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Liberation Authorities

Legitimizing the State from Above and Below

TO LIBERATE FRANCE in 1944, the Allies had to force the Wehrmacht from French soil. The French also had to create a new regime, a task that other occupied countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands were spared. Those countries had royal families and governments-in-exile empowered to restore the sovereignty of constitutional monarchies, once the Germans had gone. The French had no such recourse to a restoration. Parliament had effectively buried the Third Republic after the defeat of 1940 when it gave Philippe Pétain full powers to govern and to write a new constitution (which he chose to delay until peace returned to Europe). And the Vichy regime that he and Pierre Laval created lost all credibility by 1944 through its collaboration with the enemy, its own shadowy war against the Resistance, and its ineffectiveness in protecting, even properly feeding, the French people.1 Liberation, then, gave de Gaulle and the Resistance the opportunity and the duty to start anew. They had a vast, centuries-old state apparatus to work with: a still-functioning tax and education system, an army reassembled in Africa and Britain to join the Allied campaign, and legions of civil servants prepared to adapt to regime change as their predecessors had done, so many times before, since 1789. What’s more, many policemen, schoolteachers, and high-level public officials had become affiliated with the Resistance by the summer of 1944.
Still, if the rudimentary institutional continuity of government was one thing, the state’s authority was another. That required efficacy—the capacity of a new regime to deliver justice, security, and material well-being after years of deprivation on all three counts. And it required legitimacy, both the formal kind conferred by elections and a new constitution, and the informal kind derived from the respect citizens accord their leaders and institutions. Efficacy had to be proven, and informal legitimacy earned. Neither came automatically in the summer and fall of 1944 when, after D-Day’s Normandy invasion, the unified forces of de Gaulle’s Free France and the internal Resistance sought to establish a new republic on the heels of the Allied advance. True, over the preceding year in Algiers, de Gaulle had gradually put together the rudiments of a government-in-the-making: the National Committee of French Liberation (Comité français de libération nationale or CFLN), with representatives of the many political tendencies within the Resistance, and with a coterie of potential ministers-in-waiting. While still headquartered in Algiers and London, the CFLN became the Provisional Government of the French Republic on 3 June 1944, three days before D-Day. But jockeying for power within this nascent governing group, especially between Gaullists and Communists, remained intense as the Liberation began. Nor was it clear to French leaders how much room their American and British allies would give them to carry out regime change as they wanted to. Roosevelt harbored doubts about de Gaulle’s popularity and his commitment to democratic rule. Moreover, given the political wreckage Vichy officials were leaving behind and the tasks that lay ahead, no one could know at the Liberation exactly what kind of republican state—what new blend of democratic, paternalistic, technocratic, and even Bonapartist (authoritarian) qualities—would emerge from the long, practical business of repairing France’s social fabric and reshaping its economy.
To see how public officials and societal groups navigated through these turbulent waters of regime change in 1944–1945, this chapter explores, first, how de Gaulle maneuvered to restore state authority “from above,” and then how citizens’ initiatives locally had the effect of expanding state authority “from below.” The dual dynamic set the stage for politicians, civil servants, and policy experts to use a reinvigorated state to embark on postwar reconstruction, even as it also inaugurated a saga of contestation between public officials and societal groups that would continue through the Fourth Republic.

Renewing State Authority from Above

General de Gaulle, more single-mindedly than anyone else in the Resistance, regarded the Liberation as a task of restoring state authority. “The feebleness of the state,” in his view, had made France ill-prepared for war in 1940. Putting “the state back on its feet,” he later wrote in his war memoirs, would now be the “sine qua non of the country’s recovery.”2 Most every major objective he pursued during the first months of the Liberation era—joining the continuing Allied military campaign against Germany, integrating Resistance fighters into the regular army, restoring civic order, rebuilding national unity across the Hexagon (mainland France), reasserting France’s global standing via an empire—served the end of bolstering state authority. This statist way of looking at the Liberation came easily to a military professional such as de Gaulle, but it also drew on a venerable tradition of regarding France itself as being the creation of more than a millennium of state-building. De Gaulle also understood that reestablishing state legitimacy went hand in hand with restoring French sovereignty, something most citizens craved after the humiliation of the Occupation and amid the not so subtle sense of national embarrassment that it took the Allies, and not the Resistance alone, to liberate France. Hence, the willingness of so many of de Gaulle’s compatriots to embrace the patriotic conceit that he articulated so movingly at the Hôtel de Ville on the night of August 25, 1944, proclaiming Paris liberated, “liberated by the people of Paris with help from the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, of the France that is fighting, the only France, the real France, eternal France.”3
But if most everyone at the Liberation shared the aspiration of restoring France’s sovereignty, they disagreed about how strong or centralized or democratic a post-Liberation state should be. De Gaulle favored a presidential system with robust executive authority and centralized control. This view echoed what conservatives such as former prime minister André Tardieu had espoused during a rancorous, if in the end fruitless, national debate in the 1930s about what at the time was dubbed “state reform.” But de Gaulle’s well-known insistence on the primacy of state restoration and the need for a powerful executive evoked sharply differing views in the Resistance. Maxime Blocq-Mascart, for example, a businessman and leader of the conservative resistance group, OCM (Organisation civile et militaire, the Civilian and Military Organization), also wanted a strong executive, and he urged de Gaulle to promulgate a new constitution for that purpose immediately at the Liberation—an idea de Gaulle rejected.4 The General knew the limits of his legitimacy in the summer of 1944. Socialists and Communists, though eager for an expanded, activist state to carry through the ambitious social and economic postwar agenda of the National Resistance Council, had deep reservations about a strong executive. Indeed, Communists were dead set against a presidential system that would almost surely concentrate power in a non-Communist executive.5 In the constitutional debates to come in 1945 they would redeploy the old left-wing argument for a strong single-chamber Parliament. Still others in the Resistance had doubts about relying too much on the state. Leaders of the new Christian Democratic Party (the MRP) were still Catholic enough to fear an overweaning (and potentially anticlerical) republican state. They championed the associational life of civil society, Catholic and otherwise, as the necessary counterbalance to an expanding postwar government. And then there were a number of Resistance intellectuals, such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Emmanuel Mounier, who regarded choice-making, risk-taking individuals—brought into their own in the Resistance and anchored more in society than in the state—as France’s true propagators of national renewal. They believed the solidarities that resisters had built in the underground could give rise to new forms of national unity, transcending divisions of class and self-interest. German and Vichy repression had made them leery of expanding the state’s power to police society. They had much less to say about the positive uses of state power than did the planners for the postwar reconstruction or the party activists of the National Council of the Resistance.6
Beneath this broad spectrum of views about the how much power the postwar state should exert and how its authority ought to be concentrated lay a deeper distinction between de Gaulle and his lieutenants, on the one hand, working in London and Algiers to plan the establishment of the Provisional Government in the wake of the Allied invasion, and the internal Resistance, on the other, surviving amid Nazi terror and the Vichy militias and unsure what kind of republic de Gaulle hoped to build. Both wings of the Resistance had worked hard from 1942 to the summer of 1944 to become a unified force of national liberation. Still, they harbored starkly different views of where the legitimacy for a new republic lay. For many members of the internal Resistance it resided in the moral rectitude and democratic qualities of a new governing elite, created not by privilege or formal schooling but by the Resistance experience itself. Jean-Paul Sartre would famously capture this vision in “The Republic of Silence,” the brief essay he read over the radio a few days after the liberation of Paris. “The Resistance was a true democracy,” he said, because the risks of resistance work, taken under threat of imprisonment, deportation, and death, posed “for the soldier as for the commander, the same danger, the same forsakenness, the same total responsibility, the same absolute liberty within discipline. Thus, in darkness and in blood, a Republic was established, the strongest of Republics.”7 The internal Resistance counted on a purge of collaborators and a proliferation of local liberation committees to give this new moral elite its chance to govern in a new republic. This outlook also dovetailed with Communist Party ambitions to be a major force in postwar political life. By the eve of the Liberation, Communists held twenty-two of the thirty-eight highest posts in the internal Resistance.8
In de Gaulle’s mind, by contrast, legitimacy still came from where it always had in France, from its enduring institutions. He sought to frame the Liberation as both political rupture and institutional continuity: he rejected the idea of restoring the Third Republic, which in any event only a small minority advocated by 1944, and he reaffirmed the obligation of the state administrative apparatus to carry on its duties. By restoring republican authority as quickly as he could and removing the most obvious of Vichy loyalists, he hoped to cut short the work of the liberation committees. He feared them as a source of local power for the Communist Party, especially in southern France where the Resistance flourished most.
For all the political preparations de Gaulle had made in London and Algiers to assume power at the Liberation, he could not know in advance how the French people would receive him when he finally returned to France. In a country riven by division, he did not take their enthusiasm for him for granted. The chance to test his appeal came eight days after D-Day when he made an unannounced, carefully orchestrated visit to the just-liberated Norman town of Bayeux. “At the sight of General de Gaulle,” he wrote later, “the inhabitants stood in a kind of daze then burst into bravos or else into tears. Rushing out of their houses they followed after me, all in the grip of an extraordinary emotion.… We walked on together, all overwhelmed by comradeship, feeling national joy, pride and hope rise again from the depths of the abyss.”9 He then rewarded the crowd with eloquence and mutual respect. Speaking from a makeshift platform and surrounded by Allied flags, he told the assembled “to continue the fight today as you have never ceased from fighting since the beginning of the war and since June 1940”—propagating his myth of an ever-resistant France. He then turned to the task of asserting control over local administration. He had brought along François Coulet, his newly appointed republican commissar (commissaire de la république, a kind of regional superprefect) to serve as the highest-ranking official in Normandy in the name of the new Provisional Government of the French Republic. Coulet immediately replaced Vichy’s subprefect with Raymond Triboulet, the head of the local liberation committee, telling him to “establish French sovereignty at once; show the Allies we can administer ourselves competently.”10 Avoiding an Allied military occupation was as important as toppling Vichy. As the Allies liberated nearby towns, Coulet bicycled out to invest mayors with the authority of the Provisional Government. He took care to keep local policemen in their posts and co-opt local elites willing to submit to the new administration.11
De Gaulle’s Bayeux baptism did its job. It confirmed his rapport with the public and kept the Allies at bay. British and American officials even acknowledged he could establish local order better than they.12 Bayeux also validated the Provisional Government’s strategy for taking over territory by installing a republican commissar, enlisting the help of local resistance committees, and keeping reprisals to a minimum and lower-level public servants on the job. Harmonizing with the local Resistance, however, would prove easier in Normandy, where it was weak, than in southern France, where it was strong. Many of de Gaulle’s eighteen regional republican commissars would have a tougher time securing their authority over the internal Resistance.13 In Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse it would take a good deal longer than in Bayeux. For de Gaulle the biggest stakes were in Paris, where a Resistance-led popular insurrection liberated the city. In Bayeux de Gaulle sought to eliminate the threat of Allied administration of liberated territory. In Paris he aimed to secure the ascendency of a de Gaulle–led Provisional Government and subordinate the internal Resistance once and for all.
He achieved these goals by acquiring control over three key instruments of state authority: bureaucracy, the army, and public ceremon...