was the protection of military lines of communication. A year later he was to show that he would be prepared to move troops into France to secure the rear of the American forces in Germany, without informing the French government until the very last moment.
    The ‘full and free’ elections for which Roosevelt had originally wanted to wait before recognizing de Gaulle finally took place on Sunday, 21 October 1945. Combined with the elections for a Constituent Assembly was a referendumon the basis for a new Constitution. Only the Radicals wanted to retain the discredited Third Republic. The main question for a Fourth Republic was whether the Assembly should be given supreme powers, as the Communists especially demanded, or restricted powers, as de Gaulle insisted. Sixty-six per cent of the electorate agreed with him that the Assembly’s powers should be restricted, for it was widely held that France’s capitulation in 1940 was due to the weakness of the executive power under the Third Republic.
    As for the elections to the Assembly, predictions on the outcome were mixed. Many people expected the middle class to vote Socialist as the best way of keeping out the Communists. But the conservative vote went elsewhere: to the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, headed by Maurice Schumann. Although impeccably liberal and resistant, the Catholic MRP bore out the jibe that it was a ‘Machine à Ramasser les Pétainistes’, because after the collapse of Vichy, no credible right-wing party remained. This deficiency falsified the post-war political spectrum from the start.
    The MRP did very well in traditionally conservative areas such as Brittany, Normandy and Alsace, and gathered in the considerable quantity of Pétainists in Paris. These were the first general elections in which women had the right to vote, a fact which undoubtedly benefited the MRP, for, as all the polls showed, women were generally more conservative and pious than men.
    The final result gave the Communists 159 seats, the Socialists 146 and the MRP 152. The