Introduction

France’s defeat in 1940, la débâcle, and its surrender on 22 June, while Britain fought on to ultimate victory, set the stage for a very changed relationship between the political elites in France and Britain. This chapter is about the relations that developed between the British Labour Party and the Section française de l’International Ouvrière (SFIO) in exile in London, after mid-1940. This chapter will examine that relationship in tandem with a, less detailed, analysis of how the wider debate within the French Resistance in exile related to the British government and to that in Washington. In particular it will examine the activities of the SFIO’s Groupe Jean Jaurès, which has left us a detailed account of its activities in London between 1940 and 1944. There is not space to explore the wider context of Charles de Gaulle’s Comité national français (CNF) which was based in London until 1943 and coordinated what became known as La France Libre (or ‘The Free French’), when it transferred to Algiers, but it will make some remarks on how that organisation’s reputation affected that of the SFIO in exile. It also aims to highlight that the mutual suspicion that existed between the two socialist parties on occasion led to real cooperation and even mutual respect, particularly in the context of planning for post-war societal change. The result of these relationships during wartime was to have a lasting effect on the subsequent unfolding of Anglo-French relations during the Fourth Republic and beyond.

After 1940 the Labour Party came to be a central part of both the British government, and of the alliance that developed between Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and other Allies. This meant that the Party now had the potential to influence British domestic and foreign policy in a way that it had not since at least its brief and tumultuous period in power between 1929 and 1931, after which it had descended into factional infighting and near political irrelevance until the Second World War. During the war it had a major revival electorally, most notably in its influence over the emerging consensus in British politics that the war had to mark the start of a new relationship between the people and the state. This was stimulated by the publication of a series of reports by William Beveridge, the ‘Beveridge Report’, on topics ranging from the need for full employment to one which became known as the ‘Welfare State’, accompanied during two Labour governments after 1945 with widespread nationalisations and the establishment of the National Health Service.¹

The Labour Party and the SFIO before 1940

In contrast to the relative impotence of the Labour Party before 1940, during the 1930s the SFIO had been influential in French politics as never before, with its crowning achievement in Prime Minister Léon Blum’s Front Populaire of 1936. By mid-1940, unlike the Labour Party, it was dispersed, with many of its members under arrest or in exile. So an essential starting point for thinking about how the British and French socialists prepared for the post-1945 relationship is to look at how they interacted before and during the Second World War – a war that was to prove a vital watershed for both societies and their respective major socialist parties.

The two parties came from different traditions of political thought and struggle. The British Labour Party was a party of less than burnished internationalist credentials and largely eschewed Marxist thinking. The SFIO’s ideological position reflected its rather different background, which had more than a dash of revolutionary and syndicalist fervour.² The Labour Party’s belief system was embedded in forms of Christian Socialism and the ideas of Robert Blatchford’s 1894 Merrie England which appealed for a ‘Socialism [that was] a profound and noble religion possessing a definitely practical and economic aspect’ and shunned too much serious philosophical discourse. Blatchford’s contemporary Neil Lyons was correct in saying that ‘Merrie England alone has attracted more followers to the standard of English socialism than all or any of the other books contained in the library of the London School of Economics’.³ French socialists were much more likely to evoke books like those of Georges Sorel, who in 1908 denounced ‘[t]he optimist in politics [as] an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects … Liberal political economy is one of the best examples of a Utopia that could be given’.⁴ Labour Party politicians on the whole dreamt of such utopias and considered ‘continental’ socialists as dangerous extremists. With such divergent traditions it is not surprising that misunderstandings might arise.

The SFIO and Labour had shared membership of the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) from 1923 to 1940, succeeding the so-called ‘Second and a Half International’ of 1920–22. The rump of the LSI was based in London during the war and dominated by Belgian Socialists like Louis de Brouckère and Camille Huysmans, now exiles. Belgian and French socialists had had an uneasy relationship with their respective Communist parties, in the French case the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) since the PCF’s founding Congrès de Tours in 1920.⁵ The Labour Party’s ideological and personal difficulties with the British Communist Party (CPGB) were never quite so fraught, mainly because Labour was such a mainstream party by the 1930s and the CPGB had very few MPs to give it a public platform or much of a membership total. CPGB membership was possibly 60,000 at its peak in 1945; the Labour Party had over a million members and won over 47 per cent of the total vote in the same year, nearly 12 million people.⁶ The lack of common purpose with their Communist parties within both the SFIO and Labour Party was reflected in the gyrations of the CPGB and PCF about the USSR during the period before the German invasion of June 1941 and towards the USA after the Atlantic Charter of August 1941. The SFIO members brought their memories of past combat with them to London, often mystifying their British Labour hosts, who had not experienced the same internecine hatred in its struggles with the CPGB, even though there was much mutual hostility, not least over the importance of the USSR in the fight for socialism.

Neither had the Labour Party experienced exile and humiliation on the scale of that experienced by the SFIO after 1940. Both parties had certainly lived through turbulent 1930s with periods in government, in Labour’s case in 1929–31, and in the SFIO’s the Front Populaire of 1936–37.⁷ Both had also experienced periods in the political wilderness, with Labour at one point being reduced to fifty-five MPs after the formation of the National Government by James Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 in what has for ever more been referred to as the ‘Great Betrayal’.⁸ And by 1940 both had lost their faith in the peace-keeping strengths of the League of Nations, whose last Secretary General, former French diplomat Joseph Avenol, wrote to Blum in December 1945: ‘The League of Nations has become the collective alibi of those whose weakness allowed Hitler to come to power’, adding that ‘I humbly share in that disgrace’.⁹ He had pledged allegiance to Marshall Philippe Pétain’s Vichy Government in 1940 and died in disgrace in Switzerland in 1952. The Beveridge publication The Price of Peace summed up the League as being ‘inadequate for its purpose’.¹⁰

The Labour Party in government, 1940

During the war itself the Labour Party’s fortunes improved considerably, with party leader Clement Attlee being made Deputy Prime Minister in the Churchill Cabinet of April 1940.¹¹ After a few years of inconclusive direction from the veteran George Lansbury, from 1935 Attlee had gradually established Labour as an effective Opposition to a Conservative Government that was increasingly divided about how to respond to the threat posed by Hitler. Attlee was no socialist firebrand, retaining an affection for the British Empire, if not for all aspects of imperialism, and was a great admirer of the United States. If he can be characterised as such he was in effect a British ‘New Dealer’.¹² Labour became the main, but not sole, voice of anti-appeasement (which included Conservatives like Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Bob Boothby), emerging as a leader in debates criticising the military incompetence of the Conservative government, especially in the aftermath of the fiasco of the Norwegian campaign of May 1940. After the defeat of the expeditionary force to Narvik in Norway a bitter and splendid debate led to a second National Government under Winston Churchill. It was one that gave Labour effective control over much of Britain’s domestic wartime policy and a significant role in foreign policy,¹³ with over twenty ministerial level positions and a significant role in the War Cabinet.¹⁴ This laid an effective basis for Labour’s landslide election victory in 1945 and a spell in government until October 1951.

The SFIO meanwhile was itself forced into an electoral pact from 1944 to 1947 in spite of having had a difficult relationship with the PCF in the Resistance. Claiming they were the ‘meilleurs soldats de la Libération et de la République [the best soldiers to have liberated the Republic]’ the SFIO could not hide their disquiet in being forced into such a partnership only agreed by the PCF (who ‘hadn’t the time or the leisure to indulge in polemic’) so they could push the interests of the USSR within France.¹⁵ The disparity between the Labour Party and the SFIO was clear.

The SFIO in exile

After the humiliation of the French surrender in May 1940 – la débâcle – many exiles, including a number of SFIO politicians, arrived in London. This was in addition to many others who were not directly or indirectly linked to the party, like de Gaulle, who managed nonetheless to attract a number of SFIO figures to his cause, as we will see. Notable initial exiles included the philosopher Simone Weil, whose appeal to be allowed to cooperate with the Free French was rejected by de Gaulle, very possibly leading to her subsequent death in Ashford in 1943.¹⁶ SFIO exiles notably included the leader of the French socialists in exile, Vincent Auriol, who was to become the second President of the Fourth Republic after 1947.

Léon Blum, the former Prime Minister of the Front Populaire of 1936–7, remained the best known leader of the SFIO, but he was in detention in France. Between 1943 and 1946 his place was taken by the lesser known résistant Daniel Mayer, who periodically appeared in London with news of the struggle in France itself. Also a notable figure in the Front Populaire, Auriol was imprisoned for his anti-Vichy views (he was one of the eighty députés who voted not to make Pétain Head of State in July 1940) and subsequently joined the Resistance. He arrived in London in October 1943, and then went to Algiers with de Gaulle, where he represented the SFIO in the Free French Consultative Assembly in later 1943, and France at the Bretton Woods Conferences in July 1944 (as did de Gaulle loyalist René Pleven) and then at the San Francisco Conference in June 1945.¹⁷ He was thus quite unlike some of the SFIO whom we will encounter in this chapter, some of whom have been described as ‘dissiden[ts] within the dissidence’.¹⁸

Blum meanwhile found himself in a Vichy gaol after the French defeat of June 1940, blamed, along with French military commander Maurice Gamelin and other generals and politicians, for their pre-war policies and wartime actions, which allegedly bore a massive responsibility for the weakening of French prowess, events and accusations recounted by Blum in a post-war volume, L’histoire jugera.¹⁹ After a show trial in Riom, where Blum’s eloquent testimony embarrassed Vichy far more than had been expected, he and the other accused were imprisoned in France and then in Germany,²⁰ from whence most of them miraculously returned after the German defeat. French socialists continued to recognise Blum’s moral leadership even from his prison cell, but of course he could not play an active part in the war effort. We can add that Blum’s reputation in the United States also continued to be high, and certainly better than that of de Gaulle, famously distrusted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.²¹ Auriol even quoted Blum’s endorsement (smuggled out of prison) of de Gaulle as leader of the Free French in an attempt to soften Roosevelt’s views on de Gaulle, as early as December 1942.²² Others also quoted his example as everything that was good about France. The American Ambassador in Paris in 1940, William Bullitt, wrote a glowing elegy to Blum in the Préface to L’histoire jugera. Unfortunately Bullitt and FDR were to seriously fall out later in the war. His successor, Ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, was also dismissive about de Gaulle, and had an undoubted influence on Roosevelt’s feelings.²³ Blum’s absence in London certainly reduced the potential weight of the SFIO in both official British and American thinking.

The reception of the French exiles in London and New York was not unequivocally warm. The ground had been set by a period when Britain, and the United States, watched as France seemingly auto-destructed under the Third Republic. The celebrated British sociologist and Labour Party intellectual R. H. Tawney, in an article about Arnold Toynbee’s latest volumes on the collapse of civilisations, might well have had France in mind when he wrote: ‘The secret of vitality [in a civilisation] is perpetual adaptation in response to new emergencies; but the effort, once made, is not easily repeated … It perpetuates itself, long after a changing environment has turned its virtues into vices, so that victory at one stage spells defeat at the next.’²⁴ That was in December 1939. By late 1940 the tone was even stronger, as we shall see below. Equally, in line with Tawney’s jibe about ‘victory at one stage spells defeat at the next’ the French were being partly blamed for the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles. President Wilson was quoted with approval by Beveridge when he had said in 1918 that ‘I know that Europe is still governed by the same reactionary forces which controlled this country until a few years ago [the reference is to his ‘progressive’ reform policies] … too much success or security on the part of the Allies will make a genuine peace settlement exceedingly difficult if not impossible … They need to be co-erced’.²⁵ This was now a message that was received with some agreement in London, and it is highly unlikely that de Gaulle would have accepted it, or the SFIO for that matter. But the Labour Party saw itself as the embodiment of the new broom that would sweep aside the ‘reactionary’ forces of the past twenty years.

This was a view held across the political spectrum in Britain, one major milestone being Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s Mansion House speech of 29 May 1941, duly noted by the Labour Party’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and a major link to the Free French in London, Philip Noel-Baker. Eden proclaimed that ‘we have declared that social security must be the first objective of our domestic policy after the war’. The League of Nations produced a report in the same year that explicitly linked ‘social and economic reconstruction’ to the ‘post-war settlement’ and quoted Eden in its defence. The link was explicitly made between the need to reduce unemployment through ‘international control’, while defending the ‘freedom of the individual’. An approbatory appendix by Oxford Labour Party supporting economist Thomas Balogh is almost as long as the report itself. And other economists like A. C. Pigou, who had been crucial in the 1914–18 debate on the same topic, contributed very similar views. The ‘transition from war to peace’ had to be socially as well as economically uplifting.²⁶

A new peace thus had a ‘price’ and one that the Labour Party and a powerful coalition of foreign policy thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic were prepared to accept. The British and Americans’ distrust of the old French elites often meant that they saw exiled French generals like de Gaulle as those who had not appreciated the new realities and who lacked determination to break with the past. Such ideas were being mapped out by the Anglo-American axis, not side by side with the French. The Chatham House link with the Council on Foreign Relations was in particular vital. While de Gaulle was to spend much of the war demanding that France’s security aims be understood and respected, for the Americans and the British the key intellectual link was one that recognised the economic causes of war, and their solution to it. As Beveridge put it in The Price of Peace, the ‘target’ of British policy was the abolition of the ‘international anarchy’, which not only required robust international dispute mechanisms and a respect for the ‘rule of law’ but also an understanding of what underpinned the ‘seed of fear’ from which war grew.²⁷

That ‘seed’ had to be recognised as at least partly economic rivalry, and that required international cooperation on a vast scale, what the United States administration saw as promoting ‘freedom from fear’ at the same time as ‘freedom from want’. In Britain this manifested itself in the influence of progressive thinkers like Toynbee, eventually institutionalised in a ‘Reconstruction Committee’ set up in Chatham House and a ‘Reconstruction Ministry’ in Whitehall. Again the economic and the security elements of the coming war were explicitly linked. The impetus in Chatham House started well before the war began in Anglo-American meetings of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations.²⁸ There was no place in this vision for the narrow-minded nationalism of the past, one that was embodied for some in the figure of de Gaulle.

De Gaulle was hard pressed to believe in the supposedly idealistic aims of his new ‘Allies’. His advisors said this made it very difficult to ‘synchronise [France’s] policy with that of the Allies’ [synchroniser sa politique sur celle des Alliés]. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 was dismissed as ‘nothing but theories and even more vague ideals’ [que des théories et des ideaux plus vagues encores], a trait not unreasonably ascribed to the ‘idealist’ Roosevelt. But in an analysis as late as April 1943 it was felt that Britain had a foreign policy, the USA did not. Britain and the USSR were ‘realist’, they could do a deal involving territorial and other demands, especially in North Africa and Britain ‘might even envisage an economic union with France’ [viserait même à la constitution d’une union économique avec la France].²⁹ This showed a clear misunderstanding of the changed atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic. Neither the British nor the American ‘Post-War Planning’ teams wanted a return to the problems after Versailles. That, said Beveridge among others, had been caused by the ‘disunity of [the] victors’; there would be no more talk of ‘security’, but rather of the need for ‘democracy’, in which both the Americans and British put their faith.

It was not entirely a wrong-headed analysis. A ‘union’ had indeed been mooted at the time of the French surrender in 1940, and de Gaulle had been in reluctant agreement with the idea as Prime Minister Paul Reynaud’s military envoy in London and in accord with Jean Monnet who held the same position as the French economic representative.³⁰ Where the analysis was wrong was in assuming that Sumner Welles and others were indulging in mere humbug when they asserted, in line with the Atlantic Charter, that the United States wanted ‘a system of international economic collaboration’ [un système de collaboration internationale économique].³¹ The Free French were not being made privy to whatever planning for the post-war period was being decided upon. And the main reason for worry among French exiles in both London and Washington until the end of 1942 was that the Vichy Government remained the principal channel of communication between the Allies and France (largely through the American Ambassador to Vichy Admiral William Leahy, a close associate of Roosevelt). As the French diplomat in Washington Jean-Marc Boegner had told de Gaulle in early December 1941, Welles considered the Free French were putting up ‘no resistance’, and ‘he had a very pessimistic view of the situation in France’ [il regardait la situation en France avec un très grand pessimisme]. He even ‘considered the game to be up in France’ [considérait le jeu comme perdu en France]. Boegner continued with the same theme in later December, there had been ‘no significant change in relations between Vichy and Washington’ [aucun changement important dans les relations entre Washington et Vichy]. Moreover Welles doubted that the Free French could ever move beyond being a ‘militant’ organisation ‘in order to become a properly democratic entity’. There was even doubt that they could ‘unite a majority of the French, even those outside the country’ [rallier une majorité de Français, même en dehors de la France].³² This was not a promising background for the SFIO to hope to make a positive impact on the Labour Party or indeed anyone else in London. Whether they liked it or not, their standing was linked to that of de Gaulle, himself not given a place at the top table or even given much credibility of being the leader of a new France. As we shall see, many within the SFIO exiles tried to distance themselves from de Gaulle, with not much success, even if key members of the Labour Party did slowly warm to them.

The SFIO in exile and the Labour Party

Relations with the Free French in exile in London were largely a Labour Party preserve. It is important to note that this extended to cooperation with the Free French in France itself. Labour’s Hugh Dalton was appointed as Minister of Economic Warfare (1940–42) and given the vital task of starting a secret war to ‘set Europe alight’ with the Special Operations Executive (SOE). SOE played a huge role in France supplying the French Resistance with munitions, arms and agents to fight the Germans, though some French historians have accused SOE of never providing what the Maquis most wanted, effective light arms, as well as the freely provided explosives.³³ The Foreign Office, directed by Conservative Anthony Eden, also contained another important Labour Junior Minister, Philip Noel-Baker, who was the main point of contact between the Foreign Office and the exiled French groups in London, both Gaullist and those of the SFIO. Noel-Baker and other British officials found they often had to deal with the competing claims and egos of a very disparate French diaspora, one that often disagreed about its wartime and post-war policies, and in particular the relative weight that General de Gaulle should have in those policies.

Initial Labour Party reticence about the SFIO in London

Noel-Baker was thus the main link with the French Committee of National Liberation (Conseil National Français – CNF – established on 3 June 1940) and was an initial sceptic. He told Dalton and Attlee in June 1940 that trusting any French leader at that stage was problematic: ‘The more I think of it, the more I am sure it would be a fatal mistake to make – or even allow these Frenchmen to come to London’. He thought the best place for them to go was to ‘Morocco or Algeria, it will seem thoroughly independent and real to every Frenchman, and more and more so as it becomes quite plain that it is the Two Hundred Families who have betrayed the country’.³⁴ Given that this conspiracy theory was current among French people who had accepted their defeat, this was not a good start.³⁵ In support of his view he cited Jean Monnet, also stranded in London as part of the Allied joint commissioning programme, and a recent advocate of an Anglo-French Union. He was also influenced by his old friend, the sometime French Independent Socialist Pierre Cot, Air Minister in the Front Populaire, one of those trying to negotiate the purchase of aircraft from the United States in the latter part of the peace.³⁶

Cot, who had worked with and remained close to Noel-Baker since their days together in the League of Nations, was a great sceptic of de Gaulle’s true intentions, a trait he shared with many other French exiles. Both Cot and Noel-Baker feared that de Gaulle might prove to be a ‘Boulangist’, a dictator in uniform. When Cot asked de Gaulle to give him a job in the Free French hierarchy he was rebuffed in no uncertain terms.³⁷ But de Gaulle did his best to disabuse Noel-Baker of his fears, writing to him in the warmest terms and even inviting him to be a member of the Association des Amis des Volontaires Français. As late as February 1941 Noel-Baker was apologising to de Gaulle that then Minister of Information Duff Cooper had tried to stop him broadcasting in June 1940, testimony to de Gaulle’s powers of charm and flattery when he chose to exercise them.

Later Duff Cooper was a key liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle (1943–44), and Ambassador to France, 1944–48.³⁸ Noel-Baker also spoke warmly of de Gaulle in the House of Commons in early 1941 when de Gaulle was being seen as a troublemaker after the St Pierre et Miquelon affair.³⁹ His appreciation of Blum was also evident in his defence of other French exiles, notably André Blumel, Blum’s former Chief of Staff in the Front Populaire of 1936–37.⁴⁰ As for Noel-Baker, in 1946 Harold Laski told Blum (by now released from his prison) that Noel-Baker was a ‘charming liberal but with no capacity for decisive action’.⁴¹ This unfortunately was but one explanation of other SFIO disappointments with the Labour Party that were to follow well before Blum was freed.

The Groupe Jean Jaurès⁴²

A lively counter-point to the Gaullists in London was the Comité de liaison des socialistes français en Grande Bretagne, usually known as the Groupe Jean Jaurès (GJJ), described by its most complete historienne, Fanny Emmanuelle Rey, as a ‘dissidence within the dissidence’.⁴³ Rey points out that initially SFIO members in exile were split ‘unequally … between the Resistance and collaboration’. Those who made a key input into wider Free French activities were Auriol, André Tixier, André Philip, Henry Hauck and Georges Boris. Boris was de Gaulle’s Commissioner for the Interior after 1942, and fell out with other socialists in London over his support for de Gaulle, notably with the GJJ’s Georges Gombault, the socialist journalist and Vice President of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. During the war itself Henri Hauck advised de Gaulle about labour matters from 1940 onwards and Philip was de Gaulle’s Commissaire de l’Intérieur (Minister of the Interior) from July 1942 to November 1943 in succession to René Cassin. There were attempts to set up a separate Comité d’Action Socialiste by Daniel Mayer (aka ‘Villiers’, leader of the SFIO in Blum’s absence as we have noted, 1943–46), Albert Van Wolput (aka ‘Bosman’) and Henri Ribière, as a distinctive Resistance organisation, but such efforts tended to end up with local cooperation between Communists, Gaullists and other groups in particular areas, in this case calling itself Libération Nord.⁴⁴

The GJJ was made up mainly of those exiled to London, and organised by Louis Lévy, a prominent journalist and Vice President of the LSI.⁴⁵ They met monthly from 19 August 1940 to 22 October 1944. The initial intention was to work with what remained of the LSI and the Labour Party with the somewhat grandiose aim (in 1940 at least) of ‘promoting a popular revolution in Europe to liberate its peoples from foreign oppression and capitalist domination’.⁴⁶ The Groupe spent much of its time attending meetings of the rump of the LSI, by this period reduced to the exiled Belgian veteran socialists, notably Huysmans and the Austrian Emmanuel Adler. They also participated in a group that met at the St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster which seems to have been an occasion for an ‘assembly of socialist allies’ to complain about how they were being treated. The SOE was also based there, as was much of the British Security Service, MI6.

GJJ relations with the Labour Party

The direct relations of the GJJ with the Labour Party tended to be through William Gillies, the long-standing first International Secretary (1920–44) of the party, a man renowned for his no-nonsense rejection of any acceptance by Labour of the CPGB, which he had denounced as being part of a ‘Communist Solar System’.⁴⁷ He can be seen as a fairly typical Labour Party apparatchik of the period, a dour Scot who was not particularly fond of ‘foreigners’, despite the international vocation of socialism, a trait noticed on more than one occasion by the GJJ. On one occasion Huysmans commented that ‘it seems that the Secretary of the Labour Party does not care for [ne tient pas] with international meetings [manifestations internationales]’. Gillies was also fond of sermonising to French socialists about how they should adopt the English ‘model’ of democracy which, if adopted across Europe, would eradicate fascism.⁴⁸ Members of the GJJ also contributed a number of articles to Labour Party publications like Tribune, and produced pamphlets with the Fabian international Bureau like France and Britain, and spoke at Labour Party annual conferences. Attlee also often spoke warmly about France at these conferences, as did Noel-Baker.

Relations of the GJJ with de Gaulle

Georges Boris, a regular attender at GJJ meetings, proposed that they should work with de Gaulle from the time of his arrival in Brazzaville in late 1940, an idea that was taken up with fervour by the trades unionist Hauck and Philip, economics professor and socialist deputé (for the Rhône) who was also one of the eighty who had voted not to accept Pétain in 1940. Philip in particular would have no truck with what he saw as the ideological purity of the GJJ, for him all that existed in France was ‘a party of the Right and a party of the Left’. There were only three issues that mattered: no more ‘personal power’, no more corporative economy, and France having a future as a ‘great industrial nation’. France therefore had to adapt, as all it had at present were ‘paysans attardés’ [backward peasants]. So the Right wing of the Resistance wanted its nation back, and the Left wanted Socialism, which would require a major reorganisation of the peasantry. But nothing would happen until they had ‘Liberation’.⁴⁹

This split the French Left in exile in dangerous ways. Hauck, whom we will see was fully prepared to collaborate with de Gaulle on planning French social policy after the war (in the Sous-Commission Sociale – see below) found himself at odds with Levy and Félix Gouin (aka ‘Henry’ in the Resistance). De Gaulle’s setting up of the CNF as an umbrella for La France Libre in September 1941 led to further complaints about dictatorial behaviour, and especially because the Commissaires, in effect Cabinet ministers of the Free French, would report directly to de Gaulle, le chef des Français libres, in his own formulation. It could never be ‘an authentic and exact representation of France abroad’, protested the GJJ.⁵⁰ Hauck believed that ‘even the Labour Party has become Gaullist’, for there was increasingly no alternative to his personal profile.⁵¹ But before de Gaulle had really assumed a dominant presence as the symbol of Free France, so by about early 1942, the GJJ, even on occasion Hauck, and especially Gombault, were often very suspicious of de Gaulle, Gombault protesting that it would look as if they ‘were marching behind a general’. Yet others saw in de Gaulle their only, if inadequate, hope. By the latter part of 1943, as ‘Henry’ (another SFIO operative still based in London) reported to Mayer, by then in Algiers, Gaullism was ‘in full control’ [c’est le Gaullisme qui l’emporte], though ‘making progress towards democracy’; they should be ‘prudent’ and show ‘patience’.⁵²

These differences of view were more than a storm in an SFIO tea cup, as the disagreement affected the vital link with the British Left, upon whom the GJJ and to some extent the entire Free French operation in London relied for support. The Fabian Society at one point felt moved to downplay assertions in a lengthy pamphlet in the British press (all of the left, like the News Chronicle, the Observer, and even the New Statesman and Nation) that de Gaulle’s operations in Brazzaville and Algiers had been using ‘thumb screws’ on trades unionists and had authors ‘shot’. The pamphlet stated boldly that ‘whether we like it or not … it is time that the Governments – and by extension, the peoples – of Great Britain and the United States hold in their hands the future of France’ for they will ultimately decide

whether the political evolution of post-war France shall be peaceful or bloodily violent. If we help them to find that Government [that they want] peacefully, they may or may not be grateful to us, but if we compel them to resort to civil war to get it, they will most certainly regard us as enemies.⁵³

Gombault, ever keen on SFIO independence, also worried that the SFIO and the wider French labour movement might look like it was being ‘directed’ by the Labour Party, an interesting parallel with de Gaulle’s worries about French independence from Britain more widely.⁵⁴ The broader complaint, also echoed in the British Labour Party’s newspaper Tribune in April 1943 was that de Gaulle’s slow development of military resistance, first in Brazzaville and later in North Africa, would create an army that was full of ‘reactionary elements’ behind a ‘democratic façade’. There was, the writer agreed, a real need for ‘unity’ among the various Resistance factions, ‘but unity itself is a snare and delusion … a reactionary unity will be worse than no unity’.⁵⁵

Cooperation and inspiration: Beveridge and planning and the SFIO⁵⁶

It is easy to see the ultimately somewhat futile machinations of the GJJ as typical of the SFIO’s relations with the Labour Party. Probably far more important were the lessons learned by many in the Free French more broadly and the SFIO in particular about how France should be organised after the war, Projets pour après la Libération.⁵⁷ The admiration of many of the exiles for the Labour Party and other ideas of ‘planning’ was obvious, and it often chimed with pre-war French thinking along the same lines. As Philip Nord has shown, there is a clear continuity of thought between pre-war planification, even ‘corporatism’, and that of the post-war Plan devised by Jean Monnet, himself a prominent admirer of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ thinking in London and Washington, which made him a constant target for de Gaulle’s suspicion.⁵⁸ Labour’s domination of domestic policy in the wartime coalition worked very well on the whole and the Labour- (and Liberal-)inspired Beveridge Report defined much of what came to be known as the Welfare State. The SFIO and wider French input into this, and reaction to it, was therefore of crucial importance in a number of areas of international social policy.

One place where this took place within the Free French umbrella from January 1942 in London was the Commission for the study of post-war problems [Commission pour l’étude des problèmes d’après-guerre] which was chaired by the pre-war Quai d’Orsay senior diplomat Hervé Alphand, de Gaulle’s National Commissioner for the Economy, Finance and the Colonies and Director of Economic Affairs. But it had a large SFIO contingent and its thinking was very much influenced by contemporary Labour Party thinking about the Beveridge Report, and especially influenced Boris and Hauck. There was also a Sous-Commission Sociale, which had many of the same members.⁵⁹ As the discussions developed during the war, the SFIO worked closely with William Jowitt, the Labour Party Solicitor General and Minister for Reconstruction within the British government, and later the main architect of National Insurance in 1944. Another important point of contact was with the ‘London International Assembly’, a body that met through most of the war and made a significant impact on thinking about the post-war organisation of the UN and about war crimes tribunals, as well as matters of social policy, again with the Beveridge Report figuring as a key point of departure.⁶⁰ So did the economic thinking of John Maynard Keynes, and his call for policies to ensure continued full employment after the war take pride of place in the Commission and Sous-Commission’s deliberations. ‘England had shown the way’ and Keynes’s policies would stop ‘the mechanism of crisis’ [le mécanisme des crises].⁶¹

The main worry that comes through in the papers of the Commission and the Sous-Commission Sociale was how to avoid ‘the economic quagmire into which France was progressively sinking’ [le marasme économique dans lequel le pays [France] s’enfermait de plus en plus]. In a report that was produced in March 1943 by the Institut de la Conjoncture (1937–45, set up by the demographer and historian Alfred Sauvy), the competitive devaluations and the attendant deflation of the interwar period were identified as key problems. It was realised that this would mean a very different set of French macro- economic policies from now on. But they also rejected an overall ‘autarkic’ approach, as in the USSR. The future of France had to be ‘international’, for an autarkic system would put in danger ‘the economic balance and peace of the world’ [l’équilibre économique et la paix du monde]. Moreover this new system had to be based on free access to primary commodities, markets and, most of all, to ‘the establishment of an international minimum level of living standards’ [l’établissement international d’un niveau de vie minimum].⁶² But there were evident fissures in the Sous-Commission when it came to putting some detail to these broad ideas.

Perhaps the most important document produced by the Sous-Commission that seemingly supported the American post-war planning (PWP) process came in September 1942 in a discussion of world orders. The view expressed there was that France had to face up to the fact that it had not escaped ‘by the skin of its teeth’ [de justesse] in 1918 and that it had gone on to ‘lose the peace’, even worse, ‘it [France] had lost its soul. It must be refound’ [Elle avait perdu son âme. Elle doit la retrouver]. The reason why Hitler had appealed to many in Europe was because he had given economic ‘hope’ with his nouvel ordre (allemand), while the democracies had pursued economic nationalism, including in the United States, and in Britain (with the 1932 Ottawa Agreement). The Atlantic Charter gave hope that they had now put this behind them, but these proposals were still ‘vague’ and left the details ‘dans l’ombre’. But they liked Welles’s initial ideas for ‘international economic collaboration’, guarantees for individual liberties and ‘a well-planned economy’ [une économie bien dirigée]. First there had to be (as Welles agreed) a ‘recovery plan’ [plan de ravitaillement] (as United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was to become), then job security for all to counter Hitler’s propaganda, then international solutions passing through a combination (initially) of regional arrangements and finally one that was ‘universal’ like the League had tried to do.⁶³

Discussions within the various Free French organisations, and especially those dominated by the SFIO about the future of Germany and Europe proliferated in the twelve months before the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944. Could Germany be trusted and should it be accepted as a re-educated, demilitarised, democratic state? Not only the SFIO but also the PCF expressed these hopes. And most of all, could there be a ‘socialist plan for Europe’? Could there even be a ‘United States of the World’ [États-Unis du Monde]?⁶⁴ These ideas had a remarkable symmetry with the other Allies, and made the Labour Party link vital for the Free French to contribute indirectly to the process of PWP.

Such relative optimism was countered by others, like the prominent Socialist (and later a member of the French delegation to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC)) Boris, who expressed the fear in the Commission that the post-war world would be one where the ‘new world would impose its will on the old’ [le nouveau monde sera en mesure d’imposer ses directives à l’ancien]. The Americans must be distrusted, as they will not present this as ‘imperialism’ but as ‘altruism’. But what they will really bring is not the ‘New Deal’ (which he agrees with), but ‘risk and competition’. And once Roosevelt left the scene, as he must, Big Business will take over, and a Boom will be organised. In all of this Europe will be subjected to ‘the panaceas of liberalism’ [les panacées du liberalisme], free trade as described in the Atlantic Charter, but without much clarity as to whether this Anglo-American statement would be extended to Europe. He further speculated that the United States might ‘experiment with monetary manipulation’ [tenter l’expérience de dirigisme monétaire]. But how could there be ‘free’ trade when after the war the United States would have huge positive credit balances with all other countries? The inevitable result would be that Europeans would see any new system as ‘purely provisional’.⁶⁵

Boris had but one answer, and that was to turn to the British. His time in London had clearly impressed him that Britain was more and more interested in a ‘planned economy’. Britain was showing that Europe could pursue a different, classless road, based on ‘the principle of salvation, or even of the common good’ [le sentiment du salut ou simplement du bien commun]. This would not be without problems, the USA and even the USSR would try and divide Europe, with the latter seen as being more of a friend, but one to keep at arm’s length. For it was up to France to ‘direct and represent this coalition of European interests’ [diriger et représenter cette coalition des intérêts européens], with the British playing a role if possible. By this he meant that it depended on Britain remaining closer to Europe than to the United States. Europe should therefore be independent of the United States, for Europe had now ‘arrived at a more advanced stage’ [parvenue à un stade plus avancé] than the United States. And to make sure it stayed that way Europe must keep its own armaments.⁶⁶

Auriol was a particularly important participant in French thinking and action for the future where economic matters were concerned. As we have noted he was the Head of the Groupe Socialiste in both London and Algiers, where he was from early 1944, as well as Président de la Commission de l’Intérieur, the equivalent of the British Home Office. He was also a French delegate to the Bretton Woods Conferences in July 1944⁶⁷ and later San Francisco in 1945. His papers nonetheless show a depth of bitterness about how France was being kept in the dark about post-war planning. On one occasion in July 1944 Auriol exploded to his London comrades from Algiers, with: ‘If France no longer counts then tell us that’ [Si la France ne compte plus, qu’on nous le dise]. It was important that Attlee and Gillis [sic] be told so.⁶⁸ There is no record in the Auriol Papers of a reply, the occasion of his above noted explosion about having been ignored.⁶⁹

Conclusions: post-war SFIO–Labour Party cooperation?

The celebrated French literary collaborator Pierre Drieu la Rochelle is said to have dismissed the Germans as essentially stupid when accused of ‘giving secrets to the enemy’ [intelligence avec l’ennemi], the juridical term for collaboration.⁷⁰ The Resistance was just as divided on the point of what it was ‘intelligent’ to do with both Allies and enemies. The French Resistance in Algiers and London feared being left to deal with Germany again as it had been in 1919. Raymond Haas-Picard was quoted above complaining to ‘Villiers’ (socialist Daniel Mayer) about the ‘dangerous perspectives’ of a weakened Britain allying with France and the ‘smaller democracies’ against a resurgent Germany, and especially one that, as South African General Jan Smuts had said, was admired by the British.⁷¹ But broadly the Socialist Resistance wanted to ally with Britain against both Germany and the United States.

Hence after the Liberation many French socialists continued to believe that an alliance with the British Labour Party, and not the United States, would help France to recover its equilibrium. Auriol had said in a lengthy speech in May 1944 that part of France’s recovery depended on an ‘essential European federalism’ [Féderalisme européen absolument nécessaire]. Why should this not be as part of an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance, une alliance naturelle, as he had heard de Gaulle say recently, even if with an ‘eastern’ groupe oriental and a ‘western’ groupe occidental? Indeed one of de Gaulle’s first important foreign policy actions in December 1944 as head of the Gouvernement Provisoire (GPRF) was to conclude a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with Moscow, one which unfortunately did not encourage Stalin to invite de Gaulle to Yalta.⁷²

Also unfortunately for both the SFIO in particular and the GPRF and the subsequent Fourth Republic (1947–58), the Labour Party was largely powerless to support an Anglo-French entente to create a Europe in their own image. Warm words were spoken about France by Labour Party leaders at the First Socialist Party Conference on French soil in November 1944, attended by Gillies, Noel-Baker and Dalton among others. Equally warm words were exchanged in March 1945 at the International Conference in London, with the announcing of a pacte franco-britannique that endorsed the UN agreements of Dumbarton Oaks, the Franco-Soviet Treaty of 1944, and even des bases possibles to stabilise currencies, the subject of much French angst. But the United Nations horse had already fled the stable, the Dumbarton Oaks’ decisions having been confirmed at Yalta without French agreement.⁷³ Later in the 1940s the policies of Labour Party Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin for a ‘third world power’, a Franco-British condominium in Europe, came to nothing.⁷⁴ In 1945 the future of Europe was essentially in the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Notes

1. 1.  William Beveridge, Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, November 1942; William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, November 1944; William Beveridge, The Price of Peace (London: Pilot Press, 1945).

2. 2.  See Lucian Ashworth, International Relations and the Labour Party: Intellectuals and Policy Making from 1918–1945 (London: Tauris, 2007). It is fair to say that the Labour Party was less impressed with the Soviet Union than the SFIO. On Labour’s attitudes, see Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Andrew J. Williams, Labour and Russia: The Attitude of the British Labour Party to the USSR, 1924–1934 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

3. 3.  A. N. Lyons, Robert Blatchford: The Sketch of a Personality: An Estimate of Some Achievements (London: Clarion Press, 1910), 97 and 107–8; R. Blatchford, Merrie England, (London: Clarion Press, 1894).

4. 4.  Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Peter Smith, 1941, 1st pub. 1908), 9 and 33.

5. 5.  Annie Kriegel, Les Communistes français (Paris: Seuil, 1968).

6. 6.  A. J. Davies, To Build a New Jerusalem: The Labour Movement from the 1890s to the 1990s (London: Abacus, 1996), 179; Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party (London: A. and C. Black, 1975); Francis Beckett, The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London: John Murray, 1995).

7. 7.  Jean Lacouture, Léon Blum (Paris: Seuil, 1979).

8. 8.  David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977).

9. 9.  Avenol to Blum, 2 December 1945, Blum Papers, Archives Nationales, Paris, 4 BL 1.

10. 10.  Beveridge, The Price of Peace, 19.

11. 11.  John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: Quercus, 2016). Bew also stresses Attlee’s moderate left-wing politics.

12. 12.  Bew, Citizen Clem, 44–5, 92 and 98.

13. 13.  Such as the sending of Labour firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow until 1942: Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 1940–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

14. 14.  Bew, Citizen Clem, 250.

15. 15.  ‘Commissariat de l’Intérieur’: Exchange of letters between the PCF and the SFIO ‘Très Secret’, March 1944: A[rchives] N[ationales], Paris, 552 AP 34, 3 AU 9 Dr 2, Auriol Papers.

16. 16.  Weil is widely believed to have starved herself to death out of sorrow that de Gaulle could find no place for her undoubted talents in the Free French organisation in London. See David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990); Simone Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil; Avec des lettres et d’autres textes inédits de Simone Weil (Paris: Fayard, 1997).

17. 17.  For more on Auriol, see below. Pleven’s files on Bretton Woods can be found in René Pleven, ‘Bretton Woods: Notes, rapports, correspondence’, 1 July 1944–28 December 1945; He also attended San Francisco with Auriol: both AN 560 AP 32.

18. 18.  Fanny Emmanuelle Rey, La dissidence socialiste à Londres: Le groupe Jean Jaurès et la France (août 1940–août 1944), Mémoire de maitrise d’histoire, Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1997–8.

19. 19.  Blum’s own account of this can be found in Léon Blum, L’histoire jugera (Paris: Editions de l’Arbre, 1945).

20. 20.  Also recounted in Blum L’histoire jugera, 249–332.

21. 21.  Andrew J. Williams, France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: 1900–1940 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), where I discuss FDR’s liking for Blum in the 1930s, and Williams, France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: 1940–61 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), where I discuss his profound dislike for de Gaulle.

22. 22.  Auriol to Roosevelt, 12 May 1944, ‘Groupe Socialiste/ Parti Socialiste’ (in Algiers) 3 AU 9 DR 5, Auriol Papers.

23. 23.  Philips O’Brien, The Second Most Powerful Man in the World, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff (London: Penguin, 2019); William D. Leahy, I Was There (London: Gollancz, 1950). See also Leahy’s fellow diplomat in Vichy: Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964).

24. 24.  R. H. Tawney, ‘Dr. Toynbee’s Study of History’, International Affairs 18, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec., 1939), 798–806.

25. 25.  Beveridge, The Price of Peace, 20.

26. 26.  A. C. Pigou, The Transition from War to Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943); Anthony Eden, Mansion House speech of 29 May 1941; League of Nations Draft Report on Social and Economic Reconstruction in the Post-War Settlement’, n.d., 1941; Noel-Baker (Philip) Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge NBKR 4/229.

27. 27.  Beveridge, The Price of Peace, 11–12.

28. 28.  Andrew J. Williams, ‘Before the Special Relationship: The Council on Foreign Relations, The Carnegie Foundation and the Rumour of an Anglo-American War’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2003): 233–51.

29. 29.  ‘Politique Extérieure des Etats-Unis’, ‘Note’ of April 1943, no author, in Papiers de Gaulle, Dossier 1, France Libre de Gaulle: 1) Affaires étrangères – ETATS-UNIS, AN, AG/3(1)/256.

30. 30.  Andrea Bosco, June 1940: Great Britain and the First Attempt to Build a European Union (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).

31. 31.  Bosco, June 1940.

32. 32.  Boegner (Washington) to de Gaulle (Brazzaville, via Foreign Office), 1 and 24 December 1941, in Papiers de Gaulle, France Libre de Gaulle: 1a) Informations sur les ETATS-UNIS), AN, AG/3(1)/256.

33. 33.  Olivier Wieviorka, The French Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), especially 335; Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (London: HarperCollins,1995); Hugh Dalton and Ben Pimlott, The Fateful Years: Memoirs, 1931–1945 (London: Jonathan Cape,1957); Ben Pimlott, ed., Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45 (London: Cape, 1986).

34. 34.  Noel-Baker to Dalton, 27 June 1940, and to Attlee, 28 June 1940: Noel-Baker Papers, NBKR 4/261.

35. 35.  This conspiracy theory had a long back-story, but was very widely believed in the 1930s: Malcolm Anderson, ‘The Myth of the Two Hundred Families’, Political Studies, 13, no. 2 (June 1965), 163–78.

36. 36.  For some of Noel-Baker’s correspondence with Cot, see Noel-Baker Papers, NBKR 4/258.

37. 37.  Cot to Pleven, 13 September 1941, annotations by de Gaulle; de Gaulle to Pleven, 18 March 1942, Pleven Papers, AN, 550 AP 16.

38. 38.  Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), first published 1953; J. J. Norwich, The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–1951 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).

39. 39.  David Woolner, ‘Canada, Mackenzie King and the St. Pierre and Miquelon Crisis of 1941’, London Journal of Canadian Studies, 24, (2010).

40. 40.  De Gaulle to Noel-Baker, 10 July and 28 August 1940, Noel-Baker Papers, NBKR 4/261.

41. 41.  Laski to Blum 29 January 1946; notes of 19 October 1945, Blum Papers AN, 4 BL 1.

42. 42.  Some of the following builds on Williams, France, Britain and the United States …, Volume 2: 1940–1961, Chapter 2, 56–7.

43. 43.  The best account of this organisation is: Rey, La dissidence socialiste à Londres, 1. The files of the ‘Comité de liaison des Socialistes français en Grande Bretagne (Groupe Jean Jaurès, hereafter ‘GJJ’) can be found in the Office Universitaire de Recherche Socialiste (OURS) in Paris, under ‘Fonds Louis Levy’, 95APO 1–26.

44. 44.  Rey, La dissidence socialiste à Londres, 1.

45. 45.  Lévy worked as a journalist, mainly, but not exclusively, on l’Humanité, then the Petit-Provençal and Le Populaire (including as its London correspondent, 1940–1952) and was a prominent member of the Executive of both the SFIO and the Labour and Socialist International.

46. 46.  Minutes of First Meeting of the GJJ, 19 August 1940, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

47. 47.  See Williams, Labour and Russia, Chapter 16.

48. 48.  GJJ, Minutes of meeting of 27 April and 25 May 1941, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

49. 49.  GJJ, Minutes of meeting of 3 October 1942, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

50. 50.  GJJ, Minutes of meeting of 21 September 1941, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95 APO 3.

51. 51.  GJJ, Minutes of meeting of 16 June 1942, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

52. 52.  See, for example, Henry (London) to ‘Villiers’ (Daniel Mayer) (Algiers) 3 September 1943, OURS, Mollet Papers, AGM1.

53. 53.  ‘France and Britain’, ‘Anglo-French Committee of the Fabian International Bureau, No. 6, vol. 2, April 1943, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

54. 54.  GJJ, Minutes of meeting of 1 December 1940 and 30 March 1941, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

55. 55.  ‘The Future of France’, Tribune, 2 April 1943, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95APO 3.

56. 56.  Again, some of the below is taken from Williams, France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, 1940–61, Chapter 3.

57. 57.  Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, eds. Les idées politiques de la Résistance (documents clandestins, 1940–1944) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954). The file ‘Projets pour après la Libération’ can be found in AN, F^1A3734. This was also published in abbreviated form as a ‘compte rendu’ by Lucien Febvre, ‘Henri Michel et Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les idées politiques de la Résistance’, Annales, 9, no. 3 (1954): 413–16.

58. 58.  Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

59. 59.  The files of the Commission can also be found in the AN under ‘France libre’, F^1A3734. The ‘Sous-Commission Sociale’ is the first file.

60. 60.  The Minutes (1941–45) of the London International Assembly can be found in the Library of the London School of Economics, under LNU65-8.

61. 61.  ‘Rapport sur les Problèmes Européens d’Après-Guerre (avant-projet de 20 mai 1942)’ (author probably Boris), and (on Keynes among other matters), ‘Rapport sur l’organisation de l’économie de Paris’, 1 July 1944 (author F. Walters), AN, F^1A3734.

62. 62.  ‘Commission pour l’étude des problèmes d’après-guerre’ meetings of 10 February and 5 March 1942; ‘L’Institut de la Conjoncture’, 64-page report, 15 March 1943, AN, ‘France Libre’, F^1A3734

63. 63.  L. Jacquemin, ‘Commission pour l’étude des problèmes d’après-guerre’, 10 September 1942, AN, ‘France Libre’, F^1A3734. This paragraph was taken from Chapter 2 of Williams, France, Britain and the United States.

64. 64.  See, for example: GJJ discussions of 21 June 1943 and 13 May 1944, Fonds Louis Levy, OURS, 95 ARO 3.

65. 65.  Georges Boris, ‘Politique Américaine – les données fondamentales du problème’, July 1942, ‘Commission pour l’étude des problèmes d’après guerre’, AN, ‘France Libre’, F^1A3734.

66. 66.  Boris, ‘Politique Américaine – les données fondamentales du problème’.

67. 67.  The file of Bretton Woods can be found in Auriol Papers, AN, AU 15 Dr 2. His notes from San Francisco (largely illegible, it has to be said) are in 3 AU 15 Dr 3sdrb.

68. 68.  Auriol to London (no name is mentioned but Attlee is addressed), 13 July 1944. The letters had been written on 12 May: Auriol Papers, AN, AU 10 Dr 5. My analysis of this can be found in: Andrew Williams, ‘France and the Origins of the United Nations, 1944–1945: “Si La France ne compte plus, qu’on nous le dise”’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 28, no. 2 (June 2017).

69. 69.  Auriol to Roosevelt, 12 May 1944, and also to Churchill and Attlee, same date, Auriol Papers, AN, 3 AU 9 Dr 5.

70. 70.  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Récit secret, quoted by Pascal Ory, Les Collobarateurs (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 269; here from: Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Vichy en Prison: Les épurés à Fresnes après la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 42. The practically untranslateable wordplay he used was to say: ‘Oui, je suis un traître. Oui, j’ai été d’intelligence avec l’ennemi. J’ai apporté l’intelligence française. Ce n’est pas de ma faute si l’enemmi n’a pas été intelligent’.

71. 71.  Raymond Haas-Picard (London) to ‘Villiers’ (Daniel Mayer), (Algiers) 3 December 1943 and end (n.d.) January 1944, OURS, Mollet Papers, AGM1.

72. 72.  Speech by Auriol, 12 May 1944, Auriol Papers, AN, 3 AU 9 Dr 6. For the relations of de Gaulle with the USSR, see Maurice Vaisse, De Gaulle et la Russie (Paris: CNRS, 2006).

73. 73.  ‘Parti Socialiste, relations avec le PCF’ (in which notes on the 1st Socialist Party Conference can be found), and International Conference of London (3–5 March 1945) Auriol Papers, AN, 3 AU 13 Dr 1 and Dr 2.

74. 74.  Anne Deighton, ‘Entente Neo-Coloniale? Ernest Bevin and the Proposals for an Anglo-French Third World Power, 1945–1949’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 17, no. 4 (2006): 835–52.

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