The Provisional Government of the French Republic

On 3 June 1944 in Algiers the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) took the name of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (Gouvernement provisoire de la République française, GPRF). General Charles de Gaulle remained its president. The change came exactly a year after the committee had been created and three days before the Allied landings in Normandy. The French fighting on the Allied side wanted a government, not a committee, to set foot on French soil alongside the armies.

A popular chronology states that a “provisional French government was formed” that day. In fact no new body came into being. The same committee, with the same membership, changed its name and declared itself a government. According to French studies the decision was taken on 2 June, while the ordinance changing the name is dated 3 June, and that date has come to be accepted as the birth of the GPRF. What mattered was not the name itself but the claim behind it: Algiers was announcing that it, and not Vichy, was the legitimate authority in France and that no one else would govern the liberated departments. It was precisely this claim that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to accept.

From committee to government

The French Committee of National Liberation was set up on 3 June 1943 as a compromise between two generals – de Gaulle and Henri Giraud – with two co-presidents. Over the following months de Gaulle pushed his rival aside step by step. In November 1943 he became the committee’s sole president, and on 4 April 1944 a CFLN decree made him head of the armed forces and abolished the post of commander-in-chief held by Giraud.

The committee was already acting as a government. It had commissioners equivalent to ministers – for foreign affairs, finance, war, the interior – and it administered Algeria, French West and Equatorial Africa, Madagascar and, from the autumn of 1943, Corsica. From April 1944 two communists, Fernand Grenier and François Billoux, also sat on it. Alongside the committee, a Provisional Consultative Assembly had been meeting in Algiers since November 1943, made up of representatives of the resistance in France, political parties and former parliamentarians. It had no legislative power, but it lent the committee an appearance of representing a nation that could not then be consulted at the ballot box.

In the spring of 1944 the committee prepared to take power in France. On 21 April it adopted an ordinance on the organisation of public authorities after liberation, which also gave women the vote. Its delegates were at work in France, and in March the underground National Council of the Resistance had proclaimed its programme, intended to become the basis for rebuilding the republic. Only one thing was missing: recognition by the Allies.

The change of name

The proposal to rename the committee came from the assembly. On 15 May 1944 – according to French literature, on the initiative of a group of resistance delegates from metropolitan France, on whose behalf the socialist Albert Gazier spoke – the Provisional Consultative Assembly unanimously called on the CFLN to take the name of a provisional government. The delegates argued that at the moment of liberation France could not be treated as a territory without authority, to be organised by the Allied command as it saw fit.

The committee adopted the resolution at the beginning of June. The ordinance of 3 June 1944 changed neither its membership nor its powers – the existing commissioners kept their portfolios and de Gaulle remained president. The date was no accident. Algiers knew that the invasion was close, and de Gaulle was determined to enter France as head of a government rather than as chairman of a committee whose status the Allies could interpret as they pleased. The new name was addressed above all to Washington and London – and also to the French at home, who were to know that their own authorities were arriving with the troops.

Since August 1943 Britain and the United States had recognised the CFLN in a limited form: as a body administering the overseas territories that acknowledged it, but not as the government of France. The USSR went further in its wording, recognising the committee as the representative of the state interests of the French Republic. The renaming did not change this situation one jot. None of the major Allies recognised the new government on 3 June.

Washington says “no”

Roosevelt had distrusted de Gaulle for years. He regarded him as a politician with dictatorial leanings and no democratic mandate, and he held to the principle that the French themselves would decide who governed France in free elections after liberation. Until then, as he saw it, the Allied command was to wage the war and work with local authorities wherever that proved practical, without deciding in advance who would rule France. Nor had the President forgotten the quarrels of 1941–1943 – over Darlan, over Giraud, over the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

Washington had prepared arrangements for France, as it had earlier for Italy, envisaging an Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT). Civil affairs officers were trained to run the liberated areas until a French authority emerged. For de Gaulle this was unacceptable: France, an ally since 1939, would be treated like a defeated Axis state.

The second flashpoint was currency. The Allies had printed franc notes in the United States for the invasion forces – the so-called supplemental francs – which were to circulate in France alongside ordinary money. The notes bore the name of no French issuing authority. De Gaulle regarded them as an attack on French sovereignty and called them “counterfeit money”. Without the backing of Algiers this currency hung in a vacuum: who was to stand behind it, if the only French government that could do so was not recognised?

Not all Americans shared the President’s position. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Dwight Eisenhower, who had learned in North Africa how hard it was to wage war without the co-operation of the French administration, favoured a practical understanding with Algiers. Just before the invasion Eisenhower obtained the President’s consent to talk to de Gaulle’s representatives about co-operation in civil affairs. There was, however, no formal recognition.

The flight to London and the quarrel with Churchill

Winston Churchill tried to reconcile the two partners. He believed that the liberation of France could not begin without the French, and he invited de Gaulle to London. The general hesitated for a long time – he did not want to come merely to be told of the invasion at the last minute, with no right to discuss the administration. In the end he flew in an aircraft sent by the British and on the morning of 4 June landed at RAF Northolt near London, already as president of the provisional government.

That same day Churchill received him in his special train, standing near Portsmouth, where the Prime Minister wanted to be close to the troops before the invasion. The meeting, also attended by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, soon degenerated into a quarrel. Churchill urged de Gaulle to come to terms with Roosevelt, to go to Washington and discuss the administration there. De Gaulle replied that he had no intention of “submitting his candidacy” for power in France to the American President when a French government already existed. According to his memoirs, Churchill retorted that whenever Britain had to choose between Europe and the open sea, it would choose the open sea, and whenever he himself had to choose between de Gaulle and Roosevelt, he would choose Roosevelt. These words, known chiefly from de Gaulle’s own account, came to symbolise his conviction that France had to rely above all on itself.

Eisenhower then received the general at his headquarters near Portsmouth and outlined the plan of the operation that SHAEF had been preparing since the beginning of the year. Because of bad weather, the invasion had just been postponed by a day. Eisenhower showed de Gaulle the text of a proclamation to the French that he was to broadcast on the day of the landings. It called on the population to obey the orders of the Allied command and made no mention of the government in Algiers. De Gaulle demanded changes, which were not made because the proclamation had already been printed. He therefore refused to speak on the radio straight after the leaders of the occupied countries and Eisenhower, as the Allies had planned, and also refused – until the question of the administration was settled – to allow French liaison officers to go with the invasion forces.

On the night of 5/6 June, when the first units were already on their way to Normandy, the dispute reached its height. According to accounts by British politicians and officials, Churchill was so enraged that he spoke of sending the general back to Algiers. Eden and the diplomats calmed the situation. On the evening of 6 June de Gaulle spoke on the BBC separately, in his own name. He did not mention Eisenhower and called on the French to fight under the orders of the “French government” and its leaders. The question of the liaison officers was partly resolved over the following days.

Its place in the war

The change of name on 3 June was a political gesture, but within a few weeks it became a fact. On 14 June de Gaulle crossed briefly to Normandy. In Bayeux, the first sizeable town liberated by the Allies, he addressed the inhabitants and left behind a commissioner of the republic, François Coulet, who took over the administration on behalf of the provisional government. The prefectures and town halls in the strip of Normandy held by the Allies began to take orders from de Gaulle’s men, and the Allied civil affairs officers, having no other partner, worked with them. The AMGOT plans for France were never put into effect, and the provisional government eventually took the “supplemental francs” on to its own account.

At the beginning of July 1944 de Gaulle visited Washington and met Roosevelt. A few days later the United States recognised his government as the de facto authority entitled to administer liberated France. After the liberation of Paris in August the government moved from Algiers to the capital, and in September de Gaulle formed a cabinet of “national unity” including representatives of the resistance in France and of parties from the communists to the right. On 23 October 1944 the United States, Britain and the USSR formally recognised the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

The provisional government ruled France until the end of the war and through the first post-war months. It built an army that fought in Alsace and in Germany, won France a place among the victors – an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council – and held the first elections in which Frenchwomen voted. De Gaulle resigned in January 1946, and the GPRF carried on even after the constitution of the Fourth Republic was adopted in October 1946 – until January 1947, when a president was elected and the new institutions of the state were in place. The doctrine on which it rested – that the French state had never ceased to exist and that the Vichy regime had been illegitimate – shaped French memory of the war for decades.

On 3 June 1944 de Gaulle had not yet won the Allies’ recognition. But he had secured what mattered to him most: when the Allies landed in France, a French government already existed that could claim authority over the country being liberated, and no one else managed to take that authority from it.