Очерки истории Франции XX–XXI веков. Статьи Н. Н. Наумовой и ее учеников: читать начало книги онлайн

There remained, however, two potential stumbling-blocks. The first was the issue of Poland and the Lublin committee. The second concerned the extension of the alliance to the United Kingdom. Stalin had kept Churchill informed of de Gaulle’s visit since 20 November, and had asked for British views on a Franco-Soviet pact by telegram on 2 December, the day of de Gaulle’s arrival. The British Cabinet had discussed the issue two days later, and backed Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s preference for a tripartite Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance. Churchill’s telegram to Stalin of 5 December supported such a treaty, as well as the inclusion of de Gaulle in any Big Three talks affecting France. Stalin’s reply, dated 7 December, agreed to propose a tripartite pact to de Gaulle.[337]

The two questions came together at the de Gaulle-Stalin meeting of 8 December. To de Gaulle’s direct question as to ‘whether Marshal Stalin considered closer relations between our two countries were necessary’, Stalin again agreed to the principle of a Franco-Soviet pact but added that ‘there are good pacts and there are better pacts. A tripartite pact onto which Britain was coupled would be better.’[338]De Gaulle refused the proposal, with some irritation, for three reasons. It appeared as an unacceptable intervention by Churchill in the sovereign conduct of French foreign policy; France’s position in a triple pact would inevitably appear less important than in a bilateral treaty; and de Gaulle viewed France’s differences with the Soviet Union – despite the Polish question – as less fundamental than the unresolved issues with the United Kingdom, notably over the Levant and Germany. Those differences, for de Gaulle, could be settled only in the ‘second stage’ of France’s construction of alliances – the third being the future United Nations pact with the United States and other powers.[339]

The Soviet records suggest that Stalin then used the tripartite idea as a bar-gaining counter to secure recognition of the Lublin Committee. ‘Now the British propose a tripartite pact’, he told de Gaulle. ‘Let the French do us a service and we will do the same for them. Poland is an element of our security. We have been talking with the French about this question for two days. Let the French receive the Paris representative of the Polish National Liberation Committee. We will sign a bilateral agreement. If Churchill doesn’t like it, too bad.’ When de Gaulle observed that ‘Stalin had won this game’, Stalin replied that ‘Winning is the purpose of playing – but France will win more.’[340]This account is sharply at variance with that of de Gaulle, who describes Stalin as a ‘good loser’ over the Polish issue.[341]

The pact signed on 10 December was a minimal text centred on Germany. Stalin secured no French support for the Oder-Neisse line within the treaty (though ultimately none of the western allies objected to it); de Gaulle won no Soviet backing for his German plans. Britain was left out, to no great regret on Churchill’s part.[342]France limited relations with the Lublin committee to an exchange of unofficial representatives to deal with practical issues, notably prisoners of war; but the identity of de Gaulle’s representative – Christian Fouchet, a trusted young Gaullist of 1940 pedigree – and the fact that the French, along with the British and Americans, effectively recognised the Lublin Committee as the government of Poland in August 1945, somewhat limits the real importance of France’s refusal to concede on this issue.

Pravda reported the meetings on 11 December in largely conventional terms, referring to ‘the many manifestations of sympathy, reinforced by the shared hardships of war, between the peoples of France and the Soviet Union’, and the talks between the French delegation, Stalin, and Molotov, on ‘the full range of problems relating to the continuation of the war and the organisation of the world’.[343]Of more interest are de Gaulle’s and Bidault’s official letters to Stalin, reproduced on 15 December. De Gaulle observed that the alliance would serve ‘to co-ordinate the military efforts of Russia and France with those of the United Nations with a view to safeguarding our two peoples from a similar catastrophe in the future’, while Bidault underlined the ‘close and permanent community of interests between our two countries’ which would ‘reinforce our will to win and guarantee peace in the future’.[344]In general, however, Pravda’s reports were relatively lowkey: while the outward events of the French visit were covered, there was no analysis of the treaty’s content, and little interruption to the paper’s staple diet of (victorious) war news, considered more important. Privately, Stalin told Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to Moscow, that he had found de Gaulle ‘awkward and stubborn’, as well as unrealistic in his aims for Germany.[345]French coverage, by contrast, was altogether more fulsome. The treaty dominated the first-ever issue of Le Monde, whose editorialist observed that ‘barely a few months after her liberation, France’s co-operation has been sought out by one of the clearest victors of the war’, that the alliance was ‘a further proof of the skill and far– sightedness of the head of the Provisional Government’, and that it would no doubt pave the way for a tripartite pact with Britain.[346]What neither side mentioned, finally, was the stake of the alliance for French internal politics. For the Soviets, it would enhance the status of the PCF; for de Gaulle, it would help keep the same party in check.

De Gaulle’s BBC broadcast of 6 June 1944, inviting the French to ‘fight the enemy with all the means at their disposal’ in the wake of the D-day landings, was echoed by a call to ‘national insurrection’ from the PCF’s Central Committee. In a few days the overall number of partisan units, grouped under the umbrella of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), multiplied several times over, reaching nearly half a million men, very many of them Communists. Militarily, the results of the insurrection varied from the tragic (premature risings, provoking ferocious reprisals, in Tulle and other provincial towns) to the dashing and successful (in Lille, Marseilles, Limoges, Thiers and above all Paris). It remained to be seen which authority the FFI would recognise. Officially, the answer was clear: since April 1944, two Communists had sat on the CFLN and then the GPRF, as part of a unified Resistance movement headed by de Gaulle (who gave a ministry to Charles Tillon, commander of the main Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, on 9 September). Officially again, from 9 June the FFI were under the command of the French army, and de Gaulle ordered the dissolution of their senior command structure on 28 August. On the ground, things were less simple. The FFI sought to maintain their autonomy from the regular army, while the comités de libération, often drawn from their ranks, disputed control over localities with the prefects and special commissioners appointed by the GPRF: hence de Gaulle’s extensive provincial tours in autumn 1944, aimed at reinforcing the GPRF’s authority across France.[347]

These two competing authorities could not coexist for long. On 28 October de Gaulle ordered, by a decree of the GPRF, the disarmament and dissolution of all armed groups other than the army and the police. The two Communist ministers accepted the decree; criticism of it within the PCF was initially muted; but the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), dominated by Communists, attacked it. So did many of the militias directly concerned, with growing support from the PCF press. The Communist leadership, indeed, talked as if it was preparing a revolution: on 15 November Jacques Duclos, the party’s acting leader in the absence of its secretary-general Maurice Thorez, called for the summoning of ‘estates general’ (a reference to 1789), locally and then nationally, for the exercise of local power by ‘elected and not appointed bodles’, and for a regime in which the people’s representatives could ‘be dis– missed at any moment’.[348]De Gaulle’s decree remained ‘a dead letter’ a month after its promulgation.[349]But the logical corollary of this – a full insurrection against the GPRF – never took place. De Gaulle, supported by the majority of the population, and on the Left by the Socialists of the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), was obviously disinclined to play the role of Kerensky. Tens of thousands of Allied troops remained in France. And no instructions for a rising had come from Moscow, either from the Kremlin or from Thorez.

Thorez had deserted from the French army in 1939 and been exfiltrated to the Soviet Union, where he had resided since. His return, decided in Paris and Moscow, testifies both to the extremely close relations between the Kremlin and the PCF and to the exceptional sensitivity of the contemporary French political situation.

In the autumn of 1944, Thorez had twice requested de Gaulle’s authorisation to return to France, but the General had ignored his messages.[350]

On 21 October Georgy Dimitrov, former Comintern secretary-general and future head of Bulgaria’s first post-war government, then also in exile in the USSR, wrote to Molotov about this one-sided correspondence. While a campaign for Thorez’s return had started in France, said Dimitrov, ‘hostile elements’ were spreading the ‘myth’ of his desertion in 1939 and claiming that he had had links with the Germans. Meanwhile, Dimitrov claimed, Thorez continued to enjoy Soviet hospitality, while the Soviet press remained ‘totally silent’ on the problem, creating ‘a very embarrassing situation not only for Thorez but also for ourselves’, which could best be remedied via an article on the subject (which Dimitrov submitted for Molotov’s approval) in Pravda. Molotov’s comments, handwritten on the draft, indicate a clear intention to apply gentle pressure on de Gaulle: ‘The article does not explain clearly where the problem lies. Why can Thorez not return? Who is refusing him entry?’[351]

This form of indirect influence – and, no doubt, the situation in France produced results within a week. On 28 October – the same day as the decree dissolving the militias in France – de Gaulle wired Roger Garreau, France’s ambassador in Moscow, to say that ‘The government has decided to quash the verdicts of French courts-martial reached before 18 June 1940 and relating to persons who subsequently took part in the national Resistance movement. This decision gives M. Maurice Thorez the right of re-entry into France. You may inform him of it. However, before a visa can be delivered a few days’ wait will be necessary until the decree is published in the Journal Officiel.’[352]

During this wait, on 19 November, Thorez had a long conversation with Stalin. The length of their meeting, the detail of Stalin’s instructions on how the Communists were to behave in liberated France, and the presence of both Molotov and Lavrenti Beria all indicate the extreme importance placed in Moscow on the PCF’s activities – as well as the strengths and limitations of Stalin’s view of French politics under the GPRF.[353]For Stalin, ‘the most import ant question was how to get through the current difficult period when the Communists were not masters in France, and counted enemies as well as friends; and how to rally their own forces while preventing the forces of reaction from rallying theirs.’ Stalin punctuated the conversation with questions to Thorez, whose answers he used as the basis for his own orders. At first, he simply asked Thorez how he viewed the French situation, while expressing revealing perplexity that former prisoners of war (such as Bidault or Juin) had been given important posts in the GPRF. Thorez’s answer focused on the PCF’s relations with the French Socialists, and noted the SFIO leadership’s refusal to co-operate with the PCF despite the Communists’ success in winning working-class Socialists to their cause and despite Socialist commitments to ‘unity of action’. The Socialists, complained Thorez, were denigrating the PCF’s war record by suggesting that their heroic role in the struggle against the Germans dated only from 1941.

Stalin’s reply broached the central theme of his advice to Thorez by stressing the PCF’s continuing need for allies against the ‘forces of reaction’ and warning against excessive criticism of the SFIO. De Gaulle, Stalin argued, might well try to isolate the PCF and to act against the Communists; even if personally unwilling, ‘he will be pressed to do so by the Americans and the British, who want to create a reactionary government in France, as they do everywhere they can’. The Communists, he stressed, ‘are not strong enough to take on the struggle against the reactionary forces on their own’, and should therefore seek allies among Radicals, Socialists and ‘other elements’ to form a ‘bloc against the forces of reaction’, allowing the PCF to ‘defend itself now and, when the situation had changed, to go onto the attack’. For that reason, they ‘should not seek to identify who, among the Socialists, said what and when against the Soviet Union’. Even if ‘we know the Socialists well’ as ‘the left wing of the bourgeoisie’, the overriding need now was to avoid the PCF’s isolation. The bloc should also create close but discreet links with trade unions and with youth movements. ‘The youth movement’, added Stalin, ‘should not be called the Communist youth. Some people are frightened of flags, and this should be taken into consideration.’

Perhaps the most remarkable moment in the conversation came when Thorez mentioned that ‘the patriotic militias that had formed the main force of the Resistance under the Occupation’ had, for the moment, kept their arms. In reply, Stalin warned Thorez to: take account of the fact that there now existed in France a government recognised by the Allied powers. In these conditions it was difficult for the Communists to have their own armed forces alongside those of the regular army, as their need for such detachments was now open to question. As long as there was no Provisional Government, and as long as no zones to the rear of the battle-front fell under the authority of such a government, there was some point in the existence of such units. But what was their use now that there was a government with an army? Such arguments could be used by the Communists’ enemies, and would seem convincing to the average Frenchman. The position of the Communist Party was therefore weak and would continue to be so as long as it kept its armed forces; its position was simply hard to defend. That was why the armed units needed to be transformed into a more political organisation; as for the weapons, they should be hidden.’[354]

Stalin added that he had mentioned this point because he felt the PCF had not understood how the situation in France had changed, and accused them of pursuing their old policies, notably in attacking the Socialists and trying to hold on to their weapons, oblivious of the new context in which de Gaulle headed a government recognised by Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other powers. Because the PCF was not strong enough to ‘strike at the head’ of this government, it would need to change strategy, gather its forces, and seek allies so as to be able to claim, in the event of an offensive from reactionary forces, that it was not just the Communists who were under attack, but the whole people. Such allies would also be of use if the situation allowed the Communists to go onto the offensive. To attract them, the PCF needed a broad platform including industrial reconstruction, jobs for the unemployed, the defence of democracy, and punishment for the Vichyites who had acted to suppress it.

Stalin returned again and again to the need for the PCF to be both strong in itself and, crucially, to be surrounded by allies, to thwart its enemies’ attempts to isolate it. He was equally cautious on foreign policy issues, and advised against the French Communists’ adopting the dismemberment of Germany as a slogan, at least unless public opinion and the French intelligentsia clearly favoured it. Outwardly at least, Stalin justified his caution in relation to domestic politics: advocating such a policy without a broad supportive consensus could place the PCF ‘in the same camp as the worst reactionaries’, and in danger of condemnation by association. Hence the need to take careful soundings before moving in this direction. It might be added in passing that the Soviets themselves, while wanting the Oder-Neisse line, had no wish for a divided Germany, and gave rather little support to the GPRF’s positions on this point.

The relationship between the two men was clearly indicated by the close of their conversation. Asked if he had any further questions, Thorez replied in the negative but assured Stalin that he ‘would always need his advice’. Returning to Paris, Thorez immediately called on the French to unite their forces for victory and to ‘struggle for a free, democratic and independent France’. By the end of January 1945, he had become the clear and effective advocate of the disbanding of the militias in accordance with the GPRF decree, and of the subordination of the CDLs to the GPRF.[355]

Thorez had received a brief mention during de Gaulle’s visit to Moscow, when Stalin recommended him to the General as ‘a good Frenchman’, adding ‘In your place, I would not put him in prison… at least, not right away!’[356]But Thorez’s return to Paris on 27 November, and the orders Stalin had given him, proved in many ways more significant than the Franco-Soviet alliance. Stalin had ensured that the PCF would be led by his own hand-picked chief; and for the moment at least, France’s Communists would work within the ‘bourgeois’ political system. The importance of this was not lost on de Gaulle, On Thorez’s death in 1964, he wrote to the Communist leader’s son that ‘whatever he may have done before and after, Maurice Thorez answered my call and, as a member of my government, contributed to the maintenance of national unity’.[357]

Throughout the existence of the GPRF, France’s Communists did their utmost to implement Stalin’s directives of November 1944. They remained within government in order, as they said, to ‘bring the war to a victorious conclusion’ and to ensure ‘the co-operation of all the patriotic forces towards France’s democratic renaissance’. On one level, they were extremely successful. The PCI established itself as France’s premier political party, heading the poll at two out of the three national elections (of October 1945 and June and November 1946) with over a quarter of the vote – ahead of their Socialist rivals and over 10 points above their own best pre-war result of March 1936. Progress at the ballot-box was paralleled by an explosion in membership. Out of a pre-war total of some 300,000, the PCF had counted barely 5,000 members in the winter of 1939-40. Their numbers had risen to 60,000 by August 1944, to over 200,000 the following month, and to nearly 544,000 by April 1945; they would exceed 785,000 by the year’s end.[358]This was, to a degree, part of a wider international movement. The prestige of the USSR, as the country which had made the greatest sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany, was at its peak.[359]Communist ideas had won widespread popularity, not least because state control and egalitarianism were readily associated with the wartime mobilisation which had secured victory. In nine countries of Western Europe, including Italy, Belgium, Finland and France, as well as in four Latin American countries, Communists were in government. And in central, eastern, and south– eastern Europe the Communists had won power on the heels of the Red Army. Within France, meanwhile, the influence of the Resistance and of the democratic and antifascist forces linked to it were at their height; the PCF, as one of the principal forces of the Resistance, could not but reap the benefits. Its leading role within the main trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), itself experiencing a membership boom (with close to four million members), also helped the party put down deep roots in French society.

But France’s Communists were less successful in implementing the central thrust of Stalin’s directives – the construction, under their leadership, of a broad-based left-wing alliance. Parallel to the string of electoral victories ran a series of battles over the new constitution and over the formation of governments; in these, the PCF often faced a stark choice between the isolation that Stalin had warned against and substantial concessions to its ‘weaker’ partners of the SFIO and the third major governing party of the Liberation era, the Christian Democrat Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP).

The alliance strategy won an initial success at the municipal elections of April-May 1945. Here the PCF ran broad-based lists labelled ‘republican, democratic, and anti-fascist union’. After the first round of voting it called for ‘a bloc of all the republican, democratic and secular forces’ for the second ballot.[360]The pre-election Communist-Socialist alliance secured victories in over 5,500 municipalities, over three times more than the prewar total (cf. Chapter 5); Communist mayors headed 1,462 municipalities, including, for the first time, big towns such as Toulon, Nantes, Limoges and Reims.[361]Pravda took note with satisfaction, underlining that the victorious ‘anti-fascist’ lists consisted of candidates proposed jointly by the PCF and the SFIO, as well as Resistance organisations and, in some areas, the Radical Party.[362]

At the same time, the PCF leadership heeded Stalin’s counsels of moderation and his instruction to build a left-wing bloc. The party’s watchwords were national economic reconstruction, the punishment of traitors, real guarantees of democratic rights and freedoms, and the drafting of a new constitution – all of which would require a broad union of national forces around the programme of the CNR. Speaking at the PCF’s first postwar congress (the Tenth Congress, held in Paris from 26–30 June 1945), Thorez declared that ‘the renaissance of France is not the business of a single party or of a few statesmen, but a problem to be solved by millions of French men and women, by the whole nation’.[363]Three weeks later he offered proof of his party’s commitment to workplace discipline when he told France’s miners that their first ‘duty as a class’ was to ‘produce, produce, and again produce’; the CGT did not hesitate to break strikes where they occurred.[364]

In party terms, the leadership counted primarily on the Socialists to avoid the isolation that Stalin had warned against. At the Tenth Congress, Thorez underlined ‘the urgent need to create a strong French Labour party which would bring together Socialists and Communists and constitute the basis of a union between all republicans and all true Frenchmen’.[365]Shortly afterwards, a PCF delegation made merger proposals to the SFIO leadership. But the Socialists were in no hurry. Many feared that their party would be weakened or (as in some East European countries) simply swallowed up by the Communists in a united structure. Léon Blum, the former prime minister, whom Stalin had called a ‘charlatan’ even in 1936, during the Popular Front era, and who now returned the compliment by referring to the PCF as a ‘foreign nationalist party’, reinforced these concerns after returning from deportation in Germany at the end of hostilities.[366]His growing influence within the SFIO leadership helped tip the balance at the SFIO’s Congress of August 1945: favourable to ‘unity of action’ with the PCF, the Socialists voted against a merger. Such a union might not have produced comparable results to those obtained in Eastern Europe. But the decision was a setback for the PCF’s strategy as set out by Stalin; and from that summer, relations between the two parties began to deteriorate.

The same balance of electoral success with political setbacks was discernible at the referendum and elections of 21 October 1945, the first vote at national level since the war. With 26.2 per cent of the vote (against the MRP’s 24.9 and the SFIO’s 23.8), and the largest parliamentary group, the PCF was France’s leading party. Pravda again noted the result with satisfaction, explaining that ‘the French people know very well the role played by the Communist party in the Resistance organisations, in the struggle against the Hitlerite occupation, and in the restoration of democratic principles’.[367]

The double referendum held concurrently with the elections, by contrast, produced a less welcome result for the PCF. The referendum (itself a break with tradition, since no referendum had been held in France since the fall of the Second Empire in 1870) concerned the powers of the new legislature, and specifically its right to draft a new constitution and the limitations, if any, to be placed on its mandate. Only the Radicals opposed any attribution of constituent powers: they preferred a straight return to the Third Republic, under which they had held a pivotal position. The PCF and the CGT took the opposite position, seeking open-ended and constituent powers for the new assembly. De Gaulle, however, proposed, in the name of the GPRF, that those powers be limited. The new assembly would have normal powers of a parliament; it would draft a new constitution; but its mandate would last just seven months and its constitutional draft would be submitted to a new referendum.[368]‘De Gaulle has openly thrown his gauntlet into the balance’, noted Pravda, apparently quoting from the French press.[369]Supported by the SFIO, the MRP, and other ‘bourgeois’ groups from the Resistance, this project was opposed, unsuccessfully, by the Communists and the Radicals, as well as the CGT. At the referendum, 95 per cent of the voters backed constituent powers for the new assembly, revealing the Radicals’ extreme weakness; but two-thirds also approved de Gaulle’s proposal to limit its powers, showing – in line with Stalin’s warnings – the relative weakness of the PCF when isolated.

A sense of isolation was aggravated by the behaviour of the SFIO during the campaign. Pravda noted gloomily that ‘The Socialist Party’s campaign was almost entirely directed against the PCF. The Socialist Party rejected… the hand held out to it, and preferred an unnatural alliance with the MRP. The outcome was more than unfavourable for the Socialists.’[370]Three days later, the main culprit was identified by name: ‘Léon Blum has repeatedly spoken in favour of working-class unity and co-operation with the Communists, but every act of the election campaign was directed against the PCF. At the same time, the organisations within the Socialist Party that really pursued working-class unity and co-operation with the Communists were punished by the Socialist leadership.’[371]

A further occasion for frustration with the SFIO came with the formation of a new government. The 1945 elections had given the PCF and the SFIO together an absolute majority in the Constituent Assembly. Following parliamentary tradition, under which the majority parties form a government headed by a leader of the strongest party, the PCF’s Bureau politique proposed a PCF-SFIO coalition government with Thorez as Prime Minister, or even – as a fall-back position – with a Socialist at its head. The Socialist leadership refused on both counts, insisting that they would only take part in a tripartite (PCF – SFIO – MRP) government headed by de Gaulle.

Mindful of the Kremlin’s advice not to fight the Socialists openly, the PCF withdrew its proposal; the Constituent Assembly duly (and unanimously) invited de Gaulle to form a government. The General proposed to include representatives of the three biggest parties, but refused to appoint PCF ministers to the three most sensitive posts – Foreign Affairs, Defence, and the Interior – provoking a serious conflict. In the ensuing com– promise, the Communists made major concessions, settling for the ministries of Arms Production, Labour, National Economy and Industrial Production, and sat in government alongside the SFIO and the MRP as well as de Gaulle’s nonparty supporters. Thorez had no portfolio but the rank of Ministre d’État, second in the government’s order of protocol. This tripartite coalition would be the model for almost all French governments until May 1947.

Within weeks, however, a new conflict had erupted – between the Left and de Gaulle in the first instance, but then between the PCF and its partners. The Socialist – Communist majority demanded cuts in military spending; de Gaulle, resenting any interference by the Assembly in the government’s dayto-day business, resigned on 20 January, condemning himself to a twelve-year crossing of the desert, and the regime to a new crisis. Again the PCF proposed Thorez as Prime Minister at the head of a Socialist-Communist government, Pravda observing that if the Socialists stood by their pact with the PCF, the conflict would be quickly resolved.[372]Again the Socialists refused the Thorez candidacy, which was also rejected categorically by the MRP. And again the Communists conceded, agreeing to participate in a tripartite government under the Socialist Félix Gouin.

In principle, Socialist – Communist unity fared better when it came to drafting the new constitution. Their agreed project proposed a parliamentary system with wide-ranging powers for a unicameral National Assembly, largely formal functions for the president, and guarantees of political and social rights as well as a secular state. Approved by the Socialist-Communist majority over the MRP’s opposition, the draft was put to referendum on 5 May 1946. Opposed in the country by the MRP as well as the Radicals and conservative groupings, it went down to defeat by 53 per cent of the voters to 47. This was a set-back for the PCF, which had also still failed to create the united left-wing bloc Stalin desired. For the Communist press in Moscow and Paris, the blame, again, lay with the Socialists. Pravda reported that the PCF had ‘carried practically the whole burden of the campaign’, with Socialist support for the new constitution remaining ‘soft’; it noted that the PCF daily L’Humanité had attributed the result to ‘the Socialists’ refusal to accept Communist proposals for union and unity of action between the two parties.’[373]

[337] United Kingdom, National Archives, Kew (NA): CAB 120/524/T.2153/4; CAB 120/524/T.2233/4; CAB65/48, pp. 60-1; CAB 120/524/T.2258/4; CAB 120/524/T.2287/4.

[338] RSASPH, 45/1/391, p. 76.

[339] de Gaulle, War Memoirs, Vol. III, pp. 71-2.

[340] RSASPH, 45/1/391, P. 78.

[341] de Gaulle, War Memoirs, Vol. III, p. 81.

[342] ‘I do not understand why it was that you wished to put this triple pact into my telegram’, Churchill wrote, somewhat disingenuously, to Eden on 11 December, a week after the Cabinet had agreed to do precisely that. UK National Archives, CAB 120/524/T.2342/4.

[343] Pravda, 11 December 1944.

[344] Pravda, 15 December 1944.

[345] Young, France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, p. 32.

[346] Le Monde, 19 December 1944.

[347] The essential French account of the PCF in this period is P. Buton, Les Lendemains qui déchantent. Le Parti communiste français à la Libération (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993). Cf. also S. Courtois and M. Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), pp. 204-15.

[348] Quoted in Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, p. 213.

[349] P. Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du Parti communiste, Vol. II, 1945–1972 (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 77.

[350] RSASPH, 82/2/1353, pp. 52-3.

[351] RSASPH, 82/2/1353, p. 54. Original italics.

[352] RSASPH, 82/2/1353, p. 58.

[353] The record of this conversation, from which the ensuing quotations are taken, is in RSASPH, 45/1/390, pp. 85–93. A French translation may be found in Communisme 45-6 (1996).

[354] Some arms were hidden, though there is no evidence that this was done systematically. Cf. A. Harris and A. de Sédouy, Qui n’est pas de droite? (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978), Pp. 212-3.

[355] Buton, Les Lendemains, p. 188.

[356] De Gaulle, War Memoirs, Vol. III, p. 67.

[357] Quoted in A. Grosser, Politique extérieure (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), p. 26.

[358] Cf. Buton, Les Lendemains, pp. 269-70.

[359] In September 1944, 61 per cent of respondents to an IFOP poll conducted in Paris considered that the USSR was making the greatest contribution to Germany’s defeat (quoted in Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste, p. 226).

[360] L’Humanité, 4 May 1945.

[361] P. Martin, Les élections municipales en France depuis 1945 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2001), pp. 20-1.

[362] Pravda, 16 May 1945.

[363] M. Thorez, Articles et discours choisis (Moscow: Politicheskaya Literatura, 1966), p. 254.

[364] Thorez in a speech to mineworkers on 21 July 1945, quoted in Buton, Le Lendemains, p. 196.

[365] M. Thorez, (Euvres, Vol. xxi (Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1963), pp. 126-7; Pravila, 1 June 1945.

[366] Documents on the Foreign Policy of the USSR, Vol. xx, Moscow, 1973, p. 613; Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du PCF, p. 229.

[367] Pravda, 28 October 1945.

[368] Cf. Chapter 2.

[369] Pravda, 19 October 1945.

[370] Pravda, 25 October 1945.

[371] Pravda, 28 October 1945.

[372] Pravda, 22 January 1946.

[373] Pravda, 8 May 1946.