On the matter of De Gaulle: Anti-American rebel, anti-communist insurance or both?

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Chief commenter is Jacques Pauwels.

Jacques Pauwels De Gaulle is mentioned in this book review, “France’s Passage from the German to the American Eras”:

In two of her books, Le choix de la Defaite: les elites francaises dans les annees 1930 and De Munich a Vichy, l’assassinat de la 3e Republique 1938–1940 (Paris, Armand Colin, 2010 and 2008), Annie Lacroix-Riz, contemporary history specialist and professor at Paris 7 University, explained how the elite of French society in the 1930s—politicians, high-ranking military officers, industrialists, bankers, the high clergy, and so forth—desired and planned the “strange defeat” of 1940. It was through this betrayal that the elite was able to triumph over the leftist “enemy within,” prevent further political and social reforms such as those introduced by the Popular Front, and eliminate the system, too democratic to its taste, of the Third Republic in favor of the authoritarian and collaborationist Vichy regime. This regime pleased all elements of the country’s elite, but particularly employers, and while it was a paradise for them, it was a hell for wage-earners, and for the French people in general, as she demonstrated in another book, Industriels et banquiers sous l’Occupation (Armand Colin, Paris, 2013). In a new study, Les Elites francaises entre 1940 et 1944 (Armand Colin, Paris, 2016), the historian focuses on another aspect of the saga of the top layer of French society in the1930s and 1940s: the passage from German to American tutelage.

"La résistance? C'était toujours les communistes et socialistes!"—M. Thorez

Defeats suffered by the Wehrmacht at Moscow (end of 1941) and especially Stalingrad (winter 1942–1943), as well as the entry of the U.S. into the war and the Anglo-American landings in North Africa (November 1942) made it clear to the French elites that Germany would lose the war, and the inevitable Soviet victory would likely produce the triumph of the “mainly working-class and communist” Resistance in France, just deserts for the collaborators, and revolutionary changes that might spell the end of their wealth, power, and privileges. To avoid such a potentially catastrophic scenario, the majority of politicians, military leaders, industrialists, bankers, and other members of France’s elite, directly or indirectly responsible for the betrayal of 1940 and implicated in the crimes of Vichy’s repressive and even murderous collaborator regime, discreetly began to abandon the sinking German ship and prepare for an “American future.” They hoped that the German occupation of France would be followed by a U.S. occupation, which would avoid “disorder,” their byword for revolutionary change associated withthe Resistance; and in the contextof a Pax Americana engendered by an American victory, their pro-Nazi sins would be forgiven and forgotten, allowing them to maintain their traditional privileges as well as some of the new privileges acquired under the auspices of the Vichy regime. They looked forward to a new France that, under American auspices, would reveal itself to be a “Vichy without Vichy.”

It was possible to dream of this outcome because American leaders also hated the idea of communists and other Resisters taking power in France upon the end of the German occupation, introducing “profound [political and socialeconomic] changes” and perhaps opening the door to Soviet influence. Washington had nothing against the Vichy regime, with which it maintained good diplomatic relations until January 1943, and the U.S. authorities, headed by Roosevelt, long hoped that, after the war, Petain or one of the other Vichy leaders not too soiled by their germanophilia—such as Weygand and Darlan— would remain in power in France, perhaps after a slight “parliamentary patching” of the same system. “The American future” was concocted during negotiations in North Africa, where the U.S. had several consulates, in Spain and Switzerland, where Bern was the home base of the American secret agent Allen Dulles, who “watched over the future of France” and of Europe in general.

France’s Nazi masters tolerated these initiatives, because the Reich’s elite was planning for its own “American future,” which involved industrialists and German bankers with good American contacts—including Dulles—and even heads of the SS/Gestapo. In order to allow some of the German elite’s keenest Hitler-“enablers” and supporters/beneficiaries of his regime, for example, the banker Hjalmar Schacht, to pose as “resisters” when the Third Reich would finally crumble, they were interned in concentration camps such as Dachau, but in VIP-sections where they were “entirely separated from the mass of the inmates of the camp itself” and well treated. Similarly, the German authorities in France were kind enough to arrest many prominent collaborators and “deport” them to the Reich, to wait out the end of the war in a comfortable “detention of honour,” for example, in hotels in Bad Godesberg and the Tyrol. This experience would serve as a “badge of ‘resistance’,” allowing them to pose as patriotic heroes on their return to France in1945. In 1940, when the French elite opted for a German tutor to “safeguard their wealth,” a compatible French leader, Petain, was already waiting in the wings.
(to be continued)
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Jacques Pauwels Choosing a French leader compatible with the new, American tutor turned out to be far less easy. The tandem of the French elite and the American authorities detested what may now appear to have been the obvious choice, namely Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the “Free French.” The reason? They regarded de Gaulle as a “harbinger of bolshevism,” as nothing more than “a springboard to power for the communists.” It was only very late, namely on October 23, 1944, several months after the landing in Normandy and the beginning of the liberation of the country, that de Gaulle was recognized officially by Washington as head of the provisional government of the French Republic. This became possible because of several factors. First, the Americans had come to realize that the French people would not tolerate that “the Vichy-system might remain in place.” Conversely, they understood that de Gaulle, a paragon of patriotism, enjoyed great popularity and the support of a large part of the Resistance. Therefore, they needed him to “neutralize the communists as soon as the hostilities came to an end.” Second, de Gaulle indulged the Americans by adopting a “normal” policy, that is, a conservative policy that would not in any way threaten “the social-economic status quo”; and he undertook to “recycle” numerous Vichy-collaborators who happened to be favorites of the Americans. Third, the leader of the “Free French” distanced himself from the Soviet Union. In this manner, Gaullism was “made respectable” and de Gaulle discreetly morphed into the kind of “right-wing leader” that was acceptable to both the French elite and the Americans, successors of the Germans in the role of “protectors” of the interests of the elite. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the real new masters of France—and most of the rest of Europe—he remained a kind of “rebel” who would continue to give them headaches.

Like other books by Annie Lacroix-Riz, Les Elites francaises entre 1940 et 1944 is a surprising, fascinating study, rigorously and thoroughly documented. In her previous book, Aux origines du carcan europeen (1900–1960): La France sous influence allemande et americaine (Paris, Editions Delga, 2014), we learn how, at the end of World War II, the U.S. were able to consolidate their economic and political domination of Western Europe through the creation of European institutions. This was done in collaboration with French, German, and other elites, including “recycled” Vichy-collaborators such as Jean Monnet. In this context too, their former antagonist, de Gaulle, frequently revealed himself to be a nuisance. On the other hand, without de Gaulle, America would have found it much harder, and perhaps even impossible, to succeed Nazi Germany as the hegemon of France and most of Europe. France’s elite consisted, not exclusively but certainly overwhelmingly, of industrialists and bankers, of “big business.” That French big business meekly allowed itself to be surbordinated, first to a German, and subsequently to an American “tutor,” can only be properly understood in the context of the increasing rivalries and conflicts among imperialist systems in the 20th century, from WW I to II, described in my contribution to the Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. In 1945, the U.S. emerged as the winner thanks to the only serious challenger, Nazi Germany, being eliminated by the Soviet Union, embodiment of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism in general. In France, big business feared being obliterated by a triumph of its leftist “interior enemy,” a triumph that was likely to mirror the victory of the Soviets over the Nazis and the latter’s withdrawal from France. Becoming a “junior partner” of U.S. imperialism appeared to be the only way to escape this nasty fate.

In the late summer of 1944 it was the turn of France and Belgium to be liberated. The Americans and their British partner now had the opportunity to help decide which kind of political and socio-economic systems would emerge in these countries. Their attention naturally focused on France, a country that only a few years earlier had still loomed as a major power of the calibre of the United States and Great Britain. In France, however, the situation was extremely complex. In Vichy, Marshall Pétain presided over a collaborator regime that cultivated the conservative traditions of Ancien Regime France, in other words of France before the Great Revolution of 1789, and which considered itself, and was considered by many Frenchmen, to be the legitimate government of the country. In London, however, a certain Charles de Gaulle, also a conservative man, fulminated as much against Vichy as against the Germans and in French-language BBC broadcasts spoke eloquently of a rebirth of France that could and would become reality under his authoritarian leadership.
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In occupied France itself, a variety of resistance groups were active. The Resistance Front, a broad movement in which the communists played an important role although they did not control the leadership, was determined that after the war the clock would not simply be turned back to 1939; in contrast to both Pétain and de Gaulle, the rank and file as well as Resistance leaders dreamed of more or less radical social and economic reforms that were eventually codified in the “Charter of the Resistance” of March 1944. (This charter called for “the introduction of a genuine economic and social democracy, involving the expropriation of the big economic and financial organizations” and “the socialization [le retour à la Nation] of the [most important] means of production such as sources of energy and mineral wealth, and of the insurance companies and great banks.”) Virtually all members of the Resistance despised Pétain and many of them found de Gaulle not only politically too authoritarian but also socially too conservative. The personality of de Gaulle, then, definitely did not dominate the Resistance, as many would learn to assume after the war, and in France itself the Gaullists remained a minority for the duration of the war.
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“Although precise figures do not exist,” writes Kolko, “within France itself the Resistance groups that were Gaullist in ideology were always in a small minority [and] in many key parts of France they hardly existed at all.” In spite of this, de Gaulle enjoyed considerable influence on the Resistance, mainly because of his contacts in Great Britain, which controlled the supply of weapons to the patriots in France. Churchill hoped to manipulate de Gaulle for his own purposes: not only to eliminate communist influence in France itself but also to integrate France into a post-war block of Western European countries that, under Great Britain’s leadership, might be able to pit itself against the United States and the USSR, the two countries whose emergence as superpowers Churchill foresaw and feared. As for American leaders, including President Roosevelt, they had little feeling and even less understanding for the French imbroglio.
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They found it mystifying that the French patriots appeared to long for more than just the withdrawal of the Germans from their country and the return of the political, social, and economic status quo. The US authorities were as concerned as Churchill about the radical tendencies in general, and the communist influence in particular, within the Resistance and about this movement’s relatively radical socio-economic plans for the future. Such plans might have enjoyed wide popular support within France itself, but they did not fit into the conservative vision of the liberators. The Roosevelt administration actually preferred the collaborator Pétain over a resistance that turned out to be so left-oriented, and also over de Gaulle, perceived as a chauvinistic Frenchman `who was insufficiently subservient to London and Washington. In the White House the latter was considered almost intolerable, and not without reason he was also seen as a potential puppet of Churchill, who would favour British rather than American interests in post-war France. (continued below)