Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal 1940-1946

344 Pages·1989·5.279 MB·English

by  Andrew Shennan

RETHINKING FRANCE

Rethinking France
Plans for Renewal 1940-1946
ANDREW SHENNAN
C L A R E N D O N PRESS O X F O R D
1989
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP
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© Andrew Shennan 1989
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Shennan, Andrew
Rethinking France: plans for renewal 1940-1946.
I. France. Reform movements history
I. Title
303.4'84
ISBN 0-19-827520-X
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shennan, Andrew.
Rethinking France: plans for renewal, 1940-1946 / Andrew Shennan.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. France—Politics and government—1940-1945. 2. France—
Politics and government—1945-1958. 3. Political planning—France—
History—20th century. 4. Reconstruction (1939-1951)—France.
5. France—Civilization—Philosophy. 1. Title.
DC397.S47 1989 944.08l'6-dc20 89-9294
ISBN 0-19-827520-X
Set by Hope Services, Abingdon
Printed in Great Britain by
Bookcraft Ltd.
Midsomer Norton
Avon
Preface
The six and a half years between the fall of the Third Republic in
1940 and the establishment of the Fourth Republic in 1946
constitute one of the most eventful and controversial periods in
France’s modern history. The following study, however, does not
focus directly on the experiences of invasion, occupation, resistance,
collaboration, or liberation. Instead it deals with the ideas of
people who self-consciously looked beyond the all-absorbing
present, in order to consider what the French nation might or
should be like after the deluge. Their ideas took various forms:
personal ruminations on France’s recent past, on the defects of her
pre-war institutions, or on the nature of the modern world; long
shopping-lists of hypothetical reforms; legislative proposals, party
programmes, and committee recommendations; last but not least,
a host of more or less utopian blueprints (some of which remained
unpublished, although a surprising number found their way into
print). At a time when so much else was happening, this activity
might appear a rather marginal subject—remote not only from
actual policies or reforms, which usually had to be made under the
pressure of events, but also from the major preoccupations of
French men and women (politicians as well as grand public) during
these years.
None the less, there are good reasons for taking this peculiar
discours seriously. It is clear, first of all, that if reformist ideas by
themselves rarely explain the course of reform, they must certainly
contribute to an explanation. Political history has its événements
and its longue durée. If events or decisions are the événements, the
realities of the longue durée are the vocabularies and beliefs of the
political world. The manner in which new vocabularies and beliefs
are articulated and the extent to which they are assimilated into
the mainstream are bound ultimately to influence the course of
reform. In the present case, many of the wartime and post-
Liberation debates which will be discussed below can be shown to
have shaped specific post-war innovations. In a broader sense, in
so far as they reshaped some of the consensuses of French politics,
vi Preface
the debates had a long-term impact which cannot easily be
quantified.
Second, it may be contended that, for all its eccentricities, the
discours of national decline and renewal has considerable intrinsic
interest. In France, as elsewhere, the language of the think-tanks
and the study commissions captures a good deal of the intellectual
and political mood of the 1940s: didacticism and idealism,
escapism and optimism, certainty about the errors of the past and
insecurity about the world that was being born. It is also a fact that
the debate about the future was a significant and continuing
feature of French politics throughout the wartime and post-war
periods. The numbers of those who contributed actively to it were
relatively small, but there was always, within a much larger
fraction of both political and non-political élites, a strong
sympathy for the proselytizers of renewal.
These are objective grounds for examining more closely the
reformist ideas that were produced between 1940 and 1946. At the
same time, this book—like most—has a more subjective rationale.
To some degree, all historians work by analogy with their own
experience. Often the analogy remains implicit or even unconscious,
but here, because it has been quite conscious, it can be made
explicit. To somebody who has grown up in Britain in the 1970s
and 1980s, the vocabulary of decline and renewal that was current
in France in the 1940s is a strikingly familiar one. In the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s France experienced a crisis of decline akin, in
many respects, to that which Britain has experienced in the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s. These crises were not simply periods in which
severe problems such as economic stagnation or political instability
existed, but rather periods in which such problems were perceived
to constitute a fundamental national decline. In both cases decline
came to be seen as an inherent feature of the culture: what made
these nations distinctively ‘French’ or ‘British’ also made them
declining powers. In France in the 1940s the cautiousness and
conservatism of a peasant psychology were held to be at the root of
a demographic and economic ‘malthusianism’, while the alleged
independence and resistance to authority of French citizens
(combined with an absence of the Anglo-Saxon communitarian
spirit) were felt to have inhibited the development of a functional
modern democracy. In Britain four decades later, similar kinds of
interpretation are often offered. Instead of a peasant mentality, in
Preface vii
the British case it is usually suggested that the psychological and
social residues of the pre-industrial (or early post-industrial)
nation have caused economic decline. In France the problem was
malthusianism and an esprit petit-bourgeois; in Britain it has been
the cult of the amateur and excessive class-consciousness. There
are enough substantive parallels between the French malaise and
the British disease to suggest that it would be a comparison worth
pursuing in greater detail. The real insight that one derives from
actually living through a crisis of decline, however, has nothing to
do with substantive issues. It is simply that national decline is a
subjective as much as an objective phenomenon, a hypothesis as
well as a fact. When one has witnessed at first hand the way in
which a vast journalistic, bureaucratic, and academic industry
monitors the state of a modern nation and churns out prognoses
and remedies, it becomes difficult to disagree with the view of an
eminent historian of a much earlier national decline: The constant
interplay between action and perception should form an integral
component of the study of a society “in decline”.’1 What follows is
an attempt to apply this prescription to the history of France
between 1940 and 1946.
During the course of my research, I have accumulated debts of
gratitude in three countries. In the United States, I was fortunate
enough to be able to use the facilities of Harvard University and
Princeton University. Princeton’s enlightened policy on the
granting of ‘spouse privileges’ made my work much easier than it
would otherwise have been. In France, I have been assisted with
invariable patience and courtesy by the staffs of the Bibliothèque
Nationale, the Archives Nationales (and, in particular, Madame
Bonazzi and Madame Poulie in the section contemporaine), the
Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer, the Archives du Ministère
du Travail (in particular, Mile Bosman), the Archives des
Relations Extérieures, the Office Universitaire de Recherche
Socialiste, the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, and
the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent. In addition, I am
grateful to the Director-General of the Archives Nationales for
permission to consult the series F60 and certain restricted files in
72 AJ, to Janine Bourdin of the FNSP for permission to consult
1 J. H. Elliott, 'Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century
Spain’, Past and Present, 74 (1977), 42.
viii Preface
the archives of the MRP and the UDSR, and to M. Alexandre Kiss
of the Institut International des Droits de l'Homme for access to
the papers of René Cassin. In Cambridge, my research has been
greatly aided at all times by the staff of the University Library.
For their financial assistance, I am deeply grateful to the
Commonwealth Fund of New York, the Department of Education
and Science, the French Ministry of Foreign Relations, the
Twenty-Seven Foundation, and the Master and Fellows of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge.
In the early stages of my work I was assisted by the timely
comments and advice of Professor Stanley Hoffmann, Dr Robert
Tombs, and M. Jean Chariot. Professors Maurice Larkin and
Douglas Johnson, who examined the Ph.D. dissertation on which
this book is based, gave very helpful suggestions for revision.
Three other people have helped me throughout and, between
them, taught me most of what I know about the historical
profession. From my undergraduate and postgraduate adviser, Dr
Christopher Andrew, I have received almost a decade of en­
couragement and guidance. Not only did he suggest the idea of
studying this topic in the first place, but on numerous occasions
since he has sustained my morale and kept me on track. From my
mother and my father I have learnt more about history and
history-writing than I can possibly express. They made it very easy
to follow in their footsteps because they never made me feel as if I
was doing so.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Elizabeth Doherty, who
lived through the writing of this book and then helped me rewrite
it. Not only did she give me the benefit of her insight and expertise
at every stage of research and writing, but she kindly tolerated
some peculiar Parisian accommodation and too many years of
transatlantic commuting.
Notwithstanding the assistance that I have received from all of
the above (and from numerous other scholars to whose research I
am deeply indebted), the responsibility for what follows is entirely
my own.
A.S.
Contents
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Part I: Regimes and Renewal
1. Vichy’s National Revolution, 1940-1942 19
2. The Resistance: Liberation and Renovation 34
3. Free France and the New France 53
4. De Gaulle and the Parties at Liberation 69
Part II: Themes of Renewal
5. Constitutional Reform 106
6. Imperial Renovation and the Union Française 141
7. The New Society I: Educational Reform 169
8. The New Society II: Dissolving Class Conflict 188
9. The New Society III: Pro-Natalism and Social Security 202
10. The New Economy I: Chronology 224
11. The New Economy II: Issues 258
Conclusion 287
Bibliography 297
Index 325