COMMUNISM IN FRANCE REACHES AN IMPASSE
Maurice Thorez arrived home unannounced in November 1944, a week after meeting Stalin, and immediately counseled restraint, the adoption of a parliamentary route to power, and the creation of a mass party. In an important report to the French Central Committee meetings on January 21–23, 1945, he urged the dissolution of the “irregular armed groups” and counseled local committees of liberation to work with and support the state’s existing administration and not try to replace it. Stalin underestimated the mood of the times. The PCF had played a major role in the resistance, was well organized, and had momentum on its side. In 1944–45 the party grew and at one point in 1945 claimed to be a million strong, making it one of the largest Communist parties in Europe outside the Soviet Union.10
Many in France had been disgusted by French collaboration with the German occupation, and they greeted liberation with jubilation mixed with bloody retribution, the most brutal in all of Western Europe. The purge, or épuration, executed an estimated 10,800 people without trial, 5,234 of them during the liberation. Rumor was that the numbers were far higher. Official tribunals later sentenced close to 7,000 to death; fewer than 800 of the verdicts were carried out. Women who slept with the enemy were publicly shamed in disgusting rituals common across Europe. The courts prosecuted 32,000 people, but by the 1950s most had been released or amnestied. The civil service was purged of 11,343 or so.11 Anyone wanting to look behind these dry figures should see the stunning documentary by Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity, which focuses mainly on one locality and shows how France was divided against itself after liberation.
Maurice Thorez tried repeatedly but still failed to create a new popular front with the Socialists (SFIO). Some who feared such a “Left bloc” created a Christian-democratic-leaning Popular Republican Party (MRP). In October 1945, in an election for a constituent assembly, the PCF won 26.1 percent of the vote and the SFIO 25.6 percent. The Socialists would be the weaker partner in any bloc and wanted no part of one. Besides, they feared France might slip into becoming a “people’s democracy” similar to those in Eastern Europe. The upshot was a divided Left, coalition governments, and instability.12
After eight days of wrangling, the new assembly elected General Charles de Gaulle as president. According to his own account, the parties were unwilling to work with him, and on January 20, 1946, he resigned abruptly. He wrongly expected that the shock would make politicians see the light; he would wait more than a decade to become president again. Meanwhile, by April 1947, he was involved with the new Rally of the French People (RPF), with the aim of mobilizing the nation for unity and reform. He shunned the embrace of either Moscow or Washington.13
In June 1946 elections to another constituent assembly, the two leftist parties lost the support of the majority. The nation reverted to its “normal” voting traditions. The MRP came in first with 28.2 percent of the vote, and the PCF held its constituency and obtained 26.4 percent, while the SFIO fell to 21.3 percent. In the November elections to the National Assembly, the PCF was the frontrunner with 28.8 percent of the vote, the MRP took 26.3 percent, and the SFIO dropped to 18.1 percent.
This result surprised the Kremlin as well as the French Communists, whose leader Maurice Thorez had made a brief trip to Moscow in September. At that time he was told that while the current international situation favored the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was not prepared for war, needed to gain time, and hence had to discourage the French comrades from trying to seize power—even though the PCF was in a position to do so. The Kremlin considered that such a step might precipitate a conflict that the USSR could not win, so the advice was to go more slowly. However, with the positive electoral results for the PCF in November, Moscow now thought that Thorez should go all out to form a government, as he was entitled to do as head of the strongest party. Thereby he would succeed in following Stalin’s original order of getting into power via the ballot box. All the greater then was Thorez’s disappointment in being unable to cobble together a coalition. Instead the Communists were symbolically stopped by the Socialist Léon Blum, seventy-four years old, who came out of retirement.
On November 16 he formed a government coalition of five parties and, six weeks later, on January 1, 1947, in an attempt to stem inflation, introduced a compulsory 5 percent price cut. This effort solved nothing: people increasingly felt that the government was fumbling and incoherent.14
Economics expert Jean Monnet developed a plan for recovery and modernization, and it was accepted by the assembly on January 14, 1947. But the problem was how to finance it, meet government debt, and pay for imports. French officials had been traveling to Washington to seek assistance, and U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery strongly favored providing food and coal to help them cope. The black market flourished, and people suffered. In May the bread ration was fixed at 250 grams per day, and in August it was reduced to levels lower than those during the German occupation. That September riots broke out in cities over shortages of bread and sugar.15
The Communists employed a two-pronged strategy. In the first place, they would participate in government to gain respectability while at the same time being obstructionist. Second, they would support extraparliamentary opposition and strikes that made economic recovery difficult. They knew France desperately needed U.S. loans, yet they attacked the government for trying to get them. Thorez could not stand in the way of more jobs, and so he backed Monnet, but then he also supported the strikers.
The turning point came on May 4, when Prime Minister Paul Ramadier called the Communists’ bluff by asking for a vote of confidence on the government’s social and economic policy. The PCF had to vote against it, even though Thorez and four other Communists were in the cabinet. The next day Ramadier cleared the cabinet of its PCF members. Since that time no Communist has served as a minister in a French government.
Some historians suggest that U.S. ambassador Caffery made the provision of U.S. assistance to France dependent on keeping the PCF out. The documents, however, do not support that contention, though Caffery might well have given broad hints of what Washington wanted.16
The ambassador’s communications with the State Department reveal that he liked the new coalition government and admired Ramadier’s courage in steering between the extremists on the Left and Right. “If a really strong democratic France is to be established,” he reported on May 12, “such a coalition is not only desirable but in fact offers the best chance of success. Furthermore, its component elements are oriented toward us through mutual belief in the new basic conception of liberty and human decency and through deep fear and distrust of ruthless Soviet imperialism.”17
On June 5, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the intention of the United States to fund a recovery plan for Europe, his remarks were very general.18 The Truman administration was divided on the details and faced a Congress with newly elected, more fiscally conservative Republican majorities in both houses. Since the war the United States had already given $3 billion in aid and lent Great Britain another $3.25 billion. Negotiating the costly Marshall Plan might be difficult.
What would happen in the meantime to France, where the scent of crisis was already in the air? That summer, when the Soviet Union nudged the Communists in Eastern Europe to consolidate their hold on power, many non-Communists in France turned to General de Gaulle, who opposed the PCF on nationalist grounds. The new Gaullist RPF successfully ran in the municipal elections that October.19 Then in December the U.S. Congress, responding to what the president called the “crisis in Western Europe,” passed an interim aid package of $522 million.20 These grants were to buy American food and fuel for Europe, particularly France, Italy, and Austria, but it was still going to be tough slogging to get the more ambitious and expensive Marshall Plan accepted by the American people and through Congress.