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Instant Download Ebook of France S Long Reconstruction in Search of The Modern Republic 1St Edition Herrick Chapman Online Full Chapter PDF
Instant Download Ebook of France S Long Reconstruction in Search of The Modern Republic 1St Edition Herrick Chapman Online Full Chapter PDF
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France’s Long Reconstruction
France’s Long Reconstruction
IN SEARCH OF THE MODERN REPUBLIC
Herrick Chapman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2018
Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
A B B R E V I AT I O N S ix
Introduction 1
Conclusion 299
NOTES 315
A C K N O W LE D G M E N T S 387
INDEX 391
Abbreviations
ix
x A bbre v iations
1
2 I ntroduction
theorists of the 1950s such as Walter Rostow and Daniel Lerner would
come to argue that industrial growth, the expansion of an urban
middle class, and the consolidation of democratically run parties and
governments were all mutually reinforcing processes.12 But in practice
a state-led, top-down modernization drive could all too easily threaten
democratic renewal. Cabinet ministers and technical experts could in-
sulate themselves from pressure groups, ignore dissent, and keep their
own counsel for the sake of what they viewed as the national interest.
This inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and
democratic participation worried contemporaries at the time. Writing
in the grips of fury several months a fter the fall of France in 1940, the
great medieval historian and later Resistance martyr, Marc Bloch, con-
cluded his Strange Defeat with an appeal to the new generation of
elites that he expected to emerge from the war and rebuild the country.
“All I beg of them,” Bloch wrote, “is that they should avoid the dry in-
humanity of systems which, from rancor or from pride, set themselves
to rule the mass of their countrymen without providing them with
adequate instruction, without being in true communion with them.
Our p eople deserve to be trusted, to be taken into the confidence of
their leaders.”13 This anxiety about the destructive consequences for
democracy if state leaders were to proceed with arrogant disregard for
public participation found expression within official Resistance cir-
cles as the Occupation wore on. In 1943 an anonymous memorandum
writer, working within the planning committees of the London-based
wing of the Resistance, argued that in 1940 “democratic values” be-
came “disassociated” from “technical values” and that postwar France
must create a government “supported by scientific technique without
abandoning power to the technicians.”14 Postwar reconstruction, then,
posed a challenge fully discernable at the time: how to combine a state-
led economic revolution with an expansion of democratic participa-
tion without the one undoing the other.
This book explores how the French expanded the role of the national
state to spearhead the nation’s recovery, how they clashed over the
proper reach of state authority, and above all how they wrestled with
the tension between administrative rule and democratic renewal in a
country traumatized by defeat, occupation, and near civil war. I argue
that from 1944 to 1962, during what I term the “long reconstruction,”
I ntroduction 5
World War I. What is striking about France, however, is how far its
leaders went a fter 1918 to dismantle wartime innovations, more so
than in Britain and Germany. Victory seemed to have redeemed the
Republic, and it confirmed the conviction of many politicians, espe-
cially the conservatives who prevailed in the elections of 1919, that
the conventional political and economic arrangements of pre-France
were sufficient for the postwar world.
The more lasting breakthroughs in state expansion had to await the
Depression and the Second World War and its aftermath. Though short-
lived, socialist Léon Blum’s left-wing Popular Front government of
1936 especially broke fresh ground. Social conflict, economic crisis, and
war (or its imminence) had been pivotal occasions for state expansion
in the past. The Popular Front now faced all three. To boost rearma-
ment Blum nationalized much of the arms industry and a g reat deal of
aviation. To aid a troubled farm sector he created the Wheat Board
for stabilizing grain prices. To quell industrial unrest he brokered a
nationwide wage deal, a forty-hour week, u nion rights, and compulsory
arbitration. From the Popular Front, too, came new government pro-
grams for the arts, leisure, sports, and youth, as well as direct state in-
volvement in radio—the beginnings of what historian Philip Nord has
called the “culture state,” l ater associated with the Fifth Republic cul-
tural ministries of André Malraux and Jack Lang.24 Meanwhile, some
political elites in the 1930s, especially on the Right, became enamored
with the idea that a strong state executive and a greater reliance on ex-
perts could rescue the nation from democratic excess and unfettered
capitalism. Though “technocrat” and “technocracy” w ere not yet terms
of common usage in France in the 1930s—that would come only a fter
the war—many a Vichy and Fourth Republic policy expert came of age
professionally during the Depression decade and acquired a sense of
mission advocating planning and “rationalization.”25 Historian Jackie
Clarke has aptly dubbed this period “the age of organization.”26
Historians have, therefore, quite rightly emphasized continuities in
state expansion and the reliance on technocratic styles of governance
from the 1930s, through Vichy, and on into the Fourth Republic. Plan-
ning for the postwar began during the Occupation, and the men and
women engaged in that project borrowed heavily from ideas and plans
preceding the war. De Gaulle may have repudiated Vichy for its trea-
I ntroduction 11
sonous collaboration and its complicity in Nazi crimes, but his early
postwar government built readily on many of Vichy’s efforts to regu-
late scarcity, police the black market, promote childbirth, protect the
nation’s cultural patrimony, and innovate in economic planning and
business coordination. As historians Richard Kuisel and Philip Nord
have so effectively shown, a good many of the governmental elites in
the postwar period managed to thread their c areers through t hese re-
gime changes and hold on to their outlooks and sensibilities—if not
always their overt political convictions and loyalties—across the 1930s
and 1940s.27 It is possible, then, to construe the long reconstruction as
even longer, as beginning in 1936 or 1940. And indeed, each of the fol-
lowing chapters on policy domains begins with a close look at how de-
velopments in the 1930s and during the Occupation influenced what
happened a fter 1944.
That said, the Liberation also was a moment of rupture. It brought
a seismic shift in political fortunes, with big consequences for the re-
construction. The Right all but collapsed, discredited by its wartime
collaboration with Germany and by an im mense groundswell of
popular support for the Communists, Socialists, and left Catholic ac-
tivists who had led the Resistance movement in occupied France. For
the first time since its founding in 1920, the French Communist Party
(the Parti communiste français, or PCF) became the dominant party
of the Left. The Resistance had given it the stature and patriotic aura
its leaders had long craved, and de Gaulle was astute enough to reward
them with cabinet ministries in his Provisional Government of 1944–
1946, even as he continued to regard the party as a danger to the country.
Resistance work had enabled party activists to expand their influence
in the rural districts, in the Parisian intelligentsia, and above all in the
trade u nion federations of the leading labor organization in France,
the Confédération générale du travail (the CGT). A PCF with a solid
working-class base, a more disciplined membership cadre than any
other party in the country, and a newfound willingness to function as
a party of government shifted the political center of gravity in the
country far to the left of where it had been before the war.
The Liberation also marked the arrival a major new political force
in France, a Christian Democratic party calling itself the Mouvement
républicain populaire (the MRP). Catholic resisters, most of them
12 I ntroduction
“Social Catholics” with ties to the Catholic trade unions and youth
organizations that grew in the 1930s, optimistically dubbed their party
a “movement,” and they sought to blend Christian values with pro-
gressive politics.28 This mixture gave the MRP a prominent place in
the left-leaning governments of the early post- Liberation years, as
well as a large middle-class electoral constituency looking for an
alternative to the Vichy-tainted conventional Right. It was a winning
combination—the MRP won 28 percent of the vote in the 1946 parlia-
mentary elections, in comparison to 26 percent for the Communists
and 21 percent for the Socialists—u ntil more unabashedly right-wing
parties recovered their footing in the early 1950s. In the meantime,
MRP leaders did much to shape the reconstruction, especially in
family policy.
The Liberation also proved pivotal for the third major governing
party of the immediate postwar years, the Socialist Party or SFIO
(Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière). Socialists had rebuilt
their party successfully enough after the crippling schism over Com-
munism in 1920 to become the lead partner in Léon Blum’s Popular
Front government of 1936. But they fell victim to factionalism, fighting
throughout the 1930s over w hether to participate in government, break
with capitalism, ally with rival parties, and jettison pacifism in the
face of the fascist threat. Although Socialists were among the fiercest
critics of the far Right, an astonishing three-quarters of the party’s par-
liamentary deputies had voted Philippe Pétain full powers in July 1940,
the vote that buried the Third Republic. The Resistance, then, became
a crucial vehicle for resuscitating an ailing SFIO. André Philip, Jules
Moch, Daniel Mayer, and many others in the Resistance restored the
party’s reputation as stalwarts of the republican tradition. They played
a big role in postwar planning. And with the Liberation the party purged
its ranks of the Pétain-enabling parliamentarians. Party membership
shot up from a previous high of 285,000 in 1936 to 354,000 at the Lib-
eration, attracting schoolteachers, postal workers, and other civil
servants—the post-1920 occupational base of the party. Though still
too anticlerical to join forces with leftist Catholics to create a unified
non-Communist party along the lines of the British L abour Party—
something Léon Blum hoped for—Socialists made their party the pivot
I ntroduction 13
point around which to build the tripartite governing coalition with the
MRP and the Communist Party.29
This powerful left-wing coalition, allied with a network of Gaul-
list Resistance members loyal to the General himself (many of whom
were, like him, conservative or military in their backgrounds), gave the
dirigiste state of 1945 a patriotic republican legitimacy that would last
well a fter this unique political moment had passed. As we s hall see,
the rupture of Liberation mattered more in some policy domains than
others, but mattered it did and it changed the terms, the very vocabu-
lary, with which p eople would talk about the challenges of combining
a state-led, top-down modernization drive with new forms of demo
cratic participation. The new political climate of the post-Liberation
years, moreover, would continue to weigh heavily on those efforts,
which is why the long reconstruction constituted its own era, a deci-
sive chapter in the nation’s history when administrative elites and
policy experts exercised much greater power than they had u nder the
Third Republic, even as they and a host of societal groups sought to
revitalize France’s democratic tradition.30
Although important scholarly work on reconstruction has relied on
more conventional endpoints to the era in the early or mid-1950s, I in-
sist on the long reconstruction stretching all the way to 1962, for a
number of reasons.31 True, France’s period of impressive, sustained eco-
nomic growth began in the mid-1950s, and by then price controls and
prohibitions against collective bargaining had been dismantled, sym-
bolically marking peacetime stability. But t here were also signs aplenty
in the mid-1950s that many people in France had hardly moved beyond
“reconstruction” as a paradigm for thinking about the country’s chal-
lenges. In his much-quoted investiture speeches before Parliament in
1953 and 1954, Pierre Mendès France called afresh for a policy of “re-
covery and national renovation,” arguing that the reconstruction had
stalled amid the competing budgetary demands of the Indochina war
and government failures to make the tough choices a rebirth required.32
And indeed, many of the key goals of the reconstruction—tax reform,
housing growth, vast urban rebuilding projects, especially in devas-
tated cities like Le Havre, and the renovation of much of the country’s
energy and transportation infrastructure—were just u nder way and
14 I ntroduction
would take many more years to accomplish. Not for nothing did the
“modernizing,” left-leaning wing of the Catholic labor movement con-
tinue to call itself the “Reconstruction” group on into the Fifth Re-
public in accord with its monthly publication of the same name.
The reconstruction paradigm also endured into the early 1960s
because of Charles de Gaulle. When the General returned to power in
1958 and enlisted Michel Debré, first as his justice minister and Con-
stitution drafter and then in January 1959 as the first prime minister
of the new Fifth Republic, t hese two men understood their agenda as
finishing the work they started at the Liberation. It was a politically
convenient claim, a way to discredit the Fourth Republic they had re-
placed, but it also spoke to a commonsense view about what their poli-
cies represented. By incorporating the period of the de Gaulle–Debré
government into a study of the reconstruction, we can assess anew how
much the regime change of 1958 signified rupture and continuity. In
constitutional terms the rupture is easy to see. But if we plunge back
into policy domains, we can also take the measure of how much the
Fifth Republic was built on the Fourth.
Finally, the notion of the long reconstruction enables us to see more
clearly the links between the politics of national recovery and the
struggles over both the Cold War and decolonization, the two crucial
international contexts of the reconstruction era. Soviet-A merican ri-
valry had an enormous impact on the financial and political conditions
of the French recovery. Not only did the Blum-Byrnes Accords of 1946
and then the Marshall Plan help the French restore financial stability
in the late 1940s; the infusion of American dollars enabled French plan-
ners to structure the reconstruction as a modernization drive. The
Cold War also helped precipitate the fissure between Communists and
the rest of the French Left in 1947, with consequences for the recon-
struction thereafter. American money made it possible for the French
to pursue reconstruction and colonial war at the same time, and in-
deed French leaders in the early years of the reconstruction regarded
the empire as an important economic asset for national renewal. North
Africans, a fter all, came in large numbers to mainland France as mi
grant workers, and sub-Saharan Africa remained a valued source of
raw materials, commercial markets, and foreign currency via its own
export trade. Fourth Republic governments committed unprecedented
I ntroduction 15
17
18 L iberation A uthorities
public officials had become affiliated with the Resistance by the summer
of 1944.
Still, if the rudimentary institutional continuity of government was
one t hing, the state’s authority was another. That required efficacy—the
capacity of a new regime to deliver justice, security, and material well-
being a fter years of deprivation on all three counts. And it required
legitimacy, both the formal kind conferred by elections and a new con-
stitution, and the informal kind derived from the respect citizens ac-
cord their leaders and institutions. Efficacy had to be proven, and
informal legitimacy earned. Neither came automatically in the summer
and fall of 1944 when, a fter D-Day’s Normandy invasion, the unified
forces of de Gaulle’s Free France and the internal Resistance sought to
establish a new republic on the heels of the Allied advance. True, over
the preceding year in Algiers, de Gaulle had gradually put together the
rudiments of a government-in-the-making: the National Committee
of French Liberation (Comité français de libération nationale or
CFLN), with representatives of the many political tendencies within
the Resistance, and with a coterie of potential ministers-i n-waiting.
While still headquartered in Algiers and London, the CFLN became
the Provisional Government of the French Republic on 3 June 1944,
three days before D-Day. But jockeying for power within this nascent
governing group, especially between Gaullists and Communists, re-
mained intense as the Liberation began. Nor was it clear to French
leaders how much room their American and British allies would give
them to carry out regime change as they wanted to. Roosevelt harbored
doubts about de Gaulle’s popularity and his commitment to demo
cratic rule. Moreover, given the political wreckage Vichy officials were
leaving behind and the tasks that lay ahead, no one could know at the
Liberation exactly what kind of republican state—what new blend of
democratic, paternalistic, technocratic, and even Bonapartist (authori-
tarian) qualities—would emerge from the long, practical business of re-
pairing France’s social fabric and reshaping its economy.
To see how public officials and societal groups navigated through
these turbulent waters of regime change in 1944–1945, this chapter
explores, first, how de Gaulle maneuvered to restore state authority
“from above,” and then how citizens’ initiatives locally had the effect
of expanding state authority “from below.” The dual dynamic set the
L iberation A uthorities 19
stage for politicians, civil servants, and policy experts to use a reinvig-
orated state to embark on postwar reconstruction, even as it also inau-
gurated a saga of contestation between public officials and societal
groups that would continue through the Fourth Republic.