The Provisional Government in Paris

On 31 August 1944 the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), which had until then operated in Algiers, officially moved its seat to Paris. Its president, General Charles de Gaulle, had been working in the capital since 25 August, the day the city was liberated. Now he was joined by the members of the government and the departments that for more than a year had directed the French war effort from North Africa. After four years, French authority was returning to its buildings on the Seine, and the state that de Gaulle had been building in exile since 1940 was becoming the country’s actual government.

A popular chronology sums up the event in the words: “American forces hand over the government of France to Free French forces”. That wording is misleading. There was no American military government in France that could be handed over to anyone. The plans for an Allied occupation administration drawn up in Washington before the invasion never came into effect, and from the first days after the Normandy landings the liberated departments were run by officials appointed by de Gaulle. What did happen at the end of August was a series of formal steps that put matters in order: agreements on civil administration, the handover of command over Paris, and the government’s move from Algiers.

A state that had never ceased to exist

The provisional government had been created on 3 June 1944 out of the French Committee of National Liberation. Its guiding principle was the continuity of the Republic. According to this doctrine, the French state had never ceased to exist, and the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain at Vichy had been a de facto authority without legitimacy. On 9 August 1944 the provisional government issued in Algiers an ordinance on the restoration of republican legality. It annulled the legislative acts of Vichy issued after 16 June 1940 – including the anti-Jewish laws – and restored the republican institutions, although many regulations of a technical nature were temporarily left in force.

People, too, had been prepared to take over. Even before the invasion the provisional government had designated commissioners of the Republic for the individual regions, as well as new prefects. They were to enter the liberated towns together with the army, or to emerge from the underground and take up office before Allied civil affairs officers or self-appointed committees could do so. In Bayeux the first commissioner took office as early as June. Over the following weeks the same happened in Brittany, in the Loire valley and, after the landings in Provence, in the south of the country.

Vichy’s authority fell apart at the same time. In mid-August Prime Minister Pierre Laval was still trying in Paris to convene the National Assembly, with the participation of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Édouard Herriot, in order to hand power to it and forestall de Gaulle. The Germans cut this manoeuvre short: on 17 August they removed Laval from Paris and on 20 August Pétain from Vichy, first to Belfort and in September to Sigmaringen in Germany. By the time the GPRF arrived in Paris, there was no rival authority left in France.

The Americans and civil administration

For a long time the United States was unwilling to recognise de Gaulle as the authority in France. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt feared that the general would impose his rule on the country without elections, and for the first weeks after the invasion he refused any formal agreements with Algiers. Practice, however, ran ahead of policy. The civil affairs officers in Normandy, having no other partner, worked with de Gaulle’s commissioners and prefects, and General Dwight Eisenhower himself sought an agreement that would ensure calm behind the armies’ lines.

After de Gaulle’s visit to Washington, Roosevelt announced on 11 July that the United States recognised the French committee as the authority entitled to administer liberated France until elections were held – a de facto recognition, not a formal recognition of a government. The draft civil affairs agreements, prepared separately in London and in Washington, had to wait several more weeks. According to the US Army’s official history of the supreme command, they were put into effect only on 25 August, the day Paris was liberated, by an exchange of letters between Eisenhower and General Marie Pierre Kœnig, commander of the French forces in Great Britain and of the French Forces of the Interior. The agreements, modelled on those with the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, covered civil administration and the courts, currency, captured property, information and the distribution of relief to the population. The principle was that in the zone of active operations the military command had the final say, while outside it power was exercised by the French authorities.

On that same 25 August, the mission to France of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) opened its offices in Paris – not an occupation authority but a liaison body attached to the French government. Three days later, on 28 August, the commander of the US V Corps, General Leonard T. Gerow, who after the German surrender had set up his command post in the Hôtel des Invalides, handed over command of the city in writing to General Kœnig, whom de Gaulle had appointed military governor of Paris. Kœnig replied that he had already assumed it on 25 August and that since the liberation the administration of the capital had been in the hands of the French authorities alone. This brief letter is the closest thing to what the chronology calls the “handover of the government of France” – but it concerned military command in a single city, not the government of a state.

The move from Algiers

De Gaulle had flown to France on 20 August and from 25 August governed from the Ministry of War building in the rue Saint-Dominique. Most of his government, however, was still in Algiers. On 26 August, the day after Paris was liberated, the members of the government gathered there placed their posts at the president’s disposal so that he could reshape the cabinet – in keeping with the principle that, once back in France, the government must also take in people from the domestic Resistance. In the last days of August the ministers and their staffs moved to Paris, and on 31 August the provisional government formally installed itself in the capital. On 2 September the first meeting of the Council of Ministers was held in Paris.

The move coincided with the first decisions intended to show that in the liberated country it was the state, not the committees, that governed. On 28 August, two days after the march down the Champs-Élysées, it was decided to incorporate the FFI into the regular army. That day de Gaulle received the leaders of the Paris Resistance and told them that their headquarters would be dissolved. On 26 August an ordinance had also been issued introducing the concept of “national indignity” – a penalty for those who had supported Vichy or the occupier – which was the first step towards dealing with collaboration through the courts. It was meant to replace the spontaneous summary justice that swept through many regions of the country in August and September 1944.

Place in the war

On 9 September 1944 de Gaulle announced the new composition of the government, known as the government of “national unity”. Alongside the men from London and Algiers, it included representatives of the domestic Resistance and of every significant political current: the last President of the Senate of the Third Republic, Jules Jeanneney, became minister of state; foreign affairs went to the chairman of the National Council of the Resistance, Georges Bidault; the national economy to Pierre Mendès France; and two communists, Charles Tillon and François Billoux, entered the cabinet. In this way de Gaulle drew into the state forces that could have become his rivals, while at the same time subordinating them to himself. On 23 September the FFI were formally incorporated into the army, and in the autumn the ordinance dissolving the patriotic militias provoked a sharp dispute with the communists.

Recognition came later than de Gaulle wished, but it came. On 23 October 1944 the United States, Great Britain and the USSR – and Canada with them – formally recognised the Provisional Government of the French Republic. In November an enlarged Consultative Assembly met in Paris, and in December de Gaulle signed a Franco-Soviet treaty of alliance in Moscow. France was returning to the ranks of the Great Powers: in 1945 it received an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The August move from Algiers to Paris thus closed a chapter that had begun in London in June 1940. A government that for four years had existed outside the country, without territory and without the recognition of the great allies, took over the administration of liberated France within a few weeks. Nobody “handed” it over – the Americans merely recognised the state of affairs that de Gaulle and his people had created on the spot. The provisional government governed France until the end of the war and until the autumn of 1946, when the constitution of the Fourth Republic came into force.