De Gaulle's government of national unity

On 9 September 1944 in Paris General Charles de Gaulle announced the new composition of the Provisional Government of the French Republic. The cabinet, known at the time as the government of “national unanimity” (unanimité nationale) and in the literature most often as the government of national unity, brought together men of Free France from London and Algiers with leaders of the Resistance inside the country and with representatives of every significant political current – from the moderate right to the communists. For the first time since June 1940 France had a government in its capital that could claim to represent the whole country, not merely the émigrés or one faction of the underground.

Many chronologies state that on this day de Gaulle “formed the Provisional Government of the French Republic in France”. This needs qualifying. The Provisional Government had formally existed since 3 June 1944, when the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers adopted that name, and at the end of August it moved to Paris. On 9 September, therefore, de Gaulle did not create a new body; he thoroughly reshaped and broadened the existing government, bringing into it people from occupied France.

From commissioners to ministers

The Algiers committee, and after it the Provisional Government, was made up of “commissioners” rather than ministers – a relic of the time when de Gaulle could not yet claim to govern a state. The liberation of Paris on 25 August changed the situation. According to French official documents, as early as 26 August the members of the government who were in Algiers placed their posts at the general’s disposal so that he could freely reshape the cabinet. On 2 September the first meeting of the Council of Ministers to be held in the capital took place in Paris.

On 4 September an ordinance with the force of law (ordonnance) laid down that the Provisional Government “consists of ministers”. On the same day decrees created new ministries of the national economy, industrial production, food supply and agriculture, and the first five ministers were appointed. De Gaulle announced the full composition of the cabinet on 9 September, and it was formally confirmed by two decrees dated 10 September and published in the official gazette on 12 September. The first established that the government consisted of a ministry of state and twenty ministries; the second appointed the new ministers and those who had changed portfolios. This is why some French accounts date the formation of the cabinet to 4 and 10 September; 9 September is the day the new line-up was announced, and the date adopted by most general histories.

Who joined the government

De Gaulle remained head of the government and also kept overall control of military affairs. The sole Minister of State was the eighty-year-old Jules Jeanneney, the last President of the Senate of the Third Republic. His presence was meant to underline the thesis on which de Gaulle built his authority: the Republic had never ceased to exist, and the regime of Philippe Pétain had been merely an unlawful interruption.

The most important change was the appointment of Georges Bidault as Foreign Minister. A Christian Democrat journalist and, since the autumn of 1943, chairman of the National Council of the Resistance, he replaced René Massigli, a career diplomat from Algiers who soon took up the embassy in London. The leadership of the Council passed a few days later to the CGT trade unionist Louis Saillant. Other men of the underground also came in from inside the country: the Christian Democrat Pierre-Henri Teitgen took over the Ministry of Information, and Alexandre Parodi – in August the government’s delegate-general in the occupied country, who had negotiated in Paris during the uprising – became Minister of Labour and Social Security. The socialist and trade union activist Robert Lacoste became Minister of Industrial Production, and Aimé Lepercq, an industrialist and Resistance activist, Minister of Finance. Henri Frenay, founder of the Combat movement and a commissioner in Algiers since the autumn of 1943, remained in charge of prisoners, deportees and refugees, now as a minister.

Two communists entered the cabinet. Charles Tillon, commander-in-chief of the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), the largest armed Resistance organisation, became Minister of Air. François Billoux, who had been in the government since April 1944, took public health. Tillon replaced another communist, Fernand Grenier, with whom de Gaulle had fallen out – according to French biographers – over the lack of air support for the maquis of the Vercors plateau in the summer of 1944. The communists thus received ministries that were visible but not key ones: neither the interior, nor war, nor finance.

Those most important portfolios remained in the hands of men loyal to the general. The Ministry of the Interior went to the socialist Adrien Tixier, Free France’s representative in Washington in 1941–1943 and then Commissioner for Labour in Algiers. He replaced Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, founder of the Libération-Sud movement, who after a dispute with de Gaulle turned down the offer of the embassy in Washington and left the government. André Diethelm kept the War Ministry, Louis Jacquinot the Navy, René Pleven the Colonies and the Christian Democrat François de Menthon Justice. The radical Pierre Mendès France took charge of the national economy, Paul Giacobbi of food supply and the socialist François Tanguy-Prigent of agriculture. General Georges Catroux became Minister for North Africa. Leaving the government, by contrast, was the radical Henri Queuille, who had deputised for de Gaulle during his absences from Algiers and now retired to his native Corrèze.

In all, the cabinet comprised a Minister of State and twenty ministers. It included Christian Democrats from the circle of the future Popular Republican Movement (MRP), socialists, radicals, communists, Resistance figures with no party affiliation and non-party experts. The only ones missing were those who had tied themselves to Vichy.

Two centres of power

The broad make-up of the government was an answer to the problem de Gaulle had faced from the first day after the liberation of Paris. In practice, in the summer of 1944 there were two centres of power in France. One was the government from Algiers, with its Commissioners of the Republic, prefects and army, regarded as the legitimate authority by most of the French, though not yet formally by the great powers. The other was the Resistance inside the country: the National Council of the Resistance, which in March had adopted its own programme of reforms, the departmental liberation committees, which in many places had taken over the administration themselves, and the armed units of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), largely controlled by the communists.

De Gaulle had no intention of sharing power with these bodies. Right after the parade on the Champs-Élysées on 26 August he gave the Resistance leaders to understand that they were to follow the government, not walk alongside it. On 28 August he told the leaders of the Paris FFI that their staffs would be dissolved and the volunteers incorporated into the regular army. Bringing Bidault, Tillon, Teitgen and Lacoste into the cabinet was the other side of the same policy: the Resistance received a place in the state, but in a state led by de Gaulle. Some historians describe this as a skilful “disarming” of a rival centre of power by making its leaders share responsibility for the government.

On 12 September de Gaulle spoke at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris to a gathering attended by members of the government, the National Council of the Resistance and representatives of the main institutions of state. He set out the government’s programme: restoring the state and the rule of law, waging the war to the end alongside the Allies, rebuilding the country and social reform. In doing so he took up one of the slogans of the Council’s programme, saying that “the great sources of common wealth” were to be directed and exploited “not for the profit of a few, but for the benefit of all”. At the same time, as the Fondation Charles de Gaulle stresses, he called on the men of the Resistance to “fall back into line”. The future form of government, he announced, would be decided by the nation in elections as soon as possible. On 14–18 September he toured Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux – cities in which power after the liberation was in practice exercised by the local Resistance. According to participants’ accounts and his own memoirs, in Toulouse he treated the leaders of the local FFI coolly and ordered the British SOE officer George Starr, who commanded a network in the region, to leave France.

In September the government ordered the dissolution of the FFI staffs and the incorporation of the volunteers into the army; accounts give the date of the decree as 19 or 23 September. This “amalgamation” of the internal and external forces gave the French army – according to the most frequently cited estimates – more than a hundred thousand soldiers, many of them sent to General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s First Army fighting in eastern France.

The communists and the reckoning

The most difficult partner was the French Communist Party. It emerged from the occupation as the largest and best-organised force in the Resistance, and its propaganda called it “the party of the 75,000 shot” – a figure historians do not confirm, but one that conveyed its prestige well. It controlled the FTP and the so-called patriotic militias, set up with the consent of the National Council of the Resistance in March 1944 and subordinated to the liberation committees. The participation of two communists in the government bound the party to de Gaulle’s policy but did not settle the dispute over weapons. On 28 October the government ordered the patriotic militias to be dissolved, which provoked a sharp communist protest. According to many historians, the crisis was eased by a tacit understanding with Moscow: de Gaulle pardoned the party leader Maurice Thorez, who was in the USSR and had been sentenced in absentia for desertion from the army in 1939; Thorez returned to France at the end of November and soon, notably in a speech at Ivry in January 1945, called on the communists to submit to the principle of “one army, one police, one state”.

The government of national unity also had to deal with the reckoning for the occupation. In the first weeks after liberation, and in some regions even before it, there were thousands of extrajudicial executions of real and alleged collaborators; French historians usually put their number at around 9,000–10,000. Women accused of relations with Germans had their heads publicly shaved. The government sought to move the reckoning into the courts: departmental courts had already been set up in Algiers and the penalty of “national indignity” introduced, and in November 1944 a High Court of Justice was created for members of the Vichy authorities. Over the following months writers and journalists of the collaboration stood trial, and in 1945 Pétain himself and Pierre Laval. The courts handed down several thousand death sentences, a large proportion in absentia; according to various tallies, between just over 700 and about 1,500 of them were carried out.

Place in the war

The formation of the government of national unity ended the period in which anything other than de Gaulle’s will could still decide who governed liberated France. Neither the Allies, who until the summer of 1944 had considered a military administration of the country, nor the Resistance with its committees and militias managed to create an alternative to a government that now combined London, Algiers and the underground. On 23 October 1944 the United States, Britain and the USSR formally recognised the Provisional Government of the French Republic, and on 7 November an enlarged Provisional Consultative Assembly met in Paris.

The cabinet led France through the last year of the war. It rebuilt the army, which, drawing on the FFI and the units from Africa, grew to several hundred thousand men, fought in Alsace and entered Germany; in 1945 France received an occupation zone and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The government also carried out the programme of the National Council of the Resistance: it nationalised the coal mines and the Renault works, created a social security system, and in the municipal elections of spring 1945 Frenchwomen voted for the first time. De Gaulle’s first government lasted until November 1945. After the elections to the Constituent Assembly, in which the communists became the largest party in the country, de Gaulle formed a second cabinet, and in January 1946, at odds with the parties, he resigned. The governments of “national unity” gave way to a three-party coalition of communists, socialists and Christian Democrats, which lasted until May 1947.