The programme of the National Council of the Resistance

On 15 March 1944, in occupied Paris, the final text of the programme of the National Council of the Resistance (Conseil national de la Résistance, CNR) was adopted. The document, just under ten pages long and officially entitled the “Action Programme of the Resistance”, went down in history as the “CNR programme”, and in one later pamphlet edition it appeared under the title “Les Jours heureux” (“The Happy Days”). It combined a plan of armed struggle against the occupier with a vision of post-war France – a purge of collaborators, the restoration of democracy, the nationalisation of large enterprises and a universal social security system. It was agreed by every political current represented on the Council, from the communists to the moderate right, and that was its greatest strength.

The statement that the Council “approved” the programme needs some qualification. Between November 1943 and August 1944 the Council never once met in full session – under clandestine conditions and after the arrests, that would have been too dangerous. The text was adopted unanimously by the Council’s five-member bureau, after its successive drafts had been circulated to all the member organisations and their comments taken into account. Although the programme’s preamble speaks of a plenary assembly, historians, among them Claire Andrieu, point out that no such meeting took place.

The Council after Moulin

The Council had been created in May 1943 by Jean Moulin, the emissary of General Charles de Gaulle, who brought together in it representatives of eight resistance movements, two trade union confederations and six pre-war political parties. After Moulin’s arrest by the Gestapo at Caluire in June 1943 and his death, the Christian Democrat Georges Bidault became chairman of the Council. Meanwhile, in Algiers, de Gaulle was consolidating his position at the head of the French Committee of National Liberation, from which in November 1943 he removed Henri Giraud. The resistance at home recognised his authority but wanted a voice of its own on the future of France.

Work on the programme was directed by the Council’s bureau. Alongside Bidault it comprised Louis Saillant of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), who also represented the socialists; Pascal Copeau of the Libération-Sud movement, speaking for the United Resistance Movements (MUR); Maxime Blocq-Mascart of the right-wing Civil and Military Organisation (OCM); and the communist Pierre Villon, secretary of the National Front (Front national), the resistance organisation created by the French Communist Party. The Algiers Committee’s delegate, Jacques Bingen, also attended its meetings.

The road to a common text

The programme had several precursors. In January 1943 the clandestine Socialist Action Committee announced its own post-war programme, and in July 1943 Algiers’ emissary Émile Laffon presented the Council with a draft economic and social charter providing for state direction of the economy. Laffon’s draft was rejected: the communists objected that it was insufficiently Marxist, the representatives of the right that it was excessively statist. In the autumn the reunified CGT also put forward its proposals. The breakthrough came with a counter-draft by Pierre Villon, prepared after a meeting with the leaders of the underground Communist Party, Jacques Duclos and Benoît Frachon. Its core was a call for immediate struggle against the occupier, while its post-war reforms were – in Claire Andrieu’s assessment – “no more revolutionary than the Popular Front programme”.

On this basis the Council’s bureau, which met once or twice a week, adopted a “Charter of the Resistance” in January 1944. After comments from the member organisations, the text was reworked by a committee of the resistance movements that included Copeau and Claude Bourdet; on 28 February the bureau adopted it under the name “Action Programme of the Resistance”. The socialists hesitated longest, suspecting that the communists, by insisting on an immediate uprising and the creation of militias, wanted to pave their own way to power. After final amendments in the first half of March, which toned down the call to armed action and strengthened the social section, the bureau adopted the text in its final form on 15 March 1944.

What the programme said

The first part, the “plan for immediate action”, called for an intensification of the armed struggle and preparations for a national uprising, “directed by the CNR under the authority” of the Committee in Algiers – that is, of de Gaulle. It provided for the creation in the departments of liberation committees, which were to take over local power the moment the Germans withdrew, and set out the tasks of the French Forces of the Interior.

The second part, “measures to be applied as soon as the territory is liberated”, proved more lasting. It announced the punishment of traitors and the removal from the administration and from economic life of all who had collaborated with the enemy or with the collaborationist governments, as well as the confiscation of the property of traitors and black-market profiteers. It provided for the restoration of democracy and universal suffrage, freedom of speech and of a press independent of the state and of big capital, and the equality of citizens before the law. In the economy it demanded “a genuine economic and social democracy” – the removal of the “great economic and financial feudal powers” from the direction of the economy and the “return to the nation” of the great monopolised means of production, sources of energy, mineral wealth, insurance companies and big banks. In its social section it promised higher wages, the revival of independent trade unions and “a complete plan of social security”, which was to guarantee a livelihood to every citizen unable to work, as well as a decent pension for old workers.

The programme did not explicitly mention votes for women – these were granted a few weeks later, on 21 April 1944, by an ordinance of the Committee in Algiers, which in the same act also established the departmental liberation committees envisaged in the programme.

From clandestinity to the welfare state

Before the liberation the programme was not widely known. Only the underground paper Libération printed it in full; other clandestine newspapers printed it in part or not at all. The Consultative Assembly in Algiers unanimously called for the demand for nationalisation to be carried out, but the Committee itself never formally endorsed the programme. When the Paris uprising broke out in August 1944, de Gaulle neither accepted the programme from the Council’s hands nor proclaimed the Republic, taking the view that it had never ceased to exist. In a speech of 12 September 1944, however, he announced that the great sources of common wealth would be exploited “for the benefit of all”, and that every Frenchman was to live “in security and dignity”.

In 1944–1946 the Provisional Government of the French Republic put a large part of the demands into effect. The coal mines of northern France were nationalised (December 1944), as were the Renault works, confiscated from an owner accused of collaboration (January 1945), Air France (June 1945), the Bank of France and the four large deposit banks (December 1945), and in 1946 the electricity and gas industries and the largest insurance companies. Works councils were set up in February 1945, and ordinances of October 1945 created the French social security system (Sécurité sociale), which the communist Minister of Labour Ambroise Croizat expanded in 1945–1947. At the same time a purge of collaborators was carried out and a new press law was introduced, which stripped newspapers published under the occupation of their titles. The National Council of the Resistance remained in being until 1947; after Bidault became Foreign Minister, Saillant took over its chairmanship.

Place in the war

The CNR programme was the fullest expression of the conviction that liberation should mean not only driving out the occupier but also a reckoning with the men of Vichy and with the economic elites blamed for the defeat of 1940. The unanimity of communists, socialists, Christian Democrats and part of the right around a single text strengthened the position of the resistance in relation to Algiers and the Allies before the invasion of France, and allowed de Gaulle to speak in the name of a united nation. At the same time the disputes over “immediate action” and the patriotic militias foreshadowed tensions between the communists and the other forces, which in 1947 led to the communists’ removal from the government of the Fourth Republic.

Above all, however, the programme set the shape of post-war France: a mixed economy with a strong state sector and an extensive system of social benefits that survives to this day. In French public debate the “CNR programme” remains a symbol of agreement across divisions and a point of reference in arguments over the future of the welfare state.