4 New Look

In February 1947 couturier Christian Dior regained world fashion leadership, unveiling a calf-length hemline known as ‘The New Look’. France too got a new look. In Sartre’s Les jeux sont faits (1943) Pierre and Eve, recently deceased, return to Paris for 24 hours to try to find love together, having never met in life (despite being made for each other) due to ‘administrative oversight’.

How did a country in ‘perpetual crisis’ revive?2 Resistance and liberation generated dreams of renewal. Before the Germans executed him as a hostage in December 1941 Communist deputy Gabriel Peri testified: ‘I should like my fellow-countrymen to know that I am dying so that France may live … In a few minutes I am going out to prepare a future full of song.’3 Wartime study groups debated the nation’s future; ex-Vichy civil servants and technocrats shared ideas and expertise. The roller-coaster Fourth Republic took defining decisions on economic modernization, European integration, technology and nuclear energy that empowered de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. ‘Despite weakness of government, and foreign policy follies, all foreign observers consider that what France has done for its economy over ten years is extraordinary’, declared Aron in 1957.4 Rapid economic recovery and smart statecraft enabled Paris to seize the initiative and shape ‘the outcome of the major diplomatic and security debates between 1944 and 1954, especially concerning the occupation of Germany, the Marshall Plan, and the shaping of the NATO alliance’.5

The cards looked heavily stacked against recovery.

Figure 4.1 The March of Time: The New France 1946, showing Maurice Thorez, Leon Blum, Bidault and Roger Dannes. Credit: Everett Collection Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo.

A weak executive flawed the regime. Ministers treated the premier as first among equals, running their departments like personal fiefdoms. Pressure of domestic business, the presence of Communist ministers until 1947, lack of expertise, and a culture of leaks, all stifled cabinet discussion of external policies. Politicians prioritized party and personal ambition, leaking secrets and circulating in advance what they proposed to say in cabinet. The quotidian treadmill of balancing a fragile parliamentary coalition while battling domestic and international hazards left premiers prostrate and often physically lighter. Edgar Faure claimed to have lost four kilos during his brief premiership of 1952: In ‘forty days, including five spent in Lisbon, I had three major parliamentary debates: cost of living, European army, the budget. I still had Tunisia on my hands. In practice I constantly had to do two things at the same time: write a speech while receiving an ambassador, solve a financial problem while in a political discussion.’7 Ministerial musical chairs rotated the same small pool of players at the expense of continuity and expertise.

The head of state did not play ringmaster. The Fourth Republic’s constitution authorized the President to sign treaties, to be kept informed of negotiations and receive copies of important diplomatic papers. Vincent Auriol and Rene Coty sought to escape from the wreath-laying ceremonial prison of Third Republic presidents. Chairing cabinet meetings certainly gave them more scope than British monarchs, but access to official papers could not be assumed. Auriol protested that he had not seen a single document from a three-power conference in New York. The president found allies among top officials and diplomats, especially Henri Bonnet, ambassador in Washington, and Rene Massigli, ambassador in London. After inauguration the president sent for Quai secretary-general Chauvel, asking to be informed at once if national interests appeared to be endangered: ‘I’m permanent, you are permanent’.8 Coty, as well as intervening vigorously in Tunisian and Moroccan affairs, staunchly advocated European integration, urging prime minister Guy Mollet in 1956 to appoint a pro-European foreign minister. Nevertheless, Auriol and Coty did not decisively shape policies.

Algerian and Indo-Chinese decolonization wars, each twice as long as the First World War, splintered opinion, producing a virtual breakdown of cabinet government. Memories of 1940 were still fresh when the communist Vietminh inflicted a humiliating defeat on French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Mollet government’s use of conscripts in Algeria and condoning of torture opened up a debate between domestic critics who widened their protest into a general condemnation of the war, and the military and politicians who blamed the opposition for the war’s continuation. The kidnapping by French forces in October 1956 of the Algerian nationalist leader Ahmed Ben Bella during cease-fire talks exposed a dysfunctional regime, which had lost control of soldiers and officials.

France’s large Communist party panicked British leaders. Nearly a third of the electorate voted communist in 1947; a quarter in 1956. In 1955 Communists called a general strike paralysing the country for nearly a month. They adopted a fierce anti-American stance, attacking Washington’s Marshall Plan of 1948 as political and economic vassalage. Anglo-American promotion of West German rearmament touched a raw nerve, alienating many non-communists. The arrival of United States Supreme Commander in Europe General Matthew B. Ridgway in May 1952 touched off some of the country’s worst post-war riots. Premier Rene Plevin’s advocacy of a European Defence Community (EDC) integrating French and German forces split elite and popular opinion. The regime’s apparent inability to sustain a coherent strategy exasperated allies. In December 1953 US secretary of state John Foster Dulles threatened an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of commitments in Europe. The political and administrative machine seemed close to meltdown. Politicians routinely breached conventions of secrecy and ministerial solidarity – torpedoing by premature disclosure the projects of colleagues. Foreign leaders advised French envoys, ‘This is for your personal information only, don’t pass it on to Paris’.9

Regaining rank resembled an obstacle race. Post-war multilateralism fazed the French because defeat and occupation excluded them from Allied planning. Other hurdles compounded the pain of a new rulebook: insularity, education and a broken foreign service.

A late eighteenth-century French traveller in Italy amazed German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe because he journeyed ‘without noticing anything in the world outside himself’.14 Insularity and a fondness for abstraction delayed adaptation to the superpower era. The occupation years scaled back exchanges, reinforcing an isolation derived partly from an assumption of cultural superiority, partly from the strength of local and regional identities. Before 1939 notables like Emile Moreau, governor of the Bank of France, and Pierre Brisson, director of the newspaper Le Figaro, had no English and travelled little. In the heyday of newspaper reading in the 1930s no French newspaper had a permanent representative in Moscow, only one had a correspondent in the USA. The French had international connections but close overseas friendships were rare. America, in de Gaulle’s words, represented ‘another world’.15 Transatlantic go-between Jean Monnet, banker, civil servant and friend of Washington insiders, was an exception. Americanization in the 1950s furnished an added reason for staying at home.

An educational formation emphasizing philosophy and rhetoric delayed adaptation to the post-war world. ‘The French’, observed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, had ‘the stubborn conviction that it is enough to solve problems on paper to be immediately rid of them’.17 Careful cultivation of the written and spoken word became a substitute for action. A Paris 1968 slogan ran: ‘I take my wishes to be realities because I believe in the reality of my wishes.’18 Logic and verbalism, allied to Catholicism, rendered the French doubly suspect. ‘If there are two things on earth that John Bull hates,’ remarked Victorian statesman William Ewart Gladstone, ‘they are an abstract proposition and the Pope’.19 Excessive abstraction clogged communication between different groups in French society as well as between France and the world. A senior mandarin criticized the ‘consistently doctrinaire point of view which our inexperienced legislators adopt towards all difficulties … they take liberties with reality’.20

The grandiloquence of French political rhetoric disadvantaged policy-makers. Until the introduction in the late 1940s of simultaneous interpretation the slowness of consecutive interpretation privileged the clear expository style of English-speaking delegations. Language conditioned the chemistry of international gatherings. Anglo-Saxon dominance of international organizations enabled English to displace French as the traditional language of diplomacy. Bidault had no English, and foreign minister Robert Schuman barely any. For American Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Ernest Bevin was ‘Ernie’, Robert Schuman ‘Monsieur Schuman’.21 Chatting with the British after dealing with continental Europeans, remarked an American official, was like putting on a comfortable old shoe.

Antiquated telephone services snarled the new diplomacy – with comic effects. The Canadian delegation at the foreign ministers conference in Paris in 1946 found food and service excellent at the Hôtel de Crillon, but the telephone service functioned erratically, at times isolating the delegation from others, and cutting it off from Ottawa. An exasperated delegate went to find out why the system did not work:

I expected to encounter an array of overworked telephone operators; instead, I found one plump blonde lady placidly reading a magazine, with a box of chocolates at her side, facing a board in which light signals were frantically flashing from the different floors of the hotel. To these she seemed sublimely indifferent. ‘Where’, I asked, ‘are your colleagues?’. ‘I am alone’, she replied, giving me a glance of pathos, as though she languished for company, even my own.22

What ensured renewal? Two things: de Gaulle; and faith in renewal. At a crucial moment de Gaulle stabilized a ravaged country awaiting a constitution and an elected parliament. As head of the Provisional Government the general provided security and reassurance amid fears of civil war and Communist revolution in the autumn and winter of 1944–5. Notwithstanding exclusion from the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945, France notched up substantial gains: an occupation zone in Germany; membership of the five-power Security Council of the United Nations; membership of the European Consultative Commission; participation in the Consultative Committee for Italy; admission to the conference of foreign ministers. Germany’s formal surrender on French soil at Rheims on 8 May 1945 and General Leclerc’s presence at Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 supplied further signs of great power ranking. Victories had a downside. De Gaulle’s insistence on prior satisfaction of France’s German and Middle Eastern claims blocked a general European settlement. There was no likelihood of such terms being fulfilled. The general’s resignation in January 1946 freed up policy-making.

Resistance and liberation charged up France, fuelling hope in renewal. ‘To be twenty or twenty-five in September 1944’, recalled Simone de Beauvoir, ‘seemed a great stroke of good luck: all roads opened up. Journalists, writers, budding filmmakers, discussed, planned, made decisions with passion, as if their future depended only on them’.23 Ahead of the Liberation de Gaulle’s Free French movement asserted a world role: ‘France is international … by her geographic situation, by the radiation of her genius, by her catholicity, by her revolutionary generosity.’24 Jubilation and stoicism marked the mood. Francis Gruber’s sensation-making painting ‘Job’, unveiled at the Salon of the Liberation only a few weeks after the Germans left Paris, framed the stoicism. The biblical figure of Job symbolized oppressed Parisians enduring great suffering without forfeiting hope and faith. A gaunt male nude, like Rodin’s Thinker, resting head on hand, looks at an inscription from the Book of Job: ‘Now, once more my cry is a revolt, and yet my hand suppresses my sobs’. In the early days ambition, food and romance boosted morale. Within weeks of VE Day officials who during the winter of 1944–5 downed grogs and burnt furniture to keep warm, hosted a dinner for over 100 in honour of the Sultan of Morocco. ‘It was all beautifully done – the flowers were pretty, the service was quick and the food was good,’ acknowledged ambassador Duff Cooper.25 As he and foreign minister Bidault padded through spacious salons the envoy spotted de Gaulle’s chef de cabinet Palewski making love on a sofa to the wife of Alphand, Quai director for economic affairs.

France’s hosting of the peace conference in July to October 1946 simulated greatness. Delegates attending a reception at the Palace of Versailles marvelled at ‘a scene of amazing magnificence and beauty’.26 Abroad, the French put on a good face: ‘We had a tremendous feast’, noted a guest at France’s London embassy; ‘the food was exquisite – consomme, lobster and rice, chicken and (really green) peas, ices’.27 Keeping up appearances encouraged the French to think restoration of rank was just round the corner. As powerlessness became apparent, people remained in denial, partly from a feeling that after so much suffering things just had to get better, partly from pride in empire and its resources as pledge for future power, and partly because of an inclination to take rhetoric for reality. Vichy and the resistance had enthused so much about renewal that liberation seemed ‘the day of resurrection’ promised by premier Paul Reynaud in June 1940, when the world would defer to France ‘as the leader of civilization’.28

By 1946 the euphoria was too painful to recall. ‘The French no longer have the strength to react,’ lamented de Gaulle in March 1946. Raymond Aron identified ‘a form of indifference to the destiny of France’ born of a sense of national powerlessness.29 ‘We had this dream’, wrote François Mauriac, ‘that France, the cloth barely snatched from her face, would propose to the world the formula for the new age’.30 A down-at-heel Paris with dirty buildings and tatty public spaces made gloom and doom almost palpable. Tiredness and stress affected public behaviour. A UK exchange student encountered ‘repressed aggression, bristling hostility … everywhere’.31

Cinema caught the mood swing. The pessimism of Rene Clement’s film Au-Dela des Grilles (1949) signalled ‘a rapid moving away from the enthusiasms, which had now become illusions, of the Liberation’.32 Withdrawal from Indo-China in 1954, after the disaster of Dien Bien Phu, closed an Asian empire. ‘As in 1940,’ noted Simone de Beauvoir, ‘the future lost all perceptible shape, and I vegetated without living; the subjection of France was almost as painful to me as it had been then’. The nation’s main ambition, wrote Sartre, seemed to be ‘dying in peace’.33 The public clutched at sporting success – Yvon Petra’s victory in the Wimbledon singles in 1946, middleweight Marcel Cerdan’s world title triumph in the United States in September 1948.

Influencers scarcely attempted to inform opinion. Rookie deputies in the newly elected Assembly of 1946 lacked experience in international affairs, and political parties said little about foreign policy. There was plenty to be pessimistic about. The wherewithal to assure independence, never mind influence, was conspicuously absent. The coming of the Cold War with the threat of a third world war collapsed the ambitions of the Liberation. Britain and the United States advocated German rearmament, and London paid court to Washington, not Paris. American aid came with a price tag – German rearmament and membership of a Western alliance. Revolts in Algeria in May 1945, riots in the Cameroons, disturbances in Tunisia, and uprisings in Madagascar and Indo-China, turned empire into a costly liability. The independence of Syria and Lebanon in 1945 terminated a Middle East presence. The general staff confessed impotence: ‘the state of our military power … ruled out a French mobilization and prevented France from taking part in … a war without the help of a foreign power’.

Modernization, spurred by a booming global economy, was the chief energizer. More than an upgrading of economy and infrastructure, it crafted a new social compact between government and society, including a welfare state. France’s modernization plan, in it’s own words, was ‘not a state of affairs but a state of mind’.34 A huge migration from countryside to town propelled change. In the last pre-war census of 1936 the population was divided almost equally between town and country; by 1966 only 18 per cent of the population worked on the land and depopulation continued apace. The Republic was the first liberal democratic state to commit permanently to planning. With a tradition of state intervention France followed the developmental pattern set by post-1945 Japan. Economist Andre Philip expressed the conviction of decision-makers that ‘only great industrial states count in the modern world’.35 The economie concertee, emphasizing close cooperation between government and large private sector companies, supplied the growth model. The Commissariat general du plan (CGP) targeted transportation, telecommunications, public finances and nuclear power.

Decent housing, indoor loos and consumer durables transformed the quality of life. An American investigator researched two villages – Roussillon in the Vaucluse and Chanzeaux near Angers – and discovered a startling contrast. In 1951 the Roussillonais ‘seemed haunted by despair … Pauvre France, on est foutu [We’re done for]’. Ten years on, a new confidence ‘in the ability of themselves and their children to face the future’ had taken hold.36 A local farmer who in 1950 possessed only a mule and a twenty-year-old car now boasted a new car, a tractor and a television set. Roussillon’s experience reflected a national metamorphosis. Even a remote backwater like the Breton commune of Plozevet changed dramatically from late nineteenth-century rustic to consumer take-off.37 The availability of consumer goods improved rapidly. In 1950 razor blades were rationed and of poor quality. Returning to Paris after two years absence abroad a diplomat stocked up on them in New York only to find the same brand readily obtainable in Paris.

Modernization included the harnessing of nuclear power for peaceful and military purposes. The first five-year plan of 1952 for atomic energy marked a decisive stage in the development of France’s Atomic Agency. ‘It depends on us, today,’ declared the Plan’s preamble, ‘whether France will still be a great modern country in ten years’. Pursuit of rank and independence drove the project. ‘A nation without the A-bomb’, warned a defence chief, ‘is a second rank military power, without much influence on the international stage’.38 The military programme advanced so well that in April 1958 a date could be set for the first atomic test.

Renewal of the state machine delivered a supercharged engine that outpaced Whitehall, a fossil of the mid-Victorian Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. Until 1945 France’s higher civil service was a ramshackle, lethargic body, lacking up-to-date reference tools and quantitative data for informed decision-making. Government departments operated and recruited independently without common standards and central fiscal controls. The war delayed the consolidation of the general secretariat of government created in 1935. By the mid-1950s a revamped machine had the edge on European rivals. The ability and open-mindedness of French officials impressed an IMF colleague, particularly ‘their willingness to expound and then controvert the official line’.39 Of the central administration’s four main branches – Conseil d’Etat, Cour des Comptes, Inspection des Finances and Foreign Service – the first three recruited the ablest candidates and ranked as the most prestigious. A 1946 statute for functionaries created a unified rationalized service. The ENA, a fast-track school of public administration, opened its doors in 1945. Its graduates – enarques – constituted a meritocracy that rejuvenated the civil service. Entering students represented the best products of the highly selective system of the Grandes Ecoles – Polytechnique, Normale and Sciences Po, with a strong bias towards mathematics, engineering, science, law or economics. Fierce competition governed ENA admission and order of graduation. Enarques supplied the cadres for modernization.

A fundamental makeover of social science research retooled a reformed bureaucracy. Alongside the Centre d’etudes sociologiques (CES) created in 1946, specialist agencies focused on demographic renewal and recruiting immigrant workers – Institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques (INSEE), Institut national d’etudes demographiques (INED), and L’office national de l’immigration (ONI). The rapid growth of research centres – twenty in 1955, 300 by 1965 – confirmed the reinvention of French social science. The Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the largest government-sponsored research organization, funded scientific and technology projects. Founded in October 1939, the war delayed the agency’s opening. The state machine benefited from the restructuring and expansion of the general secretariat of government. France had lagged in the development of central coordinating machinery. The country gained a more integrated, informed and effective higher civil service, though not a more democratic one. Rather than diversifying recruitment across social strata, reform confirmed middle-class domination of the administrative elite.

The high public esteem enjoyed by government service undergirded the Fourth and Fifth Republics. In its golden years from 1945 to 74 state service recruited the best and brightest and exercised unprecedented influence. ‘I chose to serve one master and only one: the State’, declared chief mandarin François Bloch-Laine, architect of the modernization of public finances, ‘a master whose servants enjoy an independence and a liberty that one finds in few other occupations’.40 The cross-fertilization and continuity of political, administrative and business elites maximized talent and skills. Civil servants enjoyed a significant advantage over foreign counterparts: a two-way flow between central administration and top jobs in the public and private sectors, including politics. An official could stand for parliament without resigning. Defeated, he returned to the administration; elected, he kept pension rights and the option to return. The French did not live in a bubble. From the late 1950s Le Club Jean Moulin gathered functionaries, business leaders, technocrats and politicians in an informal think tank. By contrast, British mandarins had to wait until retirement to enter academe and business. They were also more isolated from other elites.

The reinvented administration had the flexibility to allow mavericks like Monnet to operate across ministerial boundaries. Canonized in the hagiography of European unity as ‘Saint Europe’, the author of France’s first modernization plan, he was first and foremost an architect of a reborn France. The success of his 1946 plan secured the backing of foreign minister Robert Schuman for the first step in economic integration, the ECSC. The Anglo–American decision to rearm West Germany forced a fundamental reappraisal of national strategy. Monnet’s advocacy of Franco–German entente and supranational control of iron and steel allowed France to contain and profit from Germany’s recovery. The workaholic policy wonk bombarded ministers and officials with notes, telephone calls and visits, jumping hierarchies and shaking up routines – leaving his secretary with a perpetual twitch.

The French engine sported an extra cylinder – ‘mission control’, a gold standard policy–coordination mechanism. Created in 1948 to organize Marshall Plan credits within the OEEC, the general secretariat of the interministerial committee for European economic cooperation questions (SGCI) coordinated policy. Chaired by the prime minister, the committee harmonized inputs from two principal agencies: the Quai’s direction des affaires economiques et financières (DAEF); and the direction des relations economiques exterieures (DREE) in the ministry of finance. Its remit covered all aspects of European policy – organizing agreed positions across the gamut of European institutions; preparing and overseeing Cabinet decision-making. From July 1956 the SGCI played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Rome. Whitehall took the hint. ‘When we did join the Community,’ acknowledged the head of the FCO, ‘we set up a similar committee in the Cabinet Office because we had been very impressed by the extent to which French policy was pulled together … very characteristically French but very efficient’.41

The revamped civil service anchored a weak executive. Surprisingly, the atrophy of state authority did not produce grey eminences. Though mandarins shaped policy choices, they were not an unstoppable mafia. To talk of ‘a Republic of officials’ overlooks two considerations. First, despite high turnover, ministers occupied strong ground. Their private office – cabinet – enabled them to make the running when they chose to do so. Functioning independently from the civil service the cabinet gave ministers extra control levers in their departments as well as a channel for personal policy initiatives. Second, determined premiers and foreign ministers overrode colleagues and officials. The full cabinet only learnt of the Republic’s most important post-war international initiative, the Schuman Plan of 1950 for a European Coal and Steel Community, hours before the public announcement.

In the Suez crisis of 1956 ministers marginalized senior advisers and took France to war with Egypt. Premier Mollet ‘drove through France’s membership of the common market in face of considerable bureaucratic resistance’.42 Prime ministers who stayed in the saddle long enough were well positioned to take a lead. The premier’s office oversaw top agencies: the secretariats of national defence and European economic cooperation; the general commissariats for the Plan and for atomic energy. Parliament had no significant say in foreign policy-making. In theory, legislators could exert control through debates, questions and foreign affairs committees; in practice, the executive blocked them with a mix of prevarication and faits accomplis. Foreign minister Schuman delayed until the end of May 1950 parliamentary discussion of the ECSC announced on 9 May. After 1958 de Gaulle trimmed back the powers of the foreign affairs and defence committees.

The post-war makeover of the foreign ministry honed French diplomacy. The skill of French diplomats awed British politicians: ‘God, the French are clever diplomats’, remarked a minister; ‘we are very foolish in allowing them to dominate the Common Market’.43 The success of French diplomacy was all the more remarkable because the service had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. In August 1944 staff returned to scenes of devastation: a wrecked tank in the courtyard, a fire-damaged wing, burnt archives and debris everywhere. A severe winter tested morale. ‘Life is hard in Paris’, recorded a diplomat, ‘without heating and food. In my Quai office, my fingers and my head are numbed. The whole country is paralysed.’44 The doyen of early twentieth-century French ambassadors, Andre François Poncet, observed that the British Foreign Office was wonderfully organized while the Quai d’Orsay was chaotic, and for this reason it was possible for a British diplomat of modest attainment to become a successful ambassador while to be a successful French ambassador required a superb intellect. He was wrong about the efficiency of the Foreign Office and right about the Quai’s disorganization – in the early post-war years. A three-way split between Vichy staff, Free French representatives in London and Algiers, and Jean Chauvel’s Paris group guaranteed bitter feuds. Getting the ministry up and running again seemed a Herculean task. Against the odds, the Quai clawed back reputation and influence.

A shortage of experienced staff impeded recovery. ‘I am scared by the work of the Quai’, noted France’s ambassador in London. ‘They are mostly inexperienced young people. They have forgotten that finance and economics bulk large in the concerns of a diplomat.’45 Free French officials were too few to compensate for purged Vichy diplomats. Resistance groups demanded the Quai’s democratization and the firing of Vichyites. Purges hit ambassadorial ranks hardest – ten fired out of fifteen. After the fall of France secretary general Alexis Leger, aka poet Saint-John Perse, went to the United States and did not return. Bidault refused to rehire pre-war heavyweights Charles Corbin and Andre François-Poncet, former ambassadors to London and Berlin, branding them museum pieces. With files scattered, destroyed or captured by Germany, institutional memory barely survived. On the plus side, the purges fast-tracked young highfliers – Maurice Couve de Murville and Herve Alphand, appointed director general of political affairs and director of economic affairs respectively.

The mixed provenance of new hires – internal resistance, Free French, reinstated Vichy staff, and newly graduated enarques – bred rivalries and missteps. Mismanaged travel arrangements and a frosty welcome from France’s local representatives bugged Albert Camus’s lecture tour of South America in 1949.46 An internal investigation into low morale identified three issues – mediocre quality of interwar recruitment, high living costs in Paris making overseas posts more attractive than central administration, and an over-severe and sometimes inequitable purge of Vichy staff.

As secretary general from late 1954, Massigli diagnosed an organizational crisis, compounded by low morale – ‘not only is there no esprit de corps … there is no longer any team spirit’.47 He blamed overloaded staff – some had not taken holidays for two years – a bureaucratic structure ill-adapted to the shift of world power from Europe to the United States, and the decline of the secretary general’s authority. Massigli tried to shore up his authority, insisting on being kept in the loop. American secretary of state Dean Acheson blamed the infighting on ‘strong personalities’, and the conspiratorial habits of wartime resistance.48 This was only part of the story. Front-line issues – EDC, Cold War, German rearmament, European integration, Algerian war and Suez crisis – proved far more incendiary than personality conflicts and career rivalries. France’s ambassador to the United Nations collapsed under the strain of Suez. From mid-1952, testified Massigli, ‘“Europeans” and “anti-Europeans” confronted each other’.49

The row in 1954–5 over the Tokyo ambassadorship of ‘super-European’ Alphand highlighted the idiosyncrasies of Fourth Republic decision-making. In early November 1954, after the National Assembly’s rejection of the EDC, prime minister and foreign minister Pierre Mendes-France announced assignments – Massigli: secretary general; Alphand – ally of Monnet and partisan of the EDC: ambassador to Japan. Eight months later the ambassador designate remained in Paris and Antoine Pinay was premier. The media debated whether the envoy should go to Tokyo or be reassigned. Pro-Mendes newspapers accused Alphand of trying to persuade Pinay to pursue full European integration. The envoy’s diary completes the story: ‘Pinay abruptly decides to take me with him to San Francisco for the tenth anniversary conference of the United Nations. Massigli, furious, tries to resist the minister’s will. He tells me: “You are making a fool of yourself” … he fears the reactions of Hoppenot our delegate at the United Nations … At Idlewild [New York airport] Hoppenot receives me with these words “I thought it was a joke”.’ 50 Within a year Alphand had pocketed Hoppenot’s job.

Notwithstanding vendettas, the lack of a policy planning section, and charges of being ill-adapted to ‘contemporary realities’, the Quai recovered its pre-war reputation as a leading player.51 By late 1951 British ambassador Harvey considered that the department had fully recovered from wartime woes and become ‘a very efficient instrument’.52 The Quai kept its legendary panache. In 1953 Soviet Counsellor Nicolai Korukine made a ‘vigorous protest’ to Guy de la Tournelle, political director, about a bomb that had been left in one of the Soviet Embassy’s buildings in Paris. In La Tournelle’s office he pulled a bomb from his pocket and placed it on the desk: ‘La Tournelle said he hoped that it had been disconnected … Korukine said it had been “partially disconnected”. Tournelle then said [that] what seemed to him abnormal in the whole affair was that the Russians had taken over a month to bring the matter to the notice of the French … as the Russians had waited so long the matter was clearly of no importance, and then … threw the bomb into the waste paper basket.’53

The Quai mastered multilateralism – helped by the presence of the UN in Paris until 1951, together with UNESCO and NATO. In November 1949 the ministry hosted so many meetings that organizers no longer bothered with the names of different organizations but called out the numbers of states in the different groupings: ‘Today the Nineteen, tomorrow the Twelve, followed by the Five, concluding with the Three.’54 Short on economic and military muscle, France maximized geopolitical assets. Most important by far was the country’s indispensability in America’s Cold War alliance. The position and size of the hexagon ensured that it had to be accommodated, not bypassed. Geography supplied the resources to integrate Western Europe under French leadership. Effective integration required French participation. France exploited soft power in the form of cultural diplomacy much more effectively than Britain. Ambitious officials competed for management of the Quai’s cultural affairs service – ‘persons in comparable positions in London would sooner die than take any kind of cultural post’, admitted a British ambassador.55 A core group of pre-war officials ensured continuity of ideas, in particular the belief that morally and historically France was a great power.

Reforms raised the profile and autonomy of economic services by consolidating them in one division – Direction generale des Affaires economiques, financières et techniques. Recruitment from other branches of the civil service infused new blood. As well as presenting a progressive face – the only European foreign service with a woman (Suzanne Borel) in a senior post – the Quai ran a much leaner operation than its competitors – smaller embassy staffing levels gave early and mid-career officials more experience than their peers in other foreign services. Paris profited from stability of personnel in key embassies – postings tended to be considerably longer than American and British appointments. Top diplomats enjoyed a longer leash than British counterparts. Preparing for the Brussels Treaty of March 1948, secretary general Chauvel went to London without specific instructions from Bidault. After consulting foreign secretary Bevin, the French official, accompanied by a senior British adviser, travelled to the Hague and Brussels. While his companion spent much of the time telephoning London for approval of the numerous treaty drafts and redrafts, Chauvel returned to Paris without once contacting his minister or department. De Gaulle’s oversight of external policy-making after 1958 ended this freedom.

The Quai raised the nation’s overseas profile, but globalization and multilateralism undermined the ministry’s ascendancy in national policy-making. Foreign policy, formerly a semi-autonomous enclave, became part of general government policy. Foreign ministers had to defend their corner against colleagues, military chiefs, parliamentary deputies and foreign affairs committees. The interdependence of internal and external issues spawned specialist agencies with overlapping interests in international affairs – three in 1913; fifteen in 1938; sixty-six in 1954. An external trade ministry opened its doors in 1951; a ministry of overseas cooperation from 1959. The first secretary general of the influential SGCI came from the ministry of finance, not the foreign ministry. Large fiefdoms escaped Quai oversight: German and Austrian occupation authorities, Algeria, Indo-China, Tunisia and Morocco. The leisured caste depicted in Abel Hermant’s La Carrière (1894), devoted to foreign affairs in a romantic sense, had long gone. Technology and multilateralism undermined the ambassador’s role and the allure of diplomacy. Olivier Wormser, director of financial and economic affairs, ‘had no use for a modern Ambassadorship … it meant endless waste of time drinking, traveling to and from airports and conveying messages to governments’.56 In the 1960s the Quai, like the FO, absorbed staff from disbanded agencies – Moroccan and Tunisian affairs, and the ministry of overseas cooperation. Multilateralism cranked up the workload, multiplying missions, meetings and conferences – twenty international conferences in 1940 became 290 a year by the 1970s. Monsieur de Norpois – Marcel Proust’s diplomat – would have struggled in the new environment.

Post-war secretary generals – five in twenty years (1944–64) – lacked the stature of interwar predecessors Philippe Berthelot and Alexis Leger. In 1950 Alexandre Parodi knew nothing of the Schuman Plan until the eve of its announcement. His efforts to defuse the polemic between supporters and critics of the EDC compromised his authority. Massigli barely lasted eighteen months, allegedly crushed between two factions: ‘on the one hand the resentment of those whom I call the “super-Europeans” who never forgave me for having opposed the EDC and for having collaborated effectively with Pierre Mendes France for the creation of WEU … on the other hand the clan of those who for various reasons identify France’s interest with that of Israel.’57 The expansion of the minister’s office into a pivotal coordinating agency undermined the authority of the secretary general. Schuman’s office, not the department, arranged Monnet’s contacts with the minister. The presence of outsiders in lead positions confirmed the Quai as one voice among several. In 1949 officials from other branches of the mandarinate filled four of the Quai’s top posts. Chef de protocole Jacques Dumaine deplored the appointment of outsider Parodi [Conseil d’Etat] to the secretary generalship: ‘It is a sign of the present lack of distinction among the staff of our foreign office that it cannot provide men of sufficient stature to fill this position.’58

Whatever the virtuosity of individual players and the charisma of French diplomacy, ministerial vision came first. Among the Republic’s longest-serving foreign ministers, only Schuman had the genius to reshape national strategy. He and Bidault belonged to the same Christian Democrat party, but Bidault lacked strong European convictions – expressing support only when the United States made integration a condition of economic reconstruction. By spring 1954, reported a British observer, a ‘worn out, garrulous’ Bidault ‘scarcely making any sense at all … said that he was casting himself to the wolves, into the waves, under the train’, but the audience ‘could not quite make out which wolves, waves, train’.59

Schuman had the ambition and will to redefine France’s place in the world. Inspired by his Catholicism – the only foreign minister in modern times whose cause for beatification has been reviewed by the Catholic Church – he sought to act on philosopher Jacques Maritain’s belief that a European federation would inaugurate a new Christendom. Fluent German and a German education made him a born ambassador for Franco–German reconciliation. His ascetic private life seemed as dull as Bidault’s was bohemian. Monk-like, he shunned the glitz of the capital, returning as frequently as possible to his home near Metz in the Moselle. Piety and modesty exposed him to ridicule and suspicion. A British politician found him ‘too much of the mystic … very much under the influence of the priests’.60 Cartoons showed him clasping a prostitute with the caption: ‘Monsieur Schuman et sa poule’ – mischievous word play on the French word for a prostitute and the Franco–German coal and steel pool. Spurning razzmatazz, he preferred to catch a bus rather than use an official car with outriders. The challenge was to devise a European solution to a resurgent Germany. Given the tug of war within the Quai on German rearmament, Schuman turned to outsiders led by Monnet, head of France’s modernization programme and main author of the ECSC. When Massigli, ambassador in London, telephoned the Quai for details of the Schuman Plan the secretary-general responded, ‘The administration has been virtually excluded from this business’.61

What made France special? Benelux, Britain, Italy and West Germany all experienced high growth and modernization. Not by bread alone – wartime dreams persisted. Gabriel Peri’s promise of a reborn nation piloting a resurrected Europe, ‘a future full of song’, lived on. The motif of effort and redemption ran through the best-sellers of the mid-1950s – still dominated by narratives of the Resistance. Commentators talked of a Sleeping Beauty with an influential role to play. ‘The day would come’, avowed historian Charles Moraze, ‘when enlightened opinion will look towards France for the ideas with which to guide … commercial, industrial and human progress’.62 Moraze’s best seller Les Français et la Republique (1956) concluded that the nation would ‘blossom forth slowly and splendidly in the new era of world history’.63 Sheer will power, argued Raymond Aron, would power recovery, ‘a resolute nation will in the end find a way to survive’ – confirming the ‘virtues of our race’.64 Mauriac commemorated the Liberation’s tenth anniversary with an upbeat assessment, stressing a profound desire for political reform, concluding: ‘Let us rejoice … because this anniversary … is celebrated in hope … We suffered from sleeping sickness but not terminally … now we are awake … nothing is ever lost for France’.65 The Algerian-born French runner Alain Mimoun symbolized recovery, dazzling the world by beating the Czech Emil Zatopek to win the 1956 Olympic marathon. In 1957 politician and journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber expressed confidence that his memoir of national service in Algeria would ‘persuade … people … that my country retains a faith and energy which will yet permit her to surmount her present sea of troubles’.66

Servan-Schreiber’s testimony explains why a regime riding an economic roller-coaster unravelled in May 1958. Anglo-Saxon critics viewed the crisis as proof of a diseased polity and torn nation. In fact, the force of frustrated post-Liberation hopes helped topple the Fourth Republic. ‘Faith and energy’, born of resistance and liberation, lost patience with political uncertainty. Making a go of some things does not guarantee overall success. The ‘rejection of the Republic’, William Hitchcock argues, ‘was made possible by its very success’.67 The confidence that came with prosperity demanded a new political settlement. The constitutional compromise of 1946 proved unequal to the strains of almost continuous colonial war. Miscalculation, hesitation and drift destabilized the regime. Arguably, the legacy of wartime clandestinity shaped outcomes more than was realized. Beset by multiple risks and choices during the occupation, resisters adopted a wait and see approach. Bidault’s Christian Democrat colleague, Francisque Gay, chided him that the temporization of resistance life had become a settled principle of government, producing a ‘fear of effectiveness which is largely responsible for the immobilisme that has engulfed our political life for nearly ten years’.68 Nevertheless, the Republic successfully constructed an economic platform for the next decade. The launch in 1955 of the Citroen DS with its aerodynamic futuristic body and innovative technology, and the Caravelle, France’s first commercial medium range jet airliner – internationally one of the most successful of the decade – showcased a rebooted economy. De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic reaped the harvest.