FROM 1944 TO 2024, SHARING THE SPIRIT OF DEFENCE
Once the Allied troops had landed in France on two fronts (Normandy in June and Provence in August), a number of crucial challenges remained. Firstly, the territory had to be liberated, by ensuring the cohesion of a disparate fighting force (Allied armies, Free France, Internal Resistance). Next, the Republic had to be legally re-established. And finally, it was necessary to restore a legitimate government to France, while respecting political sensitivities and different human backgrounds.
Charles de Gaulle managed to achieve this in just a few months, thanks to men like General Leclerc and the jurist (and future Nobel Peace Prize winner) René Cassin. Eight decades later, this daring military and political achievement is part of the defence culture that the IHEDN is dedicated to promoting.
"WE BRING INDEPENDENCE, EMPIRE AND THE SWORD BACK TO FRANCE".
From June 1944 onwards, the decisive battles for the Liberation of France began, raising strategic, military and political issues.
It was at this point that the Gaullist vision took over from the purely military vision of General Giraud. It made perfect sense and gave a grip on events. The reconstruction of the Republic and the re-establishment of the State were seen as inseparable from a military effort on several fronts. As part of this effort, the Resistance maquis helped to liberate certain areas and pave the way for the regular armies. De Gaulle did everything he could to impose the Provisional Government as the sole legitimate authority of the State, by setting it up in Paris and enlarging its membership to include representatives of the domestic Resistance. However, several major obstacles stood in the way of this project.
The first obstacle was military. As De Gaulle himself acknowledged, "how short is the sword of France". The real direction of operations was in the hands of the American general staff, on whom French troops were dependent for equipment and ammunition. But the American plan was Europe-wide: the Germans had to be pursued, their withdrawal disorganised, and enemy troops in eastern France had to be prevented from joining up. From this perspective, Paris could appear to be a secondary strategic objective. An implicit balance of power was therefore established.
French troops were mainly present in the South, in the First Army: around 250,000 men, while Leclerc led only 16,000 in the West. They performed genuine military feats (Leclerc in the Orne, Monsabert in Marseille, Larminat in Toulon) and took bold initiatives, one of which opened up the possibility of liberating Paris. The American ally was presented with a fait accompli.
CREATING A LINK BETWEEN THE FREE FRANCE AND THE RESISTANCE
The second obstacle is administrative. Who would have authority over these liberated territories? When De Gaulle landed at Courseulles (Calvados) on 13 June, this question had not yet been settled. The situation changed very quickly: barely ten days between the departure from the capital of the last convoy of Jewish deportees to the death camps (15 August) and the jubilant images of the liberation of Paris (25 August). For several weeks, several types of power coexisted in the country. Some Resistance maquis, for example, exercised de facto power.
The effort required is therefore twofold. At the highest level, the State had to redefine a legal framework that would enable it to ensure the continuity of its action. This was the task of René Cassin, who, after a great deal of preparatory work in Algiers, was the kingpin of the ordinance of 9 August 1944 on the re-establishment of republican legality. Locally, it was a matter of imposing the authority of the Commissioners of the Republic, a task prepared by Michel Debré and Jacques Bingen, and in which De Gaulle invested himself personally throughout September 1944.
The final obstacle was political. The members of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), formed on 2 June in Algiers to succeed the French Committee for National Liberation, did not reach metropolitan France until the very end of August. Their task was to organise the war effort and prepare for the crucial moments of the Liberation. But this work, already complex, was compounded by new pitfalls: firstly, a link had to be created between Free France and the Resistance inside France, and this meant changing the balance of government, particularly with the French Communist Party, which was very powerful at the time. Secondly, the struggle had to be continued, sovereignty restored and the first steps taken towards reconstruction. In short, to liberate and rebuild.
I. LIBERATE
The French campaign is complex to understand because of the multiplicity of fronts, but also because they complemented each other. From 12 to 21 August, the battle of the Falaise pocket (Calvados), which opened the road to Paris to the Allied troops, took place at the same time as the Provence landings (15 August). The announcement of the landings precipitated the Paris insurrection, which, once the truce was over, justified the diversion of Leclerc, while the American General Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, remained reticent about an urban battle that he imagined would be deadly and time-consuming.
In the south, the liberation of Marseille and Toulon by the First French Army, well ahead of the Allied projections, enabled the rapid ascent of the Rhone valley. However, attempts to disrupt the regrouping of the German armies were less successful. The Germans preferred to move up quickly and join forces in Burgundy, even if it meant abandoning a city the size of Lyon without any major commitment. After the two French armies joined forces at Montbard (Côte-d'Or) on 12 September 1944, fierce fighting began in the Vosges and the Ardennes.
French troops on the Canebière after the liberation of Marseille, 29 August 1944.
The question of the Liberation of the major cities gave rise to a strategic debate between the Allies. The 2e Leclerc's armoured division was formed and chosen by De Gaulle to enter Paris at the end of 1943. The stakes were obviously strategic, but above all political. As early as 1934, the future General de Gaulle wrote clearly in one of his programmatic books, Towards the professional armyHe was aware of the concentration of power in the capital, but also, and above all, of the symbolic value of the places of power gathered there.
From then on, have Paris liberated by the 2e DB is the surest way of warding off the spectre of competing powers, either allied (even if theoretically this prospect has been obsolete since De Gaulle's trip to Washington in July), or French, which could be embodied by the Communist leaders of the insurrection, or the National Council of the Resistance (CNR).
LECLERC LIBERATES PARIS WITHOUT THE ALLIES KNOWING
Leclerc's rerouting of part of his division, the Guillebon detachment, to Paris was therefore done without the knowledge of the Allied headquarters. It was only afterwards that Leclerc argued in favour of his initiative, responding to the risk of seeing a resistance that had run out of arms and ammunition wiped out by German repression.
The impromptu nature of this initiative and the jubilant images of the Parisian population welcoming its liberators meant that the actual fighting in the Paris suburbs, at Fresnes or Croix de Berny for example, was often overlooked, as were the constant dangers and the snipers who sometimes attacked the soldiers celebrated by the jubilant crowds.
There was a "sprint" aspect to this operation. According to a famous anecdote, Leclerc, stymied in the fighting at the Croix de Berny, instructed Captain Raymond Dronne and his veteran Spanish Republicans of the Nueve (the 9e compagnie du Régiment de marche du Tchad) to find their way to Paris, whatever the cost. It was by winding their way through roadblocks and roundabouts, with information from the locals, that the detachment found the way to Paris from the south. It entered via the Place d'Italie to reach the Hôtel de Ville, when other access routes were slower (for example via the south-west, disrupted by the German ammunition depot in the Saint-Cloud tunnel).
In comparison, the fighting was deadlier and more "conventional" in Marseille and Toulon, where the Germans fiercely defended strategic points to cover the withdrawal of the bulk of their troops. The fighting was accompanied by the intervention of local resistance groups and the militia, which sometimes led to, in the words of the General de Monsabertto "shootings that we don't understand at all".
Taking control of a town is a tricky business, due to a combination of factors:
- pockets of resistance: for example, around the National Assembly in Paris, where Philippe de Gaulle (son of the General and future Admiral) surrendered at the risk of his life; or around Notre Dame de la Garde, in Marseille;
- bombings: on the evening of the triumphant day of 25 August, when De Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées, Paris was bombed by the Luftwaffe, resulting in 189 deaths;
- and of course snipers.
II. RESTORING THE STATE
On his return to Paris, De Gaulle contemplated his office at the Hôtel de Brienne, abandoned in June 1940 in the face of the German advance, and noted the permanence of the furniture, objects and telephone switchboard, before concluding: "Nothing is missing, except the State. It's up to me to put it back". But where to find the tools for this permanence, when a break with the Vichy legacy was necessary to keep alive the compromise of the programme of the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR), and when a large part of the administration had loyally served the defunct regime?
It is at this point that we should highlight the essential role played by René Cassin, one of the main jurists of the Free French. Cassin, a Jew, a major casualty of the First World War and a former French representative to the League of Nations, was a Free Frenchman from June 1940: it was his job to negotiate with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill the statutes and funding for the the agreement of 7 august 1940. In Algeria, he played a central role in re-establishing the Crémieux decree, which gave Jews full citizenship.
The jurist René Cassin (to the right of General de Gaulle) in London in October 1941.
From August 1943 onwards, René Cassin, as head of the Legal Committee of Fighting France, worked with a team of legal experts to examine all the texts promulgated by Vichy. All of this work fed into the Order of 9 August 1944 on the re-establishment of republican legality which stipulates that :
- In fact, the Republic never ceased to exist, Vichy having been relegated to a fiction with no legitimacy, due to the unconstitutionality of the law of 10 July 1940;
- all laws and constitutional acts deriving from the latter are therefore considered null and void, but
- in order to ensure the continuity of the State, all regulations "uncontaminated by the ideology of the National Revolution" will be maintained and validated a posteriori.
"THE REPUBLIC HAS NEVER CEASED TO BE".
This body of work justified De Gaulle's refusal to proclaim the Republic once again on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville on 25 August 1944, as Georges Bidault, President of the CNR, had urged him to do: "The Republic has never ceased to be", replied the General. But it was not a question of disarming the State, in which De Gaulle saw the key to recovery: "Never, at any time in its history, has France been put back on its feet, has it been pulled out of danger other than by the State. That's a fact", he would declare a few years later. The aim of this pragmatism was to move quickly into an era of reconstruction and re-establishment of sovereignty, even though the liberation of the country was far from complete.
The other essential aspect was to re-establish the Republic at a local level, at a time when combat zones or zones that had not yet stabilised coexisted with zones liberated by the armies, but also sometimes directly by maquis exercising de facto power. One of the General's first symbolic acts when he visited Bayeux (Calvados) on 14 June 1944 was to install a sub-prefect (Raymond Triboulet) and a commissioner of the Republic (François Coulet).
General de Gaulle in Bayeux, 14 June 1944.
Throughout the autumn of 1944, commissioners were appointed, some of whom were challenged, and the General himself came to support them and ensure their authority. In Toulouse, he urged Pierre Bertaux to free himself from the invasive influence of the Forces françaises de l'intérieur (FFI), but also from the British, in a resolutely firm tone... But the choice of commissioners also depended on local power struggles: in Lyon, Yves Farge, a maquisard from the Vercors, appointed by De Gaulle, definitively imposed himself when the city was liberated by the troops of General Diego Brosset.
The task of these commissioners was a tough one, as they had to deal with maquis anxious to maintain their organisation and political influence, but also with crucial issues of public order, such as those linked to the purge, whether legal or uncontrolled (by delegation, the commissioners had the right to grant pardons). The Republic owes the gradual restoration of law and order largely to the perseverance and composure of these representatives, although initiatives such as the incorporation of the FFI into the regular army and the disarming of the patriotic militias by decree on 28 October 1944 also played an important role.
III. BRINGING POLITICAL COMPROMISE TO LIFE
Ultimately, the equation is also a political one: how can the Free French and the Resistance be amalgamated? How could the compromise patiently worked out by Jean Moulin and Jacques Bingen within the framework of the CNR be kept alive at a time when the Europe of the blocs was taking shape even before the end of the war? Finally, how could the authority of a government formed in Algiers be imposed and opened up to the Resistance without compromising its fragile internal balance?
On this point, Charles de Gaulle's initiatives were weighed carefully. Just before the Normandy landings, the French Committee for National Liberation was transformed into the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) by the Algiers Assembly. This legitimacy weighed heavily at a time when part of the CNR was considering replacing it as the embodiment of legitimate authority.
De Gaulle's choice to go to the Ministry of War before meeting the CNR at Paris City Hall was also significant: "I wanted it to be established that the State, after trials that had neither destroyed nor enslaved it, was quite simply returning home". The day after the popular jubilation of 26 August, which definitively established his personal legitimacy, De Gaulle brushed aside any "ulterior motives of certain people as to the direction of the State": "As soon as Paris is snatched from the enemy, the National Resistance Council enters the glorious history of the Liberation, but no longer has any raison d'être as a body for action. It is the government that assumes full responsibility". On the other hand, the CNR would be integrated into the Algiers Assembly, soon to be transferred to Paris.
On 31 August, the GPRF was installed in Paris, after a long wait for some of its members, such as Pierre Mendès France and René Mayer. But on 9 September, the government was reshuffled to include representatives of the Resistance. The political balance was subtle, as the government now included :
- figures from the Third Republic, such as Jules Jeanneney, President of the Senate in 1940;
- long-standing Free Frenchmen, such as General Georges Catroux (North Africa) and René Pleven (Colonies);
- men providing a link with the Resistance, such as Alexandre Parodi (Labour) and Henri Frenay (Veterans);
- Finally, a wide range of political persuasions were represented, from Christian Democrats (Georges Bidault as Foreign Minister, François de Menthon as Minister of Justice) to Socialists (Robert Lacoste, Augustin Laurent) and Communists (Charles Tillon as Air Minister, François Billoux as Health Minister). The accidental death of banker and Resistance fighter Aimé Lepercq in November 1944 led to a shift in the balance of power, with Pleven becoming Finance Minister.
The Provisional Government of the French Republic formed on 9 September 1944 (shown here in 1945).
On 23 October 1944, this government, having demonstrated its stability, was recognised by the Allies. The balance of the whole was finally defined by De Gaulle in his Chaillot speech on 12 September, three days after the formation of the government: extolling the "extraordinary national unanimity" ("the same flame animates and the same reason leads all this French elite"), the General struck an exact balance between the stakes of combat ("new and bloody efforts will no doubt still be necessary"), which were essential to restore France's voice in the world to come, and the call for a "vast and courageous national effort" to rebuild.
"THAT THE PARTICULAR INTEREST SHOULD ALWAYS BE FORCED TO GIVE WAY TO THE GENERAL INTEREST".
The social dimension of the CNR programme is also firmly emphasised: "To sum up the principles that France intends to place henceforth at the basis of its national activity, we would say that, while ensuring the maximum possible freedom for all and while encouraging the spirit of enterprise in all matters, it wants to ensure that the particular interest is always forced to give way to the general interest, that the great sources of common wealth be exploited and directed not for the profit of a few, but for the benefit of all, that the coalitions of interests which have weighed so heavily on the condition of men and on the very policy of the State be abolished once and for all, and that finally each of its sons and daughters may live, work and bring up their children in security and dignity. "
The fact remains that this effort at concord was also the responsibility of the soldiers, men transfigured by the ordeal of combat, and invested in the construction of a new France, before the issues of the Cold War and decolonisation (Sétif riots in May 1945) came to weigh on this project.
The last word goes to Colonel Louis Dio, a leading figure in the 2e DB, when leaving his soldiers, in a circular dated 20 July 1945: "But the effort is not over; this France which, thanks to you, is not dead, it depends on you that it continues to live. On the threshold of this civilian life that you are awaiting and which will enable you to return to your homes and your former occupations, remember that you are veterans of the glorious Leclerc Division and that as such you are bound by the obligation to remain united in the effort, in the work, which alone will enable France to rise again and resume its true place in the world. This taste for effort, this self-sacrifice, this spirit of sacrifice, this enthusiasm that you had in combat, may your new life be imbued with it. You owe it to your fallen comrades and to yourselves.
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