The liberation of France: a missed opportunity

The resistance and liberation of France during the Second World War are among the most remarkable episodes of the French class struggle. The mass mobilisation of the working class opened up the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, which terrified the ruling class.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 49 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

However, the leaders of the working class, starting with those of the French Communist Party (PCF), betrayed this movement. They did everything they could to restore French capitalism and keep the people of the colonies under the yoke of French imperialism.

The Communist Party and the war

At the beginning of the Second World War, the policy of the PCF underwent abrupt changes, under the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. Until the summer of 1939, Moscow sought to conclude a military alliance with the French bourgeoisie, which the PCF presented as a ‘friend of peace’ and ‘democracy’.

However, in reality, the Second World War – like the First – was not fought ‘for democracy’. Rather, it pitted the ‘old’ French and British imperialist powers against their ‘young’ rival, German imperialism, of which Nazism was only the ‘distilled essence’, as Trotsky explained. Far from any ‘democratic’ concern, France and Britain fought the war to maintain the subjugation of hundreds of millions of people in their colonies around the world. Moreover, as early as 26 August 1939, even before the war broke out, the ‘democratic’ French government banned the Communist and Trotskyist press, before banning the PCF itself at the end of September.

During the summer of 1939, faithful to the line dictated by Moscow, Maurice Thorez, the main leader of the PCF, went so far as to demonstratively enlist in the French army. Unfortunately for him, Stalin decided to sign a military pact with Hitler in August 1939. Thorez deserted in a hurry and went abroad, while the PCF denounced the war that had just broken out, which it had hitherto approved without reservation.

In May-June 1940, the Nazi armies swept away the French troops and occupied Paris. On 10 July, the National Assembly, which had taken refuge in the spa town of Vichy in central France, gave full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain immediately established a Bonapartist military dictatorship – the ‘Vichy regime’ – and proclaimed a policy of ‘collaboration’ with Germany.

Although some Communist militants joined the resistance against the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupation from the summer of 1940, the official policy of the PCF remained very confused. Some of its leaders even tried (in vain) to negotiate with the Nazis for the right to legally republish their newspaper, L'Humanité, in the name of the alliance sealed by the Nazi-Soviet pact.

The invasion of the USSR by the German army in June 1941 caused a new 180-degree turn: the various Communist Parties around the world received orders from Moscow to help the Allied war effort at all costs.

In France, the PCF led a policy of alliance with the bourgeois wing of the resistance. In May 1943 it joined the ‘National Council of the Resistance’, absorbing itself into a coalition with all the main bourgeois parties and resistance movements. Then in June 1943 it joined the government-in-exile led by General Charles De Gaulle, whom the USSR had already recognised as the only ‘legitimate’ leader of France in December 1941. This was in-effect a continuation of the class-collaborationist ‘Popular Front’ policy carried out by the PCF since 1936.

The PCF adopted an essentially nationalist outlook, and its propaganda took on an anti-German rather than an anti-fascist tone. Instead of emphasising a class policy – particularly with regard to the German working class, which was also suffering under the Nazi jackboot – L'Humanité and other underground newspapers linked to the PCF put forward the slogan, “To each his own boche [a derogatory term for Germans]!”^[1] Resistance fighters under Communist control did not fight under communist insignia, but under the French tricolour flag, without a red star or hammer and sickle.

The accumulation of defeats for the Third Reich gradually pushed many bourgeois leaders, and even some Pétain supporters, to join the resistance. This was the case, for example, of General Alphonse Juin. When American troops occupied Algeria – a French colony – in November 1942, Juin switched from Pétainism to Gaullism in the space of a few days. But in the name of ‘national unity’, the PCF turned a blind eye to this Gaullist ‘whitewash’.

For their part, the Communist resistance groups braved all risks. Hunted by the Vichy police and the Germans, they did not hesitate to organise the distribution of leaflets, strikes and even public demonstrations, right under the noses of the occupying authorities. They also stepped up attacks on German soldiers. Thousands of militants paid for this devotion with their lives.

The PCF also benefited from the aura of the victories won by the Red Army in the USSR following the Battle of Stalingrad. In the eyes of the French population, the Communists became a kind of incarnation of the resistance to the Nazi occupation. The PCF was therefore in a position of strength as the country was being liberated from the Nazis and their collaborators. However, its leadership did everything it could to restore the power of the French bourgeoisie, instead of overthrowing it.

The uprising of summer 1944

From 1944 onwards, the resistance became a major force. Tens of thousands of people joined the ‘Maquis’ (the name used collectively for all resistance groups outside of the cities) or urban guerrilla groups, and harassed the German troops and the Vichy Militia.

While De Gaulle tried to contain the action of the Gaullist resistance as much as possible, confining it to a role of auxiliary to the regular forces of the Allies, the PCF threw itself wholeheartedly into clandestine action and guerrilla warfare.

Nazi repression intensified during 1944, particularly after the Allied landings in Normandy (6 June 1944) and Provence (15 August 1944). Throughout the summer of 1944, as the insurrection and the actions of the Maquis intensified, the atrocities committed by the Germans and the Vichy government multiplied. On 9 June, more than a hundred civilians were hanged by the SS of the Das Reich Division in Tulle (Limousin). The following day, another unit of the same Das Reich Division set fire to the village of Oradour-sur-Glane after massacring its 640 inhabitants.

But the fascists also suffered setbacks. In July 1944, a communist Maquis in Limousin, led by former schoolteacher Georges Guingouin, even successfully resisted an offensive by the German army and Vichy militiamen during the battle of Mont Gargan.

After two months of fierce fighting in Normandy, the Allies finally managed to break through the front and advanced towards Paris. At the same time, the units that had landed in Provence travelled north up the Rhône valley in pursuit of the retreating Nazi troops. But everywhere else, particularly in the Massif Central and in the southwest, liberation was brought about by the Maquis who took over the cities. In many regions, power was in the hands of the insurgent population, which then established ‘Liberation Committees’ to administer the newly-liberated areas.

At the end of August 1944, the people of Paris rose up in turn. This uprising, largely at the initiative of the Communist resistance, terrified the Allied leaders: they feared that the PCF would take advantage of the situation to seize power. De Gaulle urgently dispatched French troops, some of them Spanish Republican exiles, who went on to liberate the city ‘jointly’ with its insurgent population.

But the PCF leaders had no intention of taking power. Besides, they had already received strict instructions from Moscow: the authority of the bourgeois state had to be restored at all costs. Stalin hoped to maintain the good relations forged with the Western imperialist powers during the war. The Soviet bureaucracy also feared the example that a victorious proletarian revolution in a Western European country, resulting in a healthy, bureaucracy-free workers' state, would have on the Soviet people.

The return to ‘order’

In the regions liberated by the resistance, De Gaulle urgently dispatched prefects (government officials), who took over from the Liberation Committees, without the latter putting up any resistance. This transfer of power took place with the support and approval of the PCF, the CGT (the largest trade union confederation in the country) and all the major organisations of the labour movement.

Churchill and De Gaulle, 11 November 1944 / Image: public domain

One of the problems that then arose for the bourgeoisie was the disarmament of the ‘Patriotic Militias’. Strengthened by an influx of volunteers, these militias took part in the first battles against the Germans during the summer of 1944, and sometimes suffered heavy losses. They embodied an authority parallel to that of the bourgeois state that the Gaullist resistance was in the process of restoring.

At the end of autumn, the PCF ordered the disarmament of the Patriotic Militias and the integration of some of their personnel into the regular army, where they sometimes found themselves under the orders of ex-Pétainist officers, such as General Juin.

This integration was all the easier for former resistance fighters to accept as the war was still not over. At that time, the Germans still occupied Alsace (Colmar was not liberated until February 1945), as well as many ports on the Atlantic or English Channel coasts (such as Dunkirk, Saint-Malo and La Rochelle).

The continuation of the war was therefore used to rally all classes around the bourgeois state, with the active assistance of the workers’ leaders. Many resistance fighters and ‘Maquisards’ were therefore happy to join the regular army to continue the fight against the Germans. Many of them were killed in the fighting during the last year of the war.

While the forces of the ‘internal resistance’ were disarmed, the bourgeoisie protected the state apparatus. The ‘savage’ purge of Nazi collaborators, carried out spontaneously by the Maquisards during the summer of 1944, was replaced by a ‘legal’ purge, which was particularly lenient. For example, while the prefects played a key role in the repression of the resistance and the deportation of Jews, only one of them was ever punished: Maurice Papon, who was tried and convicted in... 1998!

Similarly, the legal purge only affected a handful of bosses: those too openly involved in collaboration. This was the case of Louis Renault, who spontaneously put his company at the service of the Wehrmacht. He was arrested and died in prison in October 1944, while his factories were nationalised. But his case is the exception to the rule.

The vast majority of ‘collaborator’ bosses were able to continue to enjoy their fortunes. In 1941, the boss of the L'Oréal group, Eugène Schueller, was one of the two founders of a pro-Nazi party, the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire, which denounced Bolshevism and the “pollution of the race” by Jews. However, Schueller escaped any punishment after liberation. His granddaughter, Françoise Bettencourt, is today the richest woman in the world.

A government of ‘national unity’

After the liberation of Paris, a new ‘national unity’ government was established on 9 September 1944. The character of this government was unambiguously bourgeois from the outset. To reassure the ruling class, all the key posts (Economy, Interior, Defence, etc.) remained in the hands of bourgeois ministers or one of the few Socialist ministers – all from the most right-wing section of the Socialist Party (SFIO).

Although they had played a leading role in the resistance, the Communists participated loyally in the government, with two ministers out of 21. In reality, Communist participation in the government did not bring the working class even an inch closer to power, but rather provided a left cover for the stabilisation of capitalist rule.

In the October 1945 elections, De Gaulle and his programme for a presidential republic with Vichy overtones were roundly rejected by the voters. He had to step down. The government was then shared between three parties: the PCF, which came out ahead in all the national polls; the Socialists; and a new bourgeois party, the Popular Republican Movement (MRP).

It should be noted that, like so many others, the MRP adopted a superficially ‘socialist’ discourse. This is not very surprising. After 15 years of global economic crisis, imperialist war and fascism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie were deeply discredited.

On the other hand, the labour movement was extremely powerful. The PCF had more than 800,000 members; it controlled the CGT, which had more than 5 million union members. But instead of denouncing the hypocrisy of the bourgeois politicians of the MRP, who proclaimed themselves ‘socialists’ for electoral purposes, the PCF participated in a government with them in order to save the bourgeois regime.

Insofar as the balance of power prevented it from crushing the working class, the ruling class aimed to disarm it, disorientate it, and, finally, exhaust it by relying on the complicity of the leaders of the labour movement. It is this process that Ted Grant, based on Trotsky's analyses of Weimar Germany, described at the time as ‘counter-revolution in a democratic form’.

Social Security

To maintain its power, the ruling class was also forced to ‘ease off’ and concede a series of social reforms. The best known of these is ‘Social Security’.

This was not a new project. As early as the pre-war period, bourgeois ‘technocrats’ who had graduated from the grandes écoles and were close to banking circles and major industrialists were considering nationalising social insurance. This was in order to put an end to the mess caused by competition between the many private firms and the mutual insurance companies. Their objective was to ‘rationalise’ French capitalism to make it more competitive on the world market. They intended to achieve this by supporting finance and large private industries with nationalised social services, planned according to the interests of the ruling class.

The social security system set up after liberation was based on these projects. It obviously represented real progress for many workers, who were thus relatively protected against poverty in the event of disability or illness. But it was also of definite interest to the bourgeoisie.

The financing of this new system had to be provided on an equal basis by employees and employers. But in reality, all of the bosses' profits come from the unpaid labour of the working class. This ‘joint’ system therefore meant that employees are ‘taxed’ twice: the first time through the share of the wealth directly appropriated by the boss, the second time through tax and social security contributions.

The social security system also made employees and the self-employed bear the financial burden of medical care, rather than the capitalists. At the same time, the working class was to bear the brunt of the efforts to get the French economy back on its feet, for the greater benefit of the ruling class.

The ‘battle of production’

Before 1939, French industry was lagging far behind the United States and Germany. Allied bombing raids, followed by sabotage by retreating German troops, devastated French industry and the rail network. In 1945, French GDP was only 40 percent of its pre-war level. Many bosses and politicians then called for state intervention to absorb the losses and rationalise production.

The coal mines, several credit companies, the gas and electricity companies, the four largest banks and several other companies came under state control. However, the economy remained predominantly under private ownership. A planning commission was set up, but this ‘planning’ was only indicative: it merely encouraged private companies to invest in sectors designated by the state, luring them in with financial aid and tax breaks.

Only ‘strategic’ sectors were nationalised, so that the burden of their recovery could be borne by the entire population. These ‘rationalised’ companies and infrastructures could then be used to help French capitalism become more competitive on the world market. The vast majority of these companies were then eventually returned to the private sector, often for a pittance. For example, the banks were privatised as early as the 1960s.

All nationalisations took place without the participation of the employees, and sometimes without even changing the managers. However, a few experiments in workers’ management appeared spontaneously. In Marseille, 15 companies were ‘requisitioned’ by the local CGT after the arrest or escape of their ‘collaborator’ bosses. But this initiative remained isolated; it was even condemned by the national leadership of the PCF, which accused the Marseille militants of “wanting to create soviets”^[2].

In 1947, the National Assembly voted unanimously – including the Communist deputies – for a law that returned the requisitioned companies to their former owners and compensated them.

Demonstration outside the PCF offices in Paris, 20 February 1946 / Image: public domain

The leaders of the PCF supported with all their might this restoration of French capitalism, which they described as the ‘battle of production’. This, they said, was all in the ‘national interest’, but was of course carried out on the back of the working class for the benefit of the capitalists. Between 1945 and 1948, labour productivity doubled while average purchasing power fell by a third. Inflation reached almost 60 percent in 1946 and 1947. Hunger was still rife, and ‘ration tickets’ remained in force until 1949.

This suffering did not prevent the PCF from advising workers to “produce first, complain later”^[3]. In July 1945, Maurice Thorez gave a speech to miners from the North who were working in extremely dangerous pits, following sabotage by the Germans. Thorez proclaimed:

“Producing is today the highest form of class duty, of French duty. Yesterday, our weapon was sabotage, armed action against the enemy; today, the weapon is production to thwart the plans of reaction.”

The French colonial empire

During the Brazzaville Conference in 1944, De Gaulle had raised high hopes by speaking of a future ‘indigenous participation’ in the management of the colonies. Tens of thousands of ‘natives’ fought in the ranks of the Free French Forces (FFL). They represented nearly 60 percent of ‘Free French’ combat forces in 1944, and around half of the combat deaths. But their hopes were quickly dashed.

After the Normandy and Provence landings, the French general staff organised the ‘laundering’ of its troops. The colonial soldiers were disarmed and then sent back to the colonies, where the colonial administration was waiting for them. In Thiaroye, Senegal, indigenous soldiers demanded their unpaid back pay: they were massacred by the dozen.

On 8 May 1945, Algerian nationalists organised a demonstration in Sétif to celebrate the Nazi surrender and demand equal political rights. They were fiercely repressed. An uprising broke out; it was crushed in blood. The French army and settler militias massacred between 10,000 and 40,000 Algerians. The PCF approved the repression of what it called a “fascist plot” led by “Hitlerian provocateurs”. L'Humanité of 12 May 1945 even called for “the ruthless and swift punishment of the organisers of the revolt and the henchmen who led the riot”.

Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of Vietnam from ‘French Indochina’ on 21 September 1945. A year later, in November 1946, the French army bombed the port of Haiphong, triggering the Indochina War. In Madagascar, an independence uprising broke out in March 1947. It failed, and its suppression resulted in between 11,000 and 100,000 deaths. In these last two cases, the PCF protested more or less weakly; but it nevertheless remained in the government, sacrificing colonised peoples on the altar of ‘reconstruction’ - that is, the reconstruction of French imperialism.

The strikes of 1947

In the Ministry of Labour, the Communists certainly pushed forward the Labour Code and Social Security. But they also pushed for excessive work, and tried to contain the class struggle when it resurfaced after three years of the ‘battle of production’.

Senegalese troops in the French Army, 1940 / Image: public domain

In April 1947, a strike broke out at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt – nationalised in 1945 – to protest against the government's reduction of bread rations. The PCF condemned this strike, and those that broke out in its wake, as ‘irresponsible’ manoeuvres, as they risked harming the productivity of nationalised companies. But the party's authority over the working class was no longer as strong as it had been in 1945. The secretary of the CGT Metallurgy, Eugène Hénaff, was even booed by the Renault strikers at a meeting.

Strikes were increasing and the Communist leaders were unable to stop them. In some cities, they became explosive: in Nevers and Lyon, the prefect’s office was invaded by demonstrators.

For the bourgeoisie, the PCF's participation in the government was therefore no longer as advantageous as it had been. This was particularly the case since the Cold War had clearly begun. In May 1947, the PCF was brutally ousted from the government by its former allies in the SFIO and the MRP.

The PCF then gradually rallied to the strike movement that it had initially condemned, but this turnaround came too late: the movement had run out of steam and began to ebb away from December 1947 onwards. To finish it off, the bourgeoisie resorted to a mixture of repression and concessions, notably a general bonus of 1,500 francs and an increase in family allowances.

This defeat left its mark. The zigzags of the PCF leadership helped the bourgeoisie to divide the trade union movement. At the end of 1947, the right wing of the CGT, supported by some sectarians, split and created a ‘CGT-Force Ouvrière’ which was financed by American imperialism, but remained very much in the minority.

In 1948, a new strike movement broke out among the miners of the North. While the PCF supported it and played a key role in its organisation, the party leadership made no attempt to extend it to other sectors. The Stalinist leaders hoped to use the strike as leverage, to negotiate with the authorities and perhaps even return to government.

The miners' strike, however, was brutally repressed by the government, which sent in the CRS riot police and the army. Several strikers were killed. The movement finally ebbed away in November 1948.

Missed opportunity

The struggle for liberation and post-war years were a missed opportunity to overthrow French capitalism. The workers were massively organised and deeply hostile to the bourgeois order, while the ruling class was discredited by collaboration and Vichy.

Picket line at the Yèvre and Saint-Dominique coal pits in La Ricamarie, 20 October 1948, set up to block the CRS / Image: public domain

If the PCF had been a genuine Marxist and revolutionary party, it could have drawn on the revolutionary enthusiasm and mobilisation of the working class and peasant masses to launch a revolutionary offensive against capitalism. For example, it would have been possible to rely on the spontaneous requisitioning of companies – such as those in Marseille – to conduct a determined campaign of nationalisation of the major levers of industry and infrastructure, under the control of the working class.

Similarly, if the Liberation Committees and the Patriotic Militias had been maintained and organised on a national scale, they could have formed the architecture of a workers' state. This could have overthrown the bourgeois state, which was discredited by collaboration, and carried out a genuine purge of all the criminals who collaborated with Nazism and Pétain. On a global scale, the mood of the working class was such that the American and British imperialists would not have been able to launch their troops into a military intervention against a socialist revolution in France.

In general, if the labour movement – and first and foremost the PCF – had thrown all its authority into a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, the ruling class would not have been able to do anything to save it. Instead, the Stalinist leaders actively rescued French capitalism. The PCF paid a heavy price for this policy of class collaboration. Between 1946 and 1951, it went from over 800,000 members to only 220,000. It also lost nearly a million voters.

Today, all who want to bring down this system must learn the lessons of this betrayal, in order to fight for a revolutionary leadership for the working class, capable of facing the momentous struggles that lie ahead, and to finally lead the working class to victory.

References

^[1] France D’abord, October 1942 (https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/de/node/922941), our translation

^[2] https://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/12936_0

^[3] https://www.cinearchives.org/articles-et-publications-le-pcf-a-la-liberation-une-force-inedite-pour-une-situation-exceptionnelle-1307-1066-0-0.html