Postwar

France’s attention was now fixed, indeed fixated, upon Germany. This was not unreasonable: between 1814 and 1940 French soil had been invaded and occupied by Germans on five distinct occasions, three of them within living memory. The country had paid an incalculable price in territorial and material loss and in human lives and suffering. The failure after 1918 to put in place a system of controls and alliances capable of restraining a renascent, vengeful Germany haunted the Quai d’Orsay, home of the French Foreign Ministry. The country’s first priority after the defeat of Hitler was to ensure that this mistake was not repeated.

Thus France’s initial position on the German problem was very clear, and drew directly upon the lessons of 1918-24: so much so, indeed, that to outsiders it appeared an attempt to re-run the script of the post-World War One years, only this time with someone else’s army. What French policy makers sought was the complete disarmament and economic dismantling of Germany: arms and arms-related production were to be prohibited, reparations were to be made (including obligatory labour service in France for German workers), agricultural produce, timber, coal and machinery were to be requisitioned and removed. The mining districts of the Ruhr, the Saarland and parts of the Rhineland should be separated from the German state, their resources and output placed at French disposal.

Such a schedule, had it been imposed, would surely have destroyed Germany for many years to come: that was its half-acknowledged object (and an attractive political programme in France). But it would also have served the purpose of placing Germany’s huge primary resources at the service of France’s own plans for recovery— indeed, the Monnet Plan presumed the availability of German coal deliveries in particular, without which the French steel industry was helpless. Even in 1938 France had been the world’s biggest importer of coal, buying from abroad some 40 percent of its requirements in coal and coke. By 1944 French domestic coal output had fallen to less than half that of 1938. The country was even more dependent upon foreign coal. But in 1946, when domestic coal production regained 1938 levels, French coal imports—at 10 million tons—were still desperately short of the required amounts. Without German coal and coke, the post-war French recovery would be stillborn.

There were, however, a number of shortcomings to French calculations. In the first place they fell foul of the same objections raised by Keynes to French policy a quarter century earlier. It made little sense to destroy German resources if they were vital to France’s own recovery; and there was simply no way to oblige Germans to work for France while being held down to a low standard of living at home with little prospect for improvement. The risk of provoking a nationalist backlash in Germany against post-war foreign oppression appeared at least as great in the 1940s as it had twenty years earlier.

But the most serious objection to French plans for post-war Germany was that they took little account of the interests or plans of France’s Western allies, an imprudent oversight at a time when France was utterly dependent on those same allies not just for her security but for her very livelihood. On secondary issues—such as a customs and monetary union with the Saarland, on which the French got their way in 1947—the Western Allies could accommodate French demands. But on the central issue of Germany’s future, Paris had no leverage with which to oblige the ‘Anglo-Americans’ to do its bidding.

France’s relationship with the Soviet Union was a little different. France and Russia had been in and out of alliances together for the past half century and Russia still held a special place in French public affection: opinion polls in post-war France consistently revealed a substantial reserve of sympathy for the Soviet Union.[25] French diplomats in the aftermath of German defeat could thus hope that a natural concordance of interests—shared fear of Germany and suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’—might translate into sustained Soviet support for French diplomatic goals. Like Churchill, De Gaulle thought and spoke of the USSR as ‘Russia’ and reasoned in grand historical analogies: on his way to Moscow in December 1944, to negotiate a rather meaningless Franco-Russian Treaty against any revival of German aggression, the French leader observed to his entourage that he was dealing with Stalin as Francois I^e had with Suleiman the Magnificent four centuries earlier: with the difference ‘that in sixteenth-century France there wasn’t a Muslim party’.

Stalin, however, did not share French illusions. He had no interest in serving as a counterweight to assist the French in offsetting the foreign policy heft of London and Washington, though this was only finally made clear to the French in April 1947, at the Moscow gathering of Allied foreign ministers, when Molotov refused to back Georges Bidault’s proposals for a separate Rhineland and foreign control of the Ruhr industrial belt. Yet the French continued to dream up alternative ways to secure an impossible independence of policy. There were aborted negotiations with Czechoslovakia and Poland aimed at securing coal and markets for French steel and farm produce. And the French Ministry of War could—confidentially—propose, as late as 1947, that France should adopt a stance of international neutrality, making preventive ententes or alliances with the USA and the USSR and lining up against whichever of the two initiated aggression against her.

If France finally abandoned these fantasies and came round to the position of her Western partners in 1947, it was for three reasons. In the first place, French strategies for Germany had failed: there was to be no dismantling of Germany and there would be no reparations. France was in no position to impose a German solution of her own, and no-one else wanted the one she was proposing. The second reason for France’s retreat from her initial positions was the desperate economic situation of mid-1947: like the rest of Europe, France (as we have seen) urgently needed not just American aid but German recovery. The former was indirectly but unambiguously dependent upon French agreement on a strategy for the latter.

But thirdly, and decisively, French politicians and the French national mood shifted definitively in the second half of 1947. Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the advent of the Cominform (to be discussed in the next chapter) transformed the powerful French Communist Party from an awkward coalition partner in government to the unrestrained critic of all French policies at home and abroad: so much so that through the latter part of 1947 and most of 1948 France seemed to many to be heading into civil war. At the same time there was something of a war scare in Paris, coupling the country’s continued worries about German revanchism with new talk of an impending Soviet invasion.

In these circumstances, and following their rebuff by Molotov, the French turned reluctantly towards the West. Asked by US Secretary of State George Marshall in April 1947 whether America ‘could rely on France’, Foreign Minister Bidault replied ‘yes’—given time and if France could avoid a civil war. Marshall was understandably not much impressed, any more than he was eleven months later when he described Bidault as having ‘a case of the jitters’. Marshall found France’s preoccupation with the German threat ‘outmoded and unrealistic’.[26]

What Marshall said of France’s fears about Germany was doubtless true, but it suggests a lack of empathy for France’s recent past. It was thus a matter of no small significance when the French parliament approved Anglo-American plans for western Germany in 1948, albeit by a significantly close vote of 297-289. The French had no choice and they knew it. If they wanted economic recovery and some level of American and British security guarantees against German revival or Soviet expansion, then they had to go along— especially now that France was embroiled in a costly colonial war in Indo-China for which she urgently needed American help.

The Americans and British could guarantee France against a renascent military threat from Germany; and American policy could hold out the promise of economic recovery in Germany. But none of this resolved France’s long-standing dilemma—how to secure privileged French access to the materials and resources located there. If these objectives were not to be obtained by force or by annexation, then an alternative means had to be found. The solution, as it emerged in French thinking in the course of the ensuing months, lay in ‘Europeanising’ the German Problem: as Bidault, once again, expressed it in January 1948: ‘On the economic plane, but also on the political plane one must… propose as an objective to the Allies and to the Germans themselves, the integration of Germany into Europe… it is… the only means to give life and consistency to a politically decentralized, but economically prosperous Germany.’

In short, if you could not destroy Germany, then join her up to a European framework in which she could do no harm militarily but much good economically. If the idea had not occurred to French leaders before 1948 this was not through a shortage of imagination, but because it was clearly perceived as a pis aller, a second-best outcome. A ‘European’ solution to France’s German problem could only be adopted once a properly ‘French’ solution had been abandoned, and it took French leaders three years to accept this. In those three years France had, in effect, to come to terms with the abrupt negation of three hundred years of history. In the circumstances this was no small achievement.