2 Vive la France

In the depths of the Second World War, writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery dedicated Le Petit Prince to his friend the Jewish author and art critic Leon Werth: ‘He lives in France, where he is cold and hungry.

The fag-end of the war in Europe found the French feeling more defeated than victorious, with scarcely enough gold and foreign exchange to pay for six months of imports. The winter of 1944–5, one of the coldest on record, forced Parisians to pile on extra layers, reading one-sheet newspapers over breakfast coffee of burned barley before spending the day in long queues for groceries. Food and coal riots broke out in several towns. Cyclists powered hairdryers in the beauty salons. Shortages drove up infant mortality rates. Writer Simone de Beauvoir carried home kilos of groceries from well-stocked station buffets in Spain and Portugal. The click click of wooden heels on pavements provided a constant reminder of daily privations. Bread rationing below occupation levels returned in January 1946. The franc lost two thirds of its value between 1944 and 1947 – three devaluations by 1948. No catalogue of material loss conveys the human tragedy.

The national psyche suffered most. The war shattered France’s self-image as a chosen people. Lucien Febvre, co-founder with Marc Bloch in 1929 of the historical journal Annales, equated the prospect of the destruction of France with ‘the end of European culture as we have known, loved and served it’.2 Joachim du Bellay’s sixteenth-century sonnet Les Regrets, extolling France as ‘mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws’, framed the pre-1939 self-image. France stood for a fixed middle kingdom, heir to Greece and Rome, acme of Western civilization.

The image of a warrior people found in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and confirmed by the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon I resonated deeply. The French perceived the allied victory of 1918 as a triumph of national arms avenging the defeat of 1871 at the hands of Prussia. The strength of interwar pacifism did not deter the Third Republic from maintaining the largest army in Western Europe and supplying arms and assistance to allies. The French claimed to be guardians of revolution, liberty and human rights. The hyperbole had nuggets of truth. In 1791 the Republic was the first European nation to extend full civil rights to Jews, sheltering dissident Poles in the 1830s and 1860s, followed by Russian exiles after the revolutions of 1917, then German and Spanish refugees after 1933. French leaders, notably Albert Thomas, first director general of the League of Nations International Labour Office, and foreign minister Aristide Briand energized interwar internationalism.

Religion and empire validated specialness. Despite the anti-clericalism that culminated in the church–state separation law of 1905, religious practice remained strong and France took pride in the title ‘eldest daughter of the Church’. Government and missionaries cooperated overseas. The empire’s sacrifice of blood, sweat and treasure in the Great War stirred popular enthusiasm.

Defeat upended everything. Six weeks sufficed to topple a premier military power and universally acknowledged beacon of civilized values. Sartre captured the trauma. In the thick of the battle for France in June 1940 an army unit became separated from the rest and prepared to surrender or go down fighting:

‘Odd,’ Mathieu mused. ‘Yes, quite ridiculous.’ He gazed into empty space … ‘I am French.’ And for the first time in his life he thought it was an absurd idea … We were right in it … It was so natural to be French. It was the simplest, most economical way of feeling universal. There was nothing to explain; let the others explain – the Germans, the British, the Belgians – by what stroke of ill-luck, and through whose fault they were not quite human.… But now France had overturned and was lying flat on her back … and now we say to ourselves: ‘Well, that was it…’3

Vichy, a German vassal state under Marshal Philippe Petain, replaced the Third Republic of 1870, the most durable regime since the Revolution of 1789. Germany’s takeover of the whole of the country in November 1942 intensified the Franco–French war of resisters vs. collaborators. Vichy’s national revolution of ‘Work, Country, Family’ rekindled the post-1789 ideological quarrel between left and right. Most citizens stayed on the sidelines, victims of German reprisals and Allied bombing, and forced to witness compatriots gunning each other down. Events denied them the satisfaction of self-liberation. Resisters sabotaged German communications and helped liberate the capital, but Anglo-Saxon armies defeated the enemy in the field. Many felt like the Frenchman in the film The Longest Day – ‘wearing a World War I helmet’, he ‘waves a champagne bottle at the Allied troops rushing past him, shouting “welcome boys”.

By the early 1960s France led the pack in Western Europe, overtaking Britain in GNP. How did a down-and-out nation pick itself up? Economic miracle? Baby boom? Gallic brilliance? First and foremost, a revamped and innovative dirigiste state. Between the wars the philosopher Emile Chartier, aka Alain, championed individualism, declaring that resistance to power mattered more than reforming action. Defeat transformed attitudes. Reimagining the nation during ‘the dark years’ of occupation convinced elites that the state was the essential instrument of modernization. Post-war France benefited from a new contract between state and citizens. An interventionist state offered social welfare, nationalization of core economic sectors and democratization.

Modernization. The state’s privileging of innovation and technocracy empowered political economist and diplomat Jean Monnet in creating France’s first modernization plan in 1946. The war of 1914 ended with calls for a return to business as usual; the second conflict unleashed calls for a renaissance. ‘What was unique about France’, writes historian Richard Kuisel, was how ‘a collective sense of national decline and disenchantment with the liberal order provided the fundamental impetus for change’.5 The choice, in Jean Monnet’s words, was between ‘modernization or decadence’.6 Technocrats had cut their teeth working with the Third Republic and Vichy. A Communist Party poster caught the get-up-and-go spirit – a worker against a background of factory reconstruction with the slogan ‘Let’s roll up our sleeves, things will get even better!’

The country reinvented itself. Defeat forced the French to focus on the future. Resisters hailed a ‘new springtime’. Defeat, declared philosopher Simone Weil, gave France ‘the opportunity of becoming once again among the nations what she was in the past … an inspiration’.7 Reformist ideas seeded in the 1930s persuaded elites that the nation was capable of ‘a profound transformation on all levels, political, economic, social, cultural’.8 Confidence in regeneration held up.

The myth of a resisting nation personified in de Gaulle recharged morale. True, everyone claimed to have resisted; Marshal Petain at his trial called himself ‘the first of the resisters’. De Gaulle, however, symbolized the fact and spirit of resistance, the refusal to abandon greatness. State and citizens colluded in treating the internal and external resistance movements as a liberation army – with help from allies. The Communist film-makers of the documentary La Liberation de Paris, filmed during the rising of August 1944, de-emphasized the infighting between Communist and rival resistance groups, highlighting instead ‘a vision of the insurrection that put the city and its population at the heart of events’.11

From day one de Gaulle, as head of the Provisional Government, relentlessly pursued recovery of rank, conjuring up a self-liberating resisting France. ‘Paris liberated’, he proclaimed at the Paris Hôtel de Ville on 25 August 1944, ‘liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies’.12 Third Republic elites shared in the myth-making that rebooted the Republic’s profile and moral authority. In France saved Europe, Paul Reynaud, prime minister in June 1940, hailed a martyr-like Republic sacrificing itself for Europe; ‘most French people responded by taking up arms, or by harassing the enemy or by accepting in their hearts the call of general de Gaulle … France sacrificed herself and because she sacrificed herself the independence of the world could be saved by the stoicism of the British people, the courage of the Russian army and the colossal power of America’.13

The legend cemented the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

The myth of a resisting nation endured because it embodied a truth. Resistance revealed ‘an obscure, secret France, new to her friends, her enemies … new to herself’, with hopes and ambitions for remaking the nation.14 Vilified by Vichy and the Germans as terrorists, resisters became heroes deliberately defying law and authority – with their own pecking order. Members of de Gaulle’s London-based Free French movement in 1940 formed an inner elite, ‘Companions of the Liberation’, rewarded with top jobs in the Provisional Government of 1944–6 and the Fifth Republic.

Britain made a crucial contribution to the myth of a resisting France. Promising to set Hitler’s Europe ablaze, Churchill created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work with resistance networks. British resources fuelled the movements. During the long wait for an Allied invasion of the continent, London prioritized resistance. Joseph Kessel’s classic resistance novel, L’Armee des Ombres (Army of Shadows), underscores the efficiency of the British machine. Shortly after Kessel’s arrival in London early in 1943 de Gaulle suggested a story about the resistance. Notwithstanding stringent paper rationing a French edition appeared in Algiers before the end of the year, quickly followed by English translations. An official documentary, Now It Can Be Told (1946), followed the careers of SOE agents in occupied France, bolstering the Gaullist myth of a self-liberating France. Maquis (1945), the story of SOE agent George Millar, got a 70,000 hardback print run. De Gaulle read it and personally thanked Millar. The British film Odette (1950) celebrated the life of Resistance heroine and holder of the George Cross Odette Sampson; Bruce Marshall’s The White Rabbit (1952) about SOE agent Wing Commander Yeo Thomas came out in a French edition within a year. The memoirs of Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE’s French section, Specially Employed (1952) and They Fought Alone (1958), sustained the momentum. Popular BBC television dramas of the 1970s and 1980s like Secret Army and ’Allo, ’Allo! recycled the myth of a France resistante.

Planning the future meant rethinking the past. The retelling of recent history reinforced the image of a reborn Republic. The inquest on 1940 reached back to the First World War. The perceived folly of France’s pre-war foreign policy united resisters and Vichyites. The standard explanation of the coming of war in terms of a wicked Hitler, over-indulged by timorous democracies, left the speed of France’s collapse unexplained. Perfidious Albion, bogeyman of the Right, supplied a convenient whipping boy. German and Vichy propaganda exploited grievances over Britain’s conduct before, during and after the Battle of France. Vichy’s Anglophobia, writer Albert Camus pointed out, sprang from ‘the ignoble desire to see the person who does stand up to the strength that has overwhelmed you go down himself’.15

Scapegoating Anglo-Saxons for interwar pusillanimity towards Germany enhanced the myth of a resisting France and made the French feel better. At the peacemaking in 1919 – ran the script – Anglo-Saxon allies bamboozled France by blocking demands for a separate Rhineland and Saar, offering as a sop a Treaty of Guarantee which collapsed within months, leaving the Republic a lone gendarme of an unpopular peace. British misjudgements led to the retreats of the 1930s and the coming of war. ‘The Munich Agreement’, affirmed France’s former ambassador to Berlin, ‘was the logical consequence of the policy practised by Britain and France, but principally inspired by Britain’.16 Novelist François Mauriac put it more strongly: ‘The British’, he wrote, were ‘responsible, in large part, for the conflict of 1939’.17 After bullying France into war Britain ensured defeat by holding back RAF fighters in the Battle of France, and prioritizing the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk. The 3 July 1940 attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir added insult to injury. Churchill and Roosevelt ganged up against de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, excluded him from allied summits, and plotted to replace him by General Giraud.

The general’s war memoirs popularized the myth. Belief in Allied betrayal united the founder of the Fifth Republic and a notable of the despised Third. The general congratulated ex-foreign minister Georges Bonnet on an overview of French foreign policy since 1870, demonstrating how ‘after the unforgettable’ effort of the First World War France fell victim to the ‘downright desertion of the Americans and English … one of the principal causes of the misfortune of 1940’.18 The former minister proudly carried the letter in his wallet, displaying it like a testimonial. De Gaulle emphasized the new orthodoxy: ‘The Second World War would never have broken out if, in the 1930s, we had not fallen into the habit of relying on the English. Our governments allowed the public to believe that our security depended on what London would do … We proclaimed that we would not allow Strasbourg to come under German guns. But since the English did not want to do anything, we did nothing. When Chamberlain wanted Munich, we followed’. The general stressed ‘the natural propensity of the French to yield to foreigners and become divided … it was practically an understood thing that France never said “No!”’.19

Sans de Gaulle the French would still have resented Anglo–American dominance and their own powerlessness. The Anglo-Saxon hijacking of France’s history added salt to the wounds. In Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins, Anne (de Beauvoir) visits her lover Lewis (Nelson Algren) in the United States and listens to him talking with two ex-GI friends. ‘They were talking volubly, interrupting each other constantly. There was no doubting their sympathy for France, they were not the least bit complacent about their own country; and yet, listening to them, I felt uncomfortable. It was their war they were talking about, a war in which we had been only the somewhat pitiful excuse. Their scruples concerning us were like those a man could feel toward a weak woman or a passive animal. And already they were making wax legends out of our history’.20 De Gaulle’s accusations of allied betrayal after 1918 resonated with many influencers. Eminent historians accepted Gaullist orthodoxy. ‘French statesmen’, wrote Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, ‘practised appeasement because they needed British help and were subject to constant British pressure’.21 A.J.P. Taylor’s emphasis in Origins of the Second World War (1961) on the shared responsibility of London and Paris for the coming of war proved unwelcome. When Taylor personally gave copies of Origins to Pierre Renouvin and Maurice Baumont, luminaries of French historiography, ‘neither of them acknowledged my gift or spoke to me again’.22

National unity, a prerequisite for regaining international rank, dictated a ‘softly, softly’ transition from Vichy to Provisional Government and Fourth Republic. About 9,000 summary executions occurred in the summer of 1944 before the Provisional Government in Paris imposed its authority. There were no bloodbaths. A general hue and cry would have nullified the myth of a populace united against the German invader. While Petain, Pierre Laval and assorted Vichy prominenti faced High Court trials and execution, lesser fry escaped lightly with sentences of ‘national indignity’ – loss of civil rights and exclusion from parliament. Amnesties soon restored civil rights. Bonnet’s career illustrates the Republic’s moderation towards Vichy fellow travellers. Excoriated for abandoning France’s ally Czechoslovakia in 1938 and for pro-Vichy sympathies – though never holding office under Vichy – the ex-minister returned from Swiss exile in time to benefit from a 1953 amnesty allowing him to regain his old parliamentary seat and achieve leadership of the radical socialist party. Similarly, right-wing writer Alfred Fabre-Luce, sentenced in 1949 to ten years of ‘national indignity’, waited only two years for an amnesty. The snail-like progress of the parliamentary commission of enquiry set up in 1946 to investigate the period 1933–45 helped sedate opinion. The commission’s mix of politicians and resistance leaders boded ill for impartiality. Over four years Vichy and Third Republic notables testified on oath, but no money could be found to send delegates to the United States to interview Alexis Leger, secretary general of the pre-war foreign ministry, and former premier Camille Chautemps. The investigation never completed a report on the war years. Not that it mattered. By the time hearings concluded in May 1951, parliament and public had long since switched off.

Renowned for food, fashion, wine and culture, the Republic repackaged itself as a leading industrial and scientific power. In 1948 the media acclaimed ZOE, the Republic’s first experimental nuclear reactor, ‘A great achievement – French and peaceful, which strengthens our role in the defence of civilization.’23 The emphasis on peaceful applications of nuclear energy inspired a vision of a technological France. Nuclear power stations were marketed as ‘contemporary chateaux, symbols of national glory’, successors of Versailles and the Eiffel Tower. A 1957 film documentary opened with a picture of the palace of Versailles and Louis XIV’s first minister advising him: ‘Sire, the grandeur of a state depends on its arts and manufactures’. An overview followed of technological change concluding with nuclear power. In 1964 ‘Groupe 85’, a forum for experts, addressed the future of the nation: ‘The first unexpected challenge is the intellectual and cultural survival of an original and individual France … from now on our presence in the world depends on our ability to imprint our mark on this civilization by means of … French technology and science.’24 The challenge was to modernize without losing individuality. As de Gaulle put it, ‘the problem is to accomplish this without France ceasing to be France’.25

Religion energized the new France. In a laicized Republic with strong anti-clerical traditions the church regained influence. Like Anglicanism in Britain, Catholicism ran deep in the nation’s traditions. No other national Christian community rivalled the creativity of mid-twentieth-century French Catholicism. The worker priest movement in the 1950s and the abbe Pierre’s crusade for the homeless attracted world interest. Catholic involvement in the resistance realized a reconciliation with the state, generating confidence and cohesion. The church’s dynamism boosted the Republic’s international prestige. To portray the renewal of the French Church as a short-lived affair in a ‘deeply conservative’ institution, compromised by collusion with Vichy, is misleading.26 Religious renewal, like social and economic recovery, began in the interwar years and continued through the 1960s. The initial sympathy which many bishops felt for Petain did not necessarily signify collusion in the regime’s racist agenda. Leading prelates condemned Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation. Those who kept silent allowed diocesan facilities and networks to assist Jews. Post-liberation calls for an extensive purge of pro-Vichy bishops yielded only a few forced retirements. The high profile of Catholics in the Resistance offset the hierarchy’s mixed record. The church emerged from the war with a renewed presence in public life. Fortnightly meetings between foreign minister Georges Bidault and papal nuncio Mgr Giovanni Roncalli (future Pope Jean XIII) established a modus vivendi. The Provisional Government of 1944–6 was the first administration since the 1870s to be headed by a practising Catholic. In December 1944 the determination of de Gaulle and his foreign minister to attend mass at the little Catholic church in Moscow surprised French diplomats. President Rene Coty of the Fourth Republic – first head of state to go to mass since Marshal MacMahon in the 1870s – visited Pope Pius XII in May 1957, sealing a church–state reconciliation.

Catholic Action and Christian Democracy shaped post-war politics. The new MRP Christian Democrat party (Mouvement Republicain Populaire) averaged 4–5 portfolios in the coalition governments of the Fourth Republic. Led by foreign minister Robert Schuman, Catholics were a driving force in European integration – arousing British suspicions of a Catholic plot. Revival spanned intellectual life and pastoral ministry. The neo-Thomism of philosophers Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain influenced the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The Christian existentialism of Gabriel Marcel and the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier impacted European elites. The Vatican II Council of the 1960s relied on ‘the new theology’ of Jesuit Henri de Lubac and Dominican Yves Congar. The French Church’s traditional title ‘eldest daughter of the Church’ still resonated. In 1945 Maritain, newly-appointed ambassador to the Holy See, shared with Pius XII his confidence that ‘the Church will aid and bless the effort of the nation that prides itself on being called its eldest daughter’, affirming that France’s ideals for the ‘reconstruction of the civilized universe’ agreed with Catholic teaching.27

The annual parade of French forces down the Champs-Elysees on Bastille Day, 14 July, represented an unparalleled show of strength in Western Europe. Pride in military might survived 1940 and the disasters of colonial war in Indo-China. For one thing, the military record of the Algerian war was one of successful containment of rebellion; for another, the successful testing of A- and H-bombs (1960, 1968) and development of strike capability promised a seat in the first rank of powers. The warrior legend of the original Gallic resister, Vercingetorix, defying Roman invaders melded with the Gaullist resistantialiste myth of a united France opposing the occupier, finally from 1959 becoming mass entertainment in the new comic strip character Asterix. The miraculous survival of Asterix’s village, thanks to a mix of natural guile and magic, saves it from Roman civilization. History as popular entertainment perpetuated the myth of a unique Gallic destiny. The Fifth Republic added a profitable dimension to the warrior image – the making and marketing of arms, becoming a major world supplier.

The French appeared more imperialist-minded in 1945 than before the conflict. In the dark years of 1940–4 empire offered a pledge for the future – several territories declared for De Gaulle, and Algeria provided a base for the Free French movement. ‘Without empire’, Gaston Monnerville, deputy for French Guiana and grandson of a slave, told parliament in May 1945, ‘France today would be only a liberated country. Thanks to her empire, France is a victorious country’.28 Those like philosopher Raymond Aron who doubted whether France had the means to retain empire were few and far between.29 ‘No more French Algeria, no more France’, chanted supporters of the Algerian war. For many, Algeria was not just another colony but administratively and emotionally part of metropolitan France.

A new story with twin themes of modernization and decolonization replaced the old imperialism. De Gaulle’s repackaging of the civilizing mission as a call to modernization caught the imagination. Decolonization became a milestone to modernity, a continuation of French leadership by other means. Grandeur stood for internal modernization, leadership of the European Community, and sponsorship of newly independent Francophone countries. Modernization, argues historian Kristin Ross, was a form of internal colonialism, ‘rational administrative techniques developed in the colonies were brought home and put to use side by side with new technological innovations such as advertising in reordering metropolitan, domestic society, the everyday life of its citizens’.30 In 1960 culture minister Andre Malraux hired unemployed colonial administrators to run his new ministry of culture ‘to help him keep … domestic possessions loyal … by retrofitting the unified French culture’.31 Modernization through decolonization opened up fresh vistas and energies.

Soft power accelerated recovery of influence. A thoroughly elitist project prioritized the marketing of high culture to influential global publics.

The claim to a universal cultural voice commanded respect, and supplied leverage in Franco–American relations. By emphasizing cultural ‘specialness’ France created a case for preferential treatment from America. Much of the cultural capital amassed since the eighteenth century survived the humiliations of 1940–4. In the late nineteenth century France was the first state to recognize the importance of cultural diplomacy. As the language of diplomacy and educated elites for over two centuries, French retained its reclame, especially in South America and the Middle East. When writer Romain Gary, charge d’affaires in La Paz, won the Prix Goncourt in 1956 the city council and Bolivian press lionized him like a Hollywood star. In 1945 the restoration of France as an independent power with a UN Security Council seat strengthened confidence in a global mission. Hosting the United Nations in Paris for five years (1946–51), together with the UN agency UNESCO and the headquarters of the Western military alliance NATO, gave Paris the prestige of a world diplomatic capital. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a landmark of international human rights law, was signed in Paris and drew in part on French inspiration.

The Fourth Republic reopened French institutes and branches of the Alliance française, closed during the war, and established new centres – the Maison française at the University of Oxford (1946). Renewal and expansion meant training language teachers for schools and institutes, restoration of international exchanges in the humanities and social sciences, promotion of high culture through book exhibitions, author lecture tours, film festivals, art shows and tours by flagship theatre companies like the Comedie française. Innovations included the creation of a coordinating agency within the Quai d’Orsay: Direction generale des relations culturelles et des oeuvres a l’etranger; appointment of cultural advisers at major embassies; bilateral exchanges and agreements. A new emphasis on scientific and technological endeavour alongside language, literature and artistic creation distinguished post-war renewal.

The capital regained its reputation as the world’s crossroads – abuzz with the latest ideas, a magnet for creative artists from around the world, including American expats James Baldwin and Allen Ginsburg. Sartre held court at the left bank Cafe de Flore, expounding existentialism through a Gauloise smokescreen. A burst of exceptional creativity in the country’s intellectual life drove soft power. French ideas impacted profoundly worldwide, especially in the humanities. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) became a seminal text of modern feminism. Nobel prizes confirmed primacy in literature – Andre Gide (1947), François Mauriac (1952), Albert Camus (1957), St. John Perse (1962). Sartre’s refusal of a Nobel Prize in 1964 shocked the world and generated extra kudos.

A special relationship between state, culture and public service underpinned the selling of France. No other European state had such a close integration of elites. Like Jewish Old Testament prophets, public intellectuals represented the conscience of society. Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others engaged passionately with the issues of the day. The state treated them as an endangered species. General de Gaulle vetoed Sartre’s arrest for civil disobedience: ‘You don’t arrest Voltaire.’32 The intelligentsia’s front-runners could look forward to election to the French Academy – known as the ‘Immortals’ – perhaps receiving the ultimate accolade of a state funeral and burial in France’s holy of holies, the Pantheon. Savants blended political and public service careers: philosopher Jacques Maritain – ambassador to the Vatican; writer Andre Malraux – minister of culture; philosopher Alexandre Kojève – an influential economic policy-maker; anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss – cultural attache in Washington DC. Erudition and creative distinction lightly worn had a recognized place in political life. Within days of installing the Provisional Government in August 1944 de Gaulle, master stylist in his own right, wined and dined literary stars starting with François Mauriac, Georges Duhamel, Paul Valery and Georges Bernanos.

Serious fault lines compromised the marketing of Marianne. In the immediate post-war years French leaders envisioned their country as a third force in world politics. Very quickly, however, the Soviet Union and the United States annexed Europe’s high politics. Superpower management of the Cold War excluded a third force. Consequently, medium powers like France and Britain had difficulty finding a distinctive voice. The perception of the Fourth Republic as a crisis-ridden ‘sick woman of Europe’ undermined its self-projection as a flagship democracy. The army’s resort to torture and atrocities in the wars of decolonization in Indo-China and Algeria contradicted France’s claim to be the guardian of liberal values and human rights. A cash-strapped state could barely fund its cultural diplomacy. Financial constraints restricted the training of language teachers and capped the number of overseas lecture tours. When novelist Albert Camus undertook a government-sponsored lecture tour of American universities in 1946 he had to travel in an overcrowded freighter sharing a cabin with five others. Actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault, commissioned to present nine plays in South America, sailed in an old boat on its last voyage. Lack of money generated conflict. Some officials prioritized language teaching, others cultural projects. But the language was in full retreat. In mid-twentieth century its primacy as the lingua franca of diplomacy and world elites crumbled. At the foundation conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 France needed the help of the Soviet Union and Canada to defeat a bid to make English the sole working language.

Film exports exemplified the predicament. A parliamentary enquiry of 1952 into the film industry concluded that the ‘eminent role, which France is destined to play in the defence of peace and Western civilization’, required a strong film industry, but the contraction of French culture and language reduced the market.33 Film-makers could no longer assume that the originality and quality of their products would please American audiences. Hollywood’s hegemonic position and the universality of English limited the appeal of the low-budget, artisanal French cinema – American audiences disliked subtitles. US distributors delayed and mutilated Robert Bresson’s two masterpieces: Les Anges du Peche (1943; USA 1950), Journal d’un cure de campagne (1950; USA 1954). By the close of the 1950s film-makers capitulated to Hollywood’s mass-market criteria. ‘Screw the Americans’, exclaims postman François in Jacques Tati’s comedy Jour de Fête (1949). Fascinated by an American Marshall documentary on the speed and efficiency of the US mail service, François tries to imitate it. A hilarious merry-go-round ensues, followed by disillusionment and return to routine. France fought long and hard against Cocacolonization – borrowing some features, rejecting others. In 1949 the government set up a committee to oversee comic strips and books for children. The aim was to block comics coming from America. Restricting American competition helped make Tintin, Herge’s Belgian boy reporter, a European hero.34

Were the French as clever as they claimed? Historian Tony Judt excoriated Sartre and other idols of the European Left for denouncing the United States while ignoring the evils of Stalinism. Long before Judt’s indictment, however, Aron and Camus criticized the attitudes of their peers towards the Cold War. Judt’s critique does not detract from the achievement of French thinkers. Combining sympathy for the Soviet Union with vitriolic anti-Americanism was a way of asserting independence. Like the Maginot Line, the Descartes line of French culture has been criticized for breeding introversion, particularly in the social sciences and philosophy. ‘For long periods there has been a notable degree of closure, and ignorance of intellectual developments outside the country’, observed Marxist historian Perry Anderson, citing slowness to engage with Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, the Frankfurt School and British historical sociology.35 True, when Sartre lectured in the United States in 1946 he did not meet anyone from the Frankfurt School, but no American philosophers contacted him – though existentialism owed much to the pragmatism of C.S. Pierce and the psychologism of William James. Anderson’s critique echoed the earlier strictures of cultural historian H. Stuart Hughes. When British historians in the 1970s began to range widely over European and world history French colleagues continued to focus almost exclusively on France.36

What worried the French in the 1950s was the lack of international recognition for medicine, science and economics. Of the forty-one Nobel Prizes awarded in physics and chemistry since 1935, headlined the France Observateur in 1955, none had gone to France nor had any of the thirty-three prizes awarded in medicine and physiology since 1928. Recognition finally came in 1965 when three French scientists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris – François Jacob, Andre Lwoff and Jacques Monod – shared the Nobel prize in medicine and physiology for discoveries on genes. French science performed better than critics allowed. The quality of research in the physical sciences and mathematics can easily be underestimated. Before and during the Second World War French scientists contributed significantly to nuclear energy research. Without them, ‘neither the British nor the Canadians would have embarked … on a slow-neutron project, which was to be the indispensable basis for the production of power and plutonium’.37

Contradictions bedevilled the self-image of a progressive democracy. Liberty, equality and fraternity, the shibboleth of 1789 commemorated on the Republic’s coinage, meant some were more equal than others. The cult of the rational and universal made little allowance for differences of class, gender, ethnicity and region. Women waited for the vote until 1944. Rigid and intolerant centralization suppressed regional languages and cultures – Breton, Langue d’Oc, Basque, Flemish and Alsatian German. Public notices warned: ‘It is forbidden to speak Breton and spit on the ground.’ Industrial strife embittered the 1940s and 1950s. A wealthy bourgeoisie dominated the prestigious grandes ecoles and the higher echelons of public service. The educational system prolonged gross inequalities – a mere 21 per cent of working-class children entered secondary education. Challenges to orthodoxy were sanitized or suppressed. A post-Liberation reform intended to free the press from corruption replaced the venality of the Third Republic with extensive state intervention. Newspapers lost independence and the state had a large stable of journalists on the payroll.

The political elite represented ‘a cross-section of the upper bourgeoisie rather than of the population as a whole’. The Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA), founded in 1945, was a nursery for the higher civil service. Its graduates – known as enarques – represented the best and brightest of the civil service. Between 1945 and 1952 barely 3.9 per cent of entrants came from the lower middle class. High rates of tuberculosis and mortality raged in the bidonvilles that ringed the elegant quarters of Haussmann’s Paris and other large cities. A sociologist accused architects, developers and property companies of having changed Saint-Denis on the northern perimeter of Paris from ‘a lively city full of history into a sordid concentration camp for immigrants’.38

Guardian of revolution, liberty and human rights? The state insisted that it had lived up to its ideals and had completed in 1945 the fight for liberty begun in September 1939. ‘France has throughout the world stood for the ideals of liberty, justice and humanity’, affirmed a 1946 edition of Petit Lavisse, the standard school history text.39 An inscription on the huge cross of Lorraine at de Gaulle’s village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises refers to the ancient pact ‘between the greatness of France and the liberty of the world’. True, the Republic accepted more asylum-seekers than any other state in the 1930s, but their reception and treatment was often harsh and insensitive.

Vichy authorities assisted Nazi genocide by deporting 70,000 foreign-born Jews. Compared to other parts of Hitler’s Europe the numbers could have been much higher. Seventy-five per cent of the 400,000-strong Jewish community survived, partly because Vichy was not as systematically brutal as alleged, and partly because many Jews found sanctuary in French homes. Saul Friedlander’s Quand Vient Le Souvenir (1978) and Joseph Joffo’s Un Sac de Billes (1973) tell of life-saving shelter. The resistance myth, buttressed by tight control of the archives, concealed Vichy’s anti-semitism. When the French state’s complicity in the Holocaust became widely known in the 1970s the army’s use of torture in Algeria had already exploded the myth of France as liberty’s champion.

While London talked of Commonwealth partnership and eventual self-rule for tropical Africa, the French Union of 1946 had a centralizing, assimilationist character. Merciless suppression of rebellion in Indo-China and Algeria reflected long-standing state violence against colonial subjects. Twenty thousand Indochinese were forced to work in France between 1939 and 1952. Brutal repression of nationalist movements contradicted the claim to guardianship of human rights. The Setif massacre of 1945, followed by the suppression of the 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, and the atrocities of decolonization wars in Indo-China (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62) exposed the abyss between image and reality. On the credit side, French voices – Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958), Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s L’Affaire Audin (1958) – spoke out early against the army’s use of torture in Algeria.

On the face of it, the dizzying carousel of five regimes between 1940 and 1958 confirms the sick woman image. Over twelve years the Fourth Republic averaged a different cabinet every six months. Appearances can deceive. Marianne, unlike Humpty Dumpty, put herself together again. Turbulence masked underlying continuities – comically so at times. ‘Vive le Marechal’, cried a befuddled local as de Gaulle arrived in liberated Bayeux. Only marginal differences separated the constitutions of the Third and Fourth Republics. The ‘continuous change’ of the Fourth Republic, as Richard Vinen argues, is best understood, not as evidence of failure, ‘but rather of a bourgeoisie that was innovative and willing to adjust to meet new problems’. Resistance as a symbol of renewal legitimized the post-war polity – ‘the prestige conferred on certain sections of the bourgeoisie by their careers in the Resistance strengthened their position’.40 The continuity of a large echelon of the political and administrative elite anchored the state. The strong administrative and legal backbone inherited from the Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon I grew stronger. After 1945 the retention of identity cards and the creation of anti-riot police, Compagnies republicaines de securite (CRS), strengthened state monopoly of force and surveillance powers.

Modernization offered a unifying vision. France won a vanguard position in technological development – civil and military uses of nuclear power, French communications satellite (1965), then European colour television standard Secam (1967), and supersonic air travel with Concorde (1969). Next came rapid commuter transit – Paris (RER 1977), and high speed intercity (TGV 1980), followed by Minitel (1982–) pre-world-wide web online connection.41