Distrust and verify

‘France is of all European countries’, it is claimed, ‘the most difficult for any foreigner to write about.’1 The devotion of the French to their history has made it harder for outsiders to storm the barricades.

Even so, writing about the external policies of the Franco–British couple is no picnic. Though fake online archival sites are not yet a serious hazard, the pitfalls of the paper trail are real enough. The Paris Metro used to have illuminated maps inviting travellers to press a button lighting up connections. Until software engineers design appropriate apps researchers are very much on their own. Mapping Franco–British approaches to the construction of early post-war Europe is a daunting task because of the imbalance between British and French national archives in the twentieth century. At first glance, the rows of published French diplomatic documents – far outnumbering the British sister series – suggest an embarrassment of riches. In fact, qualitatively and quantitatively there is a big disparity between the two archives. Comparing them is like comparing a continental breakfast and a full English.

It’s a common misperception that once the voices of witnesses are accessed the rest is plain sailing. ‘All knowledge of the past that isn’t just supposition derives from people who can say “I was there”,’ pronounced a distinguished Oxford don. In short, ‘if it’s not eyewitness testimony then it’s a load of hooey’.2 If only history was so simple! Many questions remain unanswered and may never be satisfactorily resolved. The greatest barrier is the huge inequality of sources – mountainous on some topics, fragmentary or non-existent on others.

Like Bevin, the researcher’s problem is selection. The documentation varies enormously in quantity and quality. The French national archive cannot match the continuous run since 1916 of British cabinet records. As president of the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle decided high policy. Consequently, foreign ministry files track policy execution rather than formulation. Death prevented de Gaulle finishing the second volume of a three-decker memoir about his presidency. His war memoirs registered the deeper springs of action, while staying tight-lipped about day-to-day decision-making. The general curated his reputation with a highly selective and sometimes misleading narrative. Reported conversations tend to be retrospective reconstructions rather than accurate summaries from the archive.4 The recollections of the general’s familiars – information minister Alain Peyrefitte and Jacques Foccart, chief adviser on African policy – require careful handling, despite claims to be based on diaries and notes written close to events. The presidential archive reveals little about the rough-and-tumble of decision-making and day-to-day perceptions of international affairs.

Continental officials approached record-keeping much more casually than their UK counterparts. Decision-makers tended to treat documents as their own property, and were reluctant to circulate notes of meetings. A British adviser to Belgian statesman and NATO secretary general Paul-Henri Spaak recalled, ‘I could not persuade him to keep me informed of his interviews, it had not been his habit to make such records as a minister in the Belgian government’.5 Whitehall, by contrast, insisted on the use of note takers and prompt circulation of papers. At a session of the five signatories of the Brussels Treaty of 1948 the French defence minister shocked British officials when he suggested ministers should handle the main business privately without secretaries and interpreters.

There is a world of difference between the reports of the general’s views as relayed by visitors and his actual opinions.7 The president courted interlocutors, telling the British how bad the Germans were, and vice versa. Much more serious are the substantive differences between versions of the same conversation. Instead of employing note takers or promptly dictating a record the general frequently relied on an interpreter’s summary. Interpreting and taking notes do not sit easily together, however. ‘I’ve always had a lot of trouble in getting the general to give me the details of the talks he has’, observed Jacques Foccart. ‘When asked he (general) responded, “You know quite well what it’s about, you know the problems”.’8 Foccart had to insist on the president telling him the main points of a discussion.

Nevertheless, the casualness of the French machine had significant advantages. As well as giving mavericks like Jean Monnet, head of the post-war planning commission, scope to promote their own agendas, it shielded members of leaky and shaky coalitions. Beware documents, counselled French premier Georges Clemenceau, and helped by leaving as few as possible. The Fourth Republic lacked the foreign policy bipartisanship of British politics. Decolonization, German rearmament and European integration whipped up fratricidal strife, and reinforced a minimalist approach to record-keeping. The Vichy state indicted Third Republic leaders in 1942; two years later the Provisional Government arraigned Vichy notables and collaborators in the High Court. In 1946 France’s National Assembly established a parliamentary commission of enquiry to investigate political and military elites from 1933 to 1945.

Whitehall procedures enhanced the quality of the UK national archive. Incoming FO papers went first to desk officers in the appropriate geographical departments. After entering them in a file the official attached a minute listing feedback. With the head of department’s approval the folder climbed the ladder collecting further assessments. If judged sufficiently important the file went into one of the foreign secretary’s red boxes. In contrast, French foreign ministry papers often circulated without minutes. Officials sometimes annotated documents but it was not standard procedure.

A big culture shock awaited British officials posted in the mid-1970s to the European Commission in Brussels. A French dominated administration assumed ‘knowledge is power: the more secret files you have locked in your desk, the more powerful you are … very little of what went on in some fairly important negotiations ever got written down’.9 Dossiers were treated as personal property and hoarded in office cupboards. Christopher Soames, Vice-President of the European Commission, countered local customs by circulating records of talks with ministers and ambassadors – ‘a British practice hitherto unknown in the Commission’.10

Mining more documents does not produce more reliable and authoritative histories. The vast expansion and increasingly multilateral character of post-1945 international politics rule out a definitive narrative. The days are long gone when a historian could aspire to have the last word on anything. Documents have many lives, historians only one. A major segment of national policy like the history of Britain and the European Community defies comprehensive investigation. ‘A history confined to policy formulation’, wrote historian Alan Milward, ‘requires by the mid-1960s, a systematic search through the records of an ever-increasing number of ministries’.11

In its own way the archival steeplechase is as perilous as a Tour de France Pyrenean descent.

The fundamental challenge is the uncertainty of all sources. Like witnesses to a street accident, individuals carry away different impressions of the same event. Letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs and eyewitness testimonies are like the telephone game. Someone whispers a message and by the time it gets to the last person it’s completely different. The Bloomsbury luminary Leonard Woolf inquired what had happened to his paper delivery girl Mary. ‘Haven’t you heard?’, replied a neighbour. ‘She was machine gunned by a German plane and I saw it happen.’ Three months later Woolf met Mary. The story was ‘entirely untrue’.14 Old men forget. A retired ambassador writing a memoir pestered the Foreign Office for ‘a letter which, after a time-consuming search … proved to exist only in my imagination’.15 Labour leader Aneurin Bevan mocked Harold Macmillan’s taste for reading political autobiographies.

The grandparents of novelist Julian Barnes entertained themselves by reading out to one another their diary entries for a particular day several years earlier. ‘Grandpa: “Friday. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.”’; ‘Grandma: “Nonsense. Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.”’18 As well as inflating the importance of the writer, diaries distort the pressures of the moment, ensuring instant gossip and minimal reflection. ‘One defect of diaries and autobiographies’, observed writer Simone de Beauvoir, ‘is that usually what “goes without saying” goes without being said, and thus one misses the essential’.19 Missing the essential may mean talking up the nonessential. ‘One exaggerates everything,’ admitted philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; ‘one is really on the look-out, one continually forces the truth’.20 Macmillan’s diaries for the Suez crisis of 1956 have a crucial gap from 4 October 1956 to 3 February 1957. After claiming to have lost the diary entries, the premier confessed he had destroyed them at the request of his predecessor Anthony Eden.

Much goes unrecorded. Pressures towards concealment intensified after the outbreak of the First World War. War guilt arguments forced governments to publish far more documents than ever before – demolishing the Victorian assumption that almost everything of importance could be committed to paper and locked away indefinitely. After 1945 the British state introduced new procedures to regain control of information. Interwar cabinet minutes attributed expressions of opinion to individual ministers; after 1945 cabinet secretaries were instructed ‘to avoid … recording the opinions expressed by particular ministers’.21 The record turns bland and opaque. The partial release in recent years of the cabinet secretary’s notebooks has enriched the anodyne printed minutes, confirming, for example, the intention to destroy President Nasser as well as repossess the Suez canal. A quick inspection of the kitchen kills the notion that cabinet minutes are a form of holy writ; political advisers may edit the cabinet secretary’s record before circulation. While prime minister Margaret Thatcher prepared a favourite dish of shepherds pie, the head of her policy unit ‘would sharpen up the somewhat bland typed-up account of proceedings that came over to us from the Cabinet Office’.22

The state decrees big gaps in the record – intelligence, royal family and other papers deemed sensitive are shredded or closed indefinitely. Protecting the myth of a resisting France meant locking away Vichy archives about collaboration and Holocaust involvement. The FCO has admitted that it unlawfully hoarded and continues to retain at least half a million files – some dating back to the seventeenth century. The British national archive plays games with researchers – releasing and withdrawing documents without explanation – now you see them, now you don’t.

The Eden government tried to destroy any evidence of collusion with Israel in the Suez crisis. A few hours after prime minister Eden denied in the House of Commons any foreknowledge of Israel’s invasion of Egypt in October 1956 the Conservative chief whip met cabinet secretary Norman Brook leaving the cabinet room, ‘He’s (Eden) told me to destroy all the relevant documents’, Brook said, ‘I must go and get it done’.23 Changes in working procedures make it difficult to discover the whys and wherefores of decisions. Before 1939 the FO consulted with other government departments by correspondence; during the Second World War oral consultation became the norm. The urgency of post-war issues spawned ad hoc informal meetings – ‘the chat in the corridor’ or the lavatory. Prime minister James Callaghan offered the governorship of Hong Kong to European Commission president Roy Jenkins when they met in the ‘Gents’ at a European Council meeting in Paris.24

To be sure, Britain pioneered official histories based on closed archives. From 1919 the government series focused on the two world wars. In 1966 prime minister Harold Wilson inaugurated a peacetime continuation about episodes of general interest to be written by eminent historians with unrestricted access to relevant material and supplemented by recollections of key players. But the project should carry a health warning. The Official History of Britain and the European Community exemplifies the deficiencies. Publication lagged well behind record releases, and writers interpreted their remit very differently. The author of the first volume was a distinguished academic with a clear idea of what he understood by ‘official history’; his in-house successor delivered a shapeless narrative – ‘a leading historian asked me what the basic thesis of my book was going to be. The answer is that there is none … I have thought it best to try to let them [participants] tell their own story as far as possible’. Back to square one – the illusion that history is about letting the actors and documents speak for themselves! Content to toe the line, official authors are short on criticism and tight-lipped about intelligence. MI5 operative Peter Wright claimed that in 1961–3 the agency successfully hacked into top-secret traffic between France’s London embassy and Paris – ‘every move made by the French … was monitored’.25 Not a hint of this in the narrative. Did MI5 continue to read Frog cyphers during Wilson’s second EEC membership bid? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the British state has used official histories to curate the past. Early opening of files, not more Whitehall cooks, would benefit researchers and lay readers.

In spite of genuflections to open government, transparency and freedom of information, the cult of secrecy remains intact. Labour minister Tony Benn’s call in 1968 for freedom of information legislation went unanswered for decades. The UK Freedom of Information Act of 2000 (FIA) did not open the floodgates. Far from it. Thanks to loopholes and the refinement of bureaucratic procedures, FIA strengthened state restrictions on information. It imposed a general ban on royal family archives. The total of documents retained increases annually. The curating of collective memory goes hand in hand with manipulating the present. The current commemoration craze conceals rather than clarifies issues. In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, history master Irwin warns, ‘All this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember … there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it’.

Abandon all hope? ‘The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true’, wrote Leonard Woolf, ‘it is as though one had stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or quicksand’.26 Uncertainty may be a blessing in disguise, however. Minding the evidential gaps points up the potential for alternative outcomes, liberating us from hegemonic narratives. Uncertainty may be closer to reality. As Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Old Jew of Galicia’ put it, ‘When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal’.27